Farnam Street

Luke Smith's article on the 4 causes is great and captures an important idea about what modernism lacks. if you like melting asphalt (probably the best blog I've ever read) you'll probably also like: - Venkatesh Rao's https://ribbonfarm.com (it's very much a diamonds-in-the-rough type blog imo) - the farnam street blog https://fs.blog/ consistently puts out good content - /sometimes/ lesswrong puts out good ideas when they're not busy modelling spherical cows in a vacuum - https://www.lesswrong.com/ - if you're really into systems theory and don't mind reading strongly management-consultant oriented prose (can't abide it myself but the content is good), https://thesystemsthinker.com/

For books, something that has helped me in getting the best of the stuff in them has been this. For every new book, create a google doc with three sections: 1. Before 2. During 3. After The first "Before" section is to list down your preconceptions about the topic you're going to read about. What do you think you already know about the topic? What do you feel about the topic? And so on. Next, as you go through the book page by page, contrast whatever you encounter with your preconceptions. Is there anything new or interesting there? Actively seek interesting-ness or novelty. Or is there a fact that contradicts or supports your preconceptions? Note all of those down. And once you're done with reading, spend some time listing down your thoughts in the "After" section. Have you become wiser due to the book? Do you feel better at knowing more? Have you clarified your understanding of the world or yourself? Or at least, do you have more questions on the topic with you for further study? If you have additional time, restructure everything you store into a blog-post. I modified this idea originally from Farnam Street (https://fs.blog). In the long run, this sort of delta-maximization framework can become powerful and addictive and a great addition to your life.

This seems adjacent to Chesterton's Fence, though maybe not the canonical form of it. For anyone not familiar with the term, Chesterton's Fence is the idea that you should understand why a rule exists before trying to remove it or work around it: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ Here the issue is not that the rule was removed, but that the code followed the wording while missing the reason the rule existed.

They seem to be being a bit naughty with the attribution. This is all based of the ideas of Charlie Munger who featured more prominently if you look at an archive version of the same page https://web.archive.org/web/20180215045353/https://fs.blog/mental-mode… A transcript of Charlie's speech is still up https://fs.blog/great-talks/a-lesson-on-worldly-wisdom/ I guess Shane Parrish is trying to carry the torch on now that Charlie has passed.

The article made me think of Feynman's classic letter to his old student too: https://fs.blog/richard-feynman-what-problems-to-solve/

For me, an American, the work ethic comes from reading Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography after being inspired by a passage found in an American Literature textbook in 10th grade. [0] edit: Of all the different philosophies a young person can subscribe to, entering in the middle of my life, I'm lucky to have chosen one of the better ones. I remember at the time really wanted to embrace an identity of being American and here is a founding father who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and signed the Constitution who was born and raised with the institution of slavery owning slaves himself and evolving into an outspoken anti-slavery advocate working to abolish the practice. That is what it means to be an American, to grow, change, and become better, just. [0] https://fs.blog/the-thirteen-virtues/

Well, maybe the best example is this: https://fs.blog/tgmm/ I have physical copies of these books. They are really well quality material, well layouted, and the content is similar to what is found at fs.blog website. All the "mental models" for thinking they include are kind of p*rn for this kind of stuff, but it is nearly impossible to apply these mental models consciously in real life, especially ad-hoc real life situation. There is no time to think each different mental model for every situation/task/problem/matter. The most effective thinking is the real-life "quick math/no BS" style of thinking, and the real superpower is if you have made your own expedition to the matter, because then you can just recall the stuff you need from your own brain quicker and better than any LLM.

I recently read up on "zone melting" which was developed to purify germanium - but of course this same method can be used for other materials. Interesting that Hamming of Hamming codes fame gave encouragement to the developer of this materials process: https://fs.blog/great-talks/richard-hamming-your-research/ (search for Bill Pfann)

Here you go ! https://fs.blog/ It's a very good blog - albeit getting a bit too much 'commercialized' in the last years. The guy also wrote a book, which I found pretty good: https://fs.blog/clear/ That being said, you can read all this stuff, but more importantly - you need to apply it. This is the hard part.

I believe GP's comment is a reference of Chesterton's Fence [1] (an excellent image to load into your brain!). I think they agree with you. [1] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

If humanity is to mature, we should be an open book when it comes to incentives and build a world purposefully with all incentives aligned to the outcomes we collectively agree upon. https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/ Charlie Munger's Misjudgment #1: Incentive-caused Bias https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-2yIO8cnvw https://fs.blog/bias-incentives-reinforcement/

Agreed, one of my favourite blog posts is this Farnam Street one on why you shouldn't read the news https://fs.blog/stop-reading-news/ Like that haitan story every one was talking about last week, no ones knows if it was real or just BS. Better to just block it all out entirely.

