Nate Meyvis

Here's Tyler Cowen wondering which habits of talking are good for your intellectual health and development. Taking his last question first: what's already written about this? Tyler's insinuation here is too pessimistic. I'd turn to: Negotation literature, especially Never Split the Difference. Negotiators are experts at talking in ways that

Backward-incompatible changes in a workflow, as in API upgrades, break things. Backward-compatible changes can be adopted more experimentally. Since lowering the cost of experimentation is so valuable, it's worth seeking out "drop-in replacements." Here are a few favorites: Advanced clipboard managers. I use Alfred's, but any modern tool will do.

Lists of productivity tips tend to be notable in their omissions: There's a lot of good productivity advice out there, much of it in list form, and it shouldn't be surprising if someone's productivity formula is mostly a remix. My current principles: Cultivate a desire to be productive. This post

Proposition 1: Don't design a computer system by tracing a piece of data through its lifecycle. That bit of advice would have been worth the entire time investment of reading A Philosophy of Software Design, where the corresponding mistaken habit is aptly called "temporal bias." The hard part, though, isn't

What should I make of the fact that middlebrow nonfiction tends to be so much more rewarding (for me) than middlebrow fiction? Candidate reactions: What distinguishes highbrow from middlebrow offers much greater rewards in fiction than in nonfiction, for intrinsic reasons. Most obviously, the bare transmission of information matters a

New philosophy grad students often think (and hear) that their work is to cultivate philosophical ability, learn domain knowledge through coursework, produce various written artifacts, and develop a professional network. Those are good! But there are other skills, more specific than these, the value of which I didn't see well

If there is a One True Way to test software, we can't know what it is until we know a One True Way to design software.But we don't know such a One True Way.So, for now, it's more productive to think about empirical, surface-level claims about testing. (That's

I listen to maybe two episodes of The Morning Shakeout per year, but they're always great. Distance runners are, unsurprisingly, good at maintaining conversational pace and energy for an hour. Mario Fraioli does his homework but knows when to shut up; he's a sneaky-great interviewer. I wasn't familiar with Kate

Recommended. Behavior change is one of the most practically important subjects, and this is its best summary I know of. She also did an excellent interview with Russ Roberts. The book is too wordy for me, and generally conforms too closely to the airport-bookstore-pop-science genre. But it's better written than

Or: On intellectual training and life's absurdity Recently I noted that a point Jason Strasser made about poker--that people trained in it persistently mischaracterized what's special about that training--applies much more generally: Poker players often say they're good with odds, but all sorts of disciplines train that, and people can