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Hello Interactors,Cities are layered by past priorities. I was just in Overland Park, Kansas, where over the last 25 years I've seen malls rise, fall, and shift outward as stores leave older spaces behind.When urban systems shift — due to climate, capital, codes, or crisis — cities drift. These changes ripple across scales and resemble fractal patterns, repeating yet evolving uniquely.This essay traces these patterns: past regimes, present signals, and competing questions over what's next.URBAN SCRIPTS AND SHIFTING SCALESAs cities grow, they remember.Look at a city's form — the way its streets stretch, how its blocks bend, where its walls break. These are not neutral choices. They are residues of regimes. Spatial decisions shaped by power, fear, belief, or capital.In ancient Rome, cities were laid out in strict grids. Streets ran along two axes: the cardo and decumanus. It made the city legible to the empire — easy to control, supply, and expand. Urban form followed the logic of conquest.As cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes,“One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration. Augustus had divided Rome into fourteen districts, each subdivided into vici. These districts were administered by annually elected magistrates, with officials and public slaves under them.”In medieval Europe, cities got messy. Sovereignty was fragmented. Trade replaced tribute. Guilds ran markets as streets tangled around church and square. The result was organic — but not random. It reflected a new mode of life: small-scale, interdependent, locally governed.In 19th-century Paris, the streets changed again. Narrow alleys became wide boulevards. Not just for beauty — for visibility and force. Haussmann's renovations made room for troops, light, and clean air. It was urban form as counter-revolution.Then came modernism. Superblocks, towers, highways. A form that made sense for mass production, cheap land, and the car. Planning became machine logic — form as efficiency.Each of these shifts marked the arrival of a new spatial calculus — ways of organizing the built environment in response to systemic pressures. Over time, these approaches came to be described by urbanists as morphological regimes: durable patterns of urban form shaped not just by architecture, but by ideology, infrastructure, and power. The term “morphology” itself was borrowed from biology, where it described the structure of organisms. In urban studies, it originally referred to the physical anatomy of the city — blocks, plots, grids, and streets. But today the field has broadened. It's evolved into more of a conceptual lens: not just a way of classifying form, but of understanding how ideas sediment into space. Today, morphology tracks how cities are shaped — not only physically, but discursively and increasingly so, computationally. Urban planning scholar Geoff Boeing calls urban form a “spatial script.” It encodes decisions made long ago — about who belongs where, what gets prioritized, and what can be seen or accessed. Other scholars treated cities like palimpsests — a term borrowed from manuscript studies, where old texts were scraped away and overwritten, yet traces remained. In urban form, each layer carries the imprint of a former spatial logic, never fully erased. Michael Robert Günter (M. R. G.) Conzen, a British geographer, pioneered the idea of town plan analysis in the 1960s. He examined how street patterns, plot divisions, and building forms reveal historical shifts. Urban geographer and architect, Anne Vernez Moudon brought these methods into contemporary urbanism. She argued that morphological analysis could serve as a bridge between disciplines, from planning to architecture to geography. Archaeologist Michael E. Smith goes further. Specializing in ancient cities, Smith argues that urban form doesn't just reflect culture — it produces it. In early settlements, the spatial organization of plazas, roads, and monuments actively shaped how people understood power, social hierarchy, and civic identity. Ritual plazas weren't just for ceremony — they structured the cognitive and social experience of space. Urban form, in this sense, is conceptual. It's how a society makes its world visible. And when that society changes — politically, economically, technologically — so does its form. Not immediately. Not neatly. But eventually. Almost always in response to pressure from the outside.INTERVAL AND INFLECTIONUrban morphology used to evolve slowly. But today, it changes faster — and with increasing volatility. Physicist Geoffrey West, and other urban scientists, describes how complex systems like cities exhibit superlinear scaling: as they grow, they generate more innovation, infrastructure, and socio-economic activity at an accelerating pace. But this growth comes with a catch: the system becomes dependent on continuous bursts of innovation to avoid collapse. West compares it to jumping from one treadmill to another — each one running faster than the last. What once took centuries, like the rise of industrial manufacturing, is now compressed into decades or less. The intervals between revolutions — from steam power to electricity to the internet — keep shrinking, and cities must adapt at an ever-faster clip just to maintain stability. But this also breeds instability as the intervals between systemic transformations shrink. Cities that once evolved over centuries can now shift in decades.Consider Rome. Roman grid structure held for centuries. Medieval forms persisted well into the Renaissance. Even Haussmann's Paris boulevards endured through war and modernization. But in the 20th century, urban morphology entered a period of rapid churn. Western urban regions shifted from dense industrial cores to sprawling postwar suburbs to globalized financial districts in under a century — each a distinct regime, unfolding at unprecedented speed.Meanwhile, rural and exurban zones transformed too. Suburbs stretched outward. Logistics corridors carved through farmland. Industrial agriculture consolidated land and labor. The whole urban-rural spectrum was redrawn — not evenly, but thoroughly — over a few decades.Why the speed?It's not just technology. It's the stacking of exogenous shocks. Public health crises. Wars. Economic crashes. Climate shifts. New empires. New markets. New media. These don't just hit policy — they hit form.Despite urbanities adaptability, it resists change. But when enough pressure builds, it breaks and fragments — or bends fast.Quantitative historians like Peter Turchin describe these moments as episodes of structural-demographic pressure. His theory suggests that as societies grow, they cycle through phases of expansion and instability. When rising inequality, elite overproduction, and resource strain coincide, the system enters a period of fragility. The ruling class becomes bloated and competitive, public trust erodes, and the state's ability to mediate conflict weakens. At some point, the social contract fractures — not necessarily through revolution, but through cumulative dysfunction that demands structural transformation.Cities reflect that process spatially. The street doesn't revolt. But it reroutes. The built environment shows where power has snapped or shifted. Consider Industrial Modernity. Assuming we start in 1850, it took roughly 100 years before the next regime took shape — the Fordist-Suburban Expansion starting in roughly 1945. It took around 30-40 years for deregulation to hit in the 80s. By 1995 information, communication, and technology accelerated globalization, financialization, and the urban regime we're currently in — Neoliberal Polycentrism.Neoliberal Polycentricism may sound like a wonky and abstract term, but it reflects a familiar reality: a pattern of decentralized, uneven urban growth shaped by market-driven logics. While some scholars debate the continued utility of the overused term 'neoliberalism' itself, its effects on the built environment remain visible. Market priorities continue to dominate and reshape spatial development and planning norms. It is not a wholly new spatial condition. It's the latest articulation of a longer American tradition of decentralizing people and capital beyond the urban core. In the 19th century, this dynamic took shape through the rise of satellite towns, railroad suburbs, and peripheral manufacturing hubs. These developments were often driven by speculative land ventures, private infrastructure investments, and the desire to escape the regulatory and political constraints of city centers. The result was a form of urban dispersal that created new nodes of growth, frequently insulated from municipal oversight and rooted in socio-economic and racial segregation. This early polycentricism, like fireworks spawning in all directions from the first blast, set the stage for later waves of privatized suburbanization and regional fragmentation. Neoliberalism would come to accelerate and codify this expansion.It came in the form of edge cities, exurbs, and special economic zones that proliferated in the 80s and 90s. They grew not as organic responses to demographic needs, but as spatial products of deregulated markets and speculative capital. Governance fragmented. Infrastructure was often privatized or outsourced. As Joel Garreau's 1991 book Edge City demonstrates, a place like Tysons Corner, Virginia — a highway-bound, developer-led edge city — embodied this shift: planned by commerce, not civic vision. A decade later, planners tried to retrofit that vision — adding transit, density, and walkability — but progress has been uneven, with car infrastructure still shaping much of daily life.This regime aligned with the rise of financial abstraction and logistical optimization. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman argue in Underground Empire, digital finance extended global capitalism's reach by creating a networked infrastructure that allowed capital to move seamlessly across borders, largely outside the control of democratic institutions. Cities and regions increasingly contorted themselves to host these flows — rebranding, rezoning, and reconfiguring their form to attract global liquidity.At the same time, as historian Quinn Slobodian notes, globalism was not simply about market liberalization but about insulating capital from democratic constraint. This logic played out spatially through the proliferation of privatized enclaves, special jurisdictions, and free trade zones — spaces engineered to remain separate from public oversight while remaining plugged into global markets.In metro cores, this led to vertical Central Business Districts, securitized plazas, and speculative towers. In the suburbs and exurbs, it encouraged the low-density, car-dependent landscapes that still propagate. It's still packaged as freedom but built on exclusion. In rural zones, the same logic produces logistics hubs, monoculture farms, and fractured small towns caught precariously between extraction and abandonment.SEDIMENT AND SENTIMENTWhat has emerged in the U.S., and many other countries, is a fragmented patchwork: privatized downtowns, disconnected suburbs, branded exurbs, and digitally tethered hinterlands…often with tax advantages. All governed by the same regime, but expressed through vastly different forms.We're in a regime that promised flexibility, innovation, and shared global prosperity — a future shaped by open markets, technological dynamism, and spatial freedom. But that promise is fraying. Ecological and meteorological breakdown, housing instability, and institutional exhaustion are revealing the deep limits of this model.The cracks are widening. The pandemic scrambled commuting rhythms and retail flows that reverberate to this day. Climate stress reshapes assumptions about where and how to build. Platforms restructure access to space as AI wiggles its way into every corner. Through it all, the legitimacy of traditional planning models, even established forms of governing, weakens.Some historians may call this an interregnum — a space between dominant systems, where the old still governs in form, but its power to convince has faded. The term comes from political theory, describing those in-between moments when no single order fully holds. It's a fitting word for times like these, when spatial logic lingers physically but loses meaning conceptually. The dominant spatial logic remains etched in roads, zoning codes, and skylines — but its conceptual scaffolding is weakening. Whether seen as structural-demographic strain or spatial realignment, this is a moment of uncertainty. The systems that once structured urban life — zoning codes, master plans, market forecasts — may no longer provide a stable map. And that's okay. Interregnums, as political theorist Christopher Hobson reminds us, aren't just voids between orders — they are revealing. Moments when the cracks in dominant systems allow us to see what had been taken for granted. They offer space to reflect, to experiment, and to reimagine.Maybe what comes next is less of a plan and more of a posture — an attitude of attentiveness, humility, and care. As they advise when getting sucked out to sea by a rip tide: best remain calm and let it spit you out where it may than try to fight it. Especially given natural laws of scale theory suggests these urban rhythms are accelerating and their transitions are harder to anticipate. Change may not unfold through neat stages, but arrive suddenly, triggered by thresholds and tipping points. Like unsuspectingly floating in the warm waters of a calm slack tide, nothing appears that different until rip tide just below the surface reveals everything is.In that sense, this drifting moment is not just prelude — it is transformation in motion. Cities have always adapted under pressure — sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. But they rarely begin anew. Roman grids still anchor cities from London to Barcelona. Medieval networks persist beneath tourist maps and tangled streets. Haussmann's boulevards remain etched across Paris, shaping flows of traffic and capital. These aren't ghosts — they're framing. Living sediment.Today's uncertainty is no different. It may feel like a void, but it's not empty. It's layered. Transitions build on remnants, repurposing forms even as their meanings shift. Parcel lines, zoning overlays, server farms, and setback requirements — these are tomorrow's layered manuscripts — palimpsests.But it's not just physical traces we inherit. Cities also carry conceptual ones — ideas like growth, public good, infrastructure, or progress that were forged under earlier regimes. As historian Elias Palti reminds us, concepts are not fixed. They are contingent, born in conflict, and reshaped in uncertainty. In moments like this, even the categories we use to interpret urban life begin to shift. The city, then, is not just a built form — it's a field of meaning. And in the cracks of the old, new frameworks begin to take shape. The work now is not only to build differently, but to think differently too.REFERENCESDilke, O. A. W. (1985). Greek and Roman Maps. Cornell University Press.Boeing, Geoff. (2019). “Spatial Information and the Legibility of Urban Form.” Journal of Planning Education and Research, 39(2), 208–220.Conzen, M. R. G. (1960). “Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town Plan Analysis.” Institute of British Geographers Publication.Moudon, Anne Vernez. (1997). “Urban Morphology as an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field.” Urban Morphology, 1(1), 3–10.Smith, Michael E. (2007). “Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning.” Journal of Planning History, 6(1), 3–47.West, Geoffrey. (2017). Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies. Penguin Press.Turchin, Peter. (2016). Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. Beresta Books.Garreau, Joel. (1991). Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Doubleday.Farrell, Henry, & Newman, Abraham. (2023). Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. Henry Holt.Slobodian, Quinn. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Metropolitan Books.Hobson, Christopher. (2015). The Rise of Democracy: Revolution, War and Transformations in International Politics since 1776. Edinburgh University Press.Palti, Elias José. (2020). An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Columbia University Press. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, Stewart Alsop talks with guest Saila about Argentina's fascinating socio-economic dynamics, its chaotic history, and potential future under the current government. Topics range from Argentina's unique financial practices—like the "blue dollar" system and the impact of inflation on everyday life—to global geopolitical shifts, the role of bureaucracy, and the rise of multipolarity. They also explore the opportunities and challenges for crypto and fintech in Argentina, drawing connections to innovation spurred by economic adversity. Check out Saila on Twitter at @sailaunderscore for more insights.Check out this GPT we trained on the conversation!Timestamps00:00 Introduction and Welcome00:13 Argentina's Economic Situation00:56 Understanding the Blue Rate03:20 Psychological Impact of Inflation07:17 Global Political Dynamics14:30 AI and Human Perception21:23 Bureaucracy and Governance28:20 Historical Context and Future Predictions37:36 The Birth of ARPA and NASA38:21 Crazy Ideas and Vietnam39:11 The Internet's Origin and Tech's Evolution39:46 The Political Silence of Tech Giants40:58 The Dark Matter of Eligibility41:30 Navigating the Tech and Finance Worlds48:37 The Reality of Crypto in Argentina58:36 Argentina's Unique Financial Landscape01:07:20 Conclusion and Final ThoughtsKey InsightsArgentina's Economic Complexity and the Blue Dollar: Argentina's economic system is uniquely chaotic, characterized by a dual exchange rate system with the "blue dollar" or parallel exchange rate operating alongside the official rate. This system reflects a deeply ingrained culture of financial adaptation and innovation, where residents navigate inflation and economic instability with remarkable dexterity. The resilience and pragmatism of Argentines in the face of such challenges have made their everyday understanding of economics highly nuanced and practical.The Global Perception of Argentina Under Javier Milei: Under the leadership of Javier Milei, Argentina is at a critical juncture, attempting to shift from decades of economic chaos to potential stabilization. Despite initial skepticism, Milei's administration has managed to maintain a credible fiscal policy, such as adhering to a zero primary deficit. This success challenges both local and global expectations, showcasing how Argentina's political narrative can surprise even seasoned economists.The Global Shift from Unipolarity to Multipolarity: The conversation reflects on the decline of the unipolar world order dominated by the United States and the rise of a more fragmented multipolar reality. With China as a prominent actor but inexperienced in global leadership, the dynamics of international power are evolving. The U.S. faces a choice between deliberate withdrawal from global dominance or grappling with a loss of influence—a process that holds implications for countries like Argentina operating on the periphery.The Power of Illegibility in Systems and Markets: Saila introduces the concept of "illegibility," where the real value in systems often lies in aspects that are not immediately visible or measurable. This is particularly true in environments like Argentina, where formal systems often fail, and informal networks and practices flourish. The same holds in global markets and innovation hubs, where the most significant opportunities often emerge from navigating the unspoken or unseen rules.The Role of Crypto in Argentina's Financial Landscape: Argentina has become a critical testbed for cryptocurrency applications due to its economic instability and limited access to traditional credit markets. Stablecoins, in particular, have found real-world use cases as tools for saving and transacting in a volatile economy. This positions Argentina as an unlikely but important center for crypto innovation, driven by necessity rather than speculation.Innovation Through Constraint: Economic adversity in Argentina has sparked remarkable creativity and ingenuity among its population. From unique financial practices like partial cash housing transactions to unconventional uses of stablecoins, the constraints of the system have fostered innovation. This serves as a case study in how challenging environments can generate solutions with broader applicability, even in more stable economies.Bureaucracy as an Autonomous Agent: The conversation draws parallels between bureaucratic systems in Argentina and those in developed nations like the U.S., highlighting how they often evolve into semi-autonomous entities prioritizing their survival. Argentina's overgrown bureaucracy has contributed to inefficiency and economic decline, yet similar patterns of self-preservation and stagnation are visible in Western governments and institutions as well.