Agreed. His short stuff is excellent. I'll also call out his commencement speech on the meaning of a liberal arts education, "This is Water". https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

I love fs.blog, a relevant one for this is the chauffeur test from https://fs.blog/two-types-of-knowledge/

Shirley Bassey and the Propellorheads got it right: It's All Just A Little Bit Of History Repeating. [1] Writing[2], Print, Photography, Movies, Electronic music, Synths, Sampling, Trackers, Digital Photography, Photoshop, Ray Tracing, Interactive Art (eg computer games) etc etc ... Every time "it's not really art" , "there's no human touch". Every time, after a while artists learned to use it. And they made amazing art! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8 Propellerheads feat: Miss Shirley Bassey - History Repeating [2] Surely I'm kidding about the writing, right? https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/

That's a great use of inversion - the mental model detailed by Farnham Street (https://fs.blog/inversion/)

The answer is twofold 1) Network effect combined with 2) coordination problem. One or few figures dropping off is just net loss for them, does not affect the X at all. Only way to do the change is to coordinate and do it with critical mass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game https://fs.blog/coordination-problems/ Individual action can't solve problems effectively when the cost of changing behavior is too high when others don't follow immediately. Many public figures started their mastodon/bluesky/threads accounts but came back to Twitter when they didn't get following there.

It's called the Psychology of Human Misjudgement https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/

> One: Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency > I place this tendency first in my discussion because almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive super-power. https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/

A more readable (possibly revised) version can be found here: https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/

Everybody should read his speech, "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment": https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/ It's a fantastic read that can really help you understand why supposedly rational masses of people can end up being so wrong. In the tech world, it ends up being more relevant than one would like it to be.

Can anybody elaborate on the overlap between this and the Great Mental Models (https://fs.blog/tgmm/)?

I wanted to find the list without the fancy styling and found this: https://fs.blog/great-books/ Much easier to copy and paste.

https://lostgarden.com https://fs.blog I read a book a week. But I could still argue there are more treasures like the 2 above. They are rare, but they do exist.

Pretty much binge listened to these this year: - Startups for the Rest of Us (https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/): Great podcast for any aspiring entrepreneur and bootstrapper. - The Knowledge Project (https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/): Great interview podcast around a variety of topics - The REWORK podcast (https://37signals.com/podcast/): Probably don't need lots of introduction here. Read the books in the past, but its great to actually hear Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson to actually talk about those things.

Because the price you pay is determined by your diagnosis at discharge, which is a medicare concept that all health insurance plans adopted and follow. If healthcare, as an industry, could tell you what the price was upfront, then they could also tell you what was wrong with you before you were examined. It would be nice to suspend reality and solve problems with magic, but until then, we would do well to consider https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

> It would be nice to suspend reality and solve problems with magic, but until then, we would do well to consider https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ This seems disingenuous. Yes, there are times when you don't know what's wrong, and this all gets uncovered along the way. I don't think that's what is being discussed here. There are plenty of times when you do and the situation is the same. When dealing with some medical issues for my son, we had a diagnoses more or less right away - everybody knew what we were dealing with. The process we were following (and follow up treatment) was well established - everyone was able to tell us what was going to happen next, out to weeks (or even years) in advance. Yet the bills still kept rolling in for months after the fact, and certainly nobody was able to tell us up front what all of these known treatments would cost.

They also have three books that are available as audiobooks on Audible. Volume 1 in particular is fantastic. https://fs.blog/books/

It's not only HN, it's many people "out there" bashing him. The problem is that people can't seem to have a nuanced view. He has done some shitty things, but he also has done some objectively impressive and useful things. He is a weirdo, but it doesn't seem like he is an evil person. We all can use some more nuance in our discussions (here's my blog post on this topic from a few days ago: https://canolcer.com/post/we-need-more-nuance/). And here's a great article about "Grey Thinking" by Farnam Street: https://fs.blog/value-grey-thinking/

Products become great by being "mission-oriented": they help their users achieve a goal. Often the UI evolves organically based on user feedback and becomes "locally-optimized" for the user's workflow. When you get a PM/Designer who insists on following the design principles they learned on YouTube, they tend to throw out the UI along with all the implicit knowledge accumulated within it. This is related to Chesterton's Fence https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/