jcutrell

I’ve started to accumulate mental models on my personal site. I hate how buzzy the language has gotten, but I do see the value in this accumulation.

One thing that’s missing: how these models connect, and ways of picking the models you need for a given thought experiment. This is a service or app I would gladly pay for, particularly if it provided the ability to add my own models, relate them in a smart way, etc.

Giving things names is one step in convincing people. This is the principle behind recognition.

But I agree with your point - substance over labels!

How to convince other people that what you’re doing is worthwhile and valuable.

I'm deep into vim and have recently seen some things that colleagues are doing with VS Code. I have to admit, I'm tempted.

But I'm so used to vim + tmux now, it's hard to imagine working with something different.

“There are old pilots, there are bold pilots. There are no old bold pilots.”

A good pilot is skilled, but a skilled pilot isn’t always good.

Or create a genuinely scarce product.

For these interventions to work, they have to have validity. You can’t fabricate scarcity - it needs to be a real thing or else of course eventually it will be ignored.

I wonder if the hole left by failing interventions is actually an opportunity for a different type of intervention.

The whole point of BE-based intervention is that humans have a limited amount of reasoning power to put towards a given decision and can’t always choose rationally, so the nudge is amplifying a heuristic to make it easier to choose something.

The restrictions of human cognition don’t go away - a failing tactic might simply mean opportunity for a new tactic.

We’ve seen this example with things like “fair pricing model” - this is a heuristic shortcut for trustworthiness. You aren’t trying to nudge me? Great!

Certainly new interventions will surface in response.

Ugh.

"Are Right, A Lot" - what is this, a magnet for egomaniacs?

"Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit"...

These two mixed feel super toxic. The others are important, but these seem to override the humility necessary for learning...

Here is a great book on the subject: https://smile.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/d...

Essentially, great managers do these things:

- Create clarity - Provide support and equipment - Celebrate wins - Build an atmosphere of learning and development - Help cultivate personal connections - Give developers the space to work in their strongest areas - Listen to the opinions of the members on the team and make sure they matter - Instill purpose - Practice empathy - Commit to quality

This is very rarely true, and often cited. Too many sources to get reasonable gains for cached jQuery. There was a good article breaking down exactly why this is a few years back. Mobile but someone else can probably share.

Smoking long enough ensures that you will quit forever, you just won’t be alive to know it.

Is this currently working on mobile? I’m not getting audio but seeing indications that it is playing, so maybe it’s just not accounted for.

I love Brian Eno, so I’m super excited to see something like this pop up. Would love to contribute generative systems!

This is interesting. Is there actual research on “hype cycles?” I want to read it if so.

So this seems to suggest there may be plenty of false negatives, but I think the key factors in this article are at the end: Family history and genetic contributions to disease.

I personally decided to throw our 23andme tests out, for a variety of reasons (health privacy being one), but one of them is health anxiety. It feels unnecessarily anxiety inducing to provide this info, in either case. If i have a mutation, I may live with some elevated fear of something inescapable that never materializes. If I get negative results, I may wonder “what about the ones they didn’t check?” Either way, I end up with less actionable information.

Kind of a psychological phenomenon here - more data in this case doesn’t necessarily result in more information, because interpretation matters so much in this arena.

Sendengo | San Francisco, Chattanooga | Remote and Onsite | Full-Time | Software Engineer, Design Lead, and more

Clearbit is hiring! Come work on the next generation of business data applications with beautiful UI and extraordinarily useful features that help businesses see clearly.

Stack is mostly Ruby, ES6 / React, Postgres, and Go, on Kubernetes, but we’re expanding as we have new scaling issues to solve.

Excellent benefits, flexibility, and a talented, growing team.

Message me for more info, or look at the list of openings here: https://Clearbit.com/jobs

More like "this tool wasn't designed to work that way, so to use this part of the tool, you'll have to conform to the way it was intended to be used."

Works great with beer. Leave it out of the fridge so you literally have to ice it.

Make it a rule to never put more than one in the fridge at a time.

- Spend 5 extra minutes when the details matter, to focus on the details.

- Beliefs are not binary; treat them like probabilities more than certainties. "Think in bets", like Annie Duke's recent book on the subject.

- Your beliefs, opinions, work - all of it is not connected to your identity or self worth. The more you can disconnect from it (non-attachment), the less ego-driven your work will be, the more likely you are to seek truth.

- Knowing about blind spots doesn't make you immune to them. Balance yourself with other opinions, and seek out people who respectfully disagree with you.

- Remember that the world is bigger than this piece of code, this job, this decade of your life, your entire life, all of your friends and family's lives, all of humanity. And the universe is bigger than the world. Take things in stride, less seriously; this reminds us to be delighted in our work, not stressed about it. Even when we fail, if we can see the expiration date clearly, we realize it doesn't matter enough to waste our little bit of time worrying about it.

- Your feelings about reality often distort your experience of reality. This is how depression and anxiety (loosely) work. We feel something, physically, that changes what our brain sees as truth. Remind yourself of this when you are catastrophizing, as well as when you feel on top of the world.

Would love to see this with the fonts a bit larger. Would also prefer to see these expand to show the command beneath the descriptor.

Nice work!

Clearbit | Full stack, Frontend, Design lead, and Product managers | San Francisco, CA and Chattanooga, TN | Onsite or remote|https://clearbit.com

As an early engineer at Clearbit, you'll have a huge impact on our product and direction. You'll be working very closely with the rest of our team, creating APIs, building out applications, and managing huge amounts of data.

