Johanna

The rate at which you learn and progress in the world depends on how willing you are to weigh the merit of new ideas, even if you don’t instinctively like them. Perhaps especially if you don’t like them.

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

Critically, we need to be much more strategic in the way we use published research findings (from the lab) to inform what we do next (e.g. clinical trials). We need to combine and integrate — systematically — the full granularity of research claims and their provenance to provide a richness of detail to our understanding. This process of... See more

So I think efforts like Hoel’s to find the One Thing That Went Wrong in producing geniuses are doomed to fail. But even if I’m wrong, aristocratic tutoring isn’t that One Thing: there are too many counterexamples.

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. (...) By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to... See more

There's another trait on the side which I want to talk about; that trait is ambiguity. It took me a while to discover its importance. Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can... See more

Anyone has the right to move. When we think about mobility, we also have to think about immobility. Who doesn’t get to move and why? We need to look at the practical and systemic reasons that stop people from getting to the places they need to go.

Take a chance. People in their 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond endorse taking risks when you’re young, contrary to a stereotype that elders are conservative. Their message to young people starting out is “Go for it!” They say that you are much more likely to regret what you didn’t do than what you did. As one 80-year old, successful entrepreneur told me:... See more

If you do your job well you will have a lot more inbound for remote roles. This is good because you have more people to choose from, this can also be bad because it might overwhelm you.