Archive of links I've read. For exercise-related links, see Training Links.
I organize by the following tags appended to the end of each entry. Search the page by tag to find specific types of links. As of 19 November 2022, I only use tags for select links.
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- Enter rooms with intention - acknowledge everyone, move confidently, and set the tone like Matthew McConaughey does by greeting hosts, band members, and audience members on talk shows.
- Use names frequently - incorporate people's names in conversation and create nicknames to build intimacy, following The Rock's example of personalizing interactions with fans.
- Track conversation details - remember personal information shared during small talk by using tools like phone contact notes to recall important life events and follow up later.
- Practice random kindness - make time for others and use your position to help people, following examples set by Keanu Reeves and The Rock who regularly engage with fans and support others.
- Tell compelling stories - master the art of narrative by using proper pacing and dramatic elements, like Matthew McConaughey's ability to turn simple ideas into engaging tales.
- Frame risks positively - present challenges as heroic journeys rather than obstacles, similar to how Sara Blakely tells the Spanx founding story.
- Use preemptive humor - defuse potential criticism by acknowledging it first with humor while maintaining dignity, following Dolly Parton's approach.
- Listen without competing - avoid overshadowing others' experiences with your own and show genuine interest in their stories.
- Show authentic imperfection - embrace your quirks and awkward moments like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, combining confidence with relatable humanity.
The theorem concerns agents who share a common prior and update their probabilistic beliefs by Bayes' rule. It states that if the probabilistic beliefs of such agents, regarding a fixed event, are common knowledge then these probabilities must coincide. Thus, agents cannot agree to disagree, that is have common knowledge of a disagreement over the posterior probability of a given event.
Upon closer inspection, I found that the spider had created a singular strand of webbing, thicker than the rest (5x-10x), directly over the front of the sensor. It would then pluck this thicker strand whenever it wanted the light to turn on.
They recorded a maximum of 23.4 nanometres (nm) of movement – admittedly considerably less than an actual earthquake – during the 7 July concert, with particular impact coming as the 73,000 fans danced to Ready For It? and Cruel Summer.
whether the tech will be a productivity enhancing tool for human labor or an automating substitute and whether the elasticity of demand for the outputs of the augmented production process is high enough to raise the quantity of labor input.
Based on the secret stuff Dan’s shown me, I think it’s only a matter of time before AI will be able to beat any writer in a blind creative taste test. I’d peg it at about five years.I think this is about right, if not a tad long. Same goes for graphic designers and other freelance type artists.
A better strategy is to exert self-discipline over something with no real opposition, a positive action. It takes much less self-discipline to force yourself to do something you don't want to do (e.g. flossing), then it does to not do something you want.
We conclude that quotas for women on corporate boards have mainly decreased company performance and that several moderating factors must be taken into account when assessing causal effects of quotas on company performance.
disagreeable individuals engaged in two distinct patterns of behavior that offset each other's effects on power attainment: They engaged in more dominant-aggressive behavior, which positively predicted attaining higher power, but also engaged in less communal and generous behavior, which predicted attaining less power. These two effects, when combined, appeared to cancel each other out and led to a null correlation between disagreeableness and power.
men, compared to women, more highly value same-sex friends who are physically formidable, possess high status, possess wealth, and afford access to potential mates. In contrast, women, compared to men, more highly value friends who provide emotional support, intimacy, and useful social information
DARVO stands for "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender." The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim -- or the whistle blower -- into an alleged offender.
We found increased risks of myocarditis associated with the first dose of ChAdOx1 and BNT162b2 vaccines and the first and second doses of the mRNA-1273 vaccine over the 1–28 days postvaccination period, and after a SARS-CoV-2 positive test. We estimated an extra two (95% confidence interval (CI) 0, 3), one (95% CI 0, 2) and six (95% CI 2, 8) myocarditis events per 1 million people vaccinated with ChAdOx1, BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, respectively, in the 28 days following a first dose and an extra ten (95% CI 7, 11) myocarditis events per 1 million vaccinated in the 28 days after a second dose of mRNA-1273. This compares with an extra 40 (95% CI 38, 41) myocarditis events per 1 million patients in the 28 days following a SARS-CoV-2 positive test. We also observed increased risks of pericarditis and cardiac arrhythmias following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test. Similar associations were not observed with any of the COVID-19 vaccines, apart from an increased risk of arrhythmia following a second dose of mRNA-1273. Subgroup analyses by age showed the increased risk of myocarditis associated with the two mRNA vaccines was present only in those younger than 40.
Women with large breasts were rated as more attractive, fertile, reproductively successful, likely to befriend, threatening, and they were rated as less likely to be introduced to a current partner. More importantly, these ratings were influenced by the interaction between breast size, intermammary distance, and ptosis.
an expectant father experiences some of the same symptoms and behavior as his pregnant partner. These most often include major weight gain, altered hormone levels, morning nausea, and disturbed sleep patterns. In more extreme cases, symptoms can include labor pains, fatigue, postpartum depression, and nosebleeds. The labor pain symptom is commonly known as sympathy pain.
The new generation of robots conceived by the inventor has cameras set in their “eyes” and “shoulders” that film traffic continuously. Thanks to the antenna fixed on top of their head, data can be transmitted to a control center via an Internet Protocol (IP) transmission
The idea doesn't have to be good, and it doesn't have to be feasible, it just needs to be the best incredibly concrete plan that you can come up with at the moment. Don't worry, it will change rapidly when you start slamming it into reality. The important thing is to come up with a concrete plan, and then start executing it as hard as you can — while retaining a reflective state of mind updating in the face of evidence. ... The important thing is to stop waiting on the sidelines for better options to appear, and to start leaping in there. Make a crazy detailed plan, and dive into the fray.
- Our drug policies have resulted in the wildly disproportionate imprisonment of Black Americans. As Hart argues, the drug war has in fact succeeded, not because it has reduced illegal drug use in the United States (it hasn’t), but because it has boosted prison and policing budgets, its true, if unstated, purpose.
- The positive effects Hart cites include greater empathy, altruism, gratitude and sense of purpose.
- Most users of any drug will not become addicted, he says, putting the figure at around 70 percent.
the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences perceived in each other
when a company is threatened with takeover, the crown jewel defense is a strategy in which the target company sells off its most attractive assets to a friendly third party or spins off the valuable assets in a separate entity. Consequently, the unfriendly bidder is less attracted to the company assets. Other effects include dilution of holdings of the acquirer, making the takeover uneconomical to third parties, and adverse influence of current share prices.
Note that ‘Read a 5-letter word with poor resolution wrongly’ can be changed from 3 errors per 100, to 3 errors per 10,000 (a 100 times reduction in misreads) by making it into ‘Read 5-letter word with good resolution wrongly’. All you have to do is make sure that your documents are clear and easy to read. ... I suggest that the smallest font you should ever use in any document is a 12 point font. I would even accept the argument that 14 point is the smallest font size to use—especially in technical and maintenance documents and for legally binding commercial documents. The human error table makes the right thing to do clearly obvious.