Engineers at Clearbit work primarily with Ruby/Sinatra, Postgres/Sequel, Go, and React (for frontend folks). We're always learning, so you can expect this list to change and grow over time.

Message/email me with questions!

Direct link: https://jobs.lever.co/clearbit/ddd0dcc6-677c-4ef5-90a7-7ab10...

Disclaimer - I'm an engineer at Clearbit, and the above link is a referral link. If you prefer not to use the referral, feel free to go directly to our open positions page: https://jobs.lever.co/clearbit

I have no proof they are involved, but my wife and I both had a visit to a dermatologist last year. Both of us were then recommended for excisions. She was 29, I was 28.

Everything came back pretty much normal.

We were sent to this fern after a friend went there. He also had an excision. Also under 30.

Now, we feel pretty much like we were played. Maybe this is relevant to this issue.

"Master" is a strong word - feeling more like a perpetual student than approaching mastery.

Before I became a developer, learning to play music. There is almost nothing more rewarding than the ability to speak a non-verbal, near-universal language in order to express yourself.

Private pilot's license.

Podcasting.

Understanding more about cognitive bias. Rhetoric and logic.

Philosophy.

(Not sure you can master these last two within a lifetime.)

Fatherhood and being a good husband to my wife. These are easily the most rewarding experiences of my life.

This is a thing actually on Breaker and Stitcher. The show I host offers this as a "premium feed."

Not a ton of interest, unsurprisingly, as most people don't experience enough inconvenience in an ad to shell out.

I have so badly wanted to be able to Shazam and automatically add something to a Spotify playlist via IFTTT or whatever.

I wonder if that will be more or less possible now. Maybe with a Shortcut?

The title is a bit misleading. Expected the drawings to be more directly responsible for the exoneration.

Still a very interesting story.

Not necessarily immediately relevant, but Brad is going through some tough family times at the moment.

https://twitter.com/brad_frost/status/1039491001130405889

Perhaps pick up the book to support him (it's excellent), or maybe send a stranger a positive Tweet or email or whatever.

Generally speaking, nutritional studies are observational and very difficult to control for confounding variables.

Think about it this way:

"We want to feed group A organic apples, group B apples that have been doused in insecticide, and then use a group C that isn't fed anything."

This is already hard - specifically if people are resistant to eating something they perceive as harmful. But now add in further separation for confounding variables:

  - Weight
  - Race
  - Age
  - Sex
  - Other foods you eat
  - Exercise

And everything else that can vary drastically from one person to the next.

In order to actually perform this study, you would either need A) a VERY large group of people to observe (who haven't opted in to a controlled study) so you can have statistically significant sub-groups that can be stratified into quartiles or whatever (for example, sedentary, low activity, moderate activity, high activity),

Or, B) a fair sized group of people who want to opt in to such a restrictive controlled study.

Nutrition is something that typically needs to be studied for decades for things that we don't already have a pretty good idea about (like acute allergies, botulism, those kinds of things).

We are very unlikely to have this data until we have MUCH better observational data over the course of someone's life. Maybe we will have these points as people born in the early 00's start to grow up with more tracked data available, but can you tell me how many apples you ate per week in 1997?

(Quick edit to clarify some confusing language)

I think it's actually important to note that you don't even have to intend to appease your funding sources - it can happen (and I'd say most often does happen) unconsciously.

Let’s go one step further - unless you have some experience understanding academic journals (many here do), even the journals may suggest something that isn’t true by way of you reading into it.

Some things everyone here should know (like correlations and what they mean). Other things many won’t know, like certain statistics methods, base rates for a given thing, etc.

It’s easy for two people to read the same study and come out with totally different conclusions based on their individual context.

Trigger warning for health anxiety folks. Nothing to see here.

I will never forget one day I opened Hacker News, and the top story was about a 30-year-old programmer named Jonathan (also my name, and I'm 29) who found out about his terminal cancer spreading throughout his body. This was one of many trigger moments in my life.

I struggle against health anxiety. Specifically, I am obsessed with dying young from cancer.

I am not diagnosed with OCD, but health anxiety presents very similar behaviors.

When I feel particularly vulnerable to a specific kind of cancer, I tend to research and wrap my head around probabilities, prevention, and everything I can to hedge myself against that cancer. I'm constantly checking in with small pains in my body.

I have chronic back issues (partially because of my posture while working). Pain exacerbates the anxiety.

For the first two months of this year, I couldn't hold my infant son without ending up on the edge of tears, because I was emotionally convinced I would die before I ever had the chance to see him grow up.

One understated effect of OCD and anxiety is the feeling of guilt you can foster because of your own behavior.

My wife's father recently went through a battle with pancreatic cancer. It was a complete rollercoaster. He ended up having the unlikely type, in a good way - he is now cancer free. But one moment stands out to me: when she came to tell me about what they had found. She started out by telling me, "I don't want to trigger your anxiety..." This both broke my heart and made me feel understood.

This is something that really has more influence on life than you expect. I feel for those of you who struggle with OCD, anxiety, and any other mental health issues. I don't have an answer, other than you are not alone. You're not isolated. You aren't the first to experience this, and you can live your life WITH the struggle, even if it feels impossible.

Seek help. Surround yourself with people who love you and want to understand and help. Don't seek reassurance; seek acceptance.