We optimize for grades in school, promotion cycles, citation counts, but I keep wondering, who decided these metrics? Or more importantly, should I be optimizing for metrics I don’t believe in? Most people never ask this question. They inherit their metrics from parents, teachers, institutions. If you go through any form of public system in your life, you’ve likely inherited the metrics rather than deriving your own. It’s easier that way. Your parents wouldn’t want you to be contrarian in a rational sense. But I think increasingly, it’s needed. ...

My ranking of the most important investment in the world. Educators / Teachers Venture Capitalists / Angel Investors

I have a distaste for mediocrity. More precisely, I have a distaste for the moral defense of mediocrity. Struggle is not the problem. Limitation is not the problem. Bad luck is not the problem. The thing I can’t stand is when people freeze at a certain point in their development, then rename that stopping wisdom, virtue, or enlightenment. Humans are born with some amount of agency, but whether that agency flourishes or dissolves depends enormously on environment, feedback, standards, and luck. Of course this creates variance. Some people keep expanding their range of action. Some atrophy early. That part is tragic, but not offensive. ...

In a world increasingly filled with slop, the ability to index through them - judgment - is something I want to develop, hopefully through documenting this. That’s the purpose of DuyDoc. Welcome! Connect: Feel free to reach out to me through any of these channels: GitHub: @yudduy Twitter: @duyknguy LinkedIn: /in/duynguy Email: kduynguy@gmail.com I hope you find something useful here!

You’re in the library with too many tabs open. One is course enrollment. One is a half-finished internship application. One is a spreadsheet someone sent around with classes, median grades, workload, and whether recruiters seem to like them. Your friend is talking about which professor signals best. Someone at the next table is matching recruiting deadlines to midterms. The class you actually want is the one with the messy syllabus and too much reading, the one that might take over your week and leave you with something real at the end of it. The other class is clean, legible, useful, and easy to explain later. ...

I think there are roughly two ways people relate to work. For most people, work is a means. It funds the rest of life. For a smaller group, work is also an end - a form of expression, a way of making sense of the world, a place where curiosity gets to act on reality. Neither category is morally superior. The world needs maintainers as much as it needs obsessives. But if you are in the second group, a lot of conventional advice will quietly deform you. You will be told to optimize for stability, work-life balance, legibility, optionality. None of that advice is insane. It is just aimed at a different kind of person. ...

Presented is a self-curated synthesis that beautifully weaved together the world that occupied Adorno and Habermas’s minds. I hope you enjoy it. The Argument That Remains PROLOGUE — Pacific Palisades, 1944 The Pacific was out there somewhere, past the canyon, past the eucalyptus. At night you could smell it. Theodor Adorno had moved to this neighborhood the year before, into a rented house near the top of a hill, and he sometimes thought there was something almost comic about his situation: the heir to the most serious tradition in German philosophy, exiled to a city whose entire economy ran on the manufacturing of illusion. ...