blueyes

My current version of "it's not who you know, it's ..." ends with "it's who wants to work with you again." Which is another way of saying that whether you're moving up, down or sideways on a job, doing good work and treating people professionally goes a hell of a long way to increasing your luck surface later on.

rule of thumb: questions in a headline precede articles without answers.

The most dangerous delusions are high-status delusions.

"Reading and writing more" are just aspirations. Those don't translate well to new behaviors. BJ Fogg (Stanford prof, behavioral scientist) lays out how to build new behaviors in Tiny Habits. You need to make them easy and attach the easy thing to something you already do regularly. (When I sit down to lunch, I read one page...) https://tinyhabits.com/

Secondly, your mind is interfering with its own work. Tim Gallwey talks about this in the Inner Game of Tennis (which is not really about tennis! ;). Your critic is not allowing you to "run hot" and put down some words that are less than perfect. It would be helpful to find something to focus your mind on, a simple count, like key strokes or word count. Alternatively, there's the practice of Morning Pages from the Artist's Way. Just let yourself write anything for a while. It's not for publication. You need to open the gates and you can do that by lowering the stakes involved with putting a word on the page.

Inner Game

https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...

Artists Way

https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th-Anniversary/dp/01431...

I wrote about some other stuff here that helps.

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-...

I play this game.

https://www.endeavorotc.com

Duke replicated Gazzaley's results.

The first section of his book is good at explaining attention:

https://www.amazon.com/Distracted-Mind-Ancient-Brains-High-T...

There's a tautological undercurrent to this piece. Matt Levine is rare because he has certain characteristics, which are rare.

It misses a larger point which is that advertisers pay for readers who are interested in financial content, and they tend to pay less in most other areas of coverage. So other industries do not produce Matts as easily, or takes bets on writers to see if they work well driving people into the wide end of the funnel.

In the case of Bloomberg, it's a little more nuanced than ads, since the company treats content as a loss leader to make people aware of the financial data it sells through its terminal.

Matt Levine exists because Bloomberg can charge more than $400k per year to a terminal subscriber, which means they will gladly absorb a really high CAC.

My personal goal is to make my mental happenings more visible in order to understand where I get off track while tackling a task.

I think knowledge work in general is plagued by the intangibility of the processes that lead to its artifacts.

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has a few things to say about this. (Here's Jonathan Bricker's TedX talk for a glimpse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTb3d5cjSFI&themeRefresh=1)

And a lot of what ACT does happens to echo what Buddhists are trying to do in meditation.

Maybe the most important aspect of mind wandering -- ie distraction -- is: what pushes us off track? In my experience, that's often a feeling of discomfort that is tied to the anticipated pain of a task. Sometimes that pain is tedium (I know what must be done and don't want to do it), other times it's complexity (I know I must do something but the exact steps are not clear), and other times it's sheer difficulty; ie I'm not breaking the task down into small enough chunks to feel able to do them.

I'm looking for my own internal protocol to sense mind wandering, identify which type of perceived difficulty caused it, and then take the steps to stay on goal: if tedium, put on podcast and forge forth; if complexity, back up and unravel the vague aspiration; if sheer difficulty, break it down into small steps.

I feel like the very ability to slip into metacognitive reflection depends heavily on my overall state, whether I'm doing all the right things like sleeping and exercising in order to monitor the internal course of work.

You should start by caring about something so much that you want to both understand it and affect it somehow. When you begin to piece together the system, a model of what you care about, and can begin to imagine how moving one piece will affect another, then you'll be thinking.

I think your question, in and of itself, is a language trap. It's too abstract, and abstractions often fail to motivate. I fell into the same language trap in college. I thought that some wizard teaching philosophy behind the curtain would teach me how to think. But you won't find the secret to thought in the symbols of the analytic philosophers, nor in the cogitations of the continentals.

Roland Barthes once said "Je ne pense qu'aimant," which translates roughly as "I cannot think except by loving." And he didn't mean that love itself was thought, but just that it was only fascination with a subject that drove him to think about it.

I think you should get out of your head, connect to the world, begin to care about some part of it, and let that lead you toward some subject-specific form of thought:

More on same here: https://open.substack.com/pub/vonnik/p/a-few-ideas-that-made...

I have been directly involved in deals involving Palantir and I can say that their sales force, at least in Europe, is sociopathic. They play very dirty, both with their customers and amongst themselves. On top of that, I'm not particularly impressed with their software, which they charge way too much money for. It's data aggregation and visualization, gimme a break.

Attention is good. Building the habit of paying attention is hard. Many people who get good at meditation underestimate the effort required. Highly recommend BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits for more on how to get started on anything important. Similar to the OP's separate article on kaizen:

https://tinyhabits.com/about/

Dance requires balance and often involves social interaction, while lots of physical exercise does not. Balance and more precisely imbalance is a good way to stimulate adrenaline in the brain, which can accelerate learning. Claude Shannon, fwiw, loved unicycles.

Steve Allen's "How to be funny" presents a compelling model of humor as a deliberate misinterpretation of the setup, which is delivered in the punchline. So you have initial context, pivot, and misinterpretation.