No guest this week. Instead it's just a good old yap session with Meghan and Cortland talking about relationships and the conversations we've been having about them lately. As per the ad spot at the beginning of the episode we'd love to have you join us at Content Warning this coming February! You can get all the info and sign up to join us in person in Atlanta or virtually online at https://www.ContentWarningEvent.com/. If you enjoy listening to the show, please consider heading over to apple podcasts to rate and review us. If you really enjoy the show, we would love to see you in our Patreon.com/ThereafterPod! Also, look for us on social media and shoot us a message to say hello, or chat with us in Twitter spaces on Tuesday mornings in deconstruction coffee hour! Twitter: @ThereafterPod, @CortlandCoffey, @ThePursuingLife Instagram: @ThereafterPodcast, @CortlandCoffey, @ThePursuingLife
Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Robert Leshner, and Tarun Chitra explore the latest trends in the crypto world. In this episode, we dive into the impact of celebrity-endorsed memecoins, featuring discussions around Iggy Azalea's 'Mother' token, Waka Flocka Flame's 'Flocka' token, and other celebrities. We debate the broader implications of these phenomena on the crypto market, address criticisms of venture capital's role in crypto, and explore the seasonal nature of crypto trading. Tune in for an in-depth look at how pop culture intersects with cryptocurrency, shaping current market sentiment. Show highlights
Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Robert Leshner, and Tarun Chitra explore the latest trends in the crypto world. In this episode, we dive into the impact of celebrity-endorsed memecoins, featuring discussions around Iggy Azalea's 'Mother' token, Waka Flocka Flame's 'Flocka' token, and other celebrities. We debate the broader implications of these phenomena on the crypto market, address criticisms of venture capital's role in crypto, and explore the seasonal nature of crypto trading. Tune in for an in-depth look at how pop culture intersects with cryptocurrency, shaping current market sentiment. Show highlights
Episode 127I spoke with Christopher Thi Nguyen about:* How we lose control of our values* The tradeoffs of legibility, aggregation, and simplification* Gamification and its risksEnjoy—and let me know what you think!C. Thi Nguyen as of July 2020 is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research focuses on how social structures and technology can shape our rationality and our agency. He has published on trust, expertise, group agency, community art, cultural appropriation, aesthetic value, echo chambers, moral outrage porn, and games. He received his PhD from UCLA. Once, he was a food writer for the Los Angeles Times.I spend a lot of time on this podcast—if you like my work, you can support me on Patreon :)Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:10) The ubiquity of James C. Scott* (06:03) Legibility and measurement* (12:50) Value capture, classes and measurement* (17:30) Political value choice in ML* (23:30) Why value collapse happens* (33:00) Blackburn, “Hume and Thick Connexions” — projectivism and legibility* (36:20) Heuristics and decision-making* (40:08) Institutional classification systems* (46:55) Back to Hume* (48:27) Epistemic arms races, stepping outside our conceptual architectures* (56:40) The “what to do” question* (1:04:00) Gamification, aesthetic engagement* (1:14:51) Echo chambers and defining utility* (1:22:10) Progress, AGI millenarianism* (disclaimer: I don't know what's going to happen with the world, either.)* (1:26:04) Parting visions* (1:30:02) OutroLinks:* Chrisopher's Twitter and homepage* Games: Agency as Art* Papers referenced* Transparency is Surveillance* Games and the art of agency* Autonomy and Aesthetic Engagement* Art as a Shelter from Science* Value Capture* Hostile Epistemology* Hume and Thick Connexions (Simon Blackburn) Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe
What makes an accessible typeface? And how can we improve typography in regard to web accessibility? To answer this and other questions, I invited type designer Eleni Beveratou, creative director at Dalton Maag. We discuss:
In this episode you'll learn how Eleni Beveratou (Creative Director of Dalton Maag) went from hating type in school to realizing its utmost importance, leading her to find her niche and complete a Master's degree in Typeface Design. Eleni walks us through how experienced readers read and how this informs typeface choice, as well as assessing accessible type through the helpful metrics of legibility, readability, likeability. Eleni explains why choosing simpler characters over more complex shapes are not always better for accessibility, as well as how using type in digital environments must be carefully considered, particularly the differences in light mode versus dark mode. Finally, you'll learn the ‘basics' that Eleni wishes she knew early in her career. This episode was recorded live at DesignThinkers Toronto 2023 as part of a guest lecture series in GCM 230 - Typography in Fall 2023 at The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University.I'm all about interesting projects with interesting people! Let's Connect on the web or via Instagram. :)
Greetings, Esteemed Wise Wordians,Welcome back to yet another captivating instalment of 'Wise Words Book Summaries.'In this episode, we delve into the insightful pages of ‘Seeing Like a State' by the esteemed James C Scott, unravelling the profound essence of its central theme.Join us as we embark on a journey through the following thought-provoking topics:How societal transformations can take unexpected turnsThe 4 critical factors leading to catastrophic outcomes in state-led changesState projects of legibility and simplificationThe repercussions of applying measures to realityThe metric revolution and its implicationsThe fascinating story behind cadastral maps and their ramificationsUncovering the origins of the modern stateIf any of these subjects pique your curiosity, we invite you to tune in. And if our content resonates with you, why not express your support by liking our episode, subscribing to our channel, or, even better, sharing your invaluable insights in the comment section below? Your feedback holds immense significance to us, serving as a compass guiding our podcast's improvement.Furthermore, should you be inclined to put into practice any of the actionable ideas we discuss in this episode, navigate over to our website at wisewords.blog, where the comprehensive summary of ‘Seeing Like A State' awaits your exploration.We hope that you enjoy it!———————Chapters:Intro-00:00:00Overview-00:00:16Introduction (The Purpose of the Book)-00:00:48How societal transformations go wrong:00:03:314 factors that lead to catastrophic outcomes in state-led societal changes:00:04:00The pitfalls of order:00:08:10Part 1 - State Projects of Legibility and Simplification:00:09:05The Utilitarian language that underpins our modern times:00:14:13Schematics of Social Order:00:20:47Uniformity in Measurement Systems:00:21:39The value in local measurements and why they aren't of use to states:00:24:57The Metric Revolution – Empowering the State:00:32:26Measuring Land Tenure – The formation of the Cadastral Map:00:36:53Initial Goals of Cadastral Maps:00:38:59Where the Cadastral map gets it wrong:00:40:21How shorthand formulas create incentives to game:00:45:32The Origins of the Modern State:00:49:06Naming Practices as a State Tool:00:50:52State Tool – Standardising Language:00:52:48Summary so far:00:54:54Part 2 -Transforming Visions:00:55:29Understanding State Simplification in Governance:00:59:09Understanding the Modern Map:01:10:54Catastrophes in State Development:01:13:55The Evolution of the State's Role in Society:01:15:13Understanding High Modernism:01:17:33Modernism and City Planning:01:23:22Lenin: The Revolutionary Visionary:01:30:18The Art of Crafting History by Victors:01:32:18Part 4 - The Missing Link - Types of Knowledge:01:35:58Technical Knowledge - The Relation with Episteme and Techne:01:36:18Techne and Science:01:39:30Practical knowledge:01:46:53Understanding Mētis:01:48:08Effectiveness of Practical Knowledge:01:53:23Valuing Practical Solutions:01:55:51Factors Contributing to the Disregard for Practical Knowledge:01:58:32How to make development planning betterIf you enjoyed this podcast make sure to check out our other content on our other platforms: Website: https://wisewords.blog/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wisewords.blog/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wisewordsblog Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WiseWordsBlog
In this episode, Rex sits down with Valerie Garrett, VP and Design Director at Fifth Third Bank, as she discusses their workplace transformation journey. Val talks about revamping their headquarters with a focus on legibility, unity, and connection post-pandemic.Tune in for insights on leadership involvement, trust-building, and returning to the office, along with practical well-being advice and the importance of making informed decisions. Don't miss this episode for valuable tips on creating a resilient and inclusive workspace.The Resilience Lab is an Imagine a Place Production.
Austin Wade Smith is Executive Director of Regen Foundation. In conversation with Matthew Monahan. Watch this episode on video: https://youtu.be/19A2lofsByc Watch a preview: https://youtu.be/ycLqBKjLYyg Regen Foundation: https://regen.foundation/ Austin's website: http://www.austinwadesmith.com Austin's Twitter: https://twitter.com/_newcubes_ THE REGENERATION WILL BE FUNDED Ma Earth Website: https://maearth.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@maearthmedia Community Discord: https://maearth.com/community Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/theregeneration/feed.xml EPISODE RESOURCES Earth Law Center: https://www.earthlawcenter.org/ RELATED SEASON 1 INTERVIEWS Gregory Landua (Regen Network): https://youtu.be/JKgK4ZDf8gk Sam Bennetts (Regen Network): https://youtu.be/f2fKe5QIv0M Erin Matariki Carr (RIVER): https://youtu.be/VbAAM40gRjs This interview took place during Eco-Weaving 2023. SOCIAL Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/maearth X / Twitter: https://twitter.com/maearthmedia Lenstube: https://lenstube.xyz/channel/maearth.lens Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maearthmedia/ Mirror: https://mirror.xyz/maearth.eth LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/maearth/ Lenster: https://lenster.xyz/u/maearth Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maearthcommunity TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maearthmedia
In this episode, I'm joined by Neil Chilson to talk about: Impact of imposed legibility. 4:48 The problem with platform monopolies and network effects. 10:51 Content moderation on social media. 17:02 What challenges will Elon face when taking twitter private? 21:44 The truth about government policy and how individuals can help. 27:19 The power of the wave and the beach analogy. 32:29 Has the federal government gotten worse over time?
