general

Once a problem becomes moral, the acceptable solution space collapses. I'm reading Sylvia Nasar's book Grand Pursuit, and she talks about how Malthus' An Essay on the Principal of Population made the argument that as the poor classes gained more money they would always reproduce in greater numbers until they reached their previous state of poverty. This and other contemporary works of political economy posed these kinds of arguments as natural laws.

When all you've got is the hammer of mathematics, everything looks like an optimisation problem, you just need to choose the right objective function. So what should the objective function be for life? People today in general have much more means and much more freedom (i.e. fewer constraints in the solution space) than many of their ancestors, so what should we optimise? A study from Daniel Kahneman and the economist Angus Deaton says High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well being.

I recently convinced myself that I was right and a published paper was wrong. I did all the calculus by hand and decided they must have missed something. I resolved it by calculation. I played some very basic examples in my head and thought I was right, but I couldn't be sure. So I quickly implemented a concrete example case in Python using numpy. This helped me resolve pretty quickly that I was wrong; some searching produced a counterexample.

The Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP) runs every two years to predict the shape of a protein, the building blocks of life, from its sequence of amino acids. We know the shape of a bunch (around 170,000) of protiens from techniques like X-ray crystallography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging, but it's a big experimental job to actually measure this. However we know the sequence of millions of proteins due to cheap DNA sequencing and the DNA to protein translation.

I was reading [Paul Graham's How to Think For Yourself] where he talks about independent-mindedness. His examples are scientists, investors, startup founders and essayists as professions where you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. While there's some useful commentary in the article about how to broaden your worldview, I don't think a really independent minded person would do well in those professions. To succeed in science you need to study something people are interested in.

The Hawthorne effect is where when measuring the effect of lighting changes on worker output in an electrical factory any change increased output, even back to the original lighting conditions. I've heard this explained as running the experiment caused the employees to be observed more closely which led them to work harder, and used as a rationale for observing employees more. Except the Hawthorne effect is a myth. The economists Steven D.

Be settled in your life and as ordinary as the bourgeois, in order to be fierce and original in your works. Gustave Flaubert, To Gertrude Tennant (December 25, 1876) It's hard to find the energy and focus to be creative when your life is a mess. Before you can be productive you need to sleep well, eat well, exercise well and have good routines and social supports. See here for more on the origin of this quote.

I'm terrible at remembering names. When someone introduces themself I'm normally a bit anxious and in my own head and don't take in their name. It takes concious effort to remember their name, let alone the names of their family or facts about them. However remembering things about people are really important for building relationships. If you take an interest in other people's lives they will be more receptive to you.

There's a common misconception that the best way to get promoted is to excel in your current role. However doing too well in your current role can get you stuck. The actual best way is to grow and start practicing the skills for the next role. A friend of mine worked as a night filler at a supermarket, stocking shelves. He worked hard to be one of the best fillers and work his way up.

Whenever someone gets an idea in their head they start filtering out evidence that contradicts that idea. This idea is called confirmation bias, people start looking for evidence that confirms their current idea and neglecting evidence that challenges it. There's no way to completely beat a bias, but something that helps me is reframing the question. The first question that comes is normally "Can". Can it be? This leads to looking for evidence that confirms the idea.

Counting is a strangely powerful tool for enduring through something. Standard advice when you're angry is to count to ten. When stretching counting to a target number helps sustain the stretch longer. A good counting based technique for endurance is box breathing. It involves repeatedly inhaling to a count of 4, holding to a count of 4, exhaling to a count of 4 and holding to a count of 4. This is a technique used by Navy SEALs to induce calm and focus.

When I say something that is hard to hear I say it in a complex way. As if saying it in a hard to understand way will soften the blow. But it just muddies the message and causes confusion. Instead of saying "I don't want the soup", I say something like "It's not that I don't like your soup; I just don't feel like it right now. I mean it's not my favourite soup and I wouldn't be unhappy having it.

I love having a clean desk and empty inbox. But I hate spending the time cleaning my desk and processing emails. It feels like wasted time where I could do something better. However having "tidy time" to maintain things is important. A while ago I read David Allen's Getting Things Done. When I tried to implement it I got stuck on the notion of a weekly review. Setting aside some time every week to see how you're progressing on tasks and to process any new tasks.

A good technique for deeply understanding something is to try to solve it yourself first. Sometimes this can even lead to better methods or new discoveries. I heard an interesting technique from Jeremy Howard in one of the fast.ai courses about how to read a paper. First read the abstract and introduction. Then spend a couple of days trying to implement what you think they're talking about. Then go back and read the rest of the paper and see how it compares to what you did.

It's worthwhile spending some time thinking about how you spend your time. Time and energy are among your most valuable resources. A regular investment of time can build into substantial assets, but if you don't budget time it's easily misspent. I don't believe that you should allocate away all of your time, but setting some time constraints is important. If you don't put the big rocks of things that are important to you first in the jar first, all the sand and water of mundane things will fill it up.

