systems thinking

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

The first lecture in Martin Kleppmann's 8-lecture distributed systems series from the University of Cambridge undergraduate course. It introduces the subject, and accompanying lecture notes are available.

The first lecture of Andy Pavlo's CMU 15-445 Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2019), covering course introduction and the relational model.

The opening lecture of MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems (Spring 2020), introducing the course and core challenges of distributed systems. It begins a playlist that goes on to cover Raft and other consensus papers in Go.

An RSA Animate drawn from a Sir Ken Robinson talk arguing that current education systems are modeled on the industrial age. It discusses divergent thinking, standardization, and how schools disengage kids.

A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

A guest lecture Jon Gjengset gave at Two Sigma on using Rust for large, high-performance systems. It covers why Rust suits such projects, the Noria research database, a concurrent data structure used in it, and practical experience.

The first lecture of Gilbert Strang's MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra course, covering the geometry of linear equations. It opens a full 35-lecture university course.

The first lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 Maps of Meaning course, setting out the Cold War context for his theory of belief and culture. He introduces the narrative structure of culture and archetypal characters for the individual, the known and the unknown.

John Ousterhout's slides-and-voiceover lecture on Paxos, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It is a full introduction to the Paxos consensus algorithm.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

The opening lecture of Steve Brunton's Control Bootcamp, covering the kinds of control and why closed-loop feedback matters. It starts a series that follows the control chapter of the Brunton and Kutz data-driven science book.

John Ousterhout lectures on the Raft consensus algorithm, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It covers leader election and log repair.

Timothy Gowers thinks aloud, in real time, as he tries to understand why Pascal's determinant equals 1. He does not fully solve it in this episode, but shows his exploratory process.

The opening lecture of Robert Sapolsky's Stanford course on Human Behavioral Biology, explaining the course premise and how to avoid categorical thinking. It starts a roughly 25-lecture series on how biology, genes, hormones and environment shape behavior.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program gives a graduate-student session on writing effectively. His core idea is that readers care about value to them, not the writer's thinking process.

Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture covers his career at Xerox PARC and how to think about inventing the future. He goes through what came out of PARC and why companies fail to capitalize on such ideas.

Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.

The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.

Leonard Susskind lectures at Stanford on how gravity and quantum information theory have merged into a new way of thinking about physics. He covers entanglement and complexity, with applications from black holes to strange metals and the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Historian Timothy Snyder explains the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity, two ways of thinking about time that frame his books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom.

Energy scholar Vaclav Smil argues that global energy transitions are slow and that renewable targets should not rest on wishful thinking. He appraises how energy dependencies are likely to change and asks for using much less.

A segment from Carl Sagan's original Cosmos explaining the fourth spatial dimension through analogy with a two-dimensional world and shadow projection.

Chuck Spinney, a long-time associate of John Boyd, presents Boyd's thinking on the OODA loop and evolutionary epistemology. The talk runs about two and a half hours and includes Q&A.

Andres Gomez Emilsson of the Qualia Research Institute presents a model of DMT experiences using hyperbolic geometry and dynamical systems theory. He describes how different intoxication levels correspond to changing curvature and information content of experience.

Douglas Hofstadter lectures at Uppsala University on how analogy and daring thinking drove Einstein's discovery of light quanta. He argues deep insight in physics comes from imaginative leaps rather than rigid logic.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on chaos and reductionism, which he calls one of the hardest of the course. It examines the limits of breaking systems into parts to understand them and introduces chaotic systems.

Guy Kawasaki's UC Berkeley Haas talk on the top ten mistakes entrepreneurs make, covering a startup from inception to exit.