Johanna

Happy in spite of. Happiness is not a passive condition dependent on external events, nor is it the result of our personalities – just being born a happy person. Instead, happiness requires a conscious shift in outlook, in which one chooses – daily – optimism over pessimism, hope over despair.

You need a mission in order to hire well. In addition to wanting to work with a great team, candidates need to believe in your mission—i.e., why is this job more important than any of the others they could take? Having a mission that gets people excited is probably the best thing you can do to get a great team on board before you have runaway... See more

“Our guiding philosophy is that hiring is really just a search for alignment,” says Reeves. “Companies don't convince people to join them, and candidates don't convince companies to hire them. Both parties are searching for alignment to figure out, ‘Can we go do something great together?’”

If knowing the truth about some result is important to you, don’t just take someone’s word for it. Don’t leave it up to the rest of the world to do this work; we’re all bunglers, you should know that. If you can, you should try it for yourself.

The right question to ask isn’t: Can we afford a basic income? The right question is: What’s the optimal level of basic income for our economy? How much basic income can our economy handle without causing inflation or other problems? To what extent will various taxes and other economic policies increase or decrease that amount?

No blinding. Experiments must have a test and a control arm. “Blinding” is when the researcher doesn’t know whether the subject they are analyzing (be it proteins, cells, mice, or human subjects) is the test or the control. Results are more reliable if the researcher is blinded, and this is standard part of clinical trials, but is often not... See more

But there’s a different point of view, a point of view in which science is an endless frontier, where there are always new phenomena to be discovered, and major new questions to be answered. The possibility of an endless frontier is a consequence of an idea known as emergence.(...) The mere fact of emergent levels of behavior doesn’t necessarily... See more