Johanna

Giving everyone a set amount every year won’t create the highway systems, subway systems, nuclear power plants, hoover dams, space programs, water filtration systems, and more that we need as a society overall. In fact, if the total UBI system cost as a percent of tax receipts becomes too large, UBI may preclude these things from ever being built.... See more

Hire friends and friends of friends. Go after these people like crazy to get them to join. Some other candidate sources are ok, but I always got bad results from technical recruiters.

In a way, basic income as an automation solution is both too much and not enough. It’s too much of a solution for the problem of long-run mass technological unemployment, primarily because that’s a fake problem that hasn’t happened yet and likely never will. But it’s not enough of a solution for the temporary dislocation that automation will, in... See more

Poor people’s two largest expenses are housing and transportation.Guaranteed jobs have to be somewhere. Most of them will be in big cities, because that’s where everybody is. The ones in the country will be few and far between.That means to get to your government-mandated job, you’ll either need to live in the big city or have a car. Living in the... See more

Among many memorable events, I saw a talk by David Allison about his efforts to correct simple statistical mistakes in the published literature. He would notice a clear and obvious error, like a claimed interaction that wasn’t actually tested properly. He would then send a polite email to the authors to explain the situation so it could be... See more

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:1. Become the best at one specific thing.2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.