We’re starting to see news outlets say there is an alarming trend where vaccinated people are getting COVID-19 (such as this one from the WSJ). This is an example of base rate fallacy—in a population with a high vaccination rate it is inevitable that new cases include vaccinated people (especially in a country like Israel with extremely high vaccination rate). We should not take that to mean vaccines are suddenly ineffective (they’re not).

The reason you shouldn’t rely on what economists say to make decisions (for example in financial decisions) is because nobody grades an economist. As Howard Marks puts it, “Economists are like portfolio manager who don’t mark to market.” In other words, a source of predictions is only useful if it is reliably correct, but there is no way to know that about an economist because they don’t keep score.

See also:

• Naval Ravikant often says you shouldn’t trust someone who doesn’t have “skin in the game”

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Optimism is the most rational viewpoint to have by default. Unlike pessimism or negativity, optimism is helpful even when faked because we find evidence for whichever mindset we have. As Earl Nightingale said, “we become what we think about.”

While I wouldn’t go so far as to praise irrational optimism (a la The Secret), it still might be better than default pessimism.

See also:

• This might not be true in fields where psychology overwhelms fundamentals in the short run (like financial markets)
• The quality of your mind determines the quality of your life
• Mindfulness

A mutation of COVID-19 is spreading quickly throughout the world and threatens recovery efforts. The Alpha variant is believed to be 50% more transmissible than other local COVID-19 types. The Delta variant is 60% more transmissible than the Alpha variant.

Vaccine effectiveness is a concern with variants. Two doses of the Pfizer vaccine were 88% effective against the Delta variant (compared to 93% for Alpha). However, a single dose of Pfizer of AstraZeneca is 33% effective against Delta (compared to 50% for Alpha).

As a result, the WHO recommends that even vaccinated people wear masks.

Read Delta coronavirus variant: scientists brace for impact in Nature.

See also:

• What will the highly transmissible Delta variant’s effect on the R value?
• Clinical trials of the COVID-19 vaccine was not designed to discover the optimal regimen for public health and they will need to reassess for variants

Jiddu Krishnamurti recounts a story about a man who has in solitude and meditated for 25 years only to recognize that it was a waste. Krishnamurti’s advice to this man was merely “don’t seek” because what you find when you search is what you projected.

In previous talks, he discusses his dislike for meditation and mindfulness because it tends to have a motive behind it—a desire to achieve something or fulfill a promise someone made. To really see there needs to be no motive at all.

See also:

• The underlying desire and motive for meditation is another form of the illusory self

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When you sell software, the buyer considers whether or not they need more software. When you sell solutions, the buyer considers whether or not this solves their burning problem. It’s more effective to sell a solution (even if it’s packaged as software) so the buyer can see exactly how it addresses their pain and how it compares to their current way of solving the problem.

See also:

• Figure out what’s wrong with a step in a funnel by looking at the previous step, it could be that you are not talking about a solution or you don’t know the burning problem they need to solve.
• Founder-led sales helps identify product problems
• A challenge with compliance products is selling non-compliance
• Consumers buy products, enterprises buy platforms

When you are trying to figure out why a particular step in the funnel isn’t working, start by looking at the previous step. What happened in previous step that would have solved the problem you’re seeing in the next step? In sales, this is usually because you didn’t set the stage for the next stage properly.

For example, if you are having trouble closing a sale, look at the demo you did in the previous step—it should naturally lead to a sale if it was really was the solution to a burning problem the buyer has. Then look at the step prior to that and it could be that you didn’t understand their burning problem or enough information to describe the solution in their terms.

See also:

• Funnel problems can also help identify product problems
• Founding Sales

When you sell solutions not software, you need to be as concrete as possible about the buyer’s use case so you can describe your solutions in the same terms they use to evaluate it. For example, if their burning problem is too much manual work—dig into what the manual work is and how they decided this was a big problem, then describe the solution in terms that match (e.g. how many reports, hours, mistakes, etc. does the solution save).

See also:

• Beware of solutions disguised as problem statements—the problem is not “because you don’t use our thing!”

Grammarly improves the overall level of communication within an organization, but if you think of it as an organizational linter it does much more. It eliminates a class of common feedback that would otherwise need to repeated for each work product for each person (with some decay curve as new employees internalize these rules). Even better would be if it could lint the structure of documents (i.e. a minto linter) and not just grammar and phrasing.

