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This article is a great overview of confirmation bias. I truly don’t think you can eliminate bias. But the worst thing you can do for yourself is to not be aware of the potential biases that affect your own viewpoints and those of the people you consume information and opinions from.

I’m constantly surprised at how many people seem to be unaware that they’re affected by biases: Everyone else is the problem; no, no, not them. They’re un-biased.

Bullshit. Thinking that is ignorant.

(via @zeldman)

Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter – these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing world-views.

If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn’t, you hate them.

Whether or not pundits are telling the truth, or vetting their opinions, or thoroughly researching their topics is all beside the point. You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.

David McRaney, Confirmation Bias

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His full title: “It’s just wrong to position your life or your business so it is dependent on regularly succumbing to sub-optimal situations.”

Someone probably needs to revoke my fanboi card—I’ve been posting a lot of Frank Chimero stuff lately, and it’s taking some self-discipline to not post that much more…

But, exceptions are meant to be just that. By their default, they can’t be the norm. If they do become that, something’s busted and there need to be some repairs at a higher level.

Frank Chimero, It’s just wrong to position your life or your business…

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Fred Herzog


This collection of older color photographs by Fred Herzog is simply stunning. Is use of light and perspective creates an incredible story within each image.

(via Yewknee)

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My Week Alone on the Internet


In many ways it’s hard to remember, the but internet didn’t used to be as social as it is now. There was a time, not too long ago, where Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. didn’t exist, or at least had very little traction in our daily lives.

Last week, as I found myself needing to make a final push on some work—in particular, a large update to the very blogging platform this post is published on (more on that later)—I noticed, and became increasingly annoyed with my proclivity toward CRS. What is “CRS”, you ask? It’s what I’ve dubbed Constant-Refresh-Syndrome—and I had it bad.

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I’ve posted a quote from this article before, but I’d recently re-read it and it’s always interesting which little pieces come out top-of-mind a second time through.

…there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Clay Shirky, The Collapse of Complex Business Models

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Great story (and very wise words) from my friend Dustin.

Having the impulse to approach a stranger is effortless, actually doing it requires chutzpah. My advice: stock up on chutzpah.

Dustin Henderlong, Stock up on chutzpah!

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Please Don’t Abuse Your Users

Evite vs AnyVite


I made this quick little rant last night comparing the email messages users receive from two different party-/event-planning websites. It’s fairly obvious that one of them allows its business model to dictate a user experience that’s actually fairly abusive to their end users.

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This can’t be an easy way to run a non-profit organization, but I’m pretty amazed that more non-profits don’t do the same thing. Not knowing the percentage of my donation that actually does some good is one of my biggest hangups when trying to decide to donate to any non-profit. Some try to be a bit more transparent and tell you an actual percentage, but most don’t, and that number is usually lower than I’d like it to be.

Another key to [Charity Water’s] success is that 100% of donations are used for direct water project costs. (A group of private donors, foundations and sponsors help pay for the everyday costs of running the organization.) CW even pays for the paypal and credit card transaction fees when people donate online so each penny goes straight to actually building a well.

Harrison chose this route because he felt many donors had lost faith in charities due to outsized admistrative costs. Many CW donors decide to give because they know for sure where their money goes.

Matt Linderman, How branding and transparency help charity: water stand out

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Cole Rise


Cole Rise

I’ve had Cole’s site sitting open on my laptop for weeks. Every so often I scroll back through it again just to take in the images. They’re deceptively simple. When you look closely, you can tell they’re highly-crafted in post. He also plays with a lot of texture. It doesn’t always work for me, but when it does, it’s powerful.

He shares a lot of b-side and in-progress photos on his blog as well, so be sure to check that out. This fifty & two thirds post, for example, has two of my new favorite photos.

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I’ve been there. I know exactly what that fruitless cycle feels like. In a way, it’s nice to know I’m not alone.

Over the last couple weeks Chimero has been putting out a series of related essays. I would encourage you to read all three. I hope there’s book in there somewhere because I’m really enjoying reading his thoughts in long-form.

I told him how I was scared that the search for substance in a bottomless well might make me fickle. About how I’d go to one site to look for things, then to a second and a third and fourth, and then after the circuit was finished, I’d go back to the first site just to see if anything was new. I told him about how whole mornings disappeared that way. I pictured a guy looking for his keys so he could get his day started, but he searched by lifting up every item he owned to look under it. “Not under the rug. Not under the fridge. Not under the laundry, or the paperclip on my desk. Not under the silverware tray in the top drawer on the left in the kitchen. Maybe I should check the rug again?” It was a different, special kind of neurosis.

I told him about how I behaved on the sites. I’d move down, glancing, skimming, my scrollbar ever careening downward, endlessly scrolling. Then, picture after picture, on and on for infinity, witnessing flashes of color and form, my mind moving like a rock skipping across an edgeless ocean, never quite sure of what’s under the surface. Maybe nothing. Or water all the way down.

Frank Chimero, The Back Side of Your Gullet is Decadent and Depraved, Part 3

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This is one of the best posts I’ve read in a long time about—not just how to help the environment—but how to approach any movement that, at its root, is about cultural change.

This should be a set of guiding principals in the playbook for the environmental movement, but it won’t be, sadly. Why? Because it’s not sexy enough. Because it would require self-righteousnes, fear-mongering, and indignant anger to take a backseat to reason, humility, and actual progress. That is, of course, unless some of us are willing to examine our motives of why (and how) we’re working to change culture for the better.

There’s too much fear in the way we talk about our environment: fear of running out of oil, fear of climate change, fear of pollution, fear of diminishing biodiversity, to name a few.

