We can’t get traction doing everything all at once all the time #

That’s the tricky part: we need to be able to work in realistic subsets to gain understanding. 

The models in this book are expansive. They are intended to be high enough in the strata to give a little memory boost to what might be going awry when something isn’t working for people. 

The details are blurry, and that’s on purpose. We are learning all the time. There will be wrongheadedness embedded in some of my “good enough for now” foundations.  We are learning that 98.6º F is a very common baseline, health-indicating human temperature, but it’s not the only one. Wearable technology lead the way on this, not medicine. The sensors could either be broken, the person always sick, or…98.6 was a narrative-truth mean, confabulated as a singular quality of truth. 

Some of us are very, very clear that marriage is between any people who are intent on building a life together. Others of us will harm any aspect of an individual’s environment to try to get them to submit to the narrative truth that marriage can only be between one man and one woman — don’t even get them started on thruples. 

The idea that the earth is flat doesn’t survive without denying our space explorations and all the pictures of the earth from above.

What we know today might not be the same thing as reality. Knowing is a stability point. It’s saying, “I trust this answer enough to base my future on the construct of it being unimpeachably correct.” 

We also have a tendency to take a confidence in one area, and apply it creatively. It is literally the reasoning behind trust and mental modeling. So when we believe there is a single metric for the baseline temperature of a healthy human body, it is that much easier to believe that there is a single metric for the perfect human height. That doesn’t make sense when we look at a whole bunch of men and women, so we decide that the idea isn’t wrong, but that it needs to be nuanced. We get the average male height, and the average female height, and start designing clothes and cockpits that will fit the average.

It’s what we do when we design. We are making a bet that we’ve uncovered key points from which to pivot. 

We actually know very little, and knowing doesn’t allow for the one true immutable in the universe: everything changes.

The extra cost of hemming too-long pants or the shame of walking around in too-short pants is negligible compared to aiding or obstructing someone from having shelter at a cost their wages can support. We are modeling survival functions on concepts that have been proven barely tenable in nice-to-haves.

Our information technology designs are much more impactful than other things we’ve been mass-producing for over a century. The primary value of our information technology is in the mass impact. 

Orienting #

We are all individual beings on a complex, rotating, and revolving node in a space so large it boggles our minds. Each mind of each being is a complex wonder of instances of utter magic and instances of egregious dumb-assery. So, please, suspend your belief of the duality of right and wrong for a period of time. Acknowledge our incredible variance, and know that this, in its entirety, compounded and clarified across myriad minds is why we have changed how our world looks from space.