I came back here for the comments after clicking through and my wifi was glitching, leading me to get a "can't find this site" message for a minute. Interesting experience.
> Was this physically difficult to write? If it flowed out effortlessly in one go, it's usually fluff.
Probably my best and most insightful stuff has been produced more or less effortlessly, since I spent enough time/effort _beforehand_ getting to know the domain and issue I was interested in from different angles.
When I try writing fluff or being impressive without putting in the work first, I usually bump up against all the stuff I don't have a clear picture of yet, and it becomes a neverending slog. YMMV.
My most successful blog post was written about something I felt strongly about, backed by knowledge and a lot of prior thought. It was written with passion.
People asked for permission to repost it, it got shared on social media, it ended up showing higher in Google than a Time magazine (I think) interview of Bill Gates with the same title.
my take on this book is that 1) it contains a lot of foundational knowledge/wisdom about design as interpreted broadly that is very useful across contexts, and 2) it is itself, ironically, an example of poor design. Not in the visual sense, but in that it's structure and writing do a pretty bad job actually conveying that knowledge to the reader and being navigable.
I tried reading it and hated it, then I came back knowing bits and pieces of its contents from elsewhere and was like "yup, this is the only place I've seen all of this together".
"Now, one day back at Data General, his weariness focused on the logic analyzer and the small catastrophes that come from trying to build a machine that operates in billionths of a second. On this occasion, he went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal:
I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."
— from "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder
As the first author on the salmon paper, yes, that was exactly our point. Researchers were capitalizing on chance in many cases as they failed to do effective corrections to the multiple comparisons problem. We argued with the dead fish that they should.
Curious what you find to be "bs" about the results of this paper? That statistical corrections are necessary when analysing fMRI scans to prevent spurious "activations" that are only there by chance?
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