Public Health & Medicine

Like the rest of New Things Under the Sun, this article will be updated as the state of the academic literature evolves; you can read the latest version here. You can listen to this post above, or via most podcast apps here. People rag on peer review a lot (including, occasionally, New Things Under the Sun). Yet it remains one of the most common ways to allocate scientific resources, whether those be R&D dollars or slots in journals. Is this all a mistake? Or does peer review help in its purported goal to identify the science most likely to have an impact and hence, perhaps most deserving of some of those limited scientific resources? A simple way to check is to compare peer review scores to other metrics of subsequent scientific impact; does peer review predict eventual impact? A number of studies find it does. Subscribe now Peer Review at the NIH Let’s start with peer review at the stage of reviewing research proposals. Li and Agha (2015) looks at more than 100,000 research projects funded by the NIH over 1980-2008, comparing the percentile rank of the application peer review scores to the outcomes of these research projects down the road. For each grant, they look for publications (and patents) that acknowledge the grant’s support. Besides counting the number of publications and patents each grant results in, they can also see how often the publications are cited. Note, they are only looking at projects that actually were funded by the NIH, so we don’t need to worry that their results are just picking up differences between funded and unfunded projects. The upshot is, better peer review scores are correlated with more impact, whether you want to measure that as the number of resulting journal articles, patents, or citations. For example, here’s a scatter plot of the raw data, comparing peer review percentile ranks (lower is better) to citations and publications. Lots of noise, but among funded projects, if people think your proposal is stronger, you’re more likely to get publications and citations. From Li and Agha (2015) Li and Agha also look at the correlation between peer review scores and impact measures after controlling for other potentially relevant factors, such as the year or field of the grant, or the PI’s publication history, institution, and career characteristics. The results are moderated a bit, but basically still stand - compare two grants in the same year, in the same study section, from PIs who look pretty similar on paper, and the grant with higher peer review scores will tend to produce more papers, patents, receive more citations, and produce more very highly cited papers. Among funded proposals, the predictive power of peer review seems to be highest at the top; the difference in citations, for example, between a top-scoring proposal and one at the 20th percentile tends to be much larger than the difference in citations between one at the 20th and 40th percentile.1 Moreover, even at the top, the correlation between peer review scores and outcomes isn’t great. If you compare proposals that score at the top to proposals at the 10th percentile (of grants that were ultimately still funded), the top proposal is twice as likely to result in a one-in-a-thousand top cited paper. I think that’s not actually that high - since a 10th percentile proposal isn’t that far off from the average, if peer review was really accurate, you might have expected the top proposal to be something like ten times as likely to produce a hit paper than as an average proposal. Park, Lee, and Kim (2015) exploits a peculiar moment in NIH history to provide further evidence that the NIH peer review processes, on average, pick projects with higher scientific impact. In 2009, the US government passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a stimulus bill meant to fight the economic headwinds of the 2008 financial crisis. The bill authorized $831bn in new spending, of which a tiny corner, $1.7bn, was used by the NIH to fund research projects that would not normally have been funded. This provides a rare opportunity to see how good projects that would otherwise have been rejected by the NIH (which relies heavily on peer review to select projects) fare when they unexpectedly receive funding. When Park, Lee, and Kim (2015) compare stimulus-funded proposals (which got lower peer review scores) to normally funded proposals, they find the stimulus-funded proposals tend to lead to fewer publications and that these publications tended to receive fewer citations. On average, a research proposal with peer review scores high enough to be funded under the NIH’s normal budget produces 13% more publications than a stimulus funded project. If we focus on a proposal’s most high-impact publication (in terms of citations), Park and coauthors find proposals funded only because of the stimulus got 7% fewer citations. Lastly, we can look at the 5% of publications funded by these NIH grants that received the highest amount of citations. A normally funded research proposal had a 7% chance of producing one of these “highest impact” papers; a stimulus-funded proposal had a 4% chance of producing one. I think these results are pretty consistent with Li and Agha (2015) in a few ways. They replicate the general finding that in the NIH, higher peer review scores are associated with more research impact (as measured with imperfect quantitative methods). But they also find peer review doesn’t have super forecasting acumen. Note that Park, Lee, and Kim are not comparing proposals that just barely clear the NIH’s normal funding threshold to proposals that just barely miss it - they don’t have the data needed for that. Instead, they are comparing the entire batch of proposals rated above the NIH’s normal funding threshold to a batch of proposals that fall uniformly below it. The batch of normally funded proposals includes the ones that were rated very highly by peer review, which Li and Agha’s work suggests is where peer review tends to work best. Even so, the differences Park, Lee, and Kim find aren’t enormous. Peer Review at Journals We have some similar results about the correlation between peer review scores and citations at the publication stage too. As discussed in more detail in Do academic citations measure the impact of new ideas? Card and DellaVigna (2020) have data on about 30,000 submissions to four top economics journals, including data on their peer review scores over (roughly) 2004-2013. Because, in economics, it is quite common for draft versions of papers to be posted in advance of publication, Card and Dellavigna can see what happens to papers that are accepted or rejected from these journals, including how many citations they go on to receive (both as drafts and published versions). As with Li and Agha (2015), they find there is indeed a positive correlation between the recommendation of reviewers and the probability a paper is among the top 2% most highly cited in the journal. From Card and Dellavigna (2020) Neither is this because high peer review scores lead to publication in top economics journals (though that’s also true). Card and Dellavigna also track the fate of rejected articles and find that even among rejects to these journals, those that get higher peer review scores still go on to receive more citations. Siler, Lee, and Bero (2014) obtain similar results using a smaller sample of submissions to the Annals of Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal, and The Lancet over 2003 and 2004. For a sample of 139 submissions that received at least two peer review scores, they can track down the eventual fate of the submission (either published in one of these three journals or another). Among the 89 peer-reviewed submissions that were ultimately rejected, the peer review scores (from the first, initial review) were positively correlated with the number of citations the submissions eventually received, though the correlation was pretty weak. For the 40 submissions that were reviewed and accepted, again positive (initial) peer review reports were positively correlated with the number of citations eventually received. In this latter case, the correlation was too weak to be confident it’s not just noise (possible because the sample was so small). Siler, Lee, and Bero also emphasize that the three journals actually rejected the 14 papers that would go on to receive the most citations (though they did manage to get the 15th!). From Siler, Lee, and Bero (2014) Perhaps more reassuring is the fact that generally speaking, papers that went on to be highly cited tended to be identified as publishable in other papers pretty quickly. The figure below compares the eventual number of citations received to the time elapsed between submission to one of the three journals under study and eventual publication somewhere else. No highly cited papers took longer than 500 days (not great, but better than 2000!) to find a home. That could be because peer review at one of the next journals the paper was submitted to was quick to recognize the quality of these articles, or possibly that they rapidly resubmitted after getting favorable feedback from initial peer reviewers. But this evidence is pretty indirect and other explanations are also possible (for example, maybe the authors believed in the paper’s merit and submitted them more frequently for review, or they were more frequently desk-rejected and so could be resubmitted fast). From Siler, Lee, and Bero (2014) That said, we also have one more study looking at peer review reports and eventual impact, this time in the American Sociological Review. Teplitskiy and Bakanic (2016) have data on 167 articles published in the American Sociological Review in the 1970s, as well as their peer review scores. Among this set of published article, they find no statistically significant relationship between peer review scores and the number of citations papers go on to earn. After a...

FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a journey to help us think better and work smarter.  Josh Nicholson is the co-founder of Scite, an award-winning platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles. Scite allows users to see how a publication has been cited by providing the context of the citation and a classification describing whether it provides supporting or contrasting evidence for the cited claim. In this interview, we talked about the nature of research, the research lifecycle, the problem of trustworthiness and reproducibility in science, how to navigate retractions, the importance of discoverability, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Josh, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Let’s start with a big question. What makes scientific research so challenging to work with in the first place? Thanks for letting me chime in! Scientific research is complex by nature. When I describe my work on aneuploidy and chromosome mis-segregation, almost immediately 99% of the population tunes out or can no longer understand me. The terms used in scientific research are often specialized and while necessary to communicate accurately, can leave a lot of people lost. With that said, scientific research is amazing and affects everyone in some way. There is research on how video games affect spatial reasoning, how Peppa Pig influences children learning English, and how SPG20 on chromosome 13 affects cytokinesis. Research touches all of our lives, mostly in a positive way. I got into cancer research to try to understand the etiology of cancer better so that we as a research community improve the outcomes of cancer patients. My work now focuses on making all of research more understandable, accessible, and trustworthy so that people, whether they are a researcher or not, use research to make better decisions in their life and work.  Peppa Pig and chromosomes — you got a point. It’s an age-old problem. So, why do you think now is the right time to tackle that challenge? With COVID-19 upending the world, we all fully understand how scientific research can impact our lives. Now with the rise of ChatGPT and other large language models, we all fully understand the need to be able to verify information online. Is that COVID-19 study trustworthy? Is that ChatGPT output factual? Scite addresses these problems head on through the development of Smart Citations — citations that make it easy to see how any research paper has been cited, how any topic has been cited, and basically how anything is cited!  While Scite was born out of the frustration of researchers trying to determine if a study was reproducible or not, the use cases have been more than we could have imagined. One of the more exciting applications of our Smart Citations is validating the output that ChatGPT and other AI based tools are generating. The timing of what we’re building couldn’t be better. People have been trying to build something like Scite since the 1960s, but failed because the technology just wasn’t there yet. And given the rise of ChatGPT as well as the general explosion in research volume in recent years, there’s a compelling need for more streamlined, efficient solutions to engage with the scholarly literature. Agreed, the time is now. Next, can you explain how Scite actually works? In one sense, you can think of Scite as like Rotten Tomatoes for research: take a paper, topic, author, etc. and easily read what research says about any of them. Could those findings be replicated by others? Did someone discuss this piece of research in the Introduction section to give background to their own work, did they mention it in the Methods section because they used similar methods, or did they cite it in the Results section to compare their findings? Without Scite, all this information is really hard to get because it requires you to read through hundreds, if not thousands of papers. With Scite, you can easily see at a glance what the research says about any topic. We accomplished this by partnering with most major academic publishers, who give us access to the full-text of research articles. Our system, which we’ve published the details of, is able to extract, link, and classify the citation statements–textual context that happens when citations are made in text– from articles and make that information available to our users. Of course, as we’ve developed the product, we’ve discovered other ways to leverage our unique data of Citation Statements to fulfill other needs — from our unique Citation Statement search experience to verifying claims made by ChatGPT. Scite also allows users to look up any research topic directly. Can you tell us more? One of the pivotal moments in our product journey was the realization that our database of Citation Statements could be searched directly. Typically, when we index those statements, we take the sentence where the reference was made and also include the sentences before and after. The resulting statement is long enough that it offers a good contextual overview. So, we designed a search experience around it. It started by letting anyone query keywords against our database of statements. As a personal example, I live in Brooklyn and often think about the rising rents in New York. Well, it turns out you can query “Rising rents in Williamsburg” in Scite and we have a few Citation Statements that cover that exact topic! One of our colleagues is a physician and travels for Doctors Without Borders. Part of his fieldwork involved the Rohingya people in Myanmar and he was curious what the rate of hypertension was in that demographic. It turns out Scite had answers. There are a few things worth pointing out here. First, we’re not restricted to life sciences but have good coverage across fields including the social sciences. While the statements and sections are useful when deciding what papers to read, we enable you to chain ideas at the level of claims instead of papers. Each citation statement from a paper makes one or more claims and has a number of other in-text references that we link by DOI. So when you’re reading a statement, you’ll see that the original authors cited e.g. 6 papers in-text which are likely related to the claims made in that statement. You can click on each of those in-text references to see more information about those papers and quickly trace ideas. Chaining ideas like this creates a natural filter for relevance in the papers you read because they’re about the specific claims you’re interested in. In addition to listening to users and developing a tool that helps meet their needs, we are also very focused on meeting our users where they are. We know how fragmented the ecosystem can be, so we have a free browser extension and Zotero plugin that researchers can add that shows our badge wherever they read and manage research. They can always click through to dig into it through Scite, but it’s often a nice integrity check that offers a little more information than a simple citation count. What about evaluating that research? It can be incredibly time consuming to compare and contrast the literature. Yeah, so properly evaluating research is time-consuming; you have to get the queries right to make sure you’re filtering for a relevant list of papers, then go through citation lists, abstracts, and even the full-texts (ideally) and track which ones are relevant and reliable for your review. Sometimes you have access to proxies of quality like citation counts, social media mentions, and so on, but they’re not always the best measure of the most fundamental thing we’re worried about when reading a set of papers: how reliable are these claims, and can I base my ideas on them? And thinking of all the tabs and notes involved is nightmarish! Scite is designed to streamline these tasks. I mentioned earlier that you could chain citations at the level of claims, and I think regardless of whether you start on our search or on a report page, this is a really special way of finding papers that are worth evaluating. Even better is the fact that this workflow places more of an emphasis on the actual claims rather than things like citation counts, which improves the discoverability of lesser known authors or publications,gives you confidence that you’re actually being thorough, and offers a voice to more underrepresented groups in the field. It doesn’t stop there, though. Often we do a literature review project and have to come back to update that information. Maybe in a few months or years. In that time, more research has undoubtedly been published and we’ve been juggling a bunch of other projects. Scite can reduce the cost of this context-switching through features like Custom Dashboards and Alerts. A very typical use case is for researchers to sync their Zotero library into Scite — essentially the list of relevant DOIs, and set an alert to be notified when new citation statements are published about any of them. This makes new qualitative information — the statements — come directly into your inbox, so you can search for them or be notified when something relevant is published. This is pretty commonly used for pharmacovigilance monitoring in pharmaceutical companies, or even individuals looking to be notified about new therapies or advances in a field that’s personal to them (think diabetes management). A big challenge in research is how difficult it is to track retracted papers. How does Scite address this challenge? Scite’s mission is to improve how researchers evaluate the reliability of research — whether it’s a reference in their manuscript or a paper or topic they come across. Besides reading any contrasting statements we’ve indexed about a paper, another quick check is to ensure it hasn’t received any retractions or other concerning editorial notices. We have our own system for detecting these notices and s...

Most people want to be happy. In other words, the majority of human beings are engaged — consciously or unconsciously — in actions designed to improve their levels of happiness. Despite our best efforts, these actions can sometimes have the opposite effect. For example, chasing a promotion at work only to realize we have become burned out in the process. Other times, our actions can make us happy in the short term but unhappy in the long term. For example, earning a large sum of money only to realize later we have over-indexed on financial success at the expanse of our relationships. These complexities are partly why there are many definitions of happiness, and the concept has changed so much over the centuries. Happiness can in fact be described as very different things depending on the time scale you consider: Short-term: your current feelings and emotions, such as pleasure, joy, or sadness. This is what you experience here and now. Medium-term: your subjective life satisfaction. In a study about how happiness differs across cultures, it was described as the “overall appreciation of one’s life as-a-whole.” Long-term: your conscious approach to thriving as a human being. Aristotle called it a life of “virtuous activity in accordance with reason.” The first two are probably very familiar to you, so it’s the third vision of happiness — the long-term one — that we will explore in this article. Aristotle coined it eudaimonia in Greek, which is sometimes translated as “human flourishing”. Aristotle’s philosophy was that, because reason (logos in Greek) is unique to human beings, the ideal goal of human life is the fullest exercise of one’s reason. According to Aristotle, it’s not enough to be skilled or talented in order to live a good life. To achieve happiness, we must be engaged in activities that are intellectually stimulating and that drive us to excellence. But Aristotle did not dismiss other important dimensions in one’s life, such as friends, wealth, and power. In fact, he doubted that we could achieve eudaimonia if we were completely missing one of these crucial aspects. For example, he found it hard to imagine a happy life if you were missing “good birth, good children, and beauty.” In more modern terms, it’s hard to conceive being happy if you’re without money and without friends. And this is exactly one of the most known theories of happiness in psychology, the pyramid of Maslow, is all about. It’s an elegant theory, but Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has been heavily contested. While research does seem to validate the existence of universal human needs, their ranking seems to wildly vary from one culture to another, and even from one individual to another. So what are some alternative theories of happiness that better capture the diversity and complexity of the human psyche? Theories of happiness in psychology Measuring happiness is hard. First, is happiness objective or subjective? Is it about how you feel right now, or in general? Is it rational, or emotional? Psychologists are still debating these questions. To highlight how important this field of research is, there is even a dedicated Journal of Happiness Studies. But there are three main theories towards which many researchers are gravitating: Freedom of Choice Theory: according to research by Ronald Inglehart, a professor and scientist, the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on people’s happiness. When their basic needs are met, their degree of happiness depends on how much free choice people have in how they live their lives. Self-Determination Theory: evidence suggests that the ability to make choices without external influence and interference is also an important factor to live a happy life. Intrinsic motivation and the willingness to grow — basically being self-motivated — can determine how happy you are. Positive Psychology Theory: finally, positive psychology considers that instead of trying to fix things when they get broken, we should spend more time improving our mental wellbeing in a more positive and proactive way. This theory is backed by solid research showing the beneficial impact of self-help interventions. I’ll talk a bit more about it later in this article. While these theories offer solid guiding principles, it’s also worth noting that seeking happiness at all cost can also have adverse effects. For example, scientists found that failure to meet overly high expectations can leave you depressed. And research shows that happiness is way less valued in Eastern cultures than Western ones. For example, harmony is ranked higher in many non-Western cultures when it comes to the most important goals to pursue in life. It makes it worth asking ourselves: shouldn’t we accept and fully experience all of the range of our emotions, both positive and negative? Could we seek happiness in a more balanced way? A balanced approach to happiness Sometimes, life objectively sucks. And sometimes, things are fine, but for some reason we still don’t feel quite happy. This is why there’s more to happiness than comfort and managing our levels of happiness is an art in itself. I’m saying “art” and not “science”, because neuroscience has not made a lot of progress so far when it comes to understanding the biology of happiness. This great paper was published a few years ago and gives an overview of the current state of affairs when it comes to the neuroscience of happiness. In short, we have made lots of discoveries around the hedonic aspects of happiness—what brings us pleasure. We know what parts of the brain get activated when we feel pleasure, but the research trying to understand what happens in our brain when we’re happy and why is still highly speculative. So, for now, it’s psychologists that are leading the dance. Dr Carol Diane Ryff, an American academic and psychologist, has been studying psychological well-being and psychological resilience for decades. Based on her research, she created the Six-factor Model of Psychological Well-being, a theory that outlines the key factors to our happiness. Self-acceptance: this is about acknowledging and accepting all aspects of yourself, the good and the bad. It’s being aware of your strengths and weaknesses, and trying to be realistic in the way you assess your own skills and talents. It’s the daily work of loving yourself despite your mistakes and imperfections. Autonomy: being independent in the way you think, and having confidence in your opinions despite social pressures. It indicates that you are able to make your own choices. Environmental mastery: this means you are feeling in charge. You are able to use opportunities as they arise to address your personal needs. You can manage external factors and activities in your day-to-day life. It comes with a feeling of being in control of the situation in which you live. Personal growth: this is the conscious effort to continue to improve yourself through new experiences and constantly trying to become a better version of yourself. Positive relations with others: Friends, family, colleagues—in order to be happy, it’s important to have meaningful relationships with others that include reciprocal empathy, affection, and various levels of intimacy. Purpose in life: finally, and this one is a grander factor, finding meaning is about pursuing goals you deeply care about, and creating significance and value in your life. For some people, this is achieved through religion, but you can find your purpose in life through meaningful work, philosophy, or even human connections. This model was developed into a psychological well-being questionnaire used to measure how happy people are by asking them to rate statements on a scale from 1 to 6. For example, “I think it is important to have new experiences that challenge how you think about yourself and the world” for personal growth, or “I like most aspects of my personality” for self-acceptance. If you would like to take the test, I have uploaded a PDF of the questions and scoring instructions here. This is all well and good if all you want to measure your happiness, but what about improving it — being happier? Can it been learned? Teaching and learning happiness Twenty years ago, Dr Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, decided to try to answer this question: can happiness be taught? In an essay which I strongly recommend reading, he explains how the field of psychology mostly focuses on treating conditions such as depression. How would one go about helping people nurture their positive emotions instead? He started running a seminar, where he would review the scientific research in positive psychology, and also give students a bit of homework that was quite different from what they were used to. “When one teaches a traditional seminar on helplessness or depression there is no experiential homework to assign; students can’t very well be told to be depressed or alcoholic for a week. But in Positive Psychology, students can be assigned to make a gratitude visit, or to transform a boring task by using a signature strength, or to give the gift of time to someone they care for.” Dr Martin Seligman, Psychologist & Author. His conclusion was that, while happiness itself cannot be taught, we can master the skills that make us happier. In his seminar, he teaches the skill of disputing unrealistic catastrophic thoughts, the skill of savoring and taking mental photographs, the skill of contemplation, the skill of getting in the flow, or the skill of figuring out your key strengths. “Gratitude is a skill, too little practiced, that amplifies satisfaction about the past,” he says. He gives students exercises to teach them how to connect to things larger than their own successes and failures. The students learn to mentor younger students. They read Man’s Search for Meaning. He also notes that school curriculums are not currently designed ...

