Here's Some I Made Earlier

Hi everyone,

Slightly late and brief today because I got to the end of yesterday and had second thoughts about the piece I was going to send. I’m currently in the throes of caffeine withdrawal and decided that the piece I wrote about that was unhelpfully grouchy.

In lieu of a full post, I thought I might link to a couple of past highlights of other things I’ve written that you might not have seen or might enjoy rereading.

How to quickly become effective when joining a new company is something I wrote back in 2013 at a past employer. In it I talk about how the key to making progress early on is to very aggressively triage what you learn and when you learn it: Start from a problem to solve, and do not attempt to understand anything more than what you need to solve it.

More recent pieces along a similar theme are How to make decisions and The fastest way to learn something is to do something.

The common thread among all of these is some mix of “learning by doing” and “cost of knowledge” - getting complete information is almost always far more work than it’s worth, and so learning to act effectively in situations with incomplete information is extremely valuable.

A related topic I’ve written about in “There is no single error rate” is that it’s important to consider the different kinds of ways a decision can go wrong: You can do the thing when you shouldn’t have done the thing, and you can not do the thing when you should have. These are errors with very different consequences. Often the way to most effectively take cost of knowledge into account is to set one of these error rates to 100% and the other to 0%, by always making the same decision. I talk about this in “Try not to think about it”.

That’s all for this week. There might be another of these in the next week or two as I’m a bit overwhelmed with other things right now, but with any luck more substantial content will resume soon.