Abhishek Chakraborty

All Things Don’t Scale

Every strategy, rule, and principle has an acceptable size where things work well, but break when we try to scale them into a different size or speed. There are no human-sized hamsters for a reason.

The Problem is Not the Problem

A lot of us waste our time worrying about specific problems — how to deliver a project, how to get funding, how to crack an interview — whereas the real problem is we don’t know how to think about the problem correctly.

Strong Opinions Weakly Held

This is a great principle to move forward despite uncertainty. But the problem arises when bad agents in a group abuse it and turn strong opinions weakly held into strong opinions assumed to be true until you prove otherwise.

Bullshitting: How to Handle, Bypass, and Ignore this Art and its Practitioners

Some people are prone to running their mouth, saying things without an iota of concern about its truth or falsehood because their goal isn’t really to communicate information. Their whole point is just to have something to say.

The Misunderstood Art of Overcommunication

What is said is seldom communicated. Most of it is lost in translation, misinterpreted, or forgotten. To convey our intended message, we have to overcommunicate. But overcommunication is often misunderstood as repeating the same thing over and over again. It cannot be further from the truth.

True Lies: How Statistics Fools Us

When an ad says 80% of dentists recommend Colgate, what do you assume? Do you believe they asked ~1,000 dentists out of which 800 recommended Colgate, or do you think they asked 10 out of which 8 recommended Colgate?

What Disasters Can Teach Us About Good System Design

The Chernobyl disaster didn’t happen simply because of Soviet Communist top-down regime. The Challenger disaster didn’t happen simply because of the O-ring seals failure. These so called “root causes” are part of many reasons, and they are definitely not the main reason.

Psycho-Logic: Why too Much Logic Deters Magic

Human beings aren’t machines that follow a simple logic. The same thinking used for designing a car cannot be used for designing a society. We are a complex system where the rules change according to context. And we follow a much more evolved form of logic called psycho-logic.