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Chad Thiele is the founder of Chibi AI, a creative and versatile AI writing tool for bloggers, marketers, and storytellers. Chibi AI seamlessly weaves in prompts and automatically analyzes your text to offer suggestions to improve, including fact checking, so you can focus on crafting great content. In this interview, we talked about the role of AI as a creative copilot, how prompts can help elevate content, using AI to overcome writer’s block, transforming the task of editing into a breeze, the future of AI writing assistance, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Chad, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. There’s lots of conversations going about how AI will replace writers. What do you think? Can I say first, thank you so much for this opportunity. I’m a big fan of Ness Labs and the work you do. That’s an important question, and I understand the concerns surrounding AI’s impact on the writing profession. However, I firmly believe that AI will not replace writers but augment their abilities and enhance their creative process. AI is not here to replace writers, but to be their copilot towards greater heights of creativity.I envision a future where AI works in tandem with writers, acting as a copilot in their creative journey. Rather than taking over the writing process, AI is a valuable tool that supports and empowers writers, helping them overcome common challenges, such as writer’s block or time-consuming editing tasks. I understand the concern though. It’s a valid worry, especially with companies out there willing to create AI tools promising to deliver entire works “in a click.” This will lead to an overcompensation in the market where low-cost content will be relegated to AI (or to a VA using AI to generate lots of mediocre content). But as this sort of content starts to fail, the need for great writers will surface. However, it’ll be a symbiotic relationship where writers bring their unique voice, perspective, and creativity to the work (some might say nuance), while AI tools like Chibi provide valuable support, guidance, and inspiration to empower the writer. With AI’s help, writers can quickly generate a first draft. You could think of this quick draft like a sculptor’s block of clay, waiting to be shaped and molded by the writer’s chisel. But just as a sculptor’s true artistry comes from the intricate details and unique flourishes they add to their work, so too does a writer’s imagination and creativity. It is the writer who brings the work to life with their unique voice and perspective. Together, they create something truly remarkable. So you’ve designed Chibi to be that perfect creative copilot. Indeed, I’ve designed Chibi to be the perfect creative copilot for writers. I aimed to create an AI-powered writing app that actually complements the writer. Writer’s block is obviously a thing of the past. Chibi has decimated that (as most decent AI writers have). But there’s a lot more to the writing process. Ideation, brainstorming, editing, reviewing, summarizing… all things Chibi helps with. I’m sure most are familiar with ChatGPT by now. The difficulty of writing with ChatGPT is that it is a dialogue; a chat bot. You get the content then you must copy it out piece by piece. And it can be a challenge to get the best results from a chat dialogue. Everyone is talking about finding the best prompts to use in ChatGPT. Prompting is exceptional in Chibi. Writer’s can use prompts anywhere within their document. Need to insert content after a certain paragraph? Easy. Not quite happy with how a particular sentence is worded? Rework it inline. Chibi is designed with the classic writer’s experience in mind, offering a suite of tools and features that support  various aspects of the writing process—all in a familiar document format. It can adapt to the writer’s style and preferences, ensuring the generated suggestions and assistance align with their creative vision. Ultimately, my goal with Chibi is to help writers create content they can be proud to publish and share with their readers. At the end of the day it is the writer who knows their audience. Chibi is just there to help the writer make their impact. That does sound like the perfect copilot for writers. Specifically, how does Chibi work? I couldn’t continue with features without first stating the intuitive, clean interface is a key feature itself. The focus on simplicity and ease of use, allowing writers to concentrate on their writing without being distracted by the tool… it cannot be understated how powerful that is. The real star is the ChibiNLP engine. We combine large language models like GPT-4, AI21’s Jurassic 2, and others with our custom-built natural language processing engine. This fusion overcomes the limitations of individual models and provides writers with an enhanced copilot for their creative process. And this all works in the background while the writer writes. Then our unique memory feature is a special area for writers to enter information they want Chibi to remember. This helps keep Chibi’s output consistent and relevant to the story, making writing easier and faster. Smart menus offer just the right tools at the right time. No need to overwhelm writers with a ton of options if they’re not necessary. For example, when you select a passage of text you’ll see a menu where you can review or summarize it. Or you can choose the powerful rework tool. This tool is literally magic. You can tell Chibi to do whatever you want to the selected passage. Such as ‘rewrite in the first person’, ‘exchange ramen for sushi’, ‘introduce a huge but lovable grizzly bear to the story’. Check this out. Here’s a passage from one of my articles about sushi in Tokyo: “Sushi Iwa, located in the heart of Ginza, is a must-visit for any budget-conscious traveler looking for an authentic sushi experience. This hidden gem is known for its traditional Edomae-style sushi, made with fresh fish caught in Tokyo Bay. The chef, Hisayoshi Iwa, has over 20 years of experience and takes great pride in his craft. The menu changes daily based on what is available at the market, ensuring that each visit is a unique experience. Despite its high quality, Sushi Iwa offers affordable prices.” After I select it, choose rework, and tell Chibi: “Do something completely random. Be creative” this is what he changed it to: “Sushi Iwa, located on the moon, is a must-visit for any space-conscious traveler looking for an authentic sushi experience. This hidden crater is known for its traditional Lunar-style sushi, made with fresh fish caught in the Sea of Tranquility. The chef, Hisayoshi Iwa, has over 20 years of experience and takes great pride in his craft. The menu changes daily based on what is available from the intergalactic market, ensuring that each visit is a unique experience. Despite its high quality and astronomical location, Sushi Iwa offers affordable prices that are out of this world.” The editing possibilities are endless; limited only by the writer’s imagination. And you can do this completely in the flow of working on your document—no chat dialogue format to deal with. Honestly, there’s so much Chibi has to offer I really can’t go into it all in detail. Here are a few… Custom templates allow you to train Chibi to write precisely the content you need. Variables save time when you find yourself writing the same things over and over. Leads can speed up your writing. Kickstarters help you get your content started quickly. Summarize can summarize tens of thousands of words in one shot. Chibi also offers completely customizable canvas you can set up how you prefer to write, and more. What makes Chibi different from other writing tools? Ah, with so many AI apps popping up all over, this is an excellent question. Chibi AI stands out from the crowd in several ways—as you saw in the previous section. But I absolutely must start with the Community! Without a doubt it’s the Chibi community that sets Chibi AI apart. Is it weird that I immediately refer to the community rather than some tech within Chibi AI? Our community is a dedicated space full of like-minded writers—away from social media like FB groups; away from “prying eyes.” We run monthly challenges, share helpful guides, support our users, and just have a blast. We like to think of it as our little neighborhood where we all help each other succeed. Okay, back to technical ways Chibi is different. Our custom NLP engine and its ability to enhance large language models gives Chibi the ability to “see” your entire document, whereas other AI writing tools have what is often called a “look back” limit.  Another major feature that sets us apart are our artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) models. These are models custom built/trained purely to do one thing exceptionally well. These are different from the fine-tuning you might have heard of. Our ANI models are not just fine-tuned large language models like those from OpenAI. The huge benefit of doing this is we get to set our own quality and performance standards to meet. The result for writers is seamless. We sprinkle our ANI models all through the writing experience in the background to enhance the writing experience in many subtle ways. The big players are entering the market. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Canva, and others. We set ourselves apart by focusing on our writers. These companies have such a large and diverse user base they’ll remain rather generic. Whereas we’re able to continually fine-tune the writing experience specifically for our community of users and offer the absolute best results for them. I guess when you combine the Chibi community with the ChibiNLP engine, ANI models—all wrapped up in a beautiful writing experience… That’s what truly sets Chi...

Since we are born, a set of defaults influences our goals, our relationships, our tastes. From fashion to friendship, many of the choices we make in life are imperceptibly constrained by default definitions. For example, the default definition of education is formal schooling. The default definition of love is monogamy. The default definition of success is wealth and power. The default definition of aging is decline. Those default definitions are the invisible puppeteers quietly manipulating our actions and directing our lives. Fortunately, even though those are the most commonly accepted definitions, we don’t have to stick to them. We can create our own definitions. Questioning our default definitions To prosper in the vast liminal space that is life is to create our own definitions of what is good, not based on top-down rules dictated by society, not based on biased moral imperatives, not based on the rigid path to success we have been told to follow, not based on the expectations of our peers — but based on our intimate experience of the world. To do so, we need to turn our default definitions into deliberate questions. Instead of simply accepting the defaults that govern our lives, we can ask ourselves what we truly want and what we truly believe so we can discover our authentic ambitions. We need to turn our default definitions into deliberate questions. Here are some examples: Default Definitions Deliberate Questions • Education is formal schooling. • Success is wealth and power. • Love is monogamy. → What do I want to learn? What do I want to teach my children? → What brings me joy in life? → What values are important to me in a romantic relationship? To do this exercise, grab a piece of paper or open your note-taking app, and go through the following steps: Audit your default definitions. What are the default definitions in my life? What are ideas that I treat as facts, without ever questioning them?  Turn them into deliberate questions. Take each default definition, and rephrase it into a question. The focus of these questions should be what is truly meaningful to you. Answer each question. Write down your truthful answers. Be honest when you don’t know the answer: it’s okay to admit that you haven’t all figured it out yet. Of course, it may be that the answers to these deliberate questions resemble the ones found in default definition. For example, faithfulness may be an important value to you in romantic relationships, or you may believe that formal schooling is the best way to study what you want to learn. I personally went back to university to study how the brain works because I believed that working alongside neuroscientists would help me learn better and faster. The aim of deliberate questions is not to turn your life upside down. It’s to have a more mindful approach to your goals in life. A bottom-up approach to life Default definitions are not inherently bad — you just want to get rid of their “default” aspect and make your answers deliberate instead. It may be that you decide to pursue what is considered a conventional career path because stability is important to you — maybe you have other projects with higher levels of uncertainty, or maybe you need to take care of a loved one. It may be that you do want to buy a house, not because it is a commonly accepted marker of success, but because you are genuinely excited to build a home for yourself and your family. It may be that building wealth is indeed a fundamental factor in your definition of success. Think about the founder of Patagonia, who gave the business away to an environmental trust and non-profit. Patagonia continues to produce outdoor clothing and camping supplies, but now all profits will go to organizations to fight the climate crisis. This would have not been possible if the business wasn’t successful in the first place. Equally, you may discover that you don’t want to stay in the same city where you grew up, and that you would like to explore the world for a while. You may realize that the career you have been pursuing is not the one that truly excites you. Asking these deliberate questions may open the door to new ideas and directions for your life. Whatever the answers you find, what matters is that these are now bottom-up definitions you have deliberately crafted for yourself. As Terry Pratchett said: “World building from the bottom up, to use a happy phrase, is more fruitful than world building from top-down.” Because the world is changing and so are we, we can play with the rules and decide what really matters to us. The post From Default Definitions to Deliberate Questions appeared first on Ness Labs.

Like the rest of New Things Under the Sun, this article will be updated as the state of the academic literature evolves; you can read the latest version here. You can listen to this post above, or via most podcast apps here. Recommendation: My Open Philanthropy colleague, Ajeya Cotra has teamed up with Kelsey Piper at Vox to launch a newsletter about “a possible future in which AI is functionally making all the most important decisions in our economy and society.” I would have put the newsletter on my substack recommendations, but it’s not on substack, so I’m plugging it here. If you are thinking about AI these days - and who isn’t? - check it out! A frequent worry is that our scientific institutions are risk-averse and shy away from funding transformative research projects that are high risk, in favor of relatively safe and incremental science. Why might that be? Let’s start with the assumption that high-risk, high-reward research proposals are polarizing: some people love them, some hate them. It’s not actually clear this is true,1 but it seems plausible and for the purposes of this post I’m just going to take it as given. If this is true, and if our scientific institutions pay closer attention to bad reviews than good reviews, then that could be a driver of risk aversion. Let’s look at three channels through which negative assessments may have outsized weight in decision-making, and how this might bias science away from transformative research. Subscribe now Reviewer Preferences Let’s start with individual reviewers: how does the typical scientist feel about riskier research? As far as I know, we don’t have good data that’s directly on how academic peer reviewers feel about high-risk / high-reward research proposals. There is some work on how academic scientists treat novelty at the publication stage, but there might be some big differences between how risky research is judged at the proposal versus the publication stage (an argument developed in more detail in Gross and Bergstrom 2021). For one, after the research is done, you can often see if the risk paid off! In this post I’m going to focus on work looking at research proposals and to learn about the preferences of peer reviewers, I’m going to look at Krieger and Nanda (2022), which provides some granular information about how working scientists in industry think about which kinds of pharmaceutical research projects to fund. Krieger and Nanda study an internal startup program at the giant pharmaceutical company, Novartis. The program was meant to identify and rapidly fund “transformative, breakthrough innovation” developed by teams of scientists working within Novartis. Over 150 Novartis teams submitted applications for the funding, and these were screened down to a shortlist of 12 who pitched their proposal to a selection committee. These pitches were made over video chat, due to covid-19, which meant they could be viewed by lots of people at once. About 60 additional Novartis research scientists watched some or all of the pitches and Krieger and Nanda got them to score each research proposal on a variety of criteria, and then to allocate hypothetical money to the different proposals. What’s particularly interesting for us is that we can see how scientists rated different aspects of a proposal, and how that relates to their ultimate decision about what to (hypothetically) fund. Participants in the study rated each proposal on: Transformative potential (more creative, non-standard is better) Breadth of applicability (more and higher value propositions) Timescale to first prototype (within 18 months is better) Feasibility/path to execution (more feasible is better) Team (does the team have the skill and network to achieve the goal) These different scores were aggregated into a weighted average that put extra weight on feasibility and the team, but put the most weight on a proposal’s transformative potential. (After all, that’s what the program was set up to fund.) Next, the study participants are asked how much money from a hypothetical budget to allocate to different projects. Note, when they’re doing this allocation, they can clearly see the weighted average of the scores they gave on each criteria, so it is obvious which proposals are supposed to get funding, if you strictly follow the scoring formula that Novartis devised. No surprise, Krieger and Nanda find that proposals with a higher score tend to get more hypothetical funding. But they also find, all else equal, reviewers penalize projects that have greater variation among the different criteria. That is, when comparing two projects with the same weighted average, study participants give more money to a project if it most of its criteria are close to the overall weighted average and less money if some criteria are well above the average and some well below. That implies negative attributes of a project “count” for more in the minds of reviewers. Even if bad scores on some criteria are counterbalanced by higher scores on others, these kinds of projects still get less (hypothetical) funding than less uneven proposals. But we can be even more precise. This bias against proposals with low scores on some dimensions and high scores on others is mostly driven by a particular type of divergence: proposals rated as having a high transformative potential but low feasibility tend to be the most penalized. That’s consistent with peer reviewers themselves being a source of bias against novel projects. They can recognize a project is high-risk and high-reward, but when asked which projects to give research funding too, they shy away from them in favor of lower-risk but lower-reward projects. Note though, that this data is from industry scientists, and maybe they are different in their risk preferences than their academic peers. S0 interpret with caution. Let’s next turn to some studies specifically about academia. Random Averages The previous section was about possible biases among individual reviewers. But most of the time, research proposals are evaluated by multiple reviewers, and then the scores across reviewers are averaged. And that system can introduce different problems. One way that averaging across reviewers leads to sensitivity to negative reviews is the fact that money for science tends to be tight, which means only research proposals that receive high average scores tend to be funded. If a single negative review can pull your score below this funding threshold, then negative reviews may exert excessive influence. For example, proposals submitted to the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) are typically scored by 3-4 reviewers on a 6-point scale, and usually only proposals that receive average scores above 4.5 make it to the stage where a panel deliberates on which proposals to fund. Jerrim and de Vries (2020) look at over 4,000 ESRC research proposals made over 2013-2019 and find 81% of proposals with an average score of 5.75-6 from the peer reviewers get funded, but only 24% of proposals with an average score of 4.5-5. That is to say, if you have three reviewers who love a proposal and rate it a maximum 6/6, it’ll be funded 81% of the time, but if you add one more reviewer who hates it and gives it a 1/6, then the average of 4.75 implies it only has a 24% chance of being funded. Of course, maybe that’s a feature, not a bug, if negative reviews actually do spot serious weaknesses. But before getting into that, we might first ask if this scenario is actually plausible in the first place: could it really be the case that three people rate a project 6/6 and another rates it 1/6? If three people think a project is outstanding, isn't it pretty unlikely that a fourth person would think it’s actually poor? This gets into the question of how consistent are peer review scores with each other, which is itself a large literature. But at least for their sample of ESRC proposals, Jerrim and de Vries find inter-reviewer correlations are very weak. Any particular reviewer’s score is only a tiny bit predictive of their peers score. That means a score of 1/6 is less likely when three other reviewers rate it 6/6 - but not that much less likely than random (though on average only 4% of reviewers give proposals a score of 1/6). So it is true that one really bad review can substantially reduce the probability of getting funded. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the system isn’t working exactly as it should; perhaps the bad review noticed serious flaws in the proposal that the other reviewers missed? Even so, there are two reasons that this seemingly innocuous procedure (get expert feedback and average it) can lead to excessive risk aversion for a funder. First, scores are asymmetrically distributed. In Jerrim and de Vries’ data, the average score is 4.4, and more than half of reviews are a 5 or 6. If you believe a proposal is really bad it’s feasible to strongly signal your dislike by giving it a score of 1, which is 3.4 below the average. But if you really love a proposal, it’s hard to signal that with your scoring: the best you can do is give it a 6, which is just 1.6 above the average. When you average out people who really love and really hate a project, the haters have more leverage over the final score.2 Second, low levels of inter-reviewer correlation imply there’s a lot of randomness in the reviewing process. That could be bad for transformative research proposals, if they are weirder and end up getting more reviews. For example, a proposal that combines ideas from disparate sources might need more reviewers to adequately vet the proposal, since it would need to pull in multiple reviewers to vet each of the idea’s sources. That could be a problem because, in general, there will be more variation in the average scores of proposals that receive fewer reviewers. For example, in Jerrim and de Vries’ data, on average about 25% of reviewers rate proposals as 6/6. If you h...

