yeah I'm worried it could be me getting bored instead of the writers getting boring, but nobody could look at the writing in The Black Swan vs Skin in the Game and not be able to tell the huge difference in fluency, coherence, and beauty.
interesting feedback, thanks - it was mostly a stream of consciousness written in a single three hour sitting with no editing. would appreciate more detail. I'm actually gratefully surprised you found my writing so skimmable, not something I optimize for
Yeah, your ideas came across quickly but as you mentioned there was a "stream of consciousness" after and seemed to reduce in value the more it continued.
Like my English professor would always bark: "just say it." Which meant you should avoid all unnecessary words..almost to the point of leaving some things out.
If you publish something, you by definition intend people you do not know, the wider public, to read it (if you really wanted to share your thought with that one person, publishing is not required).
Choosing to do something that affects someone else while being unaffected by how they react is not normal and indicates sociopathy.
People paying attention to how they affect others, how others react, and changing as a result of their feedback is basically how society exists. Most people are wired for this. People who are not wired for this… There is nothing stopping them from hurting someone for personal benefit, for example.
I completely disagree. If you walked up to Marl, built trust with him, and asked him whether he wanted more meaningful content in his life (for a definition of meaningful which made sense to him) I think he would say yes. So it's not really about Marl's preferences but about the way those preferences are collected and Marl's (sadly mostly justified) lack of trust.
and yet if you became friends with someone that encouraged you in the right way, or found a routine that let you get exercise in a way that didn't suck, you'd probably feel really good about yourself and want to keep doing it.
It's not that its impossible to work with people to raise them to a higher stanardard. It's harder, sure. But not impossible. And the result is usually worth its weight in gold
yeah this is strange and I don't fully understand it. perhaps the options exist and we just haven't heard of them (like there's a chrome extension or an OSS library that solves every conceivable problem)? Or that the nature of the modern smartphone software stack encourages too much bundling of functionality?
> Am I just wrong that Google isn't suffering from me hating them?
No, I think you're right that Google is suffering in the long term. It's a combination of measurement difficulty and agency problems - there's no way for the VP of the product to get a credible signal about whether a change was good or not other than by looking at something incontrovertible like DAUs. You might try to introduce a metric like "user happiness" but the design space of such metrics is so large that a misaligned product manager could always use it to shove a bad change through.
Kind of like we all know GDP is a bad metric for human flourishing, but everything else feels even worse.
yeah designing anti-dopaminergic (maybe serotonergic?) tech is a class of solutions I'm especially excited about. Like browser extensions that cut out the little dopamine-triggering UI elements that designers keep adding in.
