Concepts

Ideas I refer to and appreciate:

• Cheeseburger Ethics - some things are bad, without it being a big deal - it’s still good to try to do them less, but you shouldn’t consider yourself morally obliged to eliminate them entirely

• The Galahad Principle - sometimes getting to 100% yields disproportionate value over being at 99%

• The Starfish Principle - every little bit helps, and while you may barely make a dent in something on a macro level, you can still have a huge impact for some individuals

• Universal Greeting Time - it’s always morning when someone says hello online, and always late night when they leave - instead of spending time figuring out what time it is for someone, you can now spend time explaining Universal Greeting Time instead

• Goodhart’s Law Isn’t as Useful as You Might Think - Goodhart’s law (“when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”) is pithy but overly simple - when people are pressured to meet a target, they can work to improve the system, or distort the system or data - you need to make things hard to distort, and give people space to improve the system.

• The Cube Rule of Food - food can be classified based on the location of structural starch