The most powerful versions of that reveal universal, strong and suppressed emotions as well as our basic human fallibility.

Urinal cakes?! I'll never fall for that one again...

Promising an end to slavery is a great way to conquer a place. Napoleon followed the same game plan, and in a way, so did Lenin.

Remember when one of the bill's co-sponsors announced that he was co-founding an AI regulation company called Gray Swan?

https://www.piratewires.com/p/sb-1047-dan-hendrycks-conflict...

This bill was tainted from day 1, and Wiener was bamboozled into pushing it.

And it's closer to Frisian than Dutch. If the Battle of Hastings hadn't happened, these languages would be easily and mutually comprehensible. But that just shows that English descends from a branch of West Germanic. It changed gradually over time, kept a core Germanic vocabulary for its basic terms, and borrowed a lot from other languages as it needed more complex concepts, moreso than Modern High German which allows for easy word invention through combination.

Creoles are defined as languages emerging from pidgins, which themselves are often simplified forms of speech that allow linguistically separate groups to communicate. English is not that. It has an unbroken line of native speakers whose usage gradually evolved, while maintaining a system of complex syntactic rules as well as a literature.

Peter Green's translations of Homer are excellent but ommitted from this roundup:

https://www.amazon.com/Iliad-New-Translation-Peter-Green/dp/...

The oblivion of addiction would explain most peoples' not using the tools. First, you have to admit that you have a problem.

The irony is that the same underlying process of technical and scientific innovation enabled both the Peruvian slaves traders as well as the Haber-Bosch process. But I find it strange that we only call one "European", when in fact both were. The technium giveth and the technium taketh away.

This is dumb. It's kind of like saying: "once more processing power is no longer useful, we will no longer need our large human brains."

SOTA will remain at the edge of what compute can produce for a long time to come. SOTA is a moving frontier, and there will be demand for incrementally smarter models, because they save you time by making fewer mistakes.

No matter how much more efficient algorithmic innovations make ML model training, compute will make those algorithms smarter. It's a coefficient.

She did her job, and she went home. Not much hustle there. Maybe there's grind, but yeah, I believe there are fundamental scarcities in life that require we do hard things to make a living. I don't have much empathy for people who don't believe that.

I do think there are limits to what employers can demand of us, and in Morrison's story, she learned one place to draw the line (take the salary instead of the used clothes).

This embodies a culture of dignity, which I admire, and contrasts with a culture of offense and complaint, which seems prevalent today. In a culture of dignity, you take back power to define your worth, and fight less with others about opinions and actions beyond your control. A culture of dignity ends up being less totalitarian; while a culture of offense ultimately tends toward top-down control to save the victims.

Unminification (obfuscation removal) can also be applied to text. Most specialties develop a jargon that allows insiders to communicate complex ideas quickly; that shorthand excludes outsiders. Large language models can make specialist jargon transparent and thereby expand the circle of people whose understanding applies to specialized fields. Essentially, they solve the problem of mapping specialized, jargonized concepts to things the outside reader already knows. Anyone who wants to learn needs this, and I hope it will become part of students' learning paths.

Yes, while working and raising a young boy. I just needed to escape the hellish pressure of having raised millions to build a business that didn't work, and worrying about my obligations to investors and the team members I hired. It was a bunch of tiny steps that I had to slot into the constraints of a working life. I recommend "Tiny Habits": https://tinyhabits.com Fogg has good ideas about how to redesign behavior under constraints.

I would love to know what this research surfaces about aphantasic brains and their opposites.

I got super burned out working in startups for about 8 years. didn't realize it on the inside. now that i'm out, i look back and realize i was in a constant state of stress and anxiety. i got my sleep back, started exercising, started doing ice plunge/sauna, cut stress, limited exposure to stupid messaging streams like slack. it's a new world. i had to remake myself chemically in tiny steps and it took about two solid years to do it.

While this article may be making a good point, in its construction it's quite weak. It reminds of something an old reporter once told me: "Any article whose headline is a question, fails to answer that question." Corollary: If the article had a point, it would have stated the point in the headline. But the writer didn't do the work, so it has no point to make.

Sidenote: it doesn't seem to me that the writer understands AI, its moving frontier, and its likely near-term abilities.

what is the currency now?

I think this is true for most careers and prominent roles:

"When I first came to The Times in 2006, a reporter warned me not to identify myself too heavily with my work. “Any job at The Times is a rented tux,” she said."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/dining/pete-wells-steps-d...

My personal belief: Because the enterprise market, separating as it does the user from the buyer, creates incentives that lead to bad products.

This is only tangential, but Adam Gazzaley's The Distracted Mind (2016, MIT Press) provides an excellent anatomy of focus and attention, working memory, goal management and overall cognitive control, then places them in the context of modern technology to discuss how people can fight distraction.

https://www.amazon.com/Distracted-Mind-Ancient-Brains-High-T...

It's the first time I read someone properly explain all the parts and tasks involved in attentional control in the service of achieving goals.