Johanna

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.

More democratic norms / tall poppy syndrome . In the past, people celebrated geniuses and would play up their accomplishments in order to have someone to celebrate. Now it’s considered kind of cringe to believe in geniuses, and you should play down their accomplishments, play up the degree to which they depended on lab assistants / collaborators /... See more

The best people in both groups spend a lot of time reflecting on some version of the Hamming question—"what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?” In general, no one reflects on this question enough, but the best people do it the most, and have the best ‘problem taste’, which is some combination of... See more

One other thing about meetings in remote companies: working remotely has made me realize how unimportant and ritualized so many meetings are. Often times, I will get 90% of the way through scheduling a meeting in Google Calendar only to ask myself “can’t we just update each other on this project throughout the week via Slack?” Even staff meetings... See more

I highly recommend using lists. I make lists of what I want to accomplish each year, each month, and each day. Lists are very focusing, and they help me with multitasking because I don’t have to keep as much in my head. If I’m not in the mood for some particular task, I can always find something else I’m excited to do.

1. We asked students to test a specific hypothesis with a dataset: Is BMI related to number of steps? Other students were just asked to analyze the dataset. The students with a specific hypothesis were 3X less likely to see the gorilla in the data! https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-020-02133-w…

Employing people is only worth it when the benefits exceed the costs. Giving people money is never the right reason to create jobs. That’s what basic income is for.

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.