Welcome to this edition of our interview stories, where we talk to founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Kim Dan-Yutin is the founder of BOOX, a suite of products designed to simplify e-reading and facilitate digital workflows through user-friendly e-readers. In this interview, we talked about integrating your note-taking workflow with your tablet, the importance of using eye-friendly devices, how to boost productivity by using split-screen displays, how tech companies can collaborate together to meet the needs of specific user groups, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Kim, thanks for agreeing to this interview! E-readers are notoriously hard to get right. What inspired you to create BOOX? Our story began in 2008, at a time when smartphones and tablets had hardly emerged, and people had to gain knowledge with few resources and limited digital tools. It’s in that context that BOOX was founded by a group of ambitious young geeks, driven by a deep desire to simplify and digitize the reading process. We started with a question: “How can we help people study and work productively without experiencing eye strain?” Our goal was to invent reading tools that could alleviate these challenges. After much hard work, we achieved our first major milestone: the creation of our first e-reader. This accomplishment remains one of our proudest moments to this day. Building helpful hardware is known to be a difficult challenge, so you should definitely be proud! What are the advantages of using BOOX for consuming content? E-readers have become popular due to their eye-friendly screens and paper-like feel, making them ideal for reading and note-taking. With BOOX, you can enjoy the benefits of an electronic paper display to read or write while using your favorite apps without straining your eyes. This means you can implement similar workflows as you would with other tablets — like highlights and annotations — but with the added advantage of a more comfortable viewing experience. Additionally, most BOOX E Ink tablets come with dual tone front lights, making them easier to use in low light conditions without causing eye fatigue, which is a common issue with backlit OLED/LCD displays. In addition to native highlights and annotations, many people rely on note-taking apps to capture and process information. How does BOOX integrate with their existing note-taking workflows? BOOX strives to provide our users with a variety of note-taking capabilities. With the built-in NeoReader, you can scribble directly on ebooks without any extra effort, and highlight, underline, or annotate the sentences that interest you. Our Notes app is an independent notepad with versatile tools to let you freely jot down your ideas. If you’re accustomed to popular note-taking platforms like Evernote and OneNote, we’ve implemented handwriting optimization to ensure a lag-free experience. We also have people using other apps like Obsidian. Another innovation we have made is the split-screen function, allowing you to read and take notes simultaneously with two separate windows side by side, providing a seamless and efficient note-taking experience. Just to dig a little bit deeper… Many e-readers only work well with specific proprietary formats. Can you tell us what kind of documents people can read with BOOX? BOOX devices has a native support of 24 document formats, which include nearly all popular ebooks (PDF, DJVU, CBR, CBZ, EPUB, MOBI, TXT, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX…), images (PNG, JPG, BMP, TIFF), and audios (WAV, MP3). Of course, you are always welcome to download any third-party apps to gain compatibility of more documents. What’s more, we have several preset navigation modes to optimize large-format PDF files so that users can conveniently view them in small-screen devices. That sounds great. What kind of people use BOOX devices? BOOX devices are the perfect companions for productivity enthusiasts, as we’ve heard from users worldwide. From university students and professors to musicians and researchers, our devices have helped many different people achieve their goals. One such story that particularly impressed me was that of Javier Del Águila, a Spanish epidemiologist working with the World Health Organization. He shared his workflow with the BOOX Note Air2 Plus and his achievement in studying the Omicron variant of COVID-19. We’re proud to have played a role in his research on the pandemic and improved his work process. It’s stories like these that motivate us to continue creating innovative and effective devices. This is an incredible story. Another exciting one is your collaboration with Connected Papers. Can you tell us more? The collaboration between BOOX and Connected Papers is a great example of how technology companies can work together to enhance the user experience and meet the needs of specific user groups. We have 10.3″ A5 and 13.3″ A4 sized models which are excellent for reading papers in PDF and other formats. With BOOX’s optimized reading and note-taking capabilities and Connected Papers’ advanced visual tool, we aim to simplify and streamline the workflow for academic users. We are proud of this partnership and look forward to exploring further opportunities to support the community. What about you, how do you use BOOX? In my daily routine, I rely on three BOOX devices: the Leaf2, Note Air2 Plus, and Tab X. For my daily commute, I carry the Leaf2 with me to browse the news feed as it fits perfectly in my handbag. Its page-turn buttons are exceptionally useful and save me the effort of tapping or swiping on the screen. During the day, I attend daily briefings with the product engineers in the morning and the marketing team in the afternoon, where I use my Note Air2 Plus to take notes. I love the writing feel of this device. On my office desk, I use the Tab X to read and reply to business emails and organize my work. It has a 13.3″ A4 size, similar to other tablets or laptops. At the end of the day, I spend my time with the Leaf2, reading my favorite books before bedtime. It’s a treasured moment when I can relax and enjoy some solitude. You use three different BOOX devices. If people had to choose only one to get started, how can they decide which BOOX device is right for them? BOOX offers a comprehensive product line to cater to all types of users. For those new to eReading, I recommend the Leaf2, a compact and lightweight e-reader that comes with built-in page-turn buttons and the option of black or white colors. If you are a sophisticated E Ink tablet user, the Note Air2 Plus is an excellent choice. It offers a close-to-paper writing experience and a 10.3″ A5 size, making it easy to carry around. For professionals, we have introduced the brand-new Tab Series, which is a premium selection and a game changer in the industry. It features the BOOX Super Refresh Technology, achieving ultra-smooth refresh rates. We have currently released two models, the 10.3″ Tab Ultra and the 13.3″ Tab X, with more to come in the future. Please stay tuned for updates! Once they have chosen a BOOX device, how do you recommend someone get started? When you receive your BOOX device, the first step is to get familiar with its user interface and explore its functionalities. It is packed with many possibilities to improve your workflow. To help you get started, we have an introductory video available on our YouTube channel that explains how to set up your new BOOX. We encourage you to check it out and take advantage of all the features and tools that BOOX has offered. And finally… What’s next for BOOX? Our top priorities now are to keep innovating and promote BOOX as an eye-friendly device to boost your productivity. To achieve this, we plan to release new devices tailored to different purposes and scenarios this year, while refining the user experience with a couple of firmware updates. We are also excited about the advancements in E Ink screen technology and are exploring how we can incorporate them into our new products. Thank you so much for your time, Kim! Where can people learn more about BOOX? Thank you for the interview. The pleasure is all mine. If you would like to know more about our brand and products, please feel free to visit our official BOOX Shop. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit to catch up with all our updates and join our community. The post Perfect your workflow with Kim Dan-Yuting, founder of BOOX appeared first on Ness Labs.

Being alone can sometimes feel pleasurable. A good book, some quiet time to ourselves, just us and our thoughts, away from the hustle and bustle of daily work and social obligations. But, other times, it can feel isolating. We are not simply alone, we are lonely. Why is it that being alone can lead to such dramatically different experiences? The difference between loneliness and solitude While loneliness and solitude share their basis into the same fundamental experience, the way we interact with this experience gives rise to two different mental states. Loneliness is a common but uncomfortable human emotion. Loneliness is the subjective experience in which a person is alone and which produces a feeling of desolation. When fleeting, it’s perfectly fine to feel lonely. It can be a way to process some feelings, which can be difficult but necessary. However, when loneliness becomes a constant feeling, it can actually be harmful to your health. A review of the research literature suggest that loneliness increases mortality risk by 26%. And the experience really hurts. We are social animals and we need to feel that we belong. Researchers have found that pain from loneliness and social rejection activate the same parts of the brain as physical pain. “Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves,” wondered Haruki Murakami in one of this novels. Isolation is the key word here: loneliness is a sense of isolation that can persist even when other people are present. That’s why knowing more people will not alleviate feelings of loneliness. It has become a common trope — but a true one — to say that we’re more connected but also more lonely than ever. The rates of loneliness have doubled in the United States in the last fifty years only. Scientists speak of a loneliness epidemic. In contrast, solitude is just the state of being alone. The concept of solitude doesn’t have any negative feelings attached to it. Which is why it can actually be enjoyable, or just neutral. There is a wonderful poem by Robert Duncan called “Childhood’s Retreat” which perfectly captures the beauty of solitude: It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree out of blue sky the wind sings loudest surrounding me. And solitude, a wild solitude is revealed, fearfully, high I’d climb into the shaking uncertainties, part out of longing, part daring myself, part to see that widening of the world, part to find my own, my secret hiding sense and place, where from afar all voices and scenes come back —the barking of a dog, autumnal burnings, far calls, close calls—the boy I was calls out to me here the man where I am “Look! I’ve been where you most fear to be.” How we perceive being alone makes all the difference in whether we will experience it as loneliness or solitude. When we focus on the feeling of isolation from others and world, being alone can produce a spiral of negative thoughts. When appreciated as a generative moment of self-discovery and reconnection with oneself, being alone can yield powerful insights and support your mental health. The science-based benefits of solitude It’s hard to consider inserting a little solitude in our busy schedule, but spending time alone is far from being a waste of time. In fact, the busier you are, the more likely you are to benefit from some quiet time. And research shows that solitude has lots of benefits, which include: More meaningful relationships. It may sound paradoxical, but research suggests that being able to feel comfortable on our own helps us become more comfortable when around others. Better resilience. Studies show that your ability to tolerate alone time is linked to increased happiness, better stress management, and improved life satisfaction. Basically, spending time alone makes you happier and less anxious. Increased creativity. Being in a private, secluded space, allows you to be more creative. That’s why artists, authors, and musicians seek solitude when they want to generate ideas and focus on their creative work. Self-discovery. By spending time alone and taking a moment for self-reflection—to think about our goals, our concerns, and our self—we are able to define and confirm our identities with less influence from other people, researchers found. Increased productivity. This may be the most counter-intuitive benefit of them all, but spending time alone makes you more productive. Many people work better when on their own compared to when working in a busy and noisy office. In the end, it all boils down to being intentional in the way we approach solitude. Loneliness is time alone that we didn’t choose, and therefore don’t appreciate. Solitude can be a mindful activity, if you decide to dedicate time to it and approach it as a constructive experience. On seeking solitude The good news is that you don’t need to set aside huge chunks of time to be by yourself in order to benefit from solitude. Just ten to twenty minutes of alone time a day could be enough to help you recharge. And if you think you don’t have time to dedicate to intentional solitude, you probably need that alone space more than ever. To go from simply being alone to creating space for mindful solitude, make sure to put your phone and laptop away. You won’t get any of the benefits of solitude if you spend your time scrolling on a screen. Here are a few suggestions of things you could do in your alone time. However you decide to spend your alone time, the goal is to be fully immersed in the moment, whether you actively think about interesting questions or let your mind wander. Go for a walk. Walking alone can be a simple way to clear your mind and take time to reflect on your thoughts, while getting some exercise. Bonus points if you can do it in nature. Meditate. Meditation allows you to focus on your inner self so you can find a sense of calm and clarity. It can help reduce anxiety and improve focus. Journal. Writing down your thoughts and emotions can help you process them more effectively. Journaling is also a great way to gain valuable insights into the inner workings of your mind. Listen to music. Music can be an amazing way to relax and unwind, especially if you listen to music that resonates with you and aligns with your current mental state, which can help you feel more connected to your emotions. Read a book. Besides being a lot of fun and a way to gain knowledge, reading a book alone can be an uncomplicated way to escape into another world and, if it’s fiction, get lost in a good story. You can also try gardening, working on a DIY project, dance in front of the mirror, do yoga, or practice an instrument. Any activity that allows you to enjoy your time alone will help you appreciate those precious moments with yourself. Or you could, you know, do nothing. Just think, or let your mind wander. If you’re not used to solitude, silence can feel uncomfortable at first. But allowing yourself to be alone with your thoughts is powerful, and can be a great addition to your mental gym. So trying setting aside a bit of alone time and making it part of your daily routine. The post Loneliness or solitude? The case for being alone appeared first on Ness Labs.

FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us work smarter. Tommy Barav is the founder of Magical, a new way to manage your time using AI. It allows you to schedule meetings and take meeting notes directly from your browser tabs, and it’s fully integrated with Zoom, Notion, and Google, so you don’t have to worry about how to make the most of your time anymore. In this interview, we talked about their ambition to build a Time Operating System, how scheduling is just the tip of the time management iceberg, how to cut down on time-consuming context switching, how time connects to impact, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Tommy, thanks for agreeing to this interview. What’s wrong with the way we currently manage our time and schedule conversations? Excited to chat with you today! While most people could benefit from learning about better time management techniques, the great problem is that we’re all dealing with outdated productivity tools. These legacy tools were designed for a workforce and work culture that doesn’t exist any more. As such, we’re all using products that aren’t actually built for our regular daily workflows… and therefore, most of us aren’t nearly as productive as we should be. It’s the modern day equivalent of companies designing better horse carriages instead of trying to build automobiles. You’re on a mission to build the world’s first time operating system – what does that mean?  Our ambition is to build a Time Operating System for the modern worker. We want to revolutionize how we think about time. It’s our most valuable asset resource, and one that we all wish we knew how to spend more efficiently. We’re building a Time Operating System that keeps you focused and productive by being ubiquitous. Your time is everywhere, and your tools for time, such as your calendar, notes, and scheduling, should be everywhere as well. We’ll do this in two ways. First, like most companies, we’re going to deploy the latest AI to automate as many time tasks as possible. We think of AI as a digital intern; it should handle all of the remedial tasks so you can devote your energy and time to items that deliver the biggest impact. The second is to create an all-encompassing workspace where you can access your time whenever and wherever you need. Just imagine if you had Google Calendar, Notion, and Salesforce intertwined. That would be an incredible workflow! That’s what we’ll deliver in the long-term. Right now, we’ve begun this process by creating various “Time Templates” that let you design workflows to optimize your time tasks. Such an exciting plan! Right now, how does Magical work?  Magical empowers users to manage their meetings, scheduling, agendas, and notes directly from browser tabs. Users connect to Magical with their work Google account, and can access Magical with either our Chrome Extension, or our web app that works on all browsers. With Magical, you just open a new tab and can schedule meetings, join meetings, review your daily calendar, as well as take meeting notes. We have great integrations with Zoom and Google Meet so you can join those sessions straight from Magical. We also have a wonderful integration with Notion that lets you take meeting notes in Magical and sync them directly into your Notion account. Let’s say I would like to schedule a meeting with Magical. What would that look like?  Our scheduling functionality allows you to share your availability with a single link. You can share your general availability or share preferred meeting times. We have a unique feature called Dynamic availability that lets your invitees overlay their calendar and pick alternative meeting times if they’re not available during the preferred times you suggested. You can also create and edit your personalized scheduling templates. They provide the functionality I just listed, as well as various time protections to prevent people from scheduling last minute meetings, or meetings too far in advance. Finally, we have an AI scheduling feature called “AI Time Suggest” which will identify ideal meeting times based on your preferences and availability.  That does sound magical! Scheduling is not the only tedious aspect of meetings. How else can Magical help?  Scheduling is just the tip of the iceberg! We have amazing workflows around agendas and meetings notes. First, our AI Agenda feature lets you generate detailed and bullet-pointed agendas for all of your sessions. Just enter in your meeting topic and/or goals and it will automatically create agendas. Second, our AI Notetaker is an awesome tool for meeting notes. It’s easy to get distracted jotting down notes during meetings. AI Notetaker transcribes your session and then emails you a detailed summary immediately after your meeting ends. We also have two great calendar features called Day Peek and Time Peek. Day Peek lives inside Magical on the right of your screen. Using key commands, you can toggle on/off a daily view of your calendar, which is great for staying on top of your day. Time Peek works very similarly, except it shows up as a small tab on the side of your screen when you’re browsing on the web. Again, it’s an amazing way to have your time with you everywhere.  Still, the average knowledge worker uses countless apps and has many tabs open at any given time, which can make scheduling a bit of a nightmare. The great thing about Magical is that it lives with you in browser tabs. We’ve done an immense amount of research into how people spend their time at work and found that an extraordinary number of people will spend over half of their workday in their browser.  By having your time with you in the browser you’re able to cut down immensely on the context-switching that happens when you’re constantly switching between different apps and programs. With Magical, there is literally no need to switch because everything related to your time (scheduling, meetings, and notes) is with you in a single place.  Many could benefit from less context switching and more streamlined time management. What kind of people use Magical?  We have a diverse user base with people from a host industries and roles. I’d say the core of our users are tech savvy professionals who are time-hackers or productivity enthusiasts. They are people who demand tools and solutions that optimize their time. Perhaps I’m biased, but I like to think of them as the high-performers at their companies. They are people who want to create a large impact as efficiently as possible. They value their time more than most and want to optimize as much of their lives as possible. What about you, how do you use Magical?  As for me, I use Magical to manage my packed schedule. As the Founder and CEO of a young startup I have a million tasks to do every single day. I rely on Magical to keep me organized and focused. Right now my two favorite features are Time Peek and AI Notetaker. Time Peek is amazing as it lets me take my time everywhere. No matter what I’m doing, Time Peek lets me quickly see my upcoming meetings and sessions, and also jump directly into Zoom sessions as well. And AI Notetaker is just amazing. I’m a big advocate of meetings and religiously take them in every session I’m in. That can become problematic if someone is speaking and I’m constantly having to type while trying to process everything they’re saying. With AI Notetaker I literally don’t type in meetings anymore. I can devote my full focus towards the session because I know I’ll get a full summary sent to me right after it ends. The other great thing about Magical is that all of the key workflows and features can be accessed just by using key commands. This is a godsend for someone like me as I hate having to constantly switch between the keyboard and mouse.  So many great use cases. How do you recommend someone get started?  We recommend scheduling a meeting with Magical first to get a feel for the product. Thankfully, this is a breeze. Just connect your Google account to Magical and then click “Share Times”. From there, you can quickly schedule your first meeting. Our AI Agenda will create an automatic agenda based on your meeting’s topic, and you can then invite with preferred meeting times, or let our AI Time Suggest do it for you. Next, just copy your link and send it to your invitee. Not only is it a fast scheduling experience, it’s a better scheduling experience that will make sure you find the ideal meeting time for both you and your invitee. And finally… What’s next for Magical?  The future is bright for Magical. Without revealing too much, I can say that we’re working on more innovative features and integrations that we’ll roll out later in the spring. Some of these will be expansions and improvements on current workflows, while others will be brand new. We’re a community-driven product, which means we’re constantly learning from the incredibly engaged base of Magical users. Their communication and feedback drives our product development. As we like to say… we’re building the time tool of our members’ dreams! Thank you so much for your time, Tommy! Where can people learn more about Magical? Everyone can learn more on our website and follow our updates on Twitter. The post Schedule smarter and work faster with Tommy Barav, Founder of Magical appeared first on Ness Labs.

You have a deadline. You know you should get to work. But instead of focusing on what’s urgent and important, you spend your time on something else. Despite the inner voice telling us to get started and the rising anxiety, you keep on procrastinating. Humans have always struggled with procrastination. Thousands of years ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates asked how it is possible that, if one judges an action to be the best, one would do anything other than this action. Why we act against our better judgement? Still, as irrational as it sounds, we do procrastinate. And when it happens, no amount of rational thinking will help getting unstuck: that’s because we already know we should be doing the thing! So what can we do instead? Procrastination is an emotional process Procrastination arises from a fight between the limbic system — the ancient part of the brain influencing many our our automatic behaviours — and the prefrontal cortex, which is a newer part of the brain involved in cognition and higher-order thinking. Because of this fight, there are often several emotions at play when we procrastinate. The neuroscience of procrastination: A short primer Researchers found that procrastination is often associated with negative emotions such as anxiety and hopelessness, and could even lead to even depression. Considering how ashamed and stressed we feel when we procrastinate, it’s no wonder that we see procrastination as an enemy to get ourselves rid of. But a lot of the distress we experience when we procrastinate actually arises from our resistance to it. We feel ashamed that we procrastinate; we feel stressed about the fact that we procrastinate. Instead, we should treat procrastination as a source of information. Procrastination is your body and your brain trying to communicate a state of emotional struggle. Ignoring that message leads to more negative emotions, but embracing procrastination and trying to decipher the message can help you get unstuck while protecting your mental health. Making friends with procrastination There are many complex emotions underlying procrastination. While more organic forms of self-reflection such as free-flow journaling can help, it can also be useful to follow a more structured approach, especially if you are feeling paralyzed and don’t know where to start. Created by Graham Allcott, the founder of Think Productive and author of A Practical Guide to Productivity, DUST is a simple method to identify why you may be procrastinating. It stands for the four most common reasons why we procrastinate: Difficult, Unclear, Scary, and Tedious. Difficult. You may find the task too challenging, which may be caused by a lack of confidence, a lack of skills, or both. The solution is to move the starting point a bit earlier. For example, if you want to build an app but find it too difficult, you could take an online course that covers a very similar type of app. It’s important to not use an earlier starting point as a way to procrastinate even further. Clearly define what the first action step will entail, commit to it, and do not create an endless list of “pre-tasks” before you can get started with the main task. Unclear. Sometimes, we procrastinate because the task is not clearly defined. We often use vague one-word items in our to-do list, leaving our brains to fill in the blanks. In order to be productive, it’s important to have clearly defined actions. The solution is to make your tasks more detailed and to break them down into simple, actionable, clearly defined items. For example, “presentation prep” could be replaced by “record myself presenting the talk by Tuesday so I can get feedback from my manager on Wednesday.” Scary. Our fear of failure can get in the way of our productivity. The biggest changes we want to make and the most exciting projects we want to work are also the most daunting. Our brain is designed in a way to keep us safe. Comfort is good, risk is bad. Procrastination is a way to stay in your comfort zone. A solution is to create an even bigger fear to trump the original one. For example, announcing your deadline in public may trigger your fear of being judged, helping you overcome procrastination to avoid disappointing your peers. However, it’s better over the long term to embrace these fears, which are perfectly natural reactions to have when building something meaningful. Tedious. Some tasks are just boring. Need to copy-and-paste lots of numbers into a spreadsheet? Need to clean up some data? Need to write a hundred handwritten notes for an event? There’s no way to change the nature of the task itself—even though learning some automation tools can be useful in many cases—but you can change your environment. For example, you could listen to a podcast while doing copy-and-pasting work. Or you could create a reward for yourself when you get the task done in order to make it more exciting. To use the DUST model of procrastination, just grab a piece of paper, or open your notebook or note-taking app. Then, consider each emotion in the model to identify whether you’re procrastinating because the task is difficult, unclear, scary or tedious — it can be a combination of several emotions. Finally, apply the corresponding strategy in the model. If that strategy doesn’t work, it is also possible that the problem doesn’t come from the task itself and you need a break. The task isn’t difficult, unclear, scary or tedious, you’re just tired. Instead of feeling guilty about procrastinating, let it go for now and focus on resting and recharging your batteries. Procrastination is a way for our body and our mind to tell us we don’t feel comfortable with the way forward. It’s perfectly natural, and it’s okay at times to just go with it. But when procrastination becomes recurrent and prevents you from achieving your goals, it’s good to ask yourself why without beating yourself up in the process. You’ll avoid unnecessary distress and you’ll be able to get unstuck much quicker. The post Why we wait: Understanding the emotions behind procrastination appeared first on Ness Labs.

