Ola Hovde, the number 1️⃣ in the world (Thread)

With half the season completed, I started to look at the number 1 in the world and how he has played

Ola Hovde has been number 1 ever since GW10 this season but what has he done to get there? What can we learn from it?

"The engineers on my team just want to code. They don't want to have anything to do with product. They just want specs. What do I do?"

1/n Are you asking them do to X *and* do their "day job" as defined by their managers (and frankly your roadmap) ?

If so, start there...

2/n Do they have a reason to believe that doing X will in any way improve the quality of the product and make their lives easier? Have they ever seen X "work" ?

Show don't tell.

3/n Is there average day/week a quagmire of unnecessary meetings, wading through tech debt, struggling to get *anything* to work ... and jumping through process hoops to prove their worth?

If so...no they will not have bandwidth.

4/n How do incentives work on the engineering team? Maybe they want to help, but their "grade" is determined by something altogether different.

"I'd love to, but I am on the hook to deliver [some project] this quarter to make a good impression..."

Talk to eng management.

5/n Have they had any time to practice?

Or did they get thrown into the deep end the first time they were given a shot ... expected to brainstorm on demand, be as vocal as practiced PdMs and designers, and "participate" !

Make it safe to practice. Reasonable expectations.

Survivorship Bias 101

History is written by the victors. But if we exclusively focus on these successes, we allow survivorship bias to distort our understanding of the world.

But what is "survivorship bias" and how does it work?

Here's Survivorship Bias 101!

👇👇👇

1/ First, a few definitions.

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on survivors (successes) and ignoring casualties (failures).

When we do so, we miss the true "base rates" of survival (the actual probability of success) and arrive at flawed conclusions.

2/ When we completely ignore failures, we lose our ability to correctly identify the differences between successes and failures.

Put simply, exclusively focusing on successes may actually inhibit our ability to identify (and replicate) the actions that led to such success.

3/ Cicero wrote on the topic over 2,000 years ago.

An atheist named Diagoras is shown portraits of people who prayed and were saved from death at sea as proof of God's existence.

Diagoras replies, "I see those who were saved, but where are those painted who were shipwrecked?"

4/ Cicero cuts right to the point - we cannot conclude that prayer led to being saved from the sea if we ignore those who prayed and then drowned.

Survivorship bias can lead to a deeply-flawed understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

Let's look at some examples.

We need to stop imagining the Jan 6 fascists are purely "brainwashed," misguided, etc. Neither are they guided by white supremacy *only*.

They are largely a vanguard of principled petty bourgeois reactionaries who oppose democracy whether in its mass/working-class or liberal bourgeois form. They have allies in the most conservative and reactionary corners of the "big" bourgeoisie.

They see through a funhouse mirror the hypocrisy of liberal bourgeois democracy (no, the electoral college is not "sacred" 🙄). They also vehemently abhor the capacity of true democracy—socialism—to liberate oppressed, exploited workers upon whom their precarious fortunes depend.

To the extent liberal bourgeois democracy engages mass politics and gives even a highly attenuated and mostly suppressed voice to the working masses, that section of the petty bourgeoisie which turns to fascism regards liberal democracy as a betrayal. Only capital should speak.

The woman who died attacking the Capitol Building was a small business owner from San Diego. Yes, her head was full of conspiracist nonsense but she didn't just invent that lockdowns and worker protections might save lives but hurt her bottom line.

This column by @ezraklein is very good and I agree with him 100% on policy -- we need a generous child allowance now. But I'm seeing this creeping argument on the left that it's just not important for women to work outside the home, and that's concerning.

Working 60 hours a week at two or three jobs? That's obviously awful. Being paid so poorly that you have no time for your family or leisure? That's not "dignity," that's exploitation. And it is single moms who bear the brunt of this.

But while the argument that at-home work is just as valuable as paid work may be morally correct, in our capitalist reality, not working outside of the home leaves women incredibly financially and physically vulnerable. It also leaves them isolated, depressed, and anxious.

wrote a whole book about this, but paid work is good for women. Not three jobs at $7.50 an hour to stay afloat. But work for pay, which offers a purpose outside of raising one's own children, and friends and coworkers and a $$ lifeline outside the nuclear family.

When women wind up financially dependent on men, good things do not follow. Of course there are individual stories of this working out just fine. But over the whole of a society, women as carers and men as earners is not a good system.

LEEDS LEADS CLIMATE BREAKDOWN

8 hours and 1000 flawed arguments and biased procedures later, Leeds City Plans Panel voted 9-5 for airport expansion and the false promises of economic growth.
For “what Leeds needs is a premier-league football club and a premier-league airport”
🧵

1/ There was a lot of "I do care about climate change, BUT" – followed by a lot of blah blah. Blah blah economic growth. Blah blah connectivity. Blah blah competitiveness. Blah blah Manchester. Blah blah Westminster. Blah blah offsetting. Blah blah electric planes. Blah blah blah

2/ Also a lot of "I do have sympathy for residents suffering from planes flying over their roofs at night, BUT” - followed by more blah blah.
One councillor kindly offered his advice: “the way to less noise is more planes”. Right, Sherlock. Want to try that in your backyard?🤦‍♂️

3/ The true sympathies were revealed at the end. The Panel's priority was not the well-being of those living under the flight path, nor the lives and livelihoods of threatened by climate breakdown. Their priority was a bigger, noisier airport, with a terminal in bronze-champagne.

4/ First declaring your sympathy for people’s suffering and then supporting a development that directly aggravates their suffering, is a proper kick in the face for those suffering the consequences. Like first declaring a climate emergency and then aggravating climate breakdown.