Jan Bosch
As humans, we like to label things and put boundaries around them. As we have limited intellectual and information-processing capabilities, this helps us abstract otherwise complex concepts and use them in building even higher-level concepts that we can use to explain, predict or create things. Of course, the nature of this process is that it … Read more
As I am slowly emerging from summer vacation, there are a couple of reflections that have come to mind as I am engaging my brain again. One topic that I have been noodling on is that I have noticed an undercurrent of anti-agile thinking in what I read and the people I talk to. It … Read more
Human intelligence is amazing and has led to everything that we experience in our day to day lives. Every thing we use, every idea we communicate around with our peers, every abstraction we use to deal with a complex problem has been created by a human. Nothing exists until it has first been imagined in … Read more
The last posts have taken us through 15 rules that I believe are important to ensure we’re the protagonist of our own lives. As I wrote in the introduction to this series, I believe that those who read my content have in common that we take a proactive approach to life and view ourselves as … Read more
There’s an interesting pattern at universities where a full professor typically is the only one who’s an expert in a particular field. Because of this, over time, professors tend to become quite confident in their expertise. The consequence is that they start to view their research field and themselves as the most important in general … Read more
Whenever I talk to people that are (even) older than me and ask them about how they spend their time, there often is a reflection along the lines of “The days go slow, but the years go fast.” Especially in retirement, it seems that the number of things people spend time on is quite limited … Read more
In science, there’s an interesting pattern few people talk about. It turns out that inventions often occur at the same time or almost the same time in multiple research groups. These inventions aren’t struck-by-lightning insights by a single scientist; they tend to be ideas that evolved and emerged in a research community for an extended … Read more
In many ways, I view myself as a philosophical modernist in that I believe the world we live in is getting better all the time. In virtually any metric of human quality of life, from the number of people living in abject poverty to life expectancy, things are generally improving dramatically. Contrastingly, most people like … Read more
Especially during my time in industry, a common saying among my a-type, hard-driving colleagues was “I can sleep when I’m dead.” The idea communicated was that the things you’re now spending time on are so important that you’re willing to give up everything else. Especially young, ambitious people, for some reason mostly men, have this … Read more
One story that keeps fascinating me when it comes to science is how people in the early 20th century insisted on the existence of aether for transferring light. The general belief was that similar to how sound was mediated by air, there was another medium that would allow light to flow. This was important to … Read more
