Cedric Chin @ejames_c Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

10,232

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553

Following

1,560

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Writes . Tweets about books & the art of business, from the perspective of an operator.

Singapore & Saigon

https://t.co/KyNCzfKw8B

Joined March 2008

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

1/ I recently finished digging into a body of work around extracted tacit mental models of business expertise, and it is wild. It turns out that business experts all share a common mental model of business, and you can do all sorts of interesting things if you have that model.

@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

Well well well. Can’t wait to dig in.

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@_burgyy

@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

I think my jaw dropped halfway through when I realised this was basically a masterclass in pulling psych levers.

@willahmed

Will Ahmed

6 months

A lot of good parenting advice in this video

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

HN right now, an article going “You Have Too Many Metrics.” Amazon, every Wednesday morning: “here are 400 metrics that we’re going to cover in 60-90 mins, and we’re going to look at every damn one, even if for a few seconds, because it develops fingertip-feel for the business.”

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

I’m seeing multiple people share this on my timeline, so I want to sound a warning: If you’re interested in learning for your career, these ideas are NOT AS USEFUL AS YOU MIGHT THINK. A thread of why and where to look instead.

@emollick

Ethan Mollick

2 years

If you want to learn how to learn, these two charts are where you should start. They are the result of a large meta-analysis of study techniques. You should skip the highlighting, summarizing, and rereading. Instead, practice, quiz & explain. Open paper:

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

1/ Let's talk about accelerating expertise. You want to get good. You want to get good fast. How do you do this? In 2008 and 2009 the US Department of Defence convened two meetings on this very topic. Here's what they found. (Hint: the answer is NOT deliberate practice).

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

1/ Let's talk about how note taking can help you accelerate expertise. Yes, I know how that sounds like. No, this isn't hype. There's some solid cognitive science here, and it has FASCINATING things to say about the nature of learning in messy, real world domains.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

My article on Goodhart’s Law was on the Hacker News front page last night. I thought this was a good comment (just about every other comment was bad).

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

This is a great example of reality having a lot of surprising detail. Tired: “AI is coming after your jobs” Wired: “Actually the socio-technical systems of work that these AI systems are supposed to replace are surprisingly rich in ways we didn’t expect”

@KevinAFischer

Kevin Fischer — soul/acc

1 year

I don't talk much about this - I obtained one of the first FDA approvals in ML + radiology and it informs much of how I think about AI systems and their impact on the world. If you're a pure technologist, you should read the following: There's so much to unpack for both why…

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

The biggest thing I’ve learnt over the past 5 years is that often, the most useful pieces of knowledge are hidden in plain sight, just labelled with terrible names. This is very encouraging! It means it’s very likely that someone has figured out something you want to know.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

I recommend books often — to the point where friends complain that a Very Cedric Thing is to go “read this book, it’s *just* 300 pages” (which, yes, yes, is a lot of pages). But I REALLY recommend reading Understanding Variation by Donald Wheeler. My pitch …

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 months

I'm actually starting to suspect that the best manufacturers have more to teach software folk than vice versa. This is not a strong opinion, and I want to retain the ability to revise it. But manufacturing is harder, older, and lower margin.

@Meaningness

David Chapman

3 months

Reading Goldratt's The Goal, you think "omg, manufacturing management is actually not using the simple optimization algorithms we learn in second year CS classes??" And this, similarly, makes me want to buy a defunct American chemical factory and get it running properly!

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

1/ Let's talk a little about how people learn in the real world. No, I'm not going to talk about classroom instruction, or pedagogical development, or enrolling in a cohort based course. None of that. Just a simple question: how do people ACTUALLY learn from doing?

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

As usual, this year's list of Ig Nobel prizes just kills. (I think my favourite is the Economics Prize?)

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

“A shortage of semiconductors was creating a shortage of Haribo gummy bears.” You can’t make this shit up.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

Increasingly curious as to why the tools-for-thought folk talk a lot about note-taking tool features and plugins and not at all about the cognitive science of better externalised thinking.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

I’ve been thinking about this line @visakanv said yesterday, about how people can update their positions over time as they make mistakes but not update their position-updating mechanism, and I think that broadly describes smart but ineffective people.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 months

My writing hot take, after having done this for some time, is that some people who write very well are actually not very smart.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

Complexity by M Mitchell Waldrop is one of those weird books where I finish reading it and think "ahh, that was a good yarn, it's totally not useful" and then proceed to have my entire worldview changed in the subsequent months. Just. What.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

1/ Say you want to copy Amazon's PR/FAQ. Well, after 8 months and 3 attempts, I’m comfortable enough with the process to say that it works. (Caveat: I've never worked in Amazon, so had to figure this out from books and from working with Colin Bryar). What I've learnt:

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

Me: “This is basically a masterclass in kid manipulation or parenting, I can’t tell which.” Friend: “Aren’t those two things the same thing?”

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

I find pre-product-market-fit really difficult to reason about, which is why I find @asmartbear ’s writing very remarkable. He consistently puts out the best, most realistic, most humble takes on the chaos of pre-PMF:

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The roadmap to Product/Market Fit (PMF)… maybe

This eight-step process brought WP Engine from an idea to a Unicorn. While there are other roads to Product/Market Fit, consider copying some of these ideas.

longform.asmartbear.com

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

I’ve been thinking about Amazon’s “Are Right, A Lot” Leadership Principle again. It’s probably the most controversial of the Leadership Principles, and one I’ve spent the most time thinking about (and asking ex-Amazonians about).

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

4 months

I think one of the great joys of 2023 for me was discovering that Statistical Process Control had not been properly exploited in the tech industry, exploiting it, and then realising that I had discovered a secret. Secrets still exist!

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

The Power Law is an excellent history of venture capital. Hidden in the book, tucked away in the chapter about China, is this totally random aside. Well played, @scmallaby , well played.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

Maybe the most counter-intuitive thing I’ve learnt about product in the past two years is that it isn’t shipping cadence that matters, it’s shipping cadence *and* learning cadence. The two loops need to line up. (I’m probably butchering a @johncutlefish quote here).

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 months

This is an incredible sequence in an incredible essay.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

4 years

Singapore's stay home notice procedures (aka arrival quarantine), a thread. (Yes, that's a coffee cup on the ledge of my hotel room; more on this in a bit).

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

10 months

Something that I've been thinking about, which I got from @visakanv : people who do things are able to point out tradeoffs you will encounter when you attempt to put things to practice. Whereas non-believable people will go "blah blah this thing is good."

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

4 months

I’m so obsessed with business that I didn’t realise you could apply SPC methods to, uh, personal improvement as a software engineer. But this is apparently what Christoffer Stjernlöf did.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

1/ Let's talk about burnout. No, I'm not going to tell you yet another story of burnout — there are lots of those already. And there are a lot of pet theories out there. I want to talk about burnout RESEARCH. What do we ACTUALLY know about burnout?

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

Yesterday a friend told me I should probably announce what I’ve been doing for the past 2 months. So: I relocated to KL in November to train Judo 4 hours a day, in preparation for the Malaysian Senior Nationals. I’m in my thirties; I’m not a very good player. So why?

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

11 months

There’s this Picasso quote that goes “When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” There’s probably an equivalent for business operators.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 months

Tech industry: we need to hire the best people. Companies that hire the best people win. Lessons from the Titans: if your long term strategy depends on always hiring the best people, eventually you WILL lose. More important is business systems that amplify talent.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

But for most people, in most careers, the question of learning is really: - how do you accelerate the acquisition of expertise - how do you synthesise new ideas to develop an edge in your career - forget expertise, do you accelerate basic proficiency in a skill?

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

I’ve talked a lot about cognitive task analysis, which is this fairly new (30 yo) technique to extract expertise from the heads of experts. You know how pros can’t tell you how or what they’re doing? e.g. “It just feels right” Yeah, CTA solves for that. Some podcast clips. 👇

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

Right now, with Singapore entering a lockdown again, it feels like a repeat of 2020 in more ways than one. The most interesting thing to me is that, in my local conversations, we are talking about the variants in a way that people in the West aren't.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

The more experience I have with the space, the more I’m convinced that data-driven decision making in biz is a people, process, tool problem, and in that order. Which means everything that a vendor says is a lie if you don’t have the right people or processes in place.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

10 months

Ray Dalio has a very useful concept called believability, where the protocol is basically you’re supposed to shut up and not debate when you’re talking with a higher believability person. Singaporeans have a shorter version: DTYFHTF. Or “Don’t Teach Your Father How To Fuck.”

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

I can’t recommend this enough. @zeynep takes apart the idea of “absence of evidence is evidence of absence”, and explains: well, sometimes it really is! This seems to me to be the more pragmatic question.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

Surprising things I’ve learnt in the past two months: Finance folks are actually pretty good at instantly recognising ‘articulate idiots’: folk who talk good but are strikingly ineffective. I need to learn this skill from them.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

I wrote a months-long series of posts on becoming data driven in business. At first, the ideas were from Amazon (and W. Edwards Deming). But then I started putting them to practice. Most of these posts are for Commoncog members. Here’s a thread of the big ideas.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

Ironic that the highest impact book I read in 2023 was also the shortest.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 months

I really like @Lethain 's essay on Ex-technology companies. This bit, in particular, is very good:

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

The perils of reasoning from first principles, exhibit 903863295829. (Critical thinking question: Amazon has been doing this since the 2001s. They find it important enough to continue doing so today. Why are so many metrics needed?)

