-
"Libertarians are treated as if they have quirky beliefs precisely because they are consistent."
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.
Author Archives: kevin
links for 2010-08-20
-
one-third of couples met in places where no other couples met. E.g., if you're an African explorer, you're more likely to meet your spouse while exploring Africa, and less likely to find your spouse in a Chicago singles bar. School and work are the next-most common meeting locations (15-20%). Parties and bars are good for short-term (less than one month) sexual relationships (17-25%) and not bad for marriages (8-10%). Churches are good for meeting marriage partners (11%), and poor for meeting short-term sex partners (1%). Personal ads and singles cruises are poor places to meet anyone. also liked this: If you want to meet "bad boys"/business men try going to strip clubs during the lunch hour. If you live in the Minneapolis area try Deja Vu for their $2 lunch buffet (tuesdays, Washington Avenue and 3rd).
-
I STRONGLY suspect that there is a enormous gulf between finding out things on your own and being directed to them by a peer. When you find something on your own (existential risk, cryonics, whatever), you get to bask in your own fortuitousness, and congratulate yourself on being smart enough to understand it's value. You get a boost in (perceived) status, because not only do you know more than you did before, you know things other people don't know. But when someone else has to direct you to it, it's much less positive. When you tell someone about existential risk or cryonics or whatever, the subtext is "look, you're weren't able to figure this out by yourself, let me help you". No matter how nicely you phrase it, there's going to be resistance because it comes with a drop in status - which they can avoid by not accepting whatever you're selling. It actually might be WORSE with smart people who believe that they have most things "figured out".
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.
links for 2010-08-19
-
A couple of interesting counterintuitive ideas: He mentioned that the more money people spend on videos, the worse those videos seem to get. Also, he thinks it makes more sense to have students watch lectures at home and do homework at school as opposed to vice versa.
-
Of course, the reality is you’re doomed if you’re even asking yourself the question. You know what I think? I think people who tell themselves ‘if I make $X million, then I’ll stop working and do what I want’ never make that $X million. They just don’t possess the relentlessness that makes it possible. I haven’t known that many hyper-wealthy people in my life, but at Goldman I used to sit 12 hours a day next to people whose annual incomes were greater than the capitalizations of many startups, and they possessed a rapacious greed breathtaking in scale. If they got paid $2MM that year, they’d want $4MM. Pay them $10MM, and they’d hanker for $50MM. Half a billion? They’d want to catch up to the Bill Gates of the world, and make several billion. Successful startup founders I’ve met seem no less ferocious.
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.
links for 2010-08-17
-
Compliment the author on an article, then limit your story pitch to one or two sentences. No press release
-
A Chinese friend once told me: "There are a lot of us. If you tell a Chinese woman she's 'one in a million,' that means there are thirteen hundred people just like her in China."
-
the complete set of bob ross painting dvd's is only $1378.50
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.
links for 2010-08-16
-
12 words per line: "The ideal line length for text layout is based on the physiology of the human eye… At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches – about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line. Research shows that reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width, because the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. If the eye must traverse great distances on the page, the reader is easily lost and must hunt for the beginning of the next line. Quantitative studies show that moderate line lengths significantly increase the legibility of text."
-
Depends on the government: "When we look at systematic historical evidence, instead of individual cases, we find that authoritarianism buys little in terms of economic growth. For every authoritarian country that has managed to grow rapidly, there are several that have floundered. For every Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, there are many like Mobutu Sese Seko of the Congo."
-
the best answer to the question, "why shouldn't I want to work at google" I've seen so far
-
"[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites."
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.
Recent changes
You may have noticed, but the blog's undergone a pretty heavy redesign/stripping of extraneous features lately. It's hard to go wrong with "remove everything peripheral to the content, and change the content to Helvetica," although I'm going to tweak the design more soon. Feel free to leave comments if you have any.
In the interest of sharing more of what I do and what I've been reading, I've started posting my delicious.com links in the RSS feed. I've also started a new domain called "Kevin Burke Recommends" to highlight cool products, hacks or articles I find on the Web.
I'll put together a combined RSS feed and a split apart RSS feed soon.
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.
links for 2010-08-15
-
reference, to send to people who ask. 3. Learn some art-history. You don't have to learn very much, but the more your learn, the more you'll have a grounding in what has been seen/done/discussed/etc. Most importantly, you will be able to be eloquent about form/aesthetics that you like. It is hard to talk about visual things, so in this way, it is imperative to have a good set of words when talking about form. A few great books: Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New, Reyner Banham's Theory & Design in the First Machine Age, Rosalind Krauss' Passages in Modern Sculpture.
