Johanna

Nobody wants to admit to themselves that they’re closed-minded. But the advantages of having that courage are massive. The ability to change your mind is a superpower.

As job tasks get replaced, the same humans might be able to spend their time doing more productive stuff — they’re still employed, and they get paid more (or get paid the same but have more leisure time). Meanwhile, mass automation will increase society’s income, which will increase labor demand and create whole new categories of jobs that these... See more

Sometimes I’ll just ask them a question to see how long it takes to respond. Hiring an unresponsive contractor is a terrible experience so you want to get that out of the way as soon as possible.

To “hire slow, fire fast,” start by being absurdly selective in who you hire.

For hunter-gatherers, chiefs and shamans could, and did, moonlight as foragers and hunters. Overlapping duties preserved a strong sense of community, reinforced by customs and religions that obscured individual differences in strength, skill, and ambition. Shared labor meant shared values.But in industrial economies, lawyers don’t tag in for brain... See more

The guy is amazing and has done great work for me before. Why shouldn’t I show him that I appreciate it? So I emailed him one day and said “hey, I want to do this right and I want you to know I appreciate your work. I’m raising the contract to $6,000.” He didn’t ask for that, I just did it.

The workplace will become more transparent, not less. Workers will know what projects their co-workers are working on at any given time and how this maps to company priorities. They’ll know whether it’s a good time to chat in real-time versus disrupting high-focus time like coding.

You cannot swap one life for that of another. But if friends are primarily attributes, then you could swap two people with the same attributes. Or even get someone else with better attributes.What you cannot do is remove someone from their web of entanglements and replace them with an identical twin. To do so would be to disrupt the networks of... See more