If you get your people to use checklists with specific criteria to check, instead of doing what they can remember to do, you will intentionally have designed your business for some 100 times fewer errors.
make things simple and make sure that there is enough time to do the job without undue haste. Once situations get stressful you guarantee huge increases in human failure rates.
Every human error rate table tells us that people simply do not perform well if things get difficult, confusing or stressful. ... If you want to turn complicated tasks into routine simple tasks that hardly ever go wrong, simply write clear and stress-reducing SOPs incorporating the 3Ts, and then train your people to do them systematically. Watch the human error rate fall by 100 to 1000 times less.
Premium mediocrity is a pattern of consumption that publicly signals upward mobile aspirations, with consciously insincere pretensions to refined taste, while navigating the realities of inexorable downward mobility with sincere anxiety. There are more important things to think about than actually learning to appreciate wine and cheese, such as making rent. But at least pretending to appreciate wine and cheese is necessary to not fall through the cracks in the API.
premium mediocrity is dressing for the lifestyle you’re supposed to want, in order to hold on to the lifestyle you can actually afford — for now — while trying to engineer a stroke of luck.
The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him.
There's one core truth that you need to understand, and then all the talk of UFOs, videos, and the reactions to them make sense. The US military has secret aircraft. Other militaries also have secret aircraft. These are kept in reserve for high-stakes operations. For example, in 2011, a previously-unseen model of stealth helicopter crashed in the middle of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. Rumor is that the Chinese military got to inspect the wreckage; if true, this would be a pretty major fuckup, since it would enable them to plan around its capabilities, to design radars to detect it, and to attribute any operations using it to the United States. The performance characteristics of secret military aircraft are military secrets. They are highly prototypical military secrets. That means the secrecy radiates a few conceptual steps outward: our own country's aircraft are secret, what we know about other countries' aircraft is secret, what we know that other countries know about our aircraft is secret, and so on. Deliberate disinformation is expected; if you look far back enough in time for things to be declassified, you'll find publicly-reported examples of the US putting out fake aircraft mockups for Soviet satellites to photograph, and similar tricks. There are a few videos taken from fighter-jet sensor packages floating around; these require some expertise to interpret, or else you'll wind up thinking that the sharpen filter is a glowing aura, or that the parallax is a fast movement speed, or that image-stabilization problems are fast accelerations. As it happens, the characteristics of fighter-jet sensor packages are *also* military secrets (perhaps a bit less well kept), which means that 100% of the people who are qualified to interpret those videos, are also legally forbidden from talking publicly about them. With that as background, there's nothing left to explain. Given a specific video, it can be hard to tell whether it's an aircraft with a surprising capability, or a fake video, or a sensor issue. That's the point; foreign military strategists will also look at those videos, and encounter the same problems. Dispelling the confusion would mean accepting a substantial handicap in future military operations, and there's no reason to do that.
So when you get a request, and you want to add value, get curious, and try “seeking the root.” Too often, we take requests literally and narrowly without understand the deeper intention behind them. This prevents us from fulfilling them as well as we are able.
Be a perfectionist about identifying good strategies, about abandoning sunk costs, about killing your darlings, about noticing when you're done. Be a perfectionist about wasting no attention. Be a perfectionist about learning from your mistakes. Perfectionism can be a powerful tool, but there's no need to point it at overachieving on metrics you don't care about.
The main factors in an abnormal environment are: psychological (isolation, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep deprivation, temporal disorientation); psychophysiological (thermal, stress positions), and psychosocial (cultural humiliation, sexual degradation). Each single factor may not be considered tortuous, however, if deliberately structured into a systemic cluster may constitute torture under legal definition.
1) Were studies blinded? 2) Were all results shown? 3) Were experiments repeated? 4) Were positive and negative controls shown? 5) Were reagents validated? 6) Were the statistical tests appropriate?
Weight loss over four years in initially healthy overweight/obese older adults was associated with reduction in cardio-metabolic risk but no psychological benefit, even when changes in health and life stresses were accounted for. These results highlight the need to investigate the emotional consequences of weight loss.
We conduct a comprehensive review of research on attractiveness discrimination, finding relatively more evidence that this phenomenon constitutes, to some extent, statistical (as opposed to solely taste-based) discrimination, in which decision makers assume that attractive people are more competent and discriminate based on instrumental motives. We then review research that speaks to whether decision makers might be correct in assuming that attractive workers are more productive, finding that the attractive possess a slight advantage in human and a notable advantage in social capital.
When seated at a table with people you don't know, ask "what are you interested in?" or "what have you been thinking about lately?" instead of "what do you do?".
If you have a community with high status people, and try to introduce clearer metrics of performance into that community, high status individuals in the community will strongly resist those metrics because they have an asymmetric downside: If they perform well on the metric, they stay in their position, but if they perform poorly, they might lose status. Since they are at least a little bit unsure about their performance on the metric relative to others, they can only lose.
The disturbance began when two students from the University of Oxford complained about the quality of wine served to them in the Swindlestock Tavern, which stood on Carfax, in the centre of the town. The students quarrelled with the taverner; the argument quickly escalated to blows. The inn's customers joined in on both sides, and the resulting melee turned into a riot. The violence started by the bar brawl continued over three days, with armed gangs coming in from the countryside to assist the townspeople. University halls and students' accommodation were raided and the inhabitants murdered; there were some reports of clerics being scalped. Around 30 townsfolk were killed, as were up to 63 members of the university.
a forgotten radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city. It was subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 of them were found to have been contaminated.
He made the first attempts on K2 and Kanchenjunga, and was a visionary rock climber putting up difficult routes in the late 1800s, but his climbing later took a backseat to his unsavory reputation as an occultist and sex fiend.
I have to paraphrase a brilliant friend here, I know the world and mankind could be better, bigger, faster, and more, if only people could make a commitment, could stick to it, and really do something. In the mountains I overcame my own mediocrity, and became exceptional. Sadly, the result of having achieved simply showed me how much further I have to (and can) go. Most never earn this gift because it is only given to those who recognize and then overcome their own self-imposed limitations. And who wants to do that when the new 90210 is on the TV?
I see roughly three typical public stances: boring, lively, or outraged. Either you act boring, so the bandits will ignore you, you act lively, and invite bandit attacks, or you act outraged, and play a bandit yourself. Most big orgs and experts choose boring, and most everyone else who doesn’t pick boring picks bandit, especially on social media. It takes unusual art, allies, and energy, in a word “eliteness”, to survive while choosing lively. And that, my children, is why the world looks so boring.
It was about consideration. About the pervasive sense that she was married to someone who did not respect or appreciate her. And if I didn’t respect or appreciate her, then I didn’t love her in a manner that felt trustworthy. She couldn’t count on the adult who had promised to love her forever, because none of this dish-by-the-sink business felt anything like being loved.
