This site is an essay about design and skill. Its heart is that you can learn to think better about design, alalysis, and creativity using mental tools that you already have in new ways. I’m basically just padding the copy here; this is not necessarily my considered opinion about NMNL’s theme. I have to say I’ve been preferring the short form of the name (as evinced in the logo above).
No Less starts with a discussion of design and theories of design, arguing that more things are design than are usually called that, but cautioning that most codifications of design are not as useful as they look; then continues with science and knowledge, explaining how scientific thinking can help a lot of everyday problems without sucking the life out of them; evolution discusses patterns in complex systems and the emergence of things like competition and altruism; be a badass is about being a good and happy person; finally, the information finds that metaphors from information theory and computing tie everything together with a bow.
Design happens everywhere
Everything has some design. Natural things have physical causes; artificial things have the expectations of their designer. It’s the nature of existence that things either change, are destroyed, or stay the same.
The analogy between learning (behavior associated with positive outcomes is reinforced) and a loose sense of evolution (there is more of things that tend to live a long time and copy themselves).
Neither a designer’s intent nor “random” evolution is necessarily good for us. In the former case, the designer’s incentives may not have led them to consider our interests, or they may have incomplete information. In the latter, social Darwinism is bad, etc.
We can and should look at everything critically. We can evaluate everything by wondering how it got that way and how to improve it.
Design always happens
“Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.” — Douglas Martin.
“<!— Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like […]. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. —> Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs.
Design is about basic human decency to whoever or whatever deals with what you produce.
You’re designing all the time
Everything is the product of design, and everything you do has some potential design dimension. Get good at it.
You already know about design in your fields; generalize your specialization
This is one of the cores of No Less.
No Less is mostly informal and nonfalsifiable; don’t take it too serious
It’s a list of some snippets of the authors’ worldviews. That’s ambitious enough. It’s not a guidebook. It doesn’t present a thesis, a regimen, or even a linear argument beyond the above — just examples and discussion to try to create a contagious ethos of thinking critically about how everything works.
I get the feeling we’ll be quoting this exasperatedly after we publish and get some “who do these so-called experts think they are, explaining how everyone should think” blog posts.
Our target reader is basically us from a parallel universe.
Science and truth
Strictly speaking, no subset of reality is exhaustively known. More or less by definition, the only fully enumerable environments are those we create (like math) and of those, the nontrivial ones are actually pretty unknowable (math: Gödel). This is why, in the everyday world, you can’t prove a negative.
Logic
Logic is a set of rules for combining axioms. It’s essentially a game we’ve made up to try to understand what our intuition does. (In a sense, it’s artificial intelligence, just not general artificial intelligence. It does natural human things — reasoning from axioms — better than humans naturally do.) It does not prove or disprove anything about the real world unless the real world exactly matches our starting assumptions. Science is mostly about making our assumptions better.
See, e.g., the closed world assumption, the frame problem, etc.
Valid arguments are easy. Sound arguments are arguably impossible in a strict sense.
Science is a verb
Hypothesize, observe.
And, speaking loosely, a body of knowledge it’s built up in the last 500 years or so. Confusing the two is natural but leads to a lot of confusion.
Falsifiability and the ultimate authority of reality
Just lately, I was in an Internet Argument with someone about second-hand smoke. What it came down to was me saying “here is a long list of links to PubMed saying SHS is dangerous” and him saying “but it’s just common sense that it isn’t dangerous”. Don’t be that guy.
Sometimes common sense is correct and book learning has some bad assumptions and is wrong(ly applied). Feel free to point these situations out. But don’t look at a fact and say “no”.
Science is kind of adversarial
There’s a strong analogy here with the free market and with evolution. Conceptually, things (ideas, products, phenotypes) branch out, compete for limited resources (braintime, consumer money, food/habitat/mates) in an environment partly consisting of entities undergoing the same process, some are pruned back, and the cycle, Simba, continues.
Competition. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
[17:43] Vruba: (I honestly don’t know how nuts I’m being … whether this analogy is trivially obvious or a silly stretch. It just seems like there’s a common structure there, and I’ve never seen anyone point it out except casually.)
[17:48] Platypus: (I’m tentatively in favor. It’s not crackpotty. I think what you’re going for may be simply that “evolution” as a process is not inherently biological. Competition raises local complexity. It’s a natural process that, by necessity, underlies everything interesting.)
