rudimental

There's a lot of science or research related to meditation. I like mindfulness meditation. Meditation definitely seems to reduce negative emotions, and also cultivate positive ones (or at least make space for them).

"Mindfulness meditation programs improved multiple dimensions of negative affect, including anxiety, depression, and perceived stress/general distress ... the effects were significant for anxiety and marginally significant for depression at the end of treatment, and these effects continued to be significant at 3-6 months for both anxiety and depression"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness_(psychology)#Overal...

"[Loving-kindness] meditation practice produced increases over time in daily experiences of positive emotions, which, in turn, produced increases in a wide range of personal resources (e.g., increased mindfulness, purpose in life, social support, decreased illness symptoms)."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3156028/

A recent meta-analysis:

http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=18097...

Meditation is pretty easy, and definitely cheap- definitely worth trying yourself :)

I wish AMZN rankings couldn't be bought (or Yelp reviews). I am less naive about their accuracy than I used to be. There are too many stories about manipulation to believe them without a little skepticism.

I appreciate this response. Besides getting out and living life, do you have any good resources for developing the three skills you suggest- distinguishing between short term and long term greedy behavior, how to act selfishly most of the time without appearing selfish, and understanding and practicing game theory?

It's easy to get stuck, and hard to get unstuck. It's often less about your skills and more about something like fear.

Get valuable feedback and incorporate it. That means build and use your network for helping shore up your weakness. Ask PMs and founders you currently or will soon know how they do the things you are having trouble with. Have them show you how to do it a little so you get the workflow. Look for meetups related to the issues your having (eg a growth hacking meetup or lean methodology meetup where people talk about what works and can help each other get further, stay on track, see things they missed). Also check out the War of Art, an interesting book about blocks and how to overcome them.

tl;dr

Do more, think less. Get help from real live people on ideas you're kicking around or actual prototypes and products. Don't let fear get the best of you- you can do it.

This article is relevant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/world/middleeast/by-phone-...

That would be great. Can this easily be automated so companies don't have to do anything and the result is there, helping people?

That process is happening right now, and it is interesting. But will it continue, aka is it a viable long term workaround? Articles being removed is new and in a sense exciting for the press, Google, and the public- that probably won't be so in a few months or years.

Interesting to see. I'd love more explicit measurable predictions and then, like this, observing the results and reflecting.

Wow, what a story. They sound like they're killing it, the founder's motivation is admirable, and she's making a positive dent in the world. I hope they succeed.

Inspiring.

Thanks for posting this! Grateful for the Adioso links.

I'm for the trend of people at start ups talking more openly about what their experiences are like, Australian or not.

Icelandic yogurt (or at least Siggi's) is great! Much "Greek yogurt" on the market is not once-extra strained milk and cultures. This impostor yogurt has added thickening agents like pectin and/or added protein to be like (what I would call) real Greek yogurt (although I think sheep's milk is the original milk for the yogurt- but like mozzarella di buffalo coming from buffalo milk but in general people in the US accept any cow's milk based mozzarella as mozzarella). I'm all about the Chobani and Fage and Siggi's and hate the impostors just after the money, riding the popularity.

If everyone called it pre-ordering and not crowdfunding, I think there would be less "controversy"/ upset people. (I realize the crowd might be providing the funding to make whatever endeavor possible, but if it's ultimately pre-ordering...) the conceptual framework of crowdfunding means you're a part of something bigger. It taps into the language of start up funding. If a successful campaign results in the people putting on the project making tons of money, all you might get is a refund and disappointment. That result is more palatable if all you did was pre-order something.

Edit: spelling

Could someone with better legal knowledge and familiarity with licensing help me make sense of how I should react to this?

From a blog comment- is it convicing?

"One central question in the philosophy of physics is how we should understand quantum mechanics (QM). We may want to know what we should take QM to be about. It’s worth noting that, in some (but not all) cases, this is no longer an empirical question: for instance, the traditional Copenhagen interpretation of QM is empirically equivalent to the Everett "many worlds" interpretation of QM. So, if we can’t do an experiment to settle the issue, we need to resort to some other method, which is where philosophers of physics come in."

Best quote:

"Nevertheless, there are some physics questions where philosophical input actually is useful. Foundational questions, such as the quantum measurement problem, the arrow of time, the nature of probability, and so on. Again, a huge majority of working physicists don’t ever worry about these problems. But some of us do! And frankly, if more physicists who wrote in these areas would make the effort to talk to philosophers, they would save themselves from making a lot of simple mistakes."

Philosophers interests overlap at times with mathematicians, linguists, psychologists, physicists. Sometimes they have valuable things to say to each other. E.g. Experimental philosophy is a trend in philosophy, and people who have never done scientific experiments before could learn how to do them better from scientists who have that experience and knowledge. I support people that find common ground and work together to help each other tackle the puzzles they're working on.

I agree. In my experience scientific researchers were not interested in philosophy of science and meta- questions that interested me in philosophy. They would engage in conversation but I doubt they concerned themselves with the big philosophy of science, epistemology or metaphysics questions.

They were naive realists and that's ok- it seemed helpful for getting data, interpreting results, keeping the wheels of science moving forward.

Thanks for posting this! It sounds like it was incredibly difficult at times. Hard to imagine, but thanks for making it vivid.

I would love to hear more about the following (not holding my breath):

"After hiring a few people and finding an office in NYC we were ready to launch. We solved the chicken-and-egg problem using techniques that we promised never to speak of again because they squarely sat on the grey/black spectrum of naughtiness. If there was a line, we definitely crossed it. We had to. These hacks were harmless to others, so I figured it was only a problem if we got caught."

Edit: ++empathy.

Cupertino and southern Marin County, Tracy and San Francisco have a similar geographic range. Are they grouped together? These are all quite different places to be. A lot of arbitrary choices need to be made when dividing areas. It's good to see what choices those were and why they were made.

If Cupertino and Marin are considered the same, and Tracy and San Francisco, I would agree. But they are very different places to be in, LA and Riverside.

Thanks! This will be helpful.

What about companies that have no or low revenue?

Can you point to any good resources for how to make the relevant financial projections for early employees?

At least in mathematics, I've heard he was something of a machine.

Here's another article with some biographical information but more about his work (for those that don't know the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy it's a good, free, online resource for philosophy related subjects).

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/

"...trait optimism doesn't distort how new information is integrated: subjects update their estimates similarly following information that is better or worse than expected."

Are people with high trait optimism disappointed to a greater extent than others? They have to adjust their expectations further to align them with reality/ the results.

Can optimism lead to better outcomes? Can belief in a greater likelihood of the reward lead to it happening? Probably doesn't apply to lotteries and similar situations.

Edit: fixed punctuation.