If there’s one thing that obsesses self-improvement junkies, it’s actually sticking with their regimens. Life hacks abound: Tell your friends about your plan so you’ll be embarrassed if you fail! Make sure you keep an unbroken streak! Charge yourself money if you don’t stick to it! Donate the money…

Having waxed philosophical about wisdom and amortised optimisation, I now turn to the question of what AI will concretely do: How will AI affect human mechanisms for amortised optimisation, such as cu

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Wave. I used to think that behavioral interviews were basically useless, because it was too easy for candidates to bullshit them and too hard for m

Some people have been asking me how my job search went—how I found out about and decided on the current company that I’m working for. I thought I’d write a bit about it, as a case study for other folk

July 2023 If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape…

Growth modes and direct v amortised optimisation Amortised optimisation is more important when relevant histories are long and growth is slow. If growth suddenly picks up, the flexibility of optimisin

At least in name, AI is about intelligence. However, intelligence is not the only mental quality that matters. Many deep mental skills, in particular regarding good, deep, or long-term judgement, are

There’s way too much to read. If I want to really understand a (nonfiction) book, I usually need to spend a lot of time with it. I generally spend at least as much time writing about it, and rereading

Most code editors color different pieces of your program in different ways. For instance, they’ll make keywords like if bold and bright so that you notice when you’ve misspelled them. They’ll make non

There are a lot of neat things going on in deep reinforcement learning. One of the coolest things from last year was OpenAI and DeepMind’s work on training an agent using feedback from a human rather

Let’s say you’re interested in a 500-page serious nonfiction book, and you’re trying to decide whether to read it. I think most people imagine their choice something like this: Option Time cost % that

from the book “Hell Yeah or No”: There’s no speed limit 2009-12-01 Whether you’re a student, a teacher, or a parent, I think you’ll appreciate this story of how one teacher can completely and permanen

Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. January 2012 There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schl