flâneur

Edward Chen

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on the atlas — 16

highlights — 13

  • When listening to a talk, realize that there will typically be more information than any one audience member can digest. Sometimes this is the fault of the speaker, but just as often, this information overload is by design and functions similarly to price segmentation. Noga Alon recently joked to me, “Going to a talk is difficult for everyone because nobody understands the whole thing, but it’s especially difficult for undergraduates because they still expect to.”
    Where do your eyes go? | Radimentary
  • ‘I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.’ Jim Simons
    Learning from Jim Simons — Investment Masters Class
  • “It’s the collegiality, the collaboration and the pleasure of being on the inside,” he says.
    Why High-Powered People Are Working in Their 80s - WSJ
  • [5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to be consciously aware of it.
    Life is Short
  • One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future.
    Life is Short
  • The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.
    How to Lose Time and Money
  • articles on how to stock a meat department... What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in
    Curius / Onboarding