flâneur

Harrison Qian

49 followers · 500 following · 1476 views

on the atlas — 217

highlights — 25

  • Cognitive Hygiene: Why You Need to Make Thinking Hard Again
    Cognitive Hygiene: Why You Need to Make Thinking Hard Again - YouTube
  • We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."
    History of Google
  • The world is unfair six hundred ways to Sunday—yet you just have to believe that your fate is in your hands.
    The Old World Is Dying: Advice for 2026 graduates
  • Play in terrains where there is no training data. A surprising amount of the world’s information has never been written down. Be courageous. Go outside. Don’t just monitor the situation from your phone and your toilet seat: Get like Analyst #3 and turn up to the Strait of Hormuz. The more out-of-distribution your adventures, the bigger moat you have. And if you’re one of the only people to know something, you can sell that info too.
    The Old World Is Dying: Advice for 2026 graduates
  • For instance, although a class-wide discussion might seem like active learning on the surface, it does not immediately follow that each student is active. Often, it is only a proportionally small number of enthusiastic, vocal students who participate in all parts of the discussion and can be considered truly active. Even if the instructor cold-calls on students who have not been participating, most students will only pay attention enough that they won’t look foolish or be embarrassed if called upon.
    What Counts as Active Learning? - Justin Skycak
  • and at the end if they liked it, I'd quietly say, ``Any time you want one I'll come in and give you one.'' As a result, I got a great deal of practice giving speeches to a limited audience and I got over being afraid. Furthermore, I could also then study what methods were effective and what were ineffective.
    You and Your Research
  • and at the end if they liked it, I'd quietly say, ``Any time you want one I'll come in and give you one.'' As a result, I got a great deal of practice giving speeches to a limited audience and I got over being afraid.
    You and Your Research
  • The freedom to be fully honest with other people is hard to overrate or even describe. It is always available to you.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • “Are you in venting mode or solutions mode?”
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • People are their own punishment, which means revenge is rarely worth it.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • If it’s really the path, you’ll find it more than once.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Ideas are cheap and easy to find; execution is everything. Effective altruists would be a lot more effective if they internalized this.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • There is, annoyingly, really something to the idea that our childhoods have a massive effect on our later lives, and it’s possible to be totally convinced that you’ve gotten over your past while still laboring under all sorts of mental distortions as a result. At the same time, the point of engaging with all that stuff has to be to become more functional, not to develop an identity as a victim, or to constantly be peeling your skin off.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • There are huge quality of life improvements downstream of “let me take this off future me’s plate.” You don’t just shift work earlier, you also save yourself all the mental friction between now and when you do it. Psychic cost is the integral of cognitive load over time — so do the things you most want to avoid first.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Writing defensively is a loser’s game. It lets people who won’t like your writing anyway win in advance.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • It's only when we see someone else actively making these tradeoffs over an uncomfortable period of time that we internalize that this is a valid way to live.
    the virtues of looking stupid - musings
  • Cold Turkey. (and Freedom on iOS). Allows me to type 200 characters if I want to enter Twitter. A good deterrent without it being annoying.
    My Tech Stack
  • One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them. For example, Einstein, somewhere around 12 or 14, asked himself the question, ``What would a light wave look like if I went with the velocity of light to look at it?'' Now he knew that electromagnetic theory says you cannot have a stationary local maximum. But if he moved along with the velocity of light, he would see a local maximum. He could see a contradiction at the age of 12, 14, or somewhere around t…
    You and Your Research
  • A fantastic barometer of your own interactions with powerful people (via Brian Whetten2) is to notice if you are trying to prove worth or provide value to someone. The latter is always a better way to enter a fresh conversation. Not needing anything from an interaction, and therefore dropping any persona, is usually a huge relief and immediately disarming for the other person.
    10 Insights from 10 Years of Transformational Conversations
  • I honest-to-god, not just-because-I-work-here
    🌻 tryhard - by Jasmine Sun - @jasmine’s substack
  • Subsequently completing the class with an A-minus and no further understanding of the material was a relief on the surface, but unsettling on a more fundamental level.
    math team - by benedict - bene dictio
  • think, on some level, I understood the society I inhabited was unsustainable, its shadow darker and crueler than I could
    College at Age Sixteen: What Is Intelligence For?
  • t as a requirement for showing the effectiveness of new medicine. To make a terrible analogy, you can think of RCT as Aang, from Avatar: The Last Airbender, while other techniques are more like Sokka. Sokka is cool and can pull some neat tricks here and there, but Aang can bend the four elements and connect with the spiritual world.
    02 - Randomised Experiments — Causal Inference for the Brave and True
  • mia and sebastian's theme but it's 3am and i improvise
    mia and sebastian's theme but it's 3am and i improvise - YouTube
  • It is easy to get swept up by other people’s opinions
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland