Parker Conley
I find these ideas interesting and compelling. Thanks for writing. Would also be curious for further conversation on these themes.
Appreciate the suggestion!
I’ve had coffee chats with three people who like that retreat center. I like retreats, and I did a 8h/day home retreat last summer. Have seriously considered Panditarama but it is a big time investment and career break especially early career. And also I worry it would be hard on my body sitting so long and hard, and that Mahasi practice risks being destabilizing. May still do one though. Probably not while getting a business off the ground, but maybe when there is in between time or room for a small sabbatical.
Do you have any thoughts on career circumstances where I could make income for the 9 months I wouldn’t be on retreat?
Is it possible to get a stable 10h/wk remote SWE job as an early career decently smart person? Would like to meditate 6h/day. Current idea is to start a lifestyle SaaS business.
I agree that you can’t learn a subject from using reference works, and that they are very supplemental, but this comment comes off as pretty harsh! See Exercises in Comprehensive Information Gathering if you want to understand more where I’m coming from in the benefits of reference works.
Thank you for the encouragement and kind words!
Following up re above @Ben Pace
Looking at it now, I realize you probably unpinned it due to the dead link. Fixed this!
Thanks! If it’s not too much to ask, pinning the updates comment would be useful to people though. Just not this one.
Any chance you could unpin this comment? Seems like the idea of people suggesting videos based on it didn’t work, and having the updates be the first pinned comment would probably provide more value to people looking at the post.
Below are the new tacit knowledge videos added today (the last update was August 2024).
F. Perry Wilson, “Understanding Medical Research: Your Facebook Friend is Wrong” (h/t @Marius Adrian Nicoară)
Yale clinician-researcher known for clear statistical explanations.
“Bite-sized videos explaining how to approach medical research people. Last updated July 30 2020, so hopefully it reached many people during those confusing times and helped them strenghten their intellectual self defense.”
Chef Jacob Burton, “Culinary Boot Camp & F-STEP Curriculum” (h/t @sharksmile)
Intensive fundamentals course that applies across cuisines.
“F-STEP cooking curriculum is a classic to me… first and foremost it taught me the importance of salt and what type to use when, and i think about that every time i’m cooking. goes way beyond that in the series. solid foundational info that applies to all kinds of cooking.”
Andreas Kling, “Ladybird Browser Development Livestreams” (h/t @AJ Weeks)
Veteran browser/kernel engineer building Ladybird from scratch.
“Andreas livestreams himself working on the ambitious written-from-scratch Ladybird browser all while maintaining a friendly and welcoming attitude, not something that can be said for every programming streamer!”
Joseph Noel Walker & Andy Matuschak, “Behind the Scenes of My Interview Research Process” (h/t @Benjamin Schneider)
Deep-prep podcaster interviewed by an learning researcher.
“Joe Walker puts extensive effort into researching and studying before his podcast interviews in order to come up with good and not just surface level questions for his expert guests. He also focuses on retaining the information and gaining a deep understanding which helps with subsequent conversations around similar topics.”
Ryan Singer, “Design Workflow — Part 1 & 2” (h/t @Benjamin Schneider)
Co-founder and longtime head of design at 37signals.
“Live step by step walkthrough of breaking down and designing a feature for a web app through various stages of fidelity from basic structure to HTML.”
Steve Schoger, “Refactoring UI” (h/t @Benjamin Schneider)
UI designer and co-author of the Refactoring UI book.
“Live breakdowns of how real existing designs/pages/interfaces fail and working through improvements to make them clearer and more usable (and better looking) live and step by step.”
Chris Do, “Typography & Design” (h/t @Benjamin Schneider)
Founder of design-education platform The Futur.
“Experienced designer breaks down and critiques designs from his employees and course students, showing how certain changes affect the overall layout and how it could be improved, often mentioning the principles he applies throughout. Was really helpful in learning some things about visual balance, contrast, and so on.”
Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez), “Coding with AI” (h/t @Benjamin Schneider)
Creator of Redis; productive systems hacker.
“Experienced programmer screen records brief videos of himself working on real problems with the help of LLMs.”
