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Survivorship bias often gets discussed as a cautionary tale. For example, someone might point out a person’s or company’s success, and another will retort with, “But that’s just survivorship bias!”. People don’t often discuss how to internalize survivorship bias in an actionable way. In other words: if you know that most people who win the lottery in some fashion (whether in business, investing, dating, or even the actual lottery) did so mainly out of luck, it doesn’t answer the question of how we can use this information to our advantage.

In Daniel Kahneman’s pop psychology book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes the human brain as having 2 systems for thought: a fast system, which responds quickly to stimuli, and a slow system, which tends to produce more…thoughtful thoughts. This book was all the rage amongst thought leaders circa 2011/12 after being published, but if you missed out on it, don’t worry, Wikipedia has a tl;dr which tells you all you need to know.

Software engineers tend to be smart people. Writing software is hard, and it’s entirely a discipline of exercising your brain cells to write the correct commands to make the computer do what you want it to do. Add in the layers of complexity that come with dealing with humans who want software to do something without necessarily knowing or understanding precisely what they want, and what you end up with is a fairly complicated practice.

Tools are often cited as an example of what separates humans from most other animals. And while it’s true that other animals also use tools, humans are a bit unique in that we’ve also developed tools that make tools. My dogs (I have two, Doge and Walter) occasionally utilize tools, but due to their lack of opposable thumbs their tool usage is quite limited. My dogs’ use of tools tends to be limited to acts which involve food or play.

Lies are easy. It’s easy to pretend your problems are someone else’s fault. It’s easy to pretend when things don’t go your way, that it’s the other party’s fault. We tell ourselves many lies to get through the day. Being honest is very challenging, and it’s especially hard to be honest with ourselves.

In a time when every company is trying to collect as much of your private data as possible and either opaquely or overtly use it to drain your bank account for their own gain, we can’t do a whole lot to maintain privacy. Governments are not only complicit, but generally speaking those in power love to reduce your access to privacy because mass surveillance is inevitable for any late stage empire.

It’s easy to preach, but it’s hard to be congruent with whatever philosophies you espouse. Certainly there are plenty of people who do as they say they do, but I suspect the majority of those who (like myself) write blog posts on self-help themes don’t practice much of what they preach.

You may occasionally hear about “yield inversion”, which is usually referring to the difference in yield between the 10 year and the 2 year US government treasury bonds. This number often gets mentioned in the news because when the value goes negative, it’s often interpreted as a sign that we’re either in a recession, or about to be in a recession.

Life is a series of random walks. Even if you walk the same path every day (in the literal sense), your individual steps on every walk you take are essentially random, and for the most part you aren’t even conscious of them because this is handled by muscle memory. When I say the steps are random, what I mean is that if you could precisely measure every step you take, where your foot lands, how much force you apply with your individual muscles to all the components of your leg and foot and torso and so on, the data would appear to match a pattern from a statistically perspective, but each individual step would have a normal random distribution.

Okay okay, I realize this is a click-baity subject, but I couldn’t help myself. I see a lot of confusion on the internet and elsewhere about VR, the “metaverse”, Facebook’s pivot, and the cringeworthy marketing content (which you can skip unless you love buzzwords and egregious use of terms like “collaboration” and “AI”). The whole thing is oddly reminiscent of an episode of Star Trek.