Conway’s law has become a voodoo curse—something that people believe only in retrospect. Few engineers attribute their architecture successes to the structures of their organizations, but when a product is malformed, the explanation of Conway’s law is easily accepted.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Poor managers create the illusion of productivity through busy-ness. Average managers finish work (but not always the right work). Great managers accomplish goals and develop people.

— Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby, Behind Closed Doors

Policy implies the existence of an elite group—government officials, typically—that gets to decide on something (“a policy”) that they then arrange to be imposed on everybody else.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

The paradox of permanence and impermanence: only in the latter perspective was there any such thing as progress, or loss.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

In a famous study, advanced PhDs and undergraduate physics students were given sets of physics problems and asked to sort them into categories. Immediately, a stark difference became apparent. Whereas beginners tended to look at superficial features of the problem—such as whether the problem was about pulleys or inclined planes—experts focused on the deeper principles at work. “Ah, so it’s a conservation of energy problem,” you can almost hear them saying as they categorized the problem by what principles of physics they represented. This approach is more successful in solving problems because it gets to the core of how the problems work.

— Scott Young, Ultralearning