Category: Notes

• Achievement can either come from conformity or originality
• Firefox and Chrome users tend to stay longer perform better, and miss less work than IE our Safari
• What made the difference is how you get the browser
• Disadvantaged groups tend to be more entrenched in the state quo
  • (It is harder to let go of the familiar when you have a lot to lose relative to what you have)
• We justify the default
• Practice makes perfect but nothing original
• Achievement motivation crowds out originality
• Originality it’s not about taking big risks
• We tend to manage risk as a portfolio, so risky in one place and stable in all other places
• The difficulty with originals is in selecting winners not in generating ideas
• Great ideas are a numbers game (aim for 25)
• Peer evaluation is best
• Domain experience and intuition go together
• Passion is in the heart, not the sleeves
• The way success was achieved matters (execution) more than the idea itself
• Sometimes it is better to embrace the establishment to change it from the inside
• When presenting great ideas, remember that you are living with the ideas in your head while everyone else is hearing them for the first time
• Short, mixed presentations are best for warming people up to a new idea
• We do better at remembering open tasks than completed tasks
• Stopping mid-way through the project is the best time to discuss how to proceed with it
• Percolate the ideas!
• Settlers tend to outlast pioneers
• Pioneers tend to overextend
• Get in when the market cools
• Moving first is a tactics not a goal
• Zero to start
• Experimental approaches enable creative longevity
• Horizontal hostility is common and deadly
• Similarities are actually bad for inter group alliances
• Pull back on radicalism at first
• Frenemies and ambivalent relationships are literally more exhausting than enemies
• It is better to try to convert enemies than it is to continue to placate frenemies
• Start with novelty but add a dose of familiarity
• “The point is to push the envelope not to tear it.”
• Later-born children tend to take more risks including in creativity
• Calculation of rationality vs appropriateness
• Praise the person in moral domains but action in skill domains
• Phrase as nouns instead of verbs
• Commitment culture is good for launching but grow slower and struggle to evolve
  • Shifting blueprints later is difficult
  • Make dissent a core commitment
• Dissent with respect to foster better ideas
• Cohesion is not the problem in groupthink; overconfidence and reputational concerns are
• Pretend or assigned dissent is not enough, find someone who believes it
• “I am excited” is more productive than “I am scared”
• Lean into the energy of the fear
• Leaders should present the vision and have users endorse it
• Show the problems with the status quo then show what could be

• Context limits but also provides insight
• “False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.” Darwin
• Things, especially cave paintings, often do not progress from simple to complex
• The Theory of Evolution is not a Theory of Progression, it is a Theory of Better Adaptation
• Evolution tends towards bushiness, not singularity
• Known events do not preclude unknown events
• Heritage does not guarantee preservation like biology can, but heritage can evolve much faster
• When in doubt, go to the primary documents
• We are not willing to fully embrace evolution because we are not ready for humans to be less important
• Question simple explanations, few things are actually simple
• Wealth can help genius be exposed
• Evolution is constantly adapting to current circumstances, not to overall complexity
• Question the explanations you know best, they are often wrong
• Many creatures “simplify” as they diversify

Note: Gould’s book is a good reminder at how science is a process wielded by imperfect humans and as such can be corrupted.

• You have to sneak up on generalities, not assault them head-on
• God is in the details, so is the devil
• The existence of illness genes does not mean intelligence comes from a gene
• Science is done be people and is therefore fallible
• Humans have a need to reify then order everything
• IQ tests were originally developed to ensure children got pepper educational help
• Pearson’s R represents the shape of an ellipse. 1 is a perfect ellipse (a flat line) and -1 is a circle
• Beware of drives to unify
• “Factors are useful at the borders of science”
• Cultural evolution is more powerful than biological evolution
• Genes set ranges, not blueprints
• Race should not be a thing!

Note: My notes here are a poor representation of the vastness of this book. It was like a who’s who of Europe over the past millennia.

• Much of historical grandeur is in posturing, not fact
• “Nothing succeeds like success”
• People are slowest to drop language for their numbers and their prayers
• “Borough” means “fort”
• Culture shifts with power
• Culture, education, and commerce go hand-in-hand
• Medieval countries were more like corporate brands than they were governments
• Modernization cannot guarantee survival of the state
• “Cassock” is adventurer in Turkish
• Nations and states sometimes bang out and sometimes fizzle out
• The oldest ones keep reinventing themselves

• None Overlapping Magisterium (NOMA)
• Follow the lines of inquiry suitable for your realm
• “NOMA cuts both ways”
• (Why does eternal life mean we cannot mourn our loss today?)
• Science does not perfect the mind or prevent justification of immortality
• It is a strange god that would make creatures suffer for us to learn a lesson