/references
Terms, people, concepts — 38 entries
- Brian Eno
- Musician who named the collective genius we call scenius
- Carl Sagan
- Astronomer who balanced wonder with skepticism
- Christopher Alexander
- Architect who saw design as a language of recurring solutions
- Chunking
- Perceiving compound patterns as single units
- Creole Technology
- Old technologies repurposed into new contexts
- Daniel Kahneman
- Psychologist who named the machinery in your head
- David Pye
- Craftsman who distinguished risk from certainty in making
- Donald Norman
- Cognitive scientist who brought affordances to design
- Donella Meadows
- Systems thinker who mapped leverage points for change
- E.B. White
- Essayist who wrote with invisible effort
- G.K. Chesterton
- Writer who warned against reforming what you don't understand
- George Orwell
- Writer who treated clarity as an ethical stance
- Herbert Simon
- Polymath who showed that rationality has bounds
- High Modernism
- The ideology that complex systems can be centrally designed
- Ivan Illich
- Critic who saw modern tools creating new forms of dependence
- James C. Scott
- Political scientist who showed how states simplify what they govern
- James Gibson
- Psychologist who saw perception as action, not processing
- Joan Didion
- Writer who achieved clarity through precision rather than simplification
- Ma
- The space that makes the rest visible
- Michael Polanyi
- Philosopher who articulated what we know but cannot say
- Multiple Discovery
- The same invention appearing independently at the same time
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Risk theorist who writes in antifragile aphorisms
- Paul Graham
- Essayist who writes to discover what he thinks
- Radical Monopoly
- When a technology becomes mandatory for participation
- Rebound Effect
- Efficiency gains that increase total consumption
- Richard Dawkins
- Biologist who made genes and memes tools for thinking
- Richard Feynman
- Physicist who made explanation a moral act
- Scott Alexander
- Blogger who makes long essays easy to read
- Shibusa
- Beauty with inner implications
- Shokunin
- Craftsman who polishes technique and heart through daily practice
- Stephen Jay Gould
- Paleontologist who wrote essays as a mind in motion
- Steven Johnson
- Writer who traces how ideas emerge from networks and niches
- Stewart Brand
- Editor who thinks on civilizational timescales
- Technical Debt
- A financial metaphor for deferred code quality
- Thomas Schelling
- Game theorist who showed how strangers coordinate without talking
- Vaclav Smil
- Scientist who insists on numbers before opinions
- Wabi-sabi
- Beauty in impermanence and imperfection
- Zeitgeist
- The spirit of the time that makes certain discoveries possible