Synthetic A Priori podcast

#Science #Tech #Ryan Singer

32:08

Did you know there’s an actual science to uncovering your hidden genius? It’s not about filling out a “dream job” worksheet—it’s about understanding how your brain is wired, identifying your natural aptitudes, and using them to thrive. This isn’t just a self-discovery exercise. It’s a game-changer for your career, your relationships, and how you show up in the world. Betsy Wills and Alex Ellison are redefining how we approach career discovery, proving that finding the right path isn’t just about landing a job—it’s about creating a life that aligns with who you actually are. ✅ Betsy Wills – Cofounder of YouScience, a groundbreaking psychometric assessment platform reshaping how we understand our talents. She’s also the Director of Marketing & Branding at Diversified Trust and a frequent lecturer at Vanderbilt University and NYU’s Stern School of Business. ✅ Alex Ellison – Founder of Throughline Guidance, a global college and career counseling practice. She’s a sought-after writer, speaker, and expert in college readiness and career development. ✅ Together, they co-authored Your Hidden Genius: The Science-Backed Strategy to Uncovering and Harnessing Your Innate Talents. Discovering your hidden genius isn’t just about career success—it’s about tapping into what makes you, you . Connect with Betsy & Alex: Website (Free Downloads): www.yourhiddengenius.com Book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/your-hidden-genius-elizabeth-m-willsalexandra-ellison Related Podcast Episodes: How To Be You, But Better with Olga Khazan | 288 Finding Purpose Through Human Design with Emma Dunwoody | 228 195 / Finding (And Using) Your Voice with Amy Green Smith Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music…

Synthetic A Priori

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Step into the messy phase of wrestling with ideas before they become conclusions. Ryan Singer draws connections between design, tech, science, and formal systems.

10 episodes

Synthetic A Priori

25 subscribers

updated 5 years ago

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Step into the messy phase of wrestling with ideas before they become conclusions. Ryan Singer draws connections between design, tech, science, and formal systems.

10 episodes

#Science #Tech #Ryan Singer

All episodes

1
Feeling, Form, and Function 21:44

5 years ago21:44

21:44

Part 1: 00:11 Digesting the experience from using Alexander's methods on a real building project, how feeling is different from analyzing Mentioned: For an intro to Christopher Alexander's work, see my lecture: Christopher Alexander: A Primer Part 2: 14:19 How form and function are the same thing: better form has better function. Changing the design so it feels better and then finding out it now also works better. Mentioned: A school teaching Alexander's methods, hands-on: Building Beauty The Building Beauty Software Initiative…

1
Fundierung and the Level of Life 36:42

5 years ago36:42

36:42

Part 1: 00:11 Alexander's definition of "living structure" and how to deal with it Mentioned: My livestream lecture: Christopher Alexander: A Primer Alexander tells the story about objections to the Berkley development in this short video: The Application of Feeling Nikos Salingaro's mathematical measure of living structure is in his book A Theory of Architecture On eye movement in architecture, see Ann Sussman's work Part 2: 13:18 Describing "life" as a function afforded by form, connection to Husserl's fundierung and Gibson's notion of affordances Mentioned: Stuart Kauffman's Screwdriver Problem On the idea of a "hire" in Job To Be Done Theory, see Competing Against Luck for an introduction Fundierung, function, and facticity are explained in Gian-Carlo Rota's 1989 paper Fundierung as Logical Concept The book I meant to recommend is Gian-Carlo Rota's Indiscrete Thoughts , not The Star and The Whole (which is also interesting but not written by Rota). J.J. Gibson's book on affordances: The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception Alexander's 15 Properties are explained in The Nature of Order Book One. Part 3: 23:47 What it "is" versus what it "does", three levels of software: the backend, the interaction layer, the layer of life. Music software example. Basecamp concept example.…

1
Iterating the Form/Context Boundary 32:44

5 years ago32:44

32:44

Part 1: 00:17 Point forecasts vs. system properties, estimating project length vs. the distribution of the error Mentioned: Nassim Taleb on EconTalk His recent paper: On Single Point Forecasts for Fat-Tailed Variables (PDF) Part 2: 04:39 Christopher Alexander and software in the 90s vs. today, implementation vs. product, Building Beauty Mentioned: The Building Beauty Software Initiative My livestream lecture: Christopher Alexander: A Primer Part 3: 09:22 Form/context and supply/demand boundaries, defining requirements once vs. iteratively, prototyping an affinitizing interface for an app to analyze job-to-be-done interviews Part 4: 23:05 Moving the form/context boundary , inner and outer boundaries, recursively applying the same design process Part 5: 31:03 Learning what language to use by trying to use it…

1
Movement in Market Space 29:52

5 years ago29:52

29:52

Part 1: 00:11 Introduction to a formal idea of market space, three jobs Basecamp does, turning the jobs into basis vectors for a neighborhood of a market space. Mentioned: If you aren't familiar with "jobs to be done" see Competing Against Luck for an introduction. Part 2: 16:00 Vectors in market space as functional systems, locating struggles in existing systems, value as degree of struggle, struggle on the demand side as design requirements on the supply side. Part 3: 23:46 Trade-offs, choosing where to "move" the product, supply-side motivations, how market space changes, how trends affect the stability of market locations.…

1
Design as a Multi-Scale Network, Risk as Network Structure 48:46

5 years ago48:46

48:46

Part 1: 00:12 Network theory, multi-scale networks, example of building a clustering feature on a side project, two scales of design: the feature level and the implementation level Mentioned: Barabasi's work on Network Medicine Harry Crane's Probabilistic Foundations of Statistical Network Analysis "More is different" is the title of an article by P.W. Anderson Part 2: 13:54 Unfolding as a network dynamic, learning at the fine scale under constraints from the large scale Mentioned: Christopher Alexander describes unfolding processes in Book 2 of the Nature of Order Part 3: 20:05 Risk, thin-tailed vs. fat-tailed variables, how underlying structure gives rise to different shapes of distributions, orthogonality and interdependence Mentioned: Nassim Taleb. See Probability, Risk, and Extremes (PDF) on thin vs fat-tailed variables. Re: the relationship between distributions and underlying structure: "... we cannot rule out that it is not fat tailed unless we understand the process ." (emphasis added) Part 4: 30:14 Patchiness of risk in a design problem, observation in science vs. active control in design, targeting unknowns, redesigning at the feature scale based on information from the implementation scale, example of designing for independence Part 5: 38:35 Scopes in Shape Up as tangled network neighborhoods, structure vs. opacity in the network, alternation between identifying structure and removing "the fog" Mentioned: Scopes are explained in the Scope Mapping chapter of Shape Up Outro: 46:05 Is this thing on? Say hello or just raise your hand with a DM to @rjs on Twitter .…

1
System Design, Pattern Languages, and Cognitive Grammar 35:22

5 years ago35:22

35:22

Part 1: 00:56 Patterns as functional pairings of context and form, pattern languages, generic patterns vs. unique languages designed for a project Mentioned: System design per Taguchi was discussed in Episode 4 Alexander defines form and context in Notes on the Synthesis of Form The book: A Pattern Language The pattern language for the Eishin School is detailed in Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth Part 2: 11:26 Speaking the language of Basecamp's patterns: "bucket access" and "commentables" Part 3: 16:38 Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, symbols, phonological and semantic poles, defining Shape Up as a system, how system components are like semantic poles of symbols, naming things Mentioned: Ronald Langacker's landmark books: Foundations of Cognitive Grammar Vol 1 and Vol 2 See also this newer introductory text by Langacker: Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction On unit status and the "chalk sharpener" example, see this Cognitive Grammar lecture by Martin Hilpert (29:08) Repetition and scale transformation were discussed on Episode 3 For interdependent vs. modular architectures, see Chapter 6 of The Innovator's Solution…

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Walls in Space and Time, System vs. Parameter Design 41:41

5 years ago41:41

41:41

Part 1: 00:46 Displaying data adjacent in space vs. adjacent in time, Stuart Kauffman's work-constraint cycles, time boundaries, eureka moments, an example of defining a system boundary from Basecamp 4 Mentioned: Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information Stuart Kauffman describes the "Constraint Work Cycle" in Chapter 3 of A World Beyond Physics Part 2: 20:44 System vs. parameter design in Taguchi's work, time constraints for R&D vs. production work, explaining parameter design and cost of quality improvements with an omelette Mentioned: Taguchi explains parameter design in Introduction to Quality Engineering: Designing Quality into Products and Processes The form/context boundary in Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form Tweet on R&D vs. Production Mode System design is another term for shaping. On shaping, see Shape Up, Chapter 2 Tweet on open vs. closed unknowns and knowing where an unknown "stops"…

1
Scale Tradeoffs and Transformations 43:08

5 years ago43:08

43:08

Intro: 00:00 Phases of concretizing: articulating the idea vs. getting to the idea Part 1: 02:40 Scale transformations, scale tradeoffs, examples of multiscale systems Mentioned: The New England Complex Systems Institute's founder, Yaneer Bar-Yam Yaneer's book Making Things Work . See Chapter 4 for scale tradeoffs and the military example. Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety Part 2: 16:45 Tweeting vs. writing an article as examples of different scales, bottom-up and top-down order Mentioned: Tweet on phases of new product development: R&D, Production, and Cleanup Part 3: 29:49 Launching a new product, a scale transition from separate conversations to a group announcement Mentioned: Basecamp's new email app and service, Hey.com Summary: 38:22 The end of "R&D mode" as a scale transformation, experiment at smalls scale to find parameters at large scale…

1
Risk, Possibilities, Opacity and Creativity 32:32

5 years ago32:32

32:32

Intro: 00:00 Going upstream along the path of concretizing an idea Part 1: 02:38 Phenomenology, "bracketing" Mentioned: Twitter thread on affordances and phenomenology The “ambient optic array” in JJ Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception Wikipedia pages on Husserl and Epoché (bracketing) Part 2: 10:23 Uncertainty, two kinds of opacity: risk and richness, creative constraints Mentioned: The circuit breaker to manage uncertainty in Shape Up On "opacity" see any of Taleb's books, especially Antifragile Part 3: 25:18 Ontology, res extensa and res potentia, the adjacent possible Mentioned: Stuart Kauffman's Res Potentia and Res Extensa On the evolution of tech, see the epilogue of Kauffman's A World Beyond Physics…

1
Affordances, Category Theory, Convexity of Social Media 46:14

5 years ago46:14