Johanna

To do science, you don’t need to start with the dawn of all human knowledge and then work forward. You start with the current state of knowledge and go from there. Learning the history of science is helpful for shaping your intuitions and giving you perspective, but you don’t actually have to read Darwin, for example, to do evolutionary biology.

If you don’t hire very well, you will not be successful—companies are a product of the team the founders build.

What a fascinating little paragraph on nightmares, dreams, and the nature of consciousness. I could read 10k words on every sentence. So interesting to think about nightmares as our consciousness engine running amok without the braking system of sense data.

What’s causing the productivity slowdown? The subject is controversial among economists, and many different answers have been proposed. Some have argued that it’s merely that existing productivity measures don’t do a good job measuring the impact of new technologies. Our argument here suggests a different explanation, that diminishing returns to... See more

Look for passion. Smart people are passionate about the projects they work on. They get very excited talking about the subject.

“Bursts of high-impact works [are] remarkably universal across diverse domains,” he and his co-authors wrote. Just about everybody has a period in their life when they produce at their best, even if, unlike Aretha, they aren’t pumping out some of the greatest work of the 20th century.

On average, research teams nearly quadrupled in size over the 20th century, and that increase continues today. For many research questions, it requires far more skills, expensive equipment, and a large team to make progress today.

The main problem Rosenzweig describes in the book is that attributes we tend to think cause great performance (culture, leadership, etc.) are often just things that are attributed to companies we already know are high-performing. There’s a Halo around everything they do. How many current high-fliers would ever be described as having a bad culture,... See more

Remote teams need 5x the process. When i say processes, i don’t necessarily mean heavy-handed workflows, piles of paper and someone using a giant stamp confirming every action. I mean “systemized communication and expectations made explicit”.This can be as simple as: “We do check-ins every morning…” “Please before you do X always do Y…” These... See more