A list of hot takes about cognition and learning.

• Not every hour is created equal. Brain effectiveness fluctuates throughout the day and week.
• You can read page 6 and find it gibberish. But reading through, carefully, unpacks the mystery of what is being communicated. Life plays these tricks on you: understanding something’s meaning takes care, time, and effort.
• Watching a 1 minute Youtube short the second time “feels” faster than the first time around.
• Learning is an active process, and every class is an opportunity to learn something. For a 60 minute class, you can be outside the classroom or inside it listening to the speaker – the 60 minutes is going to pass by anyways, it’s up to you to actively participate in the material and fit it into your conceptual understanding of a topic.
• Deadlines in school are artificial. Although, in practice, timelines must be met for certain deliverables.
  • For certain problems, it’s better to take the perspective that you only get so many hours to solve a problem you care about, rather than you only have to work for so many hours.
  • Imposing cognitive presure helps put people in the right mentality for doing the work that needs to get done. Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
• Judge yourself by your inputs, not the outputs. – Alex Hormozi
• Fancy apartments are facades, albeit niceties needed for human fostering. Functionally they’re all just places.
• The people at your job are who you’re going to become in 10 years by staying at that company.
• “What do you want to be” is a descriptive ask; “What do you want to do” is an active, planning one.
• Intentionality: recognize your tradeoffs and design your career strategically, just as you’d design your own college degree based on courses you find interesting, if you could.
• There’s a difference in doing research based on: do you want to be the person who gets X done, do you want to take the credit for getting X done, or do you want someone else to do X so that you can do something else based on X’s results?
• If you forgot what you’re about to say, try remembering the trajectory of your thought process. For instance, if you discussed topics X1, X2, and X3, then went on a tangent of Y1, remind yourself of the X-sequence to increase your chances of remembering X4.
• Fellowships are designed to support people doing what they want to do, not provide instructions.
• Cognitive heuristics for easier decision-making
  • Choose a default decision and then wait, pivot if you feel regret. That’s easier than choosing between two similar options.
  • Trust your past and future selves to recognize missing information, in case you can’t handle everything now. Thank your “later” and “former” “me.”
  • Think via foreshadowing. Make a decision as though: in 5 min, what decision would you have already made? Hindsight is easier to reason about than the present.
• You work hard in school for the opportunity to be entrusted with work for substantial compensation, later in life.
• Jocko Willink suggests Extreme Ownership. Brian Tracy suggests “you’re responsible for everything in your life.” This means identifying the state of things how they are today, what you’d like them to be, and then creating a plan over the next 12 quarters on how to get there. Certain things, such as habits, addictions, relationships, skills, and cognitive patterns, take time and effort to change. Regardless, they are in your control to change. Joe Brown of Heresy Financial says: even if it’s not your fault, it is your problem.
• When to write things down:
  • Saying to yourself “I’m going to remember it later” is a lie. Write it down, especially when you’re about to fall asleep.
  • Use a ‘distraction notebook’ when you want to explore a target idea but don’t want to get distracted from what you’re currently working on.
  • Write down what you want to get done during the day, first thing in the morning.
  • If you take a break on a project (e.g., restarting it the next day), you may have to spend some time to re-cache to remind your short-term/active/working memory of where you were in the problem solving process.
  • Write down repeated thoughts you have over weeks, months, or years. That’s your subconscious announcing something to your consciousness that you need to verbalize explicitly.
  • Write down helpful hints as you go. It’s easier than trying to compile down all of your heuristics at the end of an extended project.
• If you’re unmotivated or something is hard, recognize that certain things in life just take time. The goal is not necessarily to get everything done, but to work with what you have as best as you can, including your own concentration. Do a little portion now and spread out the task over a few days (as long as it isn’t urgent; otherwise, you’ll have to sit down, suck it up, and get it done). Doing this now will make the next hard task easier as you get stronger and upskill.
  • Building the habit of a task (eg volunteering, reading, going out of your comfort zone to make friends) is often more important than your day-to-day success. Even if you move in the wrong direction at first, it’s easier to pivot than build momentum in the first place. [Life Changing Advice For When You’re At a Low Point In Your Life. Jocko.]. The best habit (eg for a diet or fiscal responsibility) is the one you will actually keep.
  • Do you remember how many win vs loss days you had in the last month, year? If not and it’s important, build a system, write it down. How much slippage do you have in your wallet, unallocated money it gets lost because you don’t have a system? Is it <1% on a small principle or oncome, so it doesn’t matter too much in the long run, or 1% of a 1M which needs cutting down? Or is it a habbit like investing $5 a week, or donating $100 every few months, which starts the ball rolling? See [James Clear, Atomic Habits].
