flâneur

Chloe Nguyen

9 followers · 10 following · 1020 views

on the atlas — 55

highlights — 19

  • The problem is that the bad consequences of underconfidence and under-ambition are severe but subtle, whereas the bad consequences of overconfidence and wishful thinking are milder but more obvious. If you’re overconfident, you’ll try things that fail, and people will laugh at you. If you’re underconfident, you’ll avoid making risky bets, and miss out on the potential upside, but nobody will know for sure what you missed.
    Be less scared of overconfidence | benkuhn.net
  • Being twice as fast doesn’t just double your output; it doubles the growth rate of your output. Over time, that makes an enormous difference.
    Be impatient | benkuhn.net
  • Often, you’ll have a choice between spending time on optimizing one sample or drawing a second sample—for instance, editing a blog post you’ve already written vs. writing a second post, or polishing a message on a dating app vs. messaging a second person. Some amount of optimization is worth it, but in my experience, most people are way over-indexed on optimization and under-indexed on drawing more samples.
    Searching for outliers | benkuhn.net
  • The most important thing to remember when sampling from heavy-tailed distributions is that getting lots of samples improves outcomes a ton.
    Searching for outliers | benkuhn.net
  • the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning.
    The Law of Leaky Abstractions – Joel on Software
  • what does it seem like everyone else is mysteriously bad at? That’s probably a sign that you have good taste there.
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • People who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • handle being sentenced to freedom, and to handle it effectively, and authentically, and responsibly.
    On agency - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • I realized that even a good man in this world, who played the game straight, played by the rules, did everything he was supposed to do, could end up dying screaming. At that point, I decided there's no point in not trying to accomplish every stupid dream I've got, even if it's dumb stuff….Chase it all and do it all because we're all going to die screaming, and you might as well enjoy it here."
    High Agency
  • If you’re hiding your weird individualism to make the tribe like you, remember: They’ll soon forget everything you did or said.
    High Agency
  • A low agency trap is to put these "adults" on pedestals. To turn flawed humans into a superior god class.
    High Agency
  • There was no 'way' of doing things they all repeated -- except doing what worked for them.
    High Agency
  • simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are. It's hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you're supposed to conform to.
    How to Think for Yourself
  • the phrase “high standards” in the context of education reform means standards that all students will never be able to meet. Because if everyone did meet them, the standards would just be ratcheted up again — as high as necessary to ensure that some students failed.
    Can Everyone Be Excellent? - Alfie Kohn
  • Suppose that next year virtually every student in your state met the standards and passed the tests. What would the likely reaction be from politicians, businesspeople, and the media? Would these folks shake their heads in frank admiration and say, “Damn, those teachers must be good!”? That response, of course, is improbable to the point of hilarity. Since that dinner, in fact, I’ve laid out this hypothetical scenario at dozens of education conferences, and audiences always say that such remarkable student success would immediately be cited as evidence that the tests were too easy.
    Can Everyone Be Excellent? - Alfie Kohn
  • A wry sign on display in some classrooms reads “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” This is the position that corporate school reformers have adopted without irony.
    It's Time to Rethink Education Policy - Alfie Kohn
  • It’s time to stop defining high-quality schooling in terms of its specificity.
    It's Time to Rethink Education Policy - Alfie Kohn
  • But are we able to identify — and willing to oppose — the traditional practices and policies that fail to nurture and even actively discourage it?
    Less and Less Curious - Alfie Kohn
  • too many kids start out as exclamation points and question marks, but leave school as plain periods.1
    Less and Less Curious - Alfie Kohn