37 entries indexed
Success in Corporate America is about being visible, influential, and avoiding low-value tasks. Build relationships with mentors and sponsors who can advocate for you. Always network and treat your career like a business to open new opportunities.
Laws and regulations alone cannot stop wrongdoing unless breaking them brings real and certain punishment. In India's financial markets, weak enforcement lets dishonest sellers keep harming customers without serious consequences. To protect people, authorities must enforce rules strictly and punish offenders harshly, not just make more rules.
Julian Shapiro suggests listing your core values to decide what to focus on in life. He emphasizes choosing projects that best match your current values to avoid future regret. This approach helps you stay true to yourself and find lasting fulfillment.
Modern life concentrates wealth, power, and culture in a few winners, creating technofeudal dynamics. Economic growth follows an S-curve: rich, saturated countries struggle to grow and carry heavy debt while poorer countries can still expand fast. Governments are larger and more intrusive, making governance harder at scale and increasing the need for more local solutions.
The essay explains how chasing rare jackpot wins often leads most people to lose everything over time. This mindset has spread in culture, making many take huge risks that hurt the average person while only benefiting a few winners. The author suggests focusing on steady, reliable growth and finding deeper meaning beyond risky bets.
Successful people are persistent and keep trying new ideas until they find what works. Obstinate people, on the other hand, refuse to listen and stick to their ideas even when they're wrong. The key difference lies in being attached to the goal versus being attached to one's ideas about how to reach it.
The text discusses the trend of gamification in various aspects of life. The author explores how many things are being turned into games for engagement and motivation. Visit Gurwinder's blog for more information on this topic.
In the Autumn 2023 list of 30 useful principles, the author has condensed the usual 40 concepts into 30 to focus on quality over quantity. These principles cover a wide range of thought-provoking topics, such as Goodhart's Law, Hotelling's Law, Herostratic Fame, and more, providing insights into human behavior, societal trends, and cognitive biases. Each principle is meant to stimulate reflection rather than serve as strict rules, encouraging readers to delve deeper into the complexities of various subjects. The list offers a diverse array of concepts, from behavioral patterns like the Yes-Damn Effect to societal phenomena like the Ferguson Effect, aiming to spark contemplation and discussion.
Ideas to help you make sense of the world
The fastest way to get rich is to go slow.
Venkatesh Rao discusses various topics including failures of imagination vs. failures of nerve, the \"paycheck people\" mentality in the industrial economy, risk-taking and privilege, and the importance of courageous decision-making in unlocking the process of meaning-making. He also explores the idea that rationality can lead to nihilism, and the need for people to test their agency by facing challenges that break their assumptions about the world. Overall, he emphasizes the importance of cultivating a nuanced understanding of risk and agency in order to navigate the complexities of
All of the interesting systems (e. g.
The Most Important Forces Shaping the World
How narratives shape the economy, and why our ability to tell stories is changing
Dancoland, Season 3 Episode 15
Alex Danco's Newsletter, Season 3, Episode 2
On Mimetic Violence and the Necessity of Restraint
A couple years ago when I started this newsletter, the inaugural post was an introduction to René Girard. I’ve been meaning to rewrite it for quite some time. Today – Election Day, 2020 ̵…
Summary Chaord comes from the combination of two words: chaos and order. This exemplifies the behavior of any self-governing organism, organization, or system which harmoniously blends characteristics of order and chaos; patterned in a way dominated by neither chaos or order; characteristic of the fundamental organizing principles and nature Key Takeaways Community Organizations moving from […]
Conversations about ideas should help you understand what you think. They need more tension than a regular conversation but not so much that you're afraid to share nascent thoughts. The best...
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it's not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it... Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. We built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build.
We are led by high-functioning sociopaths, in our politics and our economy, and nowhere is this more apparent than in our war against COVID-19. It's a power thing. Read more
Summary Bloom argues that the individual is merely a “cell” within the larger group and that these groups are the primary units of selection no genes and human psychology. Hierarchy is front and center in Bloom’s understanding of the world. “This book is about the social body in which we are the unwitting cells. It […]
In this classic game theory experiment, you must decide: rat out another for personal benefit, or cooperate? The answer may be more complicated than you think.
Economist Ole Peters discusses ergodic and non-ergodic systems in relationship to expected value versus temporal average growth, using the example of a simple coin flip gambling situation. Peters explains that although in aggregate the population experiences positive expected value when taking the bet, the typical person does not. By analyzing the individual's risk preferences and applying the Kelly Criterion, Peters offers optimal bet sizes that maximize geometric growth rate for long term gains. He further introduces the concept of diversification and its importance in risk management.
If you follow applied mechanism design or decentralized governance at all, you may have recently heard one of a few buzzwords: quadratic voting, quadratic funding and quadratic attention purchase.
Why don't facts change our minds? This article explains the logic of false beliefs and proposes a better system for constructive conversation.
You can’t prove truth, but using deductive and inductive reasoning, you can get close. Learn the difference between the two types of reasoning and how to use them when evaluating facts and arguments.
Game theory is the science of strategy. It attempts to determine mathematically and logically the actions that “players” should take to secure the best outcomes for themselves in a wide array of “games.” The games it studies range from chess to child rearing and from tennis to takeovers. But the games all share the common […]
“Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is…
For the past year, I've been compiling a list of inspirational speeches. See my list of 20+ famous speeches and their transcripts here.
The experiment showed most people bet poorly on a biased coin game, often ignoring optimal strategies like the Kelly criterion. Many bettors made mistakes like over-betting, betting on the wrong side, or following gambler's fallacies. Even trained finance people struggled, highlighting how hard rational decision-making is under uncertainty.
Coming out of college or out of a traditional corporate job, most people think like turkeys. I thought like a turkey. Based on our understanding of the world having spent our entire lives in Mediocristan and the fact that up until relatively recent history, we have lived in Mediocristan, a turkey’s view of the world is highly rational. It’s also wrong. “A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.” The butcher will keep feeding the turkey until a few days before Thanksgiving… [The] turkey will have a revision of belief— right when its confidence in the statement that the butcher loves turkeys is maximal and ‘it is very quiet’ and soothingly predictable in the life of the turkey.” -N.N. Taleb
The whole thing’s worth a read but a while back I decided to go through, give it a squeeze, and extract the juicy bits: the books themselves.
A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage.
Managers often end up with their subordinates' tasks, known as \"monkeys,\" causing time management issues. To avoid this, managers should delegate effectively and transfer initiative back to their subordinates. By establishing clear guidelines and boundaries, managers can prevent an overload of subordinate-imposed tasks.