Most things in life are not zero-sum, but somehow people often seem to act as if they are. I think that this severely limits their opportunities and wastes time. Zero-sum thinking is the idea that the total utility in a situation is fixed and hence can only be divided between…
Sometimes decisions still seem daunting even after you've done your research and have carefully considered your options. In these cases, for each possible decision outcome I like to think "In 2 years from now, how would I look back on this choice?". 9 out of 10 times this makes the…
You know you ultimately want to have an impact on <insert what you think is important here>, and you want to maximise your chances of having maximal impact towards that, but there will still be many roads to Rome, some fuzzier than others. So how do you do…
Software engineers are great at automating workflows and focusing on how to do them evermore efficiently. The best engineers I know also apply this meticulously to their own workflows. They're always looking for ways to save a couple of clicks or keystrokes in actions they perform every day. There's a…
I recently read Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments, which argues that we should be focusing on maximising the rate of sustainable economic growth and discusses why that is the most important thing to target. This sparked many questions for me about what we should be optimising for (GDP? Leisure time?). In…
I used to read a lot of short news stories, especially during dead moments when reaching for my phone was the habitual action to take. This felt useful in the moment as I learned something about the state of the world that I didn't know yet, which pretty much is…