Half of what gets called "doing your own research" is reading until you find somebody who already agrees with you and then stopping.

Can we talk about the specific misery of a group chat trying to decide where to eat? Six people, all of whom have a preference, none of whom will state it first. Somebody offers a place. Two react with a thumbs up, which means nothing. One says "I'm easy!" which is a lie. The person who actually wanted Thai says nothing, because saying it now would look like overruling. Ninety minutes pass. You end up at the place nobody chose, which everyone privately rates about a six. The thing is that this is not a coordination problem, it is a status problem. Everyone knows the fastest solution is one person deciding. What nobody wants is to be the person who decided, because then the evening is theirs, and if the food is mediocre it is their fault. The only fix I have found is somebody booking it before the chat starts. Not suggesting — booking. Nobody has ever objected, which rather gives the game away: it was never that people disagreed, it was that nobody wanted to own it.

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

Nobody plays anything until it goes dark any more and I cannot work out whether that is the traffic, the phones, or the parents.

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

A thing I have noticed after fifteen years of interviewing people: almost every interview process is measuring how comfortable someone is being evaluated, and then reporting that as a measure of how good they are at the job. The tell is that the same candidate performs completely differently depending on the room. Give someone a whiteboard and three strangers and you learn how they handle being watched. Give them a real problem and an afternoon and you learn something about how they think. These correlate weakly, and we have built an entire industry on assuming they correlate strongly. What makes it hard to fix is that the noisy signal is cheap and the good signal is expensive. An hour of whiteboarding costs an hour. A realistic work sample costs a day of the candidate's time and half a day of yours, and multiplied across a funnel that is a real budget line that somebody has to defend. So we keep the cheap test and then add stages to compensate for its noise, which is how a process ends up with six rounds that are each individually indefensible. I do not have a clean answer. I have stopped pretending the current thing measures what we say it measures.

We built an entire economy on the idea that people will keep buying things they already have, and then act surprised when the things are designed to stop working.

"Just be more confident" ignores that confidence is downstream of having been right in front of people a few times, and nobody can give you that. You can only be handed the room, and whoever is giving the advice is usually the one who decides who gets the room.

A genuine question for anyone who did science at school more recently than me: how much of what I was taught has quietly been revised? Nobody sends an update.

Science journalism is mostly press releases with the caveats removed, and the caveats were the science.

We know more about the surface of Mars than the floor of our own ocean and that is a genuinely strange set of priorities.

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.

Remote work has made engineering teams worse, and the bit that broke is the part nobody wrote down: juniors learning by overhearing.

Polarisation gets the blame, but the lasting damage from social media might be flattening — every subject arrives at the same size, in the same box, with the same three reactions available, whether it is a war or a sandwich.

A thing I keep noticing about rereading. I used to think rereading a book was a waste of a life that only has room for so many books. Then I reread one I had loved at nineteen and found a completely different novel inside the same sentences — the bits I had underlined were not the good bits, and the character I had dismissed as tiresome was plainly the one the author cared about. What I had actually done at nineteen was read my own circumstances and call it a book. That is not a criticism of nineteen. It is what reading is. But it means a book you have only read once is a book you have read exactly one way, and the copy on the shelf has more in it than you took. I have no system for this and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I just stopped feeling guilty about the ones I go back to.

Most productivity advice is survivorship bias with a system bolted on. Setting the system up feels like work, which is the whole appeal.

Nearly everything we were told about food between about 1980 and 2015 turned out to be wrong, and almost nobody who told us has ever accounted for it.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.

Meetings are not the problem. Nobody distinguishing a meeting for deciding from a meeting for informing is the problem. Half the frustration in any organisation is people arriving in different modes and spending an hour discovering it, then booking a follow-up to do the thing they came to do.

Everyone I know is on their phone in bed and everyone I know is tired. I am not saying it is causal. I am saying it is a hell of a coincidence.

Nostalgia is mostly just not paying attention now. The past feels richer because it has been edited down to the good bits and you were not doing the admin.

A cricket match that ends in a draw is a better result than most wins and this is the single hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.

We have lost the ability to be mildly interested in something. It is either your whole personality or you have not heard of it.