ellius

He's referring to the current academic climate, especially in fields like literature, much of which is derogatory towards the past and "great works."

There's a fine line, though. Even keeping a list may interfere with feelings of clarity and direction if you become swamped by feelings of obligation. I once heard someone refer to Marie Kondo's "Magic of Tidying Up" as a philosophy book, and I think that's true for things like this. If keeping a big list is useful and makes you happy, for sure, go for it. But make sure it doesn't just create feelings of shame or incompleteness.

That's a nice theory and all, but if the NBA really believes that then its representatives should stop pretending to care about free speech.

Why is it any less the responsibility of American businessmen than American politicians? We're a nation of free people, and we all share in both the benefits and responsibilities of freedom. You don't get to pretend to be an American and then put your head in the sand and say, "Oh I'm just a businessman." If that's your first loyalty then fine, but at least be straight about it and don't try to have it both ways with this "we love free expression but the dollars, sorry" crap.

"By diverse means we reach the same end"

https://medium.com/@phillip_hayes/montaigne-1-by-diverse-mea...

There's a good Seneca letter, "On Quiet Conversation." It includes these lines:

"Philosophy is good advice; and no one can give advice at the top of his lungs...

Words should be scattered like seed; no matter how small the seed may be, if it has once found favourable ground, it unfolds its strength and from an insignificant thing spreads to its greatest growth. Reason grows in the same way; it is not large to the outward view, but increases as it does its work. Few words are spoken; but if the mind has truly caught them, they come into their strength and spring up. Yes, precepts and seeds have the same quality; they produce much, and yet they are slight things. Only, as I said, let a favourable mind receive and assimilate them. Then of itself the mind also will produce bounteously in its turn, giving back more than it has received."

Great book. I also recommend "The Effective Executive."

Yeah also that's not how the process of check clearing works (instant account-to-account payments). Banks batch checks payable to the same counterparty institutions and then compare their liabilities against one another to transfer only the net. It's an extension of the historical process where banks would physically go to a clearing house with bundles of paper checks and tally the differences between institutions.

An apple is red, and your underwear are red, so you should eat your underwear.

The fact that two things share a superficial attribute does not make them equivalent.

"A university is a business."

This is a massive false equivalence. For one thing, most of the "employees" in your metaphor are eighteen to twenty-two years old. Not to mention the fact that students are regularly put through the ringer and expelled on the first accusation. It's hardly akin to the "repeat offense" scenario you outlined in your first example. And comparing being expelled for an alleged sexual assault to being asked to leave a resort for rude behavior? Come on.

This is a different situation than anything you described. Universities have much more of a guardian and stewardship role than an employer, and rape is a fucking crime. It should be handled by the mechanism we've created to handle crimes, i.e. criminal courts of law.

In general I think matching your tools to your needs, and coming up with solutions that are as simple as possible (but not simpler) is a super power and hard to get right. Your goal should always be to maximize your leverage by hiding and offloading as much complexity as you can while still meeting your requirements.

I mix and match a bunch of systems, some of which are digital, to create something that works for me. I think personal productivity and reflection systems have to be unique to the user. The part I personally find useful to digitize is the small annoying tasks I have to keep track of, e.g. "talk to Bob about the x, get y and z from the grocery." These tend to move around a lot and I will push them from day to day, and they don't really reflect any underlying structure or goals. At best they tell me the various sources of all the shit I have to do and could serve as indicators of things to cut out.

I prefer handwritten systems for more long-term goals, daily reflection, and projects. You get a lot more stability and emotional connection to your tasks and thoughts when you write them down in my experience. That's what I want when I'm really planning and thinking about my life. Digital doesn't seem to have the same effect. It's too easy to delete and edit yourself.

If you're really interested, this is what my system looks like. It's a mishmash of the following:

• Pile of Index Cards - I use it as the "single source of truth" for tasks and projects. I don't use the stuff about thoughts and discoveries, but I like having discrete cards I can move around and prioritize for todos.

• GTD (Getting Things Done) - I mainly use the idea that each task should have a clearly defined "next action" or a specific trigger if you're waiting on something. Ensures I'm not subconsciously avoiding a task because it has some undefined prerequisite.

• Bullet Journal - once per week, I populate pages of the days for the week ahead with tasks I expect to do from my index cards. I use that page to notice when I'm pushing tasks back and also to reflect and write down notable events from the day.

• iPhone Notes - I duplicate the task list for the day, and I move one into a "WIP" (work-in-progress) slot. This is the first thing I plan to do. It ensures I'm not trying to multi-task and do too many things at once. Over the course of the day I will peek at that list and move items around or push them back into an "Inbox," which then circles back to the Index Cards at the end of the week. New tasks go in there too. At the end of the week I re-prioritize and throw away any index cards I realize are not necessary or I no longer care about.

It sounds like a lot, but it's actually a reasonably fluid system and I'm fairly happy with it. I refine the bumpy parts when I find they aren't working.

Anecdotally, I really like the Bullet Journal system of combining todo lists with reflection. It's useful to compare the things you'd like to be doing to the things you're actually doing, and to actively contemplate the difference and changes you can make.

On the other hand, recalling the books and passages that really resonate with you is useful and pleasant. Schopenhauer said, "Any book which is at all important should be re-read immediately." I agree with the recommendations of "How to Read a Book." I also really like Montaigne and Seneca, who advocate not reading in a manic fashion but rather finding the books that speak to you deeply and re-reading them frequently. There will always be more content than you can consume, and while I value curiosity and exploration, there is also a lot of value in absorbing the most important lessons deeply. It also helps you weaken your brain's inborn novelty addiction and encourages prolonged effort towards a goal (deep understanding), which is a better route to satisfaction than vacuuming up every new experience you can find.

I think people also have a very hard time conceptualizing the amount of time it took to evolve human intelligence. You're talking literally hundreds of millions of years from the first nerve tissues to modern human brains. I understand that we're consciously designing these systems rather than evolving them, but nevertheless that's an almost incomprehensible amount of trial and error and "hacking" designs together, on top of the fact that our understanding of how our brains work is still incomplete.

It depends on what you need. If I need a Docker expert, you can be sure I'll tailor my interview to a Docker deep dive with very precise and detailed questions about commands, concepts, etc. The first step in any interview process should be to think very clearly about what you need and to then adjust any template you have to those needs.

Amen. I'll throw in a pitch for "High Output Management," which does a good job of describing how and why to do 1-on-1s. Everyone hates meetings, but they're the primary way for people to propagate information and vent feelings. If you don't have 1-on-1s, people will bottle up feelings that don't have an outlet in other standard meetings. And if you don't have an environment of trust, no one will talk to begin with. So focus on creating an atmosphere where people can talk and then formalize and consistently create occasions for them to share their feelings-about themselves, about their careers, about their projects. Anything that you want visibility into needs to have a channel. And then just accept that your organization will evolve and you can't keep everyone, or make every project successful, or always beat your competition. Life isn't perfect. Being a leader is about driving a strategy and culture while bound by the constraints of your particular situation and the world in general.

I actually agree with that and think that's something I need to mix in. But I will say it's hard to bullshit your way through every one of those questions. I've had people BS through 3-4 but pretty much inevitably they fell apart on the others.

Here's mine:

1. I ask about prior experience, following up on any interesting resume items or comments. I try to act like a "biographer" (per the book "Who") and just learn their story.

2. I ask them to describe data flow in a basic web app. If I push this UI submit button, explain the progression of data from the client to the database.

3. I ask for an explanation of core concepts of the framework I'm interviewing for or any one they've used.

4. I ask about version control concepts and some specific git commands.

5. I ask about prior team practices, e.g. what types of meetings they have and what the interviewee thinks of their effectiveness.

6. I ask about their knowledge of ops/DevOps, e.g. explain how a pipeline works.

7. I ask about basic CS/object orientation/language concepts, e.g. static vs. dynamic typing.

8. I ask what their most interesting project or story was and why it resonated with them.

9. I ask what their toughest debug was and how they solved it.

10. I ask about their experience with testing and opinions on how best to do it.

Between all that you get a pretty decent picture of what level they're at and what is their capacity to learn.

Can you elaborate? I work on a Spring Boot application and so far we're all pretty happy with it. Obviously I'm one data point, so I'd like to hear more about what you're seeing.

Actually I didn't know that, thanks.

I really wish iPhones had away messages for iMessage and/or SMS. It can seem like you're intentionally being a dick if you don't respond promptly, so it'd be nice to just make it clear you've chosen to be not available instead of this weird uncertain state that seems to be the default. Bonus points if you could join and leave group chats seamlessly like AIM chat rooms.

It's sort of a "Tragedy of Systems." It's very easy for negligent or malicious actors to make bad decisions in a system context, but to have the consequences of those decisions not manifest in the same time or place as where the decision occurred. This makes it really easy to screw things up without suffering the consequences in complex systems, and people often make decisions for their personal benefit ignorant of or willfully ignoring the consequences.

"In the City, they sell and buy. And nobody ever asks them why. But since it contents them to buy and sell, God forgive them, they might as well."

In my book if you don't have authority, including to hire and fire and affect compensation decisions, then you aren't a manager. In that situation you're half glorified babysitter and half scapegoat. And I agree this is how most organizations are designed, and why they're so anemic. I very much like flat hierarchies and consensus decision-making, but at the end of the day someone is in charge or they aren't. If they aren't, their capacity to effect cultural change is severely diminished.

The more I study history, the more grateful I am that we invented these weapons. I look at the polarization in the United States today, for example, and I wonder what it would be like if we could kill each other less extremely. The fact that any real warfare is liable to escalate into the wholesale destruction of the species seems to be the only thing that keeps some of us from committing murder. Sad, but I'll take it.

So I included that "necessarily" on purpose. In general smarter people will solve problems more correctly. But there is also a whole class of problems where being smart is actually a detriment. Here is a good read on this topic: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/why-smart-peop...

You probably know this, but a lot of studies back you up. Being smarter doesn't necessarily make you more likely to be right, but it makes you a hell of a lot better at rationalizing your position and persuading others. Also, that comment about the "old guy with an inferiority complex who sneaks one really profound comment in every meeting" really hit home. We have that guy on my team too. You have to wonder what's going on when those guys are sitting in the corner and us blustery people are doing all of the talking.

Did an overnight study at a sleep clinic. I'd been told for years by friends that I made very weird gasping, snoring noises. After I'd been out of college a few years and realized I was fatigued literally every day despite going to sleep on time, I figured it was time to get checked.

Can't speak for OP, but my appetite and then weight have steadily decreased for six years since beginning CPAP. As a person with apnea I had no idea that my constant fatigue was causing me to eat so much, or making sustained exercise so impossible, and I really didn't even understand how tired I was. Once I was getting something approximating a good night's sleep, I had more energy, which made me less hungry and more able to sustain exercise. So it was a virtuous cycle and involved the habits you're describing, but those were made possible by alleviating the underlying problem.