The Hamming question
Richard Hamming asked: “What are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?” My Answer to the Hamming Question is my answer. It has two parts: the problem as I understand it, and how I am working on it.
Open loops and efforts
- Open Loops — things I am still thinking through, watching, or trying to act on
- Efforts — people and organizations already trying things in the same areas
Essays
- Make beautiful things scale — a better system still has to survive, spread, and retain what made it better
- Things Nobody Will Tell You About — priors I keep returning to about people, risk, timing, intelligence, selection, and feedback
- The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Turning it Off & On Again — why resetting a complex system can work when its accumulated state is too difficult to diagnose
- The opposite of a great truth is another great truth — claims that appear to conflict, but remain true together
- Ways to Break out of The Matrix — practices for interrupting default ways of seeing and behaving
Shelves
Reading
Books · Books that teach you to see differently · Tools for Thought Reading List
Watching
Anime · Movies · TV Shows
Dated plans
My Quests for 2025 records what I set out to do that year. A current page should wait until I have reviewed what continued, changed, or stopped.