As a data analyst I rely on open code and open data to inform decisions. There's a lot of data available on the web which would be great to transform and make openly available to the community. However it's not my data to give, and I'm concerned whether it would violate copyright. An interesting aspect is there are companies that scrape data from all over the web to use for analysis.

There are always more things you can be doing than the time you have. If you try to do everything you will end up accomplishing nothing. It can be hard to say "no" to someone, but it's important in order to focus on your priorities. I find it useful to have priorities and goals to set a direction. Often the actual choice of goals doesn't matter as much as that I make them, and regularly review them.

Some websites, like this one, have a lot of content but have no search function. Others have search but it performs poorly, for example Bunnings has great category pages but the search never hits it. Fortunately there's a simple way to search these sites with the site: search operator. If I want to search for articles about jobs just in this website I can type: site:skeptric.com job into either Google or Bing.

I'm sitting in a meeting listening to an update. They've missed the point, and they're focussing on the wrong thing. I start to get frustrated; why are they so far off track? Why haven't they taken the time to understand the problem? This isn't a helpful reaction; getting short tempered won't help resolve the problem. I haven't taken the time to understand the speaker and their perspective. Why do they think this is the right thing to focus on?

My friend has four different magnets for plumbers on his fridge. Three of them are generic rectangular magnets that have generic information and contact details. One of them was in the shape of a dripping tap, mentioning they were experts in leaks and drips. If they had a leaking faucet it's pretty easy to guess which plumber they would call; the specialists in dripping taps. On the other hand if they had a clogged toilet it's down to chance which of the plumbers they would call, although they're less likely to call the dripping tap specialist they're also more likely to forget to look at the fridge and just search for a plumber online.

The University of Adelaide, being a sandstone Group of Eight University, has the archaic ceremony of a mace-bearer leading the processiong carrying a heavy piece of expensive metal. When I graduated with my Bachelor of Science I was fortunate enough to be that mace-bearer. Unfortunately I wasn't really prepared for the formality. The ceremony was on a typical Adelaide summer's day, hot and dry. I was going out to lunch with my parents afterwards, so I wanted to make sure I was comfortable.

When I don't have clear goals, I'm more likely to spread myself too thin. It's easy to get in a reactive mode, where I say "yes" to anything that comes on my plate. But that means I don't have the time to focus on the important things and am jumping from task to task. It takes time to set goals and priorities, but when I don't take that time I end up spending much more time on busywork.

For any actionable item there are four ways to handle it: do it, defer it, delegate it or delete it. Delegation is an often overlooked powerful option to handle things. It's not just for high powered executives to delegate down to their personal assistants; even if you don't have any reports it's possible to delegate. You can delegate in three directions: down, sideways and up. Downwards delegation is the classic kind that comes to most people's minds.

It's very useful to diverge on ideas before converging on a solution. Trying to do both at the same time tends to stifle creativity and lead to less innovative solutoins. I find the creative process of brainstorming is more effective if I do it separately to refining ideas. Taking the time to brainstorm leads to better solutions, whether thinking about what to work on, planning out a presentation or designing a technical solution.

One of the most important abilities of an analyst is to be able to check your work. It's really easy to get incorrect data, have issues in data processing, or even misunderstand what the output means. But if your work is valuable enough to change a decision it's worth doing whatever you can to check it's right. When you get to the end of a long analysis it seems like a time to relax and be glad the hard work is over.

My first professional job was for Haese mathematics which is a small family-owned South Australian business that writed and publishes mathematics textbooks. Working for a small company was a really interesting experience, I learned software development for their applications both for students and teachers, made animations, edited audio and did layout and graphic design of the books. Unfortunately I didn't make the effort to learn much about the business itself, which makes me wonder how big the market is for mathematics textbooks.

Placing options on a scatterplot of costs versus benefits is a common practice for prioritising opportunities and solutions. The primary benefit of this approach is it can spark discussions. When people see the options on the canvas they it can help uncover unseen issues and opportunities. Getting a group of people involved in putting it together can help get them on the same page. The primary risk of this approach is getting too precise about it.

Today I was picking grapes from their vine for my partner's grandmother. They had been left too long and many were rotting or had bright blue spots where some form of fungus or algae was growing on them. I sorted the grapes into piles of rotten grapes and edible grapes. When I picked a big bunch of grapes with a couple of rotting overripe grapes I sorted it into the rotten pile, despite there being a dozen ripe looking grapes.

Estimating projects is notoriously difficult, and the larger the project the harder to estimate. But even small pieces of work for a single person are easy to underestimate. When you make an estimate base it on actual elapsed times of similar projects, always try to overestimate the time, and reduce the scope before promising more than you can deliver. Everyone knows that construction jobs are typically going to take longer and cost more than quoted, from home rennovations to major construction projects.