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

I know this is obvious, but I think it bears repeating: the higher up you go in some skill tree, the smaller the improvements become. Which leads to some interesting observations: 1) To a novice, an expert giving feedback to the merely good will seem like nitpicking.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

1/ I’ve noticed that in every skill you become sufficiently good at, there comes a point where you begin to notice nuance in your own skill (and the skill of others) and … you begin to make up your own language to describe that nuance. Let’s call this the vocab point.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

I say this as a writer, and in the most loving way possible, but there is very little correlation between the frequency and quality of one's writing (or note taking) and one's effectiveness in business or in life.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 years

Hilarious and good: the scent of bad psychology. (My favourite bit is probably the one with Nicholas Nassem Taleb's Grandma).

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

That wonderfully rare thing: a gem of a Hacker News comment.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

7 months

Goddammit.

@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

7 months

Seeing a sudden gusher of interviews with Munger makes me scared. Like he knows something we don’t. Like he knows his time with us is limited.

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Cedric Chin

3 months

The big thing I've learnt about the last five years of writing online is that you get the audience you deserve.

@visakanv

Visakan Veerasamy

3 months

stop writing for average readers and then being disappointed by the reaction. write for the best possible reader you can imagine and then persist until they materialize

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Cedric Chin

3 years

This piece on Buffett’s reading habits by @NeckarValue is incredible. He points out — rightly — that Buffett did a heck of a lot of networking alongside the reading. As always, look at what people do, not what they say they do.

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The Reading Obsession

“I just sit in my office and read all day.” - Warren Buffett

alchemy.substack.com

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

I always check for proof of good synthesis when reading yet another Second Brain guide. Yes, yes, you can tell me how you’ve set up the perfect notetaking workflow, but can you show me how it’s helped you? I want proof of work, dammit.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

The field of Statistical Process Control has this interesting idea that ‘management is prediction’ — i.e., in order to be a good operator, you need to be able to predict (within limits) the business outcomes of your actions. The implications that flow from this are quite useful.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

11 days

Things we probably shouldn't say out loud: the ability to get a company to become data driven ultimately reduces to your ability to gain and then wield political power within that company. If you're a CEO, you have this for free. If you're anyone else, good luck.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

1. Most companies aren’t data driven 2. Because data literacy is hard 3. So most data teams are treated as cost centres 4. When you sell tools into cost centres you sell on cost savings 5. But most data vendors sell on value add 6. This doesn’t work 7. So they are sad QED

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

It’s a new day, which means it’s a day for yet another [low code] business intelligence tool that gives you [actionable data insights] to help you crush your [kpis] through [narratives]. (Brackets indicate ad-libs, which are currently filled with the latest hot keywords).

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Cedric Chin

3 months

I think some operator folk shy away from writing publicly because they think “ugh, I don’t want to be an internet intellectual.” But there’s actually a writing-related advantage from being a doer not a writer.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

7 months

This took some time, but I'm pleased to announce the next phase for Commoncog:

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Commoncog's Next Phase

Announcing the launch of the Commoncog Case Library, setting the Learning in Ill-Structured Domains series free, and one more thing.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

The most important thing I've learnt about reading learning / pedagogy research is that the bulk of the results are for traditional classroom/school environments. In other words, when Ethan says “learning to learn” what he means is “learning to do well in exams.”

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

5 months

The way most people think about data is simply too ... different; too naive perhaps, to reconcile it with the ideas of the WBR. So I decided to write about those ideas directly FIRST, to set up for a sequence about the WBR. This essay is out now:

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Becoming Data Driven, From First Principles

People often say things like "become data driven" without explaining what that means or how to do it. This is everything you need to know to actually become data driven, from scratch, using the same...

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

My piece on effective hiring is on the top of Hacker News, so I guess the cat’s out of the bag and I have to invent a completely new way to hire.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

5 years

Proof that @morganhousel is one of the best VCs writing today:

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

This week's Commoncog essay is about Goodhart's Law. Or, more accurately, about why Goodhart's Law isn't that useful. Goodhart's Law goes 'when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.' Which ... so what? What are you going to do to solve this?

