Category: personal AnGoL

What Is Workaholism?

The term “workaholic” was coined in 1971 by the psychologist Wayne E. Oates, who referred to “an uncontrollable need to work incessantly” as an addiction. Workaholics are characterized by having an inner compulsive drive to work hard, thinking about work constantly, and feeling guilty and restless when they are not working. Workaholism often goes hand in hand with working long hours, but the two are distinct: it’s possible to work long hours without being obsessed with work, and it is possible to be obsessed with work but only work 35 hours a week or less.

Source: How Being a Workaholic Differs from Working Long Hours – Harvard Business Review – Pocket

Because Alan focused on important questions, others often contested his answers. But that is what good science is all about: getting many people to work on the most important questions and hashing things out. Someone like Alan, who gets others to focus on the most important questions, accomplishes great good both when others confirm a result and when others show that a seeming result is wrong. And it matters. Too much of economics is either addressing minor questions or addressing big questions with tools t

Source: In Honor of Alan Krueger — Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal

Innovation moves in cycles Carlota Perez subscribes to the long wave economic cycle theory, known as Kondratiev Waves, in which technological innovation occurs in 45–60 year waves. According to Perez, these innovation waves consist of three phases:
Installation
Collapse
Deployment

Source: The ICO Bubble Explained in Three Moments – Hacker Noon

Develop a system of note-taking.

Parrish calls his system The Blank Sheet: Before he begins reading a new book, he takes a blank sheet and writes down what he knows about the subject. Then, as he’s reading, he uses a different color pen to write down new ideas and connect them to what he had originally written, hanging the new knowledge on the old knowledge.
“Use a different color every time, so you can visualize what you’re learning as you’re reading,” says Parrish. “Then before you start your next reading session, to ease your brain into it, you just review the mind map. That gives you the context of where you left off… Then when you’re done with the book, you have this summary of the book.”
Say, for example, that you’re about to read Annie’s Duke’s Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts (which made it onto his 2018 recommended reads). Make a sheet detailing what you know about decision-making, even if it’s just the stages of making a decision: narrowing, analyzing, and evaluating your options; avoiding cognitive biases; making a commitment to whatever you ultimately choose. Then, as you read, fill in those stages as you learn Duke’s insights.
But, really, it doesn’t matter how your system works. It only matters that you have a system. Why? So that you can have a catalog of ideas that you can revisit. Parrish organizes his blank sheets by putting them into topic binders (the notes on Duke’s book would go in a “decision-making” binder), and then sits down to look at his binders about once every two months. Over time, he finds himself remembering things and making connections he may not have otherwise, mastering these various subjects.
“Not only do you understand the book at a different level, but you’re writing it down. It’s tangible. Instead of rereading all these books, you can just pick up this binder. ‘Oh, this is great. I want to go back to this story. Maybe I missed something [here].’ You’re connecting things across different domains or different situations. That’s effectively how we improve our thinking.”

Source: How to Read 80ish Books a Year (And Actually Remember Them) – GQ

Comment of the Day: Graydon: Insecurity Management: “I think you’re missing the central thing about Drake’s writing. It is not so much that, yeah, these are not the best circumstances and our feels are in abeyance; that happens, that’s depicted. But among that depiction you get what I think of as the essential Drake thing, which is a vehicle crew. They may not like each other much; they may not, in some senses of the word, trust one another. But they are entirely predictable to one another, and reliable. And it’s that obligation of reliability that lets people get their head out of hell, whether as imperfectly as Danny Pritchard does it or as entirely as the protagonist of Redliners does. (You can see much the same flavour of reliable between Gunnar and Brennu-Njáll.)…

…In terms of common elements, Drake’s characters are moderns or post-moderns; they are there in an environment with state and post-state actors. Their battles are in that anonymous impersonal context of abstractions like commodity prices. If they are to have anything in common with Odysseus or Telemachus, persons of a time when the notion of “king” was doubtful and all authority was personal authority, it has to be something basic.
I think the notion of insecurity management is more fundamental than basic; it’s much or most of why we’re a band-forming primate. (Orangutans are not, most gibbons are not; band-forming is not a primate requirement.) In Heroic Age—any heroic age—societies, your insecurity is—if you are not one already—how you stay out of “women, cattle, and slaves”, because in there, anyone can do anything to you; your insecurity is vast. (It’s pretty silly to pretend that the slave women had an option of refusing the suitors; the idea being reinforced its that it’s better to get yourself killed turning the suitor down, because when the master returns you will as surely die, and less honorably. I doubt the slave women thought was a sensible construction of their circumstances.)
You don’t get an understanding of anything important about insecurity management—that fear is in you, so killing fear means killing yourself; that you are helpless, but maybe not hapless; that it is not so much “bare is back without brother behind it” as “lone monkeys die”—in the abstract, by study, or by reading. You get it by doing actually dangerous things[1] in groups. Much effort has gone into preventing any such thing for anyone we’d call “educated” for a few generations now, and this is a mistake. If you have no personal experience of the whole band-forming process, this might benefit the randite myth of the individual and it certainly benefits the corporate desire to prevent any ganging up on problems by the prey animals, but it does not benefit you at all.
Education could do with much, much more of “theory informs; practice convinces.” If you want people to exhibit empathy for those whose state is not theirs and whose expertise is different, you need to make most of education involve failure; do this material thing at which you are unskilled. Allowing education to be narrow, and to avoid all reminder that the world is wider and that to a first approximation everyone is utterly incompetent, just encourages arrogance. Arrogance is terrible insecurity management; it makes the other monkeys less inclined to help you. (Yes of course we should overtly teach both insecurity management and band forming best practices in simple overt language.)