Often, science turns to dramatic, fear-inducing predictions to convince people that environmental issues are important and certain changes need to be made immediately. Act now, or it might be too late, we’re told.

But it’s not working.

Fear of something in the distant (or even not-so-distant) future is a lousy motivator of sustained action in the present. People lash out against fear; they rarely take calm, rational action against it.

Jeffrey Tang, How to Save the Earth (Without Fear)

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As humans, we have such a desire to be right about our convictions, but we seem to leave so little room to be wrong or learn something counter to those currently-held convictions. It makes sense as a survival technique, but it’s kind of scary when you also realize how prone we are to groupthink.

That voice in your head spewing out eloquent reasons to do this or do that doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s not particularly adept at getting you nearer to reality. Instead, it only cares about finding reasons that sound good, even if the reasons are actually irrelevant or false.

Jonah Lehrer, We Are All Talk Radio Hosts

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Wherever you stand, even if you think that Verizon and Google are not headed down a slippery slope, I still question whether or not they can be trusted with something as crucial as net neutrality. I’m rarely a fan of government regulation, but this is a textbook example of what government regulation is intended to resolve.

If companies always agreed with regulators’ rules, there would be no need for regulators. The very point of a regulator is to do things that companies don’t like, out of concern for the welfare of the market or the consumer.

The Economist, Verizon, Google and the Woody Allen problem

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Let the weight of that sink in. Our culture literally punishes people who take a stand about an issues while revering the person who makes absolutely no commitment to any side of an issue. I’m not suggesting that we should all always have our minds made up, but shouldn’t we respect someone willing to defend a position more than someone who takes no position at all?

In general, it’s easier to ask open questions than to give confident answers. There’s no social penalty for appearing open-minded – but if you take a stand and get it wrong (or just different), better watch out.

Jeffrey Tang, Thoughts on Conviction, Confidence, and Authority

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TEDx Boulder


Last Saturday I had the privilege to give a short talk at TEDx Boulder. It was an amazing opportunity and I wanted to leave the audience with something they would remember and a question they could walk away with and process later.

I’m a designer, and so I view life through that lens. I settled on using some of the tenants of Minimalism as an analogy for the way we might want to more actively curate and make choices in our incredibly-hectic daily lives.


(photo by Thad McDowell)

Each speaker had been given different time-slots for their talks. I had one of the short, 3-minute slots. It was a fun challenge. I decided my slides would have no words so that I could speak fast. I sketched out a bunch of little illustrations and used them as visual accents to the story of my day, as I told it.

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Call it whatever you want, but I’m more and more convinced that a significant aspect to enjoying a long, healthy life is perspective—so much so that these psychological factors seem to even influence our physical body and how it deals with things that will kill us, like a terminal illness.

The lesson seemsalmost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer. When Cox was transferred to hospice care, her doctors thought that she wouldn’t live much longer than a few weeks. With the supportive hospice therapy she received, she had already lived for a year.

Atul Gawande, Letting Go

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Shudder. I think he’s right. My thought, though, is that the cycle of recognizing addictions and breaking them will also increase. I just worry, as Paul does that we’re relying increasingly on inflexible control mechanisms like religion and/or government to quell addictions rather than learning how to recognize them and process through them both individually and as a society.

The process of learning to stop addictive behavior is probably more important than preventing all such behavior in the first place.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

Paul Graham, The Acceleration of Addictiveness

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On the death of newspapers (a.k.a. journalism) and an informed democracy


I’ll start out by saying this: excuse my ignorance. This is not a topic I’ve studied to any extent or have any sort of professional expertise in. I’m simply making some observations and drawing some conclusions in hopes that someone (maybe you) will respond and enlighten or correct me if necessary.

Every so often I hear the argument that journalism is dying. It usually goes something like this:

  • The newspaper industry is struggling. People are reading less newsprint and the internet is forcing publishers to give news away for free.
  • Network TV (and therefore Network News) is struggling because of the internet and because consumers have too much choice in cable/satellite, and, of course, the internet.
  • Because of these factors and declines in ad revenue tied to readership/viewership, real professional journalism is dying.

Coupled with what I’ll call the “journalism is dying” argument is usually a very grim picture of the future of democracy in our country. That argument usually goes something like this:

  • An informed electorate makes for a healthy democracy
  • A healthy journalism industry leads to an informed democracy.
  • The journalism industry is in decline and therefore democracy is in trouble.

I call bullshit.

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Not sure how I came across this in the first place, but it’s a fascinating valedictorian speech that should cause you to question not just our educational system, but the traditional work structure that follows it. Good stuff.

And now here I am in a world guided by fear, a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us, a world where we can either acquiesce to the inhuman nonsense of corporatism and materialism or insist on change. We are not enlivened by an educational system that clandestinely sets us up for jobs that could be automated, for work that need not be done, for enslavement without fervency for meaningful achievement. We have no choices in life when money is our motivational force. Our motivational force ought to be passion, but this is lost from the moment we step into a system that trains us, rather than inspires us.

Erica Goldson, Coxsackie-Athens Valedictorian Speech 2010

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I really want to agree to Godin’s premise. But, I hardly think fear-based political-pandering is new. And while I’d like it to be a short-term gain, long-term loss strategy for the politician, I doubt we’ll ever run out of things to be afraid of as a society.

That said, it’s worth recognizing, calling what it is, and fighting against at every chance we get.

It seems as though we’re entering a season in which it’s easy to ostracize or become righteously indignant over someone’s national origin, skin color, religion or sexual orientation.

If this is the best a politician can do to organize and lead, then we all lose.

Seth Godin, Intolerance and xenophobia as a (short-term) marketing strategy

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