Nassim Taleb’s seminal exploration of randomness and unknown-unknowns has continued to be relevant ten years after its debut. An absolute classic within the food for thought genre of nonfiction, The Black Swan dips into philosophy, economics, finance, epistemology, and empiricism. Written in an intellectual style with frequent references to other thinkers and artists, Taleb frequently Continue…
“How To Read A Book” sounds like it’s a book intended for elementary school students, but that couldn’t’ be farther from the truth. Mortimer Adler’s 1940 nonfiction lesson on how to read effectively should be read by everyone before they pick up another book. Using beautifully concise yet characteristically 1940s-era language, Adler’s book is a Continue reading "How To Read A Book is a Must Read"
The job interview process has been written about extensively, and some people even receive specialized training from their jobs on how to properly conduct an interview. Everyone has ideas about the best way to provide interviews, and large companies tend to have specific motifs or methods of interviewing which can take on an undeservedly mythical Continue reading "How to Be A Good or Bad…
Continuing with my thinking on late capitalism has brought me to consider the idea of the sharing economy . Many people seem to intuitively understand the gist of the sharing economy people use information technology in order to facilitate other people s renting of their stuff. Immediately, there is something strange: sharing does not mean renting in any Continue reading "Why the Sharing Economy…
Upon leaving a job about a year ago, at my going away party one of my friends and coworkers asked me if I had any advice to pass on to the team. At the time, I stated that my advice was not to give generalized advice without a specific issue in mind, because it wouldn t Continue reading "How to be a Good Adviser by Playing Pretend"
One of the first tasks a scientist or curious person must undertake before experimentation is the formulation and positing of a scientific question. A scientific question is an extremely narrow question about reality which can be answered directly and specifically by data. Scientists pose scientific questions about obscure aspects of reality with the intent of Continue reading "How to Ask A Good…
There s been a small amount of interest that I ve seen in a few communities regarding building status as an intellectual in the colloquial sense, and I think it s probably more correct to say that people would rather be perceived as smart than as dumb, which is completely fair. This article could also be called How Continue reading "How to Become a Smarty Pants"
My recent response to Paul Graham s article on economic inequality allowed me to express a few of my relatively mainstream economic ideas to a wider audience. I think that the discussion about inequality is worth fleshing out a bit more, but I m not so interested in getting into the much-rehashed capitalism versus socialism theoretical debate. Continue reading "How to Survive Late Capitalism As a…
While perusing HackerNews today, I encountered this article and this comment thread by Paul Graham (PG for short), founder of Ycombinator. I think that a lengthy response is in order. I originally intended this response to be in my HN comment, but it was too long. If you re not interested in debating income inequality, this Continue reading "A Response to Paul Graham s Article on Income…
Deciding what to prioritize during work is a critical skill that every employee in any job must understand in order to excel. In my previous post, regarding praise and criticism at work, I discussed how the coherence of priorities among members of a team results in opportunities for criticism or praise. Given that an individual s Continue reading "How to Decide What to Prioritize At Work"