Johanna

Research papers are full of valuable information, including figures, charts, statistical relationships, and references to other papers. Breaking them down into various components and using them at scale could help us train machines for different types of science-related jobs, prompts or queries. Simple questions might be answered with training on... See more

Workers are just inputs to the economic machine. When we create an identity around labor, we’re treating people as mere inputs. But people are more than just inputs. The economy is here to serve us, not the other way around. What matters is what we can get out of the machine. The people’s needs come first. Everything else is secondary. The economy... See more

A lot of the best ideas seem silly or bad initially—you want an idea at the intersection of “seems like bad idea” and “is good idea”. (It’s important to note you need to be contrarian and right, not simply contrarian.)

The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups. A good hard startup is one that will be valuable if it works (not all hard problems are worth solving!).

The standard story about nuclear costs is that radiation is dangerous, and therefore safety is expensive. The book argues that this is wrong: nuclear can be made safe and cheap. It should be 3 c/kWh—cheaper than coal.

So, if good intentions don’t help you reduce mistakes, what does? At Amazon, Gupta learned that the answer is mechanisms — processes that are repeatable, measurable, auditable and improvable.

A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks.