Johanna

If you want a global community to use your software, the world should be helping to build that software, too.

If flying cars have a near-term future, it’s probably not urban. Rural areas—where commutes are long and interruptive skyscrapers are scarce—are the more likely initial setting for airborne technology. Once drones and flying cars prove out in Idaho, perhaps they will migrate to Manhattan. Or not. Flying cars might ultimately be the rare Davos dream... See more

You will not get 100% of your hires right. When it’s obviously not working, it’s unlikely to start working. It’s better for everyone involved to part ways quickly, instead of hanging on to unrealistic dreams that it’s going to get better.

It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction. Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored. So think about it more!

If knowing the truth about some result is important to you, don’t just take someone’s word for it. Don’t leave it up to the rest of the world to do this work; we’re all bunglers, you should know that. If you can, you should try it for yourself.

Pretty soon, it becomes surprisingly easy to fill a full work day simply responding to whatever pops up instead of intentionally working on the highest priority things. We can easily fall into the trap that I described in the intro where we outsource our prioritization with whatever comes up.Without a trusted way of saying to ourselves and our... See more

Is a person with two children and a gambling addiction better off with food stamps and housing vouchers, or with UBI payments?

I call this the deluge of crappy papers. A recent article in Nautilus comes up with a more visually-arresting term - “zombie science”. This is apt, because zombies eat brains. Zombie science also consumes brains, or specifically, brain’s attention. Scientist’s time is one of the most precious resources we have and more and more is being wasted... See more