Abhishek Chakraborty (Page 3)

Phase Transition: What Traffic Jams Teach Us About Office Politics

You’re driving home from work on a highway. The traffic is flowing well. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the highway turns into a parking lot of stopped cars. There’s no visible cause. There are no accidents in sight. Where did this traffic jam come from? And what does it have to do with office politics?

How I Explain Things

All my essays are either explanations or instructions, most of them full of arguments. I’m not the best writer, but since I write (two newsletters) every week I do get a lot of practice. And over the years (knowingly or unknowingly) I’ve developed a list of common pitfalls to avoid.

Counterfactual Reasoning: How to Ask Better What-if Questions

Suppose Jonny takes a drug and dies a month later, how do we go about investigating whether the drug might have caused his death? To answer this question (correctly) we need to imagine a scenario in which Jonny was about to take the drug but changed his mind.

The Limits of Our Reasoning

Statistical concepts such as regression are confounding. While they have an explanation, they don’t have any cause. Our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and cannot swallow the reason for something being “mere statistics.”

How to Fight Like Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi pushed the Brits out of India with some unorthodox methods that we often take for granted. There’s a lot we can learn from this stubborn and scrawny man among men who knew how to fight for his principles—on his own terms—and win!

Smart People Should Disagree With You

Being contrarian is often critical to the process of becoming massively valuable. If you can bet on something that nobody agrees with, and win, there’s nothing like it. I’ve written on this topic at length, but turns out that wasn’t enough. It’s still easily misunderstood, which is a shame.

Listen to the Suck with Curiosity

Using two stories (one long and one short) I’ll introduce you to a framework that explains the relationship between persistence and stubbornness, and the difference between false fails and true fails.

Be an Imperfectionist

Perfectionism is either an excuse to explain why you can’t get something done, or it’s a way (for bad managers) to justify why employees should work harder. It’s stupid and callous, and—as we’ll soon discover—not a good strategy, especially if you want to get things done.