Cam Pegg

It’s very, very smoky in NYC right now—I can’t imagine what it’s like closer to where the fires are. Stay safe, Canadian friends.

Happy birthday, little dog. I miss you. 💔

Written in the context of software engineering, but pretty much universally applicable: Why I Stopped Arguing With People.

We like to believe humans are rational animals who occasionally feel emotions. It’s the reverse. We are emotional animals who occasionally think.

Most people don’t reason their way to conclusions and then feel accordingly. They feel first, then reason backward to justify the feeling. They follow the crowd, mistake confidence for correctness, and adopt whatever the people around them already believe. Independent thinking is rare, far rarer than we admit.

Once you accept this, arguing with logic starts to look absurd.

Yes. If I’m asking you, I’m asking because I want your opinion.

Not really a “kid’s” book and not really an “adult” book either. But definitely a very human book. Loved it.

I’m going to set aside my distaste for portmanteaux for a moment (they’re terrible, and lostalgia is a truly awful word!) and recommend you give at least the introduction to Another ___ is Possible a read (emphasis mine):

“…contemporary systems of forecasting—from data analytics to AI—often give us the form of futurity without its substance. In churning prediction without futures, they flood us with probabilities and dashboards while narrowing the range of what feels possible. Optimisation crowds out imagination. We are saturated by frameworks and models, yet starved of meaningful horizons.”

(I haven’t finished the whole thing yet, but the chapter on Generative Friction is also worth your time.)