intelligence is a crutch

Being smart is a good thing, as any smart person will tell you more times than you care to hear. And being really smart is like some kind of weird superpower. If you’ve ever been at the head of your class, or the smartest person in the room, or even just the subject matter expert in…

Facebook and the end of the Web

This week Facebook released a barrage of announcements that reveal a stunning level of ambition. You have to ask, are they really the next Google, but with evil?

I can’t speak to the question of evil, but I do have a mental benchmark for the next…

the double back theory

I have an old friend who swears by The Double Back Theory, which basically goes like this: Any important revelation will immediately strike you as obvious and true, but because its significance lingers with you for years, you will have too much time to develop alternatives and corollaries…

we are all authors of our own lives

I’m not against self-affirmation on principle. Many people benefit from empowering messages that remind them of their intrinsic worth. However, that isn’t the sort of bromide that works with my particular chemistry. I want to understand what to do, not how to feel…

the Internet is making us bad writers

Over the last several years, many people have engaged in discussion and debate about whether “the Internet makes us stupid.” What is this debate really about?

The first volley in the debate may have encapsulated the entirety of its…

know thyself

I am fascinated by a concept I recently came across in Eating The Dinosaur. Author Chuck Klosterman and documentary filmmaker Errol Morris discuss whether people have “privileged access” to their own minds.

burn this

Newspapers are dying, as any media observer could tell you. But I don’t get the strident call to “burn the boats,” as Cortés supposedly did when he conquered Mexico for Spain. Never mind that the legend never happened, this advice doesn’t make sense in light of the beliefs of the people saying it.

twitAARRR

People are talking about a report that Twitter has a low proportion of “active” users. I saw a similar debate rage a few years ago around the definition of users of Second Life.

Amusingly (and presumptuously), today’s report claims to define “True Twitter users” as active. They say…

a brief history of failure

VentureBeat was kind enough to publish a piece I submitted to their Entrepreneur Corner, under the title “How to make your startup succeed where others have failed.” That’s a good title, by a smart editor who knows what people want to read. I actually submitted a more modest title…

many goods are incommensurable

There are many simple ways of saying things pretty similar to what I’m saying here, such as:

• To each his own.
• One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
• It’s apples and oranges.