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Response to Holden's alignment plan, published by Alex Flint on December 22, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum. This work was supported by the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth. You can support my work directly here. I will give a short presentation of this work followed by discussion on Saturday (Dec 24) at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern. RSVP here. Outline This is a response to Holden Karnofsky's plan for aligning powerful AI systems in the case that such systems are developed soon. I give a summary of Holden's plan, and then critique it. My basic critique is that the tools Holden is proposing are too similar to what has been tried in the construction of human institutions, and I argue that we have failed to create large numbers of human institutions that alleviate rather than exacerbate existential risk. The Karnofsky Plan Holden has written about how we might align very powerful AI systems if such systems were to be developed soon. The basic approach Holden proposes is to train AI systems to be honest, legible, and corrigible, and value-aligned using human supervision. Honesty means not engaging in deceit or manipulation of the supervisor. Legibility means creating artifacts that help supervisors to accurately review decisions. Corrigibility means being willing to stop when the human supervisor says no, no matter how strongly the AI believes that it is doing the right thing. Value-alignment means pursuing the goals of the supervisor. To train such AI systems, Holden says we need to pay attention to the following properties of the training environment: (1) The human supervisor should provide high-quality feedback. This means that if we are training an AI system to be honest then the human supervisor should give a positive reward if and only if the AI system is, in fact, being honest. It can be hard to know whether an AI system is being honest. Therefore we may design further tools to help the human assess whether the AI system is being honest. In order to do this we may train auxiliary AI systems to assess our primary AI system, or we may restrict the complexity of the primary AI systems, or we may set up an ecosystem of differently-trained AI systems in such a way that dishonesty is "weeded out" by ecological dynamics. (2) The AI learner should correctly generalize what it has been taught. This means that if we are training an AI system to be honest then the AI system should be honest even when presented with situations very unlike those that it encountered during training. To accomplish this we may identify, during training, which situations are most likely to cause undesirable behavior given the current state of the AI, and then subject the AI to those situations and provide negative rewards until the undesirable behavior is corrected. We may train auxiliary AI systems to help with identifying the situations most likely to cause undesirable behavior given the current state of the AI (adversarial training). (3) The AI learner should not break out of the training container. This means that if we are training an AI system to be honest, it should be possible for the human supervisor to hide certain things outside the training container, such as schemes for testing the AI system in clever ways. If the AI system escapes the training container, hacks the human supervisor's cell phone, and listens to the human supervisors discussing the structure of the next test, then the AI system may be able to appear honest without actually being honest. More generally, the AI system should not escape the training container during training. To accomplish this we may build auxiliary AI systems that help to find and patch security holes in the software that holds the training container. (4) The AI learner should be thoroughly tested before deployment. This means that af...
With Guest Host Glenn Hopper This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Anat Ashkenazi of Eli Lilly, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, and CFO Evan Goldstein of Seismic.
With Guest Host Glenn Hopper This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Anat Ashkenazi of Eli Lilly, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, and CFO Evan Goldstein of Seismic. GUEST HOST: Glenn Hopper, CFO, Sandline Global, Author of Deep Finance A former Navy journalist, filmmaker, and business founder, Glenn Hopper has spent the past two decades helping startups transition to going concerns, operate at scale, and prepare for funding and/or acquisition. He is passionate about transforming the role of chief financial officer from historical reporter to forward-looking strategist. He has served as a finance leader in a variety of industries including telecommunications, retail, internet, and legal technology. He has a master's degree in finance with a graduate certificate in business analytics from Harvard University, and a master's degree in business administration from Regis University. Glenn is married with three children, two goldendoodles, and a neurotic cat. Glenn is also a member of American Mensa and volunteers his time for the Analytics Foundation, helping nonprofits to digitally transform their organizations. In his free time, Glenn is an avid runner and cyclist.
In episode 032, Martin and Jahed chat with Gregory Landua, CEO of Regen Network. Gregory has a long history in regenerative finance before it became the web3 incarnation of #ReFi. He covers the roots of regenerative finance in the permaculture movement, traces its intellectual history, introduces key concepts necessary to understand the new economy being built in natural assets, and introduces us to what Regen Network is enabling communities to do with their natural asset resources and commons management. This episode will be of interest to companies and protocols in the regenerative finance space, and those seeking to understand how the emerging ecosystem services economy. Show Notes: Enclosing the fishery commons (Alaskan commons management) Terra Genesis International Bioregionalism Permaculture Rafter Sass Ferguson Bill Mollison David Holmgren Allan Savory Holistic management 8 forms of capital (regenerative enterprise) Legibility (seeing like a state) Doughnut economics Gregory Bateson Sacred Economics Natural Capitalism World Economic Forum - natural capital assets and ecosystem services
In this episode I take on provider legibility. I know you are on an EMR but take a listen to this 13 minute episode to find out how a technical violation results in significant demands for refund by payors. I break down how payors try to use sampling and extrapolation without actually using the words but findings other synonyms to try to make it look less like they are doing something they should not be doing...
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Limits to Legibility, published by Jan Kulveit on June 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. From time to time, someone makes the case for why transparency in reasoning is important. The latest conceptualization is Epistemic Legibility by Elizabeth, but the core concept is similar to reasoning transparency used by OpenPhil, and also has some similarity to A Sketch of Good Communication by Ben Pace. I'd like to offer a gentle pushback. The tl;dr is in my comment on Ben's post, but it seems useful enough for a standalone post. “How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it's just words.” ― David Foster Wallace When and why reasoning legibility is hard Say you demand transparent reasoning from AlphaGo. The algorithm has roughly two parts: tree search and a neural network. Tree search reasoning is naturally legible: the "argument" is simply a sequence of board states. In contrast, the neural network is mostly illegible - its output is a figurative "feeling" about how promising a position is, but that feeling depends on the aggregate experience of a huge number of games, and it is extremely difficult to explain transparently how a particular feeling depends on particular past experiences. So AlphaGo would be able to present part of its reasoning to you, but not the most important part. Human reasoning uses both: cognition similar to tree search (where the steps can be described, written down, and explained to someone else) and processes not amenable to introspection (which function essentially as a black box that produces a "feeling"). People sometimes call these latter signals “intuition”, “implicit knowledge”, “taste”, “S1 reasoning” and the like. Explicit reasoning often rides on top of this.Extending the machine learning metaphor, the problem with human interpretability is that "mastery" in a field often consists precisely in having some well-trained black box neural network that performs fairly opaque background computations. Bad things can happen when you demand explanations from black boxes The second thesis is that it often makes sense to assume the mind runs distinct computational processes: one that actually makes decisions and reaches conclusions, and another that produces justifications and rationalizations. In my experience, if you have good introspective access to your own reasoning, you may occasionally notice that a conclusion C depends mainly on some black box, but at the same time, you generated a plausible legible argument A for the same conclusion after you reached the conclusion C. If you try running, say, Double Crux over such situations, you'll notice that even if someone refutes the explicit reasoning A, you won't quite change the conclusion to ¬C. The legible argument A was not the real crux. It is quite often the case that (A) is essentially fake (or low-weight), whereas the black box is hiding a reality-tracking model. Stretching the AlphaGo metaphor a bit: AlphaGo could be easily modified to find a few specific game "rollouts" that turned out to "explain" the mysterious signal from the neural network. Using tree search, it would produce a few specific examples how such a position may evolve, which would be selected to agree with the neural net prediction. If AlphaGo showed them to you, it might convince you! But you would get a completely superficial understanding of why it evaluates the situation the way it does, or why it makes certain moves. Risks from the legibility norm When you make a strong norm pushing for too straightforward "epistemic legibility", you risk several bad things:First, you increase the pressure on the "justification generator" to mask various black boxes by generating arguments supporting their conclusions.Second, you make individual people dumber. Imagine asking a Go grandmaster to transparently justify his mov...
Those who are pretty tuned into modern strength and conditioning and training for a sport like CrossFit have probably seen the use of data to improve performance. With complex systems, we can use data to make things more legible, show patterns and give us helpful information. But what happens when that information is not used correctly? One example is the recent widespread use of stretching and mobility apps to improve someone's movement and performance. We are seeing the use of virtual movement assessments to prescribe mobility interventions when human movement is a lot more complex than measuring how many degrees of mobility you have at a particular joint. There are many ways to make marginal gains, but we should be careful in what we chase and why we choose that. In episode 94 of the Legion Strength and Conditioning podcast, we talk about how you can 'keep the goal the goal' and appropriately use simplified, more legible information properly instead of optimising for data and metrics that don't represent the bigger picture. If you're not already subscribed to our newsletter, head over to www.legionsc.com to get a weekly selection of training tips and our favorite articles. We run online workshops for coaches as well. Find out when our next workshop is here: https://legionsc.com/program-design-workshops These podcast are posted in video format on YouTube as well. Show Notes: [1:15] What's triggered Luke recently [2:45] Movement and mobility applications and how they are being used [4:50] How Todd uses movement screens [8:00] Creating problems for the sake of legibility [10:00] How overly simplified messages can cause problems [15:45] Simplifying complex systems to make things legible [17:35] Goodharts Law - chasing metrics [20:10] Data averages and cycle rate of movements in CrossFit workouts [22:00] Causality in workout performances [24:00] Using data to make useful changes and improving their technique [27:20] Appropriately using data versus optimising for data
The Turkish Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Authority recently published: (1) the Guideline on the License Application for Homeopathic Medicinal Products and Guideline on the Packaging, Homeopathic Medicinal Product Information, Legibility and Tracking of Homeopathic Medicinal Products; (2) the Guideline on the Implementation of the Regulation on Quality Compliance and Quality Control Tests of Diagnostic Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Radiotherapy Group Medical Devices; and (3) the Basic Requirements Guideline for COVID- 19 Vaccines' Risk Management Plans.
I'm joined by wonderful José Scaglione. He is a type designer, lecturer, and co-founder of the high renown foundry TypeTogether, which is behind popular typefaces like Bree or Adelle. They worked with top brands, like Apple and Google, where they also contributed serif typefaces for screen rendering. And this is why I invited José – to discuss with him the predominance of sans-serif in user interfaces and screen design more broadly. We speak about, why it might be a legacy issue, and that moving out of your comfort zone can be very rewarding. It brings us to legibility, readability, and accessibility. José also shares how he experienced the switch from static fonts to variable fonts as a type designer and foundry. If you struggle with pairing typefaces, this episode also has some tips for you. Talking points: 00:28 Introduction 02:39 Greeting to José Scaglione 03:36 Is the font in the TypeTogether logo overused? 06:01 Don't use tabular figures on business cards 07:27 Benefits of learning about typography 09:49 Why is sans-serif dominant in UIs? 13:02 Legibility, regardless of sans or serif 15:34 Why are neo-grotesques so popular? 17:08 Arguments against neutrality & Helvetica 18:57 Portada: A serif typeface for UI design 20:39 Complexity of printing vs screen 24:30 Variable fonts and optical sizing 27:57 Variable fonts and file size 29:37 Do you need the design space of VF? 31:31 Belarius: Slab serifs in UI design 35:40 Accessibility and typography 42:38 Advice for typography newbies 43:20 Tips on pairing typefaces 45:26 Rapid Round of questions 47:11 Goodbye 48:18 Summary Visuals, quotes, and links: https://pimpmytype.com/talk01
Nicolas Shannon Savard and Joshua Bastian Cole continue their conversation about transgender representation. They critique Time magazine's 2014 declaration of the “transgender tipping point” of cultural visibility and explore the ways in which Hollywood's handling of trans narratives bleeds over into the theatre, politics, and daily life for trans and gender nonconforming people.
In episode 1 (part 1) of Gender Euphoria, the podcast, host Nicolas Shannon Savard sits down with Joshua Bastian Cole to talk about popular tropes in transgender representation, gender legibility on stage, and the implications of each for trans and nonbinary theatremakers.
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Epistemic Legibility, published by Elizabeth on February 9, 2022 on LessWrong. Tl;dr: being easy to argue with is a virtue, separate from being correct. Introduction Regular readers of my blog know of my epistemic spot check series, where I take claims (evidential or logical) from a work of nonfiction and check to see if they're well supported. It's not a total check of correctness: the goal is to rule out things that are obviously wrong/badly formed before investing much time in a work, and to build up my familiarity with its subject. Before I did epistemic spot checks, I defined an easy-to-read book as, roughly, imparting an understanding of its claims with as little work from me as possible. After epistemic spot checks, I started defining easy to read as “easy to epistemic spot check”. It should be as easy as possible (but no easier) to identify what claims are load-bearing to a work's conclusions, and figure out how to check them. This is separate from correctness: things can be extremely legibly wrong. The difference is that when something is legibly wrong someone can tell you why, often quite simply. Illegible things just sit there at an unknown level of correctness, giving the audience no way to engage. There will be more detailed examples later, but real quick: “The English GDP in 1700 was $890324890. I base this on $TECHNIQUE interpretation of tax records, as recorded in $REFERENCE” is very legible (although probably wrong, since I generated the number by banging on my keyboard). “Historically, England was rich” is not. “Historically, England was richer than France” is somewhere in-between. “It was easy to apply this blog post format I made up to this book” is not a good name, so I've taken to calling the collection of traits that make things easy to check “epistemic legibility”, in the James C. Scott sense of the word legible. Legible works are (comparatively) easy to understand, they require less external context, their explanations scale instead of needing to be tailored for each person. They're easier to productively disagree with, easier to partially agree with instead of forcing a yes or no, and overall easier to integrate into your own models. [Like everything in life, epistemic legibility is a spectrum, but I'll talk about it mostly as a binary for readability's sake] When people talk about “legible” in the Scott sense they often mean it as a criticism, because pushing processes to be more legible cuts out illegible sources of value. One of the reasons I chose the term here is that I want to be very clear about the costs of legibility and the harms of demanding it in excess. But I also think epistemic legibility leads people to learn more correct things faster and is typically underprovided in discussion. If I hear an epistemically legible argument, I have a lot of options. I can point out places I think the author missed data that impacts their conclusion, or made an illogical leap. I can notice when I know of evidence supporting their conclusions that they didn't mention. I can see implications of their conclusions that they didn't spell out. I can synthesize with other things I know, that the author didn't include. If I hear an illegible argument, I have very few options. Perhaps the best case scenario is that it unlocks something I already knew subconsciously but was unable to articulate, or needed permission to admit. This is a huge service! But if I disagree with the argument, or even just find it suspicious, my options are kind of crap. I write a response of equally low legibility, which is unlikely to improve understanding for anyone. Or I could write up a legible case for why I disagree, but that is much more work than responding to a legible original, and often more work than went into the argument I'm responding to, because it's not obviou...
In episode 1 (part 1) of Gender Euphoria, the podcast, host Nicolas Shannon Savard sits down with Joshua Bastian Cole to talk about popular tropes in transgender representation, gender legibility on stage, and the implications of each for trans and nonbinary theatremakers.
