If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.

This excerpt is what drew me in to this interview. It’s long, but there were a number of insights in it that stuck out to me. I’ve noted some for myself elsewhere, but I wanted to note a few here in a professional vein.

First up, this observation about life being like high school is interesting. It might be maddening at first, but as Obama points out, it should be empowering:

You’re in high school and you see all the cliques and bullying and unfairness and superficiality, and you think, Once I’m grown up I won’t have to deal with that anymore. And then you get to the state legislature and you see all the nonsense and stupidity and pettiness. And then you get to Congress and then you get to the G20, and at each level you have this expectation that things are going to be more refined, more sophisticated, more thoughtful, rigorous, selfless, and it turns out it’s all still like high school. Human dynamics are surprisingly constant. They take different forms. It turns out that the same strengths people have—flaws and foibles that people have—run across cultures and are part of politics. This should be empowering for people.

Lastly, I wanted to note Obama’s own admitted disposition towards optimism intertwined with this idea of forgoing changing the world and instead iteratively improving the world;

I think it is possible to be optimistic as a choice without being naive...[However] being optimistic doesn’t mean that five times a day I don’t say, “We’re doomed.”...

The point I sometimes make [is] “Can we make things better?”

I used to explain to my staff after we had a long policy debate about anything, and we had to make a decision about X or Y, “Well, if we do this I understand we’re not getting everything we’re hoping for, but is this better?” And they say yes, and I say, “Well, better is good. Nothing wrong with better.”

Nothing wrong with better, indeed.

My wife shared this with me, commenting that I should think about this in the context of our young kids. With our 4 year old just about to reach the age where the social convention is you send them off to public school, we’ve been discussing topics like this.

Elites first confront meritocratic pressures in early childhood. Parents—sometimes reluctantly, but feeling that they have no alternative—sign their children up for an education dominated not by experiments and play but by the accumulation of the training and skills, or human capital, needed to be admitted to an elite college and, eventually, to secure an elite job.

Good article making the rounds in technology circles about how unreliable code can be.

Human intuition is poor at estimating the true probability of supposedly ‘extremely rare’ combinations of events in systems operating at a scale of millions of requests per second. That human fallibility means that some of the more subtle, dangerous bugs turn out to be errors in design; the code faithfully implements the intended design, but the design fails to correctly handle a particular ‘rare’ scenario.

Stupid computers. Always doing precisely what you tell them to instead of catching the gist of your commands. Do what I mean, not what I say!