A couple weeks ago, I happened to hear Pat Buchanan on Fresh Air (scroll down). I don’t recall all of the details, and I don’t have the time to listen to the whole interview again, but I was struck with a thought while listening to him: the conservative viewpoint is all about selfishness. The things […]
Category: thoughts
The Animal Who Tells Stories
One of the issues brought up in response to my last post was that we, as humans, are really poor at statistically evaluating risk. We’re really good at remembering spectacular stories, or relevant anecdotes, but we’re really bad at taking numbers in the abstract and turning them into guides to behavior. And this isn’t just […]
The danger to ourselves
A flame war erupted on an email list I’m on when somebody decided to endorse Bush over Kerry, because Kerry wasn’t going to stand up to the terrorists. He went on to mention Kerry’s comment about 9/11 attacks being a “nuisance” (which is a mis-quote but never mind), and how awful an idea it was […]
Generalist
Beemer put up a thoughtful comment in response to my last post. To quote one part: Smart kids, especially the ones who go places like MIT, often get this idea that they need to be Einstein or Newton, which is frankly silly. Because that’s not how the world works — it’s the total contribution of […]
Management by conversation
I’ve been going in circles on my current assignment at work for close to a week. Somebody else was assigned to the project today, and we sat down and I started talking through what I thought needed to get done. And it all just flowed right out. It always kills me when that happens; I […]
Productivity and existentialism
I’ve been tossing this post around in my head for close to a month now, and it’s not coming together, so I’m just going to get down what I have and invite feedback to see what others think. Be warned, it’s a long one, with lots of whining. It starts with my tendency to procrastinate. […]
Why do we write?
I’ve spent some time over the past couple days thinking about why Infinite Jest annoyed me so much. I went and read several gushing reviews of the book, as well as interviews with Wallace where he explains what he was trying to do. Part of what Wallace was apparently trying to convey was that life […]
Autistic management software
I was talking to a friend today who’s turning into a manager, and using Microsoft Project to lay out schedules and the like. And I was horrified, given my aversion to such things. But he pointed out that it was handy for him to be able to point at his schedule and say he couldn’t […]
Self promotion
In the spirit of Paul Graham, I’m going to start this entry with a question that re-occurred to me a couple days ago: What is the right balance of self promotion to do? I was sitting in a project update meeting and noted the difference in how much detail people put into their various updates. […]
Bush and Rove
A couple links about Bush and Rove today. Link 1 was that I happened to catch Fresh Air on the radio today, and Terri Gross was interviewing Wayne Slater, co-author of the book Bush’s Brain : How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. Slater was apparently based in the Austin bureau for the Dallas […]
