A rigid business plan gets one locked into a preset invariant policy, like a highway without exits —hence devoid of optionality. One needs the ability to change opportunistically and “reset” the option for a new option, by ratcheting up, and getting locked up in a higher state. To translate into practical terms, plans need to 1) stay flexible with frequent ways out, and, counter to intuition 2) be very short term, in order to properly capture the long term. Mathematically, five sequential one-year options are vastly more valuable than a single five-year option.
This explains why matters such as strategic planning have never born fruit in empirical reality: planning has a side effect to restrict optionality. It also explains why top-down centralized decisions tend to fail.
Stop what you’re doing right now, scientists, and figure out teleportation.
I started a new Tumblr. Recommendations welcome.
The folly of sensationalism: William Wordsworth on the news … in 1798. (via explore-blog)
(Source: , via journo-geekery)
Via the New York Subway’s Historical Maps section, the 1912 BMT Route Map.
This is a bit outside the normal scope of my blog, but it’s an excellent talk on sexual tropes, narratives, and reality. I absolutely recommend.
Camille Paglia, ArtsATL Q&A (via lulclipfile)
You’ve probably seen TV journalists asking soft questions to politicians with whom they - or the boss of their network - are sympathetic. You know, like ‘Have you always been motivated by a desire to serve your country?’ or ‘Can you explain how your spending cuts will help our economy?’
Quantum mechanics doesn’t involve questions like that. It teaches you to ask questions that might actually produce a useful answer, and over time it will enable you to organise your thoughts about the natural world. It shows you how to prove things through experiment, and how to take nothing for granted, no hypothesis, until it has been exposed to every test of cause and effect.
…I wanted to try and pierce the fabric of reality, and, when it came to social action, take the skin off all our assumptions and see what was underneath. Advanced mathematics and quantum mechanics allowed for that.
To get to the truth, you have to look at your behaviour in how you set up the experiment and see how much the outcome has been affected by what you did and how you did it.
You have to find a true measure.
You have to look at how things are constructed - and how you yourself have constructed your way of looking - so as to get some insight.
Now, the more I looked at this feature of quantum mechanics, the more I saw that it might constitute the thing I had long been looking for: a theory of change, a theory of human-initiated change in the world.