2025-11-05 21:34:05
Sometimes I fall into patterns with other people where I keep noticing the choices they make violate my personal rules of thumb.
For example, a simple rule-of-thumb I have is "if asking someone whether they'd like to do something is costless, you should just do it rather than speculating what their answer would be."
That is: maybe you think so-and-so wouldn't do such-and-such because of thing-and-thing, but if it doesn't hurt to ask then you might as well just ask them and let them decide for themselves; any time you spend debating how likely they are to do the thing is completely wasted for everyone, you should just ask them and be done with it.
But this doesn't seem to be a common rule of thumb, and often when I'm organizing things with other people I'll say "should we ask Person?" and my interlocutor will say "Person will probably say no because of Reason," and I'm thinking sure, that might be true, but is there any reason not to ask them?
And this is not trivial, because there are situations where it is costly to ask someone about a thing, so in my head I'm like are you trying to tell me there's a cost to asking in this case? Or that you don't want them to do it, but you're pretending they wouldn't want to as an attempt to save face? Or do you just enjoy trying to figure out whether people will or won't do something, as a prediction? Or is there some mysterious other thing happening here?
And eventually, my thought is should I just explain this rule of thumb and then check whether you share it or not? But that part is costly to me, because I think people generally respond badly when you say "hey, I think you're making this entire category of decisions badly, here's an academic-sounding explanation of why there's no point in us continuing this conversation."
If anyone has advice on how to do this better I'm truly all ears. The above is just one example, it happens to me with various rules of thumb, so I'm looking for a solution in general.
Books newly in my pile, let me know if they're in yours:
Playing to Win, by David Sirlin
Reality, by Peter Kingsley (h/t reader J.)
The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman
This Is Your Brain On Birth Control, by Sarah Hill
Call Center Management on Fast Forward, by Brad Cleveland and Julia Mayben
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There, by Timothy Shay Arthur
Natural Remote Viewing, by Jon Noble
Passage, by Connie Willis (h/t reader KL)
If your job was to bring together hunters from lots of different places, you'd probably get sick of having conversations at parties where you explain your work and then have to be like "no, I'm not that kind of hunter-gatherer...."
2025-11-03 21:35:12
Thanks for all the feedback on my recent How Weird Should This Blog Be post. My main takeaway is that (most of) you massively overestimate how much mail (most of) your favourite bloggers get; for most writers the answer is "very little," and you can meaningfully determine what someone writes about and/or how happy they feel about writing just by dropping them a line. Email your favourite blogger today!
One big thing that Silicon Valley is right about is the vital importance of tightening feedback loops. They didn't invent this, but I think a lot of businesses could benefit by adopting their cultural obsession with it. (Obvious caveat: I've never worked in Most Businesses, this is all just my view from the outside).
Ceteris paribus, in any given industry, I would bet on the business that has found a way to build an endless feedback-and-improvement loop over the ones that haven't. A lot of the time there's a way to make your product that allows you to constantly solicit and implement feedback, and many other ways that don't, and I don't think people who are not-implementing feedback loops are cognizant of how much they're missing, or even always that the high-feedback alternative exists.
For example, David Chang writes:
My first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, had an open kitchen. This wasn’t by choice—I didn’t have enough money or space to put it farther away from the diners. But cooking in front of my customers changed the way I look at food. In the early years, around 2004, we were improvising new recipes every day, and I could instantly tell what was working and what wasn’t by watching people eat.
Or Walt Hickey on Marvel comics as test loop for movies:
Marvel Comics was an R&D operation that went on for 60 years that tested, at a very cheap rate all things considered, ideas and concepts and characters, that ... were able to decisively determine what the best possible stories from the best possible characters were.
Making movies is very expensive, making comics is less-expensive, so publishing a ton of comics and seeing which ones readers respond to gives you a much tighter feedback loop than making movies blindly and waiting to see how viewers respond to those. (Even if you show the movies to test audiences before final editing and releasing, you're not getting anywhere near the amount of honing that comics gave you).
Or take my own business of board games. The creator of Settlers of Catan would supposedly playtest every single weekend with his family, stop whenever the game got bad, then change the rules for the next weekend to improve that bottleneck. I would bet on any boardgame creator who found a way to playtest every day, over one who playtests every week, over one who playtests every month. But a significant number of board game creators are only managing to test once per month.
There's a crazy element here where if your boardgame (or other product) is even moderately successful you're anticipating tens of thousands of hours of usage in the wild, which for some games is thousands of times more than they spent on testing it before they launched. This is insane! Some amount of feedback reaches the creator after publication via online reviews and angry emails, which hopefully can be incorporated into version 2, but overall there's a ridiculous disconnect and most of the useful information about the games gets lost (much like most of the information about how restaurant-dishes are received gets lost if the chef is in a closed kitchen).
