Betterment

Three masterpieces from glimmer through struggle to breakthrough.

my month of rotting

There are few sitcoms, thrillers or plays where the plot can tolerate the addition of a cell phone. Once the characters have the ability to connect and clear up misunderstandings at will, a lot of …

What kind of culture will we build? At work, in our community, online? Compliance Quality Inquiry Inclusion Consumption Possibility and/or Fear Each of us builds culture every time we interact with…

An open source game about learning Git

When someone starts a business, they spend a bunch of time with a business plan, working to raise funds and get it off the ground. After that, though, the purpose of the business is completely alig…

Every internet success works because the network effect kicked in. There’s no other way for an idea to reliably and economically reach a big enough audience to be sustained. That’s why Super Bowl a…

That’s the first part of the confusion. It’s a group of people who can’t decide what the thing they do is supposed to be. Is it: Advertising Publicity Increasing retail distributi…

Weather predictions are probabilistic, not deterministic. That means there isn’t a single right answer that we can calculate. We can’t say it will rain at 11:05 but we can say that there’s an 80% chance of rain today. Forecasting when we’ll be done is also probabilistic, in exactly the same way. We can say based on past throughput data that we have an 85% chance of being done on or before May 12.

The defenders of the status quo often demand certainty when facing decisions about the future. It sets up the conditions for doing nothing, because certainty never happens until the future arrives.…

The flexibility of Obsidian combined with the organization of a bookmark manager.

Digging into the philosophical roots of the battle between Tiago Forte and Conor White-Sullivan

How to use ChatGPT to master the best of what other people have figured out

What the science of stress tells us about peak performance

How GPT-3 will turn your notes into an *actual* second brain

Give yourself the space to be inspired

The overarching principle of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is that the harder you do an exercise, the more physiological benefits you accrue; thus, by incorporating intervals of higher intensity efforts in your workouts, you can get more fitness bang for your buck in less time.  When we think about HIIT, we tend to think about […]

Ways of Seeing by John Berger is a seminal text based on the 1972 BBC series of the same name, which explores the role of art in western civilization and how it has shaped how the world is seen.

Diving deep into Johnson-Laird’s theory of mental models. It is one of the leading psychological theories of reasoning, even though it doesn’t have the status of being a consensus theory (few theories in psychology do).

Have you ever wondered what the wiring layout behind the control panels at Abbey Road studios was like? Neither have I. The Beatles recorded some of their best work there, and I have no idea if it …

Starting in 1940s post war Paris, the “Existentialism” philosophical movement became all the rage, soon spreading globally led by big names like Jean-Paul

Until just recently, a solar eclipse wasn’t a tourist event. It was the cause of real panic. Two reasons that are worth considering: It was a surprise. They were not predicted. They were unex…

When the deal falls apart, or the team loses the game, or a partnership hits the rocks, it’s easy to focus our energy on what just happened. “What if they had called a different play?&#…

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no l…

Your marriage is struggling. You’ve invited your wife to do couples therapy, to go out for date nights, to spend more time together in general. But she’s refused all these invitations.  Your daughter has the potential to be a champion swimmer. But she isn’t into the sport, and getting her to go to practice is […]

When a resource can be used more efficiently, we end up using more of the thing, not less. So, when cars get better gas mileage, people drive more, and consumption can actually go up. When AI learn…

It’s tempting to hand it to other people. If someone else takes the blame, if they accept the responsibility, then we get satisfaction and we’re off the hook. Alas, this doesn’t w…

During a recent interview over on the Dwarkesh Patel channel, Professor Sarah CM Paine (who teaches Geopolitics  over at The US Naval War College) gave a

Apparently, we were a lot happier last year than we are this year. At least that’s what the studies say, (and we all know they’re right). The United

Fear is self-focused. Day to day, our fear is about us. What will happen if we give that speech, launch that project, get stuck in traffic, are eaten by an alligator… And generosity is about …