[1] I do not mean “fight in a war”; I mean “use power tools”, “split wood/use an axe”, “build something to keep the rain off and sleep under it”, “assemble a pontoon bridge”, “portage in haste”, “use a wood-fired oven”, “make jam” (think about the failure modes for a minute), and such like; all of these things can hurt or kill you, and at group scales you can’t possibly take sufficient care of yourself by yourself. Such activities don’t usually do us any harm because we’re pretty good at being a band-forming primat

And I think: The science fiction/horror/fantasy author David Drake very effectively and rightly, I think, puts it thus in the mouth of one of his characters, the Goddess Athene Danny Pritchard:

Force accomplishes a lot of things. They just aren’t the ones you want here. Bring in the Slammers [Regiment] and we kick ass for as long as you pay us. Six months, a year. And we kick ass even if the other side brings in mercs of their own–which they’ll do–but that’s not a problem, not if you’ve got us. So, there’s what? Three hundred thousand people….
So, you want to kill fifty kay? Fifty thousand people, let’s remember they’re people for the moment…. You see, if we go in quick and dirty, the only way that has a prayer of working is if we get them all. If we get everybody who opposes you, everybody related to them, everybody who called them master–everybody…. They’re not dangerous now, but they will be after the killing starts. Believe me. I’ve seen it often enough. Not all of them, but one in ten, one in a hundred. One in a thousand’s enough when he blasts your car down over the ocean a year from now. You’ll see. It changes people, the killing does. Once it starts, there’s no way to stop it but all the way to the end. If you figure to still live here on Tethys….
What do you think the Slammers do, milady? Work magic? We kill, and we’re good at it, bloody good. You call the Slammers in to solve your problems here and you’ll be able to cover the Port with the corpses. I guarantee it. I’ve done it, milady. In my time…

Source: Hard Power, Soft Power, Muscovy, Strategy, and My Once-Again Failure to Understand Where Niall Ferguson Is Coming From: Live from Le Pain Quotidien

Philippe: You need to take baby steps. I want to clarify one thing; these types of decisions are not solely an issue for mainframe or legacy systems. It can be a monolithic Java or .NET applications. It’s really any application which is difficult to segment. So then after their struggle on how to start, and because these applications are mission-critical, you need to enhance and you need to transform that application, but you need to be sure that this system will not collapse, or still provide services and value.
So for that you need to understand the as-is architecture, how it’s structured, to be sure that if you don’t know a specific layer or specific aspect, you will be able to investigate, define a plan, and then execute this plan. It doesn’t have to be a long approach, to rewrite from scratch into a microservice. Maybe begin by defining specific baby steps in a way to transform the presentation, as an example, and then after decouple different sections or modules.
That’s all for Part 1! Tune back in tomorrow when we’ll cover ‘as-is’ architectures.

Source: Should Every Application Leverage Microservices? Part 1 – DZone Microservices

Every economy in the world today is divided between an advanced segment, typically globally integrated, employing a minority of the labor force, and a low-productivity segment that absorbs the bulk of the workforce, often at low wages and under poor conditions. How should policymakers address this dualism?
 
CAMBRIDGE – Around the world today, the central challenge for achieving inclusive economic prosperity is the creation of sufficient numbers of “good jobs.” Without productive and dependable employment fo

Source: The Good Jobs Challenge by Dani Rodrik – Project Syndicate

“Success isn’t about how your life looks to others. It’s about how it feels to you. That’s what it means to be true to yourself.” — Michelle Obama

Asking a computer to ‘tell me about this picture’ poses other problems, though. We do not have HAL 9000, nor any path to it, and we cannot recognise any arbitrary object, but we can make a guess, of varying quality, in quite a lot of categories. So how should the user know what would work, and how does the system know what kind of guess to make? Should this all happen in one app with a general promise, or many apps with specific promises? Should you have a poster mode, a ‘solve this equation’ mode, a date mode, a books mode and a product search mode? Or should you just have mode for ‘wave the phone’s camera at things and something good will probably happen’?
This last is the approach Google is taking with ‘Lens’, which is integrated into the Android camera app next to ‘Portrait’ – point it at things and magic happens. Mostly.

Source: Cameras that understand: portrait mode and Google Lens — Benedict Evans