The Challenges of "Great People" as a Model for Social Change - A Critical Review of "How to Change the World" by David Bornstein Last summer, I finished reading David Bornstein’s book “How to Change the World: Social Entreprenuers and the Power of New Ideas”. The book is pretty neat, detailing the work of several “social entrepreneurs”, or talented people who work to solve social problems in their communities. The book also details
How to Build a Community - Two Book Reviews of "The Penguin and The Leviathan" and "Liars and Outliers" I’ve noticed that quite a few people are interested in fostering communities – both creating communities and improving them to make them work together. But how do we go about actually doing this? What’s there to community that we can foster and build upon? What makes a community thrive,
Notes on "High Growth Handbook" Elad Gil, among other thing, was a VP at Twitter who helped scale the company from 90 to 1500 people. He wrote a book, ”High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People”, to write about how to scale a company, mainly through the hiring of lots of
List of my Favorite Named Adages, Aphorisms, Dictums, Laws, Maxims, and Rules to Live By Some of these are classics. Some of these are insightful. Some of these don’t make sense. Some of these might be misattributed. Some of these I just made up. Enjoy! Acton’s Dictum - “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Allen’s Maxim - “You can
Notes on “High Output Management” by Andrew Grove Originally written on 2016 May High Output Management [https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fsmile.amazon.com%2FHigh-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove%2Fdp%2F0679762884&t=NDFiMzI5MWQzMDM0MzZiZTczNWNiNTk1ZmFlNTc4OWY1YzlmMzUxMSx6M2RuRmpFZQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AV4PauJm3isl5XsOhjkhguw&p=https%3A%2F%2Fpeterhurford.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F144004296021%2Fnotes-on-high-output-management&m=0&ts=1647111249] is
Notes and Reflections on “Deep Work” by Cal Newport Originally written on 2016 January In “Deep Work” [https://href.li/?http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/], Cal Newport spends the first third of the book arguing for the importance of “deep work” and the second 2/3s telling you how to achieve it. Deep Work Deep work is spending a
End-Relational Theory of Meta-ethics: A Dialogue Originally written on 2013 October What is this? This is an essay where I explain my opinions on meta-ethics through a guided discussion with a hypothetical inquisitor. It seemed like a much easier, more efficient, and more fluid format than writing a dozen tinier essays. The only downside is at
Is Mew a Ditto? Originally written on 2011 January. Pokémon has been a fixture of many childhoods, and of all the Pokémon, seem few to captivate as much as Mew [https://href.li/?http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew]. He was popularized in the very first Pokémon movie, which featured a showdown between Mew
Visualizing the Monty Hall Problem Originally written on 2009 April. This is a famous thing from the advanced annals of mathematics again. Luckily there is very little mathematical debate on this, but at a time — there used to be. However, this is a problem that many people (including me) have trouble visualizing, so they just
