Category: Food for thought

Tim Harford explains why you shouldn’t forget the boring stuff. Some pretty good examples.

…smooth, successful operations are uninteresting, and uninteresting matters tend to be neglected. Eventually they stop working well, at which point they become interesting again. 

This is certainly true of the AC waveform. It seems boring because it has felt like a solved problem. Yet, as with low inflation or herd immunity from measles, if we allow the foundations of a success story to be eaten away, we find that the problem isn’t quite as thoroughly solved as we assumed.

…

Success leads to boredom. Boredom leads to neglect. Neglect leads to failure. Failure is no longer boring. But if we don’t show more interest in the successful systems we have built, they may suddenly become far too interesting for comfort. By the time these boring topics start seeming interesting, it’s too late.

Alex Tabarrok explaining zero sum thinking.

Zero sum thinking fuels support for trade protection: if other countries gain, we must be losing. It drives opposition to immigration: if immigrants benefit, natives must suffer. And it even helps explain hostility toward universities and the desire to cut science funding. For the zero-sum thinker, there’s no such thing as a public good or even a shared national interest—only “us” versus “them.” In this framework, funding top universities isn’t investing in cancer research; it’s enriching elites at everyone else’s expense. Any claim to broader benefit is seen as a smokescreen for redistributing status, power, and money to “them.”

Especially relevant right now.

Tushar Dadlani talking about the growing gap between how fast some actors can change the world and how fast others can respond to those changes.

…we’re experiencing massive “leverage arbitrage” where actors with higher-order leverage can extract value from systems faster than actors with lower-order leverage can maintain those systems. Google’s compensation revolution didn’t just raise tech salaries—it systematically destroyed entrepreneurial ecosystems globally by making employment more attractive than company-building. Social media platforms don’t just connect people—they reshape democratic discourse faster than democratic institutions can adapt. AI systems aren’t just tools—they’re deployed faster than we can develop frameworks for understanding their social implications.

And this arbitrage is making us perpetual junior programmers.

Rachel Kroll taking about benefits of documenting.

I used to be on a team that was responsible for the care and feeding of a great many Linux boxes which together constituted the “web tier” for a giant social network. You know, the one with all of the cat pictures… and later the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism. Yeah, them.

Anyway, given that we had a six-digit number of machines that was steadily climbing and people were always experimenting with stuff on them, with them, and under them, it was necessary to apply some balance to keep things from breaking too often. There was a fine line between “everything’s broken” and “it’s impossible to roll anything out so the business dies”.

At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it would be like it had always been there. Enough people went through the revolving doors of that place such that six months’ worth of employee turnover was sufficient to make it look like a whole other company. All I had to do was write it, wait a bit, then start citing it when needed.

Loved the reference of revolving doors.

Anurag Bansal talking about how well intentioned actions like subsidising solar panels can end up hurting the most vulnerable sections of society on The Daily Brief podcast.

…if your house generated more electricity than it used, you could make money off it by selling it away. Now, if you combine that with the absence of any major import duties on solar panels, the financial case for a rooftop solar became very, very attractive. But this is also where things started getting a little bit complicated.

See, electricity grids are built for scale in general. They are designed to serve millions of people in a centralized and predictable way. That’s how, by the way, the costs stay reasonable because the fixed costs of generation, transmission, and distribution are spread across a large number of paying users.

But the thing is, when that scale breaks, which is when wealthier users exit the system, the math suddenly starts falling apart. And that is exactly what is right now playing out in Pakistan. The richest households who paid the most amount of money for grid electricity are suddenly leaving the grid system altogether.

That means that the burden of paying for the fixed cost of electricity infrastructure is falling on smaller, poorer group of users, which are people who cannot afford to install solar panels, but they still rely on the grid. Now, these users are now left to cover the cost of not just their own electricity, but also the expensive take-or-pay contracts that the government had signed many years ago. And to remind you, these contracts do not care about actual consumption.

Whether or not people use electricity from the grid, the government is still obligated to pay the power producers. So even though solar is reducing demand from the grid, the cost of that unused electricity is still very much there, and it is being passed on to whoever is left on the system. That, ladies and gentlemen, is invisible price of defection.

Maalvika Bhat explaining the curse of vision in her post about how being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage.

We are perhaps the only species that suffers from our own imagination. A bird building a nest does not first conceive of the perfect nest and then suffer from the inadequacy of twigs and mud. A spider spinning a web does not pause, paralyzed by visions of geometric perfection beyond her current capabilities. But humans? We possess the strange gift of being haunted by visions of what could be, tormented by the gap between our aspirations and our abilities.

[…]

Watch a child draw. They create fearlessly, unselfconsciously, because they have not yet developed the curse of sophisticated taste! They draw purple trees and flying elephants with the confidence of someone who has never been told that trees aren’t purple, that elephants don’t fly. But somewhere around age eight or nine, taste arrives like a harsh critic, and suddenly the gap opens. The child can see that their drawing doesn’t match the impossible standard their developing aesthetic sense has conjured.