Despite the best intentions, a group of people make unwise decisions because of a collective desire to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions. In striving for conformity, there can be a loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. This phenomenon is called “groupthink”. Here is a personal example. When arranging to meet up with friends for dinner recently, everyone proclaimed to be happy to make a flexible and spontaneous restaurant choice on the night we met. With our party collectively agreeing to not make a reservation, on our arrival in the food quarter every restaurant was full, and we couldn’t find anywhere to eat. If one person had suggested that we make a table booking beforehand, this situation could have been avoided. But nobody said anything. This was not a big deal, but groupthink can lead to harmful business decisions, as well as impacting your personal life. Fortunately, this phenomenon can be managed with some simple strategies. The science of collective decisions The term groupthink was first coined in 1952 by William H. Whyte Jr, with most of the initial research carried out by Irving Janis, a research psychologist from Yale University. Theories of social conformity and social influence suggest that as humans, we are often averse to acting contrary to the trend of a group. Going against the grain can induce fear that our opinion might be wrong, or that we will incite conflict or even be rejected by the group. In 1998, researchers Marlene Turner and Anthony Pratkanis evaluated the research around groupthink theory. They found that it is most likely to occur within groups that are highly cohesive, especially if there is a strong leader, high levels of stress within the group, and low self-esteem within members. These conditions reduce the chance that a group will find a better solution to a problem than the one presented by influential group members. In another paper published by Turner and Pratkanis, it was highlighted that groupthink serves as an attempt to protect a collective identity by helping to maintain positive social characteristics. This may be especially true when the group feels under threat. Rather than share alternative views, the group effort is directed towards “maintaining a shared positive view of the functioning of the group”. This is achieved by ensuring consensus at all times, regardless of how sensible the decision is. However, as Dr Paul Hart argued, a group that’s caught up in groupthink may fail to notice important events, ignore serious threats, and disregard potential alternative actions. With a breakdown in group communication, and the desire for group harmony prioritized over rational decision making, dysfunctional outcomes can occur. According to Hart’s research, “groupthink, in short, is a recipe for policy fiascoes.” In short, groupthink can impact rational collective thinking, leading to poor decision making. The desire for a collective identity within the group can stifle independent thinking, with life-changing consequences. How to avoid groupthink When making collective decisions, there are some strategies that can be employed to avoid groupthink and its associated risks. Rather than accepting group conformity, it’s helpful to challenge the status quo. Assign one or two people in the group to play “devil’s advocate” and encourage them to interject with potential pitfalls and alternative solutions. Incorporating this specific role into the group will ensure other options are always raised and explored. When an idea is first raised, treat it as a transitional placeholder rather than a final decision. A group leader should refrain from offering ideas that may inadvertently sway others too early in the process. Instead, aim for the remaining group members to generate multiple ideas in the early stages of planning to avoid unnecessary conformity. It’s also helpful to proactively foster psychological safety during discussions. Irrational decisions based on the desire to conform can be avoided when group members have the freedom to think creatively without fear of ridicule. When individuals feel comfortable sharing unfiltered thoughts, a far greater breadth of ideas can be deliberated.  Ensure those who think innovatively are rewarded, even if another plan is eventually followed. Offering the opportunity to make suggestions anonymously can help contributors feel safer. Once a range of ideas has been voiced, encourage people to think critically and ask questions about the options. Invite an outsider to consider the possible options for objectivity and to mitigate the risk of the wrong decision being made due to group cohesion, low self-esteem or a strong leader. Groupthink can be responsible for collective decisions that are irrational, risky or even illegal. In a group setting in which cohesion and a positive social opinion of the group are highly valued, members put a lot of energy into ensuring harmony within the group. However, this form of mismanaged agreement is avoidable when group members can safely share their creativity, explore the pros and cons of various options, and seek objective opinions. If you’re in a position of leadership, make sure to encourage your group members to share their ideas — even if they don’t align with yours! The post Groupthink: when collective decisions go wrong appeared first on Ness Labs.

FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this new edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Chris Reinberg is the founder of Mindsera, an AI-powered journal designed to train your thinking skills. Mindsera makes thinking with mental models actionable with journaling templates that guide your thought process. In this interview, we talked about the power of thinking from first principles, building a personal board of advisors, writing as a thinking tool, using mental models to generate personal insights, why we should focus more on inducing quality decisions, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Chris, thanks for agreeing to this interview! You believe in the power of bringing together cognitive psychology with software and design. Can you tell us more? Thank you for having me. I believe the world’s most valuable skill is clarity of thought. When you start to think about it, thinking is the most powerful tool you can possibly have. Thinking makes you act effectively in the world. It helps you get what you want out of life. Whenever we want to accomplish something, there are obstacles in our way. Thinking is what sets humans apart as expert problem-solvers who can find solutions to overcome these obstacles. It’s all within our heads. Thinking made us go from fighting with sticks and stones to smartphones, artificial intelligence, and launching reusable rockets with the mission of becoming a space-faring civilization. That’s quite spectacular. My own background is kind of a peculiar one. I’ve been a professional mentalist for over ten years. Mentalism, in other words, is the art of getting inside people’s heads. It’s about how to use the biases in our minds to create seemingly impossible feats of mind reading. That got me obsessed about how the mind works in general. I went from mind reading to mind building and started investigating the thinking habits of geniuses and to what degree it’s possible to optimize the software in our heads. On one side, we have a mental health crisis; on the other hand, we need to reskill for the future. To succeed, we must become mentally fit, not just mentally healthy. When we look at various research about the essential work skills in the next decade, they all point to cognitive skills like critical thinking, decision-making, problem solving, creativity, self-leadership, mental resilience, and continuous learning. It’s no surprise that these are the same skills that underlie the success of the most accomplished, creative, and prolific people on earth. So I asked myself, how do you keep yourself mentally healthy and improve your cognitive skills? What would be this piece of software that you can build if you think about it from the first principles? And this is what inspired you to create an AI-powered journal. Exactly! Many people do not understand who they are, where they are, or where they are going. In consequence, instead of attempting those actions that would make their lives as valuable as possible, things just happen to them, and they’re often not good. The antidote to that is becoming thoughtful about your life, and you do that through journaling. Reflecting on your thoughts and feelings makes you understand yourself better, find uncovered self-knowledge, and improve your overall mental health & fitness. Also, the best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write. There is no difference between writing and thinking. Writing is a sophisticated form of thinking. If you make your thoughts visual with words, it becomes so much easier for your brain to organise information and make sense of things. Mindsera is kind of a supercharged journal. It analyses your mindset, helps you structure your thinking, and has an integrated AI mentor to explain things, brainstorm, and give actionable advice. It’s a copilot for thinking. While writing is helpful in and of itself, it can be hard to generate insights from journaling. How does Mindsera address this challenge? That is a problem a lot of people have. We all know journaling has massive benefits, but how do you do it? The act of sitting down to write can be daunting, and the blank page is a well-known trigger for writer’s block. Fortunately, there is a solution to that. The human mind is a problem-solving tool. To get the mental juices flowing, all you need to do is ask a question. Questions focus your thinking because every question is a little problem for your mind. Everyone is constantly trying to give you answers, but the reality is you don’t need better answers, you need better questions. The better the questions, the more insightful and robust the answers and possibilities created. So, where do you find good questions? We all have tried journaling prompts, but the problem with them is that they are too general and get repetitive very fast. This is where our curated list of mental models and frameworks becomes useful. Tiago Forte explained it well: “Our creativity thrives on examples. When we have a template to fill in, our ideas are channelled into useful forms instead of splattered around haphazardly. There are best practices and models for almost anything you want to create.”  But it’s one thing to read about mental models and another to apply them, so we turned the most useful mental models into journaling templates. They make thinking with mental models actionable by guiding your thought process. Have a long-term decision you need to make? Use the Regret Minimization frameworks from Jeff Bezos. Want to find purpose and meaning in life? Think with the Ikigai framework. Need to build habits and achieve goals? Well, there are frameworks that help you to do that. We have frameworks for almost every occasion used by the absolute top 1% to make better decisions, solve complex problems, and be more productive. Some famous people who are vocal about the benefits of clear thinking, mental models, and writing include Elon Musk, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Naval Ravikant, Jordan Peterson, and Paul Graham. You are in good company! That’s such a powerful feature. Mental models can be a great way to generate insights. Then, the next step in better thinking is to go from insights to decisions. I’ve always liked this concept of a personal board of advisors. Whenever I have an important decision to make, I tend to go to an imaginary meeting room in my mind. Around the table, there are Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Steve Jobs, and other great minds. I explain the situation to them and listen to what they have to say. It’s a way to trick myself into seeing things from new perspectives. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, you can actually talk with digital minds that imitate the thinking of those cognitive giants, past and present. Marcus Aurelius to develop stoic qualities. Elon Musk to build a start-up. Alan Watts to find purpose and meaning in life. Carl Jung to assist in personal growth, and so on. You can have your own personal board of advisors to explain things, brainstorm, and give actionable advice. Basically, you get the power of a personal coach without paying hundreds of dollars per hour. This makes it accessible to everyone, not just a selected few. Another exciting feature is “mindset analysis” – can you tell us more? This is something I’m personally very excited about. I have always thought, what would happen if you write all of your experiences and reasoning into a personal journal and then give it to the world’s top psychologists, entrepreneurs, and philosophers to assess? What insights could they distil for you, and how beneficial would that be? Now with AI, it’s possible. When you finish your journaling session on Mindsera, click analyse. The mindset analysis measures your emotional state, gives a percentage to each emotion, reflects on your personality, and provides you with a list of personalised suggestions. One of our user’s favourite features is the original artwork generated based on your journaling entry. I’m always excited to write my thoughts down because I want to see the visualisation of those thoughts. It’s a really great incentive for positive habit-building and kind of feels like magic. I find the act of creating generative art from personal thoughts gives meaning to the resulting images. It also makes journaling social, as you can share the artwork with your friends. So, each time you sit down to write, you build up a personal art gallery of your mind. Also, I want to stress that we are big believers in freedom and privacy of thought. We are an independent company and do not sell your data or see what you have written. With the latest privacy update from OpenAI, your data will also not be used to train future AI models, so Mindsera truly is a private space for your thoughts. What kind of people use Mindsera? Just like people who go to the gym care about their physical health and fitness, people who use Mindsera care about their mental health and cognitive fitness. They understand the importance of keeping their minds sharp and agile, just as athletes understand the importance of keeping their bodies in top shape. Most of our users tend to be some kind of makers – startup founders, solopreneurs, indie hackers, digital creators, and investors. The most important asset you have as an entrepreneur is your mind, so improving your cognitive skills is the single most powerful thing you can do. It makes you better at solving problems, navigating uncertainty, making decisions, managing stress, and staying focused and productive. What about you, how do you use Mindsera? Mindsera, for me, is all about staying in a state of clarity. It’s the most powerful thing. When you operate from a place of clarity and intention, your thoughts and actions have leverage. Success in life depends on your ability to make good decisions. The quality of your decisions depends on the quality of...

We are obsessed with optionality. Not sure what to do with your life? Get a degree. Not quite sure what to do with this degree? Go to grad school. Still not quite sure? Get a consulting role at a big firm so you can decide what kind of job you enjoy. And so on and so forth. We fall prey to the optionality fallacy. The problem is not with optionality itself. The problem is that we tend to assume optionality is built by keeping as many doors open for as long as possible. As Erik Torenberg puts it, it can be “like spending your whole life filling up the gas tank without ever driving.” The conventional path of accumulating optionality gives you reassuring but fragile options. In contrast, the best options — which involve lots of experimenting and tinkering — may feel riskier in the short term but will help you thrive through uncertainty. Optionality as convexity Traditional approaches to optionality assume a linear life curve, with a linear dependence on the parameters — if do this, you get that. People “follow safe paths that cap their downside, not realising that they also cap their upside,” says Torenberg. He adds: “Many ambitious people, even though they understand this intellectually, still prefer the more conventional paths of accumulating optionality.” It is often true that if all goes to plan, that is, if the actual parameters do end up looking highly similar to what they anticipated, following the traditional path will result for most people in a mostly predictable result. But the reality is, life’s curve is non-linear. There are few things more uncertain and complex than your life path. Each day brings its own unpredictable challenges and random events. Inject an adverse event, such as losing your job, or a lucky one, such as inheriting a large sum of money, and the pains or gains will often be amplified in a non-linear way. So, how can you design a life that embraces the random nature of reality? By having an approach to life which will result in larger gains than pains in a random environment. Functions with larger gains than pains are “nonlinear-convex”. The graph below shows the effect of a random event which causes more gain than pain. Things go well? Great upside. Not so well? Limited downside. The performance curves outwards, making it convex. And optionality is what gives it these crucial properties. Because you have options, you can discard the results when something doesn’t go well, thus limiting your losses. This allows you to experiment more, take more risks, and increase your chances of a big upside while capping the potential downsides. “It is in complex systems, ones in which we have little visibility of the chains of cause-consequences, that tinkering, bricolage, or similar variations of trial and error have been shown to vastly outperform the teleological* — it is nature’s modus operandi. But tinkering needs to be convex; it is imperative.” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb. “Critically we have the option, not the obligation to keep the result, which allows us to retain the upper bound and be unaffected by adverse outcomes.” *From the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “A teleologist attempts to understand the purpose of something by looking at its results. A teleological philosopher might argue that we should judge whether an act is good or bad by seeing if it produces a good or bad result, and a teleological explanation of evolutionary changes claims that all such changes occur for a definite purpose.” Taleb calls the difference between the results of trial and error in which gains and harm are equal (a linear function), and one in which pains and gains are asymmetric (a non-linear convex function) the “convexity bias” — the more convex the function (bigger difference between potential harm and benefits) and the more random the environment (higher volatility), the larger the bias. As humans tend to hate uncertainty, we have a propensity to miss the volatility property. In random, complex environments, convexity is easier to attain than knowledge. “Under some level of uncertainty, we benefit more from improving the payoff function than from knowledge about what exactly we are looking for,” says Taleb. In other words, when the future is uncertain, we benefit even more from performing experiments with a convexity bias that could lead to a big pay-off but have limited potential downside. Optionality through thoughtful tinkering Most ambitious people spend a lot of time and energy accumulating what feels like optionality by competing for a degree from a reputable university, then a prestigious work placement, and so on. Accumulating popular skills may feel like a path to more optionality, but the issue is: we don’t know what we don’t know. We cannot guess what skills will be helpful in the future, what random events (positive or negative) life will throw at us. In a complex system such as life, where you have limited visibility of the chains of cause and consequences, you are better off using trial and error. Tinkering and experimenting is a more efficient investment of your time than following a set path of learning which assumes an intrinsic value in specific skills and ignores the non-linear way life works. Experimenting does not mean giving something a quick try and abandoning it if you don’t see immediate results. Taleb gives the example of technologists in California who instead of investing based on narratives that look good on paper (assuming linearity), opportunistically switch or ratchet up their investments. This whole process takes many years of tinkering. “Typically people try six or seven technological ventures before getting to destination — note the failure in strategic planning to compete with convexity,” writes Taleb. To increase your optionality, apply the same to your life. It may mean taking a job in a new, unproven industry; investing in an emerging skill; learning an uncommon language; understanding a lesser-known culture; solving a hard problem few people are looking at. Rely on a series of experiments rather and avoid following a pre-defined narrative. Take these experiments seriously. Stay focused and give them your all. Go through a full cycle of deliberate experimentation before you decide whether you want to continue following this path, or if you would rather explore another path. And remember—you don’t only live once. One day you will be dead, but it takes about seven years to master something. If you live to be 88, after age 11, you have 11 opportunities to be great at something. Most people never let themselves die and cling onto that one life. But you can spend a life building things, another life writing poems, and another life looking for facts. You have many lives. Each of them is an opportunity to learn and grow. Live them. The post Unlocking the power of optionality appeared first on Ness Labs.

Children have an incredibly inquisitive mind. “Why?” they keep asking. They explore new things for no other reason except that they just want to know. Researchers tried to figure out how often kids ask questions. Turns out, a lot: on average, children ask 107 questions per hour! But it seems that as adults we tend to fall into fixed and convenient cognitive patterns. “Schools do not always, or even often, foster curiosity,” says Susan Engel, author and senior lecturer in psychology. Her research shows that what she calls “episodes of curiosity” — such as asking direct questions, manipulating objects, or intent and directed gazing — occurred 2.36 times in a two hour stretch in kindergarten, and only 0.48 times in a fifth grade classroom. So, what’s going on, and is it ever too late to rehabilitate your curiosity? Creativity gets unlearned When NASA was looking at hiring highly creative people, they hired Dr. George Land to devise a test that would accurately measure creative potential. Dr. Land collaborated with another researcher, Dr. Beth Jarman, to create a test which measured divergent thinking, or the ability to look at a particular problem and devise multiple solutions. The test worked well and is still a cornerstone of research around curiosity. But Dr. George Land, being curious (see what I’m doing), wanted to go further and understand the underlying mechanics of curiosity. Where does it come from? How does it evolve through our lives? To answer these questions, he led a large-scale observation study of 1,600 children. He got the kids to take the test at age 5, 10, and 15. The first time they took the test, 98% scored the highest possible score on the creativity test. The second time they took it, five years later, only 30% of the very same children scored well on the test. Even more depressing, the third time they took it — by now in high school — it was only 12% of kids that did well. What about adults? Well, it’s not getting any better. Based on a sample of 280,000 people, less than 2% of all adults are defined as creative based on their answer to this standardised test. Some evidence suggests that this dramatic decrease in curiosity could be caused by our increase in knowledge as we grow up. Once we feel like there’s no gap between what we know and what we want to know, we just stop being and acting curious. But why should we care? 3 surprising benefits of curiosity Based on the results above, it seems like most adults go about their lives without any effort to foster their curiosity. You might think, maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all. But curiosity has magical properties which have been extensively studied by scientists. Curiosity keeps you young: research shows that keeping a sense of wonder throughout life and as well as a novelty-seeking behaviour helps people to stay young. A study which followed aging individuals while tracking their curiosity levels found that those that showed high levels of curiosity were more likely to be alive five years later. Curiosity helps you learn: there is strong evidence that curiosity helps you better remember new information. The more curious you are about a topic, the more likely you are to remember it. Curiosity fosters better relationships: being genuinely interested in other people helps build more robust relationships, research shows. This means a greater feeling of intimacy and creating the foundation for meaningful relationships. Convinced you should do more to cultivate your curiosity? The good thing is that low levels of curiosity doesn’t mean your curiosity is just gone. In most adults, it’s mostly suppressed. In fact, every time you go to bed to sleep and you start dreaming, you let your curiosity run wild. How to cultivate your curiosity There are a few simple activities that will help you foster your curiosity and by extension increase your creativity. Try a few and see which ones feel most effective for you personally. Ask questions: randomly ask yourself questions like why? and how? when reading something or chatting with friends. You can even write down some of these questions to take the time to find the answers later. Read outside of your field: pick a type of book you would never naturally buy in a bookstore. Is it classic poetry? Non-fiction? A cookbook? Something about geology? Read it just for the sake of reading it, even if it doesn’t directly contribute to your work. Be inquisitive with people: choose someone in your entourage that you haven’t seen in a while, and invite them for coffee. Make it your goal to learn as much as possible about their interests. Take that approach any time you meet a new person. Practice saying less: this is linked to the previous one. Try to talk less and to listen more. Immerse yourself in a topic: select a topic that you find interesting, and push the limits of your curiosity by going deep. This means reading lots of articles, books, and research papers, watching TED talks, listening to podcasts. Write: take it to the next level by writing about this topic. This is exactly what I’m doing here. By committing to write on this blog, I get to explore new topics and cultivate my curiosity. Carry a notebook: it will make it easier to remember topics you’re curious about and want to either research or write about later. Learn about yourself: curiosity doesn’t need to only be outward. Explore your feelings, ask yourself about your goals and behaviours, or even research your past and family history. Slow down: productivity can be the enemy of creativity. Take the time to let your mind wander and let questions pop into your head. Hang out with a child: playing and talking with a child is probably one of the best reminders of our potential for curiosity. We were all born curious. As adults, it’s our choice to be curious or not. It does take some conscious effort, but it’s worth investing in our curiosity so we can make the most of the extended liminal space that is life. The post The science of curiosity: why we keep asking “why” appeared first on Ness Labs.

