July 4th, 2023
by Jason Benn & Devon Zuegel
So, you’ve been invited to an unconference! Maybe you’re not entirely sure what that means (did the organizers misspell "conference"?), or maybe you’ve been to dozens of these before and you’re looking for some ideas for how to run an awesome session.
This blog post will be a quick primer on what an unconference is, and then we’ll share some tips on how to make a session excellent, both as the host and as a partici...
July 2nd, 2020
Imagine you're at a dinner party, and you're getting into a heated argument. As you start yelling, the other people quickly hush their voices and start glaring at you. None of the onlookers have to take further action—it's clear from their facial expressions that you're being a jerk.
In digital conversations, giving feedback requires more conscious effort. Silence is the default. Participants only get feedback from people who join the fray. T...
February 3rd, 2019
I. Loan application
Before serving time for mortgage fraud, Toby Groves seemed like the last person who would get into that kind of trouble. His older brother had been sentenced for the same crime twenty years earlier, and Toby had seen how it destroyed his family. He swore he’d never make a similar mistake.
Then in 2003, the company he’d founded ran into problems. Out of a sense of responsibility to his employees and their families, Toby to...
November 17th, 2018
A debate I’ve come across again and again is whether language is objective or subjective. It tends to crop up in moments like when dictionaries update the word "literally" with contradictory definitions or when people argue that Ebonics isn't "correct" English.
The working definitions we'll use:objective: something that can be correct or incorrect, i.e. really out there in the world independent of whether or not you perceive itsubjective: so...
June 3rd, 2018
Epistemic status: High confidence about the pros/cons discussed regarding my own experience, fairly low confidence about the parts I heard secondhand.
Epistemic effort: Low-to-medium effort. I realized these things were connected while I was in the shower last night, then I spent two hours stream-of-consciousness writing to get them onto the page. I then read it over once for minor editing and shared it with a friend to sanity check.
1.
"Bik...
February 9th, 2018
I’m proud to be a beginner! But when it comes to the concrete steps of learning something new, I often feel undue shame about my approach.
At first, I thought it was a fear of not knowing things or, more likely, a fear of other people seeing of me as a beginner. This doesn’t add up though. I don’t hesitate to ask questions when I’m stuck, and I pride myself on my love of picking up new skills and learning new things. In fact, going from zero ...
February 5th, 2018
My favorite aphorism might be "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". It's a useful idea to incorporate into your life philosophy, both for yourself and others. It's nice to offer help to someone with a problem that you can solve, but far better to teach them how to do it.* On the flip side, when there's something you don't know how to do, I encourage you to find someone who will bot...
February 2nd, 2018
In an email exchange with Brian Lui, he asked me an interesting question about the rate of flaking in San Francisco:
I had a brief question too. I've read that the rate of "flaking" in San Francisco is really high, because everyone is so busy and there is so much to do. But then I thought, wouldn't that lead to an extra strong norm against flaking, because your time is too precious to get flaked on by someone? Apparently this doesn't happen an...
February 2nd, 2018
Most people seem to think of themselves as "at the edge" of several communities rather than defined by a single identity. It’s easy to think of yourself as special and that other people are more singularly defined, but that’s a bias stemming from the fact that you’re mostly seeing people in the context of just one of the communities they’re a part of. It can be hard to remember: you just don’t have visibility into their other thoughts and othe...
October 8th, 2017
History is too often reduced to stories of good versus evil. We get the impression that we are somehow different from the people who were bad, and we take for granted that we would never make similar choices.
We should learn to empathize with those who make terrible choices — not to pardon their choices nor to deny ourselves the right to grieve, but to recognize when we might be heading down a similar path. If we see them as people and unders...