"Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist."
The contradiction of mutations: these “errors” in replication cause the loss and degradation of genetic information, but are also the only source of all that information in the first place.
Oliver
Have nothing in your house that is not beautiful.
Oliver
I try to ignore opinions that are merely copied from media/others; so, I realize, should I for guilt, confessions, admissions: real atonement comes from within; parroting confessions, just like “we have sinned” in church, is mostly performance/ritual, without skin in the game.
Oliver
Beware either/or, with us/against us, yes/no approaches to complex questions, not least because they leave out some of the most interesting responses, such as: neither, the framing is malformed, there are more dimensions than you think.
Oliver
If you, your community, or even most people, think that those opposed to you are cranks, pseudo-scientists, deluded, etc. remember that you’re necessarily wrong some of the time, and those category errors, once uncovered, represent immense opportunity.
Oliver
In a discourse with sides (e.g. left-right, a two-party system, prescriptive vs descriptive), it’s impossible for your side to be right about everything; the other side’s ideas should be an efficient place to find merit, therefore, if you can manage to ignore the branding.
Oliver
Philosophy Smell #7: “Denial as a Symptom of Guilt”—The lady doth protest too much, indeed. Nonetheless, anything in the form, “that which disagrees with X is evidence of X” is a mind-prison, internment in which can sometimes be broken only by a painful collision with reality.
Oliver
Frederick Brooks: conceptual unity requires tiny teams with one mind in charge. Eric Raymond: the team can be of any size, given sufficient comms tech and leadership by one mind.
Prediction: the technology of expression will improve to the extent that any number of minds can lead.
Oliver
“In any profession, 90% of people are clueless but work by situational imitation, narrow mimicry & semi-conscious role-playing.”—Nassim Taleb
Oliver
My third corollary to Conway’s Law: The quality of an organization’s output is inversely proportional to the extent to which its actual structure corresponds to its org chart.
Oliver