Slow thoughts

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  • October 24, 2024

    Super-Signalling

    Evolution has created a nasty cognitive hack that ethologists call the super-stimulus. I’d like to propose a term for a related behaviour.


  • July 5, 2024

    Love, Math & Witchcraft: How Roasting Psychoanalysis Came Back to Bite Richard Feynman

    The further we zoom in on Mother Nature, the clearer it becomes that, at its most fundamental level, science resembles ‘witch-doctoring’ more than anything else.


  • May 28, 2024

    A Personal Journey Towards Extended Intelligence, or: Getting Intimate With Chet

    I’ve come to allow “Chet” entry to my most private quarters.


  • March 7, 2024

    Abortive Action : the Power of Walking Away

    Steve Jobs famously said that “real artists ship”, but Ulf Lundell was perhaps even more profound in stating that “a cancelled concert is also a concert.”


  • December 23, 2023

    Getting Over Steve

    The gospel of Jesus Christ was an exclusively male affair, but there are at least three female takes on Steve.


  • September 5, 2023

    The World’s Not Enough : Steve Jobs Held Hostage By Own Exquisite Taste

    It’s sad to think that we need disaster to strike in our lives, in order to sober up and see what’s worth a damn. Sad, but at the same time also somehow hopeful.


  • June 23, 2023

    We Need to Talk About Steve

    My bromance with Steve goes back as far as I can remember. That’s probably why I felt such a severe case of cognitive dissonance when picking up Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ memoir Small Fry.


  • April 23, 2023

    Two Types of Failure, part II : Process Over Product

    If all you care about is to perfect your process, a great product will eventually follow.


  • October 21, 2022

    An Occupational Hazard : Suffering the Reverse Dunning-Kruger Effect

    My dream has come true, only I should have been more careful what I wished for…


  • October 17, 2022

    Into The Soft Zone

    Where adults need to protect their fragile zone with headphones, nicotine and seclusion, kids naturally invite whatever the world serves up and use it creatively.


  • October 11, 2022

    Interesting Spells I-N-T-E-R-E-S-T-E-D

    The latest HBO show feels as random as life itself. It really shouldn’t work, and yet something keeps it all together.


  • September 19, 2022

    The Funny Thing With Smart

    When the thermometer was invented, nobody really understood what temperature was. The same is now true of intelligence; we can measure it, but remains a mystery.


  • August 20, 2022

    Mode Confusion and the Future of Robot Design : Lessons from Human Factors Engineering

    Human factors engineering taught us to minimise the risk for mode confusion. That’s highly pertinent when designing interaction with social robots.


  • August 9, 2022

    The Cost of Optimism : Philippe Squarzoni, Climate Change and the Total Perspective Vortex

    I recently read two novels about gay men in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. Their reluctance to take the test reminds me of my own feelings with regards to global warming.


  • April 28, 2022

    Distributed Cognition

    When you forget the details of some complicated concept and have to consult an external resource, that’s distributed cognition.

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