Every book must pretend to be a self-help book:

Most of us, I realize, don’t have a direct say in what macro forms of information and economic organization prevail in the wider society, though we do influence that outcome indirectly, in the basic act of choosing between employment in the private or the public sector.

But this is the beauty of the long-zoom perspective: the patterns recur at other scales.

You may not be able to turn your government into a coral reef, but you can create comparable environments on the scale of everyday life: in the workplaces you inhabit; in the way you consume media; in the way you augment your memory.

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts.

• Go for a walk
• Cultivate hunches
• Write everything down, but keep your folders messy
  • Modern technology makes it easy to write and record everything down.
  • But how to maintain its serendipity? Avoid excessive structure?
• Embrace serendipity
• Make generative mistakes
• Take on multiple hobbies
• Frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks
  • Modern networks: Twitter? Blogosphere?
• Follow the links
• Let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

Notion of the Adjacent Possible

• As society grows and adds more elements into its toolkits, the adjacent possible grows
  • “You need the right spare parts”
• Echoes of How Information Grows; one progress unlocks another. Combinatorial possibilities grow exponentially.
• Evidence:
  • Innovative ideas come in multiples, “in the air”
  • Ideas that are "ahead of their time" fail to take off because the necessary building blocks are not there
    • Samo Burja would say: these building blocks are not just other inventions, but also "social technologies"—the LLC, user habits, VC ecosystems etc.
    • Similarly: What about organizational cultures/designs determining the boundaries of the adjacent possible?
      • E.g. if Apple had gone under in the 90s, there might well be no iPhone. (Android is inevitable. The iPhone is Not? Or a vertically integrated player is exactly what is needed to crack open the smartphone market?)
      • If so, at the national level, the "adjacent possible" might not be merely expanding, but might also be contracting. Whiggish notions of progress disabused.
    • Example of ideas ahead of their time: Robin Hanson's futarchy? (And pushing for more social measurements generally)