Although we would like to think we have a realistic perception of ourselves and the world around us, many of our thoughts are actually inaccurate representations. These so-called cognitive distortions can trick the mind, impacting our sense of self, our mental health, and even the integrity of our decision making. How can we learn to think more clearly? Binocular tricks of the mind A cognitive distortion is a mental phenomenon where we develop an inaccurate perception of reality. Cognitive distortions are often described as “pop-up” thoughts that quickly appear, but then start spiraling in a negative loop. They can be triggered by traumatic events such as difficult events in childhood.  The American psychiatrist Dr Aaron Beck worked with patients experiencing a wide range of mental health conditions, and discovered that distorted thinking patterns could impact the way we experience reality, which could in turn affect our mood. A collaborative study between psychologists in Australia and Brazil confirmed Beck’s findings. The research teams agreed that the distortion of facts leads to the maintenance of negative beliefs, which can lead to low mood or even depression. David D. Burns defines cognitive distortions as “a highly misleading way of thinking about yourself and the world”. He also describes the “binocular tricks” of magnification and minimization — two common forms of cognitive distortion. In magnification, our mistakes, fears and shortcomings become exaggerated, as if we are looking at them through a pair of binoculars. This can lead to catastrophizing, whereby small errors feel all-consuming or seem far more impactful than they truly are. Conversely, minimizing causes us to shrink the positive aspects of our lives down until they seem insignificant, barely worth noting, or even invisible. As if looking through a pair of binoculars backwards, you may minimize your own success or personal qualities so that you no longer recognize their value. You might also minimize others’ mistakes or imperfections, causing you to inaccurately believe that your peers are superior to you. The impact of magnification and minimization It is widely acknowledged that those who struggle with an intensely low mood are likely to show cognitive distortions. These errors of thinking contribute to the continuation of anxiety and depression, creating a vicious cycle. In addition to giving anxiety and depression stronger roots, cognitive distortions such as magnification and minimization can negatively impact your decision-making and overall well-being. Maximizing your mistakes, as if scrutinizing yourself through a pair of binoculars, can cause poor self-esteem, feelings of low self-worth and an unbalanced view of yourself.  For example, at work, you might make a small mistake, but due to cognitive distortion, maximize its potential impact. Seeing a small mistake magnified could lead you to ruminate on the potential for disciplinary action, dismissal, or the end of your career, even though this is far from likely. If you are interviewed for a role but are ultimately unsuccessful, you might go back through each interview question with a fine-tooth comb, and find holes or weaknesses in every one of your answers. You may start to believe that you are useless at interviews, and that you will never be successful in acquiring another job.  Conversely, minimizing your achievements will turn you into your harshest critic. If you pass an exam, are offered a new job, or receive a promotion, rather than seeing your success as being the result of your own hard work, you may downplay it as nothing more than luck. This belittles the effort you have put into succeeding, so that you do not recognize your own dedication or talent. Many of us also fall into a trap of minimizing compliments paid to us. By automatically rejecting someone else’s opinion that we are hard-working, talented, or creative, we do not leave space for positive self-belief to blossom. How to avoid binocular tricks It is important to investigate whether the beliefs you hold might be distorted, as beliefs that are strongly inaccurate can negatively influence one’s overall thinking and behavior. Fortunately, there are several strategies that you can follow to avoid magnification and minimization. Here is a simple exercise to reduce the impact of the binocular tricks your mind may play on you. For any situation you face, you can draw two columns and then document the relevant pros and cons, trying to keep the list of pros longer than the list of cons. For example, if you are unsuccessful at an interview, try to tease out the positives of the experience. This might include the recruitment process being beneficial for future applications, the interview being an opportunity to network with other professionals, or the chance to further narrow down your job search. By keeping the list more positive than negative, you can avoid setting up a vicious cycle. Whenever something good happens, or someone says something positive about you or your work, make a note of it. You can keep your notes in an app, in your journal, or even on small pieces of paper that you store in a jar. In collecting these memories, you create a resource that you can pull from whenever you next experience magnification or minimization. Finally, talk with your friends about your experiences and general mental health. Those close to us can often offer a far more balanced perspective, enabling them to point out when our perception may be positively or negatively exaggerated. Although it may feel natural to bat their compliments away, try to accept them and see yourself in the same light that others do. Binocular tricks of the mind can damage your mental health, propagating anxiety and depression, and even negatively impacting your decisions. Putting these strategies in place will help you focus on areas in which you have excelled, rather than dwelling on the things that have not gone as well as you hoped. Rather than harshly critiquing yourself, you can start to adopt a more self-compassionate mindset. The post Magnification and Minimization: Two “Binocular Tricks” of the Mind appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Rohan Gupta is the co-founder of QuillBot, a suite of AI-powered writing tools that include a paraphraser, a grammar checker, a summarizer, a translator, and more — all in one place. In this interview, we talked about the challenge of integrating every step of the writing process, how AI can unlock our creative potential, how technology can support English language learners, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Rohan, thanks for agreeing to this interview! You started building tech-enabled tools from a young age. What was driving you? As a child, I was fascinated by the endless possibilities that technology could offer and was eager to explore them. This interest in technology may have led me to experiment with coding and building software tools from a young age. It was amazing being able to exercise my creativity to build tools and products that people would genuinely use and love. And you were still a student when you launched QuillBot. Can you tell us about the early days? Yes, Jason and I were both students pursuing different startups at the time, and we met at a startup accelerator. The first version of QuillBot was quite janky. It was a single page web app, effectively a demo. It went live on Reddit and got great reception, even though the first version of our AI was not that good. People loved the concept and it was quite novel at the time. It was helpful to writers who used English as a second language in particular. QuillBot started going viral, and we had to figure out a way to cover the costs. So we built out a premium subscription and bootstrapped the business to over one million monthly active users before raising venture funding. QuillBot is now an advanced AI writing companion that provides everything from a paraphraser to a summarizer and a grammar checker. How does it work exactly? QuillBot is unique in that it caters to every writer’s needs, whether those are simple or more complex. It’s there for writers through every step of the writing process, which includes brainstorming, research, outlining, drafting, editing, and creating citations. Instead of focusing on a singular problem, QuillBot aims to alleviate every pain point a writer might face while writing.  However, if a writer needs specific help in just one area of the writing process, they can choose to use just a specific tool for their needs. For example, if a writer doesn’t have the best grammar, they can choose to write the paper on their own and run the final draft through our Grammar Checker. People complain about the proliferation of writing tools and how disjointed the writing process has become. How does QuillBot address this challenge? A good writing tool will simplify and ease the writing process, not make it more difficult or disjointed. Not all writing tools can achieve this. QuillBot prioritizes a streamlined experience, which is why you’ll never see an ad on the site. Every tool works with just the click of a button, which takes away any convoluted steps that might confuse our writers or eat up their time. QuillBot also offers an extension for both Google Chrome and Microsoft Word, ensuring that our users will be able to write well wherever they write. The extension allows for quick edits and suggestions without going on the website, making it easy for users to perfect their writing across the web. An exciting feature is the QuillBot Co-Writer – can you tell us more? At its core, the Co-Writer is a writing space that employs the features of the Paraphraser, Summarizer, and Citation Generator to correct and perfect the user’s work as they write. The “Suggest Text” button helps users who are experiencing writer’s block by recommending the next sentence based on existing text. The Co-Writer also includes online research capabilities, a space for note taking, and an outline generator, allowing the user to complete a paper from start to finish without ever leaving the tab they’re on. What kind of people use QuillBot? Our two largest demographics at QuillBot are students and English language learners (ELLs), and those groups have a tendency to overlap. Students are usually focused on the content of their essays, so they find the Citation Generator, Summarizer, and Grammar Checker particularly useful for automating tasks that would otherwise take them a lot of time, such as creating citations. Students are very busy people, so saving time on writing projects goes a long way for their overall success in school. ELLs find that tools such as the Paraphraser and the Grammar Checker are particularly useful when sending communication. For those who are still learning English, these tools help smooth out and correct their language so they are able to speak, or write, effectively. Now they are better equipped to integrate into their new community and improve their lives moving forward. However, QuillBot’s clientele is not limited to those two demographic groups. QuillBot users range from content creators to businesspeople to researchers, and beyond.  Users find the Summarizer to be helpful when conducting research, because it condenses any article or piece of text into its most important points, effectively cutting out all of the filler material.  The Paraphraser is great for online content creators, because it helps them write original content that will rank well on search engines. The seven writing Modes help narrow each piece of content down for its respective audience, ensuring that tone is consistent throughout the text. What about you, how do you use QuillBot? I do all of my writing with QuillBot. In particular, Compare Modes is a great feature found within our Paraphraser that allows a user to compare text that has gone through our different Modes, which change the tone and style of the text depending on which Mode is in use.  I like to use this feature to ensure that I’m coming across the right way in everything that I write, whether that be a company-wide message, private correspondence, or an interview such as this one. I find seeing all of the different outputs laid out next to each other helps me to weigh my options and pick the perfect Mode for any occasion.  This feature works hand-in-hand with Freeze words, which lets the user keep a word or phrase the same when paraphrasing. This is particularly handy when I’m writing something that includes a branded keyword or proper noun that cannot be changed or rephrased in any way. For example, QuillBot’s tagline is “Make writing painless.” That has to be frozen to ensure brand consistency and an understanding of our core mission and values.  How do you recommend someone get started? The best way to get to know QuillBot is to play around with all the tools. Grab a sample text and run it through the Paraphraser, using the different Modes to create different paraphrases. Run it through the Summarizer and go through all of the available settings and options. Our Co-Writer has tutorials available for all of the tools within the broader Co-Writer space, which includes the Paraphraser, Summarizer, Grammar Checker, and Citation Generator. It’s a great place to learn, play around, and create something new — or tweak something that already exists! Within that space, you can draft a new project, edit a work-in-progress, and work through every step of the writing process. It’s a great option for those new to QuillBot, because it showcases a number of our tools in an easy-to-use setting. In the future, what role do you think AI writing companions will play in the creative process? We’re already seeing AI improve people’s writing skills. With tools like the Grammar Checker and Summarizer, writers are able to produce content more efficiently than ever before, with little to no mistakes.  Other AI writing companions, like the Co-Writer, help users brainstorm and research. It’s easier than ever to create and expand upon an idea in order to bring it to fruition. The entire creative process is already being impacted positively by AI, and I don’t see that slowing down any time soon. And finally… What’s next for QuillBot? We are on a mission to better streamline writing and fundamentally redefine the writing process. We plan to do this by incorporating new generative AI tech, improving UX/UI, and building out multilingualism as part of the writing journey. There is a huge opportunity to redefine writing and we intend to capture it! Thank you so much for your time, Rohan! Where can people learn more about QuillBot? Everyone can go to QuillBot.com to learn more about our brand and product. You can also follow our journey on Twitter. The post Building the most powerful AI writing companion with Rohan Gupta, co-founder of QuillBot appeared first on Ness Labs.

If you add up the number of hours are your disposal during a given week, the total will be the same for every single living human being on the planet, whatever their occupation: 168 hours per week. Remove the weekends, and that’s 120 hours. Get some sleep, and you’re left with at most 90 hours of awake time during the weekdays. Eat, shower, and do all the basic things human beings need to do on a daily basis, and you get a maximum 80 hours per week to play with — that is, if you don’t have kids or other irreducible obligations. So little time, and yet, we waste a lot of energy on low-leverage tasks that leave us tired and dissatisfied. We confuse hard work for high-leverage work. These low-leverage tasks don’t meaningfully contribute to our success, and they certainly don’t contribute to our well-being. Instead, how can we focus our time and energy on high-leverage activities that are both productive and good for the mind? More than moving the needle Unnecessary paperwork, long meetings, chasing down deliverables, fixing typos in an article… What do all of these activities have in common? They are tedious, frustrating, and often avoidable. The expression “moving the needle” originating in the indicator of measuring instruments such as the speedometer. It has become one of these overused bits of business jargon you will hear in many organizations, used to describe work with a small yet noticeable impact. While it makes sense for a massive organisation to pursue many such “needle-moving” activities, it can be exhaustive and counterproductive for an individual to follow such a strategy. Moving the needle may imply a corresponding level of hard work; which is not the case with high-leverage activities. This is the basic principle of leverage: using a lever amplifies your input to provide a greater output. Good levers work as energy multipliers. Instead of moving the needle, you want to operate the most efficient levers. High-leverage activities are energy multipliers Based on skills, experience, network, and many other factors, everyone’s levers are different. What they have in common, when activated, is their ability to turn a relatively smaller amount of time and energy into outsized results. Not sure what such energy multipliers can look like? Here are ten examples of high-leverage activities you could experiment with: Automating part of your work Creating and publishing original content Joining a public speaking club Taking a writing workshop Mastering a critical tool Implementing metacognitive strategies Learning a new language (including how to code) Looking for a great coach or a great mentor Pushing back on unnecessary (-ly long) meetings Investing in personal and professional relationships You should obviously not aim to pursue all these activities at the same time, and many may not even be right for you. These are for illustration purposes — what a high-leverage activity is for someone may be a low-leverage activity for you. The main question to ask yourself is whether these activities have an outsized impact compared to the amount of effort they require, and whether they seem to provide you with more time and energy to focus on what really matters. By purposefully choosing which levers to activate in your life and work, you can reclaim your time and energy so you can achieve your goals without sacrificing your mental health. Clarifying your highest leverage activities As investor George Soros wrote in his book The Age of Fallibility: “It is much easier to put existing resources to better use, than to develop resources where they do not exist.” High-leverage activities are not about making more time or using more energy; instead, the aim is to better optimise your resources to focus on work that goes beyond moving the needle. In order to identify these high-leverage activities, you need to reflect on how to allocate your resources. Document your daily activities. The first step is to get an idea of the way you currently spend your time and energy. We very often overestimate or underestimate the time we spend on certain activities. Time seems to contract when we’re having fun, and to expand for boring tasks. But time perception doesn’t correlate with leverage. Spend a few days tracking how you spend your work days. You can even install a time-tracking app to help with accuracy. Highlight the tasks you feel best suited for. Better yet: focus on the tasks only you can do. Because of your unique set of skills, interests, and connections, some tasks will be both easier and more enjoyable to you than to somebody else — as well as better performed by you in some cases. For instance, someone on your team may be better suited to create and design a business presentation; another team member may be the strongest person for cold emailing and conducting initial meetings; but you may be the best person for the final negotiation. Choose your levers. First, be selective. While high-leverage activities lead to outsized results compared to the time and energy investment, you still only have a limited number of hours available to you. Ideally, try to keep your list of high-leverage activities to 2-3 items at most. Then, make sure to commit to these levers: let your team know about your focus areas; delegate tasks you are not the best suited for; automate repetitive and energy-draining activities; hire contractors for what cannot be automated. Remember: hard work is not necessarily high-leverage work. Do not measure your productivity based on time and energy—time in particular is not a measure of productivity. Focus on activities with oversized output compared to your input. Learn to delegate. Use your time to invest in yourself, your systems, and your relationships – these investments compound. While we all have an absolute limit on time, high-leverage activities can multiply our energy. The post High-leverage activities: how to identify your energy multipliers appeared first on Ness Labs.

