I’m going to be starting a new job on Monday. I’ve given a lot of you the blow by blow account of how the negotiations with my employer went. But the main takeaway from this exercise for me are the fololowing:
-
No one will advocate for me as well as me. My boss may be awesome, but they will still never be as interested in getting me as much as I want.
-
Loyalty should be for people, not companies. It was very apparent to me that my old employer didn’t value my institutional knowledge and other intangibles as much as they valued saving money. This is how almost all companies are at their core.
Thanks to all of you for being there for me during this time.
First, a better way to look at most every political issue:
Some Americans would feel less polarized and alienated from their fellow citizens if they recognized that some of the people fighting on “the other side” of a polarizing issue actually hold values and beliefs that are strikingly similar to their own.
Second, First Principles is a good model, even though Elon Musk will likely be demanding $1 billion from the UN to not destroy the world within the next 20 years:
First principles thinking is the act of boiling a process down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there.
Third, conspiracy theorists aren’t really skeptics. A lot of them define themselves by what they’re against, rather than having a core set of principles they believe in. This allows them to have wildly contradictory views without feeling cognitive dissonance:
Conspiracy believers are the ultimate motivated skeptics. Their curse is that they apply this selective scrutiny not to the left or right, but to the mainstream. They tell themselves that they’re the ones who see the lies, and the rest of us are sheep. But believing that everybody’s lying is just another kind of gullibility.