-
good writing from paul carr - the more we learn about people the less interesting they seem
-
Flip the ball into the air then volley it. You can get under the ball, way more dip.
-
good series. I wish they'd focused more on the data. Use of short videos is interesting, they're engaging but anything longer than 30 seconds and you lose the audience. Backs up everything DFW said about the vast gap between the pros and amateurs. Consistency is way underrated
-
Interesting how you can succeed if you're willing to be bored in training: "The Premier League side who probably best maintained their shape last season was Fulham, their progress to the final of the Europa League finally gaining Roy Hodgson proper recognition in England. The key to their achievement was long, hard, not particularly interesting work on the training field, working on positional play, and the key to whether Hodgson can enjoy similar success at Liverpool – which is probably the most interesting tactical issue at any Premier League club — is whether he can persuade a higher grade of player similarly to submit to what pretty much every Fulham player admitted was a punishingly boring training regime."
-
The important stuff in the common design pattern has been tested to death - everyone who matters is using clicktracking, a/b/x testing and deep user analytics. The reason they all look the same is the same reason that all infomercials or porn sites use the same basic structure - that's what testing indicates will convert best. Some people know this empirically, some are just blindly aping the fashion, but there is wads of data backing it. Lots of whitespace improves readability, as does the use of a sans serif font. Deviate from either and a lot of people will hit the back button because they can't easily read your text. A clear call to action massively improves conversion. The rectangular button in a dominant colour will increase signups by 10-20%.
-
I think the typical view of politics from inside a partisan mindset is to see politics as a battle of the good guys versus the bad guys. Maybe the good guys are on the left, maybe the good guys are on the right, but it’s this Manichean struggle and the way to get progress is for the good side to win and impose their will. Mill sees through that and sees that, in fact, politics is a dialectical process. At any given time truth is partly on one side and partly on the other. It’s more a battle of half-truths and incomplete truths than of good versus bad. The excesses of each side ultimately create opportunities for the other to come in and correct those excesses. Liberalism, in Mill’s view and in mine, provides the basic motive force of political change and progress. It will go astray, it will have excesses, it will make terrible mistakes – and a conservatism that is focused on preserving good things that exist now will be a necessary counterweight to that liberalism.
-
moe tkacik story about two daughters of a billionaire that get hooked by a cult. large parts profile the cult leader, who started in multi-level marketing and worked his way up. I am fascinated by guys like this, who build power and status and money from nothing, just their own words. Surely if God created humans He would not have let them fall prey to people like this as easily as they do
-
"I have this very abstract idea in my head," he confides. "I wouldn't even want to call it stand-up, because stand-up conjures in one's mind a comedian with a microphone standing onstage under a spotlight telling jokes to an audience." That kind of comedy is fine, he says, but for him it's in the past. Shandling is striving to exist—and thus to be funny—completely in the moment. "The direction I'm going in is eventually you won't know if it's a joke or not," he explains, describing his new act, which he has been quietly testing in clubs where his name never appears on the marquee. "What I want to happen is that I talk for an hour and the audience doesn't realize it is funny until they're driving home."
-
on running barefoot, eating vegetables only, not getting injuries Tarahumara men have a taste for corn snacks and beer, for instance. They're hard workers, but come downtime, they party like a rap star's roadies. According to one of the few outsiders to witness a tesguinada -- a full-on Tarahumara rave -- women were ripping the tops off each other in a bare-breasted wrestling match, while their husbands watched in glassy-eyed, drunken paralysis. Tarahumara men love sports, booze, and gambling so much, they'll stay up all night to watch a game, down enough beer in a year to spend every third day buzzed or recovering, and support their teams by literally betting the shirts on their backs. Sound familiar? But here's where American and Tarahumara men part company: Many of us will be killed by heart disease, stroke, and gastrointestinal cancers. Almost none of them will.
-
the one asking for your email address only - to show to people who want to collect tons of data from customers, which reduces their sign up rate 50% or more
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.
Lectures for Basketball Coaches: Fatigue is Entirely a Mental Phenomenon
The last three summers I've coached at the best basketball camp in the East Bay. One big part of camp are the "defense" and "skills" lectures. I've wanted to do this for a while, but I'm not at camp, and I'm a way better writer than I am a motivator, so I'm posting my lectures here.
This is Part I in a series of posts.
