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That survival, I think, is part of the key to understanding where the digital may be taking us. In terms of most of our life so far, as a species, it’s not a natural thing to see the dead, or hear their voices. I believe the significance of that is still far from being understood. We can actually see what life, at least in some very basic sense, was like, one hundred years ago. We can watch a silent movie, and not only see people who are long dead, but see people who were in their seventies and eighties in the 1920s, and who therefore bore the affect of their developing years — i.e., from before the Civil War, and earlier.

You can think of any business process as a chain – a series of steps that people go through to get things done. Processes don’t depend on the intelligence or creativity of the people who run them, so much as their consistency and ability to perform a specialized task. The manager of the process is responsible for the intelligence of the system.

Business has to get away from time-based performance criteria and begin to focus on rate and accuracy of behavior as the criteria for workplace recognition and reward. Thousands of studies have demonstrated the superiority of ratio-based performance schedules of reinforcement over time-based schedules. In spite of what is known about how to accelerate performance, business, industry and government continue to pay for time, not performance. I am confident that world economic conditions will ultimately force a change from paying for time to paying for performance. The bottom-line difference is too great to be ignored. Whether in training or in daily work activity, it is performance not time that should be reinforced, recognized and rewarded.

This is a nice addendum to the 10,000 hour rule. While deliberate practice remains absolutely crucial, it’s important to remember that the most important skills we develop at an early age are not domain specific. (In other words, Tiger Woods is not using the same golf swing he relied on as a 5 year old.) Instead, the real importance of early childhood has to do with the development of general cognitive and non-cognitive traits, such as self-control, patience, grit, and the willingness to practice.

I don’t think universities will disappear. They won’t be replaced wholesale. They’ll just lose the de facto monopoly on certain types of learning that they once had. There will be many different ways to learn different things, and some may look quite different from universities. Y Combinator itself is arguably one of them. Learning is such a big problem that changing the way people do it will have a wave of secondary effects. For example, the name of the university one went to is treated by a lot of people (correctly or not) as a credential in its own right. If learning breaks up into many little pieces, credentialling may separate from it. There may even need to be replacements for campus social life (and oddly enough, YC even has aspects of that). You could replace high schools too, but there you face bureaucratic obstacles that would slow down a startup. Universities seem the place to start.

It’s too easy to blame the organization and the system and the bottom line for decisions that a person would never be willing to take responsibility for. Whenever you can, work with people who take it personally.

There is a great lesson in this for photographers of today who dedicate themselves to one project or another, failing to understand that the best work might come from an obsession with the medium rather than the personally oriented choice of what might be done with it. Lee always has a camera with him and is constantly making pictures. How much better the work of today might be if all the young and dedicated photographers took up this habit.

In my mind, music is just all there all at the same time. We spend so much time trying to divide it up or categorize. I won’t say I don’t do it — at home I have jazz CDs in one pile and classical CDs in another pile. But in my imagination the music can all be there. There’s that pile and this other pile, but they’re all in the same room. I don’t want to hear just one thing.

Curatela. Oggi siamo tutti curatori. Raccattiamo il materiale che troviamo in rete e lo riconfezioniamo senza alcun rispetto per il legittimo creatore. Tumblr rappresenta l’apoteosi di questo fenomeno. Il problema non è tanto la pirateria, quanto la mancanza di rispetto per il lavoro creativo, il tempo e le energie investite per creare qualcosa che prima non c’era. Un tempo, il termine curatore era usato per indicare una persona disposta a prendersi cura di qualcosa. A proteggerlo, difenderlo, condividerlo con altri in modo intelligente. “Curatore” è una parola che ha smarrito il senso originario, un po’ come “amico”, che oggi è diventato un verbo, un sinonimo di compra-vendita, di scambio interessato, di mercificazione. Facebook e Tumblr non hanno promosso la diversità e l’originalità. Semmai, incentivano conformismo e piattezza”.

As knowledge becomes networked, the smartest person in the room isn’t the person standing at the front lecturing us, and isn’t the collective wisdom of those in the room. The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins the people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it. It’s not that the network is becoming a conscious super-brain. Rather, knowledge is becoming inextricable from—literally unthinkable without—the network that enables it. Our task is to learn how to build smart rooms—that is, how to build networks that make us smarter, especially since, when done badly, networks can make us distressingly stupider.

Dr. Derek Cabrera noticed something really disturbing. The secret to LEGO’s success was the switch from all-purpose LEGO sets, with blocks of different sizes and colors, to predefined kits, models that must be assembled precisely one way, or they’re wrong. Why would these sell so many more copies? Because they match what parents expect and what kids have been trained to do. There’s a right answer! The mom and the kid can both take pride in the kit, assembled. It’s done. Instructions were followed and results were attained. LEGO isn’t the problem, but it is a symptom of something seriously amiss. We’re entering a revolution of ideas while producing a generation that wants instructions instead.

HOW TO BE A GOOD TEACHER?
1. Give a damn. 2. Get to the point when you speak. 3. Expect something from them. 4. Teach to the students who are interested in learning. 5. At all levels, do not overestimate the attention span of your audience. 6. Do not be afraid to be idiosyncratic, provided you adhere strictly to #2.

Rhythm is at least equal to harmony in the scheme of human evolution.  It’s just that the European concept (since it was so devoid of rhythm) related harmony to emotion so clearly that it used to seem like the only way to do it.  At this point, we know differently:  obviously rhythm can give you that same emotional value.