A great advantage our digital-game-creator cousins have is that they can endlessly track and iterate their games over time; physical games and other physical products can't do that. But I suspect that we can get a lot closer to the ideal by somehow incentivizing more structured feedback from post-publication players, or releasing more and better prototypes with more and better feedback loops before going to market. I've experimented a little with this, but I think there's a million miles further to go, and that it's plausible I could tighten the loop by 100x and make my games 1000x better as a result. If you know how to do this, please let me know.
2025-11-01 03:00:02
A very happy 🎃 Halloween 🦇 to you and yours.
The most American Building. My grandfather slept in it while it was unfinished in between training stops in World War 2. My father took classes in it. I went to it on field trips. It’s a wonderful building.
Preach, Nabeel, Preach. I wonder why “education” rather than “age” has been what has sorted our politics 🤔.
On relationship between growth and trust, arguing that living through periods of higher GDP growth leads to higher societal trust. On one level, this squares well with the idea that trust is a mixture of competence, commitment, and character, with societies delivering growth being seen as competent. On the other hand, I would expect higher levels of trust to also unlock opportunities for faster growth.
Home field advantage in the NFL is actually real and it basically disappeared in 2020 when no fans were in the stadiums. Via Crémieux.
More than 98% of new vehicle sales in Norway were EVs in September. From Elective via Anton.
Unconfirmed but from a reliable source: Amazon drivers are paid 12 cents per package delivered.
A growing share of Americans (+13%) say Religion is gaining influence in American life according to Pew. I’m not sure how to square this with the thing I learned last week, that support for declaring the United States a Christian Nation is falling amongst Christians or that the fastest growing Catholic sects are the strictest ones. Strange things are happening!
For the first time in 35 years, no rap songs are in the top 40. Rolling Stone.
Should we care about process or outcomes? Some really successful people (see Tom Brady here ) seem more to favor the process over the result while others favor the result over the process (see Phil Knight / Nike and Sam Altman). How should I make sense of this?
What would have to change for Western Society to become less individualistic? Is it possible for Western Society to become more individualistic? What would it look like to short individualism?
Episode 3 of Dangerously Skip Permissions is next week: LLM pricing is broken, but not in the way that you think with my friend Anjali Shrivastava.
2025-10-29 20:13:23
I have conflicted feelings about how weird and experimental a blog like this should be.
One model is like a restaurant: a blog exists to serve up variations on a particular theme. When I go to an Italian restaurant I am doing it because I want to eat some kind of wheat-cheese-tomato combo, and while I'm fine with the restaurant adding some light original flourishes, I will be fundamentally betrayed if they suddenly serve me a thai green curry. And this is true even though I love green curry, and even if it's unexpectedly a good green curry.
Another model is like a snack conglomerate: there's some limitations on the variety of outputs based on the skills and resources of the proprietors, and maybe some very loose sense boundaries to what kinds of things count as "a snack," but fundamentally the output can cover a lot of ground, and its understood by everyone that there will be misses as well as hits.
Part of the issue here is that there's two different ways to interact with this (or any) blog: you can be a regular reader who gets the new installments every week, or you can find yourself reading one standalone piece that fell into your stream somehow.
I suspect the regular readers might have a relationship to their favoured blogs more like a restaurant – I know I'd feel weird if Matt Levine suddenly started publishing speculative fiction under the banner of his finance newsletter, even though I suspect he'd write incredibly good spec-fic.
Meanwhile, the drive-through readers are treating this more like a snack they picked up at a train station – even if they enjoyed it they probably don't remember the name of the piece, and certainly not the name of the publication, so they really don't mind how (in)consistent the range of offerings is.
So far I've attempted only very minimal variation in my writing on this blog – I did try a couple of fiction pieces, which got 0 explicit reaction and which I therefore assume were not-good, but mostly I think the pieces are pretty consistent within a recognizable cluster of themes.
But I contain a great deal more weirdness, and could make this blog much weirder if desired; I also contain a great deal of classic atoms-vs-bits-ness, and could keep the blog whatever-it-currently-is as well.
What would you like to see here? Some of you will immediately tell me that I should do whatever I want to do, which is kind, but assume that I will incorporate my own preferences separately, and I care deeply about your own desires: how weird do you want the blog to be?
2025-10-27 20:57:25
For context: this book has an incredibly impassioned fan base who claim their debilitating back (or knee, or wrist) pain ended immediately by the power of this knowledge alone.
For example, a Seattle group dedicated to repetitive strain wrist injuries supposedly disbanded after reading the book and realizing their pain was all psychosomatic; Larry David supposedly said of his treatment (in a documentary I haven't watched) "it was the closest thing to a religious experience, and I wept."