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Epistemic Legibility, published by Elizabeth on February 9, 2022 on LessWrong. Tl;dr: being easy to argue with is a virtue, separate from being correct. Introduction Regular readers of my blog know of my epistemic spot check series, where I take claims (evidential or logical) from a work of nonfiction and check to see if they're well supported. It's not a total check of correctness: the goal is to rule out things that are obviously wrong/badly formed before investing much time in a work, and to build up my familiarity with its subject. Before I did epistemic spot checks, I defined an easy-to-read book as, roughly, imparting an understanding of its claims with as little work from me as possible. After epistemic spot checks, I started defining easy to read as “easy to epistemic spot check”. It should be as easy as possible (but no easier) to identify what claims are load-bearing to a work's conclusions, and figure out how to check them. This is separate from correctness: things can be extremely legibly wrong. The difference is that when something is legibly wrong someone can tell you why, often quite simply. Illegible things just sit there at an unknown level of correctness, giving the audience no way to engage. There will be more detailed examples later, but real quick: “The English GDP in 1700 was $890324890. I base this on $TECHNIQUE interpretation of tax records, as recorded in $REFERENCE” is very legible (although probably wrong, since I generated the number by banging on my keyboard). “Historically, England was rich” is not. “Historically, England was richer than France” is somewhere in-between. “It was easy to apply this blog post format I made up to this book” is not a good name, so I've taken to calling the collection of traits that make things easy to check “epistemic legibility”, in the James C. Scott sense of the word legible. Legible works are (comparatively) easy to understand, they require less external context, their explanations scale instead of needing to be tailored for each person. They're easier to productively disagree with, easier to partially agree with instead of forcing a yes or no, and overall easier to integrate into your own models. [Like everything in life, epistemic legibility is a spectrum, but I'll talk about it mostly as a binary for readability's sake] When people talk about “legible” in the Scott sense they often mean it as a criticism, because pushing processes to be more legible cuts out illegible sources of value. One of the reasons I chose the term here is that I want to be very clear about the costs of legibility and the harms of demanding it in excess. But I also think epistemic legibility leads people to learn more correct things faster and is typically underprovided in discussion. If I hear an epistemically legible argument, I have a lot of options. I can point out places I think the author missed data that impacts their conclusion, or made an illogical leap. I can notice when I know of evidence supporting their conclusions that they didn't mention. I can see implications of their conclusions that they didn't spell out. I can synthesize with other things I know, that the author didn't include. If I hear an illegible argument, I have very few options. Perhaps the best case scenario is that it unlocks something I already knew subconsciously but was unable to articulate, or needed permission to admit. This is a huge service! But if I disagree with the argument, or even just find it suspicious, my options are kind of crap. I write a response of equally low legibility, which is unlikely to improve understanding for anyone. Or I could write up a legible case for why I disagree, but that is much more work than responding to a legible original, and often more work than went into the argument I'm responding to, because it's not obviou...
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: Illegible impact is still impact, published by G Gordon Worley III on the effective altruism forum. Write a Review In EA we focus a lot on legible impact. At a tactical level, it's the thing that often separates EA from other altruistic efforts. Unfortunately I think this focus on impact legibility, when taken to extremes and applied in situations where it doesn't adequately account for value, leads to bad outcomes for EA and the world as a whole. Legibility is the idea that only what can easily be explained and measured within a model matters. Anything that doesn't fit neatly in the model is therefore illegible. In the case of impact, legible impact is that which can be measured easily in ways that a model predicts is correlated with outcomes. Examples of legible impact measures for altruistic efforts include counterfactual lives saved, QALYs, DALYs, and money donated; examples of legible impact measures for altruistic individuals include the preceding plus things like academic citations and degrees, jobs at EA organizations, and EA Forum karma. Some impact is semi-legible, like social status among EAs, claims of research progress, and social media engagement. Semi-legible impact either involves fuzzy measurement procedures or low confidence models of how the measure correlates with real world outcomes. Illegible impact is, by comparison, invisible, like helping a friend who, without your help, might have been too depressed to get a better job and donate more money to effective charities or filling a seat in the room at an EA Global talk such that the speaker feels marginally more rewarded for having done the work they are talking about and marginally incentives them to do more. Illegible impact is either hard or impossible to measure or there's no agreed upon model suggesting the action is correlated with impact. And the examples I gave are not maximally illegible because they had to be legible enough for me to explain them to you; the really invisible stuff is like dark matter—we can see signs of its existence (good stuff happens in the world) but we can't tell you much about what it is (no model of how the good stuff happened). The alluring trap is thinking that illegible impact is not impact and that legible impact is the only thing that matters. If that doesn't resonate, I recommend checking out the links above on legibility to see when and how focusing on the legible to the exclusion of the illegible can lead to failure. One place we risk failing to adequately appreciate illegible impact is in work on far future concerns and existential risk. This comes with the territory: it's hard to validate our models of what will happen in the far future, and the feedback cycle is so long that it may be thousands or millions of lifetimes before we get data back that lets us know if an intervention, organization, or person had positive impact, let alone if that impact was effectively generated. Another place we risk impact illegible is in dealing with non-humans since there remains great uncertainty in many people's minds about how to value the experiences of animals, plants, and non-living dynamic systems like AI. Yes, people who care about non-humans are often legible to each other because they share enough assumptions that they can share models and can believe measures in terms of those models, but outside these groups interventions to help non-humans can seem broadly illegible, up to interpreting these the interventions, like those addressing wild animal suffering, as being silly or incoherent rather than potentially positively impactful. Beyond these two examples, there's one place where I think the problems of illegible impact are especially neglected and that is easily tractable if we bother to acknowledge it. It's one EAs are already familiar with, though likely no...
Tyler brings his reflections from James C. Scott's Seeing like a State, and sparks a conversation about the problems inherent to making things “legible.” The notion of legibility takes the dialogue beyond the production of governmental policy, and ultimately into the very structures of language and knowledge themselves.
Paris Marx is joined by Legacy Russell to discuss how glitch feminism challenges existing ideas of what constitutes the body and the effects of having those conceptions embedded within our technological systems.Legacy Russell is the associate curator of exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and will become executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen in September. She's the author of “Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto” and is currently writing “Black Meme.” Follow Legacy on Twitter as @LegacyRussell.
More information about Brain Lenses at brainlenses.com.BL supporters receive an additional episode of the show each week. Info about becoming a supporter at the above address.Read the written version of this episode: brainlenses.substack.com/p/legibility This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at brainlenses.substack.com/subscribe
For the love of U and I. Jules Gill presents 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Video Game UI...ENJOY!Follow us on Twitter:@Retr0J@WCultureGamingCheck out our YouTube channel: youtube.com/whatculturegamingFor even more awesome content, check out: whatculture.com/gaming See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this final episode of a 3-part mini-series, Diana uses scissors to cut through different types of paper and plastic. This ASMR-inspired (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) episode is perfect for winding down after a long day of studying. Focusing your mind on the sounds will help you stay as sharp as your scissors.
Sometimes we simply forget what average is and need a reminder. In episode 67, we are having a discussion about a recent journal article that looks at the typical handwriting abilities among second graders and compares their scores on the Evaluation Tool of Children's Handwriting - Manuscript to the teacher's subjective observations of the children's work samples. Links to Show References:Long, D. M., & Conklin, J. (2019). Handwriting Performance of Typical Second-Grade Students as Measured by the Evaluation Tool of Children's Handwriting - Manuscript and Teacher Perceptions of Legibility. The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy, 7(4), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.15453/ 2168-6408.1492 The Evaluation Toll of Children's Handwriting Purpose Therapy Box Find the perfect OT gift for yourself or your favorite OTP! Use promo OTSchoolHouse for 10% off!Back To School ConferenceLearn more & register for the OT School House: Back to School Conference before early bird registration ends!
This week we're joined by Tim Fendley, Founder and Creative Director at Applied. Tim chats with us about lessons he's learned from doing wayfinding projects around the world including Legible London. 32
From the middle ages to the Middle East, from Futura to Freight, join us on a journey across the type universe and go where no designer has gone before… welcome to An Incomplete History of Type. Name: Blackletter (specifically Donatus-Kalender) Release Date: 1455Designer: Johannes GutenbergClassification: BlackletterOwned By: n/aClaim to Fame: The world’s first mechanized typeface, used in the world’s first mass-produced book.
Legibility vs Readability, Uniwidth Typefaces, and more! This week we're going into detail about what really is the difference between the terms legibility and readability and why it's important to distinguish the two as a designer. Plus, we've gathered some fantastic Internet finds. There's a one-of-a-kind article about the science of reading, an unbelievably detailed thesis covering the design of italic type, and we'll top it off with a list of recently released typefaces that will rock your socks off. Weekly Typographic Newsletter Links
Two episodes ago I covered the disasters which can occur when we try to exercise too much control over natural systems. In the last episode I talked about how systems can be too controlling, and how it's better that a system be legible than that it attempt perfection. In this episode, much like peanut butter and chocolate, I combine these two great ideas into one fantastic idea, and explore how the way we combat wildfires in many ways resembles the way we fight political fires, and that both methods fail in similar ways.
In a recent newsletter, Matthew Yglesias suggested three steps for creating effective policies: It’s easy for everyone, whether they agree with you or disagree with you, to understand what it is you say you are doing. It’s easy for everyone to see whether or not you are, in fact, doing what you said you would do. It’s easy for you and your team to meet the goal of doing the thing that you said you would do. These are great, but I think they could be applied far more broadly, which is exactly what I do in this episode.
In addition to sharing their tech origin stories—in quite different and nerdy ways—Jason comes up with with a weird business idea, Andrew wrangles with how to define the iPod and Martin's handwriting is put under the microscope. (Here's a hint: as you follow the episode, check the show notes below to view each origin story's corresponding image.) Pyjama/Pajama Buckets and Milo 00:00:00 Singlet (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/singlet)
We're joined by the talented trio of Reggie Blockett, Leonard Taylor and Steve Mobley Jr. for a conversation about queerness in the academy. We talked about the legibility of queer folx and whose gaze and experience are normalized when queer visibility is even questioned.
Listen to this episode if you agree that athletes and celebrities should do a better job of signing their names in terms of legibility and recognizability.
An infamous logo that combines an inukshuk with the year 1989. A font making the world a better place, one letter at a time. It’s time for the legibility vs. readability smackdown! In today’s episode, learn the difference between legibility and readability and how to use the technical aspects of typeface design and page layout to improve both. Discover why it’s not always necessary to have either in a design, however 99% of the time, a document should be both legible AND readable. Let’s do this in 3, 2, 1...
THIS EPISODE WARNS OF SACRIFICING LEGIBILITY OF NOTES FOR SPEED AND THE PITFALLS OF DOING SO IN THE STYLE OF DICTATION. THIS DICTATION IS NOT READ AT ANY PARTICULAR SPEED, BUT READ MORE FOR ACCURACY PRIMARILY. THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING. IF YOU HAVE NOT SUBSCRIBED OR LEFT ME A MESSAGE, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO DO SO. WE ARE ON SEASON 3 AND I HOPE THAT YOU ARE ENJOYING THE PODCAST. ALL SUGGESTIONS ON MATERIAL IS WELCOME. YOU CAN ALSO SUPPORT BY CLICKING ON LISTENER SUPPORT ON ANCHOR.FM.COM @ LET'S WRITE STENO. FROM PRACTICAL POINTERS FOR SHORTHAND STUDENTS PG 22 DON'T SACRIFICE LEGIBILITY FOR SPEED TRANSCRIPT THOSE WHO KNOW LITTLE TO NOTHING ABOUT SHORTHAND, FREQUENTLY ASK THE STENOGRAPHER, "HOW FAST CAN YOU WRITE?" AND THE SHORTHAND WRITER WILL CARELESSLY REPLY, " OH! ABOUT 150 to 200 WORDS PER MINUTE. " WHENEVER YOU HEAR SOMEONE TALK LIKE THAT, PUT YOUR HAND IN YOUR POCKET, PULL OUT ALL THE SPACE CASH YOU HAVE, LAY IT ON THE TABLE AND SAY: ALL THIS AND MORE WILL BE YOURS IF YOU WILL KINDLY SIT DOWN AND WRITE IN SHORTHAND WHAT I SHALL DICTATE, AT THE RATE YOU STATE, 150 WORDS PER MINUTE, AND THEN GIVE ME AN ACCURATE TRANSCRIPT OF WHAT YOU HAVE WRITTEN. THEN YOU WILL SEE THE RAPID ONE HIDE HIS DIMINISHED HEAD AND VANISH IN HIS SHELL, AS HE FAINTLY REPLIES, "I USED TO BE ABLE TO WRITE AT THAT SPEED WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL." NEVER BOAST YOUR SPEED! AIM FOR ACCURACY AND LEGIBILITY FIRST AND SPEED WILL FOLLOW SPEED AS APPLIED TO SHORTHAND IS A COMPARATIVE TERM. EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON THE MATTER DICTATED. WORDS OF ONE SYLLABLE, IT IS TRUE, MAY BE WRITTEN AT GREAT SPEED, OR SPEED MAY BE ATTAINED BY PRACTICING THE SAME MATTER OVER AND OVER AGAIN, BUT SUCH TESTS DO NOT REPRESENT THE ACTUAL, REGULAR, NORMAL RATE AT WHICH THE STUDENT CAN WRITE. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IS SO RICH IN WORDS THAT IT IS POSSIBLE TO MAKE THE MOST SKILLFUL WRITER OF SHORTHAND IN THE WORLD, SLACKEN WHEN WORDS ARE DICTATED THAT ARE NOT IN HIS VOCABULARY. HE HAS TO THINK OF SHORTHAND FORMS, AND IN DOING SO HESITATES, AND HENCE THE SPEED IS DIMINISHED TO ILLUSTRATE A CASE IN POINT: SUPPOSE A SELF-MADE MAN MAKES A SPEECH, AND ALLUDING HIS FATHER'S EARLY LIFE, SAYS: "MY FATHER WAS A FARM LABORER AND USED A PICK AND SHOVEL " THIS IS EASY LANGUAGE, READILY TAKEN DOWN, BUT SUPPOSE FOR A MOMENT THAT YOU HAD TO REPORT THE SPEECH OF A HIGHLY EDUCATED BOSTON LADY WHOSE FATHER WAS, BY A STRANGE COINCIDENCE, ALSO SELF-MADE AND FORMERLY USED A PICK AND SHOVEL. SHE WOULD NOT USE THE SAME LANGUAGE IN CONVEYING THIS INFORMATION, BUT WHATEVER SHE SAID, YOU, AS THE SHORTHAND WRITER, WOULD HAVE TO RECORD VERBATIM SHE MIGHT MURMUR SOMETHING LIKE THIS, "MY ESTIMABLE AND VENERABLE, PATERNAL, ANTECEDENT WAS INDEFATIGABLE, MANIPULATOR OF AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS." IN TAKING WORDS LIKE THESE, ONE'S BOASTED SPEED WOULD DWINDLE CONSIDERABLY. DO NOT THEN BOAST OF YOUR SPEED, BUT AIM FOR LEGIBILITY AND ACCURACY, SPEED WILL COME GRADUALLY. WHEN YOU HEAR AN UNCOMMON OR UNFAMILIAR WORD, PRACTICE THE OUTLINE OVER AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL IT CAN BE WRITTEN FLUENTLY. THEN FIND OTHERS AND DEAL WITH THEM N THE SAME WAY, NEVER WRITE YOUR SHORTHAND CHARACTERS IN A WAY THAT WILL IMPERIL THEIR LEGIBILITY. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sandra-clay/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/sandra-clay/support
Catch up on all the headlines in NFL, College Sports and MLB news with "What is Trending" for March 31, 2020.
