Johanna

Your internet is not as fast as it could be. Does that matter as long as you can load this article? Arguably not. Our world runs on the functional, not the perfect.

Now that drugs are illegal, only a small percentage of the population really has reliable access to them — the rich and powerful. This is a problem because drugs only seem to unlock a great creative potential in a small number of people. (...) Not everyone needs drugs to have great breakthroughs. “I do not do drugs,” said Salvador Dalí, “I am... See more

If you’re five or 500 people, hire as many originals as you can. Yes, there are risks of hiring too many originals — but it’s even riskier to hire too few.

1. We asked students to test a specific hypothesis with a dataset: Is BMI related to number of steps? Other students were just asked to analyze the dataset. The students with a specific hypothesis were 3X less likely to see the gorilla in the data! https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-020-02133-w…

As work becomes more like life, it also becomes more of life.

Certain features of the modern academic system, like underpaid PhDs, interminably long postdocs, endless grant-writing drudgery, and clueless funders have lowered productivity. The 1930s academic system was indeed 25x more effective at getting researchers to actually do good research.

If you criticize X to Y, Y wonders whether you criticize him to others as well. This problem can increase to the extent your criticism is biting and on the mark.