The first model, exemplified by Crichton, is what I call Type 1. It craves activity and feasts at the buffet of appealing opportunities that success creates. The other model, exemplified by Grisham, is what I call Type 2. It craves simplicity and autonomy, and sees success as a source of leverage to reduce stressful obligations.
"The Centipede's Dilemma" is a short poem that has lent its name to a psychological effect called the centipede effect or centipede syndrome. The centipede effect occurs when a normally automatic or unconscious activity is disrupted by consciousness of it or reflection on it.
1. The larger company is more important than their manger, their chain of command, and their department. This is a core organizational principle in helping to reduce interpersonal and interdepartmental conflict. This is mentioned in most of the emails. 2. Focus is on logical communication. If someone's input or help is required on something in order for it to be done, that employee should speak directly with the other person. This is part of the reason startups work. People - who know what they are doing - speak to each other. This is in contrast to bloated corporate or government organizations where middle managers speak to each other about things they do not know (enough) about. 3. Trust your employees, (more than your managers). This email is very clear about how Elon would like communication in Tesla to flow. It is written so that every employee knows how things are to be done. It is also very clear that managers who try and bypass this approach in the way they run their department will no longer work there.
You haven’t had one original thought in your whole stupid fucking life. Everything you think, do, and say is derivate, played out, stereotypical, cookie cutter, cliché, passé, antiquated, obsolete, yesterday’s news. You are so fucking devoid – of novelty, value, honesty, soul.
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best; Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing; The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
On the day of his inauguration—in fact, minutes after he concluded his 20-minute inaugural address—the Islamic Republic of Iran announced the release of the hostages.[2] The timing gave rise to an allegation that representatives of Reagan's presidential campaign had conspired with Iran to delay the release until after the election to thwart President Jimmy Carter from pulling off an "October surprise".
Tradition in many European countries in which bees would be told of important events in their keeper's lives such as deaths, births, marriages and departures and returns in the household. If the custom was omitted or forgotten and the bees were not "put into mourning" then it was believed a penalty would be paid, such as the bees leaving their hive, stopping the production of honey or dying.
A boring reason to keep a plan secret is so that people can’t find out about it and stop you. If I sell you 10 kilos of methamphetamines, we probably don’t want to advertise that. The above examples aren’t like that. A more interesting reason is that you want to do things in public, but you don’t want others to know your true reasons. Even more interesting are plans that work best if you yourself don’t understand them. For these, your best hope is that you inherit a culture that’s figured them out for you (and also forgotten about the reasons for you) so you can get the benefits just by going with the flow.
We Americans are simply repeating our own feeble efforts. This is due, in part, to fear. If my experience on Denali this season is any indication, most American climbers are scared: scared to be cold, or they wouldn't be trudging along in down suits when others rush past them freed by their light clothing and flexible attitude. They are scared to be hungry, or they wouldn't carry so much damn food. Scared to rely on their own skill, or they would not carry so much unnecessary hardware. With few exceptions, American climbers are afraid to do anything other than follow a recipe that was designed to succeed based on twenty-year old equipment, technique and knowledge.
In life we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add.
But I do recognize that every time we heed "their" advice, the WHO advice, the CDC advice, about diet, about exercise, about fitness we become less healthy, and weaker, with less strength, less endurance — we become less capable — and if we obey, if we do as we are told we build a habit that leads to less autonomy, less freedom, with fewer possibilities to make individual decisions regarding our own health, and opportunity. If that's what you want so be it. If that is what you were working toward during the previous five years or ten years then so be it. If it wasn't then you need to ask questions, you need to risk the penalty for civil and social disobedience to do what you believe is right for you.
The good citizen in real life fights the planning applications for new adverts; they tell their local politicians about the damage badverts cause; they fund campaign groups to tell others the same. Make a conscious decision to avoid adverts, and enjoy your life more. Do the science that explains to advertisers exactly why these badverts don’t help them sell. Technologists too: use the benefits of modern technology to multiply your effort, shut down the adverts sooner.
Six army regiments each have six officers of six different ranks. Can the 36 officers be arranged in a 6-by-6 square so that no row or column repeats a rank or regiment?
The seeds Vavilov and his staff protected now cover 80% of the cropland of Russia. Credit for scientific revolutions is hard to apportion, but as I reckon it Valilov is responsible for, at a minimum, tens of millions people living when they would have starved or never born, and the number could be closer to a billion.
You would not believe how much opportunity is out there for those who do things and tell people. It's how you travel the entreprenurial landscape. You do something interesting and you tell everyone about it. Then you get contacts, business cards, email addresses. Then you get contracts, job offers, investors, whatever. You make friends who think what you do is cool. You make a name for yourself as "the person who did that cool thing." Then, the next time someone wants to do something in any way related to that cool thing, they come to you first.
But second, because it builds false confidence. Maybe the heuristic produces a prior of 99.9% that the thing won’t happen in general. But then you consult a bunch of experts, who all claim they have additional evidence that the thing won’t happen, and you raise your probability to 99.999%. But actually the experts were just using the same heuristic you were, and you should have stayed at 99.9%. False consensus via information cascade!
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
The general theory of YNAB is to "give every dollar a job". Each dollar is allocated to a specific purpose, such as annual car insurance payment, long-term housing repair fund, college savings, etc. The app encourages users to consider recurring expenses every month to prevent spending "surprises" and break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. It encourages users to be flexible in their spending. When overspending occurs, the app encourages users to move money between categories to "roll with the punches" if more funds than allocated are spent in a category.[4] Over time, users are encouraged to "age their money", accumulating savings and watching their money grow.
My bottom line is that remote work is sometimes significantly less efficient (by factors of 2x-5x), but that this effect is felt most for people who are new to an organization or who are switching fields or roles. In particular, many senior employees won't experience a productivity hit, so the relevant decision-makers might systematically underestimate the costs of remote work.
Settlers moving from urbanized or relatively settled areas in the East faced the risk of mental breakdown caused by the harsh living conditions and the extreme levels of isolation on the prairie. Symptoms of prairie madness included depression, withdrawal, changes in character and habit, and violence. Prairie madness sometimes resulted in the afflicted person moving back East or, in extreme cases, suicide.
Learn to be more conscious of my impulses when I’m ready to buy something. Learn to pause, and to breathe, to let the physical desire wane. Force myself to wait, if the purchase isn’t an absolute necessity. Let myself think about it, and analyze whether it’s something I really need to buy. Often the answer is no. Slowly improve upon this, over time, as I always make mistakes.
Less means you spend less. You need less storage. You need a smaller house. Less means you worry less. You search for things less. You are less bogged down by clutter. Less means you’re lighter. You’re freer. You can focus on better things. Less means you can travel more quickly. You spend less time with stuff, and more time doing stuff.
The fewer requirements we have, the less of a burden these requirements become. The more often we have the same thing every day, the more likely they are to become a requirement.
