Johanna

The optimal time to make a decision about the candidate is about three minutes after the end of the interview. (...) I ask interviewers to write immediate feedback after the interview, either a “hire” or “no hire”, followed by a one or two paragraph justification. It’s due 15 minutes after the interview ends.

The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. Perhaps most of all, you want to be around people who don’t make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea, and who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves.

This is the fundamental tension: culture vs. math. 1. Management has clearly and consistently shown a greater preference for offices than workers. vs 2. During a downtown, it’s clearly advantageous for zombie-office companies to reduce their footprint

Why is nuclear expensive? I‘m a little fuzzy on the economic model, but the answer seems to be that it‘s in design and construction costs for the plants themselves. If you can build a nuclear plant for around $2.50/W, you can sell electricity cheaply, at 3.5–4 c/kWh. But costs in the US are around 2–3x that.

A lot of extraordinary things in life are the result of things that are first-order negative, second order positive. So just because things look like they have no immediate payoff, doesn’t mean that’s the case. All it means is that you’ll have less competition if the second and third order consequences are positive because everyone who thinks at... See more

These plans fail even though they cheat and give themselves dictatorial power. “End corporate welfare, then redirect the money to UBI!” But if it was that easy to end corporate welfare, wouldn’t people have done it already, for non-UBI related reasons? “We’ll get a UBI by ending corporate welfare” is an outrageous claim. And even the plans that let... See more

What the Fed is actually trying to do here—as opposed to the story it’s telling about what’s happening in the economy—is clear, yet extremely difficult: It is trying to destroy demand just enough to reduce excess inflation but not so much that the economy crashes. This a little bit like trying to tranquilize a raging grizzly bear with experimental... See more