Just a bit more than two weeks did not enable long reading sessions. I did not open as many books. I was also less lucky than last with regards to quality.
- I’m OK - you’re OK - Thomas Anthony Harris
Where the author introduces and explains transactional analysis, a model for interpreting psychological behavior. In this model, all interactions between people allegedly reproduce features of either the Child (I’m not OK, you’re OK), the Parent (I’m OK, you’re not OK), or the Adult (I’m OK, you’re OK).
As these things usually go, I found it a tad reductionist. Yet, it felt adequately different from other things I have read about practical psychology (attachment theory, etc) and I filed it in my mind as “perhaps useful”.
- The 5 levels of leadership - John C. Maxwell
Where the author tries to share his “career ladder” for leadership.
Some bits felt adequately original and though provoking, so despite the insufferably patronizing writing style I did not regret the time spent on this. However, I figured afterwards that most of it is redundant with other items on my reading list, so with a better reading order I could have skipped it at no loss.
In other words, I read this so you don’t have to. Don’t.
- The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel
- This was a much better reading experience. Although now little of it feels new to me, I so wish I had read this ten or fifteen years ago. It would have allowed me to overcome serious emotional blocks I had w.r.t finances, much earlier.
- Ego is the Enemy - Ryan Holiday
This is a book I could not have read earlier, as I was simply not ready for it until very recently. It also brought back the excitement I experienced while reading last month.
It is a challenging read, as in, it makes me emotionally uncomfortable in each chapter. This is the good kind of discomfort: the one where I have to deconstruct a few positions that previously held secure to accept what the author is trying to teach me. I will likely want to share this book actively with friends, although I am not sure yet how to place it in conversations.
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Meanwhile, as usual, much interstitial learning occurred.
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Reading Tanner Greer’s How I taught the Iliad to Chinese teenagers was an experience that was just all around enjoyable. This book-formatted-as-a-single-web-page has three layers: on its face, it explains the author’s curriculum for a workshop introducing US American “college culture” to Chinese students. At that level, it is interesting to learn about the expectations and behaviors of Chinese students. The second level of reading is a solid introduction to the main themes of the Iliad. Although I had read the Iliad before, most of these themes were new to me and Tanner made me want to rediscover them through Homer again. The third layer was Tanner’s view of the philosophical foundations of our society. I may not buy his view (yet), but I admire the elegance and succinctness of his presentation.
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In Work is Work, Coda Hales looks at organizations through the lens of fundamental principles in system design. For example, Amdahl’s law for computer programming can be used to develop an intuition that the best management techniques and largest hiring budgets can never accelerate a team further than the speed allowed by the length of their longest sequential team process. Other system design principles are applied as well and the result is an general toolbox to detect or predict organizational challenges. I will remember this.
In Do Your Employees Feel Respected? (Harvard Business Review, archive), Kristie Roger delineates a (her) definition of respect with two components: owed and earned. This decomposition enables her to identify multiple organizational pitfalls and possible strategies to avoid them. I found this actionable.
In Faults, Errors and Failures, the pseudonymous author helped me refine my understanding of error handling in programs. Although I had already developed most of these intuitions through experience, this read taught me a few new good words to teach them better. This connects well to another article I had read a few weeks prior from Ryan Fleury, The Easiest Way To Handle Errors Is To Not Have Them, which taught me (or reminded me of, perhaps) a useful programming pattern.
Dan Luu’s Diseconomies of scale is an exhaustively supported argument that large organizations are irreconcilably worse at doing certain complicated things than small organizations. This goes again the folk belief that any complex problem becomes easier/cheaper to solve “at scale”. The article is very good and hard to summarize properly, so if you are generally interested in the topic of perverse incentives you should just read it.
Also, tangentially related to my overlapping stories from above: Why it’s impossible to agree on what’s allowed also by Dan Luu.
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In I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind, Josh Collinsworth convincingly argues that LLM-based assistants will make programmers un-learn how to make their software accessible, because the models were not trained for it. After all, it takes careful governance to act in favor of disenfranchised minorities, and few of the participants in this latest industry frenzy have incentives to care about them. I agree with Josh and it makes me sad.
This reminded me of how AI face recognition struggles at recognizing Black people, also because of incomplete training and how Google blocked searches on “gorilla” for not knowing how to direct their search algorithm properly.
I have mentioned earlier why I do not believe that “AGI” will be discovered or built any time soon; perhaps the better statement is that I am pessimistic we can simulate anything better than the most deeply flawed versions of our collective intelligence.
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Today’s last (but not least) reportable learning is an intuition that I will find very hard to teach.
Segue—it is not often that experience brings me learnings that I am unable to decompose into convincing teaching materials! My last time was as far as December, when I discovered how a product can emotionally appeal to one’s sense of self-identity in a way that defies language. I still do not like when learnings are not easily teachable. When I was younger, I would even outright refuse these learnings. Like the only good software is the one that’s open, I used to operate under the principle that the only good learning is the one that’s shareable. I guess I have become more accepting.
Anyway, here are two thoughts, and they are saying the same thing:
- The coast of Great Britain has infinite length.
- Project cost overruns are unavoidable.
In essence, the intuition is that cost functions in the real world have fractal dimensions!
When this dimension is “small enough”, refining the measurement device (say, a literal measurement stick, or the granularity of tickets in an issue tracker) merely increases the precision of cost estimates, through an asymptotically converging process.
However, there are things where the fractal dimension is larger. In that case, refining the measurements yields an exploding cost estimate. The more refinement work one does, the more effort seems to be required to achieve a result.
I believe that successfully identifying the type of fractal dimension is a valuable skill. One I will want to learn.
I also came to learning this intuition by looking hard at my home renovation project.
Through last November, my lack of trust was driving me to ask my contractor to help me close some project specification gaps. After each clarification request, a more detailed project analysis was produced, with each successive cost estimate going up non-asymptotically. This was an expensive lesson. My financial fears being stronger than my lack of trust, I then stopped asking questions. Since then, the staff in charge of doing the work has independently addressed numerous gaps I had identified prior, plus many more I hadn’t seen, using creative (and unplanned) solutions. Moreover, these solutions will not be charged to my budget.
In other words, trusts saves money?
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References:
- Thomas A. Harris - I’m OK - you’re OK.
- John C. Maxwell - The 5 levels of leadership (don’t read it).
- Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money.
- Ryan Holiday - Ego is the Enemy.
- Tanner Greer - How I taught the Iliad to Chinese teenagers.
- Coda Hales - Work is Work.
- Kristie Roger - Do Your Employees Feel Respected? (archive).
- Pseudonymous - Faults, Errors and Failures.
- Ryan Fleury - The Easiest Way To Handle Errors Is To Not Have Them.
- Dan Luu - Diseconomies of scale.
- Dan Luu - Why it’s impossible to agree on what’s allowed.
- Josh Collinsworth - I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind.
- Wikipedia - The Coastline Paradox.
- Wikipedia - Fractal dimension.
is an entrepreneur who occasionally publishes field notes on systems, leadership, and the messy edge between technology and people.
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