S3E08 Seeing Like A State, Video Games, Neoliberalism, and how DnD influenced Computational Late Capitalism. Links: 1933: Organisational Memory --- Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo Website: https://www.thejaymo.net/ Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online Zine: http://startselectreset.com
How to Save the World | A Podcast About the Psychology of Environmental Action
Where does all your trash really go after you throw it away? Dietmar worked on the MIT Trash Track Project where they attached GPS sensors to hundreds of pieces of garbage and followed it around the country. We talk about the good and bad side of smart cities, the growing trends around data in urban legibility and we explore some significant flaws in the recycling industry for solving the waste problem. Dietmar has recently authored a book called "Waste is Information" published by MIT Press and is a consummate intellectual force in the urban data, design, and in particular the complex story behind all the stuff we throw away. Dietmar Offenhuber is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Art + Design and Public Policy. See more of his work here http://offenhuber.net/ Get a copy of How to Save the World on Amazon https://amzn.to/2Z4jivL Follow Katie: Twitter @katiepatrick http://twitter.com/katiepatrick Instagram @katiepatrickhello http://instagram.com/katiepatrickhello Support the podcast Contribute a monthly donation at patreon.com/katiepatrick to help me continue to make these episodes possible. Thank you to Jordan, Nader, Mike, Gary, Alex, Ben, Dee, and Ian for contributing! Xx
This week on Blind Contour we’re sitting down with Christina Quarles, our final interview from ArtCrush 2019¬. In this audio profile we check in on the artist and discuss her current practice, composition choices, and goals within her abstract, figurative paintings. Legibility teeters on the edge of lack and excess; when we lack information about a thing, it is vague. However, as information accumulates, the risk for contradiction increases and legibility tips into ambiguity. As a queer, cis woman born to a black father and a white mother, Christina Quarles engages with the world from a position that is multiply situated. Her work is informed by her daily experience with ambiguity and seeks to dismantle assumptions of our fixed subjectivity through images that challenge the viewer to contend with the disorganized body in a state of excess. Christina Quarles (b. 1985 Chicago, USA) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2016 and holds a BA from Hampshire College. Quarles was a 2016 participant at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Pérez Art Museum Miami Prize, and in 2017 she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She will have a solo show at the Hepworth Wakefield Museum in October 2019. Recent exhibitions include: But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2019); Always Brightest Before Tha Dusk, Pilar Corrias, London (2018); Christina Quarles / MATRIX 271, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2018); Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and as a Weapon, New Museum, New York (2017-18); It’s Gunna Be All Right, Cause Baby, There Ain’t Nuthin’ Left, Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles (2017); No burden as heavy, David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2017); Fictions, The Studio Museum, New York (2017); and Reconstitution, LAXART, Los Angeles (2017); among others.
Merea, Dex, and Justin kick off the Legible church podcast with a conversation about the importance of clearing defining your vision and values to build your church brand.
This episode was recorded on August 23rd 2019, at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies. In this podcast, we welcome David Balgley, Masters candidate in Arab Studies at Georgetown University, discussing his research project entitled: Land, Labor, and Youth Aspirations in the Gharb, Morocco. In this podcast episode, David discusses some of the factors impacting the labor decisions of young people in the Gharb, including the ways in which gender, class, and access to productive capital create and constrain the opportunities for youth in the Moroccan countryside. In addition, he breaks down how young rural people negotiate the tension between maintaining social ties to their ancestral land with economic pressures to migrate. In this context, David explores how the privatization of collective land in the Gharb could stimulate new labor possibilities, livelihood shifts, and youth aspirations. Further reading Akesbi, Najib. 2012. “A new strategy for agriculture in Morocco: The Green Morocco Plan”. New Medit 11 (2): 12-23. Balgley, David. 2019. “Assembling Land Access and Legibility.” In The Politics of Land, edited by Tim Bartley (117-142). Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Bidwell, R. 1973. Morocco Under Colonial Rule: French Administration of Tribal Areas 1912-1956. London: Frank Cass and Co. Bossenbroek, Lisa, Jan D. van der Ploeg, and Margreet Zwarteveen. 2015. “Broken dreams? Youth experiences of agrarian change in Morocco’s Saiss region”. Cah Agric 24(6): 342-348 Bouzidi, Zhour, Nicolas Faysse, Marcel Kuper, and Jean-Paul Billaud. 2015. “Les Projets Des Jeunes Ruraux : Des Stratégies Diversifiées Pour Accéder Au Foncier et Obtenir l’appui de l’État.” Alternatives Rurales, Hors Série Jeunes Ruraux: 13–24. Faysse, Nicolas, Zhour Bouzidi, Zakaria Zadiri, Elhassane Abdellaoui, and Zoubir Chattou. 2015. “Les Jeunes Ruraux Aujourd’hui.” Alternatives Rurales, Hors Série Jeunes Ruraux: 4–12. Giuliani, Alessandra, Sebastian Mengel, Courtney Paisley, Nicole Perkins, Ingrid Flink, Oliver Oliveros, and Mariana Wongtschowski. 2017. “Realities, Perceptions, Challenges and Aspirations of Rural Youth in Dryland Agriculture in the Midelt Province, Morocco”. Sustainability 9: 871-894. Ghanem, Hafez. 2016. “Targeting Excluded Groups: Youth, Smallholder Farmers, and Women”. In The Arab Spring Five Years Later: Toward Greater Inclusiveness (107-135). Washington: Brookings Institution Press. Mahdi, M. 2014. “The Future of Land Tenure in Morocco: A Land Grabbing Case.” New Medit 13 (4): 2-10. Petit, Olivier, Marcel Kuper, and Fatah Ameur. 2018. “From worker to peasant and then to entrepreneur? Land reform and agrarian change in the Saiss (Morocco)”. World Development 105: 119-131. Swearingen, Will D. 1987. Moroccan Mirages: Agrarian Dreams and Deceptions, 1912-1986. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
The importance of whitespace in conveying information and feeling.
Ramblings of a Designer podcast is a weekly design news and discussion podcast hosted by Adan Zepeda (twit: @adanzepeda, insta: @adanz.designs) and Terri Rodriguez-Hong (@flaxenink). Send us feedback! ramblingsofadesignerpod@gmail.com Why are tech companies making custom typefaces? https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/ Kill Your Personas https://medium.com/microsoft-design/kill-your-personas-1c332d4908cc Michael Shainblum https://www.behance.net/gallery/72568003/THE-WORMHOLE-Timelapse-4K ‘Year of the Woman’ Indeed: Record Gains in the House https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/09/us/women-elected-midterm-elections.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur FACEBOOK PORTAL REVIEW: TRUST FAIL https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18072998/facebook-portal-plus-smart-display-messenger-review-price-specs Legibility: 7 Typographic Tools To Create Readable Screens https://uxstudioteam.com/ux-blog/legibility/?utm_source=Slack&utm_campaign=distro Contente https://contente.app
Typography is a core component of logo design, but so many designers lack the essential knowledge needed to use fonts correctly. To solve that, this week Ian interviews Michael Stinson to talk about the fundamentals of type, choosing and managing fonts, licensing, book recommendations and more. Michael is the typography instructor at Laguna College of Art + Design, and is also the founder and lead Instructor at TypeEd, an educational platform that teach designers about the fundamental theory of type. Show notes, and a full transcription of the interview can be found here: https://logogeek.uk/podcast/typography-fundamentals/ Typography Resources & Books Mentioned michaelstinson.com TypeEd Website Font Management: Suitcase Fusion The Anatomy of Type by Stephen Coles Amazon UK | Amazon US Type Matters! by Jim Williams Amazon UK | Amazon US The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst Amazon UK | Amazon US Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility Amazon UK | Amazon US InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign Amazon UK | Amazon US The Complete Manual of Typography by James Felici Amazon UK | Amazon US Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks Amazon UK | Amazon US A Big Thank You to FreshBooks FreshBooks have sponsored the Logo Geek Podcast, and I’m so thankful – without them this would not be possible (It takes so much time!!). FreshBooks is a cloud based accounting software that makes it easy to create and send branded invoices, track time and to manage your incoming and outgoing money. I highly recommend it, and you can try it out for yourself with a free 30 day trial.
Episode 20 The internet broke this week and we had a whole day without it - It was nice. From those beginnings I end up talking a little bit about social media being an enemy. Warrens, Plazas and the Edge of Legibility You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers. Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo
People often spend too much time on cutting edge technology or ‘clever’ marketing campaigns, when basic things like legibility are not in place.
Listener Lynn Leitte joins Tim for a discussion on how a fad of low-contrast visual design is hurting readability of text and usability of interface elements. What say you? Episode was recorded in late April but for a plethora of reasons is only available now.
