Andrei Stoica

Arrow is trying to explain why health care — including health insurance — isn’t like other markets. He basically just lists a bunch of reasons why health care is different. These reasons include:

• Health insurance is subject to a lot of information asymmetry — the aforementioned adverse selection, plus “moral hazard” (ie., people with more insurance

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Coding is a culture of blurters. This can yield fast decisions, but it penalizes people who need to quietly compose their thoughts, rewarding fast-twitch thinkers who harrumph efficiently. Programmer job interviews, which often include abstract and meaningless questions that must be answered immediately on a whiteboard, typify this culture. Regular... See more

“The fast shall inherit the earth.” This was previously printed in the Facebook internal book they’d give new employees. Now we can read it as “the fast will catch Elon’s attention, which will influence an army of fans to mimetically adopt the message.” Unfortunately that’s not as catchy.

Understanding DFW’s Big Question, do you see why he asks the specific sub-questions he does in each of these profiles?

I guess the point here being that do you see what I mean w/r/t answers just not being that interesting and the questions you ask shaping your reality? No one else would write Federer like DFW did. McPhee, writing about a tennis... See more

Some of Cowen’s theories seem to misunderstand on a fundamental level why people do things at all. Use opportunity cost to your advantage, he enjoins his reader, by scheduling a call halfway through a movie; if you don’t have to reschedule, the film wasn’t worth finishing. Desserts deliver diminishing marginal returns after the first few bites; the... See more

The submersion of an individual’s identity into the mass, into a group identity, is the main thrust of Hoffer’s thesis. He repeatedly makes the point that people do not turn to mass movements because they are inspired or because they are stupid, but because they are bored, searching for a way to exist that allows them to escape an unsatisfactory or... See more