## Highlights - Well if you’re a fish, water can be hard to see. Same thing here. In order to see our own thinking, we’ll have to triangulate it from the outside. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944496)) - Westerners, he says, prefer to understand things as mechanisms, while the Chinese prefer to understand things as organisms — and these are two very different kinds of processes. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944518)) - Mechanisms come together by assembly, when a creator arranges raw material in just the right way to serve a particular purpose. They’re typically made out of discrete parts, each with its own purpose that fits into the overall structure. And they’re cleanly-factored and globally-optimized: the result of a far-sighted design process. Organisms, on the other hand, aren’t assembled from the outside. Instead they start out small and simple, and expand outward while gradually complicating themselves. In other words, they grow. The result is a hacky mess of tangled parts, vestiges, fuzzy boundaries, and overlapping purposes: the hazards of a short-sighted, local optimization process. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944523)) - we say, “I have a body,” rather than, “I am a body. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944601)) - So if science sounds strange, it points to something wrong with our intuitions. The problem is that while God is dead, we haven’t finished refactoring our worldview. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944637))  ## Highlights - Well if you’re a fish, water can be hard to see. Same thing here. In order to see our own thinking, we’ll have to triangulate it from the outside. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944496)) - Westerners, he says, prefer to understand things as mechanisms, while the Chinese prefer to understand things as organisms — and these are two very different kinds of processes. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944518)) - Mechanisms come together by assembly, when a creator arranges raw material in just the right way to serve a particular purpose. They’re typically made out of discrete parts, each with its own purpose that fits into the overall structure. And they’re cleanly-factored and globally-optimized: the result of a far-sighted design process. Organisms, on the other hand, aren’t assembled from the outside. Instead they start out small and simple, and expand outward while gradually complicating themselves. In other words, they grow. The result is a hacky mess of tangled parts, vestiges, fuzzy boundaries, and overlapping purposes: the hazards of a short-sighted, local optimization process. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944523)) - we say, “I have a body,” rather than, “I am a body. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944601)) - So if science sounds strange, it points to something wrong with our intuitions. The problem is that while God is dead, we haven’t finished refactoring our worldview. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944637))  ## Highlights - Well if you’re a fish, water can be hard to see. Same thing here. In order to see our own thinking, we’ll have to triangulate it from the outside. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944496)) - Westerners, he says, prefer to understand things as mechanisms, while the Chinese prefer to understand things as organisms — and these are two very different kinds of processes. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944518)) - Mechanisms come together by assembly, when a creator arranges raw material in just the right way to serve a particular purpose. They’re typically made out of discrete parts, each with its own purpose that fits into the overall structure. And they’re cleanly-factored and globally-optimized: the result of a far-sighted design process. Organisms, on the other hand, aren’t assembled from the outside. Instead they start out small and simple, and expand outward while gradually complicating themselves. In other words, they grow. The result is a hacky mess of tangled parts, vestiges, fuzzy boundaries, and overlapping purposes: the hazards of a short-sighted, local optimization process. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944523)) - we say, “I have a body,” rather than, “I am a body. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944601)) - So if science sounds strange, it points to something wrong with our intuitions. The problem is that while God is dead, we haven’t finished refactoring our worldview. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944637))  ## Highlights - Well if you’re a fish, water can be hard to see. Same thing here. In order to see our own thinking, we’ll have to triangulate it from the outside. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944496)) - Westerners, he says, prefer to understand things as mechanisms, while the Chinese prefer to understand things as organisms — and these are two very different kinds of processes. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944518)) - Mechanisms come together by assembly, when a creator arranges raw material in just the right way to serve a particular purpose. They’re typically made out of discrete parts, each with its own purpose that fits into the overall structure. And they’re cleanly-factored and globally-optimized: the result of a far-sighted design process. Organisms, on the other hand, aren’t assembled from the outside. Instead they start out small and simple, and expand outward while gradually complicating themselves. In other words, they grow. The result is a hacky mess of tangled parts, vestiges, fuzzy boundaries, and overlapping purposes: the hazards of a short-sighted, local optimization process. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944523)) - we say, “I have a body,” rather than, “I am a body. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944601)) - So if science sounds strange, it points to something wrong with our intuitions. The problem is that while God is dead, we haven’t finished refactoring our worldview. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1456971470/17944637))