Seth Kimmel speaks on the transformation of scholarly disciplines in early-modern Iberia. Kimmel explores how the conversion of Iberian Muslims to Christianity in the early 16th century produced a new radically literal approach. (December 8, 2011)
Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Often when you ask an expert who’s accumulated a large amount of experiential data around a problem area, they’re fabricating an answer. They actually have way more information than they could possibly convert into a verbal symbolic language, and the inability to articulate something doesn’t mean that there isn’t knowledge there, right? Taste is real and experience is real, and you can have a lot of knowledge that can be extremely difficult to articulate. 00:00:31 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and joined today by our guest Connor White Sullivan of Rome Research. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Thanks for having me on. 00:00:49 - Speaker 2: And Connor, I happen to know you have a dog companion. There’s a husky, right? He is. 00:00:55 - Speaker 1: One thing I like about them is that they’re not bred to be obedient dogs, cause you didn’t want somebody who was an inexperienced sled driver to drive the whole team out onto thin ice. So the dogs sort of take a light suggestion, which is one of the reasons they’re particularly hard for first time owners. 00:01:13 - Speaker 2: I feel like they take light suggestion also is a good training for being a manager of software engineers and designers. 00:01:20 - Speaker 1: Or maybe a parent too, but uh, yes, a parent of a toddler, absolutely. 00:01:23 - Speaker 2: And I think our audience probably knows who you are and knows about Rome cause you’re definitely a notable figure in the tools for thought scene that we consider ourselves part of, but for those that aren’t familiar, maybe you could give us a brief introduction. 00:01:39 - Speaker 1: How would you introduce from? 00:01:42 - Speaker 2: I consider it having created not only the kind of modern phenomenon of tools for thought, which obviously that concept extends well back in time. Indeed, Mark and I did a whole podcast on it, but in terms of popularizing it in kind of the last few years, it’s really, I think, opened the aperture for a lot of tools, including us and others to say there’s more to productivity software than, I don’t know, email and note taking in calendars, and that’s what I think of as the collective kind of tools for thought, scene. And then the, the specifics of the product, I think it really is all about the value of linking thoughts together and bringing things that I think of as being part of obviously the internet, part of things that have been in our knowledge tools in different ways over the years, but putting them together into this kind of notes and Personal memory and personal thinking space in just a new way that really struck a chord with people indeed to the point that I think it’s been widely copied now and I would say you basically invented or at least pioneered a whole new category of software, which is quite a special thing to do in one’s career, I would say. 00:02:46 - Speaker 1: The thing that is interesting to me is that part of my frustration in the last few years is that none of the folks who have supposedly copied us have copied the things that I think are actually important or are even indicative of the direction of like why I built Rome or what we’re aiming for. I think of writing as a tool for thinking. We’ve talked about this in past discussions, just one on one. I don’t have a great extended working memory. Like, I’ve worked with people who are actually geniuses who are able to visualize complex systems in their head, who are able to, you know, recall any piece of information they need, but I have a hard time just Laying out all the steps of the problem and trying to think through all the variables that are there, and just trying to keep my head straight, especially around things like software design, let alone systems design or building a team, or any kind of complex decision. So, Rome, what you see right now as a product is something that did largely evolve as a sort of cognitive prosthetic for me. Largely I handled my ADHD and trying to learn as an autodidact, all of these things that I needed to do to be able to build Rome. I’m self-taught engineer, self-taught designer, self-taught manager, maybe not good at any of these things, but I had to learn how to fundraise, had to learn how to do marketing, like, I studied none of these things, had no formal training in anything, and I had to figure out how to get good enough at a lot of things. At the same time, more or less, or in various sequences. So, I built Rome as a tool for helping me to organize my own learning and also just to, I’ve had very severe ADHD for my, my whole life, and it runs in my family, but it is not. I think Mark, I might have heard you say it on a podcast, or maybe it was some other colleague of yours that was on saying that they were characteristically unemployable or something. Well, I was fortunate for startups to exist because I don’t think I could have held down like anything even remotely resembling a white collar job, for any amount of time if I had not been able to, to build my own companies where I couldn’t get fired. So, a lot of Rome was built as a tool for me to be able to just organize my own thinking as I was thinking. So, I think of it first and foremost as an extension of my working memory, so that I can Zoom in, eliminate all the extraneous things, have a clear workspace, but then at any point, I can pick up pieces from, I can break problems down into smaller chunks and know that I will have the relevant information available the next time I’m able to pick it up, which might be some indefinite point in the future. So, R Rome is a tool for writing, but it’s also, and I’ll talk a little bit about It’s a little hard to fully explain, especially what we’ve been doing over the last few years, if you don’t know the context of why I started Rome, and what it’s trying to get to, and why I, like, even got interested in software in the first place, but I don’t want to tangent too far yet. So yeah, it’s a different medium for writing and thinking and trying to Organize your brain so that you can think thoughts. The way I said it before like this, there are things you can’t see with the naked eye that you can see with the telescope, and there are things that you can’t hear, but, you know, if you’ve got a powerful microphone, you can hear them, and I think that there are thoughts that we can’t think unless we’ve got some sort of cognitive AIDS. And Brett Victor has talked a lot about this. I know you guys are probably fans of his work. I’d love to chat a little bit about some of those ideas, but I think that a lot of our diagramming tools, mathematical notations, programming languages are all cognitive prosthetics that allow you to think thoughts you couldn’t otherwise think, and Rome is It’s also a programming environment. You can write code and execute it in code. We’re trying to create a whole new kind of medium for expressing your thoughts first to yourself, but then eventually be able to create a communication medium that can allow for a different kind of coordination and knowledge transfer, and a new kind of collective action, collective thinking, collective intelligence, and that’s the real thing that has been motivating me for at least the last 15 years. Which kind of leads me into the questions that I want to ask you guys. 00:07:07 - Speaker 2: Well, please do. I have something to say about what you just said. It’s very inspiring, especially because in many ways you’re not talking about the specific features or exactly the way that how does this writing slash thinking slash notes slash memory tool differ from what comes. Before, but this underlying why, which is exactly as you said with Brett Victor, I think Andy Metzek talks about this a bit in his work, talking about, for example, Roman numerals versus Arabic numerals and how that allowed us to, yeah, essentially do new things, think new thoughts, do new kinds of Math and the computing medium obviously has all this potential to open that up, but to date, even as far into this computer thing as we sort of are in many ways we are just transliterating, OK, I’ve got a sketchbook. OK, now that I’ve got an iPad, let me make a direct transliteration of what’s on paper. I’ve got. A typewriter, let me turn that into a word processor and so forth, and I would say most notes programs, even pretty sophisticated ones, I don’t know, you take every note in prime 10 years ago can obviously do a lot of things that like a paper filing system can’t do, but in the end it kind of is just that on a computer. And it seems very clear to me that there’s so much more potential if we truly embrace the dynamic medium of the computer, and there’s probably 1000 different experiments we need to do, and different people will need different things, to your point about what exactly is the right thinking prosthetic for you probably is also for a lot of other people, but maybe not everyone in the world. Different people need different ones, and that’s why I think it’s so. experiment and break out of our established categories, but I felt like a few years back you couldn’t get past the like again productivity software just kind of like notes, email, word processors, spreadsheets, and happily the tools for thought seeing that you really helped seed, I think has opened our minds to like, OK, let’s do some innovation here. 00:08:57 - Speaker 1: Even the idea that you could have end user customization where people could actually write code, I mean, like, We got so much push back when we let people run arbitrary JavaScript inside, and I mean, rightly so, because it’s also a multiplayer tool. Obviously there’s some security concerns, but my entire thesis is, I want to give people power, right? And I know I’m extremely neuro atypical. And I know that a lot of systems, which worked very well for plenty of other people, worked horribly for me, right? Schooling being the sort of most obvious one. So I know the feeling of being put into a box and the box not being extremely constraining and wanting to do more and needing people who do not want to give you their permission. I hate asking for permission. And so, that’s one of the reasons that first I was like, well, Wild West, you wanna run JavaScript, we will give you the ability to completely break everything in your graph. Like, if you wanna really mess yourself up and just like grab some code that you found off the internet and put it in there, and like, maybe you’ll lose, you know, all your notes because you’ve got some random, I don’t, especially in the early days when it was still a small amount of attention there. I have a very different attitude than folks with the security mindset of, well, what if hypothetically, somebody might be trying to steal my notes? I’m like, you’ve been using the product for a day and a half. Like, I don’t think this is a hard target yet, but I get ahead of myself. I have been really excited to see that proven out, you know, that people now are trying to Do something that was pretty common in things like text editors and for Emacs and Vim and for professional programmers are very used to the idea of being able to modify their tools. And if you work in the trades, like my recreational activity is doing metalworking, you know, I like welding for fun, right? And one thing I like to do is like making my own tools and making jigs, and like, if you’re doing any kind of carpentry, You know, oh, you don’t have the exact right tool for it. Well, if you’ve got an angle grinder and you’ve got a welder, and you’ve got some scrap metal, like, you might be able to jerry rig something up that might be able to serve the purpose of what you’re trying to build a one-off tool, and we haven’t had those for knowledge workers, except for in the domain of computer programming, and I think that people who do other kinds of work, it’s been very exciting to see so many like, Folks who are doctors, who’ve never written a line of code in their life, and they’re able to learn in the weekend enough to build some functionality into Rome that like, is not my priority. I don’t care about it. It would never occur to me to make it, but it’s ideologically important to me that they not have to get my permission to make the tool do what they want to do. So here’s the question I’ve got for you guys, which is, when did you guys start caring about computers at all? And what was it that made you care about them? 00:11:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I usually peg myself for 8 years old, and I think it was an Atari with 1K of RAM, since I’m old enough that that was the kind of computing. I think we had one of these in our entire school, the elementary school I was in. I don’t know what drew me to it, maybe this is just a classic young nerd thing that you can’t identify it, but I like to at least post hoc rationalize it that I saw the potential for creativity and I immediately want and all you could really do with program computers back then was program them, right, like they could use logo, maybe later basic and you’d get in there and just in the same way that a kid just wants to pick up that piece of paper and the crayons and start drawing scribbles, and that it’s this form of expression. I saw the same thing in the computer and just was endlessly fascinated with it. 00:12:42 - Speaker 3: What about you, Mark? Yeah, similar story for me. I did not have the experience of programming very young. I didn’t do any really substantial programming until I was in college. And the specific impetus for me was, I was studying economics, among other things, and I wanted to do agent-based simulations to test out some economic ideas. And so, OK, I got to teach myself Java. And I remember, in retrospect how completely terrible that Java program was, just the incredible amount of copying and pasting. You wouldn’t even believe it. But anyways, at that point, I got into that track that Adam was describing where it’s an incredibly powerful and accessible medium for creating. I’ve always liked creating things like I did model airplanes and other stuff like that. But there’s actually a pretty narrow set of things you can actually do that’s both powerful and accessible. Maybe you are into welding, but as a 19 year old in rural Maine, it’s kind of tough, right? But you can get a computer and do whatever you want. And you don’t need to ask anyone’s permission, and the sky’s the limit. So it’s pretty cool. 00:13:39 - Speaker 1: I want to touch on both of those. Adam, you’re talking about being a nerd. If you can imagine it, I was such a nerd I didn’t have enough friends to play D&D with. Let’s say that, like, I used to play this single player D&D type book. It was like a choose your, I don’t know if you guys might have been actually maybe. Too old to remember the RL Stine Choose your own adventure books, those were like really big in the 90s. 0 yeah. There was a game called Quest, and it was individual paragraphs, each with a number, and it was like, oh, if you go down the right hallway, go to 232, if you go down the left one, if you fight the goblin or whatever. But I remember playing these games all the way through, and then I actually made the multiplayer. I did have two friends who were nerdy enough to indulge me in this for like, A couple recesses before they were sick of it, but I played the games all the way through and then continued the rule set for the game and just started writing paragraphs at the end of the book to try to like keep the game going, because they were originally supposed to publish, like, 10 of these game books, but only 2 of them got published in the US so, and in some ways actually there’s something reminiscent of Rome in that sort of backstory. You’re talking about agent-based simulation for economics, Mark. Here’s the next question I’ve got for you guys. What’s the first problems or bigger problems that you remember and awareness of, or even caring about? 00:15:00 - Speaker 3: I’m gonna give you sort of a half answer here. So there’s certainly problems if I go back in my memory when I was a very impressionable kid, you know, whatever. The 3rd grade science teacher says, you know, all the turtles are dying, so everyone, you know, goes home and clips all the six-pack plastic things and, you know, stuff like that. But something that’s still sticking with me is when I was working in computers and originally I had this very unalloyed excitement about the cloud. Coming out of college, I was like the cloud services in particular. This is before I was even at Hiroku. It’s just so powerful to be able to have a hosted service that does everything for you, and the end game is everything moves to that model. And I would say I still think there’s a lot to that. But it was only with the experience of living in a society that has embraced that model that you realize some of the really tricky downsides of it. Something I’m still grappling with is someone who works in computers. So we could do a whole episode about that, but that’s one that I’ve definitely thought about. 00:15:53 - Speaker 1: Our follow-up question. You guys know the phrase, you can’t solve the problems you have, it’s attributed to Einstein, you can’t solve your current problems with the thinking that got you into them. Yeah. Do you know the exact quote? 00:16:06 - Speaker 2: We can’t solve the problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, and I do think there’s a maybe a positive spin on that, you know, one is like, we had dumb thinking and then that led us to be in a bad situation and we need to be less dumb. But another way to put it might be that in moving yourself or your group or society forward with better thinking, well, that creates new problems like the cloud. Version there that Mark mentioned and now you need to solve those new problems, but on net you’re probably better off than where you were before. It’s just that the idea that anything is going to bring a panacea utopia where all your problems are solved and now we don’t need to have new thinking and new solutions and be aware of the downsides of the world we’ve created, that will basically never happen. 00:16:55 - Speaker 3: I think you can even generalize it and say, even if there’s not progress, there’s change, the world is different. There’s no going back, you know, that’s the way it is. The only way out is through. 00:17:06 - Speaker 1: So I thought that’s The potential hope is networks. I politically became really alive when I read Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and, you know, saw lay shirky, organizations, institutions. My life plan was to sell John Deere tractors in Africa cause it seems like the coolest job I could do. I was planning on like doing a few years in college and then like going and being like a heavy equipment salesman in Africa because I wanted to travel, and that looked like a job that would pay for me to travel to really crazy places. And I thought, you know, excavators and tractors were cool. So I was like, yeah I’ll probably do that. That was like my freshman year plan, and then I was like, oh, but actually, we might be at a period of history that is as important as the printing press. 