Johanna

Even better, forget the $300 number and mandate that it has to increase at a rate pegged to GDP growth. Maybe fix the start date at 2020, and then in year X, one third of the difference between year X GDP and 2020 GDP must be given out as basic income. In theory you should be able to get a UBI of $10,000 per person in a few decades without making... See more

The most impressive people I know care a lot about what people think, even people whose opinions they really shouldn’t value (a surprising numbers of them do something like keeping a folder of screenshots of tweets from haters). But what makes them unusual is that they generally care about other people’s opinions on a very long time horizon—as long... See more

What’s causing the productivity slowdown? The subject is controversial among economists, and many different answers have been proposed. Some have argued that it’s merely that existing productivity measures don’t do a good job measuring the impact of new technologies. Our argument here suggests a different explanation, that diminishing returns to... See more

I don’t care when our employees come to work or what their schedules are. I don’t care where in the world they live (provided they have a great Internet connection). I don’t care how they do the work. I’m not going to micromanage. If you’ve really hired the best, they should be able to prove it with output and show their work.

Most people’s mental models of energy are flawed: they think there’s a ‘tank’ of energy that gets depleted as you spend it. This may be roughly true for physical energy, but mental energy is different: spending mental energy on things that you consider productive or important gives you more mental energy for other things: a positive feedback loop.

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Second order thinkers ask themselves the question “And then what?” This means thinking about the consequences of repeatedly eating a chocolate bar when you are hungry and using that to inform your decision. If you do this you’re more likely to eat something healthy.

Few recruiting messages are as powerful (when true) as “the world needs this, it won’t happen any time soon if we don’t do it, and we are much less likely to succeed if you don’t join.”

To fairly and evenly weed out candidates — and protect your employees’ time — Gupta also recommends assigning a take-home coding test between phone screen one and phone screen two.“This assignment should be a trivial coding problem,” he says. In the past, he’s assigned something that would take a moderately skilled coder 10 minutes to finish.... See more