New Things Under the Sun is a living literature review; as the state of the academic literature evolves, so do we. This post highlights some recent updates. Subscribe now Local Learning Last year I wrote a post called Remote Breakthroughs about the changing nature of innovation among remote collaborators. Part of that post discussed evidence that local interactions do a better job of exposing us to new ideas than remote interactions. I’ve now spun that discussion out into it’s own expanded article, specifically on that topic. This was mostly prompted by a new paper, van der Wouden and Youn (2023). Here’s an excerpt from that new article, titled Local Learning: In my experience, the internet can’t be beat for encountering a diversity of ideas. But often, that encounter is at a pretty surface level. You read a tweet; a headline; a blog post synthesizing some studies, etc. Nothing wrong with surface level engagement - you can’t engage in everything deeply. But pushing the innovation frontier increasingly requires deep engagement with at least some domain of knowledge. And there are reasons to think that offline/in-person interaction might be better for forging that kind of deep engagement with new ideas. To start, let’s look at van der Wouden and Youn (2023), which wants to see if in-person collaboration on academic projects more reliably leads to the transfer of knowledge between coauthors than remote collaboration. To answer that question, the authors gather data on 1.7mn academics who, at some point over the period 1975-2015, produce a sequence of three papers that exhibit a very specific pattern. In reverse order, they need: The last paper in the sequence to be solo-authored The second-to-last paper to be coauthored with at least one other author At least one more prior paper. They’re going to pull all that information from the Microsoft Academic Graph. Next, they want an estimate of what knowledge domains the academic is fluent enough in to publish an original research paper in. To get those, they leverage the 292 subdisciplines that the Microsoft Academic Graph tags papers with. By looking at the subdisciplines tagged to your work, they can get an idea about what you are an expert in, and also how your areas of expertise grow over time. Moreover, by focusing specifically on solo-authored work, they can be most sure that it’s really you who is the expert, and not one of your coauthors. The main idea of the paper is to figure out an academic’s areas of expertise based on all papers they’ve published, up to and including the first one in the sequence of three alluded to above. Next, they look to see if the second paper in the above sequence was conducted with local or remote collaborators. Finally, they look at the final paper in the sequence, which was solo-authored, and see if it is tagged with any new subdisciplines, relative to all your papers up-to-and-including the first one in the sequence. If so, they take that as evidence that the author gained expertise in a new subject in between the first and third paper, possibly via their interaction with their collaborators on the second paper. Lastly, they can see if this “learning” effect is more common when you work with local or remote coauthors. In the following figure, we can see how the probability of writing a solo-authored paper tagged with a new subdiscipline changes when you work with increasingly distant colleagues on your previous paper. van der Wouden and Youn call this the “learning rate.” If your collaborators were local (under 700m away, a 10 minute walk), then about 7.5% of the time, your next paper is on something you haven’t written about before. If your collaborators are out of town, say more than 25km, the probability drops to more like 4.5%. From van der Wouden and Youn (2023) This pattern is consistent across fields, though stronger in some fields than others. For example, the relative probability of pivoting to a new topic after a local collaboration compared to a distant one is generally higher in STEM fields than in non-STEM fields. Moreover, while the figure above is raw data, you get a similar effects when you toss in a bunch of additional control variables: the number of coauthors, the career stage of the academic, the ranking of the institution they are affiliated with, and so on. The post then goes on to discuss another paper, Duede et al. (2022), which was originally part of the Remote Breakthroughs article. It closes with some discussion of how these trends have changed over time, and ends up arguing these results are consistent with a theme I’ve argued elsewhere: that proximity is good for meeting new people outside your usual professional context, but not so necessary for productive collaboration once these relationships are formed. Read "Local Learning" A Bit Less Local Learning The article Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and Innovation is about a similar theme: how changing technology affects the ability to collaborate over a distance. The article originally covered three studies, each about how the expansion of transit options - new air routes, new train routes, or more local roads - facilitated more remote collaboration among scientists and inventors. I’ve added to this article a discussion of Koh, Li, and Xu (2022), which looks at the expansion of the Beijing subway system: Koh, Li, and Xu (2022) studies the impact of the dramatic expansion of the Beijing subway on private sector innovation. The subway system in Beijing grew pretty slowly until the 2000s, when the pace of expansion dramatically ramped up ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and as part of the government’s stimulus response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The number of subway stations went from 41 to 379 between 2000 and 2018, while the total track length grew from 54.1km to 655km over the same time frame. Koh, Li, and Xu cut Beijing up into 0.5km squares and look at what happens to the number of patents by distant collaborators residing in different 0.5km blocks. Across a lot of different approaches,1 they find a subway connection that reduces travel time between blocks by at least an hour leads to a 15-38% increase in patent applications filed. Change in number of patents between blocks after travel time is reduced by an hour or more. From Koh, Li, and Xu (2022) Now that this article also discusses subways, I could have changed the title to “Planes, Trains, Subways, Automobiles, and Innovation”, but since that is quite a mouthful I instead changed the title to Transportation and Innovation. Read "Transportation and Innovation" Long Distance Learning The article The “idea” of being an entrepreneur tries to argue that one important factor about whether people choose to become entrepreneurs or not is if they even conceive of entrepreneurship as an option. The piece argues this idea - that yes, even people like you can be an entrepreneur - is often spread by social contagion from people who are like ourselves but are also entrepreneurs. I’ve now added a new section to this article about the transmission of the “idea” of entrepreneurship via mass media. If transmitting the “idea” of entrepreneurship matters, then countries with mass media celebrating entrepreneurship might get more entrepreneurs, because people consuing this media diet are more likely to consider entrepreneurship a viable option. This is a tough hypothesis to test, since mass media tends to reflect the society it is targeting. In a society with lots of entrepreneurship and lots of mass media celebrating entrepreneurship, which caused which? Likely it’s a bit of both! Another reason it’s hard to test this hypothesis is because, ideally, you want to compare people exposed to one mass media diet to people exposed to another one, but who are otherwise identical. But most people have access to the same mass media (that’s what makes it mass!), and so if one group chooses not to consume it, it’s likely because they differ in some way. Slavtchev and Wyrwich (2023) identifies one peculiar instance in history that does permit testing this hypothesis. When Germany split into East and West, following the Second World War, most forms of entrepreneurship were banned in East Germany. From the 1960s on though, West Germany consciously crafted and broadcast TV programming into East Germany, as a matter of policy. Compared to East German television, West German television tended to celebrate individualism, business, entrepreneurship, and the like. This programming was popular, if you could get it: surveys indicate over 90% of people who could access the broadcasts tuned in at least several times per week. But not everyone could get it. A few regions that were far from the broadcast towers, or where signals were blocked by hills and mountains, could not easily access this programming, and surveys indicate many fewer people in these regions regularly watched West German programming: just 15% several times a week, and 68% never. Yet besides their geographic distance and different topography, the regions of East Germany with access to West German television don’t seem to have been much different from the (small number of) regions of East Germany without. Slavtchev and Wyrwich argue this is the kind of natural experiment we’re looking for: mass media promoting entrepreneurship in a society that is not already celebrating it (it was mostly outlawed!), and different levels of exposure to this mass media among groups that were otherwise similar. Lastly, after the collapse of the USSR, many forms of entrepreneurship became legal once again in East Germany, so Slavtchev and Wyrwich can actually see if this differential mass media exposure mattered: do parts of formerly East Germany with greater exposure to West German television end up with more entrepreneurship than those without?2 Yes. The figure below tracks the per capita number of new businesses and new self-employed indivi...

“You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” The traditional saying remains true even in modern society, and we’d like to think that when we perform a favor for someone else, they will return it in the future. But this is not always the case. Research shows that reciprocity has a very narrow window, and our desire to give back wanes rapidly before disappearing altogether. About three weeks ago, I met a friend for coffee. When she had to rush off, I happily covered our bill and assumed that next time, she would do the same. However, “reciprocity decay” forewarns me that, as three weeks have already passed, I should probably forget about that coffee ever being repaid. Understanding reciprocity decay can provide us with valuable insight into both our expectations of others and the way we collaborate with them. The science of reciprocity Reciprocity is a deeply rooted dynamic of human relationships. Reciprocity of both benefit-for-benefit as well as harm-for-harm was a cornerstone of relationships in ancient Greece. Extensive research has shown that the principle of “voluntary requital” was a form of transaction in a time when there was no formal system of trade. There is some evidence demonstrating that it’s not only humans who are capable of reciprocity. Rats have been shown to set up “food-exchange programs”, vampire bats partake in high levels of reciprocal grooming, and capuchin monkeys show reciprocal provision of food from food-rich to food-poor environments. These mechanisms enhance survival of the species. In recent years, cultural anthropologists have discovered that human relationships are based on a “web of indebtedness”. American researchers reported that reciprocity can include rewarding kind actions or punishing unkind actions. Researchers from the University of Zurich noted that reciprocity has powerful implications for economic domains. They found that reciprocal behavior can determine both the enforcement of contracts and social norms, as well as greatly enhancing collective action. Through reciprocity, sophisticated systems of aid and trade have become possible, bringing immense benefits to societies that utilize them. In professional circumstances, employees may work above and beyond their role to provide additional services, if they believe that they may later be reimbursed with praise, promotion, a pay rise or another benefit. In one’s personal life, reciprocity can be linked to the frequent exchange of favors between family or friends, the existence of customer loyalty, and the tradition of tipping in restaurants. Writing with Benedikt Herrmann, Simon Gächter summarized that the human web of indebtedness created through direct and indirect reciprocity is crucial to successful human cooperation. The impact of reciprocity decay As we’ve seen, reciprocity is essential for a modern society that functions well, and many of us are happy to give when we feel confident that, in the future, we will receive something in return. However, studies by Amanda Chuan, Judd Kessler and Katherine Milkman suggest that if reciprocity is not triggered within a specific timeframe, any sense of obligation can vanish, leaving the initial donor with nothing at all. The researchers examined data from a university hospital that had sent more than 18,000 donation requests to patients following hospital care. Patients were most likely to donate if the request was sent within 30 days of their visit, with a significant decline when it was sent between one and four months later. They concluded that economic behavior is time sensitive due to reciprocity decay. It is therefore important to capitalize on opportunities to receive payment for any “debt” promptly, rather than leaving it too long to ask. Reciprocity decay is likely due to the memory of a generous act fading in time. Something that was significant initially may not feel as valuable one week later. My friend who was grateful to avoid having to wait for the bill may now be consumed by a busy work schedule or a mountain of life admin. While making it to a meeting on time was important three weeks ago, this may no longer hold any significance. Furthermore, in the normal chaos of life, she may simply have forgotten about the bill. Older research agreed that reciprocal decay was likely due to the fading memory of a favor. However, this study also highlighted that the sense of obligation to repay a favor is likely to depend on how valuable the initial favor was. One coffee is of little consequence, whereas saving someone else’s life could “produce a sense of obligation that lasts a lifetime.” Fostering balanced cooperation By taking reciprocity decay into account, it’s possible to foster more balanced cooperation. When someone is indebted to you, avoid waiting too long to make a request for reciprocal action. If the repayment of a coffee had been very important to me, I could have messaged my friend the following day to arrange another catch up. Similarly, if you want customers to provide feedback on your service, make sure your request is timely. Asking for immediate feedback can be off-putting, while waiting too long may reduce your chance of a response. It is therefore advisable to wait a day or two before exploring reciprocity. Conversely, if you recognize that you have waited a long time for a favor to be repaid, make sure the first correspondence you send triggers the recipient’s recall of your past act of kindness. If you helped a colleague plan a workplace event, you can spark fond memories by gently reminding them of how enjoyable the day was. This may make them feel more inclined to help you out in return, despite the delay. Although in some cases, an equally weighted favor might be returned despite time passing, you will often need to accommodate for reciprocity decay. While hospital patients may be less likely to make financial donations many months after treatment, they may be willing to share a link to the hospital’s charitable causes on their social media instead. Finally, it’s important to recognize when you have missed the boat. If a long time has passed, draw a line in the sand and accept that a favor won’t be repaid once an individual no longer feels indebted. This may help to minimize any sense of disappointment you may feel around the favor you provided. For instance, buying a coffee for a friend is no big deal. Rather than feeling I have been fleeced or that my minor generosity went unnoticed, it’s better to forget it altogether. Reciprocity is an ancient phenomenon that is essential for the healthy functioning of society. Although we expect others to remember our kind deeds and repay them, as time passes it is likely that reciprocity decay will occur. Fortunately, we can foster more balanced cooperation by not waiting too long to request that a favor is repaid, making allowances for the other party when some time has passed, and knowing when to accept that it is time to simply let go. The post Reciprocity decay: How our desire to give back wanes over time appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Nils Janse is the founder of Delibr, a Stockholm-based startup helping product managers harness the potential of AI. In this interview, we talked about the main traps product teams fall prey to, the key qualities of great product managers, the power of dynamic templates for product requirements documents, writing out potentially controversial decisions as explicit questions, reconciling information across product management platforms, and more. Enjoy the read! Hi Nils, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Let’s start with a big question: what do you think makes a great product manager? Great product managers succeed at thinking about the things that will really have an impact. They take a big enough step back to start from a holistic, end-to-end perspective, understanding both the business and the user perspective. They then find the things that really matter across this scope and then drill down to get those things right, not fearing to get their hands dirty with details, whether it is UX copy or key tech aspects. And they are efficient or savvy enough to not get bogged down handling all the other details. Together this lets them come up with a sharp, insightful point of view for how to build something that can actually move the needle. AI-powered assistants are everywhere. Why did you decide to focus on helping product managers specifically? Our focus on helping product managers (PM) stems from our extensive experience working with them. Over 500 PM interviews have given us a deep understanding of their challenges. We know many PMs spend a lot of time writing product requirements documents (PRD) and user stories, and that junior PMs struggle with doing this well. The latest generative AI technology is great for these types of challenges. How does Delibr tackle these challenges? Our solution leverages this latest generative AI technology both to give PMs guidance on what and how to write, and to speed up their writing process immensely, actually writing a draft for them, then giving feedback and suggesting edits. We are combining the power of the latest AI models with our knowledge of the domain to create the right prompts and integrate them deeply into the natural workflow of PMs. Can you tell us more about how Delibr helps product managers adhere to best practices? Our dynamic templates let PM start clean and still have the guidance of what topics they might want to address, depending on what they are working on, and we then provide best practice support across topics.  Many product teams fall into either the trap of providing a too detailed template, which makes writing a PRD feel like an administrative task and stifling creative thinking, or of providing little-to-no template, which leaves junior PMs struggling and the lack of consistency makes it hard for stakeholders to read them. Designing these dynamic templates was a close collaboration with our customers over several iterations, and with the latest AI they really get another boost. A challenge for many product managers is to manage feedback and revision. The work to detail out any new feature involves a lot of both minor and major decisions, and it is easy for PMs to trip up on facilitating all of these. That is why Delibr offers a unique way for facilitating decisions. It is based on writing out potentially controversial decisions as explicit questions. Each such question can then have several potential answers, with pros and cons, and even ratings, followed by a decision, that can be approved or poked. This allows PMs to move quickly and make decisions, while making their thinking transparent and inviting to a structured discussion. Saves them a crazy amount of headache. Beyond that we allow for normal comments and mentions, and also allow PMs to instantly turn any document into a presentation. And of course, if a PM is concerned about what feedback they might receive, they can preempt that feedback by asking the AI to provide feedback from different perspectives, e.g. support, marketing, or even CEO. Another use case I find exciting is using Delibr to streamline the writing process. How does that work? So the most obvious way we support the writing process, on top of the dynamic templates, is to just as the AI to write the entire PRD. And by working on that use case quite a bit, it is now actually surprisingly good.  But the first thing will always just be a draft, and in going from a draft, Delibr has a huge advantage in being an “outliner” — which is a special type of writing tool, originally used by authors. It structures the document into a tree of nested bullet list and allows the writer to quickly collapse, expand, zoom, break things apart, move them around, and merge back again. This in itself makes the writing process faster and more delightful.  But we have also found it is such a good fit with generative AI. We have added commands so that the user can ask the AI, anywhere in the tree, to e.g. draft a new section, or brainstorm some ideas, or research that topic, or add pros and cons. Or, the writer can select any branch of the tree and give the AI some input for how to revise it, continue writing, and more. All-in-all, this becomes a very dynamic and engaging experience of almost building, iterating and pulling together the different parts of the document together with the AI. And how does Delibr integrate with the overall product management lifecycle? Delibr streamlines the entire product management process, not just refinement of PRDs and user stories, but all the way from strategy to development. Its features and AI templates support PMs at every stage, including strategy with visual goal breakdown — for instance OKRs as well as templates business model canvas, competitor analysis, and more — and Product Hierarchy helps PMs process feedback. It also supports discovery with Opportunity Solution Trees to enable PMs to structure their discovery work, validation with experiment boards, prioritization with solution rating, RICE scoring, and timeline/now-next-later roadmaps, development with AI templates for user stories, acceptance criteria, and release notes, and rollout with AI templates for help center articles, marketing briefs, press releases, and more. With so many product management tools, people may worry about having to reconcile information across platforms. Delibr is designed to be the single-source-of-truth for PMs, and has integrations with e.g. Zapier and Jira. A main use case for the Zapier integration is to pull in feedback from other systems. The real-time two-way sync with Jira, ensures product documents and Jira tickets are always up-to-date and reflect the same information. With less juggling many different platforms, Delibr streamlines the product management process, freeing up time and enabling PMs to focus on creating impact. What about you, how do you use Delibr? At Delibr, we have an internal slogan: “We couldn’t have built Delibr without Delibr.” Circular references for the win! On a more serious note, we structure insights from interviews on Opportunity Solution Trees, that break down into solutions, that also live on boards, and that link with Jira. Beyond that, most of the team uses it for basically everything. Once people start using Delibr and get the hang of it, the combination of the structured documents with an AI boost that lives embedded in customizable process flows is kind of unbeatable. How do you recommend someone get started? Getting started with Delibr is simple. First, sign up and describe your next feature to the AI, to get the quick win of a draft PRD to revise, discuss, and then send to Jira. Early on, use Delibr for refining epics. To learn more, attend the Outcome-Driven Product Leader program at the Delibr Academy. Over time, use Delibr to streamline your entire product management process and move away from the feature factory. You’re based in Stockholm. How did building your company outside of Silicon Valley influence your work? Being based in Stockholm has been great for us. The city has a thriving startup scene and is home to a high density of successful tech companies. This strong ecosystem has been beneficial for us in terms of access to funding and talent. And we have always had a mix of Swedes and people from different backgrounds, making for a nice “Sweinternational” culture. However, as we haven’t had the experience of building our company in Silicon Valley, we cannot make a direct comparison. And finally… What’s next for Delibr? Right now, we feel like we have struck gold with helping product managers, and so we will continue for some time with digging where we stand, working to create this new level of clarity and flow for PMs, enabling them to ship more value. It is really exciting to be at this intersection of where we can use our deep functional expertise to inject AI into the main tool in their workflow. However, product managers are at the very frontier in terms of how they work, compared to other knowledge workers. Over a longer time horizon, we believe that the rest will want to emulate and pick up how product managers work, and then the solutions and approaches we develop will be sought after by a much wider market. Thank you so much for your time, Nils! Where can people learn more about Delibr? Thank you! You can read more about Delibr on our website and follow our journey on LinkedIn. The post Harness the power of AI to supercharge your productivity with Nils Janse, founder of Delibr appeared first on Ness Labs.

“What am I here for?” is one of the oldest questions humans have been grappling with. For millennia, religion has provided for many a source of meaning — the comforting idea that someone was in control and that, even if we didn’t have the ability to comprehend it all, the world ultimately made sense. With the advent of modern science came the realization that there may not be any master plan after all. The complexity of nature seems to have arisen spontaneously, without any kind of ultimate justice in an afterlife. Without the guidance of religion in a world that is blind to suffering, many are left to define their life purpose on their own. This quest to move beyond mere survival to a life of significance, which should in theory provide us with increased clarity and motivation, can unfortunately become a source of stress — especially when everyone around us seems to have it all figured out. This is purpose anxiety: the fear of not knowing your purpose in life. A “why” for living To understand purpose anxiety, we need to understand what purpose is. Patrick McKnight and Todd Kashdan, two psychologists from George Mason University, defined purpose as a “central, self-organizing life aim that organizes and stimulates goals, manages behaviors, and provides a sense of meaning.” They describe purpose as a compass that provides direction to life, with continual targets for one to aspire to. They explain that purpose is based on a higher order of cognitive processing by the cerebral cortex, which means that it’s not driven by a primal motivation such as food, pleasure, or safety. While these primal motivations provide us with a “how” to survive, purpose is a “why” for living. While the words “purpose” and “meaning” are often used interchangeably, they’re actually two different constructs. Meaning is oriented towards cognition, our ability to mentally process and connect ideas and make sense of our lives. In contrast, purpose is geared toward action rather than comprehension. Both meaning and purpose enable us to better live in the present moment, but meaning helps us make sense of our memories so we can understand our past, while purpose helps us to consciously project ourselves in the future. Having a strong sense of purpose in life has been linked to many psychological benefits, such as higher levels of well-being, life satisfaction, self-acceptance, self-esteem, sense of control, and optimism. Conversely, lack of purpose is associated with depression and self-derogation.  Purpose seems to be a net positive in and of itself. But when the future is uncertain, we may struggle to define what exactly our purpose is. When unfruitful, this search for purpose can lead to existential distress, which the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl called “noögenic neurosis” — also known as purpose anxiety. The rise of purpose anxiety Our search for purpose can be associated with psychological distress, such as worry, fear, stress, frustration, and even jealousy. This phenomenon, purpose anxiety, has been defined by Larissa Rainey as “the experience of negative emotions in direct relation to the search for purpose.” While human beings have been wondering about their purpose in life for a long time, purpose anxiety has become more prevalent in the past century. Several factors may be responsible, such as longer life spans and a greater fulfillment of basic needs. As we’ve become wealthier and safer, we’ve started seeking motivation through the fulfillment of higher order needs. And as we’re now living longer than ever before, questions about death have been pushed further away in our minds, replaced with questions about life. In the words of psychologist Corey Keyes: “Science has succeeded in putting death further at bay, leaving in its wake new questions for individuals regarding what to do with the added years of life and how to make that time meaningful.” Culture has also shifted, making people reconsider their definition of self from an institutional perspective to an individual perspective. Work doesn’t provide purpose in the way it used to. Instead of accepting the purpose offered by society, we feel a powerful need to discover our own purpose for ourselves. Life is full of opportunities, but because purpose has become a choice instead of a calling, we are no longer provided with a map outlining what it looks like to live “the good life”. Fortunately, while it is true that searching for one’s life purpose involves psychological anguish, it can ultimately be rewarding. Dealing with purpose anxiety There is no magic bullet to finding a purpose in life, but we can make the search a lot less excruciating by applying simple strategies to minimize purpose anxiety. Avoid social comparison. When searching for a purpose in life, it can be tempting to compare ourselves to others, especially if we’re surrounded with people who seem to have found their calling. However, social comparison may inflate negative emotions and lead to purpose anxiety. Instead, practice self-reflection to understand your intrinsic motivations and explore the inner questions that fuel your curiosity. As Roy Bennet puts it: “Live the life of your dreams according to your vision and purpose instead of the expectations and opinions of others.” Embrace the liminal. Our time between life and death is an extended liminal space. It can be scary to not know where we’re going, which may lead us to desperately cling to a ladder of linear goals, where each next step is clearly defined in order to achieve success. But this liminal space can also be seen as a playground, full of opportunities for growth and discovery. Enjoy the journey by exploring different paths and learning about yourself along the way. Practice deliberate experimentation. As we have seen, purpose is action-oriented. Even if you don’t know yet what your purpose in life is, you can take steps towards investigating potential sources of purpose. Just like a scientist, design short experiments where you try working on a new project, meeting new people, or learning a new skill. Use metacognitive strategies to document the process and how it makes you feel so you can keep on adapting your experiments until you find a direction that feels stimulating and fulfilling. In the beautiful words of psychiatrist David Viscott: “The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.” Finding your purpose is a lifelong journey. It can cause anxiety. But, if we let ourselves enjoy the search, it can also help us live life to the fullest. The post Purpose Anxiety: The Fear of not Knowing your Purpose in Life appeared first on Ness Labs.

