• Developer Minded Users Over Value Building From Scratch

    When given the option to start with something pre-built, developer minded users are skeptical they won’t have enough control over the implementation and run into a critical limitation or burden. This leads to the impulse to build using the lowest level control they can (e.g. API integration). However, it’s often the case that they under estimate the cost of building and maintaining their customized solution.

    Examples:

    • Building a checkout flow that converts well, is bug-free, supports methods users want to pay with, coupons, invite codes, prevents common user errors (e.g. address typos), etc. is actually quite a lot of work over a longer time horizon.

  • Developer Minded

    Users that think about your product in terms of how it will be used and what they need it to do. They imagine implementing the product and the downstream effects (like ongoing maintenance). Experience colors the developer-minded userβ€”bad experiences in the past brings in additional decision criteria and expectations.

    See also:


  • White Fragility

    White people respond with outrage over any allegation, perceived or actual, of racism because they see racist as synononymous with bad people who hurt others. This narrow view contributes to being closed off to the idea of systemic racism because it allows white people to say it’s not them it’s bad people.

    Not understanding socialization

    White people don’t view race as an important characteristic of themselves and dismissive of the experience of people of color.

    Individualism and objectivity contribute to this and make it difficult to acknowledge societal and systemic issues and tend to blame the individual for failures.

    Individuality prevents reflection on group membership (e.g. rich/poor, young/old) and unearned advantages. Group membership conflicts with objectivity–we would need to acknowledge we don’t see the world objectively, but through a group’s cultural lens.


  • Colonizing Mercury Is a Better Prospect Than Colonizing Mars

    Mercury is a better option for colonization than Mars because of the abundance of solar and thermal energy and availability of water.

    Mars has less available water and would require more reliance on nuclear energy because there is significantly less solar energy and heat. This would eventually require mining although Mars is believed to have less uranium than Earth. If energy is costly and natural resources are scarce, prospects of building a sustainable colony for a large group would be very challenging.

    Read the article


  • Polymorphism

    A way of expressing similar, but different objects. For example in object oriented programming you might have a Vehicle class that specifies a method to move and any method that operates on a Vehicle can call the move method. However, move might be implemented differently for classes that inherit Vehicle e.g. an Airplane or a Submarine.


  • Karura

    Uber drivers in Kenya call it ‘riding Karura’ when you use the app to match with a driver, cancel the ride, then paying the driver a pre-negotiated amount in cash.

    The term comes from the nearby Karura forest which is a popular taxi pickup point. It also loosely means ‘law of the jungle’ where you do what you need to do to provide for yourself and family.

    This is a form of disintermediation that cuts Uber out of the value chain so the driver can earn more take home pay per ride.

    See also:

    • This American Life 713: Made to Be Broken where they talk about rules that are broken for good and bad reasons.

  • Trust Models

    Describes different systems that require reliance on others by plotting across two axesβ€”how many people need to behave correctly out of how many for the system to work.

    Examples:

    • 1 of 1 is the traditional centralized modelβ€”you rely on a single entity to behave well e.g. Google
    • N of N every actor needs to act as expected for things to work
    • N/2 of N is blockchain where the majority of miners are honest
    • 1 of N is a load balancer with liveness checkingβ€”only 1 of many need to be operating as expected to work
    • Few of N there are many actors and as a small fixed number act as expected
    • 0 of N there is no reliance like checking hashes yourself for validity

    See also:


  • Spiritual Materialism

    New-practitioners adopting the practice of meditation and mindfulness has a tendency to coincide with a change of identity. Outward signs like wearing buddhist bracelets or behaving differently or even discussing the positive experiences they have had with others is an attempt to raise one’s status (i.e. I’m superior to you because I’ve found spirituality). It’s counter to the practice because it contributes to reinforcing the self and can be harmful to making progress. This was the impetus from removing ‘streaks’ from the Waking Up app (see signaling as a service).


  • Principal-Agent Problem

    When a person acts on behalf of others they may act in their self-interest. This may be counter to the best interest of those they act on behalf of (principals) because of diverging interests and asymmetric information (agent knows something the principals don’t). Examples include politicians, CEO’s, brokers, even doctors, etc.


  • Metta

    Love and kindness meditation where you concentrate on visualizing someone you know being purely happy and reciting phrases to with them well. This practice uses the concentration on others to practice mindfulness (similar to focusing on the breath).


  • Uncanny Valley

    An object’s likeness that is very similar to another, but slightly off which evokes an eerie negative reaction. This happens with robots/dolls or video game characters that are meant to be hyper realistic, but fall short in capturing the richness of a face. Humans are so good at noticing and detecting the slightest differences that the replica needs to be near perfect.

    See also:

    • It’s hard to imagine a metaverse that aims for 100% realism.

  • COVID-19 Is a Vehicle of Fantasmic Projection

    The virus and pandemic of COVID-19 serves as a container for people to project their own fears, beliefs, and ascribed meaning. For example, some take COVID-19 as a sign from Mother Nature that we are overstepping and it is some sort of balancing. These are highly irrational interpretationsβ€”viruses are by definition not a living thingβ€”and so it is more of a vehicle for one’s ideology.

    See also:

    • Slavoj Ε½iΕΎek who discusses the philosophy of ideology and made this point during a podcast.
    • Apophenia, the general concept of seeing patterns that are not really there.