There are three groups of people within an organization: Sociopaths (tend to be at the top running the company, characterized by self-interest and need to control), Clueless (tend to be middle management, characterized by misplaced loyalty to the organization), and Losers (tend to be at the bottom, characterized by striking a bad economic bargain). The Gervais Principle speaks to the dynamics between these three groups with the Office as allegory.

Sociopaths (who wield all the power) promote over-performing Losers into middle management thereby making them Clueless. They maneuver the Clueless to escape their own risk. For example, Michael was a top sales person before becoming a Clueless manager.

Sociopaths turn under-performers into Sociopaths and fast-track them to positions of power. Losers that are self-aware (knowing they made a bad economic bargain) seek opportunities to raise their standing before they run out of time and get fired. For example, Ryan the intern who is bad at sales (his actual job) and manipulates his way into management position by David (a Sociopath).

The Losers are left to fend for themselves. They find fulfillment outside of work and do just enough to get by. This is exemplified by Stanley, who knowingly plays along to the delusions of the Clueless and does enough work to never get fired.

Read the essay.

See also:

• Performance management is a way of preventing the rise of low-performing Losers into Sociopaths in positions of power
• Peter Principle a more popular (and simplistic) explanation of organizational incompetence
• This theory can be thought of as an example of the principal-agent problem, the organization is not properly incentives to counteract the bad behaviors of promoting low-performing Losers and senior managers manipulating the Clueless.

Building a business of any size takes substantial effort and is stressful. Just because a business is smaller doesn’t mean there is less work to do and less issues to deal with. If you are going to start a company, might as well strive for it to be a large one.

See also:

• Naval Ravikant mentions this in an interview on his ‘how to get rich’ tweetstorm

At it’s heart, a company is a way of abstracting IP (the things or process of what you create), capital (investment, contributions, bank accounts), liability (separation from owners and employees), and ownership (how much does each person own on what terms).

The way TypeScript adds incidental complexity to using libraries undermines the two most important values of using TypeScript and JavaScript. It makes it harder to use a non-typed library which adds friction to using the wealth of libraries available in the JavaScript ecosystem. It also makes the type system less valuable when you need to hack around poorly typed libraries or incorrect type definitions by casting to the any type.

Inter-operating with libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem from TypeScript introduces incidental complexity due to packaging and types. There are (at least) four different ways to import a library[0] in TypeScript, each with subtle differences. Depending on the way the library is packaged you will need to pick the correct incantation.

To get the benefit of static typing for a non-typed library, you also need to add @types/name-of-lib to your dependencies. Sometimes these are no longer needed when the library adds TypeScript support as did aws-sdk which, depending on what blog post or StackOverflow question you are looking at may or may not tell you.

Finally, types in a library that has TypeScript support can be done poorly. For example, I found a rather unfortunate issue in marked.js because the Tokens union type doesn’t have a common discriminator property. That makes it not possible, or extremely hack-y to find a specific kind of element[1].

[0]

import { Lib } from 'some-lib'
import 'some-lib';
import * as Lib from 'some-lib';
const lib = require('some-lib');

[1]

export function extractMarkdownTitle(md: string): string | null {
  const lexer_output = marked.lexer(md) as marked.TokensList;

  // Hack: This isn't typeable because Tokens is not a descriminating
  // union type (Def and Space don't have a `type` prop)
  let title: any = lexer_output.find((val: any) => {
    // Without casting to `any`, this won't compile
    return val.type === 'heading';
  });

  return title ? title.text : null;
}

A role at a VC firm where you get paid to work on your next startup and help vet deals or give advice to portfolio companies. People don’t apply to be an EIR, they are asked and are typically already successful entrepreneurs that the VC want to invest in early (although there is usually no obligation to invest or accept investment). There’s not much written about this role and it tends to be different across VC firms.

See also:

• So what does an EIR actually do?
• 6 Months, $90,000 and (Maybe) a Great Idea (2010)

Below is a list of tools for networked thought I’ve come across:

In traditional media, writers write and readers read. On the internet, publishing is nearly free and readers can easily respond in comments, forums, blogs, and so on. This leads to more disagreements merely because it’s easier to say something and people tend to get angry when they disagree on the internet.

See also:

• Paul Graham’s essay on How to disagree mentions this and is oddly prescient for being written in 2008

In Shape of Stories, Kurt Vonnegut discusses story arcs as peaks and valleys from good to bad. It reveals that we don’t know enough about real life to judge whether something that happens is a good thing or a bad thing. He uses Hamlet to illustrate—throughout the story each event is neither good nor bad, despite the tragedy (and murder) Hamlet and the world appear no better and no worse.

