Lionhearted writes: [A] large majority of otherwise smart people spend time doing semi-productive things, when there are massively productive opportunities untapped. A somewhat silly example: Let's sa
Program Optimization One of the earlier lessons in every programmer’s education is how to speed up slow code. Here’s an example. (If this is all greek to you, just note that there are three different
A few different things that have occurred while investigating. It seems weird to me there are lots of posts about akrasia and productivity but not adhd. 1. High Rejection Sensitivity makes my attentio
Around a month ago, I found an incredibly insightful quote deep in the Reddit comments about a particular basketball player who had recently changed teams. People who try hard to win first and foremos
Epistemic Status: Hopefully enough Dakka Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book Inadequate Eqilibria is excellent. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t done so. Three recent reviews are Scott Aaronson’s , Robin H
I didn't really try the Zettelkasten Method . I jotted a few notes on cards, complete with indexing designations, over the course of a day. Then the notecards migrated to a back corner of my desk, and
Summary: You can decide what state of affairs counts as neutral, and what counts as positive or negative. Bad things happen if humans do that in our natural way. It's more motivating and less stressfu
The Introduction The Curse of the Counterfactual is a side-effect of the way our brains process is-ought distinctions . It causes our brains to compare our past, present, and future to various counter
Previously : Slack In a couple earlier articles I urged people to adopt strategies that reliably maintain a margin of "30% slack." I've seen lots of people burn out badly (myself included), and preser
Epistemic Status: Reference. Expanded From: Against Facebook , as the post originally intended. Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You . They seek resources at your expense. Fees are hidden. Ext
Meditation has been claimed to have all kinds of transformative effects on the psyche, such as improving concentration ability, healing trauma, cleaning up delusions , allowing one to track their subc
A couple of weeks ago, after reading yet another piece of high-minded marketing copy, full of words like hand-crafted and artisan , a silly verse popped unbidden into my head: This is not the renaissa
There is an urban legend ( probably originating in an episode of Dragnet ) about a gang of clothing store thieves whose modus operandi was to use a long stick to remove large numbers of clothes from r
There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created software layers in the taxi industry, 99desi
Do labels like “broad thinker,” “generalist,” “synthesizer,” “right-brained,” or “conceptualizer” get at aspects of a coherent personality type? Call this mind the “Da Vinci” mind for short. Recently,
Like many people, I have most of my best ideas in the shower. This is sometimes annoying: I could use more than one shower’s worth of good ideas a day, but I’d rather not end up as a shrivelled yet in
People sometimes tell me that they want to join a startup, so that they can learn how it works, and eventually start one themselves. I usually end up suggesting that they skip straight to step 2 and s
Today, January 7th, was a brutal bitch of a day, and it was a great day. Every grim reality of the cloudworker lifestyle, the dark side of everything from mobility and laptops to eating on the run and
Life, as the John Lennon song goes, is what happens when you're busy making other plans. Should you pay more attention to life or to your plans? This is probably the fundamental question that any life
Some follow-up thoughts to this essay . On cooperation : Here's a provocative hypothesis: Without prestige status, group-level cooperation may be literally impossible. It's the (informal) currency tha
If you’re okay with killing time, it’s not scarce enough. Time is scarce, life is short, and as the grains of sand slip through the hourglass, so does the precious gift of time. Once gone, it disappea
Prodded by several comments, I have finally decided to write up some my thoughts on time management here. I actually have been drafting something about this subject for a while, but I soon realised th
What if I told you our world isn’t as it seems? That much of what we call politics and the “culture war” is really an ancient theological war over the metaphysics of reality, colliding with the digita
I am really, really into cooking. In the heady days of 2016 I regularly threw dinner parties for 30+ people. These days I don’t hate myself that much, but it’s still a big part of my life. I know more
In February 2022, Jim Keller organized a scientific anarchism event in Woodside, California. Scientific anarchism, a term borrowed from the controversial philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, concer
I rise blissfully at 4:30 a.m., thanks to my Tibetan singing bowl alarm clock. After twenty minutes of alternate nostril breathing, I start my day with a three-minute cold shower. This I follow with t
The trouble with self-help advice is that it’s often based on barely any evidence. For example, how many times have you been told to “think positively” in order to reach your goals? It’s probably the
Applied Capitalism For Fun And Profit I'm a capitalist. A friend of mine is a devoted Marxist. I think we mutually agree that, considering any particular employee, it is in that employee's personal in
HOWTO: Be more productive Translations: 日本語 | Русский | Беларуская “With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the senti
Photo by Zhang Kenny on Unsplash While some work does have value that is captured in relation to the date it is delivered, I have experienced that, more often than not, teams are given arbitrary deadl
Apr 13, 2022 An interesting pattern seems to recur across the career of great scientists - an annus mirabilis (miracle year) in which they make multiple seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span
Hi everyone, After overthinking overthinking last week I thought this week I’d talk about something that seems like (but isn’t) its opposite: half-arsing (half-assing if you speak US English). Half-ar
Hi everyone, I’m cheating this week. Yesterday was @threadapalooza , in which people assemble 100 tweet threads in order to stretch their ability to talk about a subject. I picked “Trust” for my topic
Once, on a day where I felt like I knew something, I declared that I would be okay with dating anyone who wasn’t vegan or an actress. It was clear to me that cheeseburgers were crucial to my happiness
LeBron James didn’t always have thick calves, a raging six-pack, and arms like the Incredible Hulk. Ask LeBron about his off-season training regimen, and he’ll share a detailed run-down of his workout
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewordin
Take my attempt here with a grain of salt. Many book length treatments have argued different sides of this. I only hope that this can serve as a starting point for your own experiential investigation