Map and Territory

Why giving humans bug reports is easier than giving feature suggestions

I spent this past weekend at a case study competition called UW Apprentice, which was unique among events I’ve attended in two ways. One is that the cases were fresh from real startups that came in and…

An Economics of Flexibility

“… mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily…

Outdated Journal Policies Are Preventing Biomedical Science From Entering The Digital Era of Academic Publishing

Over the last few decades, technological advances have facilitated a considerable shift in the academic publishing culture in mathematics…

Need Dynamics

There’s neediness, and then there’s wantiness.

Fluid Decision Making

A lot of folks these days talk about “flow” to mean some kind of mystical state where they experience something like automatic decision making where they get out of their own way and just do. Less mysteriously, other folks use “flow” to describe periods of focused attention. More…

Internalizing Existentialism

Over the last couple months, due to reading Daoist philosophical texts, I’ve come to deeply internalize something I’ve known for a long time: morality doesn’t exist “out there” in reality and is instead a construct of our preferences and the dialectic between different people’s…

In Defense of Kegan

I find Kegan’s model of psychological development extremely useful. Some folks I know disagree on various grounds. These…