Johanna

Basic jobs don’t help the disabled. (...) First, the disability application process is a mess. Imagine the worst DMV appointment you’ve ever had to obtain the registration to a sketchy old car you got from a friend, then multiply it by a thousand – then imagine you have to do it all while being too disabled to work. (...) Second, disability is... See more

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

After you figure out your vision and get product-market fit, you should probably be spending between a third and a half of your time hiring.

No small number of economists are hard at work studying how to bring the economy to full employment. But what these economists are forgetting is that full employment is not the same thing as full output. Ideally, we’d want to maximize what we’re getting out of the economy rather than what we’re putting into it. Full employment just means we’re... See more

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.

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.