[17:48] Vruba: (Right … Douglas Adams’s point that evolution is tautological. “Survivey things survive”.)
Rigor is about being adversarial with yourself
Feynman quote, I think from the cargo cult speech, where he talks about bending over backwards to show how you might be wrong. Basically, have a model of a smart critic in your head.
Beware false science
“Science, incidentally, not only ignores the question of indwelling essences by looking instead at measurable relationships, but science also does not agree that knowledge is obtained through Rothbard’s Medieval investigation by a reason, i.e., by inventing definitions and then deducing what your definitions implicitly assumed.” — Robert Anton Wilson.
I keep coming back to this because I think it’s especially dangerous around nerds. Scott Adams comes to mind. Just because you can take some real-life situation and put a dab of science on it doesn’t mean you’re being “rational”. I’ll have to find a good example of this.
Crackpottery
Overactive pattern-finding.
Usually the simple and obvious explanation is the good one. Real explanations are subtle and complex, but when confronted with a mystery that you have to deal with (as opposed to figure out, necessarily), assume it’s the most obvious thing it could be.
There are only a few obvious answers to a given problem. There are an infinite number of subtle ones. If you make a subtle guess without good information, you’re definitely going to be wrong. If you make an obvious guess without good information, you might at least come close to a simplification of the real answer.
This sounded way clearer and wiser when I thought it up while falling asleep.
Evolution, in a broad sense, sure explains a lot
First we explain exactly what actual biological evolution is, stressing that it’s been refined since Darwin and, as Nick has pointed out, that sexual selection is often badly underappreciated, especially in humans.
Then we put it in more abstract terms to talk about how it describes a wide variety of counterintuitive things.
Abstractly:
Anything you see in a system (not right after outside interference, duh) is something that survived or is the descendent of something that reproduced. These anythings you see might be individuals/species, but also larger patterns (rivers, forest fires, ocean currents) and smaller traits (genes, memes/behaviors).
Consider ant pathfinding. There’s variation, in that they tend to move randomly when bored. And there’s selection, in that a good path forms positive feedback. So uncoordinated ants can adapt a path to a food source in a random environment, much like uncoordinated breeders can adapt a population’s traits to an arbitrary environment.
Consider learning. There’s variation in what we try (at many scales: “maybe I’ll take up chess” and “this time I’ll sacrifice a rook”). And there’s selection as we do what we’re good at and what we enjoy. So a free society tends to form stable systems where there are approximately enough accountants in the right places, etc., with very little central planning compared to naïve Communism.
In fact, the connection between the idea of positive feedback and the idea of adaptation should be explored. Energy minima/fitness maxima, etc.
The randomness of variation is valuable because it tends to break us out of false models and local utility maxima, especially as conditions change.
Variation can be meta-variation, like changing the mutation rate.
In an extremely broad sense, evolution just means things have reasons
Artifacts embed history; they encode information about their creation. Human-made things, obviously, encode the expectations and thus knowledge of the designer.
Evolutionary psychology
Understand selfhood
Understand consciousness. You’re a verb, and not a particularly well defined one at that. You’re a distributed pattern with many constants and many variables.
Everyone else is a self too. You’re supposed to know this after you’re more than 36 months old or whatever it is, but people seem to have trouble with it.
You’re the one on the ground in your situation. Trust yourself to have a better idea than other people of what it feels like to be you. Unless there is a positive reason not to, act in your own enlightened self-interest. It’s what other people expect.
Subsidiarity.
Bushido
We’re bad at selecting from huge ranges. If it doesn’t really truly matter, choose fast, put it behind you, and repeat until you’re at something that does matter. The abilities to handle subtlety, choose well, and get distracted are strengths, but easily perverted ones.
More big risks (start a company), fewer small risks (bike without a helmet). Little risks and big risks both have have big consequences, but big risks are easier to keen an eye on.
If you’re not sure whether you should do something scary, the answer is probably yes.
(Not) Worth doing well
Nick’s XKCD post, http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html etc. etc.
Don’t take the idea of cheating out of context. If you’re ethically in the clear and have found a legitimate shortcut, take it and don’t feel guilty. Refer to functional equivalence to define what makes a shortcut legitimate. Emphasize that finding a shortcut is often about redefining goals by seeing a larger context: the shortcut to what other people are thinking of as “design a better propeller” may be to drop the implicit constraint and go design a jet.
