Amit Cohen

When I was at Google, my very first promotion from Eng 1 to Eng 2 got rejected after 2 years in the role. The feedback from the promo committee was “work on more impactful projects”. I was disappointed, but I also learned that “I’ll just do what I’m told and I’ll get promoted” is simply not true. I needed to rethink my approach.

The feedback from... See more

So it’s useful to ask what absolute power would reveal about Israel and Hamas. In other words, what would each side do if it had nukes and its enemies didn’t? Based on Hamas’s history, and its charter, which calls for the total obliteration of Israel, we can be confident they’d nuke Tel Aviv. And yet, if Israel had nukes, they wouldn’t nuke... See more

The very smartphone or laptop you may be using to read this is the result of thousands of minds, all thinking together about what it takes to extract raw materials from the Earth, assemble everything into the singular shape you see now, imbue it with the properties of computational power, and cleverly market the resulting device so your hard-earned... See more

This is why the people who score well on intelligence tests and win lots of chess games are no happier than the people who flunk the tests and lose at chess: well-defined and poorly defined problems require completely different problem-solving skills. Life ain’t chess! Nobody agrees on the rules, the pieces do whatever they want, and the board... See more