Written: July 6, 2020 | Released: August 27, 2021 (1) Parkinson's: work expands to fill the time available for its completion(2) Hofstadter's: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law(3) Gates's: most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years(4) Goodhart's: when a measure becomes a target, it...

Written: July 5, 2020 | Released: August 6, 2020 Many of the hard-to-replace things in life accumulate damage as time passes. It's critical to learn to detect and improve damage before these things fall apart. This requires a combination of vigilance (noticing the damage before it is really bad or even irreversible) and continually using effective strategies to repair what's broken. A car will...

There's a deeply-rooted, incredibly superficial aspect of human nature that is rarely discussed: our obsession with small variations in bone structure/skin smoothness on a person's face. At extremes, people are desired or shunned due to tiny, otherwise almost meaningless facial details. In the attached image, there are two non-existent women (generated by a face generation AI set to generate "...

A “superstimulus” triggers a response that evolution gave us, but to a stronger degree than is likely to occur in nature. They exist because we humans purposely optimize our environments to create these responses. We are surrounded by more superstimuli than most of us realize. Examples of superstimuli: • food: Cheetos / skittles / McDonalds • goal achievement: video games ...

I think that one of the most important skill sets for good thinking is “Nuanced Thinking”: resisting binary dichotomies on important, complex topics. Our brains, too often, are dichotomizing machines. We tend to simplify the world into true or false, good or bad, is or is not. This dichotomizing tendency works well when it comes to relatively simple topics like: • 1+1=2 (true) vs., the Illumin...

(co-authored with Kat Woods) When a friend or loved one has something bad happen to them, what should you do to help them feel better? This question can be difficult to answer because it seems that at different times people want different things: empathy, problem-solving, optimism, distraction, and so on. See for instance this study where people give divergent answers about what they want from...

As you have likely heard, the Coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19) has continued to spread throughout the world. As of March 4, 2020, cases of the virus have been confirmed in 73 countries, including 16 U.S. states. China had a massive outbreak, which mostly seems to be under control, but the virus is spreading exponentially in many other countries. Nobody knows what is going to happ...

Imagine you could program yourself like a simple robot, with rules like, "when situation X occurs, do Y." What rules would you choose to program yourself with to improve your life or the lives of those around you? Interestingly enough, we can program ourselves in this way, and it's not even that hard to do. As a simple example, you can program yourself so that when you FIRST ENTER YO...

If you want to build a great product, project, or service, then the "Meta Question" - "What don't I know that I must know?" - should be your obsession. The answer to the Meta Question is itself a question (the "Product Question"). The Product Question might be: "Why do our best users return to our product again and again?" And to answer this question, you ask the Tool Question ("What tools in the...

What makes for a good manager of a team? Below is a little framework I made to help answer this question, which I call: "a Good Manager C.A.R.E.S." Sometimes managers as a group get a bad reputation. Some people even wonder whether managers are needed at all since they don't seem to do any of the "real work." There are also plenty of bad managers who actually impede the people they manage....