See also:

• As with decision fatigue, editing or reviewing can be exhausting and quality can slip because it takes too much effort.
• Better tools are important for remote work, especially as teams rely on low-bandwidth collaboration.

Immanual Kant states that between instinct and culture is wildness. It is in mankind’s nature to be raw and wild so we find ways to cover up this wildness through culture—a collective set of customs, art, and achievements.

As a counter argument, shipwrecked boys don’t devolve into savagery, but the categorical imperative is still probably a good thing to embody nevertheless.

In discussing market changes, Howard Marks, remarks that psychology overwhelms fundamentals in the short run as the reason why markets can appear irrational. This is a neat way of holding both the idea that investors are rational and markets are irrational simultaneously.

See also:

• The Robinhood momentum algorithm might be perfectly suited to capture the psychology in the short-run
• The stock market boom during the pandemic appeared irrational (how could the market do well when there is so much unemployment and businesses failing?) yet it was largely due to rational fundamentals (increased savings and low interest rates resulted in investors moving from bonds to stock to get the same level of returns).
• Tournament like fields with asymetric and convex payouts favor high-variance strategies amplifies this short-run psychology.
• People are bad at long-term thinking

An object that is rotating on it’s intermediate axis is unstable. You can see this by trying to flip your phone into the air trying to get it to complete multiple rotations end over end (the intermediate axis)—it quickly becomes chaotic.

This video shows how it works in skateboarding.

It takes effort to make decisions and when confronted with numerous decisions to make, people get fatigued. These aren’t just big decisions (what should I do with my life?), but also small ones (what should I wear? what should I eat for dinner). This impairs a person’s ability to make further decisions (or avoid them).

However, it’s unclear whether this is a consistent phenomenon. Research by Carol Dweck reveals decision fatigue primarily affects people who believe willpower runs out quickly. Decision fatigue is also related to studies on ego depletion, which has since been debunked.

A saying from a Korean drama (which might be poorly translated into English) that all it takes is a few people to spread something. What might seem like a huge effort requires only a few key players e.g. spreading a rumor.

See also:

• This saying literally means a positive R value
• Humor over rumor is a strategy that relies on this to combat misinformation

Al Smith was a poor Irish-American who grew up in the Fourth Ward of New York City (Lower East Side). He became a Tammany Hall loyalist and henchman, but became so well liked (by Tammany and the people of his district) that he was elected to the State Assembly.

Not knowing anything about legislation and bills, every night he would read each bill. He would pay for transcripts of the days session to read later so he could try to understand it. He would sit in on committees that he wasn’t a part of. He then mastered it. Combined with his likable character, talent for oration, and now an in-depth understanding of how legislation worked and it’s problems he quickly became effective and championed reform while becoming the assembly speaker.

He then pushed for the local Tammany democrats to change course and embrace progressivism. They acquiesced and it opened the door for a new kind of candidate—the kind that made Al Smith the governor of New York where he led a progressive agenda.

See also:

• From The Power Broker

Answering the question, how do you do early sales when you are pre-product?

• Find the right buyer
  • You probably don’t know the right one yet
  • Talk to a lot of people
  • founder-led sales
• Warm intros are better than cold outreach
  • Cold Calling Techniques Literary Notes
  • you should be able to get from seed to series A on your network alone
• Operationalize intros
  • Speed is undervalued
  • make it easy to say yes to making an introduction
• Have the pricing conversation early
  • willingness to pay should be at the core of product design
  • Monetizing Innovation
  • founder led sales helps identify product problems
  • product design partner or pilots
• Setting up a sales process
  • Ride-alongs to help synthesize feedback or use Gong
• Closing the sale
• Turning into reference customers

It’s easy to be intimidated or anxious when doing something big all at once like writing an essay. Turning a large project into a ‘slow burn’ helps remove that worry—it’s easier to do small parts over a longer amount of time across several projects than in one big effort in a short amount of time sequentially.

This is similar in spirit to incremental writing where you write one idea or paragraph at a time then edit it all together. However, ‘slow burns’ should be applied to several projects at once so that everything feels easier.

From a video by Ali Abdaal.

See also:

• This concept can be easily applied using tools for networked thought as notes are easier to write than a blog post.
• Slow burns can have compounding effects as it’s easier to reuse and borrow ideas than to start from scratch. However, this typically comes after a long time of recording ideas.

I’ve now written 1,000 notes since May 25, 2020 in my Zettelkasten. You can see my reflections on writing 500 notes and here are my thoughts since then.

