Random Musings

  Consider the following game. James and John are being interviewed by a fast-growing company. Both of them would like to have the freedom to work remotely whenever they choose. Each of them negotiates his terms of employment without communicating with the other. The company's official policy is that all employees must be tied to their office desks from 9-to-5 every day. If both candidates insist on working remotely, both of them would be allowed to. If one of them agrees to be tied to a desk, the other one would also be forced to work in this way. Simultaneously, the company offers each of the candidates a bargain: Get hired immediately if you betray the other and agree to be tied to a desk. The two candidates have the power to change the company's policy, but they do not know it. They also assume that all other major companies would follow the same procedure. The possible outcomes are: If James and John betray each other, they both end up tied to their desk. If J...

 

  What is one thing you’re always going to splurge on? Saving my own time. Anything that provides convenience to me, I will pay a premium for.

  " Nonviolent Communication shows us a way of being very honest, but without any criticism, without any insults, without any putdowns, without any intellectual diagnosis implying wrongness."         The Nonviolent Communication model consists of two parts, empathy and honesty , and four components, observations , feelings , needs , and requests . When I am expressing what is alive in me using observations, feelings, needs and requests I am using honesty. When I am acknowledging verbally someone else's observations, feelings, needs and requests I am demonstrating empathy.  With NVC  we do the same thing. We practice in a safe place. We find what we do in practice is what we do in live situations. So, if you practice responding compassionately, you are much more likely to be compassionate in difficult situations. The long pause at the beginning of this video is similar to the pause th...

 

  In my experience, the most sophisticated decision makers tend to be hypothesis-driven thinkers. They may be engineers solving a technical problem, product designers fulfilling a customer need, or entrepreneurs growing a business. They form a hypothesis about how to reach their goal and then work systematically to either validate or falsify it.    Say you’re tuning a learning algorithm that estimates the health of corn stalks based on input from a tractor-mounted camera. (Many companies are developing products like this to help farmers make decisions about planting, weeding, or harvesting.) If your algorithm is doing poorly, how should you go about improving it?    Some engineers tend to apply a one-size-fits-all rule. Someone who has experience improving algorithms by collecting more data may tend to gather more photos of corn stalks. When that doesn’t work, they may end up trying things more or less at random until they stumble on something ...