Tim Urban
Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?
Tim Urban did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
Filter All topics · Newest first
-
Their wordsToddler parenthood is a reality distortion zone that makes it hard to remember that most people find your toddler breathtakingly uninteresting.
↗Tales from Toddlerhoodwaitbutwhy.com 1st of 3 in this piece
-
Our reading
Young children learn a new language through immersion far more effectively than adults do.
Their wordsIf I took my daughter to China for a year, and we just lived there with no language instruction, I'd come back knowing approximately six Mandarin words and she'd be fluent.
↗Tales from Toddlerhoodwaitbutwhy.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsToddler parents can take solace in the fact that parenting probably matters less than we think it does.
↗Tales from Toddlerhoodwaitbutwhy.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 20 months earlier
-
Their wordsAnd it's a general reminder that AR and VR2 being separate categories is a thing of the past.
↗All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com 1st of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsIt's the next step in a centuries-long human mission to conquer long-distance.
↗All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsIf you zoom out on a story of technology, you usually see a big exponential curve. But if you look at the curve up close, you see that it's wavy, made of S-curves.
↗All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 9 months earlier
-
Their wordsThe problem is, when humans went bipedal, our pelvises got smaller, and as humans got smarter, our heads got bigger. So evolution had to get creative. Its solution: all human babies would be premies, born when they were still small enough to pass through a human pelvis.
↗10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimesterwaitbutwhy.com 1st of 3 in this piece
-
Our reading
Expecting parents should be required to take a mandatory course before caring for a newborn.
Their wordsThere should obviously be like a mandatory four-hour course every expecting parent has to take before they're actually in charge of a newborn.
↗10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimesterwaitbutwhy.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsthis is the most personal of personal decisions and no one should ever try to pressure anyone else to have kids-it's way too big a thing to be anyone else's business.
↗10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimesterwaitbutwhy.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
-
Their wordsThere were a bunch of bad trends: Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives.
↗A Short History of My Last Six Yearswaitbutwhy.com 1st of 2 in this piece
-
Their wordsThis book is my best crack at explaining what I think is an existential risk to liberal societies and what I think we need to do to get to that awesome future I used to be so excited about.
↗A Short History of My Last Six Yearswaitbutwhy.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 22 months earlier
-
Their wordsMany films are the most fun the first time because a part of our brains loses itself in the plot and actually experiences what the characters are experiencing, to an extent.
-
Their wordsClearly something other than the current type of healthcare advances will be needed to crack through the natural human lifespan ceiling-it'll take some deeper recoding of the human genome.
-
Their wordsI think in most cases, we should feel fine loving the art we love, regardless of who the artist is, what they did, or what they believed.
- 5 years earlier
-
Their wordsA scientist gathers together only what he or she knows to be true—the first principles—and uses those as the puzzle pieces with which to construct a conclusion.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 1st of 11 in this piece
-
Their wordsCreative thinking is a close cousin of first principles reasoning. In both cases, the thinker needs to invent his own thought pathways.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 2nd of 11 in this piece
-
Their wordsDogma, unlike first principles reasoning, isn’t customized to the believer or her environment and isn’t meant to be critiqued and adjusted as things change.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 3rd of 11 in this piece
-
Their wordsThe chef reasons from first principles, and for the chef, the first principles are raw edible ingredients. Those are her puzzle pieces, her building blocks, and she works her way upwards from there, using her experience, her instincts, and her taste buds.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 4th of 11 in this piece
-
Our reading
A person who works from a recipe, even an innovative one, starts from something that already exists.
Their wordsBut what all of these cooks have in common is their starting point is something that already exists. Even the innovative cook is still making an iteration of a burger, a pizza, and a cake.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 5th of 11 in this piece
-
Their wordsThe chef creates while the cook, in some form or another, copies.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 6th of 11 in this piece
-
Their wordsFor cooks, even the more innovative kind, there’s almost always a ceiling on the size of the splash they can make in the world, unless there’s some serious luck involved. Chefs aren’t guaranteed to do anything good, but when there’s a little talent and a lot of persistence, they’re almost certain to make a splash.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 7th of 11 in this piece
-
Their wordsConventional wisdom is slow to move, and there’s significant lag time between when something becomes reality and when conventional wisdom is revised to reflect that reality. And by the time it does, reality has moved on to something else. But chefs don’t pay attention to that, reasoning instead using their eyes and ears and experience. By ignoring conventional wisdom in favor of simply looking at the present for what it really is and staying up-to-date with the facts of the world as they change in real-time—in spite of what conventional wisdom has to say—the chef can act on information the rest of us haven’t been given permission to act on yet.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 8th of 11 in this piece
-
Their wordsAnd if the tenets of that church don’t truly resonate with you or reflect the current reality of the world—if it turns out that you’ve been working off of the wrong recipe—then whatever conclusions have been built on top of it will be just as wrong. As demonstrated by the flood geologists, a reasoning chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 9th of 11 in this piece
-
Their wordsBeing a gamechanger is just having little enough respect for the game that you realize there’s no good reason not to change the rules.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 10th of 11 in this piece
-
Their wordsConventional wisdom worships the status quo and always assumes that everything is the way it is for a good reason—and history is one long record of status quo dogma being proven wrong again and again, every time some chef comes around and changes things.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 11th of 11 in this piece