This site hasn’t been updated since 2012. You can still peruse who I was back then, but know that much of what I think, feel, write, and do has changed. I still occassionally take on interesting projects/clients, so feel free to reach out if that’s what brought you here. — Nishant
I've been giving more talks lately than I usually allow myself to, and they all deal with some aspect of human psychology and building things. I examine how we, just by being us, with all our peculiarities, can affect what we set out to build, and what ultimately gets built. I've found that typically there is an undesirably large delta between those two.
An antidote I suggest to the problem of being sabotaged by ourselves is introspection: looking within oneself as one goes about living. But that's easier said than done. Introspection is one of those things that you just can't pick up from a book (though, there are some fantastic and approachable books out there to give you a head start).
But, what's worrisome in its own paradoxically recursive way is that one needs the ability to be introspective about their own introspections to estimate just how accurately they've been introspecting. And, this seems to tend to infinity.
I just re-read what Katja (Josh introduced me to her blog) wrote a while back, and it made me think about this again today. I fear she's completely right.
Hypothesis: We have relatively few concepts for the world inside our heads, because it’s not very shared, and we get concepts mostly from other people. This means it is hard to think about the world inside our heads, and so also hard to remember.