Essay
Interesting concepts
Ideas I find useful in understanding new info
I recently read Ben Kuhn’s thoughts on writing, and I found myself motivated to write about random ideas.
Mostly going to be a list of concepts that I find interesting. If you look for them, I think they show up quite often, and its nice to tie new phenomenon into ideas you already know.
Agile language
- Expected value and variance
- Bifurcated, polarized, orthogonal, positive and negative correlation
- Laminar vs. turbulent processes
- Unimodal, bimodal, and skewed distributions
- Signal-to-noise ratio and “high signal”
- Leverage, marginal returns, and force multipliers (high impact activities)
- Betting vs. hedging
- Heuristics
- Failure modes, win conditions ;)
- Incentives (economics)
- First and second-order chaos (Sapiens)
- Local vs global optimums
Patterns and trade offs that show up repeatedly
- Satisficing vs. optimizing
- Exploration vs. exploitation, sample efficiency
- Chunking, locality
- Observability
- Delegating vs. growing
Other, more rare concepts
- Markov processes (memoryless)
- Activation energy
- Schelling point (Patrick Collision mentioned here)
Might add more later.