While the first 500 was about building the habit and getting a feel for making notes that are useful to me, the second 500 was about putting them into practice. I used Zettelkasten to reason about several startup ideas and started a company. I wrote more starting from outlines of notes. I followed my curiosity and added many new notes about a wide range of topics including economics, physics, philosophy, racism, remote work, and many more

I also struggled to keep up the pace of adding more notes. I added less per day than the first 500. While I’ve read many books, I don’t take the time to translate literary notes into permanent ones (although it’s still valuable for improving recall).

I’m spending less time on the meta game of note taking (filling up notes about how to do it and reading about it constantly). It’s a smell if I find myself overly concerned with tools and process rather than practicing.

I improved the published notes to make it a more enjoyable experience to browse. I added full text search. I redesigned the layout and typography to be more modern while still hitting a score of 100 on Lighthouse. I still love hitting the ‘random’ button and reviewing old notes that way.

The same benefits cited everywhere still hold true, but the effects of note blogging on SEO did not continue increasing at the same rate as it did when I started. I still get more eyeballs on my public notes than I get impressions on tweets, but that’s mostly because I don’t tweet that often.

In React, useEffect let’s you perform side effects in function components. They are meant to run once when the component is mounted, however you can recursively call it by combining adding a useState data dependency to it. By toggling the value of the data dependency inside the effect, it recursively call the effect. This is useful, for example, in implementing retry logic to an API call say for automatically retrying when an access token expires.

const [retryToggle, setRetryToggle] = useState(false);

React.useEffect(() => {
  if (someConditionToPreventInfiniteLoop) {
    return
  }

  fetch("http://example.com")
    .then((r) => handleSuccessHere(r))
    .catch((err) => setRetryToggle( i=> !i))

  // This dependency allows us to re-run the effect whenever this
  // value changes.
}, [retryToggle]);

People often get hung up on the ‘viable’ part of a minimum viable product (MVP) and tend to think of it as something that can be crappy. Framing how you are building the first revision of a product idea as a minimum remarkable product (MRP?) makes clear that it has to be obviously better than what’s currently out there or it will not get anyone’s attention.

This framing is less of a functional definition (minimum viable evokes ‘it kinda sorta works’) and more of a user centered definition (minimum remarkable evokes ‘what would get our users attention?').

(I couldn’t find a source, but it comes from Amazon or Jeff Bezos).

See also:

• This is closer to the advice of build an initial product a small group of users love

A refresh token in an OAuth setup using Json Web Tokens (JWT) is used to request a new access token. Because access tokens are short lived (to minimize the impact of a token being exfiltrated), a long lived refresh token is commonly used to, for example, stay logged into an app rather than need to log in every n minutes (the length of the access token).

Why have two tokens? In web apps this provides an additional layer of security and a better access story for your auth service (for high traffic app). Access tokens have a short life and the signed token is verified on every request (CPU bound), a refresh token affords a chance for the auth service to cut off access (using a deny list in a database i.e. IO bound) and is also stored separately (HttpOnly cookie) to prevent cross-site-scripting (XSS) attacks. This also improves scalability, authentication happens less frequently (at login time and token refresh time) which can reduce load on an auth service.

The refresh token should be treated differently because it has a longer expiry. It should be stored in a more secure way to prevent leaking it. In the browser that means storing it in an HttpOnly, Secure, and SameSite (to prevent CSRF attacks) cookie in the browser which can not be accessed from JS and refresh token rotation. This makes it possible to “refresh” an access token by making a request and including the cookie (using fetch with credentials: 'include').

See also:

• Storing JWT in cookies creates a cross site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability.
• Block old browsers if you use SameSite cookies to prevent CSRF.
• Read An in-depth look at refresh tokens in the browser.

Merging data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) round 16, and American Time Use Survey (ATUS) shows that an estimated 45% of jobs (~67MM based on number of employed citizens) in the US can be done remotely. However, prior to the pandemic only 10% of workers who could work remotely actually did (the takeup rate).

Read Ability to work from home: evidence from two surveys and implications for the labor market in the COVID-19 pandemic from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

See also:

• Of those who did work remotely two-thirds want to continue to work remotely
• This also shows 55% of jobs can’t be done remotely which may correlate with the inequality of remote work
• COVID-19 changed the takeup rate significantly, 18.3 of workers ‘telecommuted’ in April 2021 according the May Employment Situation Summary