Reductionism

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Religion is a wonderful one because it allows you to kind of see the world as a linked sequence of cause and effect that actually has either purposeful evolution towards something good or at least provides a story for your life. In terms of sort of specific ones, I see reductionism as extremely popular, which I perhaps as I say it think might be what kind of my model grew up fighting a little bit against. And outside of physics, even in physics in a lot of different places, thermodynamics being one example or emergent phenomena generally being another,. We have difficulty dealing with them through reductionist methods.

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How are curiosity and innovation connected? What's the most important problem in your field? And are you working on it? Why or why not? Is curiosity the best heuristic — either for an individual or for society at large — for finding valuable problems to work on? What mental models do people tend to use by default? How much is an academic degree worth these days? What are some alternatives to degrees that could count as valid credentials, i.e., as unfakeable (or very-hard-to-fake) signals of someone's level of skill in an area? Can people learn to fake any kind of signal, or are there some that are inherently unfakeable?

Rohit Krishnan is an essayist at Strange Loop Canon, where he writes about business, tech, and economics. He's been an entrepreneur and an investor and is very excited to see when crazy ideas meet the real world. Follow him on Twitter at @krishnanrohit.

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