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Create a User Manual of Yourself for Others Summary: Creating a user manual for yourself, including strengths, weaknesses, triggers, blind spots, and insights for working effectively with you, enables others to understand and collaborate with you more easily. By soliciting feedback from colleagues and using their input to enhance self-awareness, you can provide new team members with valuable insights about working with you, facilitating quicker and more effective collaboration. Transcript: Speaker 1 He said, you know, when i buy a new car, it comes with an owner's manual, so i know how to operate it. But when i work with a new person, whose way more complex than a car, i don't get anything. And so i'm kind of starting from square one, when fact, they have all these experiences that could teach me something from their past about how to work with them better in the present And the future. And so what he did, same as orschol nick, he sat down and he wrote up one pager on how to work with him effectively. What are his strength what are his weaknesses, what are the triggers that bring out the worst in him? What are the the moments that bring out in the best in him? And then he didn't stop therehe asked his team to write their user manual for him, so that he could gauge his own self awareness. And of course, he found the team's os is much more ecihtful and accurate than his own, because of the blind spot factor in part. But now every new person who works with him gets that one pager and gets to immediately start as if they'd known him for a month or two, and say, ok, you know, here are the things i might want To adapt if i want to be really affective with this nager. And so i've gone, i've gone and done that. I asked a bunch of people who worke with me to write my user manual. Andit is very simple. The questions are, what are my strengths? What brings those out? What are my weaknesses? What brings those out? What are my blind spots? And what do you know now about working with me that you wish you had known when we first started working?

#399 — Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything

The Tim Ferriss Show

Two Models of Searching for Truth: Unearthing the Truth v.s. Growing Into The Truth Summary: Science is like carving away everything that isn't truth, but I think it's more like an infinite vacuum with trees growing in all directions. The search for truth is complex and ever-expanding. It's like ecology, where species have multiple solutions to a problem, which continually changes. I believe in infinite diversity and combinations, and that complexity can emerge from simplicity. Instead of focusing on the core, we should expect to branch out. Transcript: Speaker 2 One metaphor I like is that I think some people have as their image of science. Imagine we're sitting on the surface of a sphere, and they think they're kind of digging down to the core of the truth. They're discarding the earth beneath them, the falsities, and they're going to hit the truth. Speaker 1 We're carving away everything that isn't science, you're saying? Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think that the image I have instead is there's an infinite vacuum outside of that sphere, and there are trees growing out from the surface of the sphere in all directions. And as they grow out, more space is available, and they branch and expand. And that just goes on, and it gets more and more complex the further you get out. And that's kind of how I think of the search for the truth. That strikes people maybe initially is a little bit weird. I guess that's how I interpret like beginning of infinity, David Deutsches' phrase. But another way to see that is ecology, the way the species were. Species are all after some abstracted fitness landscape, I guess is one way to conceive of it. But somehow we don't end up with one solution to that problem. In fact, we get a bunch of solutions to the problem, and as that problem gets solved, it actually changes the problem, because now for all the other species you've got to deal with, and There's other species that you can eat, there's all kinds of stuff going on. That's how I think about it. I eat reflecting infinite diversity and infinite combinations. I think that there's just a lot of things going on, and you can build a lot of complexity from a small set of ingredients. And you shouldn't expect to get down to the core, you should expect to branch out from the core.

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Ambiguity in Communication is Both a Feature and a Bug Summary: In 1984, Eisenberg proposed that ambiguity in communication is important and influential. This idea suggests that being too clear can limit interpretation and hinder coalition-building. Ambiguity can be used to evade accountability, but it is also a general principle of communication. Transcript: Speaker 1 It's Eisenberg in 1984 in communication monographs or something. It's this great rambling paper and this idea has been massively influential to me, but he's basically arguing that it would seem like the point of communication should be clarity, To be as clear as possible. For me to say, I mean this and you do know exactly what I mean and that's the goal and ambiguity is therefore a bad thing. He argues that actually no ambiguity is a really important thing and other people have expanded on this. Now the way I think about this is like a blend of Eisenberg and then other people who've come a bit later, but that in a lot of ways if you're trying to get let's say a coalition, you don't Want to say this is exactly what our goal is and this is what we're trying to do. You want to use vague terms so that a bunch of people can sort of map whatever they think that the goal is onto and say that's consistent. It also leads to a reduction in accountability because after you do something and someone says, you said you were going to do this and you say, nah-ah listen to what I said, it's consistent With what I did because what I said was ambiguous. So it's pernicious in a way too. It's used nefariously in a lot of ways by let's say politicians and other kinds of leaders to avoid accountability, but it's also just a general principle of communication I think.

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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