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What is the Sickness of Our Times?

There are these two basic fun­da­men­tal fears, these ur-fears that are rip­pling through our soci­eties. The first is the fear of com­plex­i­ty, and the sec­ond is the fear of change.

The Conversation #51 — Phyllis Tickle

Historians get real­ly ner­vous about pat­terns. That’s chang­ing a bit now. And the truth of it is there’s not much way to avoid the 500-year cycle. You almost have to work too hard to unsay it, it’s so obvi­ous­ly there in every way. And if you say every 500 years we go through one, then you imme­di­ate­ly say we’re in the 21st cen­tu­ry and baby are we going through one.

The Conversation #48 — Chris Carter

When you talk about learn­ing and tra­di­tion­al edu­ca­tion­al styles, there’s this very com­mon incli­na­tion to try and force infor­ma­tion upon peo­ple rather than hav­ing them just kind of dis­cov­er it of their own voli­tion or dis­cov­er it by accident.

Amdahl to Zipf: The Physics of Software

There are all of these won­der­ful laws that peo­ple have dis­cov­ered and refined and pro­posed and proved over the years. And some of these laws can apply to the soft­ware projects and the teams and the com­mu­ni­ties that we work in every day.

Mindful Cyborgs #51 — Nordic Larp, Social Change, and Free-will Agency with Eleanor Saitta

Change is going to hap­pen. I guess in a lot of cas­es I see my role in the world as try­ing des­per­ate­ly to build enough tools, and enough under­stand­ing of how they work and how they can be used, and to get that stuff out into the world enough so that when stuff inevitably breaks and falls apart and explodes in our faces, we’ve got kind of a first aid kit that we can reach for.

Psychological demands of tech­nol­o­gy — or how your prod­uct is killing my self-esteem

There is a cer­tain way peo­ple work, or a cer­tain way a large por­tion of peo­ple work. And when you build a thing that demands them to suf­fer, you should make some attempt to alle­vi­ate that suf­fer­ing so they can get to the goal.

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