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6 of Adam Mastroianni's claims fit 6 mental models. Most often: Everything decays without maintenance, Make it real, Power laws.
Institutions, code, cities and knowledge run down by default; keeping something alive is work that has to be paid for.
Their wordsFeelings, or vibes, on the other hand, seem to stick around a lot longer.
Making a cheap, real version settles questions a description cannot.
Their wordsYou cannot dump your bucket into someone else’s bucket.
In many things a few cases account for most of the result, so the average misleads and the outlier decides.
Their wordsIn the long run, the best stuff is basically all that matters, and the bad stuff doesn’t matter at all.
Ask "and then what?": follow a decision past its first effect to the ones that come after.
Their wordsThis extremely bad system is worse than nothing because it fools people into thinking they’re safe when they’re not.
When something becomes cheap and plentiful, the value moves to whatever is still rare next to it.
Their wordsUntangling them requires some knowledge, yes, but knowledge is cheap and easily acquired. What you really need is curiosity, self-efficacy, perseverance, perspective, and hope.
Reward a number and people, or machines, will find ways to move the number without the thing it measured (Goodhart's law).
Their wordsEvaluation forces me to flatten everything I teach into something that can be tested, and it encourages students to ignore everything that isn’t on the test.