Quotes

My creative process begins with: just thinking. I do a lot of thinking, a lot of pondering. I rarely watch films in airplanes; I just sort of sit there, looking at the ceiling. Day dreaming is the equivalent of doodling; it’s mental doodling.

Source: Designer Marc Newson on Fountain Pens and the Sad State of Cars – WSJ

Don Norman in RISKS digest 28.88:

[T]hat’s why we have so many accidents: engineers think sensibly and logically and are completely unaware of how people really behave. As I tell people over and over again, logic is an artificial way of thinking, invented by philosophers and mathematicians. if it were how we thought and behaved, it wouldn’t have had to be invented and it wouldn’t be so difficult to learn.

JP: One theory about early successes is that they often are fairly random. So there’s lots of smart people, there’s lots of pretty talented people and then, in some cases, they end up being a talented computer science grad at Stanford. Some of them go on to be professors and teach or work at good startups—and then Larry and Sergey are running this giant empire. Part of that is chance, or luck, or happenstance, the initial project being right for the moment and taking off and getting attention and it snowballs from there. There’s some theory that a lot of this is the result of preferential attachment or cumulative advantage. Preferential attachment is a node in a network that you connect to early and then it’s more connected so it’s more likely to attract other connections.

The Nike email was this accidental, random thing that resulted in me being able to find Ken and Arianna Huffington to be partners with because I had made this big thing that was big on the Internet. And then because of that it was easier to do BuzzFeed. You have more opportunity when you have an early success, then there’s more opportunity and then that opportunity allows you to do other things and it snowballs. So small, lucky things that happen early on can sometimes have a ripple effect and then people look back on it and say, oh wow, that person is smart or talented or something because it seems like it’s a string of these things, but actually they’re not independent variables.

From Felix Salmon’s interview with Jonah Peretti, via waxy.org

In the modern world, the state is a kind of souped up business. That’s why we’re all "taxpayers" instead of "citizens." "Taxpayer" reframes policy outcomes as a kind of customer-loyalty perk. If your taxes are the locus of your relationship with the state, then people who don’t pay taxes — people too young, old, disabled, or unlucky to be working — are not entitled to policy outcomes that reflect their needs.

Cory Doctorow – Standardized testing and schools as factories: Louis CK versus Common Core [Boing Boing]

The notion that “you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution” is an impossible standard that impedes actual social progress, which always happens incrementally. A much better way to make a difference is to contribute as little as possible to the problem while contributing as much as you can to the solution.

It’s important to hold yourself and others to a high standard, but when people try to do good and you punish them for not doing enough, it makes it hard for them to try again.

Max Temkin (via Pwnmeal Extreme Gaming Oatmeal, via waxy.org)

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Before succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it’s critical to ask, “Who, exactly, benefits from making work feel like non-work?” “Why should workers feel as if they aren’t working when they are?” Historian Mario Liverani reminds us that “ideology has the function of presenting exploitation in a favorable light to the exploited, as advantageous to the disadvantaged.”

In the Name of Love, by Miya Tokumitsu | Jacobin

Via Alexis Madrigal’s 5 Intriguing Things