Kevin Smith on the meaning of life

This talk has echoed with me more than once over the past two years and provided an unpleasant but maybe necessary perspective on life. 

The biggest switch I've had to accept is how we always think of a death in war or getting eaten by a bear as worse than dying in the modern world, but is that even true?  Confronting your idea of a good death seems almost invariably a side-channel question into a good life.

How to deal with really difficult topics

Samantha Bee of the Daily Show helps us manage when things get tough.

Thought of the week

If your beliefs are always purely emotional, its difficult to convince
anyone else.

If your beliefs are always purely rational, you won't convince yourself.

"Sharpshooter" fallacy

A professor friend noted that its always better to mistake a rock for a bear than a bear for a rock.  The person in the first scenario can laugh about it later, the second cannot.

The problem comes in when people make decisions based on patterns that are not present, such as the assumption that there were German spies in the non-bombed neighborhood during WWII.  The rush to caution is therefore seems to be a good idea, the rush to judgment does not.

(Note: "Sharpshooter" is also known as the Ontological Fallacy.)

(thanks Mark)

Broken on purpose

An outstanding talk about what is broken and why, and another strong reminder of Douglass Adam's Somebody Else's Problem Feild.  One of the difficulties of increasing complexity is the potential for irrational as well as counter-productive policies, behaviors, and products.  A reminder that designers must ask who their audience is and spend a little time thinking about what could go wrong.

Most revolutionary about the talk is the notion of when breaking something on purpose may be exactly what's necessary; its not new that the pursuit of perfection is a bad idea but sometimes doing something "wrong" makes all the difference, or perhaps the right thing in reverse.