The Snail Shell

Before you read this post, read Patrick MacKenzie's negotiation advice . Ok, great. You're 95% of the way there. Here are a few ...

Ok, so you want to be a Data Scientist. The best prep would be to have interned as a Data Scientist. I hadn't done that. Here are some ...

Ok, so this is for a very focused crowd, I guess, but I know a lot of people who will be in my shoes, and I feel like I learned something, ...

Each row is my series of interactions with a given company. This chart is not at all in chronological order. Legend: Computer monitor...

Ok, here the main game is: - get a card with a sweet bonus - meet the Minimum Spend - get some bonus points - downgrade it at the end o...

Sometimes I play the credit cards game, to get a little bit of bonuses without paying money. I'm a pretty-inactive member of reddit.com...

I feel like neural network humor has gotten really good. This Tumblr seems to be the epicenter. Pokemon recipes   paint D&D superhe...

"I Changed My Mind" award I feel like, in online arguments, the thing I most admire is when people change their mind in the face...

two mostly-unrelated thoughts about cities: 1. when I was moving back to Pittsburgh, I thought about "the Aikido test": say I w...

We teach kids (intentionally or not) that they are a "self." Let's leave aside the question of how to teach them that there...

1. Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse . I'm enough of a hippie to think you should actually just pay them without measurin...

like Uber. Your "boss" is an algorithm that says "you get 4.7* or above, you can keep working; if not, you're fired....

I am just signal boosting an SSC post again, but in particular I like his rules for a debate. He calls it a "purely logical debate...

Here is an uncomfortable fact of working life: Alice: I think X. Bob: are you sure? Charles: what about Y? Dave: I don't know, I d...

I remember reading something about how sincerity, not irony, is the ethos of our generation. (oh, here it is .) (set aside for a minute ...

It would be pretty fun to look back and think "here's what I thought at 20, 25, 30, 35, etc", for two reasons: 1. it would p...

Life Hacks by Dan Tasse 1. Call your book "Life Hacks" so people will buy it 2. Be kind of glib so people will continue readi...

I am not sure what it will be called. Perhaps Tati should name it. It is hers now, after all. And it's totally great. This is my f...

Considerations on cost disease Very many of our arguments should indeed be prefaced with "Look, really our main problem is that all...

(and no, this blog hasn't been taken over by a spam bot. I guess consider it somewhere between Oblique Strategies , 43 Simple Ways to S...