People often underestimate how brittle attempts to improve the world are.
Altruism, at a large scale, often hinges on a chain of assumptions/requirements, such as:
A & B & C & D & E
One broken link in the chain means it looks like you're doing good but you're not really doing it.
For example, to help the world by delivering medicine, the chain might look like this:
The medicine reliably cures the disease
& the side effects are not worse than being...
More
systems thinking
Five Powerful Learning Techniques Most People Have Never Tried
Obscure yet very powerful methods of learning that many people have never tried
Here are five uncommon but highly effective learning techniques:
1. Intuition Flooding
To understand something well on a gut level, spend hours looking closely at a huge number of examples, until your intuition forms a predictive model.
I do this fairly often but don’t think I’ve heard it discussed!
Example: Look carefully at 100 user interfaces.
2. Expert Observation
Ask an expert if you can wa...
More