jorleif

12 ms·

61.
by jorleif 14y ago
Of course, you can't control it. At best you can optimise based on the cards you're dealt in life. You can certainly choose to take risks to meet interesting people, which risks embarassment, rather than jumping off barn tops and risk dyi
62.
by jorleif 14y ago
It is also known as the law of large numbers. If the unreliability of the assessments are unreliable but the errors are independent, then the aggregates will be less unreliable. Of course this only holds if the unreliability is well behaved
63.
by jorleif 14y ago
Is manager/maker really the only way to scale things? Instead of the maker founder becoming a manager, how about the maker founder getting "assistants". For the management parts, it could be similar to a traditional secretarial role, and fo
64.
by jorleif 14y ago
Taleb's definition is subjective. From wikipedia: 1. The event is a surprise (to the observer). 2. The event has a major effect. 3. After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been ex
65.
by jorleif 14y ago
I was not really trying to say that cramped spaces are great, rather try to think about ways to live in smaller spaces, simply because space is expensive, especially in cities. For this I'm considering the analogy "storing stuff in the clou
66.
by jorleif 14y ago
> The JIT equivalent is not going to be renting a venue for a dinner party. It's going to be going to a restaurant or a bar. Yes, exactly, my post was clearly very unclear. I was not trying to say "this is how we all live in the future"
67.
by jorleif 14y ago
Pretty cool, it seems to me that the reasons to have large spaces are mostly 1) psychological (this house feels claustrophobic) 2) storage of stuff. Imagine if we somehow managed to get rid of the second one. For people working from laptops
68.
by jorleif 14y ago
This was exactly what I was thinking as well. To take the analogy further, computers are still used to a ridiculously large extent to prepare paper documents, and the software has become relatively easy to use with a little training. Simila
69.
by jorleif 14y ago
Wow, that was an awesome piece that I hadn't seen, thanks for linking to it. I think it could be summarized as: If resources are sufficient and exact implementation does not matter, just get started, but when resources are scarce and there
70.
by jorleif 14y ago
An interesting corollary to "Move your feet", instead of overanalyzing, is that you can't get good at something without doing it repeatedly. When you do something over and over again the analyzing mind starts noticing things that often turn
71.
by jorleif 14y ago
Variability in land form may lead to different crops being suited for different parts of the land, which would affect both disease and weather risks.
72.
by jorleif 14y ago
I haven't ever seriously grown anything, so I admit not knowing much about commercial agriculture operations, but what I was thinking about was the following kind of tradeoff: You can do one thing (e.g. one crop) very efficiently, if that
73.
by jorleif 14y ago
Does the author of the article somehow assume that Millennials don't spend because they don't buy cars or houses? Do they just stuff their money in their socks, or might it be that they splurge on electronics and traveling? Of course, one d
74.
by jorleif 14y ago
I wonder if more advanced robotics is going to make farming "complicated" land profitable again. The need for flatness etc. might become irrelevant with smart enough automation, and some variability in land form could be an excellent risk m
75.
by jorleif 14y ago
Why can't you engineer away jerks? I mean, we have democracy, free markets etc. and among their main contributions is to engineer away the effects of bad behavior. In a democracy, you won't get the best decision, but you will get an accepta
76.
by jorleif 14y ago
Actually, the original paper is this one: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/16/1206569109.full... Here is an description of the result and its implications http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2012/07/zerodeterminant_...
77.
by jorleif 14y ago
An e-commerce concept I believe could work wonderfully is serving markets "near" those served by traditional shopping. For example, when buying furniture, there is either the traditional way of buying a ready made piece cheaply (e.g. IKEA),
78.
by jorleif 14y ago
> having laws most people are guilty of breaking is a valuable tool of social control Not to dispute anything you are saying, this seems to be a preferred tool n some authoritarian countries. The downside is that it places a huge drain
79.
by jorleif 14y ago
Nice organizational insight: Yes, in theory the higher up managers should do something about the bad boss, but they don't know there is a problem, and a conflict is hard to solve, since you don't know who is to blame (and tend to side with
80.
by jorleif 14y ago
I understand that this "positive will of organizing" is related to legibility in the sense of James C. Scott (see e.g http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-calle... ). But this failure mode is so common, that one would thi
81.
by jorleif 14y ago
This is a huge flaw, but it is even more common to have the opposite huge flaw, that is, to only do the safe cash-cow things, which has killed many big companies. I believe that this is the core problem of any business with hit-miss dynamic
82.
by jorleif 14y ago
"the company insisted on using its own indigenous billing system" This is something I have a hard time understanding. Why do companies always seem to insist that everything in their operations is within their full framework? I mean, sure ef
83.
by jorleif 14y ago
What are good side projects? I get this "cool stuff that I don't get to do at work" idea, but I think it's vitally important to have side projects that have a different gratification profile than one's main work. If you work as a developer
84.
by jorleif 14y ago
I know very little about heavy industrial processes, but probably in many cases there are alternative processes that are not optimal in the case of continuous power, but with fluctuating power supplies they might become viable. A possible a
85.
by jorleif 14y ago
One of the things that always surprises me when talking about lulls from wind and solar power, is that the assumption always is that we _have_ to provide continuous power. Would it not be possible to have industrial facilities that run in b
86.
by jorleif 14y ago
And perhaps ironically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kari_Kairamo
87.
by jorleif 14y ago
An important factor between Web 2.0 startups and "change the world" startups is the size of investment required. Web 2.0 startups are very cheap. Starting Tesla Motors on Y Combinator funding would be impossible. Apple was also started on a
88.
by jorleif 14y ago
While I recommend exercise, and know that the kind of routine described here can be a very useful tool, doing this all the time seems absurd to me. Humans have managed to remove almost all natural physical stressors from their lives, but th
89.
by jorleif 14y ago
I agree with your claim, but attributing that to evolution as an efficient optimizer is a bit strange. If you are building a brain with trial and error, there is bound to be lots of bits and pieces of it that are not operating optimally for
90.
by jorleif 14y ago
I find the value of human life comparison between China and the US somewhat ludicrous, since societies obviously tend to react much more strongly to babies with strange acute symptoms (kidney stones), than to elderly people passing away fro

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