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).

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.

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.

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 interpretations—viruses are by definition not a living thing—and so it is more of a vehicle for one’s ideology.

See also:

• Slavoj Žižek 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.

Seeing patterns or interpreting meaning in randomness that is not truly there. For example, seeing faces in rock formations on the moon or imagining a pattern in static noise.

Collaboration is low-bandwidth if the mediums in which groups of people coordinate require little resources.

For example, face-to-face collaboration is high-bandwidth in that it requires parties to be in the same place at the same time with no latency between them and transmits information instantaneously using verbal and non-verbal (e.g. body language, whiteboards, etc) communication. Where as sharing memos asynchronously is low-bandwidth collaboration in that it is not tightly coupled with time (read it when you have time) and relies exclusively on a single medium (written communication) to transmit information.

Both forms can be effective, but in different situations. Working on a distributed team necessitates low-bandwidth collaboration for processes to work smoothly, but things like design work is more efficient with high-bandwidth collaboration to get feedback quickly and be creative.

Learning a programming language that is immature and substantially different from what’s commonly used in the industry makes you faster at programming, specifically debugging and unblocking. These skills generalize to any programming and make you faster at ‘figuring things out’ next time something unexpected happens.

For example, rust or clojure are significantly different from common languages like Java or Ruby that you can’t rely on previous experience to fumble your way through writing it (like JavaScript). Errors and tooling tend to be worse and often obscure (e.g. clojure’s error messages). This forces you to learn the language deeper to understand what’s going on and read much more code (e.g. reading source code of the language itself or a particular library).

When working remotely, teams rely on low-bandwidth collaboration (e.g. video conferencing). It’s difficult to do certain kinds of creative work that involves fiddling and rapid iteration like product design. To make up for it, tools used need to be exceptionally fast at producing a change (e.g. pixels on a screen, reloading code) that a group can react to otherwise it amplifies the friction of low-bandwidth collaboration.

See also:

• Remote native companies

From a talk by Bret Victor where he talks about the principle of getting immediate feedback in a tight loop with whatever you are building. A good analogy is analog instruments—you strum a guitar and immediately get the result and the vibrations. He also talks about the need for better creative tools that support this principle. Programming in particular suffers from a disjointed creative experience that makes it hard to fiddle around and see what you are doing.

See also:

• Inventing on Principle (transcript)

Baumeister and Tice introduced the concept that willpower is a finite resource that can be exhausted when used because it requires mental energy. The original experiments involved a willpower depleting task that requires self-control (e.g. don’t eat that cookie) followed by a task that requires a lot of mental effort (e.g. a quiz). They found that participants performed better when they were not first given the willpower depleting task.

See also:

• Ego depletion theory has been debunked—failed to reproduce in large scale experiments and meta analysis found flaws in the interpretation of findings.
• Operant conditioning as a possible alternative explanation where the priority of a reward changes based on other motivations

A command line interface for a web application that seamlessly blends text based user input and graphical UI elements for output. This affords a highly productive keyboard-based interface (rather than point and click) which is familiar to developers.

Doing things fast has more primary and second-order benefits than we realize which makes it hard to conceptualize its full value. As a simple example, consider how we evaluate products by how completely they solve the problem. If you remove the temporal component, the value of the solution drops to zero—a solution is useless if it’s not available in a sensible amount of time.

Now factor in the value of exceeding your expectation for a sensible amount of time. Then factor in the likelihood of doing it again because it’s fast. Then repurpose the time saved towards working on something else that is valuable.

The reason there are far fewer engineering management blogs compared to software development blogs not because there is a small supply of managers who can write blogs, but because managers are secretly worried they are doing it completely wrong (imposter syndrome).

Unlike engineering blogs, managers don’t tend to write up how something went totally wrong with managing people lest they reveal too much or make themselves look bad.

There’s also not a strong impetus to experiment. Experimental management sounds about as bad as experimental accounting.

See also:

• Management is kind of like bond management as in it’s a negative art
• Engineering management

Hot iron is rage and emotion. Cold iron is calculating and unwavering. When they face off together, cold iron tends to prevail.

See also:

• Malazan book of the fallen where thos expression comes from in discussing the difference between military leaders e.g. Coltaine and Dujek are cold iron where Korbolo Dom is hot iron.

Emotion feels like it has extra meaning to us and demands our attention. However, everything arises in consciousness so we can define emotion as an energy. Because we find evidence for whichever mindset we have, doing so strips the extra meaning we assign to emotion. In that way, it’s no more a sensation than an ache in your knee.

People prefer situations where they know the risk. In experiments ran by Daniel Ellsberg, participants were asked to bet on a known 10% chance to win and an unknown chance to win (which was actually 90%). People tend to choose to bet on the 10% option.

This is not considered risk aversion, but ambiguity aversion. People did not bet on the unknown option because it could be less than 10%.

See also:

• Bayes' Theorem might have helped people reason about the likelihood of the unknown odds
• Game theory

In mindfulness, calling attention to anything that enters consciousness has the effect of bringing you back to the present moment rather than lost in thought or dwelling on something. Since everything arises in consciousness, this can be practiced any time, not just during focused meditation sessions.

A free/libre text editor that has so much functionality that it’s often joked about being an operating system that has an ok text editor.

See also:

• org-mode, an emacs package for organizing your life in plain text
• Emacs is the ultimate editor building material

There are more people in the U.S. dying of COVID-19 per day than WWII and the number of total deaths will likely exceed the total U.S. combat deaths from WWII.

See also:

• Blog post comparing COVID-19 and WWII

An exercise to enumerate all of the ways a project could go wrong. As a prompt, imagine the project has failed, what happened and why? This helps to uncover possible issues that can be prioritized ahead of time to achieve a more certain outcome.

See also:

• Engineering management

All thoughts, senses, and perception arises in the same place, one’s consciousness. In that way, the visual field is no different than thoughts and so things one thinks of as outside of the body and inside the body are actually the same. This is a foundational concept for mindfulness as taught by Sam Harris.

Signaling is often the underlying motivation for our behaviors. We make visible our values to both the in-group and out-groups in ways such as buying a luxury automobile (to signal wealth) or posting a flattering image of ourselves on vacation. Products and services can be viewed as selling signaling as the underlying value to users. For example Fortnite, which is free to play, sells costumes and emotes which have no affect the ability to win the game and are purely sold as a form of signaling.

Read the blog post

See also:

• Identity is a powerful motivation for behaviors

Robinhood is linked to recent events like the stock price of Hertz skyrocketing despite going bankrupt or Kodak jumping 1,000% on news of a pivot to drug manufacturing. By displaying stocks other users are buying/have bought (a simple way of consumerizing stock picking), they’ve inadvertently created a ‘momentum algorithm’ that, simply by displaying popularity more people buy and drive the price up.

See also:

• Money Stuff that suggests how COVID-19 has created millions of bored people looking for entertainment by betting on stocks

Behavioral change, such as forming a new habit, can be motivated by how it reflects your identity (both positively and negatively)–we do things that provide evidence for who we are.

For example, identifying with being a healthy person means the actions you take will be more likely to reflect that. It’s not that you like to workout it’s that you are a fit person and that’s what fit people do.

See also:

• Atomic Habits