What is the knowledge that produced these results? I know it's cliche to make fun of non-fiction books as mostly being three ideas repeated nineteen times each, but.... as best I can tell, there are literally only three ideas in this book:
I think that's genuinely it, that's the whole book. And I am here for it! He is arguing against an assumption of Cartesian dualism – the mind and the body are entirely separate, so physical problems couldn't be caused by emotional ones – and from the tone of the book I gather that he really did have to argue this a lot against people who found it implausible.
But since I need zero additional convincing about the mind-body connection and its discontents, my reaction to his proposal is "sure that could be true, the only real question is whether it works empirically." And since lots of people seem to have semi-miraculous experiences with his methods, and since they're costless to implement and seems low-downside to try (assuming it doesn't stop you from getting other treatment you needed), I would say if you're in pain and find this intriguing I think it's worth a shot.
Still, I have to emphasize that as a book this thing is bad. It's not super long but it is so much longer than the content which I believe I faithfully summarized in 100 words above.
Again I give him some leeway because I guess he was arguing against assumptions that are no longer as prevalent, and maybe he was part of changing those assumptions to the point where his argument feels redundant, bitter-sweetly.
But if I had to pick one mega-gripe with the writing it's that he endlessly does that thing which so many non-fiction books written by experts do, where they've been told that giving examples is good, but a) they're trying to anonymize their case studies, and b) they fundamentally do not understand what makes case studies interesting and worthwhile, which is a combo of vivid details and new insights from each example.
As a result, this book is 50% composed of: "let me give you an example. A [young/old/milddle-aged] [man/woman/child] came to me with back pain. They had seen many other doctors for many years and had been told their pain was incurable, and that they would never [play tennis / go running / dance the tango in Argentina] again. However, after talking to me and learning about my methods, it turns out that their pain all stems from the trouble in their [work / marriage / torrid affair with an Argentinian tango dancer]. Now they have been pain free for 10 years and they tell me that it's all thanks to my methods."
The above is not exaggerated, except for that he never does anything as interesting as the Argentinian tango bit. I swear that not a single example added anything meaningfully different to my understanding than the 100 examples before, all of which are just variants of "this person had anxiety or anger from their work or home life, and their physical pain was actually just trapped emotional pain."
But maybe I'm being unfair: even if it's bad as writing, maybe that doesn't make it bad as a book? I believe in newsletters functioning as spaced repetition, maybe personal improvement books are the same: the repetition is the product, it relentlessly hammers the core idea into your brain until the idea actually sticks.
Legendary blogger Jehan suggests the correct approach here might be "keep reading until your back is fixed, then stop." I can support that.
2025-10-24 21:11:29
The Alpha Terrace Historic District in Pittsburgh, PA. One of my dream places to live.
My guilty pleasure on YouTube right now are videos claiming Ancient Egyptians had access to advanced technology that allowed them to machine vases out of hard stone. I’m agnostic as to whether or not this is true, but I can’t look away!
Why is Switzerland so rich? This is good, but I think it misses a couple of things. First, Switzerland was spared the physical and human losses of both World Wars. Second, there’s a cultural element that the post doesn’t speak to. Switzerland is both highly individualistic and highly communal, a mix of live-and-let-live and we’re-all-in-this-together that I believe allows it to make more pragmatic decisions, the benefits of which compound over time.
Some of the strongest US-China copium I’ve ever seen.
Creating a village for your child. I wish it were easier to do this.
What happens when someone dies on an airplane.
11 states and half of the counties in the US have more senior citizens than children. This sounds outrageous but I’m curious how much this has changed over time and the degree to which this is just more about longer life spans. Someone should analyze this the way Brian Potter analyzed US pedestrian deaths.
Costco’s Kirkland Brand drives more revenue than all of Procter and Gamble combined.
One of the great joys of having children is that they ask obvious questions you haven’t considered. This week it was: “Why do we call it a piggy bank?” [^1] It turns out that this (possibly) comes from the name of the clay, pygg, that was used to make jars for storing coins and that shaping them like pigs was a visual pun.
Support for declaring the United States a Christian nation is falling amongst Christians.
Someone told me this week that in France they say that there are six reasons someone will pay for something: Security, Pride, Novelty, Comfort, Money, Friendliness.
The Tiny Teams Playbook. This rhymes with some of what I learned this summer while “interning” with Roo Code. See also prototype first development.
Dead Framework Theory - the idea that LLMs are freezing frameworks like React into the internet. I thought like this at first, but I no longer think that this is true and I actually think LLMs will make it easier to bootstrap new frameworks provided those frameworks have real advantages over what they’re replacing because LLMs make it so much easier to adopt new tools.
Peter Steinberger’s Agentic Coding Guide.
Living Dangerously with Claude.
[^1]: The actual question was much funnier. My 5 year old made a piggy bank at church, causing my 3 year old to ask, “Daddy, do pigs have banks?” As I think about this, it gets even more puzzling, because I'm not sure he's ever been to a bank.