Scaling Smarts: The Orthogonality Factor

Benoit Pimpaud
4 min readSep 2, 2023

A system that scale isn’t necessary good: take our present-day society. Name it capitalism, liberalism, globalization or whatever. It’s a good example of a scaled system with several shortcomings.

Some would argue that it works great though.

Quoting Steven Pinker here:

“If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be, you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you’d be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman- if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now.

In the same way, if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.

People live longer and healthier lives on average than ever before. We see less wars, less diseases. Poor people are way richer than decades ago.

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Written by Benoit Pimpaud

Data & Beyond Engineer. 👀 From An Engineer Sight: a periodic about data, engineering, and design: fromanengineersight.substack.com

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