Join 📚 Quinn's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .
Inversion: Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant. Instead of asking, “How can I help my company?” you should ask, “What’s hurting my company the most and how can I avoid it?” Identify obvious failure points, and steer clear of them.
50 Ideas That Changed My Life - David Perell
perell.com
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
Most of us really enjoy the building aspect but start to get a little shy when it comes to telling people about the stuff we’ve built. That could be for any number of reasons: fear, embarrassment, self-preservation, or an aversion to being perceived as hawking your wares.
It’s a valuable exercise to investigate whether or not you resonate with any of those reasons. Are you afraid people are going to make fun of what you built? Are you embarrassed that it isn’t up to your own (admittedly high) standards? Are you waiting for some elusive perfect moment? Do you have an aversion to “marketing” and don’t want to become the thing you hate? Whatever it is for you, I encourage you to really dig into it and see if that fear is worth keeping around.
Publishing your work increases your luck
https://github.com/readme/
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