A lecture from Kurt Vonnegut about how to analyze and critique fictional stories. By graphing the plot along two axes, Good to Bad and Beginning to Entropy, you can visualize the story and compare their shapes to other stories. It also shows that stories seldom tell the truth that we don’t know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

Watch Shape of Stories via YouTube.

See also:

• Story telling is also important for business writing. The Minto Pyramid Principle helps deliver the message, but SCQA could also be thought of as the same axes as the shape of stories.

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Good magic just works. It’s invisible and you quickly forget that it’s there.

Bad magic works sometimes. It’s mysterious and hard to understand.

Good programming abstractions are the right kind of magic. You can depend on them and build on top of them with confidence.

Bad programming abstractions are the wrong kind of magic. It’s equally a mystery when it works as when it doesn’t work. They’re leaky and you end up spending more time cleaning up after the magic than benefiting from it.

The airplane test measures the (often binary) ability to write code in a specified programming language while secluded on an airplane with no internet access. It shows the programming language’s capability to unblock the programmer and is an indicator of productivity.

Typed languages (such as rustlang) fair better because it’s easier to reason about code and jump to a definition when you need to understand what’s going on. However, other contributing factors include the legibility of error messages and stack traces, quality of documentation, quirks in the language, tooling, and whether it is ‘batteries included’. In this way, typed languages can also fail the test (e.g. TypeScript’s quirks with interoperating with JS libraries and Webpack generally requires access to StackOverflow).

Modern websites rely on strict hierarchy of pages to help users navigate. This uses central pages to send users back to once they’ve completed reading an article. However, this rigidity does not optimize for serendipitous discovery and many important pages on a website can be inadvertently orphaned (either because it doesn’t fit neatly into a hierarchy or users don’t know to look for it).

Digital gardens on the other hand eschew strict navigation and rely on hypertext linking to allow a wide range of paths to content in a self-directed way. This comes with a trade off of overall coherence between content nodes.

Read ‘The limits of structure’ by East Gate.

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You can run queries directly on the org-roam database directly (it’s just a sqlite database) to get interesting stats about your Zettelkasten.

The location of the database can be found by evaluating org-roam-db-location.

Note: file names have the date embedded in it formatted as yyyy-mm-dd so taking a substring is the easiest way to group by dates.

(Updated for org-roam v2)

Total notes (not journal entries)

select count(*) from files where file not like '%journal%';

Notes per year (not journal entries)

select substr(files.file, 24, 4) as year, count(files.file)
from files
where file not like '%journal%'
group by year
order by year desc;

Notes per month

select substr(files.file, 24, 7) as month, count(files.file)
from files
group by month
order by month desc;

Links per note

select substr(files.file, 24, 7) as month, round(cast(count(links.source) as real) / cast(count(distinct files.file) as real), 2)
from files
join nodes on files.file=nodes.file
join links on nodes.id=links.source
where links.type = '"id"'
group by month
order by month desc;

Notes per day

select substr(files.file, 24, 7) as month, round(cast(count(files.file) as real) / cast(count(distinct substr(files.file, 24, 10)) as real), 2)
from files
group by month
order by month desc;

Words written for a given year

Counting words written in org-roam

The majority of websites of the ‘old web’ (1990’s) were hand crafted, highly customized places where creators acted more as librarians—carefully maintaining a table of contents and some evergreen content. This all changed with the introduction of Moveable Type, a CMS that took the labor out of publishing content and democratized a minimal, organized, aesthetic.

As a result of Moveable Type, reverse chronological content (blogging) became the majority of the web. This stemmed from the constraints of the software (only one way to sort content), but the effect was profound. A table of contents was replaced with a feed of content. It was far easier to publish new content so that’s what people did.

See also:

• How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy which discusses how blogging caused the end of the ‘old web’
• The Garden and the Stream talks about the Stream as replacing topology (old web) with serialization (blogging, social media)

I’ve now written 500 notes and roughly 84,000 words since May 25, 2020 in my Zettelkasten. Here are a few thoughts and observations.

I started out writing too many notes that were definitions. For example, I would come across an interesting word or concept I want to recall later so I cut a new note for it. The problem with accumulating notes like this is that the collection becomes more of a dictionary which requires rote memorization to be put to use. I have a hard time remembering those notes and connecting them to other notes.

Compared to definitions, notes written as a claim are far more interesting and useful. I find it avoids the wikipedia feel and leads to more creative ideas. I still write some definition notes, but they tend to serve as pointers to a group of related notes via backlinks.

I’m certainly writing a lot more—adding notes at a rate of 1,000 per year[0]. I’ve built a durable habit of writing every morning[1] which I look forward to each day. I can see the daily progress because publishing notes visualizes growing knowledge.