Brandon Sanderson, “Writing the Stormlight Archive Vol 2 — Rysn Interlude (13-part series)” (h/t @Isabelle Thibault)
Prolific fantasy author and veteran creative-writing instructor.
“The videos shows him writing a chapter in one of his most well known book in a few hours and shows his pre-writing notes.”
Brandon Sanderson, “Brandon Sanderson Write-a-Thon” (h/t @Isabelle Thibault)
Prolific fantasy author and veteran creative-writing instructor.
“There is also another session with a live audience where he comments his writing a bit more.”
Hikaru Nakamura, “GMHikaru YouTube Channel” (h/t @Vlad Md Golam)
Five-time U.S. Chess Champion and leading blitz specialist.
“Hikaru streams and comments games, and of course plays himself. For example, in a video ‘How to Crush a 500, Every Step Explained’ he plays different people from 500 to ~2700 Elo for an hour, explaining each move, which is fascinating to watch, and to understand how a mind of a grandmaster works.”
Dan Abramov, “JavaScript Coding Sessions” (h/t @Vlad Md Golam)
Creator of Redux and key React contributor.
“Dan dives deep into React’s core logic, which is already very interesting, at the same time the videos are pretty simple to watch and following Dan’s thoughts can be really exciting. Besides React, he has videos where he recreates Wordle, Snake, Minesweeper games, solves Advent of Code puzzles.”
Daniel Naroditsky, “Beginner-to-Master Speedrun” (h/t @Julian Hunt)
Grandmaster and top bullet player known for instructive commentary.
“Daniel streams himself playing chess while talking through every decision to a very deep level. He discusses why he makes certain moves and why certain moves feel better than others.”
Matt Colville, “Running the Game” (h/t @Noah Topper)
Veteran tabletop-RPG designer and educator.
“Matt’s videos are really informative and his primary goal is to show that DMing is a straightforward thing that anyone can do, not something reserved for certain members of the tabletop RPG hobby. I’ve tried to pick out a few of his videos that are especially hands-on, but he has lots more which are very useful.”
Alexander Arguelles, “Live Language-Learning Study Sessions” (h/t @Liface)
Polyglot famed for rigorous, inventive study techniques.
“He has various videos of him live-studying different languages which give learners direct insight into his methods.”
Manifold-Sphere Teams, “Manifund, Manifold & Manifest Docs (2023-2024)” (h/t @Saul Munn)
Fully open startup ecosystem sharing notes, budgets, and strategy docs.
“This isn’t a video, but it’s probably relevantly close. All Manifold-sphere things are public — all meeting notes, budgets/finances, strategy docs, etc. I think that someone could learn a lot of tacit knowledge based on how the Manifold-sphere teams work by skimming e.g. our meeting notes docs, which are fairly comprehensive/extensive.”
Financial Modeling World Cup, “Microsoft Excel World Championship 2023 — Finals Highlights”
Annual Excel esports series. Yes, Microsoft Excel.
ants_are_everywhere, “Live Code-Reading Sessions”
Channel run by a former Google engineer who methodically “reads” large open-source projects—Linux kernel, Blender, Git—while narrating each investigative step.
Sahil Lavingia, “Public Board Meetings & Founder Logs”
Founder-CEO of Gumroad and author of The Minimalist Entrepreneur; shares raw board-meeting recordings and work sessions covering product roadmaps and revenue metrics.
Provides a transparent example of lean, remote startup management and “build-in-public” decision-making
Joseph Noel Walker, “Interview Research: Episode 160 — Richard Butler” [paywalled]
Independent podcaster known for extensive preparation; this episode pairs the finished interview with a publicly released packet of his notes and source documents.
Adam Doupé, “pwnable.kr Walk-throughs”
Associate Professor of Computer Science at Arizona State University and Director of ASU’s Center for Cybersecurity & Trusted Foundations; leads their internationally ranked CTF team.
A 17-video series that solves each level of the pwnable.kr binary-exploitation wargame, narrated step-by-step from vulnerability discovery to exploit.
Paul Buchheit & Sam Altman, “Pitch Practice” (Startup School SV 2016)
Buchheit created Gmail and later became a Y Combinator partner; Altman is co-founder / CEO of OpenAI and was YC’s president at the time of recording.
