Kyle Chayka talking about TextEdit:

nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking. Using the app is the closest you can get to writing longhand on a screen. I could make lists on actual paper, of course, but I’ve also found that my brain has been so irredeemably warped by keyboards that I can only really get my thoughts down by typing.

I like software that is unable to do anything other than what I tell it to.

Whenever you try to force the real world to do something that can be counted, unintended consequences abound.

As noted in the article, the world begins to respond and adapt to your measuring once you begin to measure it.

As Tim Harford writes, data “may be a pretty decent proxy for something that really matters,” but there’s a critical gap between even the best proxies and the real thing—between what we’re able to measure and what we actually care about.

if more data isn’t always the answer, maybe we need instead to reassess our relationship with predictions—to accept that there are inevitable limits on what numbers can offer, and to stop expecting mathematical models on their own to carry us through times of uncertainty.

statistics can be used to illuminate the world with clarity and precision. They can help remedy our human fallibilities. What’s easy to forget is that statistics can amplify these fallibilities, too.

Worth remembering in our time of statistical models around language.

A fascinating look at technology’s influence on doctors (based on years of experience by a well-renowned doctor).

First, there’s the realization that some of the constraints prior to digitalization were actually beneficial:

piecing together what’s important about the patient’s history is at times actually harder than when [we] had to leaf through a sheaf of paper records. Doctors’ handwritten notes were brief and to the point. With computers, however, the shortcut is to paste in whole blocks of information—an entire two-page imaging report, say—rather than selecting the relevant details. The next doctor must hunt through several pages to find what really matters.

That’s when you start to realize that technology has its benefits, but you likely traded one set of problems for another. For doctors, apparently technology is becoming so overbearing that we’re hiring for jobs which didn’t exist to handle the computerization of everything:

We replaced paper with computers because paper was inefficient. Now computers have become inefficient, so we’re hiring more humans [to complete computer-related tasks].

Which results in us humans acting like robots in order to fulfill the requirements of the systems we built:

Many fear that the advance of technology will replace us all with robots. Yet in fields like health care the more imminent prospect is that it will make us all behave like robots”

The author’s solution?

We can retune and streamline our systems, but we won’t find a magical sweet spot between competing imperatives. We can only insure that people always have the ability to turn away from their screens and see each other, colleague to colleague, clinician to patient, face to face.