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.

While it might seem like being stressed or anxious is binary, it’s more like a sum. Each stimulus accumulates even if they appear separate and unconnected e.g. personal vs work stress.

The accumulation raises the temperature of your emotional thermometer and each additional stimulus feels larger than it is making it difficult to do anything. That’s why it’s surprising that something seemingly so small feels outrageously difficult or causes you to ‘snap’.

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

A manager is constantly sythesizing information into useful direction and feedback to the team.

For example, in performance management you are taking a body of work and extracting useful feedback. In team discussions and meetings, you are fascilitating discussions by making sure the important information is distilled and follow-up actions happen.

Without the ability to synthesize vast amounts of disparate information the team can feel unfocused or unclear in what they need to do to be successful.

See also:

• Engineering management

The platonic ideal of technology and human interaction occurred during the summer of 2016 when everyone was playing Pokémon Go. As a location-based game, people were suddenly gathering in the same places with something in common to talk about and do together.

Learning through association of a behavior with rewards and punishment. We tend to do more of the things that make us feel good rather than feel bad.

See also:

• Atomic Habits which talks about designing for establishing good habits and stopping bad habits as a way of piggybacking off of operant conditioning (although I don’t think the term is ever mentioned in the book).

Trade flows can be predicted based on the proximity of two places and size of their respective economies. While not very detailed, it has shown to be very successful in it’s predictions that it is still used today, more than 50 years after it was introduced.

Distance makes some intuitive sense, if trade costs anything, merchants would aim to reduce that cost. But, what underlies that is also potentially cultural similarities and language for doing business.

See also:

• A-Star algorithm which computes the shortest path between two points based on a cost function. (Could this be used along with the gravity equation as a predictor of trade routes?)

A possible explanation to the Fermi Paradox can be found in energy economics. As a civilization progresses the cost of producing energy decreases which also reduces the cost of a world-ending event such as nuclear war. The pessimistic view is that civilizations eventually reach a point where they destroy themselves and therefore never make it to the point where they can achieve interplanetary communication or contact.

See also:

• Tyler Cowen mentions this in an interview with Steven Pinker who took the more optimistic viewpoint that violence is limited to the number of people who are willing to participate not the cost of energy.
• Energy consumption grows in lockstep with economic growth

A pathfinding algorithm for finding an optimal path within a graph between two nodes.

A common way of representing signed integers (can be positive or negative) in computers. You can invert the sign of any number (except 0) by taking the complement of the number and adding 1.

For example using 4 bits:

• 1011 is the binary representation of -5
• The complement is 0100 (flip 1s to 0 and 0 to 1)
• Adding 1 to the complement is 0101
• 0101 is the binary representation of 5

A team explores the solution space of a set of pre-prepared problem statements or scenarios by sketching out different approaches that solve it. This helps to kick start the product discovery phase by exploring many different solutions simultaneously with minimal effort. Sometimes this reveals new problems or constraints that have not been uncovered yet.