Johanna

When we cut off the supply and discovery of new drugs, it’s like outlawing the electric motor or the idea of a randomized controlled trial. Without drugs, modern people have stopped making scientific and economic progress. It’s not a dead stop, more like an awful crawl. You can get partway there by mixing redbull, alcohol, and sleep deprivation,... See more

Work in ProgressAmerica’s Most Important Economic Storyteller Is ConfusedAn old economy is dying, and a new economy is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monstrously confusing data.By Derek ThompsonAn illustration of the dollar-bill portrait of George Washington shrugging in confusionThe Atlantic; GettyJune 17, 2022About the author: Derek... See more

One trend to keep an eye on is that we’re likely nearing the end of requiring repetitive, unchanging movements for efficient production processes.Nonrepetitive movements are fundamentally an information problem - they require some method of telling a machine the state of the surrounding environment, and what to do depending on what that state is.

The weight of all of this evidence is that low doses of radiation do not cause detectable harm. Little to no cancer, or at least far less than predicted by LNT, is found in the subjects receiving low doses, such as workers operating under modern safety standards, or populations in high-background areas.

There are two possible mistakes you can make — you can either hire the wrong person or fail to hire the right one. None of us like to say no, but you should bias toward the latter. And doing so early in the process, even with limited data, saves time for everyone, including the candidate.

A manufacturing process, once in place, can be repeated thousands or millions of times. But it’s very difficult to decompose a building in such a way that it can be produced by a sequence of repetitive movements, and it’s difficult to mass produce large numbers of identical buildings.

You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How... See more

View candidate sourcing as a long-term investment—you may spend time now with someone that you don’t even talk to about a job for a year or more.