Our preferred sleeping patterns affect both our mental health and our productivity. To make the most of your time and your energy, it is therefore essential to understand your chronotype. Human chronotypes roughly fall into two broad categories: the early risers and the late risers. As someone who has always been a morning lark, I fall strongly into the early riser category. I enjoy waking up when the day is young and am at my most productive during the early morning hours. Night owls, on the other hand, tend to wake up later in the morning (or afternoon), and are much more energetic during the latter hours of the day. Common wisdom tells us that “the early bird catches the worm” — that people who wake up early are more likely to get what they want. Is it true? Is one really better than the other? Let’s have a look at the science of chronotypes. Our internal biological clock Chronotypes are studied in the field of chronobiology, the study of biological rhythms. Chronobiology examines both the effect of time on biological events, and our internal biological clocks. Franz Halberg of the University of Minnesota, who has coined the term circadian, is widely considered to be the father of American chronobiology. One of the key topics of study in chronobiology is how our chronotype is related to the circadian rhythm, a process that keeps our sleep-wake cycle roughly the same so that it can repeat every 24 hours. Put simply, the circadian rhythm helps us to stay awake during the day so that we sleep at night. While the circadian rhythm occurs naturally in health, external factors such as light and temperature can interrupt it. For example, those who live close to the north pole are known to be at risk of sleep disturbances including “midwinter insomnia” during dark periods of the year. Circadian rhythm disturbances have also been identified in some mood disorders including depression and seasonal affective disorder. Why we have different chronotypes “Morningness” and “eveningness” are alternative terms used to describe an individual’s chronotype and preferences for when one chooses to sleep. Those who lean towards morningness prefer to go to bed and wake earlier than those who lean towards eveningness. There is emerging evidence suggesting that our chronotype has a strong genetic component. Using chromosome information available in the UK Biobank cohort, researchers identified new genetic loci that could be related to core circadian rhythm and light-sensing pathways.  The variation between individuals could have evolved as a survival technique in hunter-gatherers, as it may have offered groups greater collective safety. While some people were sleeping, others could stay awake and protect the tribe. While your chronotype might be affected by genetics, there are other factors that can impact your preferred sleep pattern. Chronotype has been shown to vary with age. Kindergarten aged children are morning oriented, but by the teenage years, there has often been a shift to eveningness. Aged 17 to 20, the return to morningness may mark the end of adolescence. With increasing age in adulthood, one is likely to become even more morning oriented. Differences in sex are also present, with women tending to wake earlier and generally preferring morning activities when compared to men. The impact of sleep patterns Your sleep patterns can impact important areas of your life. Tristan Enright and Roberto Refinetti demonstrated that chronotype can impact academic achievement. Studying 207 university students, the researchers found some evidence that early birds may attain better grades than night owls, probably due to evening chronotypes “being more sleep deprived (…) as a result of the early schedule of most schools.” Christoph Randler and colleagues reviewed the evidence of multiple studies, and noted that morningness was related to greater extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness when compared to eveningness. However, there are plenty of positives associated with being a night owl. While morning types might have a slight academic advantage, eveningness correlates with an aptitude for creative thinking, including fluidity, flexibility and originality. Eveningness was also associated with being more open to new experiences. In addition, researchers Marina Giampietro and Guido Cavallera noted that those with an evening disposition had greater ability to apply divergent thinking strategies to visual content. This may make it easier to generate a variety of ideas or alternative solutions to problems. However, Giampietro and Cavallera found a higher risk of behavioral troubles, greater stress rates and more difficulties in social adaptation for night owls. Both chronotypes have advantages and limitations. The key is to understand your sleep patterns so you can use them to your advantage. How to make the most of your chronotype Determining your natural chronotype will allow you to make the most of it. Unlike students who are constrained by class times, many employers support flexible work hours which could empower you to work earlier or later to harness the benefits of your chronotype.  The easiest way to determine your chronotype is to put your alarm clock away and experiment with when you naturally want to go to bed and wake up. One’s chronotype is more of a spectrum than a binary measure, so you may find you fall somewhere between the early bird and the night owl. Once you have hidden your alarm clock, use a sleep tracking device on your watch or download an app to monitor your sleep patterns. This can help you understand how many hours you sleep for, how long it takes you to fall asleep, and during which part of the night you are getting restorative deep sleep. You may notice that your sleep quality or quantity is better following an early night, or when you go to bed later but have a lie in. Once you have a better idea of your chronotype, you will have a better idea of which sleep routine suits you. Adhering to this sleep schedule means you should be sleeping when your body is naturally ready to rest. For morning larks, this knowledge may help you avoid persevering with a task long after you should have gone to bed. For night owls, the pressure to wake up and work before you are ready should be eased. Once your sleep routine is in place, think about how best to manage your work demands. Schedule your creative work for when you are most alert  As an early bird, I know I am at my most creative before 11am. Where possible, this is therefore the time that I set aside for work that demands imagination, resourcefulness and innovation. In the afternoons, I know I can get the more straightforward admin work completed. Night owls can flip this schedule, first completing simple tasks, before creativity blossoms in the afternoon or evening. Chronotypes can impact important areas of your life, including academic achievement, creativity and thinking strategies. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that you can change your chronotype, as it is mostly determined by your age, sex and genetics. Recognizing your chronotype, and working out how to make the most of your biological rhythm, can help you work with your body’s needs, rather than against them. Maximizing your creativity and efficiency by working at times that suit your sleep pattern could help you feel better rested and able to work more productively. The post Chronotypes: Is it better to be a night owl or an early bird? appeared first on Ness Labs.

Dear reader, As the number of articles I’ve written has grown, it’s become harder and harder to make sense of the New Things Under the Sun back catalog. That’s a shame, because I update those older posts as the literature evolves, to keep them close to the academic frontier. So today I am happy to announce the launch of a set of indices to help readers figure out what they might want to read on New Things Under the Sun. Just a picture, check out the real thing here There are nine different indices, each of which gathers together all the articles I’ve written related to a specific topic, such as “how science works (or doesn’t)”, “geography of innovation”, and “how innovation is changing.” Inside each index, I’ve listed all the relevant articles on the topic and written a 3-6 bullet point description of the article’s contents. My hope is this makes it easy to find what you want to find. Click the button below to check out the indices and see if there is an article on the site that you would have read but didn’t know existed! Visit the Site Index But what if you’ve looked and what you want isn’t there? In that case, my advice is to head over to the progress forum, where I am answering user-submitted questions for the next 48 hours, and ask away. Thanks everyone; back to your regularly scheduled programming next time! -Matt Subscribe now P.S. Special thanks to my unpaid semi-competent intern, chatGPT for assistance writing bullet point descriptions of New Things Under the Sun articles. You didn’t really make this project easy, but you did make it feasible. Keep at it kid and I know, someday, I won’t have to rewrite 50% of your work. P.P.S Happy Valentines Day everyone!

Introspection is considered an inherently human ability. While external observation allows us to understand the world around us, internal contemplation allows us to examine our own thoughts and feelings to foster self-reflection and self-discovery. The practice may be as old as humanity itself. Thousands of years ago, Plato asked: “Why should we not calmly and patiently review our own thoughts, and thoroughly examine and see what these appearances in us really are?” Most spiritual traditions throughout the ages and across the planet include some form of introspection, whether it is the nepsis (Greek for “sober introspection”) of Orthodox Christian theology, the pratikraman (Sanskrit for “introspection”) of Jainism, or the muḥāsaba (Arabic for “self-interrogation) of Islam. Today, journaling and other methods of introspection are commonly encouraged by mental health practitioners to help people manage their thoughts and emotions, better understand their actions, and make more deliberate decisions. Which bears the question: is introspection always good, and does more introspection automatically lead to increased well-being? Times of introspection Whether we want it or not, life is full of moments of introspection. Some are forced upon us, for instance when we encounter failure or when we lose a loved one. Our attention is violently pulled inward, towards our internal mental and emotional states, without much control over the process. The cadence of these forced moments of introspection is by definition uncontrollable. Other times, we decide to sit down and make space for introspection. It may be because we are considering an important choice or feel like we need to better understand an experience, or because we have committed to an artificial cadence of introspection. You could have a daily journaling practice, a weekly review, or conduct a year-end retrospective. All of these practices have in common that they follow a fixed frequency, where you commit to regularly reflect on your thoughts, your emotions, and your progress towards your goals. You would think that such a habitual practice would be good in and of itself. But, as often with psychological processes, the reality is a little bit more complicated than that. Research has shown that introspection, when not practiced properly, can lead to many unintended consequences. In one of the most famous studies on the consequences of introspection, psychologist Anthony Grant discovered that introspection was negatively correlated with insight. The more participants practiced self-reflection, the less self-knowledge they had. Their results suggest that you could spend an infinite amount of time in introspection without emerging with any more insight than before you started. What is happening here? This phenomenon is called the introspection trap. We basically think that introspection will automatically give us the answers we need, and we go for the most obvious answers — the ones that feel simple and plausible. This often results in confirmation bias, our natural tendency to interpret and remember information in a way that confirms our prior hypotheses or personal beliefs. Another way we tend to go for the easiest answers is by only considering the most recent information, a form of memory bias known as the recency effect. This is particularly the case when we practice self-reflection right after an event, instead of giving our mind some time to process the experience. For instance, let’s say that you had a fight with a colleague. You decide to grab your journal or to open your daily notes to write about the conversation and how it made you feel. In that scenario, you are likely to seek justifications for why your colleague was wrong, and to be influenced by the strong emotions you are still feeling after the fight that just happened. In contrast, if you wait until the next morning to practice self-reflection, you will create more distance between your present self who is journaling and your past self who went through the unpleasant event, which will allow you to consider your experience more objectively. As you can see, the crucial aspect of temporality when it comes to introspection is not about how often you sit down to contemplate your thoughts and emotions. It’s about when you do it. Turning introspection into insight The two main cognitive biases that can reduce the benefits of introspection are the confirmation bias and the memory bias. If you jump to conclusions, you will simply validate your existing beliefs and you won’t be able to find the actual answer to your questions. If you systematically turn to introspection without allowing enough time for unconscious processing to happen in your mind, you won’t be able to turn introspection into insight. It doesn’t matter how often you practice journal or proactively review your experiences if you let these cognitive biases get in the way of generating helpful insights. Fortunately, there are some simple principles you can apply to avoid falling into the introspection trap. Make space for unconscious processing. If you just experienced a difficult or puzzling event, wait for a while before grabbing your notebook. You’ve probably noticed that we often have “aha” moments while showering — which we aptly call shower thoughts. It’s because we often don’t try to do any hard thinking in the shower. Your brain is capable of processing lots of information in the background through diffused thinking, but it requires that you temporarily let go of the steering wheel. Practice second-level thinking. Avoid jumping to conclusions by exploring alternative explanations beyond the most likely one. A quick way to practice second-level thinking to make better decisions is to use the 10-10-10 questions: “How will I feel about it 10 minutes from now? How will I feel about it 10 months from now? How will I feel about it 10 years from now?” Experiment with structured introspection. To make sure you don’t fall prey to cognitive biases, you can try using a self-reflection template with questions that encourage you to dig deeper. This could be asking “why?” five times to get to the core of the problem, or it could be a personal template that includes some of your most common blindspots. For instance, if you know that you tend to fall prey to the recency effect, you could add a question asking how the most recent instance connects to past experiences. Embrace moments of forced introspection. There will be times where life will throw unexpected challenges at you that force you to consider your thoughts and emotions. It may be tempting to avoid these painful moments of introspection, but they can be an incredible source of personal growth. Instead of turning away, try to lean into the discomfort to expand your self-knowledge. Harness the power of collective intelligence. Finally, it may sound counterintuitive, but you don’t have to do it all alone. Researchers call “group-based dialogic introspection”, where participants first spend some time examining their thoughts and emotions on their own, then discuss them with the group. While it doesn’t have to be as formal as in a research setting, you could try the exercise with a trusted friend so you can add a layer of objectivity to your self-reflection process. Albert Camus once wrote: “In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion”. However, the way we engage with our inner world will affect how useful this process can be. Without care, we can easily fall prey to the introspection trap. Like any other tool, introspection can be misused. Increasing your cadence of introspection won’t help you unlock more insights. Rather, you need to make room for unconscious processing of your experiences and try to reduce the impact of cognitive biases. A structured format or reflecting as part of a small group can be helpful to turn introspection into insights. The post The Introspection Trap appeared first on Ness Labs.

Some experts say tooth-grinding is a behavior rather than a disorder, and the dentist’s chair isn’t the best place to address it.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help you think better and work smarter. Alex MacCaw is the founder of Reflect, a networked note-taking app designed so you never miss a note, idea or connection. Reflect makes it a joy to collect information and connect ideas. In this interview, we talked about the most important principles for a sustainable note-taking app, the limitations of collaboration for note-taking, how to build a CRM with backlinks notes, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Alex! Let’s state the obvious: there are already lots of note-taking apps out there. But Reflect seems to be different in that it’s built around strong core values. That’s for sure — there’s a lot of different apps out there which is indicative of the size of the problem and the nuances in all the different ways people think. When it comes to note-taking everyone has an opinion and different requirements. If you’re not careful you try to appeal to everyone, and then you end up making a kind of Frankenstein app that serves no-one. That’s why, when I started the company, I wrote down a set of product principles to be our north star. When people come and ask me “Is Reflect the tool for me?” I point them to those principles and ask if they resonate. Those principles are: speed, security, reliability, and simplicity. All we’re trying to build is a simple tool that just works and gets out the way. It’s got to be frictionless and fast, it’s got to work offline and quickly sync, and it’s got to be secure – your notes are probably the most personal data you own. And how do those values translate to how Reflect works? For speed and simplicity, notes are instantly synced across your devices. Speed is prioritized as new things are added in, so that things don’t become overly clunky and slow over time. And we apply the “less is more” principle — we’d rather hone existing features than add more. For security, notes are fully end-to-end encrypted — only you have access to them. We’ve also passed a security audit and follow best practices. When it comes to reliability, you can take your notes across all your devices, and have them sync instantly, even with offline work. You can import your notes from other existing notes tools, and easily export your notes if you decide to leave. Last but not least, we focus on sustained, profitable growth, and have no intention of raising venture capital. This increases the chances we’re always around. That sounds great. Another challenge with many note-taking apps is that your ideas end up living in a silo, making it hard or overwhelming to share your thoughts with others. Collaboration is great when you’re working out of a Google Doc or a Notion page for a project with your team. They you’re writing in the public domain — these aren’t your internal thoughts.  But when you know (or even suspect) that others might be seeing what you are writing, you become much more likely to self-censor. Your thoughts and ideas become less original. For something like your personal notes, this is problematic. Instead of focusing on how to give others access to your notes, thoughts and ideas, Reflect focuses on how to privately capture everything in a frictionless way. This might be saving snippets from your Kindle or browser, easily capturing an idea from mobile on the fly, or recording a voice recording directly into your notes. We want to eliminate that feeling of forgetting a brilliant idea before writing it down, or what your thoughts were on a pitch that was made weeks ago. When you are ready to share your ideas with the world, you can one-click publish to allow anyone to access that specific note. Another use case I find exciting is using Reflect as a CRM. How does that work? Most CRMs function like a digital rolodex. You put a contact in with some info, then shut it away until you need that specific person’s contact info. At best you can put additional details of the contact into the file. But this misses everything important that happens around that person (or place, or thing). The conversations and interactions you’ve had with the person, where your last conversation left off, and every other detail you learn and collect along the way is what really makes the difference. Not forgetting the details helps us build stronger relationships and connections. Take 1-to-1 meetings. Reflect pulls in your calendar appointments, and auto creates a backlinked note around the event with the subjects. When you have a 1-1 with someone on your team, you can instantly pull up the linked note and pick up right where you left off last time. This system is great for people like myself who have a ‘goldfish brain’. Instead of repeating someone’s name in your head over and over to try to internalize that small piece of information, just create a backlinked note.  What about you, how do you use Reflect? The way I use Reflect does evolve and change as I change, but generally speaking it goes like this… Everyday, Reflect automatically creates a new note dedicated to that day. I have a ‘journal’ template that contains things like ‘top of mind’, ‘grateful’, ‘habit checklist’, and what I worked on that day. Meetings go in my daily note too — they’re a one-click add with the calendar integration. In the evenings I like recording an audio journal. This then gets transcribed and uploaded into Reflect. That’s it! So simple! What’s the personal drive behind building Reflect? I have got different things out of the different companies I’ve started. My last one, Clearbit, got quite big and did the whole VC thing. It was a huge catalyst for personal growth and where I spent some formative years of my twenties. With Reflect, I’m really optimizing for having fun, and for me that means programming. If I get to sit down and build out some new features, maybe chat to our customers in Discord, well, that’s a good day for me. It’s also been nice building products for myself for a change. In many ways building a consumer company is a lot harder than building something for businesses, but one of the perks is that you are the customer. And you get to make it just the way you want it. That does sound like the perfect way to scratch your own itch. How do you recommend someone get started with Reflect? First head to our website and start a free trial. After signing up, read through our 4 page note-taking course. It will tell you how to use Reflect effectively, and will also give you some real-world examples and use cases to get you started. Create your first daily note by outlining your to-do list for the day and linking any names or places — if it starts with a name, link it. Keep building from there! Your notes will become more valuable over time as you connect things through backlinks and tags. And finally… What’s next for Reflect? We’ve got lots of fun stuff cooking. The most immediate of which is my favorite thing to work on: performance improvements. We’re about to launch a version of Reflect that uses less memory and starts twice as fast. Later this year we’ve got some things like an iPad app, advanced search, and a few more AI related things we’ll share more about soon. Thank you so much for your time, Alex! Where can people learn more about Reflect? Thank you! You can sign up and find more about the app on reflect.app. We also have a note-taking course on our Reflect Academy page, where people can learn how to take better notes. And of course they can follow @reflectnotes on Twitter. The post Unleashing the power of networked notes with Alex MacCaw, founder of Reflect appeared first on Ness Labs.