• Everything compounds. You will always be slower at something at first than when you’re months into a project. The goal when starting out isn’t to be good. It’s to get the ball rolling, especially to gather the resources you think you will need in 4 wks/mos when basic parts are starting to come together.
  • [Brian Tracy: The Laws of Accumulation]
  • Capacity vs autonomy. You can (autonomously) train your capacity over time even if you’ve reached capacity today.
• Goals for project management:
  • Enable your trainees to tell a quality story about the time they spent working with you.
• Questions to ask about task allocation, whether this is something simple you need to accomplish (eg synthesize your weekly financies together) or a significant project (eg 12+mo research agenda):
  • How important is the task?
  • What are the costs of doing it (opportunity cost) versus not doing it (hanging over your head), including money, time, and cognitive side effects of learning by doing?
  • How much effort will it take to get the desired outcome (synthesize new knowledge, improve efficiency, gather background information)?
  • Is it cheaper to do it yourself or allocate it to someone else? If it’s chepaer to subcontract, who is the right person for the job? How will you communicate the task to them? How will you verify that the task is “good enough,” while you fix any remaining issue?
  • When will you do the task? e.g., it might take 2 hrs to do if you start at 10am or 6 hrs to do if you start at 11pm
  • How will you minimize downside risk of your investment, so that, with 100% probability you only lose X amount, while with 95% probability you only lose Y amount?
  • What are the enumerable ways the task could go sideways? (e.g., a college student finishing a 10 page semester-long essay at the last minute, at scale.) How likely are these possibilities?
• For a (probability) variable X in [0,1], values 0 and 1 are categorically different than those in (0,1). Especially since in most circumstances, probability distributions can’t be estimated accurately.
• Pareto curve for food: time (and opportunity cost for spending your time elsewhere), money, effort to aquire or put together, taste or quality, health (long term) or fit with desired diet (medium term) or effects of refined sugar and other substances on your body (short term), side effects (e.g., cognitive side effects from digesting food, if you do eat, or nutritian deficits, if you don’t eat)
• Your body is a control system, similar to central planners affecting the economy via measuring the Beveridge Curve. You apply treatments to affect your body’s state, including how much sleep you got the past few nights, whether you take a 20 minute walk in the sunlight to refocus your study brain, or if supermarkets blast your senses with light and sound so that you experience decision fatigue and induce you to buy more than you intended.
• When you come across something you don’t know, write it down instead of dismissing it. For example, thinking that accredited investor rules don’t apply to you since you don’t qualify. People don’t know what they don’t know, until they realize that such a concept is useful and important for their well-being.
  • Many important concepts in life are on a need-to-know basis.
• There are levels to this game.
  • Professionally, socially, financially
  • The skills you need when climbing the latter are all different and complex:
    • Associate -> junior: doing the work the first time yourself
    • -> senior: when you are consistent at doing enough reps that you can take on larger scope projects and more responsibility
    • -> team lead: where you can guide the direction for a project and enabling others to succeed
    • -> division manager: where you’re creating an environment together and organizing people for their growth and success
    • -> company executive: where you’re guiding the direction of the business while enabling culture and process
  • Compensation is rewarded by scale of the people you impact and difficulty / scarceness of the problems you solve. “Solve rich peoples’ problems” - Alex Hormozi.
• There are key words for interfacing with retail workers or bypassing them to get help from a manager. Recognize that 80-90% of consumer queries get triaged in the most efficient mannar. Complex queries, like getting help rolling over your 401k into a Rollover IRA, often require manager help. (Don’t DDOS-style spam this though, otherwise business systems will adapt at scale and become less efficient for consumers overall. There’s a trust model involved here.)
  • See [Comedy Central]
• When you’re in a rut, check your systems. Sometimes your mood is a lagging indicator of your sleep, fitness, socialization or relationships, sunlight, eating habbits, smoking/drinking/vices, etc. In the mean time, at least have fun. What can you do that’ll make your system feel endearing, fit, appreciative, or grateful?
• Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
• Embrace change. A river looks the same yet its water is always changing. No two experiences or relationships are ever the same.
• A Tale of Two Seas. “The Sea of Galilee is flowing and lush; the Dead Sea takes but never gives.” This demonstrates the need to donate and give back to your community. Example [source].
• As a retail voter, I’d recommend treating politics like the Median Voter Theorem [Wiki] and vote accordingly, rather than voting through the party line. That is, take some time to go through high-contensions issues and determine your own views on things. Then figure out which tradeoffs you value more, and which politicians are individually representing your beliefs (subject to those tradeoffs). You’ll likely find that the politicans are voting through the party line; but you don’t have to, to get your ideas heard.

A list of questions you should ask people ahead of you

• What is one thing you would tell your past self before you started?
• Any book recommendations?
• TBD