Category Archives: Personal Experience

How Escape From Immoral Mazes

Posted on January 16, 2020 by

Previously in sequence and most on point: What is Success in an Immoral Maze?, How to Identify an Immoral Maze This post deals with the goal of avoiding or escaping being trapped in an immoral maze, accepting that for now we are … Continue reading →

Posted in Good Advice, Immoral Mazes Sequence, Long Post Is Long, Moral Mazes, Personal Experience | 16 Comments

Write Down Your Process

Posted on July 24, 2017 by

Previously: Help Us Find Your Blog (and others) Mark Rosewater is the lead designer of the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering. This means he is part of Magic’s R&D department, one of the world’s few pockets of cooperation, sanity and … Continue reading →

Posted in Facebook Sequence, Good Advice, Magic: The Gathering, Personal Experience, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Book Review: Weapons of Math Destruction

Posted on June 4, 2017 by

Epistemic Status: Minus One Million Points Shortness Status: Long (this is a proposed new norm I want to try out, in the sense of ‘apologies for writing a long letter, I did not have enough time to write a shorter … Continue reading →

Posted in Death by Metrics, Economics, Personal Experience, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 16 Comments

How to Destroy Civilization

Posted on May 24, 2017 by

Epistemic Status: Parable. Can’t tell to what extent I am being serious but it’s not zero. I. Recently I made a huge mistake. At heart, I am a gamer. Playing games is fun and makes me happy, whereas not playing … Continue reading →

Posted in Games Other Than Magic, Personal Experience, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Meditations on Mexico City

Posted on March 24, 2017 by

As I begin writing this, I am on a flight back from Mexico City to New York (I finished the next morning back in the city). It has been a good one-week trip. Most of the time outside of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal Experience | Tagged , | 2 Comments

On Cutting Wages

Posted on December 24, 2015 by

This post is a response to Bryan Caplan’s request that I share my experiences cutting wages. It was not fun. While I was CEO of MetaMed, we were continuously short of revenue. We started the company thinking we would be … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal Experience | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Thing and the Symbolic Representation of The Thing

Posted on June 30, 2015 by

Let’s assume there is a thing that all would agree is, in context, a Good Thing(tm) that someone in your situation would want. Do you want the thing, or do you want the symbolic representation of the thing?* This sounds … Continue reading →

Posted in Death by Metrics, Impractical Optimization, Personal Experience, Rationality | Tagged , , , | 29 Comments