Some people will object that the term “blankface” is dehumanizing. The reason I disagree is that a blankface is someone who freely chose to dehumanize themselves: to abdicate their human responsibility to see what’s right in front of them, to act like malfunctioning pieces of electronics even though they, like all of us, were born with the capacity for empathy and reason.
At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.
boys with autism have broader faces and mouths, flatter noses, narrower cheeks and a shorter philtrum — the cleft between the lips and nose — compared with controls
if your actions are not in line with your desires – examine your environment. what is it asking of you? what behaviors is it rewarding? accept that when you are tired and hungry and scared that you will do what is easiest, and find a way to make what is easiest also what is correct. use that 3pm energy to set the stage. make it beautiful. make it echo and nurture your desires. because it effects you. it affects you. accepting that will at least allow you to use it to your advantage.
too often people see “change your environment” as move to a different one. while this is sometimes needed, how often do people simply recreate the same mess in a new place? yes, there is occasionally toxicity that must be left – but if that toxicity is your own mess, there may be value in at least trying to clean it up. there is also power in creation. in molding an environment for a purpose. to sit in a space with ethos. with soul. and an objective.
As long as most scientists can manage to accept definite, unmistakable, unambiguous experimental evidence, science can progress. It may happen too slowly—it may take longer than it should—you may have to wait for a generation of elders to die out—but eventually, the ratchet of knowledge clicks forward another notch. Year by year, decade by decade, the wheel turns forward. It's enough to support a civilization. So that's all that Science really asks of you—the ability to accept reality when you're beat over the head with it. It's not much, but it's enough to sustain a scientific culture.
there is now 12.7 Salesforce Towers, or 747 Salesforce Tower floors, worth of empty office space spread across San Francisco, which is roughly enough space to accommodate between 98,000 (based on an average, pre-Covid, density) and 131,000 (a la twitter) worker bees.
analyses revealed that parents engaged in fewer conversational turns with their children at the month’s end, a time that typically coincides with money being tight as parents await paychecks or other sources of income.
The Myth of the Lone Genius is a bullshit cliche and we would do well to stop parroting it to young people like it is some deep insight into the nature of innovation. It typically goes something like this—the view that breakthroughs come from Eureka moments made by geniuses toiling away in solitude is inaccurate; in reality, most revolutionary ideas, inventions, innovation etc. come from lots of hard work, luck, and collaboration with others.
It will surprise no one to know that although felony convictions have gone up for everyone, they are far higher in the Black community than the white community. As of 2010, about 23 percent of black people had a felony conviction on their record compared to 6 percent of white people.
I love capturing the little moments of daily life that happen at street level as I'm wandering around a city, whether it's a new one an ocean away or my own neighborhood in San Francisco. These are very different from the photos of the Eiffel Tower that every visitor to Paris has somewhere in their phone camera, different from the ones you'll find on travel guides or city government websites. You can't easily find the pictures I want on Google Images. I've yet to find a consistent good source of photos capturing exactly what it is that I find interesting on a city street, the sort of thing that I want to include in my City Reviews exploring the effects of infrastructure, culture, geography, and history on the day-to-day life of people living in that place. The only alternative is to capture them myself.
The barbell strategy is an investment concept that suggests that the best way to strike a balance between reward and risk is to invest in the two extremes of high-risk and no-risk assets while avoiding middle-of-the-road choices.
Among other results, the team found that ad viewing behaviors vary depending on channel, time of day, program genre, age and gender. For example, older viewers are more likely to avoid ads by changing channels; younger viewers are more likely to avoid ads by leaving the room or diverting their visual attention – likely due to multitasking with a second screen.
When you view life as a continuous cycle in this box, it can be easy to take its components for granted and view everything as a mundane blur of familiar events. However, when you take the time to actually inspect the box with mindful awareness of its contents, you will discover the true amazement that lives within them. And the best tool one can use to magnify these great discoveries is the practice of gratitude.
People who are extroverted, agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and open seem to do better at basically everything. Let’s call these people all-blues. Broadly speaking, they are more happy, successful, intelligent, creative, and popular. They have fewer addictions and less of every mental disorder. The only real tradeoffs are agreeableness against income/intelligence and extraversion/conscientiousness against math scores.
Resistance has value, however you express it. Take control of your health, don't cede it. If that means changing your diet and your physical behavior, if it means shrinking your bubble to reduce your exposure — to the virus, of course, but also to feeble minds and obedience — then so be it. Independent individuals, building enclaves of independent thought, is the only way ahead that I can imagine. Because lockstep in lockdown, both physical and intellectual, has never produced an outcome wherein free ideas and free people may survive.
The only goal is to try and understand what you think and feel that you need. This could be based on performance, general well-being, or adaptations to foods that you believe are good for you but that you are currently intolerant to. If what you put in does not have a purpose, then consider the behavior or habit, take inventory of your practice and make a change.
most people have fewer friends than their friends have, on average. It can be explained as a form of sampling bias in which people with more friends are more likely to be in one's own friend group. In other words, one is less likely to be friends with someone who has very few friends. In contradiction to this, most people believe that they have more friends than their friends have.
The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once.
The global supply chain mess will require increased global vaccination and acquired immunity, semiconductor capacity expansion and the end of extraordinary housing/labor supports to resolve. We expect all three to occur over the next few months, leading to a global growth bounce in 2022.
Summarizing our previous arguments, we may conclude with a few broad generalizations. Evolutionary progress of the species has not been perceptible within historical times and may, for all practical purposes of record of prophecy, be left out of account as non-existent. Uninheritable progress, due to tradition, has genuinely taken place in the realism of science and technology, where each worker stands on the shoulders of his predecessors. In the realm of morals, the refinement of traditional codes may lead to a certain ethical progress throughout a whole society. But the greater part of what is called moral progress consists merely in changes that are entirely without ameliorative direction. Progress in the arts is very limited and, as soon as the technique of artistic expression is perfected, ceases altogether to exist. Every artists starts from the beginning and depends for success on his personal talents alone. Something analogous is true of religion. Even in the material world the idea of progress is untenable. We are today very rich because we are living on our cosmic capital. When that capital is exhausted, mankind will be bankrupt. Nothing could be more obvious.
If you want to know something, or develop a skill or ability, go do it. Get out of the “I read it on the internet” mask of expertise. It is an endless scroll of conjecture and assumption, most often from people who sit all day and stare at a screen. Want to know how to build a “superhero physique?” Go fucking build one.
The main symptom is that, in the moment, acting upon your desires never feels urgent. It never feels important, and can be put off. Or it never feels possible, the problem just feels like a fact of life. And so a solution must center on solving the problem in the moment. And the solution that worked for me, is to make it part of your identity to be an agent. Make it a point of principle to do things, not because the thing is necessarily the perfect action, but because I choose the life where I do things, over the life where I always wait for the perfect opportunity.
I often find myself trying to justify my existence; how can I write about science when I'm not a professional scientist, or philosophy when I'm not a professional philosopher, or politics when I'm not a professional policy wonk? When I'm in a good mood, I like to think it's because I have something helpful to say about these topics. But when I'm in a bad mood, I think the best apology I can give for myself is that the discovery drive is part of what it is to be human, and I'm handling it more gracefully than some.
The most appealing daily schedule I know is that of a turn-of-the-century Danish aristocrat. He got up at four and set out on foot to hunt black grouse, wood grouse, woodcock, and snipe. At eleven he met his friends, who had also been out hunting alone all morning. They converged “at one of these babbling brooks,” he wrote. He outlined the rest of his schedule. “Take a quick dip, relax with a schnapps and a sandwich, stretch out, have a smoke, take a nap or just rest, and then sit around and chat until three. Then I hunt some more until sundown, bathe again, put on white tie and tails to keep up appearances, eat a huge dinner, smoke a cigar and sleep like a log until the sun comes up again to redden the eastern sky. This is living…. Could it be more perfect?”
If we want to raise healthy, high-agency children, we should give them the freedom to make decisions without removing them from the consequences of those decisions. Giving children agency now will help them avoid a dark cycle of work, pain, and reckless release in the future. Even if a life of indulgent hedonism is fun in the short-term, it ultimately leaves a void in the heart.Or, in short, let children be children and understand that eventually they will form some degree of discipline by growing up. [!productivity, !thoughts]
A group of monkeys in a small town in India took "revenge" on the local dog population this month by throwing them off of the top of tall buildings and trees.
"There is no shortcut to strength development, as there is none for the development of skill, agility or endurance in an athlete. No amount of fancy gimmicks or equipment or adoption of alleged time-saving 'fads' will substitute for a long term program of hard work, that is required to develop the quality of strength needed by an athlete for optimum performance in his specialty. Greater progress in track and field during the past 15 years has been the result of harder work by the athletes, not by resorting to shortcuts and less work."
This exercise inspired me to approach the world with this new-found mental tool. I thought to myself: “Identify my goal, take into account what I have, and creatively repurpose towards my goal.”
The function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth.
the function of a road is to connect productive places.
Besides being a very dangerous environment (yes, it is ridiculously dangerous to mix high-speed, highway design geometry with pedestrians, bikers and turning traffic), they are enormously expensive to build and, ultimately, financially unproductive.
progress increases with experience: each percent increase in cumulative production in a given industry results in a fixed percentage improvement in production efficiency.
Day to day, progress is never going to be linear, so winning has to be about behaving the right way, not achieving the right results.
I control my charities now; they do not control me. I am master of my time; it is not wasted wantonly among a thousand thoughtless folks. And while I find ways to do more than ever for those who really deserve help — the young, the sick, and the bereaved — I no longer allow myself to be sacrificed by the selfish demands of those who are perfectly able to take care of themselves.
To me, money is instrumental — a resource to put a number on, trade off against time and effort and risk, and manage with basic math. But to other people it seems to be a measure of their character, a core part of their identity, and a leading cause of their derangement.
“the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.
Including some good comments:Being difficult is part of the very nature of exercise; you don't get physically stronger or gain physical endurance unless you work hard enough to be uncomfortable, and you don't improve meaningfully in these ways unless you are uncomfortable over and over again frequently and consistently. So I think sentiments like "it doesn't really matter, only do it if it's easy and you like it" (which rarely pop up in those words but I think are nevertheless subtly pervasive in nerdier subcultures) are especially detrimental to exercise in particular. And that's why I do sometimes bother to promote exercise explicitly.
but it's also at least a little annoying and frustrating. because yeah, i almost certainly do have a genetic predisposition to be coordinated and so forth; but also, i started gymnastics training when i was in preschool, and every single year since then i've practiced some combination of gymnastics, soccer, dance, yoga, martial arts, running, weight lifting, swimming, cycling, hiking, and a smattering of more niche activities that require and develop physical skill. it's not like i just woke one morning able to do backflips. i did not roll a natural twenty on "core stability". i've worked hard for it my entire life, and that's important to me.
"You'll feel so much better" and "it's healthy" were the main reasons I was told to start exercising. I guess that's true, but after lifting for 7 years consistently, the main thing I noticed that no one told me was "you'll gain this superpower of every social interaction being a bit tilted more in your favor". Getting a good haircut for the first time ever probably helped too. The difference in how I'm listened to and treated is clear - people are much more interested in what I have to say.
And now you have to make a choice. You can go out in a blaze of glory, fight for what you know is right, and maybe take down a few moral monsters in the process. Or you can choose to live and let live, to let injustice go unanswered, to work with the monsters you hate. It’s up to you.
With Timelapse in Google Earth, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been compiled into an interactive 4D experience. Now anyone can watch time unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change.
What is the Maui Habit? Each day when you get up from your bed you repeat these words “ Today is going to be a great day”.
Life is full of cycles, great and small. Personal development is linked to lasting change. We pass through various stages, some achieved consciously, others reached accidentally. Daniel Levinson proposes that one's life cycle is composed of four 25-year eras. Confucious argued for six cycles. Aristotle thought there were three stages. The details don't much matter only that we change over the course of our lives and—sometimes—we have the opportunity to direct that change. At other times life appears simply "to happen" and we find ourselves on a different road, or continent.
By a floor job, I mean something that puts a floor in how bad and desperate your life can be. As in “I won’t be unemployed forever, I can always go do X”. Or “I won’t be working at this miserable fast-food place with this boss I hate forever, I can always just do X”. A lot of this depends on just how unlucky you are – the floor for high-IQ people with savings and college degrees is quite a bit higher than the floor for less smart people with no qualifications who need something now.
I find that these break down into 3 areas: finding new projects that I feel excited about, reframing tasks I need to do anyway into ones I feel excited about, and feeling excited about self-improvement - fixing a particular problem in my life.
People are more satisfied with their lives when they have a comfortable standard of living, a supportive social network, good health, the latitude to choose their course in life, and a government they trust. The highest echelon of happy countries also tends to have universal health care, ample paid vacation time, and affordable child care.
This provides time for reflection. To understand, deep in my own body, that to suffer is to grow. To try things that are deeply frightening, and to fail wisely and come back again and again until I succeed. That defines one possible (and proven) channel for growth and the goal of growth is nothing less than knowing yourself. Not the self that is uncovered, excavated, but a self that is molded by your very own trials and tribulations.
we can offer sympathy, acknowledge the problem and offer help working towards solutions in what small ways we can, or we can abandon these young men to seek acknowledgement of their issues from dark side of the internet for want of any other options.
In other words, when you asks for a busy person's time for "mentorship" or "advice" or whatever, show (a) you are serious and have gone as far as you can by yourself (b) have taken concrete steps to address whatever your needs are and (optionally. but especially with code related efforts)(c) how helping you could benefit them/their project.
Definition: Slack. The absence of binding constraints on behavior.
Lambda School's founder and CEO is a masterful influencer and marketer. Lambda School launched amid frustrations about the cost of traditional universities combined with the growing "learn to code" movement. Their promise seemed like a dream come true: Pay nothing up front, learn faster than a traditional college, and you don't owe anything if you don't get a job.I would love to see Allred respond to this article, but I doubt it will happen. Yet again, if something is too good to be true, it probably is. [!culture, !technology]
If you want good things to happen, you must have or make room for what you envision to occur. Do you want better friendships? How does that occur if you don't clear time for meaningful conversations? Want to improve your diet? Where do healthful foods go if your pantry and 'fridge are full of low-quality consumables? Opportunity is only such if you have the means to seize it and the space to store it.
Before you speak, ask yourself if what you are going to say is true, is kind, is necessary, is helpful. If the answer is no, maybe what you are about to say should be left unsaid.
It also takes advantage of the online communication features of social media by engaging new users with specially appointed ‘quit coaches’, finding social support through the program’s Facebook group, and arranging meetup events for members. Overall, researchers found that this method was highly successful. Participants in the social media group were 205% as likely to quit smoking, and 214% more likely to be able to remain smoke-free over a period of 30 days.
There is no amount of wood smoke that is good to breathe. It is at least as bad for you as cigarette smoke, and probably much worse. (One study found it to be 30 times more potent a carcinogen.) The smoke from an ordinary wood fire contains hundreds of compounds known to be carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, and irritating to the respiratory system. Most of the particles generated by burning wood are smaller than one micron—a size believed to be most damaging to our lungs. In fact, these particles are so fine that they can evade our mucociliary defenses and travel directly into the bloodstream, posing a risk to the heart. Particles this size also resist gravitational settling, remaining airborne for weeks at a time.
Did you know that seventy years ago, our grandparents were having an underpolarization crisis? True! In 1950, the American Political Science Association "released a call to arms...pleading for a more polarized political system". The report argued that "the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily, leaving voters confused about who to vote for and why". Everyone agreed with each other so much, and compromised so readily, that supporting one party over the other seemed almost pointless.
As a practice, we teach that you should not look up to someone. Looking up infers also looking down to. This hierarchy might feel like a natural consequence of ability, and to a certain degree, it might be, but ranking others is a trap that puts yourself in between those you despise and those you glorify. You become stuck because your impression of greatness is wedged between the disappointment you have in yourself and the place you imagine is better.
Wear a weird-looking mask. You’ll get some looks, but you’ll be better for it: it’ll steel you for the moments when having the courage to stand out really matters.
only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.
I wanted to take that one on….F-35s, the case study. Although, I gotta tell you, yesterday we were talking to some guy, some lieutenant colonel, or colonel, said ‘what are you flying?’ Said ‘F-35,’ I was like that’s a piece of…and he was like…and he laughed, and I was like, ‘no seriously, tell me about it,’ and he was…an F-16 guy, F-35, he said…’unbelievable aircraft,’ I’m not…I…that investment, for…that capability, that we’re never supposed to use, ‘well, we have to deter, blah blah bluh blah…Are we fifth generation? You know we…I think it’s hilarious, you know, right now, you know, ‘well we need to invest in the sixth generation,’ I’m like, we have created a monster, but you know that.
As for mealtimes, few people in northern Europe ate breakfast in 1501. The medieval two-meal rhythm of the day persisted: dinner was at about 11 a.m. and supper at about 5 p.m. But as more people moved into towns, and made their living by working long hours for other townsmen, the time at which they could have supper was pushed back into the evening. This meant that dinner, the main meal of the day, had to be eaten a couple of hours later and became lunch. It followed that you had to eat an early meal, breakfast, in order to get through to lunchtime. School also helped bring about this change, for more and more boys went to school, and the long lessons required that they eat breakfast. Hence breakfast was ubiquitous in towns by 1600.
sea monk or sea bishop, an animal that was sighted of the coast of Poland in 1531, washed up on Danish shores in the late 1540s and went the 16th century equivalent of viral.* *This of course had nothing whatsoever to do with the Protestant Reformation or Henry the Eighth declaring himself head of the Church of England. Scientific interest only.
act in a way that you are proud of. do you like being a person who cuts corners? who inflates their victories and hides their defeats? or do you want to be the person who does it right every time. who humbly works for what they know is right. who owns their victories and their defeats without embellishments. do you want to be a person who responds to pettiness with pettiness? who lies and cheats because everyone else is doing it? or do you want to be a person who rises above it. who acts to fulfill their understanding of the world, who has the courage and grace to stand for something.
so interrogate your model. update it often. use your strength. challenge your definitions. recognize when you are getting angry about a media pundits characterization of their opponents argument. use the internet (or better yet the real world) to actually talk to someone who disagrees with you. ask them why they believe what they do. what their objective is in supporting certain policies. realize that we are all variables in someone else equation – modeled and primed and generalized to explain and mobilize. that we are sold formula-as-truth by those who’s profits are the sum. we all do it.
Buy experiences, which include things that are cheap and you use for a long time in short increments. Make it a treat because the joy declines as you get used to anything, inject novelty where you can to refresh the source of delight. Calculating the value of your time, even very roughly, will let you make good trade-offs whether you’re buying time or paying with time. Pay now (cash) and consume later (memories) just make sure not to overestimate the time you’ll spend reminiscing and the amount of suffering you’ll have to pay. Invest in others, but don’t confuse the warm feeling of treating a friend with the ethical imperative to make the world a better place.
The key is you have to find what steals your time and squash it.
Hicks received several doses of strychnine (a common rat poison, which stimulates the nervous system in small doses) mixed with brandy.[4] He continued to battle onwards, hallucinating, barely able to walk for most of the course. When he reached the stadium, his support team carried him over the line, holding him in the air while he shuffled his feet as if still running. Hicks had to be carried off the track, and might have died in the stadium had he not been treated by several doctors. He lost eight pounds during the course of the marathon.
Sport is nothing, if not a gateway to physical and psychological possibility. All one needs is the courage to push the boat way out: the deeper and rougher the water the better. Such a test distinguishes the fiery from the faint. Confronting it you are either pointed or pointless. You can do as much as you imagine. Often more. Or you come up short.
I watched from afar as she detached herself from the the usual Games athlete triteness; she doesn’t market her abs or hype her “program”. That said at the deepest level she is still in the public eye, the “athlete thing” is an experience, and whether a blessing or an inconvenience she handles her role positively. At its heart, the energy she expresses with her vineyard and the process by which she learned to grow, harvest, and bottle her own wine is the same energy you may see her sink into the winning stride of a silly fitness competition: it was effort, toil, and joy, and whether she loses or tastes a blended red that exceeds her expectations, her eyes crease and her smile requires no explanation.
