From Farnam Street to Quantum Computing

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

This morning I was reading an essay on quantum computing when an idea appeared: write a blog post called “From Farnam Street to Quantum Computing.”

That’s the way it is with ideas. They just appear.

I sat down to write the post. And I realized it was a longer story with so much potential richness and detail that I might spend the next month getting it all down.

But I was smarter than that.

I created an outline. And then I wrote as little as I could about each item. And I peppered it with links to side roads for Future Me or any passing strangers to drive down.

The story starts with Sam Harris’ book: “Waking up.”

That leads to Sam’s Podcast, now called “Making Sense.”

That leads to this episode in which Sam talks about mental models with Shane Parrish.

Shane writes the Farnam Street Blog. FS Blog helps people “master the best of what other people have already figured out.”

I’ve read Farnam Street posts from time to time, but after Sam’s interview with Shane, I started giving it a serious read. I’ll write a post about Farnam Street after this one.

And I signed up for “Brain Food,” Farnam Street’s newsletter.

Brain Food 322 pointed me to “Leading Above the Line,” a podcast conversation with Jim Dethmer of the The Conscious Leadership Group. And holy shit, he says so many memorable things in that not-quite-two-hour interview that I’ve got to have the transcript. Which I can get, along with a whole lot of other stuff if I join the Farnam Street Learning Community. Which I did for a totally-worth-it $149.00.

The transcript is on this page but don’t read it unless you sign up. Or read it and then sign up. It’s worth it. It’s got such great stuff that I’m going to write another post about it as soon as I finish this one.

That podcast led me back to Farnam Street where I’ve been consuming page after page of content—because (as the site take pains to point out) you don’t remember that much from one reading. I’ll write about that later, too.

Not that I couldn’t have read the pages before. But I had a new sense of urgency. And supercharged it by listening to other podcasts in Farnam Street’s Knowledge Project series, in which Shane interviews brilliant people to find out what they do that makes them different. I’m about 9 episodes so far into 61 so far.

Then this morning’s Brain Food led me to this:

Why books don’t work — “Books are easy to take for granted. Not any specific book, I mean: the form of a book. Paper or pixels — it hardly matters. Words in lines on pages in chapters. And at least for non-fiction books, one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. This last idea so invisibly defines the medium that it’s hard not to take for granted, which is a shame because, as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken.

Really? Books don’t work? I read that article. Which is so rich that I’m going to write another post about it as soon as I finish this one and the other one.

And that led me to Quantum Country, a new kind of book that happens to be about quantum computing, a subject about which I know a little, some of which I am sure is wrong. Quantum Country is so rich that I’m going to write another post about it as soon as I finish the other two.

Now let me get this out so I can write some of the others.

​