However, I’m not continuously synthesizing these notes into other durable artifacts like essays. There’s some amount of reaping and sowing that I’m missing. I’ll need to make this an explicit goal and set aside some morning writing time to work on essays occasionally.

I have a better mental model for connecting content by adding links as if I am curating a path along a garden. The amount of links per note has noticeably increased over time[2]. I’m also better at spotting individual concepts and ideas so I can appropriately cut a new note. This leads to better connections because it’s easier to connect more specific things together than more general things.

Publishing notes daily has resulted in twice the traffic to my personal site from search engine traffic. The effects of note blogging on SEO make it so I’m constantly extending the long tail of keywords the site is ranked for. This creates a virtuous cycle because my interests are wide and niche which adds more unique keywords which draws more impressions and clicks.

I’ve evolved my workflow for writing and publishing over time to make it easier to contribute across devices (which I wrote about in Zettelkasten, Emacs, and Creative Thinking). It’s complicated, a bit clunky (need to constantly push/pull from a git repo), and would be difficult for others to adopt. This led to me starting a side project to focus more on note blogging and building tools that combine the benefits of a Zettelkasten with publishing.

Finally, it takes some time to ‘get it’. I read somewhere that the benefits of note taking like this don’t kick in until around 500 notes and there is some truth to that. I have a much better idea of what I want to get out of it and I’m seeing evidence that my collection is like a second brain that I can consult when doing my own thinking. Pretty neat!

[0] Notes per month

[1] Notes per day

[2] Links per note

See querying stats from org-roam for how these queries were made.

Due to the consumerist nature of the modern web, we expect a perpetual stream of activity from web content. For example, going to someone’s personal blog and seeing the last post was 2 years ago leaves the impression that it is not relevant and abandoned so it must not have been that good. Another example is open source software. The dreaded ‘Still alive?’ issue implies that the value we assign to something we can consume on the internet is proportional to the frequency it is updated.

See also:

• Reverse chronological content took over the web shows expectations of perpetual activity was not always the case

Adding dates to content like a blog post provides value when the content can best be understood by the relationship with when the content was created. Otherwise having a ‘Posted on: yyyy-mm-dd’ does little more than to signal there is activity here and that you are the kind of person that writes regularly.

Evergreen content does not need a date to be understood and it’s context is derived by the content around it (content as topology rather than content as serialization). In fact, a heuristic for telling if a piece of content is evergreen would be to remove the date and see if it still makes sense to someone in the future.

See also:

• Reverse chronological content took over the web talks about the pitfalls of websites defaulting to a single sort order

Streams are a metaphor for the majority of the Internet we interact with today characterized by time-ordered events that require context to understand.

For example, try going back to a tweet from a few years ago and try to glean it’s full meaning. It requires context—when did it happen, what do we know about the author, what was it in response to, etc.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are the pinnacle of the stream. Content is an argument (not even a dialogue, typically a nameless ‘them’), real-time reactions, and primarily ephemeral.

Gardens are different. There is no singular relationship of elements (i.e. a heterarchy) in a garden, no strict hierarchy or chronology. It emphasizes the reader (or creator) to find their own connections between objects in and draw their own path.

For example, content in a digital garden is evergreen and evolves over time. There are many links between content the creator places to connect meaning and generate context over time. Adding content and connections extends the meaning of what already exists without needing to rewrite it.

As a counter example, consider a blog post. It’s a snapshot in time of a collection of ideas strung together. It’s unlikely to be updated and extended as the author acquires new information. They could write a ‘part 2’ sequel, but this introduces a new strict hierarchy of ideas and requires reading the previous parts to fully understand the context.

Read the essay.

See also:

• Examples of digital gardens
• Digital gardening is a grander vision of Zettelkasten
• Zettelkasten

Since I started publishing my Zettelkasten notes, I’ve noticed a large change in overall search engine traffic. My personal site and notes have doubled in impressions and clicks. Notably I receive more impressions from search engine visitors than I do from tweets from my Twitter account.

I’ve noticed some compounding effects that lead me to believe these effects will continue. As more notes are published along a wider range of topics (I’m naturally curious!), notes rank for more keywords (a very long tail), which increases impressions and clicks which further improves ranking and page authority. Even better, this content is evergreen once it’s indexed by search engines and increases in value over time. This is the exact opposite of tweets—most impressions happen in the first few hours and is unlikely to be found again because they are primarily consumed in a stream.

Digital gardening is a superset of Zettelkasten principles applied to public content. The ethos of gardening is more free form and doesn’t emphasize the experience of the visitor. The reader of a digital garden would benefit from Zettelkasten principles such as atomicity (one concept or idea per note). Content in digital gardens should be structured at the leaf nodes for a more useful visitor experience.

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