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In Daniel Kahneman’s influential book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he argues that we have two distinct systems for thinking. System 1 operates automatically, quickly, with little effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to effortful mental activities, including complex computations and deliberate choice-making. While Kahneman’s work became wildly popular in the early 2010s, I still find myself coming back to it whenever I make a decision too fast and then have to invent a story about why it was “obvious.” If you haven’t read it, Wikipedia offers a solid overview, but I’d still recommend the full book for anyone interested in understanding why we think the way we do.

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.

Companies collect an absurd amount of private data about you, sometimes with your consent and sometimes by burying it in defaults and dark patterns. Governments usually do more to normalize that than stop it, but there are still ways to give away less. You’re not going to get complete privacy unless you unplug entirely. You can still cut down how much data you hand over.

I can write about a philosophy a lot more easily than I can live it. Certainly there are 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. Consider fitness gurus. A lot of physically fit people started with advantages that make staying fit easier in the first place. Research suggests that fitness outcomes are influenced by genetics anywhere from 40-70%, with one twin study finding that genetic factors account for 47-80% of fitness trait variation. My unscientific observations align with this research.

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—the data would reveal a pattern from a statistical perspective, but each individual step would follow a normal random distribution. In fact, research on human gait variability confirms this, with studies showing that step-to-step fluctuations follow statistical patterns characteristic of complex systems.

I realize this is a click-baity subject, but I couldn’t help myself. There’s so much confusion online 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.

I remember when my first serious girlfriend broke up with me decades ago. Her chief complaint revolved around some recent incident, the details of which have faded from memory, but our conversation remains vivid. I pleaded with her, explaining how she was clouded by recency bias—focusing on the recent negative experience while overlooking all our positive history together.