Two founders present, receive Buchheit’s critique, then hear Altman repitch—an inside look at how veteran investors probe and reframe early-stage ideas.
GitLab Inc., “GitLab Unfiltered” YouTube channel
The all-remote DevOps company that went public on Nasdaq in 2021 at an $11 billion valuation shares >12k raw meeting, architecture-review, and demo videos under its “default-open” policy.
MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson), “Breaking Down a $100M Show — Beast Games, Episode 1”
World’s most-subscribed individual YouTuber (300M+ subscribers), known for large-scale philanthropy and record-setting view counts.
Reviews budget, crew logistics, and set-design choices for a $100 million reality series, illustrating cost control and high-volume production planning.
Soren Bjornstad, “Effective Flashcard Writing: Decomposing Thinking, Fast and Slow”
Software engineer at RemNote and author of Grok TiddlyWiki; publishes a public Zettelkasten (Mosaic Muse).
Live records the step-by-step process of turning narrative psychology prose into well-scoped spaced-repetition prompts.
Taran Van Hemert, “Fixing YOUR Videos!”
Former senior editor at Linus Tech Tips; his Premiere Pro workflow tutorials have 4M+ views.
Diagnoses viewer submissions, demonstrating colour-correction, pacing tweaks, and audio-mix fixes while narrating each decision.
Gennady Korotkevich (“tourist”), “touristream 012: Codeforces Round 672 (Div. 2)”
Six-time IOI gold medalist and two-time ICPC world champion; first programmer to surpass a 4000 Codeforces rating.
Katie Dill & Aaron Epstein, “Stripe Head of Design Katie Dill Reviews Startup Websites”
Dill led design at Airbnb and Lyft before heading Stripe Design; Epstein is a YC Group Partner and co-founder of Creative Market (acquired by Autodesk).
Applies conversion-focused heuristics to early-stage landing pages, highlighting hierarchy, trust signals, and copy clarity.
Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown), “How I Animate 3Blue1Brown | A Manim Demo with Ben Sparks”
Creator of the 7M-subscriber mathematics channel and original author of the open-source Manim animation engine; taught MIT’s Intro to Computational Thinking.
Demonstrates project structure, scene scripting, and render iteration for producing visual maths explanations.
Paul Sellers, “Woodworking Masterclasses”
British master cabinet-maker (apprenticed 1965), author of Essential Woodworking Hand Tools; built furniture commissioned for the White House.
Multi-episode builds and technique demos focus on hand-tool joinery, sharpening, and shop layout for beginners with minimal equipment.
Gary Bernhardt, “Destroy All Software Screencasts Catalog” [paywalled]
Founder of Destroy All Software and author of the famed “Wat” lightning talk; delivers dense 10–15-minute screencasts on Unix, testing, and language design.
Jonathan Blow, “Braid, Anniversary Edition — Developer Commentary Podcast”
Indie-game designer of Braid and The Witness; featured in Indie Game: The Movie and currently developing the Jai programming language.
Discusses level design, art direction, and technical trade-offs while replaying the remastered game with fellow developers.
Thanks for the submission. Ideally, there would be a link of some kind for single-click access. I imagine that doesn’t exist, but just double checking!
Thanks, added!
So glad to hear!
Thanks, added!
Thanks!
Thanks! My account is parconley if you’d like to add me as a co-author.
I tried, but I don’t have the 100 karma on the EA Forum required to cross-post. If you or someone else would like to, feel free!
Also, if you want to work with rat-adjacent people every once and a while, there’s an EA Focusmate Group you can join.
Thanks for the point. I was going to add this as a footnote in a draft relating to uncertainty about the anecdote specifically (though it doesn’t quite capture your critique):
Sometimes called the Bannister Effect, though the 4-minute mile effect is more understandable. Also, I chose the 4-minute-mile anecdote because it is pithy and present in the Overton window. There exists conjecture as to whether subsequent records after Bannister’s mile were due to a psychological effect (compared to, say, equipment improvements; I’m not concerned with the epistemics of this particular anecdote, so I did not investigate this in detail).
It’s possible that some of the other anecdotes also were linear rather than step changes. Though, I still lean towards thinking they were step changes in behavior.
Late to respond but I fixed this when I saw it. Thanks!