Quinn Said

Most of the things I learned in the last ten years (like perl, what the hippocampus does, or how to build a ring flash) aren’t very useful to most people. But I learned many amazing, terrible, and funny lessons this last decade about the nature and doings of humans. Here are some, and may you come by this knowledge easier than I did.

• Busy is not the same thing as important, but it can sure seem that way
• If you want to see the future, don’t look at how people are using technology. Search out how they’re misusing it
• All people substitute belief for reality sometimes, and waste their time arguing with what is happening to them. Some people do this with business, some politics, some relationships, and some physics. This is how you get speculative bubbles, wars without end, horrendous breakups, and Darwin awards.
• The things you actively think will never happen to you are much more likely to happen to you than the things you just never considered at all.
• Just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean the business world isn’t insane and stupid. It really is.
• Cultures can have nightmares. A Whole society can become sick, It can roil in somatic pain as its own subconscious tortures it. History records these times with confusion. They are disturbing and inexplicable moments that don’t seem to have a real cause. They’re no fun to live through, and living through them gives you no more insight than looking back on them. You just hope to get to the other side.
• Compassion, even for the very worst, costs nothing and opens up possibilities.
• It may be possible to forgive absolutely anything, and it may be necessary in order to survive. But to say you forgive someone before you can is a lie.
• Ten years ago I thought there was no such thing as a free lunch. But actually, they’re all free. “The sun pays all the bills.”
• I’ve been to Asia, Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa, islands in the Caribbean, the Pacific, nations and states of wildly varying wealth and culture. Africa is different. Everywhere you go changes you, but Africa changes everything.
• Dreams can creep up on you and come true while you’re doing other things.
• Power and status are not as correlated with good decision making as I had hoped.
• You can’t love away illness.
• Some technologies will change your whole life for the better without you noticing, like text messaging, GPS, or spellcheck. Some will disrupt your life in ways you have no tools at all for dealing with, like the web vs newspapers or filesharing vs music labels, or when automatic spellcheck likes to correct your typos to say ‘incest’ when you meant to type ‘insect’.
• In the tech world you don’t have the luxury of believing your preferences. When you run up against a technology you don’t like, you have to figure out why you’re wrong. When you come up against one you love, you still have to figure out why you’re wrong.
• Storing a good collection of maxims, aphorisms, and proverbs in your head can actually get you through a lot.
• Most people explain their faults upfront, but it’s very hard to hear them while it will still make a difference.
• Ten years ago, I was in favor of Brinworld- radical transparency. Now my views are moderated, more complex. I thought it would usher in an age of tolerance, but I’ve learned that people can hold double standards in their heads I have no theory of mind for. But more importantly, I learned that privacy is vital for creativity. We need safe places to think strange thoughts. Sometimes they are what embarrass us, waste our time, or sink us to our lowest depths, but they are also the seeds of new worlds.
• People are about as smart as you tell them they are.
• You’re all geniuses.
• I never understood the capacity for addiction before I had my daughter. Now I’m pretty sure drugs and alcohol are just taking over the same circuits in addicts that would make me do anything for her.
• Humans have terrible memories. Most of the time, memories are just stories we make up about the past to explain how we see ourselves now. But memory is quite useful this way, and takes on an almost literary truth to make up for its factual error. However, it’s no way to measure or understand how we change over time, and it’s worthless for figuring out what happened.
• I have killed far too many ideas for being born infants instead of springing fully formed and battle ready from my forehead.
• There are people that just use a huge amount of toilet paper, and they seem to have nothing else in common, not bowel diseases or hygiene or so on. I have no idea what the hell they are doing with it. Perhaps that’s for the next 10 years.
• 30 is a great age, when you can start to relax and get some perspective.
• Graphic novels seem to make pretty good movies.
• Becoming an expert is the delightful process of learning enough to understand far less of your field of endeavor than you did when you started. These days it’s practically my main signal I am getting somewhere- a sense of my grain of knowledge in an ever widening sea of my ignorance.
• Whatever constraints, limits, or rules you come up with for humanity, there’s someone out there breaking them. And there’s a decent chance they’re blogging it.
• When humanity communicates instantaneously over vast distances and across all cultural and national boundaries, there’s almost nothing we can’t turn into porn. But it turns out porn isn’t the end of the world.
• Democracy doesn’t work very well anymore, if it ever did. The models I was given for how politics and policy work were completely false.
• The founding fathers were a bickering pack who largely hated each other. They spanned the political and cultural spectrum, and universally agreed on exactly nothing. They were rich, they were poor, they were monarchists, anarchists, aristocrats and demagogues. There were some saints and heros, but there were some downright evil people, and there were a few that were all of the above.
• This makes me wonder how the founders of the global network will be seen by history.
• Writing a first book is one of the hardest things a person can do.
• Minor tragedies always remain tragedies, but major ones can go either way.
• Most of the easy problems have been solved. The ones that look easy are hiding the most terrible complexities.
• Institutions are made entirely of humans, and all that implies.
• It is easy to forget that unsustainable things can’t go one forever, because you expect them to start failing as soon as you realize they are unsustainable. Instead I have found that stupid things can go on much longer than I thought they could.
• Unsustainable things are still unsustainable.
• Torturer, tortured, trainer, trainee, conqueror, conquered, these are all misleading distinctions. No one really comes back out of those rooms.
• You will likely reach a point when it seems life is not really your own, when it is filled with career, interests, family, obligations, and things. It will so architected, so set, you will believe you are trapped. You’re not. You can walk out anytime.