I just attended this month’s Bay Area OWASP meeting here. Utterly and completely brilliant. This is a major part of why I moved home to the Bay Area.

Tufte has criticized the way Microsoft PowerPoint is typically used. In his essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”, Tufte criticizes many properties and uses of the software:

• It is used to guide and to reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;
• It has unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of early computer displays;
• The outliner causes ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on each slide;
• Enforcement of the audience’s linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with handouts, readers could browse and relate items at their leisure);
• Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use poorly designed templates and default settings (in particular, difficulty in using scientific notation);
• Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points. This may present an image of objectivity and neutrality that people associate with science, technology, and “bullet points”.

Tufte’s criticism of PowerPoint has extended to its use by NASA engineers in the events leading to the Columbia disaster. Tufte’s analysis of a representative NASA PowerPoint slide is included in a full-page sidebar entitled “Engineering by Viewgraphs” ^[8] in Volume 1 (page 191) of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s report.

Tufte argues that the most effective way of presenting information in a technical setting, such as an academic seminar or a meeting of industry experts, is by distributing a brief written report that can be read by all participants in the first 5 to 10 minutes of the meeting. Tufte believes that this is the most efficient method of transferring knowledge from the presenter to the audience. The rest of the meeting is then devoted to discussion and debate.

This is something worth thinking about. Very interesting.

Now people are saying the same things about Arc that they said at first about Viaweb and Y Combinator and most of my essays. Why the pattern? The answer, I realized, is that my m.o. for all four has been the same.

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

Excellent stuff.

So I asked, then, what do Jobs and Jefferson and da Vinci have in common?

And then one of my favorite quotes hits me.

“Real artists ship.” – Steve Jobs

Could it be that the difference between a generalist and a dabbler is just saying “this is as done as it’s going to be” and shipping the work?

I think maybe yes. If you look at a Jefferson, da Vinci, Jobs – they shipped. A lot. I think the dabbler moves on when he’s 95% complete, so he never gets the completion, satisfaction, and feedback from completing a work.

Also, by completing a work in a field, you gain some renown and prestige, which makes it easier to get in touch with other successful people, which speeds your learning curve.

The dabbler moves on when things get tough. The generalist keeps going until he puts enough work out that he feels complete in a particular field, and then and only then is he on to the next thing.

I so fucking love this post.

I have another way of putting this: you aren’t wasting time unless you fail to produce something from your time. Creation. Output. This is the key. ::

Ideas are a lot like viruses. Neither a virus nor an idea is alive, technically, but both reproduce though contact with other people.  And both are hard to eradicate. For example, 20% of the American population believes Obama is a Muslim. That’s actually an increase since he was inaugurated.

Most idea viruses are the bad type. But I see no reason we couldn’t engineer good idea viruses. Such a virus would have three traits:

1.       It must be catchy, so you never forget it.
2.       It must be something you are inclined to share.
3.       It must cause a positive change in the world.

The catchy-sharing part happens all the time. You see that in the form of famous quotes.  One harmless idea virus is John Lennon’s “Give peace a chance.” It’s catchy, and it has a positive message, but it probably doesn’t cause people to act differently. It’s too general.

I’ve been tinkering with an idea virus that links education with peace. It would be a takeoff from the famous observation (and idea virus) that no two countries that both have a McDonalds ever went to war. I’m not sure that assertion is technically true. And it’s hard to act upon, short of conquering a country and forcing it to become a free market.

Here’s my engineered idea virus:  Education is the antidote to war.

The engineering that went into that idea is that you want it to be true because it suggests an alternative to war. That’s what lets it slip past your rational defenses.

So excellent.

1 + 1 = Infinity

To take on the myth of the lone genius, we need not only to draw on the best science and history, we also need to focus on the fundamental social unit: the pair. As Tony Kushner writes in his notes to Angels in America, “the smallest indivisible unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.” Buckminster Fuller got at the same idea when he wrote that “[u]nity is plural and, at minimum, is two.”

In the sphere of romantic love, most of us already accept the primacy of pairs. And much of the new relationship science is focused on romantic and personal intimacy. But love, at its essence, is private and inscrutable. Long-bickering couples often outlast their placid neighbors, and this oddity layers on top of another problem: What’s our unit of measure for “good” relationships? Is it fiery passion? Is it duration? Is it the number of kids who go to the Ivy Leagues?

With creativity, by contrast, we start with a public text that can be subjected to reasonable (if not perfect) tests. Whether or not you like the Beatles’ music, it’s perfectly straightforward that most people accept their work as novel, useful, and beautiful.