Strategy - Abhishek Chakraborty

The Problem with Too Much Fairness

We care so much about fairness that we are willing to sacrifice economic well-being to enforce it. Research shows that just to ensure shirkers get what they deserve, we are prepared to make ourselves poorer.

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.

The Politics of Victimhood

The instinct to think like a herd has been prevalent in human beings since prehistoric times. Even a smalltime politician knows that if they can tap into this sentiment, they would become massively popular within the group.

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.

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.