Close your eyes. I want you to raise your hand if you think pain is a good thing, if it's good that the world has physical pain. Okay, you can open your eyes.
Now I want you to describe what a world without pain would be like. Your mom is cooking dinner and tells you to bring a pan from the stove to the table. The pan is burning hot, but you can't feel pain, so you grab it and bring it to the table. When you look at your hand, it's red and covered in blisters. Or you are playing around with a friend and he starts twisting your arm. Usually if it hurts too bad you would say "Uncle," but you can't feel it hurt, and you keep fighting until he twists your arm out of its socket. I could go on - you step on a sharp object in bare feet, etc.
If we didn't have pain, we might end up doing a bunch of silly things and have no idea that we were hurting ourselves. So pain is our body's way of telling us that we need to stop what we're doing because if we keep doing it, there could be long term effects.
Okay, now think about fatigue. Raise your hand if you think getting tired is a good thing. Okay. Well, let's imagine that you never got tired. You're on the track team and running a marathon. Because you don't get tired, you feel great and practically sprint the whole thing. You're in first place by a mile, all the way until mile 20, when your muscles collapse from lack of energy and you fall in a heap on the track.
Even though people compete and exercise all day, it's pretty rare that someone collapses because their muscles fail. Why? Because we get tired and stop long before we get to the point where our muscles fail. So fatigue is our body's way of saying, "you need to keep some energy in the tank," because it was hard to tell when you'd need those spare reserves. Imagine being the most tired you've ever been, two hours into a practice, running sprints, when suddenly a tiger bursts into the gym, and you need to run for your life. Your brain is trying to make sure you have enough energy left to outrun the tiger.
Well as it turns out, our brain is actually extremely conservative. That means that your brain starts telling you that you're tired way before you actually get tired. Scientists have done studies of people on treadmills. They'll take measurements of people who are exhausted - unbelievably tired, and what they find is that their muscles are actually fine, that they could keep going in theory. Their muscles aren't holding them back, their brain is holding them back.
So what does this mean? When you get tired, your body is still ready to go. You have way more potential energy sitting inside you, ready to be tapped if you can will yourself to do it. The biggest enemy is your brain. It's tough but you can train yourself to overcome your limitations, with practice. You have to push yourself every day a little further, and a little harder, than you did the day before. When you start hurting, tell yourself that you're not tired and go harder. It's not something everyone can do, which is why you have to practice every day and push yourself to your limits.
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.
How to sell a scoop of ice cream for $60,000
Sell it on top of Mount Kilimanjaro and make the buyer feel good about giving to charity:
They also offered a $45 ice cream bucket, with two dozen scoops of all the flavors, which we ordered.
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.
Theory of conversation, part 2
Last week I noted Scott Adams' thoughts on how to make good conversation. Making conversation is a skill that I need to work on.
Good
- Tell a story, if you are a good story teller, or funny
- Create something from nothing; it's hard to describe this category, but think about standing in a nondescript environment but I'm thinking of inventing a nickname/story, accuse someone of something, being funny without telling jokes, saying something in a funny/cocky way, etc. Often this is where the most memorable in-jokes and stories are made. I'm extremely not-good in this area. Pickup artists are extremely strong in this area.
- Along the same lines, conversations about risky or sexual topics
- Gossip, if you're careful not to shit where you eat
- Asking the other person to describe an accomplishment or event, because people like talking about themselves and it's a way to raise their status
- Give a compliment, if you are not too obvious about it
- Outline choices you've made and the reasons for doing so
- Describe why you spend your time the way you do
- Describe productivity hacks
- Describe a problem and then collaborate on a solution
- Checking your email or answering your phone while we're talking. This drives me nuts.
- Asking yes/no questions
- Terse factual questions
- Silence/Having nothing to say - depends on how well you know the person, situation but generally you should have some stuff to talk about.
- Speaking during a momentous occasion, like standing on a mountain watching the sun set.
- Commenting on how awkward silence is
- Apologizing - just don't do it
- Continually bringing up a past failing to signal to the other person how apologetic you are - again, just don't do it
- Trying to be funny if you are not funny
- Telling a bad story. Most things that don't involve staring at your computer can become good stories if you tell them well enough but I'd estimate about 2% of the population possesses this skill.
- "You had to be there" events, as Adams says
- A youtube video, unless you can actually watch it in a quiet room
- Hijack the conversation to talk about yourself
- Interfere with an on-going conversation between funny people
- Gossip, if you are shitting where you are eating and provoking your partner to wonder what you say about her behind her back.
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.
