Gary Basin

Archive

Writing

Essays and notes by Gary Basin, arranged newest first.

2020

  1. Compounding effects of project selection, for the Atom and You
  2. How to create simplicity
  3. Try Design Thinking
  4. Unclear Intent
  5. Fame
  6. Integration and Fragmentation
  7. Slacking off?
  8. You flow downhill
  9. Noticing stuckness is a superpower
  10. My dog craves Vision
  11. Entrepreneurship is therapy
  12. One Week Project Management
  13. Valley of Mismatch
  14. Tortoises and Hares
  15. The Innovator’s Dilemma: a visualization
  16. Prescriptions are a dead end
  17. Distractions make you creative
  18. Find the third way
  19. Tonglen
  20. Ship an update
  21. Vision breeds hallucination
  22. Choice is like junk food
  23. An allergy to market prices
  24. You’re already an expert
  25. How Judo turns threats into opportunities
  26. Hidden goals of price controls
  27. If SHTF are you prepared?
  28. The two moments of trend spotting: velocity and acceleration
  29. Three conditions for applying the Precautionary Principle
  30. Decision Journals: How to stop fooling yourself
  31. No motivation without vision
  32. Trusting your gut is not enough
  33. Spectrum of Arbitrage
  34. There’s only one universal startup formula
  35. Trading stocks is not the worst thing you can do
  36. Find your superpower
  37. How to know what people want
  38. Tell your story, bit by bit
  39. One paragraph at a time

2019

  1. One weird trick for 2020
  2. Shiny deck: $40,000. Great story: Priceless.
  3. Brainstorming
  4. The best bank may be no bank at all
  5. Copying features doesn’t work, except when it does
  6. How Stripe tells its story in 2000 pixels
  7. Robinhood, slick and dangerous
  8. Making sense of Haus.com
  9. Mission over metrics
  10. Shaking the tree
  11. Typography, it does things
  12. Can you optimize for creativity?
  13. How to build an Awesome City
  14. Corporate Senescence

2018

  1. Seeing Through Lenses
  2. Three Stonecutters Inverted
  3. Interpersonal Legibility
  4. Everything in motion
  5. Where are you heading?
  6. Motivation: universal solvent
  7. Patterns of distraction
  8. Hearing is believing
  9. Dangers of lucid dreaming
  10. Bartender school
  11. Ants through chocolate
  12. Desires held hostage
  13. Punishing yourself
  14. Competing commitments
  15. Yummy actions

2017

  1. Pro-hindsight
  2. Effectuation
  3. Pre-hindsight
  4. Thinking Toys #15 — Presencing
  5. Thinking Toys #14 — Implementation Intentions
  6. Thinking Toys #13 — Miracle Question
  7. Reason as Attentional Prosthesis
  8. Thinking Toys #12 — Granularizing
  9. Thinking Toys #11 — Self-Decomposition
  10. Thinking Toys #10 — Bargaining
  11. Thinking Toys #9 — Undichotomizing
  12. Thinking Toys #8 — Curiosity
  13. Parts in Conflict
  14. Thinking Toys #7 — Action Echoes
  15. Thinking Toys #6 — Tonglen
  16. Developing Self-Efficacy with Minimum Viable Habits
  17. Thinking Toys #5 — Focusing
  18. Thinking Toys #4 — Falsifiability
  19. Thinking Toys #3 — Construal Levels
  20. Thinking Toys #2 — Opportunity Pointers
  21. Thinking Toys #1 — Inversion
  22. Talking past each other
  23. My introspection practice
  24. Ways of Seeing
  25. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Certain Questions
  26. What is Wisdom?
  27. Authentic Emotion and Reliable Action
  28. Emergent Cause
  29. Path creation with the Will
  30. E-Prime
  31. Mixed feelings
  32. Dissolving mind and body
  33. What does attention enable?
  34. Desire paths everywhere
  35. Satisfaction Levers

2016

  1. All soup is tasty soup
  2. In support of Trump
  3. Experience Machines
  4. How to steer your subconscious
  5. Open-minded Delegation
  6. What it means to Want

2015

  1. Routine: Power and Peril
  2. Powerful second-order effects
  3. Even you value privacy
  4. The Logic of Buddhist Philosophy
  5. Old vs New, Mindfulness and Innovation
  6. Post-capitalism Links 7.23.2015
  7. Ethics and [Effective] Altruism Links 7.20.2015
  8. The problem with mocking the “backwards right-wing guy”
  9. Optimization functions of firms – Benevolence vs Profit
  10. Conspicuous Corporate Altruism
  11. Demonization of consumerism

2014

  1. Organizations as Organisms: Building Systems with Intention
  2. Organizations as Organisms: DNA and Culture
  3. Organizations as Organisms: Multi-Human Collectives
  4. A bitcoin for your thoughts: The end of privacy and mumblings on a path forward
  5. Bitcoin bet
  6. Citation as manipulation
  7. My goop’s nutrition

2013

  1. Diet sense
  2. Computational transcession
  3. Bayesianism and Ethics
  4. Hogs are bad
  5. Eating your cousin
  6. Flying arms
  7. Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models
  8. Mammalian slaughter
  9. Standing desk
  10. Habit training
  11. Affecting the conversation
  12. Far right politics
  13. Net positive yield fusion in a lab?
  14. Communication dopamine spikes
  15. Aging as disease
  16. Ultimate punishment

2012

  1. Untitled
  2. Review
  3. DNA Carriers

2011

  1. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
  2. Octopi
  3. the territory
  4. Vanity
  5. LW Sequence notes – Mysterious answers to mysterious questions (Part 1)
  6. Self-awareness as a level of sentience
  7. Transaction costs
  8. What do tigers dream of
  9. Econofail
  10. Causes of War
  11. Econ question
  12. Population, technology and growth
  13. Long term impact of technology
  14. Self
  15. Habits Pt. 2
  16. Beware experts in everything
  17. Habits
  18. How to sleep
  19. Two kinds of smart
  20. The Self-modifying light bulb
  21. Lotteries are hard
  22. Beauty of physics
  23. Experts suck
  24. Beware of stories
  25. Humans walk in circles
  26. No More Bananas and GMO
  27. Being Present
  28. Scientology