"Sometimes questions are more important than answers."
~ Nancy Willard
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"How does that work?" is a great way to start thinking about everything.
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The Tyranny of Convenience
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Some of our tools are external - physical objects that help us with completing tasks. Others are internal - mental concepts that form when we use our mind to solve problems.
What happens when all the external tools around you make your mental tools obsolete? When your work is simply arranging inputs and outputs of these tools, without doing anything yourself?
"Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.“
Tim Wu
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Is Facebook tapping your phone? It's unlikely, because it doesn't have to.
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This is supposed to be a Data Kraken - too much?
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When it comes to convenience, there is a fine line between being in control and being controlled. Designers try to make you feel like you’re behind the steering wheel, even when you’re just a passenger in for a ride.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Did it ever happen to you that you had a conversation about a service or a product, only to later find an ad for it on Facebook or Instagram?
Were you freaked out by it? I bet. Or maybe it happened to someone else and they told you.
There’s a rumor going around that Facebook is secretly listening in on your conversations.
It is highly unlikely that this is actually true, mostly because they don’t need to.
For the sake of convenience (real or perceived) we offer them so much information about ourselves, that they can basically predict the topics of our conversations based on the traces of data we leave.
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Razors: Powerful thinking tools
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One of the more important ideas about thinking comes from a guy called William of Ockham and it goes like this:
"entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity)“
You have to cut him some slack, he lived in the 14th century, when it was en vogue to write like this.
What he meant was this:
If you have two possible explanations for why something is happening, always choose the one that needs less assumptions.
(That’s why it’s called „Razor“: It cuts away everything you don’t need)
How can we apply this razor to our thinking? Here's one example from the field of modern medicine: While there are lots of illnesses, most people get sick on very common diseases. Sometimes, when symptoms are ambivalent, it can be tempting to diagnose a very rare disease even if it is very unlikely the patient actually has it. To keep diagnoses relevant, doctors say:
„When you hear hoofbeats: You just go ahead and think ‚Horseys‘, not ‚Zebra‘. OK Mister Sillybear?“
A corollary: Hanlon’s Razor
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice.“
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One of the most productive thinking tools I ever encountered is inversion. It’s a technique used throughout the history of philosophy and logic. In fact, it is so common that people never really bothered to give it a proper name. But in our everyday thinking, we tend to ignore its powers.
What is inversion? Here’s an example:
In mathematics, some things are hard to prove. Like "There is no smallest positive rational number.“ (Refresher: A rational number is any number that can be expressed as the fraction of two integers)
This sentence means: For any rational number r you choose, you can always find another rational number s that is smaller than r ("closer" to 0).
So, an easy way to prove this sentence is to flip it around and assume that there is such a thing as a smallest (closest to 0) rational number. Let’s call that number r.
But then we can divide r by 2: r/2, which is larger than 0 but smaller than r. Which is a direct contradiction of our assumption. Therefore, there cannot be a smallest rational number.
You can use this kind of thinking in many situations. Just flip your question. I find the following question useful in workshops when people are stuck while searching for solutions:
„What would you have to do to make your situation worse?“
Surprisingly, most people find it very easy to come up with ideas how to make things worse. For example: „What would have to happen to make your customers less happy?“ - „Well, our staff could be rude, and even less helpful.“
So - there you have it: Make sure your staff is polite and helpful to make your customers happy.
Inverted thinking is inconvenient, because we imagine an even less favorable outcome to our actions. But it is a very necessary and productive tool for innovative thinking.
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Factories for the immaterial
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That thing you see above is kinda special.
It is The Everything Formula. It not only produces itself, it also produces everything else you want it to. (within boundaries, because everything in life comes with a caveat)
This is waaaay to meta for me, but maybe you enjoy some more self-replication? What about a computer program that prints out its own source code? It’s called a Quine, and it’s quite a thing to wrap your head around.
Self-Replicating computer programs
In this context, by self-replicating we do not mean a program that successfully copies itself to some place else (like a computer virus), which is easy. We are talking about computer programs that when run, print out an exact copy of their source code.
And that's a concept that's rather hard to grasp. See, if you want your program to output something, your code basically looks like this:
CODE_TO_WRITE_THE_OUTPUT("output data");
The instruction always wraps around the data, like
print('Hello World');
Which would give you the output of
Hello World
So, you’d think that in order to print print('Hello World');, your code would have to look like this:
print('print(\'Hello World\');');
But then of course the outside instruction would be missing, and you wouldn't output your own source code at all.
But it is possible to do that, and to be honest, I find that very confusing. Here's a list of Quines in common and not so common languages.
Number Factories
Here's another factory that does something interesting: It produces every imaginable number, just by using 4.
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Mathematical factories are not the only factories out there. There are also formulas that allow you to generate jokes. It's always surprising how many disciplines that have the reputation to be about ingenuity, emotions and personality, are actually dependent on rigor, discipline and methodical thinking.
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A tool for making dotted lines
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So, this is something for the connoisseurs out there, everyone in that intersection of the venn diagram of:
- Notetaking, pens, pencils, stationary and everything around it
- Mechanics
- Things you don't actually need
(via the ever-phantastic present&correct)
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Yet even more convenience: The joys of virtual assistants
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"You can shingle a roof, paint a house, or fix a chimney with the help of just a ladder, moving it and climbing, moving it and climbing, getting access to only a small part of the job at a time, but it’s often a lot easier in the end to take the time at the beginning to erect some sturdy staging that will allow you to move swiftly and safely around the whole project.“
~ Daniel C Dennett
Thinking about the tools and factories you use, even without noticing, can leave you 🤔. So don't forget to employ the Number One Feel-Good factory of all times: The good old "High-five yourself because you deserve it."
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