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.
Relaxation: Why the Next Best Option is the Best Option When somebody tells you to relax, it’s probably because you’re uptight and you make a bigger deal problems than you should. Here’s some counterintuitive advice: you don’t have to relax yourself. Relax your problems instead.
How to Win Arguments with Honesty Honesty and truthfulness are not the same thing. Being honest means not telling lies. Being truthful means actively making the full matter known.