Vaishnav Sunil

Oct 26, 2024 | optimaloutliers.com | Vaishnav Sunil

Paul Graham's essay titled "Good and Bad Procrastination" argues that procrastination can be virtuous when it means putting off small tasks to work on more important ones. He categorizes procrastination into three types: doing nothing, doing something less important, or doing something more important. The last category, he argues, is actually good procrastination - the kind practiced by "absent-minded professors" who forget to eat while solving important problems.

Sep 12, 2024 | moralmayhem.substack.com | Vaishnav Sunil |Maxim Lott

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. In this episode, we sit down with (author of Maximum Truth) to dive into prediction markets, focusing on election betting markets. We explore liquidity, market depth, and whether concerns over market manipulation hold water. We also indulge in some meta-political analysis, offering our intuitions on the best arguments and tail risks for each candidate in the current race.

Aug 14, 2024 | vaishnavsunil.substack.com | Vaishnav Sunil

People love personality tests, and for good reason. While much of the popular literature on personality types can be considered "pop science", there are important insights to be gleaned from scientific research on personality. Personality traits have been shown to cluster together in non-random ways, representing dimensions of individual differences that are largely independent of factors like cognitive ability and domain knowledge that often receive more focus in hiring decisions.

Aug 3, 2024 | everythingisatrolley.com | Vaishnav Sunil

Note: This is the first post in a series of posts about career liquidity. Read the next part hereWe're used to thinking about skills and experience in terms of their market value - how useful they are and how much employers or customers would pay for them. But  another, more subtle dimension gets less attention: liquidity. Just like in financial markets, some human capital is easier to price and trade than others.

Feb 9, 2024 | latecomermag.com | Niko McCarty |Kevin Esvelt |Ben Mueller |Vaishnav Sunil

The Cell Is Not a Computer There is a self-reinforcing feedback loop within science: models of reality are proposed, and experimental tools and methods are created to test those models. Tools dictate what can be discovered, and our models determine which tools are made to begin with. Theoretical models are often useful for a long time, until their fundamental limitations are recognized.