- Heaven disarmed
Niccolo Machiavelli,
from Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius
(1531)
Machiavelli on the baseness of interpreting religion in accordance with indolence
- Demons in America
Tony Kushner,
from Angels in America
(1991)
Roy Cohn on choosing, and the worth of the nice man
- Inside you, two Wolfes…
Tom Wolfe,
from Collected Works
Wolfe on lies and the people who tell them
- The microservices corollary to Greenspun's 10th Rule
Sam Newman,
from Monolith to Microservices
(2019)
Every microservice architecture contains a half-broken reimplementation of Erlang.
- On the Ordeal of Novelty
Sam Newman,
from Monolith to Microservices
(2019)
making mistakes much faster and in more interesting, expensive ways
- J.S. Mill on cognitive apprenticeship
John Stuart Mill,
from Autobiography
(1873)
"Striving ... to call forth the activity of my faculties by making me find out everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt the full force of the difficulties"
- Later equals never
Robert C. Martin,
from Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
(2008)
Robert Martin on LeBlanc's Law, with some fun recent illustrations
- Rarely affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish
Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas on low-wattage spergism
- Nietzsche on the Graeculus histrio
Friedrich Nietzsche,
from Die fröhliche Wissenschaft
(1882)
Every time a person begins to discover to what extent he plays a role and to what extent he can be an actor, he becomes an actor.
- Spengler on Faustian technics
Oswald Spengler,
from Man and Technics
(1932)
The passion of the inventor has nothing whatever to do with its consequences.
- How to Prove It, Part 7
anonymous,
from “BSD Fortune”
Some esoteric proof strategies.
- Universal Human Rights vs. National Sovereignty
Reflections on national sovereignty, cognitive democracy, and the possibility of humanity
- On JFK's untimely demise
Sean McCarthy,
from “The Zürich Interviews - Sean McCarthy: 7th Gen Potato Famine Victim”
(25 Nov 2020)
JFK began a long tradition of people who investigate the CIA committing suicide through multiple self inflicted gun shot wounds to the head. They get very sad with what they find out - the CIA is bad - and don’t want to go on living.
- "a habit of reducing a complex problem to primitive operations"
Steve Hsu,
from “Feynman on AI”
(29 Sep 2020)
Hsu on the Manhattan Project generation's neurons
- "Don't be so rigorous or you will not succeed."
Richard Feynman,
from “Feynman's Interpretation of Quantum Theory”
(21 Apr 2008)
to Hugh Everett, as quoted by H.D. Zeh, via Steve Hsu
- cowen on uni-disciplinary advice
Tyler Cowen,
from “How to think about uni-disciplinary advice”
(15 May 2020)
“Usually the generalists are the best predictors,” or: beware epistemic false modesty from specialists
- microservices are an organizational scaling technique
Itamar Turner-Trauring,
from “'Let’s use Kubernetes!' Now you have 8 problems”
(04 Mar 2020)
“when you have 500 developers working on one live website, it makes sense to pay the cost of a large-scale distributed system if it means the developer teams can work independently ... if you’re a team of 5 and you have 20 microservices ... you’re doing it wrong.”
- ignoring differences in communication frames considered harmful
Raemon,
from “Noticing Frame Differences”
(29 Sep 2019)
“When disagreements persist despite lengthy good-faith communication, it may not just be about factual disagreements – it could be due to people operating in entirely different frames — different ways of seeing, thinking and/or communicating.”
- steelmanning divination
Vaniver,
from Less Wrong
(5 Jun 2019)
or: Co-Star, rendered intelligible for the rationalist
- italo calvino on the two cultures of the social sciences
Henry Farrell,
from Crooked Timber
(17 Sep 2009)
causal modeling and thick description
- a salutary effect of genetic fragmentation
Freeman Dyson,
from The New York Review of Books
(May 2018)
genetic isolation intensifies genetic drift. a higher quantity of small, genetically isolated populations may be more likely than fewer non-isolated ones to produce intellectual revolutions.
- goodhart, lucas, heisenberg: variations on a theme
or: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”
- let people be wrong
Peter Boghossian,
from City Journal
(November 2019)
or: against compulsive demands for coherence
- the gell-mann amnesia effect
Michael Crichton,
from “Why Speculate?”
(2012)
or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the fake news