For decades, the metaphor that the brain is a machine has caused some confusion. However, even if the metaphor is incorrect from a biological standpoint, viewing the mind as a machine can be useful as a heuristic for everyday decision-making. Created by a cognitive scientist at Harvard University, the concept of “mindware” builds upon the computer analogy to encapsulate the mental knowledge and procedures we use to solve problems and make decisions. It’s a practical metaphor to help you decide what to “download” into your mind. What we download onto our mind The term “mindware” was coined by David Perkins in his 1996 book Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence, where he argues that there are three types of intelligence: neural, experiential, and reflective. Perkins describes neural intelligence as the “hard-wired, original equipment”, or the brain’s hardware that we have to work with initially. This form of intelligence might be genetically determined, and is the type that is often measured by traditional intelligence tests. Neural intelligence might assist you with pattern recognition, time series prediction, signal processes and anomaly detection. Experiential intelligence refers to context-specific knowledge that is accumulated through experience. The more stimulating the environment you are exposed to, the more experiential intelligence you might expect to acquire. Varied stimulation could therefore give you an intellectual advantage. The last type of intelligence according to Perkins is reflective intelligence. Reflective intelligence is what Perkins calls mindware; the ability to use and manipulate our cerebral skills to effectively utilize neural and experiential intelligence. Mindware represents the tools that we can “download” to our mind to broaden our thinking patterns and processes — it’s not too different from the most scientifically accepted concept of metacognition. Mindware as a practical metaphor Again, mindware is not a neurobiological aspect of the brain you could directly observe, but rather a useful metaphor for thinking about thinking. Whereas neural intelligence can be compared to the hardware that a computer is built with, reflective intelligence, or mindware, would be the figurative software. In his book, Perkins writes that “the programs you run in your mind […] enable you to do useful things with data stored in your memory”. Perkins argues that reflective intelligence is a form of intelligent behavior, and its development should therefore be fostered. As with computer software, the mindware that we might choose to download will depend on what we currently consume, our interests, and our goals for development. If you apply this metaphor, choosing to download useful mindware can be beneficial for everyday decision-making. Selecting the right mindware for your needs will help you make the best use of your mind in terms of knowledge, understanding, behavior and attitudes. With mindware supporting the development of your thinking, you can make better choices, decisions and judgments. With greater quality to your reasoning, you can select better mindware. It’s a virtuous cycle. In his book Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, Richard E. Nisbett explores how mindware can promote a powerful form of problem-solving. Mindware can help us frame common problems so that scientific and statistical principles can be applied to them. Nisbett argues that developing these tools needed for cognitive reasoning allows for the practical application when faced with personal or professional decisions. Just as with computer software, we should also remain alert to the risks of downloading “cognitive malware”. A  study by researchers led by Jala Rizeq argued that contamination with cognitive malware could cause unwarranted beliefs and attitudes, including conspiracy beliefs and anti-science attitudes. Without maintenance, our brains can become congested by malware. Learning how to clear the malware and make space for helpful mindware can help to protect us from negative thought processes or decisions. With practice, one can learn to better identify forms of malware so that it is not downloaded in the first place. This idea is similar to the concept of mind gardening, which encourages us to be mindful of the “seeds” we plant in our mind garden so it produces supportive, productive, creative thoughts. How to download useful mindware One of the first steps is to become more mindful of the content you consume. In the same way that you would not download random software onto your computer without checking if it is safe and genuine, downloading mindware to your brain requires the same process. Before you cognitively “download” anything new, think about whether you trust the source of the data, and if the information will benefit you. A common form of mindware is mental models. They can be used constructively in shaping our thoughts and behaviors. You may discover mental models that will work for you when reading a book, listening to a podcast, or having a conversation with a friend or colleague. If you encounter a useful mental model, add it to your note-taking app for later reference. Conversely, avoid downloading cognitive biases, a form of mindware that can lead you to incorrectly process and interpret information or to make inaccurate assumptions from your observations. This can negatively impact the way we think, or stop us from fully exploring the potential consequences of our decisions. Being aware of cognitive biases can help us ensure we intentionally act in ways that will support our personal or professional growth. The theory of learnable intelligence shows that by downloading mindware, we can take control of the tools we employ for thinking. To remain healthy, our minds need to be treated with care, including the mindware that we download to them. In the same way that you take care to protect your computer from malware, it’s important that you feel confident about the reliability, reputability, and safety of the information you consume. This will allow you to create a library of mindware that will support you in making well-thought-out decisions. That’s part of why the concept of mindware can be such a helpful metaphor. The post Mindware: A Theory of Learnable Intelligence appeared first on Ness Labs.

Like the rest of New Things Under the Sun, this article will be updated as the state of the academic literature evolves; you can read the latest version here. You can listen to this post above, or via most podcast apps here. Talent is spread equally over the planet, but opportunity is not. Today I want to look at some papers that try to quantify the costs to science and innovation from barriers to immigration. Specifically, let’s look at a set of papers on what happens to individuals with the potential to innovate when they immigrate versus when they do not. (See my post Importing Knowledge for some discussion on the impact of immigration on native scientists and inventors) All of these papers confront the same fundamental challenge: successfully immigrating is (usually) a matter of choice, selection, and luck. For the purposes of investigating the impact of immigration on innovation, that means we can’t simply compare immigrants to non-immigrants. For example, immigrants (usually) choose to migrate, and if they do so because they believe they will be more successful abroad, that signals something about their underlying level of ambition and risk tolerance. That, in turn, might mean they are more likely to be innovative scientists or inventors, even if they had not migrated. Compounding this problem, countries impose all sorts of rules about who is allowed to migrate and many of these rules make it easier to migrate if you can demonstrate some kind of aptitude and talent. That means successful immigrants are often going to be drawn from a pool of people more likely to have the talent to succeed in science and invention, even if they had not immigrated. These are challenges; but there is also a degree of capricious luck in immigration (and life in general). There are people - perhaps many people - who want to immigrate and have extraordinary talent, but who do not for all sorts of random reasons. Compared to otherwise identical people who do migrate, they might lack information, financial resources, or face higher barriers to legal immigration. Indeed, in many cases, immigration is literally handed out by lottery! The papers we’ll look at employ various strategies to try and find comparable groups of people who immigrate and people who do not, to infer the impact of immigration and place on innovation. Subscribe now Talented High Schoolers One way to deal with the selection effect is to try and measure the talent of a sample of both immigrants and non-immigrants and then compare immigrants and non-immigrants who appear to have similar underlying talent. Agrawal and Gaule (2020) and Agrawal et al. (2023) does this with the International Mathematical Olympiads. The International Mathematical Olympiads is a prominent math competition for high school students from around the world that’s been held annually for decades. Up to six representatives from each country are selected via regional and national competitions, and then travel to a common city and try to solve six different (presumably very hard) math problems. Because it’s an Olympiad, winners take home gold, silver and bronze medals. Agrawal and coauthors know the scores of all the competitors from 1981 to 2000 and then look to see what happens to the competitors later in life. In Agrawal and Gaule (2020) they show that scores on these math competitions strongly predicts later success as a mathematician. That in itself is surprising, given that the talents for doing creative mathematical research may, in principle, differ substantially from performance in a competition. From Agrawal and Gaule (2020) Their dataset also establishes something else: students from low income countries are less likely to obtain PhDs in math than students with the same score from high-income countries. In Agrawal et al. (2023) they use this dataset to look at the different fates of those who immigrate from their home country and those who do not. On average, a migrant is about twice as likely to be employed in academia as a mathematician as someone from the same county who got the same math score but did not migrate. Of course, while math scores help address the problem of selection, this doesn’t really get at the problem of choice. Perhaps people who really want to be mathematicians are disproportionately likely to migrate, since the highest ranked mathematics departments tend to be in the USA, and it’s this difference in career intention that explains the difference in career outcomes between migrants and non-migrants. Agrawal et al. (2023) provides some additional evidence that this is not purely an outcome of career choice. For one, looking only at migrant and non-migrant students who both become math academics (in their own country or abroad), they find the migrants go on to garner about 85% more citations to their publications than their domestic peers (remember, with the same score in math competitions). We might think citations aren’t a great measure of math skill (see my post Do Academic Citations Measures the Value of Ideas?), but they also show migrant academics are about 70% more likely to become speakers at the International Congress of Mathematicians (a non-citation-based measure of community recognition). So among people who ended up becoming academic mathematicians (either at home or abroad), the ones who migrated went on to have more distinguished careers, as compared to their peers who did equally well in high school on math. But this is still pretty indirect evidence. Fortunately, Agrawal and coauthors also just asked Olympiad medalists directly about their preferences in a survey. From respondents in low- and middle-income countries, 66% said they would have liked to do their undergraduate degree in the USA if they could have studied anywhere. Only 25% actually did. Just 11% said their first choice was to study in their home country. In fact, 51% did. Why didn’t they study abroad if that’s what they wanted to do? A bunch of the survey evidence suggests the problem was money. For 56% of the low- and middle-income respondents, they said the availability of financial assistance was very or extremely important. Students from low- and middle-income countries were also much more likely to choose a hypothetical funded offer of admission at a lower ranked school than their peers in high-income countries. Gibson and McKenzie (2014) provides some complementary evidence outside of mathematics. As part of a larger project on migration and brain drain, they identify 851 promising young New Zealanders who graduated high school between 1976 and 2004. These students either represented New Zealand on the International Mathematical Olympiad teams, the International Chemistry Olympiad team, were top in exams, or earned the New Zealand equivalent of the valedictorian rank. Like Agrawal and coauthors, they can then see what happens to New Zealanders who migrate, versus those who remain. They find researchers who moved abroad publish more than those who do not. As noted, this poses some potential problems; even though we know all these students were talented, those who migrate may have different unobserved levels of skill, ambition, risk tolerance, or something. One way they attempt to deal with this is to focus their attention on the subset of researchers who actually do migrate away from New Zealand, and then looking to see what happens to their research output when they move back. The idea here is those who left were, at least initially, displaying similar levels of skill, ambition, risk tolerance, and so forth (if so, why did they return? We’ll get to that). For each New Zealand migrant researcher who returns to New Zealand, Gibson and McKenzie try to find another migrant who stayed abroad, but is similar in age, gender, what they studied in high school, highest degree, and so on. They then look to see what happens to the number of citations to their academic work. While both groups had essentially the same citations prior to return migration, after one group returned to New Zealand, the citations to their work declined substantially relative to the citations of migrants who remained abroad. From Gibson and McKenzie (2014).Citations fall at the end partially due to a mechanical effect: there are fewer years available for more recent papers to receive citations. Again, we see that being abroad was good for research productivity. But again, perhaps we are concerned that there is an important but unstated difference between New Zealanders who stayed abroad and those who returned home. Perhaps the ones who came back simply couldn’t cut it? But we actually don’t see much evidence of that. The figure above matches each returnee to someone who stayed abroad based on a number of characteristics. But one characteristic they were not matched on is citations to their academic work. And yet, prior to returning, their citations were on a very similar trajectory. And like Agrawal and coauthors, Gibson and McKenzie also surveyed their subjects to see why they moved back. Most of the answers were not related to individual research productivity, but had to do with, for example, concerns about aging parents, child-raising, and the location of extended family. Scholarship Restrictions Another line of evidence comes from Kahn and MacGarvie (2016), which focuses on PhD students who come to America from abroad. The paper’s big idea is to compare students who come on the prestigious Fulbright program to similar peers who were not Fulbright fellows. The students and their matches are really similar in this case: they graduated from the same PhD program, either studying under the exact same advisor and graduating within 3 years of each other, or merely studying in the same program but graduating in the same year. The only difference was the Fulbright students have a requirement to leave the USA for two years after finishing their studies, whereas the matched students faced no such...

We live in a society where speed has become a measure of performance. We try to quickly go through our to-do lists, keep up with fast-evolving market demands, and rapidly ship product updates. Sure, we’re productive, in the oldest sense of the term — from Latin producere, which means “to bring forth”. But it somehow doesn’t feel like we are going forth. We dreadfully sense that for all the work we do, we’re not really growing. We’re stuck in a pointless pursuit, trying to outrun each other and ultimately outrunning ourselves. As a result, the breakneck pace of blind productivity is leaving many people burnt out. In a 1953 article, famous physicist Samuel Goudsmit already wondered “whether [all the] contrivances physicists have lately rigged up to create energy by accelerating particles of matter [weren’t] playing a wry joke on their inventors. “They are accelerating us too,” he says. In protesting against the speedup, Goudsmit can speak with authority, for in the course of only a few years, he, like many other contemporary physicists, has seen his way of life change from a tranquil one of contemplation to a rat race.” We could argue that speed is not problematic in and of itself. In fact, many of us find ourselves able to work quite fast on a project when we feel passionate about it — as if wind was blowing through our sails and easily pushing us forward. But it’s because such projects come with a sense of direction. A mental model for directed growth Speed itself doesn’t have direction. When you say that you’re moving at a certain speed (“I’m driving 80 miles per hour”), it doesn’t tell you anything about where you’re going. This is what mathematicians call a “scalar” — a quantity that can be fully described by its magnitude alone. Speed is a scalar, and so are volume, mass, and time. When you’re talking about how fast or how big something is, you’re describing it as a scalar. In contrast, a vector is described by both its magnitude and its direction. Velocity is an example of vector: it not only tells you how fast you’re going, but also where you’re going — for instance, “I’m driving 80 miles per hour to the south.” Thinking about your actions as vectors instead of scalars is a helpful mental model to manage your goals. You’re working a lot (magnitude), but are you learning (direction)? Your team is shipping product updates fast (magnitude), but is customer feedback improving (direction)? How to design effective vectors of action Once you understand this mental model, you can consider your vectors of action so it becomes easier to objectively assess your progress, your impact, and your well-being. Consider velocity over speed. Remember to not only consider the magnitude of actions — i.e. how fast you’re going, how much work you’re producing — but also the direction of your actions. When considering your actions, think about your trajectory, such as your learning goals, personal growth, opportunities for self-discovery, and wider impact. Reflect on your sense of direction. Do you feel like you’re being pulled in different directions? That you’re unclear as to where exactly you — or your team — are going? Or maybe you are going in the right direction, but at the expense of your well-being. Block time to regularly review both your progress and its impact on your emotional and mental health. There is no point making progress if you burn out in the process. Reviewing your external success and your internal experience will help you more sustainable work practices.  Keep adjusting your trajectory. If you notice that you’re not going anywhere or not going in the right direction, make changes to get on a path that makes sense to you. These changes can be small such as tweaking a workflow or implementing a new routine, or bigger such as exploring a new career or starting a side project. Again, what matters is that these changes improve the direction of your actions. Vectors of action offer a more holistic view of your progress and whether you’re going in the right direction. Seeing your actions as a vector and not a scalar is a simple mental model to reflect and make adjustments to the way you work, so you can maximize personal growth without sacrificing your mental health. In the words of Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman: “Growth is a direction, not a destination.” The post Vectors of Action appeared first on Ness Labs.

Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Laurent Cozic is the founder of Joplin, an open source note-taking app designed to help you capture your thoughts and securely access them from any device. In this interview, we talked about why open source matters for note-taking, the benefits of offline-first note-taking applications, his commitment to privacy and security, and much more. Enjoy the read! Hi Laurent, it’s great to have you! Joplin is one of the very few open source note-taking apps out there. What made you decide to go this route? The fact that it is open source is an important aspect for many of our users, because it means there is no vendor locking on the data, and that data can be easily exported and accessed in various ways. I went this route because I was looking for a good note taking app back in 2016 and couldn’t find any satisfying option, and I didn’t want to end up having all my data under the control of a third-party. Indeed, most companies have little incentive to provide good export options, because obviously they don’t want you to go elsewhere. So the day you want to migrate, you find that you’re kind of stuck here. With Joplin on the other hand, we make a point of providing multiple and reliable export options to standard export formats. Moreover, we have a strong commitment to make an app focused on privacy and security, and the best way to achieve that is to be transparent about the software. By publishing the code publicly, anyone can audit it and verify that the data is not misused for example. Those positions are not always economically sound ones — after all, anyone can steal the source code if it is public, and anyone can easily move to a different app if we make it easy. However, we want to differentiate ourselves and, in a way, convince our users to stay with us by providing quality and secure software you can rely on. That’s a great product philosophy! You’re also a vocal advocate for privacy and security. As we have more and more of our data online, keeping things private and secure is increasingly important, even more so for a note taking app, which can contain a lot of private notes and work-related documents. One of the ways we achieve this is via the end-to-end encryption feature. It means that the data is encrypted on your device before it is uploaded to the cloud. And since you’re the only one who knows the key, nobody else can access your data. Even if someone hacks the cloud server, they will not be able to read the encrypted information. We are also transparent about any connection that the application makes, and disclose the list of third-party services the app needs access to. Those are needed to provide certain features such as auto-update or to search for plugins, but usually those features can be disabled too. Finally, we also work with security researchers to keep the app more secure. We receive a few vulnerability reports every year and act on them as quickly as possible. The app was audited by a security analyst as well, who provided a number of useful pieces of advice, most of which were implemented. For example, we now make use of the system keychain to store sensitive information on Windows and macOS. Beside your strong commitment to open source, privacy, and security, what makes Joplin different from other note-taking solutions? Besides regular plaintext notes, Joplin supports various media formats such as images, videos, audio files and PDFs. From the mobile app you can also take a photo and attach it to the current note, and we will also add freehand drawing to the desktop and mobile apps soon. It’s also possible to create diagrams and charts using Mermaid, and to create maths expressions using Katex. One of the strengths of Joplin is the ability to customise it to your needs — you can do so for example by installing plugins. We have close to 150 different plugins to add functionalities such as backlink support (Zettelkasten style), calendaring, templates, tabs to open multiple notes at once, etc. And there are various plugins to improve the editor, improve tag management, and customise the application theme. We also have an Extension API which external applications can be used to interact with Joplin. For example, someone created a VSCode plugin to browse your notes from the editor, and there’s also a Thunderbird plugin to create a note from an email. Not long ago, we’ve also added support for “callback urls”. Those are Joplin-specific URLs that can be used to open a note within Joplin from any third-party application. For example, we use this feature in our issue tracker — the issues are on GitHub but we link to certain Joplin notes that will contain some additional information. Via these plugins and external applications, it’s possible to customise the application to fit your workflow, such as GTD and Zettelkasten, and to automate and simplify various tasks. Finally, Joplin is offline-first, so data is always available on the device, even without an internet connection. I believe this gives peace of mind because you can be sure that your notes can always be accessed, even without a connection, and even if the service you sync with closes down. This sounds like an infinitely extendable note-taking app! What about collaborating with other people? Thanks to Joplin Cloud it is now possible to collaborate on notebooks with others. You can share a notebook with someone, and they will have full access to it along with the notes and sub-notebooks it might contain. This is useful to teams for example, to share documents related to a project, or to create a wiki. We actually use this extensively at Joplin. As with regular notes, this shared data is secured using end-to-end encryption. Additionally you can also publish a note to the internet. The app will generate a secure link which can be shared with others — the note will then be displayed as a mini-website and can be accessed from any browser. With so many different use cases and so many different devices you support, what does it look like to capture notes with Joplin? Over time we developed various ways to capture notes into Joplin. The app is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android and all those apps can sync with each other. Additionally we provide a web clipper extension that can be used to save web pages or to take screenshots in the browser and save them to notes. The mobile apps also let you capture information in various ways. For example, you can take a photo and attach it to a note, or share documents with the app to again attach them. That kind of flexibility sounds great. What about you, how do you use Joplin? For work, I use it for example to maintain a list of features to be implemented. I also record various ideas for new features or plugins. And I keep various notes on how to run Joplin Cloud, email templates too. For personal notes, I use the app for many different things. For example, to organise trips so that I know where to go and when to go, and I link the relevant flight tickets and other reservations to these notes. I also have notebooks on various topics — cars, various recipes. I also use it to store sheet music so that I can easily access them from my tablet on the piano. I have general to-do lists too as well as shopping lists. My notes are not particularly well organised. I simply put them into different notebooks, and I rely on the search engine to find what I need. I use the “Go to anything” feature a lot, as it allows me to quickly jump from one note to another without leaving the keyboard. How do you recommend someone get started? There are many ways to use Joplin so it will depend on your objectives. For your own personal use, simply download the app from our website, install it and press “Synchronise” — that will give you some options to sync your data between devices. From there, try the app and see if you like it! Something that’s often overlooked in Joplin is that a large collection of plugins is available, and that’s useful to add certain features that you need but are missing from the app. To install a plugin, open the “Config” screen and navigate to the “Plugins”. From there you can easily search and install plugins. If you are planning to use Joplin for your organisation, it might be a good idea to give a try to the Teams option of Joplin Cloud. With this you can easily manage your team members, add new ones, and manage billing in a central place. Once Joplin Cloud is set up for everybody, you can share and collaborate on notebooks, and publish notes to the internet. And finally… What’s next for Joplin? For the fourth year now, we participate in Google Summer of Code, which means a few students will be working over the summer on various projects to improve the app. In general we remain committed to the open source spirit of Joplin and GSoC is a great way to do that — it gives students a chance to work on a relatively large codebase while being mentored by us, and on our side we can get some great work done. It’s always an interesting experience and we’re looking forward to it. The Joplin Cloud service that was launched in 2021 has been a great success and is being continuously improved. It offers increased performances over other sync options, and has additional features such as sharing and publishing notes. We have recently added a way to publish multiple linked notes, which essentially means that it’s possible to publish a whole website via Joplin Cloud. More such changes are coming as we want to make it easier to collaborate on notes and documents using this service. For example, we plan to implement an “email to note” feature soon, which will allow sending an email to a special Joplin Cloud address, and that will add the note to your collection. We are also very keen to make improvements to the mobile app, both i...