Rules, Guides and Heuristics

Mine

Causal Rules

1. Exercise
2. Take a nap
3. Eat something healthy and drink water every two hours you’re awake
4. Good sooner is better than perfect later – the first does not preclude the second
5. Big or persistent problems should be broken into smaller problems
6. Any thing you want to remember should be written down
7. To learn a thing – do it. To master a thing – do it for many years
8. You have no will-power. Bribe, incentivize and trick yourself
9. Take your hobbies seriously
10. Balance is more important than any individual success or failure

How to Practice

1. Use meta-research to prevent covering material you already know or material you are not ready for
2. Find ways to practice new skills so that the outcome will not be ambiguous
3. Knowledge and skill should be reviewed only often enough to keep them fresh
4. Make the decision to move into research consciously, and be aware that learning what is established in a field will almost always be faster than original research
5. A single exercise should employ as many new skills as possible with out becoming ambiguous and review as many old skills as possible that need refreshing

Emergency Response Steps

From Emergency Response Plan

1. Roles
2. Reaction
3. Location
4. Protocol
5. Data
6. Communication
7. Objective
8. Planning

Gaining Trust

From con-man Victor Lustig

1. Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con-man his coups).
2. Never look bored.
3. Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.
4. Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones.
5. Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other fellow shows a strong interest.
6. Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown.
7. Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (they’ll tell you all eventually).
8. Never boast. Just let your importance be quietly obvious.
9. Never be untidy.
10. Never get drunk.

Motivation

From Dan Pink

• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Purpose

Expertise

According to Malcom Gladwell in "Tipping Point" it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in almost anything.

Spotting the Future

The future often comes from (source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/04/ff_spotfuture/)

1. Cross pollinating seemingly unrelated disciplines
2. Converting a sub-exponential process to use an exponential one
3. Remove artificial scarcity
4. Audacious goals, when achieved, transform the world
5. Open (extensible) system are generally more successful than closed ones
6. System should have design and usability down to their core
7. The way that people voluntarily waste time is indicative of coming trends

Joi Ito of MIT

http://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/45107871992/joi-ito-of-mit-media-lab-from-a-wired

Resilience over strength

Yield and allow failure then bounce back instead of trying to resist failure

Pull over push

Pull the resources from the network as needed, as opposed to centrally stocking and controlling them

Risk over safety

System over objects

Compasses over maps

Practice over theory

Because sometimes we don’t know why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that there is some theory around it

Disobedience over compliance

No one gets a Nobel Prize for doing what they are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience

Emergence over authority

Learning over education