Created: May 01, 2020
Modified: January 24, 2022
Modified: January 24, 2022
enabling environment
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Andy Matuschak's concept of an Enabling Environment gets at something I've had in my mind but not named. It's an environment that expands its participant's ability to do things they find meaningful and important. I've thought about college and grad school in this sense: in grad school, it felt possible to do important research, because everyone around me was doing it, big ideas were in the air, I had easy access to top minds in the field, and we were mostly too young to have seriously failed at anything, so it was easy to be ambitious. Andy makes the point that other places can be enabling environments:
- High-functioning corporations.
- Organizations like Y Combinator.
- Good software: Photoshop, Roam.
- A high-quality collection of evergreen notes.
- He observes that great enabling environments usually focus on doing the thing being enabled. Great universities focus on research, and contributing to knowledge, not just talking about it (teaching). Y Combinator focuses on actually building startups, not just talking about it. Intuitively I understand why this is important. And Andy gives some reasons. Can I attempt to articulate my own reasons?
- Doing a thing forces a deeper understanding than just describing a thing: generative vs discriminative modeling. You learn more about the violin from playing violin, or about tennis from playing tennis, than you would from just reading a book about those things.
- An emphasis on action forces you to focus on the meaningful and valuable parts of the experience. Everything is interesting, but if you're trying to achieve a goal, you'll have to exercise choicefulness.
- Pursuing concrete goals, in an environment where other people are pursuing similar goals, leads to shared goals, and collaboration. conspiracy is a thing for a reason. A good collaboration will go much further than either person on their own.