Get cheap beans and rice and spend your money on the sauce.
Learn to enjoy (1) letting go of things you spent time on (e.g., doing a really good job on an unimportant assignment) and (2) keeping things you didn’t spend time on (e.g., several of my most beloved mementoes were spontaneous creations).
Ethics
You’re designed to be, let’s say, 98% honest. Deception is hard for you, easy for others to detect, and will be harshly if subtly punished (e.g., with pity). Avoid it — if for no other reason — for your own advantage. You probably have to keep fewer secrets than you think. People like transparency and emotional availability, and it makes competitors underestimate you.
Persistence
Sadly, the way to be good at things is to practice them. It really, truly works. There is such a thing as a prodigy, but not in the sense of coming from the womb able to compose symphonies; e.g., Mozart worked like a dog. He wrote his first works at age 4 or whatever, but he wrote his first mature work after 10 years of hard work, just like everyone else.
Enjoy routine problems. It’s the only way to stay sane.
Propagate your memes
Insist on getting your taste out there, for reasons analogous to the reasons it’s important to put factual research out there: it’s valuable and other people will test it.
It’s easy to be hung up on originality. It’s overrated. (Except in the natural sciences, where it’s actually a thing.) Short of plagiarism, saying something in a new way, in a new context, is new. Stop worrying so much. Sheesh.
Reserve and shyness are fine. But it’s easy to sit around thinking you have things figured out when the only reason that people aren’t politely correcting you is that they don’t know what you think.
Teach and learn
“Those who can’t do, teach” is more wrong than right. Richard Feynman, T.S. Eliot, and other canonical geniuses had the time and will to teach (even at introductory levels).
(That said, often people at the top of their field don’t have the time and will to teach, at least not in a classroom. Try to get something useful out of them anyway.)
Straighten out your ideas about authority, authenticity, and security
You’re supposed to figure this out (80%) when you’re young. Changing your mind is fine, but being conflicted about these things as an adult, as a lifestyle, doesn’t make you youthful; it makes you immature and irresponsible.
This seems to be a big hangup in our culture. See The Rebel Sell for an argument that the counterculture is the mainstream and just as tooly as the mainstream ever was.
See following chunk.
Be stable
Be openminded and risk-takey, sure. But don’t let anyone you don’t trust push you off balance. Let your friends, teachers, and lovers upset you, but only them.
When you’re emotionally off balance, you’re at risk of grabbing stuff randomly. This is what cults and interrogators do: they screw with your sense of equilibrium until you trust the nearest authority. In a much smaller way, it’s what advertisers do: they raise some kind of worry and present you with the solution.
When you’re looking for someone’s approval, you belong to them. If you trust them, good. But if it’s The Man, or Fashion, or Being Socially Conscious, you’re a sheep.
Be contrarian
In a free society, what’s popular tends to be slightly overcapitalized.
Get good at estimating
This is kind of cheating; it boils down to “be good at knowing stuff”, which is a goal, not a guideline. But hey. Do it.
Hack
Hacking is stretching the rules, for good or evil, well or badly. “I wouldn’t have thought you could do that” in any sense. It’s full of failure, offense, and boredom, but it’s worth it. Whatever you do, hack it.
Debug
Find a better place for this.
Learn how to compare what works to what doesn’t, to partition search space, etc.
Can you reproduce the problem? Can you change it?
Progress as a form of debugging, starting by debugging the empty string (the bug being that it gives no output). Progressively making things less bad.
Codeswitching
A badass can switch domains quickly.
No Permanent Damage
From Penn & Teller. Presented as a principle, but really more like a mantra. If you’re not sure whether to do something dangerous, don’t do it if it could cause permanent damage; otherwise, do it. Worse comes to worst, you’ll heal and people will admire you.
Information: no, really
It’s all just bit/symbols. Syntactic manipulation is equivalent to semantic manipulation (Gödel, Escher, Bach). Materialism is for real.
K-complexity and algorithmic information theory
All about density.
Algorithmic compression is like narrative.
Favor dense things.
Once-and-only-once/normalization
A basic understanding of compression.
Patterns and predictability.
Exformation
Culture, humor, etc.
Exformation is the thing in the real world that we remove to make information theory math.
Extensionality and functional equivalence
Normal forms, isomorphism, and 1:1 thing:representation mappings. When can you say things are identical?