When we’re talking about very unpopular beliefs, polls can only give a weak signal. Any possible source of noise – jokesters, cognitive biases, or deliberate misbehavior – can easily overwhelm the signal. Therefore, polls that rely on detecting very weak signals should be taken with a grain of salt.
the return trip effect is likely due to a violation of expectations. Participants felt that the initial trip took longer than they had expected. In response, they likely lengthened their expectations for the return trip. In comparison with this longer expected duration, the return trip felt short. The greater the participants’ expectations were violated on the initial trip, the more they experienced the return trip effect
Several investigators observed that short naps of less than 30 min duration had an invigorating effect, helped to maintain daytime arousal levels and enhanced performance...Moreover, short daytime naps were also reported to improve the emotional state. Even habitual nappers have been reported to benefit from naps
Naps of less than 10 min duration have few if any benefit, whereas naps of between 10 and 45 min have restorative effects that last throughout the rest of the day...The body and mind thus need to be trained to take short naps.
The optimum time for a nap is in the afternoon around 15:00 hours [3:00pm]. Daytime naps during the afternoon may have a biological basis, as daytime arousal levels have been shown to decline around this time
Daytime naps are associated with sleep inertia after the patient awakens. Sleep inertia results in impaired alertness and performance for approximately 30 min after awakening from a nap, and slows the speed of cognitive tasks, but has few effects on the accuracy of task performance.
Another concern about daytime naps is that they could diminish the quality of subsequent sleep at night [23,24]; however, there is little evidence to support this concern. Most investigators have not found daytime naps to affect nighttime sleep adversely.
Unlike morphine which takes 15 to 20 minutes to relieve pain, the lollipop is effective within five minutes. It’s also much easier to administer than morphine, which must be injected into a large muscle, and if the dosage is too strong the lollipop can be rapidly removed. The effects of morphine cannot be halted.Seems like a good solution to pain management. [!medicine]
First, an independent lab should store blood and urine samples from all major league players annually and test these samples (using the latest detection techniques) at 10-, 20- and 30-year intervals following each player's retirement. Second, all players should be paid over a 30-year period. Third, if any player's blood tests positive for performance enhancing drugs, that player will forfeit his remaining salary and pension and will be banned from baseball for life.I especially like last part and have advocated (amongst my friends) for this to be implemented in track and cycling, along with forfeiture of their sponsorships. These athletes' livelihood is dependent on their participating in major events. The risk of this being rescinded is significantly greater than the "risk" of not using PEDs and performing poorly. Sadly, I think PEDs increase the excitement of events, as the athletes are playing at higher levels. [!culture]
There was an armed standoff with police, who lobbed tear gas canisters at the building. The MOVE members fired at them, and a gunfight with semi-automatic and automatic firearms ensued. Police used more than ten thousand rounds of ammunition before Commissioner Sambor ordered that the compound be bombed. From a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter, Philadelphia Police Department Lt. Frank Powell proceeded to drop two one-pound (0.5 kg) bombs (which the police referred to as "entry devices") made of FBI-supplied Tovex, a dynamite substitute, targeting a fortified, bunker-like cubicle on the roof of the house. The ensuing fire killed eleven of the people in the house (John Africa, five other adults, and five children aged 7 to 13). The fire spread and eventually destroyed approximately sixty-five nearby houses. Although firefighters had earlier drenched the building prior to the bombing, after the fire broke out, officials said they feared that MOVE would shoot at the firefighters, so held them back.
When you're feeling depressed for no good reason, force yourself to laugh. It triggers happiness almost as well as externally-induced laughter. Eventually, you will noticeably condition yourself to release seratonin (or endorphins, or something) every time you notice that you're seratonin-deficient. It's been effective for me. I started it as a moody teenager and it quickly became self-perpetuating. Google suggests I'm not alone. It's got a whiff of wire-heading, I admit, but ideally you're using it to solve a brain chemistry defect, not an external problem.
Waking up: I found brute force works best - Old style alarm clock with clanging bells placed on opposite end of room. This trumped all sorts of complex maneuvers, including training self to have a fixed pattern response to an certain iPhone alarm.
The eye is not a single frame snapshot camera. It is more like a video stream. The eye moves rapidly in small angular amounts and continually updates the image in one's brain to "paint" the detail. We also have two eyes, and our brains combine the signals to increase the resolution further. We also typically move our eyes around the scene to gather more information. Because of these factors, the eye plus brain assembles a higher resolution image than possible with the number of photoreceptors in the retina. So the megapixel equivalent numbers below refer to the spatial detail in an image that would be required to show what the human eye could see when you view a scene.
I think we agree, the past is over.
See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction.
You work three jobs? ... Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that.
Fred brings home 100 kg of potatoes, which (being purely mathematical potatoes) consist of 99% water. He then leaves them outside overnight so that they consist of 98% water. What is their new weight?
at work, we naturally resent the people who get paid more and work less than we do. We almost never notice the people who are paid less and work more than we do.
I used to think I disliked social interaction. I have since realized – and it blew my mind – that I only disliked social interaction with people who aren’t awesome.
Standards are set to help raise people up. To inspire. To push. Standards aren’t lowered just so folks can brag about hitting them. If it could be done easily you wouldn’t bother trying. If everyone achieves it easily they must be doing it wrong. Or the standard must be changed. How do so many end up on the bad, self-defeating side of ego?
So I say, “Why don't you try to get good at something?” Pick one thing and do it to the exclusion of other things. Develop it. Progress. Rise. By doing so you will reach a height from which you may observe what you have left behind, what you sacrificed in order to achieve. Being good at the one thing clearly exposes the difference between what you can do well and what you can’t. Weaknesses become obvious. The focus of future work is clear. But only IF fixing those deficiencies will take you closer to your goal.
routine is the enemy of slow subjective time. It will speed up subjective time enormously.
Novelty is what slows time down, and a routine is an engine for eliminating the unexpected, thereby eliminating novelty.
Novelty makes the human brain pay attention. Something novel is something potentially life-changing, in both good and bad ways. Full focus, aliveness to the present moment and unusually clear memory all kick in when paying attention to something novel.
I’ve found that doing some kind of significant event (holiday, life goal) in January makes the subjective year seem much longer.
At the senior levels most of your time goes into identifying what needs to be built and how to build it. You have to research what the problem looks like. You talk to others and get everyone to agree on what needs to be done.
It’s essential to replenish your physical and emotional energy, along with your capacity to focus, by prioritizing good sleep habits, nutrition, exercise, social connection, and practices that promote equanimity and well-being, like meditating, journaling, and enjoying nature.
What aspects of your situation are truly fixed, and which can you change? Altering your perspective can buffer the negative impact of even the inflexible aspects. If exhaustion is a key problem, ask yourself which tasks—including critical ones—you could delegate to free up meaningful time and energy for other important work. Are there ways to reshape your job in order to gain more control or to focus on the most fulfilling tasks?
Reduce exposure to job stressors. You’ll also need to target high-value activities and relationships that still trigger unhealthy stress. This involves resetting the expectations of colleagues, clients, and even family members for what and how much you’re willing to take on, as well as ground rules for working together. You may get pushback. But doubters must know that you’re making these changes to improve your long-term productivity and protect your health.
