A taxonomy of haters:

1. The anti-fan. Like an obsessive fan, but with negative polarity. Has unrealistic expectations of you, and is disappointed when you cannot fulfill them. (HT @paulg)

2. The snob. Hates you to show discernment. Loves to nit-pick and be pedantic. 3. The troll. Has no real opinion, but loves to get a rise out of people that do.

4. The "helper". Socially-inept, they offer their scathing unsolicited feedback only to help you do better next time. Usually don't realize how rude they are.

There's a certain style of writing associated with aphorisms, platitudes and epigraphs.

I'm trying to figure out what it is. People seem to find it a lot more compelling than other phrasings of the same information. Perhaps for that reason it's often also scorned.

Some ideas... Some of the appeal might just be the prosody of the phrase itself. Good quotes just *sound* good, irrespective of their actual content.

"Haste makes waste." > "Doing things quickly will cause you to make more mistakes."

There's a value in self-presenting as being really bad at something.

Your instinct is to present as competent. Sometimes that instinct backfires.

e.g. Guy turns down job in German. Says his wasn't good enough. You know how he would have learned German well: by taking the job. I found it really helpful when learning languages, but it applies to a lot else.

When you present yourself as, "Hey, I'm bad at this, but I want to try to learn," people want to help. Without this self-conscious presentation, some people interpret it as haughty to try.

I treat everything I think about the world as a working draft.

When I read things I wrote 10 years ago, I'm often embarrassed by stuff I got wrong. Shouldn't I have known X?

But, if I go forward 10 years, I'm sure I'll feel that way about things I think today. There are two common reactions to this truth, both of them bad:

(1) Expertise and knowledge don't matter, just believe whatever you want.

(2) Unless you're the world's leading expert on X, don't have opinions at all.

Some thoughts on quantity vs quality in creative work:

If you write, code, paint or otherwise make things you're aware that both matter, but the relationship often seems complicated.

Making less sometimes makes things better. Sometimes making more does too. What gives? My theory is that quality is largely determined by the way you make something. A lot of this isn't explicit, but routines and workflows you're not even aware of.

If you increase your output so that you're no longer able to follow your best practice, quantity lowers quality.

Stuck inside? Here are some of my favorite online courses to expand your mind:

1. Michael Sandel - Justice -

Some of the most compelling instruction I've seen on any topic. Harvard philosopher explains moral philosophy with thought-provoking questions. 2. Walter Lewin - Physics: youtube.com/playlist?list=…

Taken down after a scandal, these are still the best introduction to college-level physics around. Originally taught at MIT.

Does anyone know why Asian countries have such a strong focus on education? It seems to be a much higher cultural value there than in US or Europe, but I haven't read any research on why.

Some possibilities: Cultural hold over from Confucian-era imperial examinations. This might explain why China (and, to a lesser extent Korea and Japan) have such a strong focus. Competitive education for elite status attainment may be culturally deep.

Counterexample: what about India?

Currently reading Timothy Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious amazon.com/Strangers-Ours… Some thoughts: The book came up in my reading of LeDoux's Anxious, which I shared some notes on here (

https://twitter.com/ScottHYoung/status/1185577291407089664

). The basic thesis is that much of the work of the mind is invisible--yet it has pervasive influence over our lives.

Currently reading Anxiety by neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. Fascinating (if not the easiest) read about the biology behind consciousness and anxiety. Here's what I've learned so far: LeDoux argues that the way researchers have talked about anxiety has led to misconceptions. The amygdala has often been called the brain's "fear center". This makes it seem like processing there results in our conscious appreciation of fear. But this probably isn't correct.

Math is mostly taught as calculation. But we do little pen-and-paper calculating in our lives, so it feels mostly useless. I think we'd do better if we focused on back-of-the-envelope reasoning + learning to spot patterns. Back-of-the-envelope, or Fermi estimations, are useful to mentally get an intuition of *roughly* what the right answer ought to be, which can then be rigorously double-checked. This is where math is really useful--it makes you less gullible.

I've been playing around with different note-taking systems since reading @soenke_ahrens's wonderful book How to Take Smart Notes ( amazon.com/How-Take-Smart… ) Some things I've learned: 1. The value of a note-taking system is being able to *find* notes, not *store* them. A great system will remind you of useful ideas serendipitously, rather than needing you to first realize the value and then go hunt down the source from your archives.

I've spent my first week in Japan. Here are some random first impressions: Attention to detail. Japan is somewhat famous for this, but it was still impressive. They even manage to get Western food right (elsewhere in Asia it often seems more like an allusion to the real thing.) This isn't to say that's a benchmark of success, but it shows great care.

Should you learn something new, or outsource it to someone else?

This is a situation that comes up a lot in work and life. Do you learn accounting--or hire an accountant? Write a script or hire a programmer? Do your own drywall or hire a contractor? My thoughts... At first, the easiest response is: do you want to learn it?

Life is short, work is busy. You don't need to be good at everything, and sometimes getting someone else to do it will free yourself up for learning how to do something else.

How much should you trust "experts" vs. people who have a lot of hands-on experience (aka "doers")? This has a meta-level issue that's come up a lot in discussing my book, so I'd like to weigh in here... First, I'm not an expert in anything. I try to stay as informed as possible, but that's a long way from even having a PhD, never mind being an "expert" leading a particular field. This should bias me in favor of people like myself vs experts, but I actually think the opposite.

Question: Should I do an intensive ultralearning project or focus on a small, repeatable habit? (e.g. 6-week burst or 10-minutes a day?)

The answer is both. Let me explain: 100 hours in 3 years vs 30 days will be different.

Spacing effects mean the spread-out schedule is better for long-term retention. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_e…)

Conversely, bursts may help for (A) prioritization and (B) environments that aid learning. (e.g. immersion for languages)

Whenever I read pieces comparing countries like Sweden to the US, I always wonder why "nation" is considered the individual unit. Why not compare regions with similar population or area? Sweden vs NYC or USA vs EU instead of nations of wildly different sizes. If nations were mostly homogeneous, this could be justified, but they aren't. China is middle income. But Beijing is like other developed countries, at least in terms of GDP and HDI.

The perceived intelligence required to learn a subject is related to how "tall" it is. Tall subjects stack concepts on top of each other (like math/physics). Flat subjects span out in wide directions (like history/trivia). The taller a subject is, the harder it is to join a conversation and know what the hell two experts are even talking about. Reading a random psych paper as a layperson is *much* easier than a random physics paper. Psych is flatter than physics.

Oil painting + neuroscience, a thread... @slatestarcodex has shared a lot about an influential model of human cognition (e.g. slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its… ) which states that thinking can roughly be divided as the merging of top-down and bottom-up processing.

Recently, I've developed a weird sort of obsession with videogame speedrunning. For those who don't know, this is a hobby where players try to beat a videogame as fast as possible. Here's why that's interesting... First, people who do this are *really* good. Like that game you played as a kid and spent months on people have gotten it down to twenty minutes. But even if you don't care at all about videogames (I don't play much at all anymore), I think the community around is fascinating.

There are two types of performance domains. Ones in which the best are extremely close to each other in terms of performance, and ones in which the best are a *lot* better than the rest. Athletics strikes me as closer to the former. Barring a few outliers, top runners, leapers and swimmers often have times that are only seconds apart. Being the best here is about asymptotically approaching a perfect point.

Some useful mental models worth knowing: Efficient markets (and the efficient market hypothesis): Prices adjust until quantity supplied = quantity demanded, and that this can result in an "efficient" distribution where nobody can be made better off without making somebody worse off. Applies to a lot more than econ.