This is what leads most of us to stop drawing. Not because we lack talent, but because we’ve developed the ability to judge before we’ve developed the ability to execute. We become connoisseurs of our own inadequacy.

And this is where our minds, in their desperate attempt, devise an elegant escape. Faced with this unbearable gap, we develop what researchers call “productive avoidance” — staying busy with planning, researching, and dreaming while avoiding the vulnerable act of creating something concrete that might fail. It feels like work because it engages all our intellectual faculties. But it functions as avoidance because it protects us from the terrifying possibility of creating something imperfect. I see this in wannabe founders listening to podcasts on loop, wannabe TikTokkers watching hours of videos as “research,” and wannabe novelists who spend years developing character backstories for books they never begin.

The spider doesn’t face this problem. It spins webs according to ancient genetic instructions, each one remarkably similar to the last. But human creativity requires us to navigate the treacherous territory between what we can imagine and what we can actually do. We are cursed with visions of perfection and blessed with the capacity to fail toward them.

Daniel Sada talking about layoff paradox and why layoffs are easier than firing an employee.

To fire someone for performance, managers must document everything meticulously. Every missed deadline, every subpar deliverable, every coaching conversation needs to be recorded. HR requires a paper trail that can withstand legal scrutiny. This process can take months or even years, during which the underperforming employee continues to collect their salary and potentially drag down team morale.

The legal risk is real. Even in at-will states, wrongful termination lawsuits can be expensive and time-consuming. Companies worry about discrimination claims, especially if the fired employee belongs to a protected class. Better to have an ironclad documentation trail than face a costly legal battle.

Layoffs, paradoxically, are “cleaner.” When you eliminate entire roles or teams, you sidestep the performance documentation requirements. You’re not firing someone for being bad at their job, you’re eliminating the job itself. The legal risk is minimal, and you can even look compassionate by offering severance packages and transition support. Employees can even claim unemployment and keep their income for months!

For VPs and executives, layoffs solve multiple problems at once: they can eliminate underperformers without the messy documentation process, reduce headcount to hit financial targets, and maintain the narrative that they’re making “tough but strategic decisions” rather than admitting they failed to manage performance effectively.

The bitter irony? Getting laid off is often better for the employee than being fired. Layoffs typically come with severance, extended healthcare, and the ability to say you were “affected by restructuring” rather than “terminated for cause.” You get more time to find your next job, and your professional reputation remains intact.

A wonderful post by Joan Westenberg who went a deleting spree of all her knowledge base—notes, links, to do lists.

Two nights ago, I deleted everything.

Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. I deleted every Apple Note I’d synced since 2015. Every quote I’d ever highlighted. Every to-do list from every productivity system I’d ever borrowed, broken, or bastardized. Gone. Erased in seconds.

What followed: Relief.

And a comforting silence where the noise used to be.

For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.

But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

And so…

Well, I killed the whole thing.

This is akin to the forest fires which are valuable for some ecosystems to thrive. They open the forest canopy to sunlight so that sunlight reaches the ground and stimulates new growth. Sometimes, we also need a clean slate to start with new set of ideas.

Another wonderful excerpt from the post.

In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. But a structure is not thinking. A tag is not an insight. And an idea not re-encountered might as well have never been had.

Ardem Patapoutian talking about proprioception in this interview where he discusses about his Nobel prize for medicine.

The simplest test is to close your eyes and touch your nose. If you think about how you’re able to tell where your fingers are with your eyes closed, you realize it’s because of how much your muscles are stretched. It’s the same sensor, Piezo 2, that senses this. You don’t feel that the muscle in your second finger is stretched, but rather you gather all the information, and your brain forms an image of where you are and what space you occupy. And that’s why, easily, without looking, you can walk, run, play soccer, play the violin. You can do all of this thanks to proprioception. And we take it for granted because you can’t turn it off. You can close your eyes and imagine what a blind person is like, but you can’t turn off proprioception. That’s why most people don’t know about it, because it’s always there. And it’s a big philosophical message: we take things for granted when we always have them.

A post from Better Than Random talking about how being useful and being valued are two different things.

Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely. You are reliable, efficient, maybe even indispensable in the short term. But you are seen primarily as a gap-filler, someone who delivers on tasks that have to be done but are not necessarily a core component of the company strategy. “Take care of that and don’t screw up” is your mission, and the fewer headaches you create for your leadership chain, the bigger the rewards.

Being valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction. This comes with opportunities to grow and contribute in ways that are meaningful to you and the business.

It took me a few years to truly grasp the difference. If you’re valued, you’ll likely see a clear path for advancement and development, you might get more strategic roles and involvement in key decisions. If you are just useful, your role might feel more stagnant.