Seeking out rich interpersonal interactions and continual personal and professional development. Find coaches and mentors who can help you identify and activate positive relationships and learning opportunities. Volunteering to advise others is another particularly effective way of breaking out of a negative cycle.
I’d suggest finding the local legends now, see what they are working on, building deep knowledge about it, ask for an interview and join them. In a big place like that, there are always movers and shakers - they are also looking for motivated and talented devs for their team, so it is mutually beneficial. It will only work with your initiative and a bit of luck though.
28.2% of respondents spent money to buy themselves time each month [mean_amount = $147.95 US dollars (USD) for respondents who reported buying time]. Respondents who spent money in this way reported greater life satisfaction
For society, too, there are uncomfortable difficulties: we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely, and yet hold in confidence what they see. Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance. Yet the allegiance of coaches is to the people they work with; their success depends on it. And the existence of a coach requires an acknowledgment that even expert practitioners have significant room for improvement. Are we ready to confront this fact when we’re in their care?
There is also lots of anecdotal support for the large variation between programmers. During the time I was at Boeing in the mid 1980s, there was a project that had about 80 programmers working on it that was at risk of missing a critical deadline. The project was critical to Boeing, and so they moved most of the 80 people off that project and brought in one guy who finished all the coding and delivered the software on time. I didn’t work on that project, and I didn’t know the guy, so I’m not 100% sure the story is even true. But I heard the story from someone I trusted, and it seemed true at the time.I can absolutely see this being true. More manpower doesn't always equal more productivity, as there is a lot more room for conflict. This concept was refuted by Laurent Bossavit here (Bossavit "no longer stand[s] by this article", and instead offers a book to explain) and subsequently addressed by McConnell here. [!productivity]
Whereas near transfer – i.e., the transfer of skills within the same domain – is sometimes observed, far transfer – i.e., the transfer of skills across two distant domains – is rare or possibly inexistent (Melby-Lervåg, Redick, & Hulme, 2016, Sala et al., 2019a). Moreover, when it does occur, transfer of skills is often limited to the degree to which the two domains (source and target) share contents...performance significantly worsens when experts engage in certain subspecialties of their field of expertise.
they claim that it is possible to induce far transfer by engaging in domain-specific cognitively demand ing activities that boost domain-general cognitive skills...At a neural level, this generalization is thought to be enabled by the activation of shared brain structures that are common to the practiced activity (e.g., music) and other core cognitive skills (e.g., fluid intelligence, working memory, and language;
The overall impact of music training programs on cognitive and academic outcomes is weak and moderately heterogeneous (gbar = 0.184, SE = 0.041, tau2 = 0.041, I2 = 43.16%)...inverse relationship between the studies’ design quality and magnitude of the effect sizes. Conversely, a small overall effect size is observed in those studies employing neither active controls nor random assignment (gbar = 0.246).
these results indicate that music training fails to produce solid improvements in all the examined cognitive and academic skills equally
And some specific subtraits and their predictors (not necessarily best):Openness: Daily mean length text messages
Conscientiousness: Robust mean dur[ation] weather app night
Extraversion: Nightly mean no. phone ringing
I'd be interested to see how companies harness these predictors to their advantage. [!psychology, !culture]Ambition: Robust mean time first event [wake-up time]
Assertiveness: Daily mean no. outgoing calls
Openness to ideas: Loudness fourth most listened song
Carefreeness: Daily mean no. Android-Email (app) [I suspect the lower this value is, the more carefree a person is. Go figure!]
Making an effort to be as open and responsive as possible with loved ones: reaching out more, responding faster, expressing dissatisfaction more readily, and offering praise whenever it occurs to me.
Redistributing speaking time to quieter people when group conversations become lopsided.
Being more vocal at work: speaking up more in meetings, writing more thorough documentation, leaving more detailed comments in code reviews, and sharing links that are relevant to company projects in the #random Slack channel.
Participating more actively on Twitter. This means writing more Tweets of my own, responding more frequently to others, and being more liberal in my use of the ‘like’ button.
Writing more blog posts. Writing takes a lot of work, and more often than not, what I write doesn’t bring me much recognition. But occasionally I hear a word or two of thanks for sharing an idea that helped or stimulated someone, and this is enough to convince me that my efforts are worthwhile.
That's [terrorism's main damage-doer is everything that happens after the attack—the money spent, fear induced, etc.] what Osama bin Laden noted in a tape after 9/11 -- that on the cheap, his attackers had not simply killed 3,000 people but induced a response that will cost the U.S. trillions of dollars over a decade or more (if the costs of war in Iraq are included, as they should be).
The ski was slipped into a bin of postage that was being loaded into a truck behind a station (a collaborating staff member created a verbal disturbance up the street to momentarily distract postal workers’ attention). Notice of postage due received, 11 days. Upon pickup at the station, the clerk and supervisor consulted a book of postage regulations together for 2 minutes and 40 seconds before deciding on additional postage fee to assess. Clerk asked if mailing specialist knew how this had been mailed; our recipient said she did not know.
"Please be advised that human remains [item was molar tooth in plastic box] may not be transported through the mail, but we assumed this to be of sentimental value, and made an exception in your case."
the future of ambition is one in which millions of brilliant people globally, historically excluded from the global economy, have the opportunity and incentive to harness ever more powerful technologies to solve some of our species’ and our planet’s most important problems. Impressive progress in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology gives ambitious individuals the tools – again, at falling capital cost – to build products and services that we can scarcely imagine today.
Optimize for mindfulness, growth, or productivity based on the circumstances of the day and its relation to all subsequent days.
At an undisclosed location outside of time, there is a version of myself who notices when I have chosen a goal that requires reliable performance over an extended period. This self then runs an integrity check and, provided the task does not seem prima facie unrealistic given our capabilities, replicates us as many times as there are days needed to complete the task. Each clone is sent to a specific day. I am one of these clones. I don't need to worry about whether I will follow through on my commitments beyond today, because that's not my job. Someone else is handling that. I am TodayMe, and if I follow through on my portion of the task, then I can trust that TomorrowMe -- who is, after all, identical -- will also do his part. And so on.
You're forking off a temporary version of yourself who ignores the passage of time and forgets all cares beyond the task at hand. As the forked self, it doesn't matter how long it takes to "spool up" and get through the "ugh field" surrounding the task, because time is meaningless inside the bobble. It takes what it takes and that's that.
Successful time travel is all about bringing our past, present, and future selves into a cooperative alignment. They need to trust each other. They need to communicate. Sometimes, we need to prepare things in the present and send messages into the future. Sometimes, we have to envision different futures to provide direction to the present. Sometimes, we need to honor the past.
Let’s take all these things together: In a world where you can get cheap housing in or quite close to a massive hub of culture. A world where all shipments and returns are cheaper and faster, where you can order food from anywhere quickly for no cost, where you can travel anywhere in the city with exceptional speed. A world where all the streets have shade and no cars, there’s considerably less pollution, and the view is amazing even in the densest sections.
