How Structure Compels Originality — Creativity Demands Freedom There are few things as rewarding as transforming our ideas into something tangible. Creativity feeds our need to see effort become reality. Thoughts alone serve no feedback, but building things is a direct line to nature. To craft something real is to understand the world in ways mere contemplation cannot. …

The Folly in Trying to Find the Location of Behavior — A Biological Basis for Learning and Memory Neuroscience is the science that tries to understand the nervous system; that highly complex system of neurons and signals permeating the human body. This includes the brain, spinal cord, and an intricate network of nerves. The nervous system is the major control system our bodies use to coordinate our physical…

How to Meet Expectations, Our Way — For a high-level discussion on this topic, check out the NonTrivial Podcast. Contribution as Survival Life doesn’t just happen. We must carve out an existence by taking actions that facilitate our survival. We make decisions each day that hopefully move us in a fruitful direction. We interact with others, take jobs, produce value…

Recognizing the Cost of Precision — For a high-level talk on this topic check out the NonTrivial Podcast. Mathematics as Rigor Our worldviews are largely based on how we think things work. Our experiences settle into ideas, and we use those ideas to make decisions. Our perceptions don’t exist merely as isolated concepts, rather we fashion them into narratives…

How Focusing on Structure Beats Focusing on Time — For the podcast episode on this topic check out the NonTrivial Podcast. Life and Deadlines Life presents us with a host of challenges for which we must find solutions. Finding solutions is less about ideas and more about discovering ways to build physical things that produce useful outputs. We might be constructing a…

Developing a More Rigorous Heuristic — Check out the NonTrivial Podcast to listen to a high-level discussion on this topic. Contents Quality and Decision Making Challenges in Defining Quality A More Robust Definition (intuition) A Mathematical Treatment Making Decisions Quality and Decision Making Quality is important in our lives. We want to consume and create quality things. On the consumption side…

How Victors Let Nature Coordinate the Win — You can also listen to the podcast version of this piece on NonTrivial. We define a thing’s value by its characteristics; what it does and doesn’t do. But a thing cannot adequately be defined outside its environment. There are countless dependencies that make a thing, a thing. We need to…

How Today’s Economists Conveniently Misunderstand our World — You can also listen to the podcast version of this piece on NonTrivial. Economists are known for attempting to treat economics like a genuine science. But upon closer inspection it becomes obvious that their methods are quite outdated. …

The Cost, Beauty and Inevitability of the Human-Technology Identity — Original photo by Rachel McDermott For the podcast version of this article see the NonTrivial episode here. The usual way of thinking about technology is as an extension of life. Technology extends our eyes, our ears, our muscles. If we pick up a smartphone we can see and hear family…