Johanna

The absence of a contingency plan is a fatal design flaw for UBI. Top-down complexity has a cost. If UBI fails 10–30 years into the future we may have a significant population percentage that has never done any work and suddenly needs to. Because any UBI program failure would likely be a result of running out of money, it could be catastrophic for ... See more

Among many memorable events, I saw a talk by David Allison about his efforts to correct simple statistical mistakes in the published literature. He would notice a clear and obvious error, like a claimed interaction that wasn’t actually tested properly. He would then send a polite email to the authors to explain the situation so it could be correcte... See more

It’s also important to think about what you’re well-suited for. This is hard to do with pure introspection; ideally you can ask a mentor or some people you’ve worked with what you’re particularly good at. I’ve come to believe that founder/company fit is as important as product/market fit.

To show how this might work, let’s take multiple sclerosis as an example. It is a devastating condition in need of better therapies. When testing new drugs in animal studies, researchers measure and report a number of different metrics, including the effects of drug candidates on inflammation, on damage to nerve fibres (axon loss), on damage to the... See more

The idea that you can reinvent yourself each hour of the day is liberating. We get stuck in ruts and tell ourselves that we cannot change because we are too old, too young, too poor, too tied down. These are only excuses. They absolve us from responsibility.

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.

Software entrepreneur Ray Ozzie has a specific technique for handling potential interruptions — the four-hour rule. When he’s working on a product, he never starts unless he has at least four uninterrupted hours to focus on it. Fractured blocks of time, he discovered, result in more bugs, which later require fixing.