I’ve watched this video several times over the past few months, and each time I revisit it I feel inspired. Many of the statements from this talk make me think about our collaborative brainstorming process at work, for instance: “good ideas normally come from the collision between smaller hunches, so that they form something bigger than themselves.” It also makes me realize how fortunate I am to work at a place that sees the value in sometimes working from coffee houses, and even bars, “because they are spaces where ideas can mingle, swap, and create new forms.”
(There are many more interesting animations from the creators of this one too.)
I’ve always been baffled by how traffic jams can sometimes seem to pop up out of nowhere, and then sometimes even go away all of a sudden. I’ve also always thought that there must be someone out there who studies traffic patterns — and if there wasn’t already then I should take that up as a field of study.
So I was delighted to read both of these articles recently and find out there are indeed people out there using math and science to study traffic jams.
I’ve been reading (er, listening to) Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational this weekend. This passage from Chapter 2: The Fallacy of Supply and Demand, which is all about anchors and imprinting, really struck me.
“Could it be that the lives we have so carefully crafted are largely just a product of arbitrary coherence? Could it be that we made arbitrary decisions at some point in the past and have built our lives on them ever since, assuming that the original decisions were wise? Is that how we chose our careers, our spouses, the clothes we wear, and the way we style our hair? Were they smart decisions in the first place? Or were they partially random first imprints that have run wild? Descartes said “I think, therefore I am.” But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first naive random behaviors — what then?”
He goes on to recommend that we always question our habits and decisions, in particular the first decision in what could be a long line of decisions about any one thing. Ariely also mentions a Socrates quote I like: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Even if our choices in life were completely reasonable at one point, are they still reasonable?
This also relates to my favorite Dave Matthews Band lyric from the song Dancing Nancies, “Could I have been anyone other than me?” — something that’s often stuck in my head and so I think about a lot.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this article from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.
Some quotes from the article that resonated with me:
“Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually.”
“For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.”
I also followed one of the links in the article to read more on the Quantified Self blog. And that got me wondering: is it really “wise to collect as much information as we can and figure out what to do with it later” — aren’t we “more than the numbers”?
