The West Got Rich Because of How It Argued – Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth (2016)
Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth (2016) asks not what happened during the Industrial Revolution but why it happened in Europe and nowhere else. Here’s the argument in 10 points:
Anti-structure : easy to miss because the mind is a structure-detector.
Everything you think is solid is actually on fire. Your language, your money, your cities, the numbers themselves — none of them were built and none of them can be nailed down. They are anti-structures: order that rests on nothing, authored by no one, held up by the single fact that everything inside them refuses […]
How Indians do breakthroughs -An Experience with Episodiclabs
India is not known for innovation. The Indian collective psyche still responds to the fear of poverty rather than the excitement of discovery. We chase degrees and we chase high-income jobs — a reflex perhaps set in motion by the British-era civil services examinations, the forerunner of today’s IAS, which made the exam the standard of merit. […]
Running ML on a NORDIC -nRF52840 MCU , our experiments with Mouse 2 – Air mouse.
Since we had mastered the 9-axis hardware miniaturisation , I wanted to push the limits of our team to test their fit with a new product – Mouse 2 ( A mouse HCI device re-imagined to help CAD/CAM and DESIGN creators ). It was necessary to test my assumptions before we start creating a prototype […]
Sociology : Crowd vs Individual , The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895)
The law of mental unity. When people gather into a psychological crowd, they form a kind of “collective mind” that makes them feel, think, and act quite differently than they would in isolation. A crowd is not simply the sum of its members—it’s a new entity with its own character. The disappearance of the conscious personality. In […]
Pirates Vs Navy : Why Corporates and Small-business solve The Ocean differently.
Pirate vs Navy I’ve sat in both kinds of rooms, and you can usually tell which one you’re in within about four minutes. In one room, somebody says “let’s just try it and see what happens” and everyone nods and the conversation moves on. In the other room, somebody says the exact same sentence and […]
Perception Cycles vs Human Behavior : People like Progress but they are not sure about Change.
Everyone cheers for progress because progress is imagined, and imagination is free — it costs nothing to picture the after photo, so we fall in love with it. Change is different: change is what truth does when it finally gets loose in a room. Truth doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t wait for consensus, doesn’t care that your […]
China = Industrial Speed .
The real big gaps — the ones even China’s industrial speed can’t touch — are in industrial components that are big, bulky, complex, and high-value. For everything else — the tiny, consumer-speed products with fast iterations (90-day product cycles) — you can’t beat what China offers. The one-line rule: don’t play Shenzhen’s game — use it. China’s […]
You Decide. Let Me Know Why.
I ran a company of 50 people, and I made almost none of the decisions. That sounds like a failure of leadership. It was the opposite. Someone would come to me and ask, “Should we build the app for iOS or Android?” My answer was always the same: You decide — and tell me why. Which vendor […]
To do the New or Not
From Academia to Business: What Changes About “New” I made that transition. It reverses the sign on the same word. Academia’s unit of value is contribution — delta from prior art. Business’s unit of value is adoption — delta from doing nothing. A finding nobody has published is valuable by definition. A product nobody recognizes is a liability by […]