00:17:50 - Speaker 2: Part of the thesis, I guess, of the wealth of networks is that the creation of this network society through the ever increasing communication capabilities, the internet being the kind of, at least to date, the ultimate manifestation of that creates a moment of opportunity to have an impact, to change the way the world works. Again, that’s certainly where the startup world sees itself as an This highly dynamic, you know, early stage thing where you have the opportunity to maybe have more impact than you would as an individual. So was it that part of the book that sort of inspired you to think, OK, well, it was a couple of things. 00:18:22 - Speaker 1: It was the idea of non-rival goods. So first, the idea of, I’d make something and it costs $0 for there to now be a million versions of it, right? And That because the goods are non-rival and they’re post-scarcity, like, they have a different kind of economic pattern to them. That was one aspect of it. And so he sort of had a four part quadrant, that he was sort of laying things out. He was thinking about the state, the firm, the market, and the network. So, a state would be something which is public goods, like, you know, they’re trying to manage resources that cannot be sort of carved up into small pieces, you couldn’t have property rights on things like Clean air, you know, so places where there’s lots of externalities and like one person could hurt the commons. But there isn’t less private incentive for people to maintain or protect the commons. So the state historically has used coercion for the governance of the Commons. So the state would be centralized management of a commons, the firm would be centralized management of private resources, the market would be decentralized management of private resources, and the network is decentralized management of public resources. So, like, it allows for the creation of new kinds of commons, particularly information commons. 00:19:43 - Speaker 1: And so here we’re thinking what open source or the way that like DNS works where there’s no, I mean, I also was interested in Ray Kurzweil at the time, so I was thinking general like techno utopian post scarcity, like what happens when we can 3D print organs and the more we can get to actually we might be on the cusp of technology that allows you to take things from the digital world into the physical world, and this could be potentially somewhat revolutionary in terms of if I can get any medicine that I need. By like downloading it, and if someone can make an open source version of the medicine that I need, like, that was the kind of one aspect of what I was thinking, that was that book. But the other thing, I think it was mostly just I got some hope that like, hey, there’s, you know, Linux. I also got then disillusioned but I did a bunch of open source stuff. My undergraduate thesis was on trying to create a way of we finding a local government and actually like making a more direct democracy type approach. Under the assumption that, you know, people have a ton of tacit knowledge, like, there’s voices that are not heard that have expertise that is not like, recognized and you need culturally relevant solutions. I was coming from anthropology background, so I was thinking a lot about like, the thing that is gonna work in a rural village in Ghana is like not gonna work necessarily in Boston, Massachusetts, right? And even the thing that’s gonna work in Southie is not gonna work in Jamaica Plain, maybe. Like, you need to tap into the resources and the culture and like the actual lives and local contexts, lived experience of people who are in a community. 00:21:11 - Speaker 2: You know, I’m a huge fan of being close to the problem, let’s you, like you said, tacit knowledge, understand it in a way that you just can’t, but yet as our societies get bigger and literally this is just a scaling the number of humans thing that exists, which is governments are going to naturally get further away from the people, right? The government of the United States 200 years ago when the population of the United States was a tiny fraction, you know, it’s much closer to those people whose problems it’s hopefully trying to solve. 00:21:40 - Speaker 1: Do you guys remember your first ideology? 00:21:44 - Speaker 3: Baby’s first ideology? 00:21:46 - Speaker 2: Ba’s first ideology. Yeah, I mean, the classic thing you have with, yeah, let’s say university students is, yeah, they get really into environmentalism or something like that, and it becomes almost the purism of it, right? 00:21:57 - Speaker 1: Do you remember the first thing you were ideological about? I, it’s easier to call it an ideology if you’re like post, if you’ve left it in some ways. 00:22:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, probably open source actually. 00:22:04 - Speaker 1: Open source. How old were you? 00:22:05 - Speaker 2: And Linux specifically, this is the year of Linux on the desktop, you know that this year is Linux on the desktop? 00:22:11 - Speaker 2: Well, being the kind of lover of open source belief in what that could bring and thinking, OK, commercial software’s days are numbered, eventually we’re all going to be running, you know, things that are developed in the common for the common good. It’s just a matter of time. So yeah, I think that was probably one of my first in the late 90s. 00:22:29 - Speaker 1: I was definitely in that ideological camp until I try to run an open source project. And then I realized it’s a lot easier if people actually can make a living and do the thing full time and yeah. What about you, Mark, do you remember your baby’s first ideology? 00:22:44 - Speaker 3: Oh, I was gonna give you another half answer, which is, I’ve always been more of an is than an art person. I associate isms with thought, you know, the world ought to look like this. And there’s something to that. And of course, people having aught notions feeds back into what is. But for me, I keep myself busy just trying to understand what’s actually going on and the dynamics that are unfolding. As you understand things better, you certainly develop notions about how they might be different, or how you might want them to be different, but I try to keep a real close eye on how The world actually is, cause just understanding that is quite hard. To give you a concrete example, you had talked a little bit about technological determinism. Just understanding how the various technologies that have and are evolving, what that means for us is incredibly not obvious. Even something like computers, or even networking is networking going to be centralizing? I don’t know, it’s right in the name, shouldn’t it be? Or is it gonna be highly centralizing as, you know, for example, Samuel Burge has argued in one of his pieces that we can link to. It’s not obvious to me. 00:23:43 - Speaker 1: All right, well, I mean, we can take a second on this because I think the best kind of prophecy is worth telling, right? Where certain kinds of things, like the most interesting predictions are self-fulfilling predictions, right? Something where because you imagine a thing to be possible, and you believe that it’s worth your energy to try to make that thing possible, you can make the thing possible, right? I mean, both of you guys have made startups happen out of nothing. Like, nobody makes anything happen out of nothing, but like, The early stages are crazy, because it’s not a Ponzi scheme per se, but like, you need to convince investors that you’re gonna be able to convince engineers that you’re gonna be able to like convince customers, like, it is a crazy balancing act where you have to make a vision into a reality. Even just in the assembling of the early team, and the raising of enough capital for people to quit their jobs for long enough to get the proof points to convince more and yeah, I think there is a faith based element to it. 00:24:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, my thinking is there are two ways, you know, the idea of a map territory conflict? 00:24:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, right. 00:24:42 - Speaker 1: If the map I have in my head doesn’t match the territory, there’s two ways I can change things. I can try to update my map, or I can get a bulldozer and I can try to change the territory, right? 00:24:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there is something to that. The power of the ideological person and often the world are changed by young people that have sort of like an unrealistic vision because they aren’t stuck in the status quo and they are willing to take that bulldozer in, but it has to be balanced somehow by pragmatism. 00:25:08 - Speaker 1: My first company was trying to make an online town common. The idea was if you could get the for any local issue, and every issue could be made into a local issue, was the sort of the hope, right? If you could accumulate political capital, Online. So if you could confirm that all the people on this little forum thing were actual registered voters in this town, was the mechanism that we had for trying to accumulate political capital, then you could sort of force a more responsive local government and start to sort of decentralize the place where people are most likely to influence and get some power. And the idea At the time, I was hoping, you know, oh, if you gave people that like, then we could actually have democracy experiment everywhere, you know, like, but it totally didn’t work. It totally, like, I didn’t even want to use it because I realized I didn’t care that much about, like, you know, the property taxes and like the paving of the roads, and like, what to name the new library, like, just the local politics issues were so boomer. And I was like this little 19 year old, like libertarian socialist, like, we’re gonna have an internet anarchism revolution, and all of my users for that product were like 60+. I was so glad that I had no power to coerce anyone to do anything cause I just didn’t understand the world. So I became even more pro startups because there’s something beautiful where you have to Be right about making something people want. You have to both have a vision, but that vision does get tested against reality of like, will it blend? Like, can you ship it? Like, when you ship it, will anyone care? Like, if you build it, will they come, right? You kind of have to believe it in order to build it, but reality will test you there, which is one of the reasons I like startups, and it’s also one of the reasons why I’m hopeful for more. diversity of political entrepreneurship or things like that. Like, it’s one thing I really do share in common with biology and the hope that there will be more micro nations someday in the future and actual entrepreneurship and meaning bounded communities or something, something like that. Utah is a great example of like, somebody put out a vision and a bunch of people with the same kind of ideas. Utah is the original network state. 00:27:32 - Speaker 2: Certainly makes me think of charter cities, which is certainly another kind of libertarianism type sphere idea, but yeah, it is that idea of it’s not just about self-governance and getting to choose, but also the let 1000 flowers bloom. We have to try a bunch of stuff because, as you said, Ideas have to be tested in the real world, and we can sit around and debate them, and indeed people do, but until you can try it at scale, over time, see how it actually impacts people’s lives, do people really want to live in that place that does change society in some fundamental way? 00:28:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah. So here’s another question I’ve got for you guys, which is like, and I’ll give my answer first, but I’ve been thinking recently about just Beliefs that sort of lodge in your head that end up propagating into all sorts of other things, and you don’t necessarily go back that often to reexamine them. So I’ll give one, which is the idea that like, creative work can’t be coerced. And I think this is part of why I’ve been so pro volunteeristic type associations and like trying to figure out networks for mutual aid and ways for people to help each other, where it is a very opt-in system. But I think it might also be just directly related to me having a pretty oppositional, like low agreeableness personality where I really don’t like to be coerced in anything, so, like, I just, I assume that good work can’t happen under real coercion because I won’t work under coercion, therefore, you know, I don’t know if anything jumps to mind for you guys in terms of like, little beliefs like that that might color. 00:29:08 - Speaker 2: The core of critical thinking, I think, is trying to examine beliefs that are in your mind and how did they get embedded, and the reality is it’s rarely a I encountered a new idea, fact checked it carefully, and then decided to make it part of my worldview. It’s more you get exposed to something a lot over and over again and it just through osmosis sinks into how you see the world, and I always find it funny. To stumble across little beliefs, even just things like, you know, should you keep this particular food item in the fridge versus is it OK to, you know, sit on the shelf stable and sometimes there’s just something I picked up when I was a kid from one of my parents or something, and I didn’t realize until I was an adult that actually you can stick that on the shelf. I just never examined it, right? 00:29:51 - Speaker 1: What did you keep in the fridge that you didn’t need to keep in the 00:29:53 - Speaker 1: fridge. 00:29:54 - Speaker 2: Remember what maybe it was uh potatoes was one that was like that. It does slow down they’re like budding or something like that, but I don’t know, I think my mom always stirred potatoes in the fridge and then yeah, I had a roommate that was just like, I’m just going to put them on the shelf. We don’t have room in the fridge. I’m like, wait, you can’t do that, you know, they’ll spoil, but then I’m stopping and thinking, well, wait, how do I know that or why do I think that? And the answer is, you know, it’s just something I absorbed. 00:30:17 - Speaker 1: What about you, Mark? Do you have any things you’ve noticed that were like, it’s the most general question. Do you have any unexamined beliefs? Yeah. With a terrible question, I, I apologize. 00:30:28 - Speaker 3: I’m not sure if this is exactly what you were asking, but there are some lenses I keep in my pocket. I’m always putting them up and using them to look at the world. So one lens is the lens of trade-offs from economics. It’s very easy to speak in absolutes or to speak in terms of improvement, integradation. The reality is almost always one of trade-offs. Another one that I use all the time, relatedly is Distributed information processing. This kind of is related to your idea of mutual association. The world is so complicated that there’s no way for it to be understood, essentially, especially when you consider that a lot of the things that are important to understood are matters of personal preference. So it’s not physically possible to bring that information into one place, compute, and to spit out results about what ought to happen. So it has to be done in a distributed way. And it’s so easy to fall into the trap of, you know, what if we just brought all the information in one place and figured out what to do? It just, it can’t be done. And when you remind yourself of that all the time, you come across many cases where you see people trying to do that, to try to extract the information and put it through an explicit machine and turn out an answer. And you have to instead just let it be out there and let the network process the information and decide what should happen. 00:31:41 - Speaker 1: Can you go into more detailing? 00:31:42 - Speaker 3: Well, this is the whole key tenet of Like Austrian economics or Hayakian economics, people can look up those things and read about it. There’s a famous, I think it’s an, I wanna say it’s an essay written about the manufacture of a lead pencil. And something as simple as that, there’s actually no one in the world who knows how to manufacture a lead pencil. Like it has to involve many different people from around the world, and they all have their own test and knowledge and understanding of what kind of wood is right, and, you know, they know about the quirks of the machine and like how it’s always off by one degree, so you got to counteract that right. That’s sort of thing that it seems so simple, but even something as basic as that can’t be known centrally and needs to be distributed out, by the way, not even to mention. Like how many should be produced at what price, where, what materials, there’s an incredible amount of complexity that can only be computed on and distributed way. I just find that a handy idea to go back to it often. 00:32:33 - Speaker 1: Can you think of examples besides the market? Like, the first thing that you’re making me think of was, I feel like I’ve only in the last few years, Gotten language for thinking about why it makes sense to listen to emotions so much. Like like thinking of emotions almost as like bass net massive information compression systems where you’re just getting a vibe about like, oh, this feels off. There’s an essay called The Limits of Legibility, or it’s like a less strong post that I like, but often when you ask somebody, especially an expert, or somebody who’s like accumulated a large amount of experiential data around a problem area or around a scale or something like this, like, well, why do you think we should do it this way or that way? They’re fabricating an answer, like, they actually have way more information. Then they could possibly convert into a bit stream that is compressed into, you know, verbal symbolic language. And so, if you treat the answer that somebody gives you of why as if it’s actually meaningful. Many people actually treat the why, especially if they want to argue about it, as though that’s the real thing, rather than a like tiny symbolic representation of like, what in that moment they were able to generate, which might not even be the real thing. Right. And the inability to articulate something doesn’t mean that there isn’t knowledge there, right? That is like such a like taste is real and experience is real, and you can have a lot of knowledge that can be extremely difficult to articulate. I found this to be extremely challenging when I was trying to introduce sort of counterintuitive cultural norms into the company, and I was bringing people who were used to working in, like, all right, so, since I finally found a moment where I actually made a point, Rome is not a normal company. It’s because I think normal companies are what got us into the situation we’re in, right? I wouldn’t want to work at Google. I wouldn’t want to work at Microsoft. I would have no interest in being there, like, they’re not building products for people like me, and also, like, they kind of are, but like, the thing that I’m interested in is trying to figure out a different way of thinking together and in a bunch of different ways. But Especially as I was having folks coming in who I’m trying to communicate certain practices, especially practices around how I work with Rome, that had just evolved over time, right? I’ve got a whole very different way of using the tool than, you know, your average user, and trying to communicate why I do things a certain way or why I was even asking somebody to do something a certain way, it was very hard to do. If there wasn’t trust that there was some intuition there, and that the words that were going to be used as the explanation for why we’re trying a thing, we’re not the actual only reasons. Like, I could come up with a 100 reasons for why we might try to do the thing. 00:35:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah. It’s such an important point, and we’ve mentioned it on the podcast many times, but I think it’s worth reiterating that experience and judgment and expertise, they’re incredibly multi-dimensional, you know, millions. Millions, billions of dimensions, right? And there’s no way to compact it down either in terms of the model itself of experience, say, or the answer to some discrete symbols, as you were saying. And furthermore, when you get discrete symbols out, they’re often just back solved, like this huge multi-dimensional model spits out in an intuitive answer. But then it’s unsatisfying to convey that so the brain just like finds a way back through symbols it knows to convey something that sort of ends up at the destination, and it sort of plausibly sounds like a quote unquote argument or quote unquote reason, but it’s just totally backstop of that how they actually got the answer. Now I’m gonna turn this around, because this is an idea that I’ve embraced in my own thinking, but what does that mean for a tool like Rome or other tools for thought, which are inevitably collections of discretized pages and links and things like that. How do you reconcile those two worlds? 00:36:29 - Speaker 1: TLDR, my first startup, I started as an open source project, could not recruit anybody to actually work on it, was somehow able to pitch it as a business plan competition, like at business plan competitions, got 10K, suddenly could get actually better engineers and the ability for them to work full time. And so I found having an open source like political project, plenty of people who were interested in the idea, but nobody could actually help me build the thing. A lot of the talent, as soon as I framed it as, oh, well, like, I guess we’ll make it a media startup and maybe we’ll sell the data. Like, it’s disgusting to think about the idea of selling political data now, but at the time, I was just trying to figure out how do I win this business plan competition, so somebody will give me some money. I worked construction before I got into tech. That was my summer job. But it was a terrible business. You know, I got to give like some TEDx talks and go to the Aspen Institute, and we did end up getting acquired by AOL, but It was not a good business model. We were selling software to newspapers to get high quality uses generated content on like super niche issues that they were like, civically important for the mission of newspapers. It was just a bad, bad business. And I was trying to solve so many problems at once, in terms of how do you build a user interface for collective intelligence? How do you think about the political dynamics of like, OK, what people are excluded if you’re using real names and you’re using local, like voter registrations. The problem of political coordination plus how do you crowdsource from a large body of people the actual best ideas from a broad perspective, so that you don’t have to read every comment. I was trying to solve a bunch of things at once, and I found that I actually had to do some sort of science, and the fact that I couldn’t isolate any variable was like just blah. So after that company was bought, I was still interested in how do you build a better way for groups of people to In a weird way centralized their decentralized knowledge. So maybe the Hayek point is, it’s not even perfect execution, this is just a bad idea. I’ve wasted my whole career. Maybe like, if I just read Hayek, I’ll be like, OK. The collective intelligence stuff isn’t gonna happen, but I wanted to simplify the problem. And so my first thought was, if I am able to be as a single player, Able to take the best writing that was done. So, like, one problem we had in the first company was, how do you get critical mass for a social network, and then how do you create a ecosystem that actually inspires people to be as articulate as they possibly can be about what their position is, or like why you should do the thing. How do you actually get people to give really, really high quality content, and then how do you from a large mass of users. Identify the best content from a diversity of perspectives, because instead of just having people vote down ideas that are good articulations, but they happen to disagree with, how could you actually get the best ideas from many different perspectives and see this sort of multi-dimensional object of, like, any kind of question, but we were particularly starting with these local political questions. And my thought was the simplified version of this problem is, well, one, we had only been able to launch in places where we had critical mass for my first company which is called Local Acracy. And so I was like, the tool has to work without critical mass. It has to work as a single player tool. And if I can start with the best writing throughout all of history, and I can be the one who’s aggregating it, and I can figure out how to like map these different perspectives together. Well, now I’ve just isolated a bunch of variables because I don’t have to worry about getting the best, like, articulation of an idea. I’ve got the entire corpus of human history. I can just pick out what I think are the best articulations of the idea, and I don’t have to worry about critical mass, cause as long as I’m interested in the problem, I can do this, or as long as anyone’s interested in the problem. And so, There was a book called The Sentopicon. They’d spent like 50 million bucks. It was from Encyclopedia Britannica, and it was a great books course of all the best ideas of Western history. And the first two sections of the book are an index of these ideas where they sort of summarize it, and they point to the paragraph number of, like, where the ideas articulated by Descartes, or Hegel, or Marx or Kant or Plato, or whatever, right? So I was like, well, if I can make a digital version of this, and I can make it for a single player. And then I just charge money for that. I don’t have to worry about selling software to newspapers who then run into advertisers, and like, I have to convince a bunch of other people. If I can just find people who want to organize thoughts, and I just sell it to single players, then I can maybe get the iteration cycles that I’m gonna need. I can basically keep this company alive long enough to run through all the iterations to solve this potentially impossible UX problem of how do you actually create these high dimensional objects. That represent many different perspectives around a single sort of truth thing. Like, how do you build a truth engine? How do you build a system that actually allows you to sort of create this base net so that your beliefs could propagate. 00:41:27 - Speaker 2: Well, I see the breadcrumbs now. You start with kind of collective action and you’re thinking in terms of governance, but you’re also thinking in terms of networks and how to bring together sort of computing and some of the open source and maybe kind of more freedom oriented ways of organizing ourselves. You tried to do that with software for kind of participation in government and that was a total bust, but it leads you into the like it was so poor. 00:41:52 - Speaker 1: I mean, it’s like. Imagine selling software to government. Now imagine that you have to sell software to government and to the newspapers that are going through like massive decline at the same time, and the subject matter that is gonna be discussed on there is like extremely boring. You guys familiar with Michael Nielsen’s reinventing Discovery? That was the book I was looking for for forever after my experience with Localocracy and then trying to work on, cause when I ran a labs group briefly and poorly at Huffington Post, cause after we were bought by AOL, we ended up in the editorial division for HuffPost, and then I just was able to spin out my own little labs group for about a year, focusing on kind of collective intelligence, crowdsourcing knowledge, figuring out ways of doing new stuff. And anyways, the book that I found that was sort of one of the better textbooks on thinking about the problem of collective intelligence is that one. And he talks about things like The problem of a conference where, even if you have all the experts in the same place, you’re not necessarily routing the right people for the right conversations. You have to worry about when you’re making everything synchronous, whether people had enough coffee or whether they’re distracted by something, like, you want to be able to allow for a certain kind of serendipity to be more Predictably happening and like remove the sort of constraint of they have to be in the physically right place at the right time, they have to just happen to bump into each other. When you run into somebody, you don’t know that they know something that you need to know in order to solve the problem that you’re working on, but you don’t know what the name of their knowledge is and blah blah. Like there’s certain kinds of human routing or information routing problems that he lays out pretty well in there. He calls it efficient allocation of expert attention. And so one of the reasons Ro is block-based even is just trying to work with that. So not just thinking about thinking in terms of Blending, programming, and writing. So you’re not just writing paragraphs, you’re actually trying to think about a kind of data structure of a pattern of thought. And that’s a lot of what I’ve been trying to create as a medium is, you know, if you think about block references, which is something that none of these so-called roam clones do at all. I don’t know any of them that are actually multiplayer, right? The reason I’m referenced your offline talk is like, we’ve been multiplayer from day one, even though we’ve been a single player tool. Right? That was actually architecturally some of the hard stuff to figure out was like, how do I make this thing work as sort of a collaborative real-time thing with a graph database and start thinking about the interpersonal dynamics of referencing somebody else’s thought, or like, what are the different ways that you write when you’re trying to write almost as statements that you’re expecting to be reused by other people? How do you think about version control of a statement? Or like the way someone might transform a statement or rephrase a statement. Like, these are the kinds of, you know, it, it’s thinking about language in a different way than paragraphs or pages, because we’re trying to think about how to create an object where you’re not gonna have to read the entire history of a Slack channel when you go into it to get up to speed. You know what the group knows, actually, if you’ve got a new piece of knowledge that really would have unlocked something that the group was talking about 6 months ago, you know, and the group kind of shelved that whole discussion because they didn’t have that knowledge, how does your knowledge immediately fit in and unlock that? Right? So, it’s thinking about a different kind of collaborative thought data structure. And so things like block references and the ability to build a statement up out of other statements, having unique ideas for those. Yeah, that’s the kind of work that I think is important about Rome and something that never gets talked about on any of the YouTube videos of users. I’m not complaining about it because if people weren’t happy with the things that I thought of as basic, which is the stuff that everyone imitated, right? I needed to get those basic things. To even get to the place where I could think about the block references and all these other things, which are still rough. Therefore, a problem people don’t know they have. Like, nobody’s trying to, like, reinvent prose. I’m trying to reinvent prose. I don’t think prose works for large scale collaborative problem solving. Like, essays do not work. I mean, they can work. They’re the best that we have right now. I saw you shaking your head, Mark, right? Like, and in fact, there’s a whole other thing which is like being able to go from Convincing rhetoric that is storytelling where like the author is taking you on a journey with them into the structure, you kind of may wanna have both. You wanna have a sequentially ordered narrative that is being presented, but then if you’re trying to analyze the logic of it, or like debug the program, you might wanna have a more sort of structured graphical representation of it for the analysis of, like, where are the weak points in the narrative, but. 00:46:41 - Speaker 2: I find it very interesting, you know, your vision for where you want to be longer term, which is really about collective intelligence more than individual intelligence, but you can’t bootstrap into getting everyone to use something at the same time. 00:46:54 - Speaker 1: Also, your past and future selves are totally different people, right? The past is a foreign country. So the other reason that I started with the single player tool is that I didn’t have to convince anybody else to use it to be able to iterate on it. Other authors were other people, and myself across time was other people. And so it is an easier and still extremely difficult problem to solve the problem of organizing your own thoughts over time as your thoughts change, being able to go back and actually reexamine them. These are actually more related than people think. Like, people don’t realize how many selves they have, right? I actually think the idea that you are just one self is kind of, you have up so many different sub-agents running around. Like, one day you think this, if you’re hungry, you think that, if you’re tired, you think that, like, how do you actually bring your all your internal family systems is, yeah, I don’t know if you guys have ever gotten into that kind of stuff, but like, You’re many, you are many. Yeah. 00:47:48 - Speaker 2: Contain multitudes, absolutely. Certainly, writing is a technology for not only communicating with others, but also communicating with your past and future self is a powerful piece of it. 00:47:58 - Speaker 1: And present self, I don’t know what I think until I write it sometime. 00:48:01 - Speaker 2: Um, so yeah, the externalizing the thought, the conversation with the page, you see what’s there, and that becomes a loop that’s different from the kind of thinking inside the brain. 00:48:11 - Speaker 1: Or to tie back to Mark saying, you know, when you were talking about you got into programming so you could build those multi-agent models for doing economic simulations, like, that’s the kind of stuff I want people to be able to do in Rome, right? It’s like, Rome is the database of all their notes, all their thinking, right? And so if they want to just start playing with stuff, they shouldn’t have to worry about setting up a web server or web page or whatever, like, it’s like, OK, they write some JavaScript and suddenly they’re embedding a little. And that’s one of the cool things with closures, like, closure interpreter inside Rome, and a JavaScript interpreter inside Rome. So, hopefully someday, the future mark is thinking through his economics thoughts with little simulations inside the notes, and like, they’re part of his scaffolding of his own thinking, and he’s gonna be able to go back and not just read his old thoughts, but like, play with the simulations that he was writing. 00:49:02 - Speaker 2: That’s super interesting and definitely the programmability built into the tool that again, programmers, editors have had since forever, but bringing that to something that’s more for other kinds of knowledge workers or other kinds of, obviously power users, but people who are more working in the realm of ideas, not necessarily code. Putting those two things together, I think was a surprising but important innovation. 00:49:25 - Speaker 1: I’ll say one word here too, which is that someone asked. What are we working on? What have we been working on? One thing that is still an open research problem that I’ve seen no one else even thinking about is the idea of that there are higher order functions for regular thinking, right? If you do weird San Francisco hippie like intentional relation stuff with other groups of people, like, you get used to these kind of patterns of questions, right? For instance, I ran a learning cult, cause I was trying to do it with work flowy and Excel, like, I was trying to build a sort of peer to peer research group with, you know, just friends and folks that I met when I was in the Bay Area. I was trying to figure out the minimum thing I would need to build for Rome to build a decentralized research group, right? And so I was, in order to stress test, I was like, how close could I get to the ideal social and like information structure without building anything with like off the shelf tools. And I used Workflow, which was a tree-based outliner, and I used Google Sheets. And I would do stuff like, I would ask people, what are the like 7 best books you’ve read in your life. OK, for each book, like, what were the 3 big ideas? For each of those big ideas, how did that impact you? For each of those ideas, can you find two quotes from the book? Can you go back and do these things? And even just a simple thing like a for each function, right? Even just like being able to separate out, I want to ask. Questions, and then I wanna take those answers, and I wanna map new questions onto the answers onto these things, and I want to create a data structure out of this. Map, filter and reduce, like, we don’t have higher order functions for these basic qualitative kinds of, you know, personal interactions. And so one of the main things that I’ve been working on with R is trying to build a programming system for And maybe for like teachers or like group facilitators or something like that. For me, this was a very important practice for being an autodidact was I had a methodology for like deconstructing books, for like, managing my attention, and it was always really inconvenient to have to go back and forth between like what step am I on right now? And then I couldn’t just like set up, this is the sequence of events that I wanna do. And just like look at each thing one at a time, and separate out the sort of cognitive scaffolding from the actual thinking. And so, I’m trying to build a sort of higher order programming language for creating cognitive scaffolds for guiding your own thinking, for like, you know, intentional, either reflection or investigation, or like that kind of stuff like that, because I think there’s a whole domain of programming that is about programming your mind. You being the programmer of your mind and being able to be like, let me think about the thinking I want to be doing, and let me create prompts for myself, where like, I’m the evaluator. So, that is what Rome really is. It’s about building a programming language for human cognition, which could be the individual or multiplayer. 00:52:23 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. Join us on Discord to discuss this episode with me, Mark, and our community. The links in the show notes, and you can follow us on Twitter at @museapphq. Connor, I’m so glad that you’re helping us think big thoughts about how we can just be better at collective intelligence cause it’s pretty clear that that’s a place that humanity can get a lot better. And thanks for coming on the show. 00:52:47 - Speaker 1: Thanks so much.
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