Defend Institutions

Nobody sets out to make an unmaintainable mess.

Probably the most common complaint from software engineers is that they never have the time to eliminate technical debt. Productivity and velocity go down, bug rates go up, product performance plummets, and customer complaints skyrocket. Technical debt is always related to complexity, and hidden complexity is still complexity.

Years ago, my wife overheard a conversation at her hair salon, between another client and a her stylist. It was funny because they were both talking about the cost of a purchase, but they didn't understand each other. One of them thought that the cost was the same as the price. The other thought it didn't cost anything if their minimum monthly credit card payment didn't go up.

"If You're So Rich, Why Aren't You So Smart?" -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I got interested in luck recently. Not the superstitious kind of luck, where you avoid opening an umbrella indoors over a black cat while throwing a pinch of salt under a ladder, but whether it is possible to change your experience of luck.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says in "Fooled by Randomness" and as Robert H. Frank says in "Success And Luck", most of what separates billionaires from the rest of us is luck. There are millions of other people who are just as smart, just as hard working, and just as talented, but they're not billionaires.

When ChatGPT exploded onto the scene on November 30, 2022 (hard to believe that was less than 2 years ago!), the idea of AI "alignment" was suddenly a big deal. That means "alignment with human values."

I thought: "wouldn't it be nice if humans were aligned with human values"?

Even some values that seem uncontroversial, like "tell the truth," are things that most people agree with but nobody actually does. Sorry, Jim-Bob, when your sister said "your new glasses are cool" what she actually meant was "your new glasses make you look like a dork". But that's not the kind of misalignment that is a problem.

A few years ago, software engineering was a pretty great job market.

Then, in 2022, tech companies laid off 165,269 employees. In 2023, they laid off another 264,220 employees. So far, in 2024, they've laid off 124,517 employees.

It used to take very little time to find a new tech job, and now most of us have friends who have been looking for a new job for months, or even more than a year.

"Intelligence is knowing that Frankenstein is not the monster. Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein is the monster."

"Eat rocks," said Google's AI, apparently confusing people with ostriches. Meanwhile, Apple decided the best way to sell iPads was to literally crush musical instruments. Welcome to the wacky world of AI marketing, where billion-dollar companies with genius-level employees somehow keep making decisions that would embarrass a sleep-deprived intern.

These facepalm-inducing moments aren't just amusing anecdotes; they're symptoms of a larger problem in the tech industry: a critical lack of wisdom. In this article, we'll dissect why having the smartest people in the room doesn't guarantee smart decisions, explore the crucial difference between intelligence and wisdom, and demonstrate how we can harness AI itself to help us make wiser choices. Spoiler alert: it involves dusting off some advice from good old Ben Franklin.

Let's face it--the internet is a giant distraction engine.

Ever gone online to check the weather and somehow ended up watching a whole documentary about monarch butterfly migration? It's like going to the store for milk and coming home with a live chicken.

The internet is designed to capture your attention and hold on to it like a puppy with a rope toy. And while that's great for advertisers, it's not so great for your own productivity or your precious and limited free time.