The natural sciences are concerned with how things are. Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be.The natural sciences are concerned with how things are. Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be.

Herbert Simon

The point is not to mistake the success and confidence of moguls like Musk for a path out of our troubles. To hand over the keys, so to speak, and watch what happens. To, say, let Bill Gates, who made his fortune dominating software and was also ‘the richest man in the world,’ solve world health from on high. To let Jeff Bezos, another one-time ‘richest man in the world,’ create the standard for how we get stuff and how we treat the workers who get that stuff to us.

It’s time to stop hero worshiping the tech billionaires

  1. Raise a million dollars from friends and family.
  2. Set up an app whose only function was giving people $10 for signing up.
  3. A hundred people sign up the first month, word of the app gets out, and 99,900 sign up the second month.
  4. You have a large and enthusiastic user base with a huge growth rate, things that venture capitalists love.
  5. Raise another $1 billion from VCs at an enormous valuation, cashing out a few hundred million dollars for the founders.
  6. Step 6 is a mystery.

[Via Matt Levine]

Work life, generally speaking, you ride a roller coaster. Not every day is a good day, there are projects you work on that don’t always go well, and if you’re doing anything interesting, that has to be the case. If everything you have going on in your life is focused on work, it means your entire life rides the roller coaster.

Remember: What You Do Is Not Who You Are

Last year was an outlier because of risky driver behavior. Americans drove faster, didn’t wear seat belts and were more likely to be impaired by drugs or alcohol while behind the wheel. People also spent more time on motorcycles, sometimes without a license. All this was during a year spent taking extreme caution when it came to most other aspects of our lives — yet we chose to take more risk on the road. It could be because living under [COVID-19] restrictions made us want to break free, and that’s actually a common response to pandemic-sized risks.

Why We Sometimes Die When Trying to Avoid Risk