A $10 notebook, the kind you use for journaling, caught my eye. I went back and forth on it for days. I treated the purchase like it needed a formal decision memo.
And at the grocery store, I grabbed a container of watermelon. Also about $10. I didn’t really think about it until I got home.
Why did I agonize over one decision and not the other? It wasn’t price: They cost about the same.
It might be the difference between a purchase and a bet.
The watermelon’s value was obvious before I picked it up: I like watermelon. I’d rather have watermelon than $10. Done.
But the notebook’s value was unknown. It depended on whether a new way of capturing notes would actually change how I think. I wasn’t really buying a notebook but trying to predict whether I’d actually use one.
The agony was about the uncertainty of the payoff, not the price.
One of my favorite shirts says, “Free speech makes free people.”
I wear it because the sentence is true and worth sharing. It has the secondary effect of advertising FIRE, the free speech organization that sells the shirt.
People regularly stop me to praise the shirt’s message. Sometimes they ask what FIRE is. The shirt never feels like a pitch.
It gives people language for something they already believe, or helps them see a problem more clearly, before it asks for anything.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson have followed a similar approach with Basecamp, the collaboration software.
I read them first for their thinking about work: why meetings drag, why busyness isn’t the same as productivity, why calm is better than chaos. I internalized a lot of that before I ever thought about their software.
A shirt slogan, a blog about work. Each appeals to who we want to be. Neither asks for anything. The pitch, if it needs to come at all, comes later.
These stories are often treated as evidence that AI is overhyped and doomed to fail, maybe even that it should be discarded.
They’re better understood as evidence of learning. Of trial and error.
I’ve spent the past year figuring out how AI can help me. At various times, I’ve worked with AI to plan fitness regimens, shape marketing plans, and create elaborate automations on my phone to send morning briefings with the news and my to-do list.
Some of these uses I abandoned within a week. Some were almost right but required revision. And some, like using AI to help explore ideas, have worked from the start.
My misses were the only way to find out what worked for me. I couldn’t predict in advance where a tool would or wouldn’t fit my needs.
Likewise, we can’t derive from first principles how to use AI in customer service, or in management, or in law. The stakes might be larger for a business than for me, but the trial-and-error approach to learning is the same. Christopher Mims’ recent Wall Street Journal piece makes a complementary point: trial and error is how we learn where not to use AI.
Head up to a rooftop in Washington, DC on July Fourth and look around. There are fireworks in every direction.
None of these fireworks are official. Many of them are of dubious legality. All of them are joyfully celebrating the country‘s birthday.
The official fireworks on the Mall a few miles away are visible if you squint. They reflect a patriotism of pomp: Sousa marches, military flyovers, and elaborate displays planned months in advance.
The neighborhood fireworks are America. Informal. Self-organized. Ungoverned. Thumbing their noses at authority.
Venezuela does not have a national early warning system of its own, but people with Android phones received alerts from Google’s Earthquake Alerts system, which can pull data from more than two billion phones equipped with built-in accelerometers. The same sensor that detects rotation on the screen can also sense vibrations from seismic waves.
This is recombination fueling innovation. Nobody put accelerometers in phones to create an earthquake-warning system. Instead, Google engineers stitched together built-in sensors, location data, push notifications, and seismology know-how to create something entirely new: a distributed, planet-scale earthquake-detection network.
Of course, this tech is possible only because the devices we carry with us are capturing and sharing, in real time, both our locations and the slightest vibrations.