I’ve been seeing several references on Facebook and email recently to this site or similar sites, which makes the claim that it is safer to ride a bicycle without a helmet. This is ridiculous nonsense to me, and I finally snapped and wrote a long email rant in response, and decided to post a version […]
Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Amazon link I finally read this book, which has been on the to-read list since it came out because of its discussion of cognitive biases. I hadn’t been in a particular hurry to read it, especially since I’d listened to Kahneman’s Long Now talk which covered the main themes of the book. But I finally […]
How is your memory indexed?
My Facebook friends have heard me complain a few times that I have apparently exceeded my brain’s capacity to keep track of people. At Google, I have worked with hundreds of people, and it’s entirely embarrassing when one of them sees me at lunch or elsewhere on the Google campus and says “Hi Eric!” and […]
Expertise as exception handling
A few months ago, I wrote a post claiming that expertise was doing difficult tasks consistently and Rif challenged me on that. And I’ve been thinking about it over the past few months and have another model I’m going to throw out there: expertise as exception handling. One example of this is my experience as […]
Maximizing collisionability
Last night, Tony Hsieh of zappos.com spoke at the Long Now on the topic of Helping Revitalize a City. He described Downtown Project, which is the company he designed to create a thriving community (tech, art, fashion, family) in downtown Las Vegas. As he discussed the project, he brought up a great concept that I […]
Hosting update
I should have known better than to keep pushing my luck with textdrive.com after last year’s catastrophic meltdown, but I didn’t want to deal. Unfortunately, textdrive went down without even an email to its users a couple weeks ago, and their provider deleted all their data on Friday. Oops. At least I had a backup […]
Don’t act like a special snowflake
Disclaimer: This post is not about you. Please do not take offense. It is an exaggerated amalgam of people for the sake of making a point. Over the past several months, I have talked to a number of people looking for jobs or practicing company pitches. And what I see is people getting frustrated that […]
Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Amazon link Taleb is known for his book The Black Swan, which I own and have read but apparently never wrote a review for. While his writing style is a little annoying, the central concepts of nonlinearity and power-law distributions are worth remembering (described in a Long Now talk here if you want the short […]
2013 review
I’m a little late to this, but a 2013 review is an easy post to kick off my theoretically renewed commitment to blogging in 2014. For the first time since joining Google in September of 2008, I wasn’t completely swamped by work, and thus had time to invest in the rest of my life as […]
Inequality, Globalization and Technology
There has been a discussion about economic inequality on an email list I’m on. It started with a link to this CNN summary of “must reads” on inequality, and has continued over a few other threads the past couple months. I’ve written a few thoughts in those threads, and thought I would assemble them here […]
