Johanna
@johannaeinsiedler
Notoriously Curious, Data Science Nerd & Entrepreneurship Advocate
Author of CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter with hand picked recommendations for your information diet
Johanna
The picture this survey paints is bleak: Over the past century, we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgement, we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient.
Patrick Collison • Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck
How to Drop Out
ranprieur.com
When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It works like this: When you were three years old, if your parents weren't too bad, you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun activities, like singing songs and playing games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, and severed from the life inside you. If you were "rebellious", you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, and when your rebellion ended in suffering and failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be trusted. If you were "obedient", you simply crushed the life inside you almost to death.
Freedom means you're not punished for saying no. The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom, after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing you're supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because nobody is forcing you to finish and it's not really what you want to do. It could take months, if you're lucky, or more likely years, before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your actions as valuable.
Good ideas are getting harder to find. In 300 BC, if you noticed that the water level in your bathtub got higher when you got into it, you were allowed to run through the streets shouting “eureka!” and declare yourself to be a genius. Now you would need some 400 page mathematical proof drawing on the topology of eight-dimensional manifolds in order... See more
Scott Alexander (slatestarcodex) • Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring
The housing boom & office bust aren't just downstream of the same causes—pandemic, remote work—but also they're mutually reinforcing.
With the "donut effect," you get a hollowing out of urban real estate (esp. offices), pushing value to residential RE in suburbs, small towns.
nametwitter.comThere’s often an initial apprehension that comes from welcoming a lot of new hires into the fold. But there’s also something deeper. What these comments get at is the sense that there’s a certain “unscalable” spirit from a team’s earlier, scrappier days — and that each new addition represents a slow chipping away at the je ne sais quoi that forged... See more
First Round Capital • How Gusto Built Scalable Hiring Practices Rooted in Tradition
It’s become easier to be busy, but harder to be productive. To work on the right things at the right time.
Substack • Hardly Working
If you are successful, it’s almost always because some people went out of their way to help you. You have a moral obligation to pay it forward.
Sam Altmantwitter.com
Hiring Advice and
Anything meaningful takes five years to do, whether that ’s getting a company off the ground or mastering a skill.If we start working at 20, that’s 60 productive years — or 12 five-year blocks to do new things, then move on.Instead of living one life or career, why not live a dozen instead?This ebb and flow of interest and desire feels natural to... See more