Category Archives: organized individuality | 個人大組織

Khan Academy

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The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization created in 2006, by Salman Khan. With the stated mission of “providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere”, the website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,300 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics.

— Wikipedia on Khan Academy

With so little effort on my own part, I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time. I can’t imagine a better use of my time.

— Salman Khan (educator)

2011.06.10 Friday ACHK

瘋人新世紀

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（安：對我來說，這個是一個嶄新的想法。）

哪個想法？

（安：你那個「地球人大部分是『瘋子』」的比喻。）

如果你覺得這個只是一個「比喻」的話，即是你未完全領會它的意思。

（安：這個牽涉到語意問題。如果「地球人大部分是『瘋子』」中的「瘋子」不是比喻的話，你就扭曲了「瘋子」這個字眼的意思。）

如果「瘋子」是指「瘋人院內的病人」的話，那當然不是每一個人也是「瘋子」。但是，如果「瘋子」是指「不理性的人」的話，地球人中，「瘋子」佔了大多數。

還有，即使假設，對於「個人」而然，「理性的人」比「不理性的人」多；對於「群體」來說，「瘋狂的機構」遠比「理性的機構」多。

— Me@2011.06.04

2011.06.04 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

On Keeping Your Soul

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The great challenge at the beginning of ones career in academia is to get tenure at a decent university. Personally I got tenure before I started messing with quantum gravity, and this approach has some real advantages. Before you have tenure, you have to please people. After you have tenure, you can do whatever the hell you want – so long as it’s legal, and so long as your department doesn’t put a lot of pressure on you to get grants. (This is one reason I’m happier in a math department than I would be in a physics department. Mathematicians have more trouble getting grants, so there’s a bit less pressure to get them.)

The great thing about tenure is that it means your research can be driven by your actual interests instead of the ever-changing winds of fashion. The problem is, by the time many people get tenure, they’ve become such slaves of fashion that they no longer know what it means to follow their own interests. They’ve spent the best years of their life trying to keep up with the Joneses instead of developing their own personal style! So, bear in mind that getting tenure is only half the battle: getting tenure while keeping your soul is the really hard part.

— Advice for the Young Scientist

— John Baez

2011.05.02 Monday ACHK

The future of web startups

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So you end up with a world in which high school students think they need to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students think they need to get good grades to impress employers, within which the employees waste most of their time in political battles, and from which consumers have to buy anyway because there are so few choices.

Imagine if that sequence became a big, straight pipe. Then the effects of being measured by performance would propagate all the way back to high school, flushing out all the arbitrary stuff people are measured by now. That is the future of web startups.

— Paul Graham

2011.04.29 Friday ACHK

不敵天氣 2

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You can spend your whole life trying to be popular, but at the end of the day, the size of the crowd at your funeral will be largely dictated by the weather.

— Frank Skinner

你可以花一生的時間，令到自己受歡迎；但是，你的喪禮將會有多少人出席，還要視乎當日的天氣。

— Me@2010.07.16

2011.04.18 Monday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Founders at Work 5

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I think there’s a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not, the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse.

In big companies, there’s always going to be more politics and less scope for individual decisions.

The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups. That would be a good thing.

— Paul Graham

2011.04.02 Saturday ACHK

不卑不亢

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知己知彼 2

Always make new mistakes, 2.2

一般人怕做自己的主人，因為一般人怕犯錯，更怕犯錯後，不能推卸責任。其中一個主要原因是，一般人對自己不了解。

我現在不會「怕做自己的主人」，不會「怕犯錯」，因為我對自己有信心。或者，我根本毋須標籤自己「有沒有信心」。我應該直接描述自己為「情緒健康」。

「情緒健康」，並不是建基於自己「無所不能」，而是建基於知道自己什麼可以做到，什麼不可以。要知道「自己什麼可以做到，什麼不可以」，本身並不容易。你既要對主觀的自己了解得足夠深入，亦要對客觀的自然定律了解得足夠詳細，才可以準確評價，以自己當時的實力，能否達到任務要求。

所以，凡是自己嘗試全新的東西，而又沒有前人的類似經驗可以參考時，根本沒有可能在事前保證，自己會成功；「失敗」幾乎是必然的結果。

— Me@2010.12.14

Self knowledge is best learned, not by contemplation, but action. Strive to do your duty and you will soon discover of what stuff you are made.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2010.12.14 Tuesday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK