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:
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 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 -50100 (flip 1s to 0 and 0 to 1)01010101 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.
Being on video conference calls repeatedly is exhausting. This phenomena is believed to be caused by the brain working overtime because we can tell the other person is an imperfect projection and reading body language is difficult. This became into the national consciousness during COVID-19, where much of the workforce was forced to work from home and use video conference tools to communicate.
A habit that helps make acquiring new habits easier. For example, the habit of removing the option of not doing something you need to do decreases the mental energy to take the desired action and thereby create the habit. This is related to the ‘make it easy’ concept in Atomic Habits, but rather than designing changes to per habit, it’s an overall discipline which makes everything easier.
Economist Alex Tabarok argues that pundits should be required to bet on their opinions and predictions. By putting skin in the game, they are forced to tie their success with the quality of their predictions. Put another way, listen to the people that have the most to lose from getting a prediction wrong.
Startups display many properties of a full blown economy sped up many by many times. You could study many phenomena much faster by watching a fast growing startup from the inside. In governance, how control structures change from flat democratic organization to hierarchical. Stagnation as the number of people increases and efficiency decreases.
If every time a group of people need to work together they need to agree on how they work together, who is involved, and expectations, the cost of cooperation would grow with the number of people (possibly exponentially). By automating established norms, practices, and processes, the cost of coordination goes down because you are no longer solving the same problems repeatedly. See also:
In a conversation about innovation with Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel made the point that we can always do more with more and conversely, less with less. Innovation is when we can do more with less. For example, finding more oil in the ground and extracting it is not innovation, producing more energy per barrel is.
In order for an economy to prosper, there must be a high degree of trust in the system. For instance, without trust that someone will uphold their side of a contract, only limited kinds of transactions can occur. If there is trust that a contract will be enforced then there is higher assurance the other party will make good, making it possible for more complex arrangements and entities outside the system can more easily participate. See also:
Prior to the 1900s, people did not believe an animal could go extinct–they assumed nature was endless. It wasn’t until the passenger pigeon disappeared that the U.S. public became aware and top of mind. When President Theodore Roosevelt complained that he spent months without seeing a bison during his many hunting expeditions it kicked off an unheard of conservation movement to prevent the extinction of bison. It’s believed this was only made possible because of the public recognition of the passenger pigeon’s demise that the movement was made possible.
Refers to the Leo Strauss notion that serious writers communicate ideas through many layers of meaning and abstraction which simultaneously protects the author from the ruling regime and attracts the right readers. A ‘Straussian reading’ or interpretation is extracting the hidden subtext and stating it openly. See also:
The non-secular Buddha, who teaches the practice of meditation and mindfulness through a more academic lens. See also:
There are two different kinds of fun. Type I fun is when you are having fun and know you are having fun while doing it. Type II fun is when you are miserable doing it, but in hindsight it was fun. Building something, startups are an example of type II fun. See also:
Capitalism has gone through several phases 1) local markets bounded by limited mobility 2) globalization where markets expanded beyond borders now 3) markets saturated bounded by consumption. Universal basic income increases the overall level of available consumption by providing everyone with the ability to participate in the demand side of the economy. Read the blog post from Tim Robinson.
A policy of providing regular income to people who are not working or are unable to work to meet basic needs.
People who recently uncover an idea tend to be the most zealous in promoting and defending it because it becomes part of their identity and identity is a powerful motivation for behaviors. For example, an engineer that recently learns and implements a microservices architecture that is outspoken that it’s the one true way for building large systems, but has only used it to implement their personal blog. See also:
Something you focus on seems more important than it actually is. This is apparent if you consider that at any moment there are many problems to solve, but the one you are thinking about is the one that tends to get solved. This is a form of availability bias and can cause you to over value something when making a decision. See also:
In plate tectonics, all of the interesting effects like mountain formation, earthquakes, happen on the edge of the plates. This is also a useful analogy for any field where the more interesting work happens on the bleeding edge. See also:
The conceptualization of long periods and how they fit into our lives which was originated from studying geological strata. Realizing that time is longer than we think was problematic in the 18th-19th century–the earth is not ~6,000 years old, there are no artifacts of humans in geological strata that were uncovered during the industrial revolution, even the dinosaurs had to be conceived of. Darwin once said time is inconceivable, yet articulated evolution as the product of small changes over long stretches. It can be powerful to grasp inconceivable lengths of time. See also:
A product team or organization that moves slowly (e.g. reviews, gatekeepers, heavy process) in introducing changes moves slower over time. As slowness increases and the chance of success remains constant, then each failure is more expensive. This leads to a negative feedback loop where more slowness is introduced to try and guarantee a positive outcome.
Make a little progress on your most important goals every day, even if it’s something small. Any time you let things slip, it’s easier to slip again and eventually it becomes a habit. The rule of no zero days prevents that and provides evidence of your changing identity every day. See also:
There is a tendency to write a problem statement as the problem you want to solve (i.e. the solution). For example, “We give users no guidance on X” is unlikely to be the problem statement rather than “users are confused”. The former is a solution disguising as a problem and the latter is actually the problem which may have many other solutions. A solution described as a problem is self-referential and can be used to justify anything. See also: