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List of things I think are worth reading (last updated 3/1/2021)
viviers20

Really great summaries! 

I'd list this thread if I ever made a list of things worth reading. 

The point on normal distributions is fascinating. I've heard Jordan Peterson mention this phenomenon to explain why males populate the prisons even though they are only slightly more aggressive than women on average, but I think the finland vs india example is even better.

Also - the point on how to read a book. I've never heard of that breakdown. I think I'll use it when digesting information in the future.

Btw, why did you put log(popularity) in the denominator? 

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2just_browsing
Glad to hear I pointed you to some helpful stuff! The log(popularity) is to discourage me from populating this list with lots of insightful but really well-known or easy to find stuff—I think this would make it less interesting or useful. Then "log" was arbitrarily chosen to weaken the penalty on popularity (compared to if I just divided by it). I'm not doing any of this quantitatively anyway, so it's really just me rationalizing including "Doing Good Better" but not the n other good popular things I 'should' similarly recommend. 
Does making unsteady incremental progress work?
viviers30

Awesome post! I wonder if there's a take-home that can improve motivation for some people here. I'm not convinced that telling people they don't have to be perfect everyday will work. It could give them an out. A rationalisation on any given day that "it's okay to slack today if I pull up the average later on". 

 

Also how do you create these graphs? They're awesome

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2ChristianKl
It's possible to be stuck in local maxima for various optimization pressures. There are often cases where you can either do a task in the way that was presently most effective for you or try new ways to do the task.
1peterbarnett
Thanks! Yeah, I definitely think that "it's okay to slack today if I pull up the average later on" is a pretty common way people lose productivity. I think one framing could be that if you do have an off day, that doesn't have to put you off track forever, and you can make up for it in the future.  I make the graphs using the [matplotlib xkcd mode](https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.xkcd.html), it's super easy you use, you just put your plotting in a "with plt.xkcd():" block