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Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse is to will yourself out of it. If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue. Keep watching sunsets until each one becomes as beautiful as the first (the secret is that the innumerable company of the heavenly host sings in a slightly different key each time).
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Nice quote from Einstein describing fundamental science discovery: “highest form of musicality”
““That [the] insecure and contradictory foundation [of Bohr’s quantum hypotheses],” Einstein would say, “was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr’s unique instinct and perceptiveness to discover the major laws of spectral lines and of the electron shells of the atom as well as their significance for chemistry appeared to me like a miracle. . . . This is the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.”” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb)
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From Open Socrates, Agnes Callard:
“My own approach to Socrates might be described as “hard-line intellectualist”-I think that Socrates is just what he seems to be, namely someone who believes that we don’t know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that philosophythe pursuit of such knowledge-is the only sure road to becoming a better person. Why is this collection of views so implausible?
If you posed this question to the many scholars who try to save Socrates from his own intellectualism, they would say “because it is obvious that someone could have knowledge-such as the knowledge that it is wrong to steal, or kill-but be unwilling to act on it.”
Socrates' response is: What makes you think that was knowledge?
The real source of the opposition to Socratic intellectualism is not the commonsense observation that people often act in ways they are ready to repudiate, but the insistence that what we sometimes act against deserves to be called “knowledge.””
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Started reading On Freedom, Timothy Snyder 📚
“The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”
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Geoffrey Litt writes on “avoid the nightmare bicycle” from Changing Minds, Andrea diSessa:
Good designs expose systematic structure; they lean on their users’ ability to understand this structure and apply it to new situations. We were born for this.
Bad designs paper over the structure with superficial labels that hide the underlying system, inhibiting their users’ ability to actually build a clear model in their heads.
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Simon Willison writes Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes
If you’re using an LLM to write code without even running it yourself, what are you doing?
Hallucinated methods are such a tiny roadblock that when people complain about them I assume they’ve spent minimal time learning how to effectively use these systems—they dropped them at the first hurdle.
AI is going to lower the barrier to folks getting creative with code, but if you are a seasoned developer you have to be an active participant to get the most of out LLMs.
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Reading A Cumulative Culture Theory for Developer Problem-Solving, C. Hicks:
We hypothesize that understanding how collective solutions are shared between developers, and keeping such transmission functional, may prove a more powerful explanatory factor in technology innovation than any individual cognition or performance variance among developers. It is also likely more accessible to those who wish to intervene on and increase technical innovation. While interventions attempting to improve working memory have often proven impractical, unethical, or unlikely to succeed, interventions attempting to improve cycles of adaptive response between individual-and-social systems, incorporating improvements to the psychological context that promotes social sharing and teaching, have emerged as intervention targets which associate with lasting objective outcomes in achievement and performance (see Walton, 2014; Hicks, 2024; Lichand et al., 2024).
Culture creates innovation.
Another important aspect of cumulative culture is that it helps individuals both learn from and imitate processes of creativity. For instance, developers’ participation in interest-driven technical communities which share niche, unusual, or obscure solutions may bolster developer problem-solving along with well-documented social benefits from support, role modeling, and sense of belonging (Townley, 2020; Trinkenreich et al., 2023). Alongside these social benefits, exposure to infrequently-noticed features of a problem can cognitively benefit developer problem-solving because this helps individuals to overcome functional fixedness, i.e., the cognitive bias which discourages people from seeing novel solutions (McCaffrey, 2012).
This is one of the reasons why I run the JavaScript meetups and Scottish Technology Club. I want to be exposed to technical excellence, creativity and innovation. Sharing and supporting with a community is a key mechanism. If we all do it, Scotland improves, we create and attract more opportunities.
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On inner critics, knowing what you want, boundaries and desires from Maeбичка, via TheZvi
If “I do not want to do A” is not respected on its own (by others or your own inner critic), of course you are going to come up with whatever reasons you can think of to justify it to other people or to yourself!
By alienated from desires I mean:
People especially do not respect the boundaries/desires of children—who then become uncertain of their own boundaries/desires, and then grow up having to justify them not only to others but also to themselves.
This is how someone would come to habitually give reasons they do not realize are divorced from their own truth.
You can be your own justification, but this involves knowing yourself. But also realise that your desires are malleable and often context dependent.
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My purpose in posting about this article on Outcome Orientation as a Cure for Information Overload is to give it a place in my public feed so that I can come back to it later, and to attract the attention of others who also think seriously about these sort of things.
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Reading this blog on a washing machine installation and software estimation, that the unknown of a PVC wall in a U-bend spigot inlet caused a problem reminds me of when we moved into our house. We had the same issue with the drainage from a sink overflow dripping into the cupboard below. The previous occupants had tried taping over the spigot, and lined the cupboard with waterproof tape too. They had never checked to see if there was a hole where the water should be flowing! Lesson: check your understanding of the system, and make sure that the basics are right before plastering on multiple fixes.
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Reading Dominic Cummings, including this on storytelling and culture making:
People who change big things see bits of the future already here and redefine the mainstream by taking risks, not worrying about looking silly to people who just talk and copy each other all day. It’s impossible to know how these complex dynamics will pan out so people should just try to build as much of what’s needed as possible and see how the cards fall. SW1 is always super-mimetic when crises come so work on building things that seed the memes.
Seize the memes of production! Sense-making and culture building are changing. If you want to make a dent, then you need to figure this out.
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/tsp-5-what-comes-in-2025-6-as-both
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Jasmine Sun on oral vs literate culture, LLMs, and politics:
We are clearly returning to an oral-first culture. First, social media accelerated conversation, focusing on instantaneity over permanence and collective consciousness over individual belief. Second, video has overtaken text on every online platform (much to my personal dismay). Most people have lost the focus to read a 1,000 word article, but have no problem listening to a 3-hour podcast. Now, LLMs are in the process of obsolescing literary precision, too. Why write concisely when people will just read a summary? Why learn a system’s mechanics if an AI can do everything for you? We no longer need to convey thoughts via structured grammars. The LLM, as a universal translator, has solved legibility.
2016 was a turning point for oral culture. Peak Trump, peak Twitter, the death of the text and the fact. When we all lost our minds to the collective unconscious, the birth of a worldwide “vibe” that could shift together as one. And at the risk of sounding hyperbolic: I think there is a correlation between oral culture and authoritarianism, between a less literate population and strongman leaders. When people don’t evaluate ideas separate from their speakers, power gravitates to the most magnetic voice in a room.