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

This might be a very weird thing to say (unless you've actually done layoffs before, and done them badly) but Brian Armstrong's layoff email is close to best practice as I've ever seen. I'll likely be rereading it for years to come.

A message from Coinbase CEO and Cofounder, Brian Armstrong

Earlier today, I shared the following note with all Coinbase employees.

www.coinbase.com

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

5 months

This is a very lovely story <3

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

4 months

A huge part of why I feel very strongly about ‘Becoming Data Driven’ is that I feel that data analysts aren’t well served by existing writing on the topic. (The other part is that I’m a business nerd and want to get better at operating, but I think that’s obvious).

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

5 months

At some point, even after tweeting ceaselessly for weeks about the ideas, there comes a point where you just have to shut up and sit down to write. It doesn’t get any easier.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

I think one of the more entertaining anecdotes from @stevesi ’s Hardcore Software was the bit where Office PMs learnt to ignore startups who went “it’s like Word, but with the subset of features that people ACTUALLY use.” … only to find out that everyone uses a different subset.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 months

It strikes me that business people who say “we should stop using war analogies in business” happen to be those in a) high margin industries, b) with moats, who c) have not experienced margin compression in their recent pasts.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

Lost my second and third match. I was fearful, and it was difficult to fight with one eye. Clearly I need more training. But so here ends the experiment.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

It’s on.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

11 months

My old article on the ability to see expertise is on the Hacker News front page again. Rereading the piece … man. I spent four months training five hours every day to get to the ‘vocab point’ for Judo. I never expected the cost to be so dear.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

I had an informal expertise extraction conversation yesterday, with a senior software engineer I respect. The preliminary takeaway for software design expertise is that experts *attempt to predict the direction of change* for their software requirements, and design accordingly.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

The organisation that has invested the most research money into effective accelerated training techniques in messy, real world, applied domains is the military. I’m not joking. You want to dig into work funded by military grants. These are likely the most fruitful for careers.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

Won first match. 3 more matches.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

9/ I've written about CTA in the past. For instance, I helped @johncutlefish with some skill extraction a few weeks ago. You may read about that experience here: And the most comprehensive book on it is this one:

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John Cutler’s Product Org Expertise

A few weeks ago, I helped Amplitude head of product education John Cutler extract tacit expertise around diagnosing and improving product organisations. Here's how that went.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

I spend all my time thinking about how humans can use data well, and nearly no time on the possibilities of generative analytics. Abhi has a longer and grumpier explanation for why.

@_abhisivasailam

Abhi Sivasailam

@_abhisivasailam

6 months

Growing chatter about generative analytics seems to mostly be about how well text-to-SQL/chart/report will work. Idk the answer but I'm pretty sure it's the wrong question. If today's charts/reports/queries generally do not create significant value, why would more of them?

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

Here’s a fun pattern that you can’t unsee once you know it. How do you know if someone is speaking from proper experience of a data-driven culture? The answer: they’re not too concerned with “difficulty of asking questions”.

@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

(Although, to be fair, from working in a vendor, reading vendor content or data influencer content, one gets the distinct impression that most of these folk don’t actually know how to use data in the pursuit of operational excellence.)

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 months

Unfortunately, my essay on Deming has morphed into a comprehensive one-stop introduction to the man’s ideas, so that you don’t have to read books about him. I hate myself.

@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 months

Working on a Deming piece that should go out in a few hours. Trying to couch the man’s controversial ideas to make them more acceptable is … hard.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

22/ And it's just scratching the surface. For a full summary, including some other uses of the research, read my blog post here:

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Book Summary: Accelerated Expertise

Accelerated Expertise is the best book we have on creating accelerated training programs today.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

Meanwhile the article calling for ‘less metrics’ mostly talks about output metrics, has no conception of input metrics, displays zero understanding of the value of understanding variance (the fingertip-feel I mentioned earlier in the thread), nor the value of process control. 🤷‍♂️

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

4 months

I learnt recently that some of my younger readers are basically reading Commoncog with an essay open in one window, and ChatGPT open in another window. And they’re basically entering terminology or whole phrases into ChatGPT to try and grok what I’m saying. 🤯

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

About two years ago I wrote a series of essays on Lia DiBello's research into business expertise. Her work has been hugely influential to me — it's changed the way I view business, and affected the way I think about my growth as an operator. That series WAS paywalled ...

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

5 months

Most people think that the Amazon Weekly Business Review is just a metrics meeting. That it's simply a way of looking at a large number of metrics. That you can just as easily substitute some other practice to look at metrics and do just as well. Most people are wrong.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

4 months

I hope one of the implications of my Becoming Data Driven essay is clear: that you need to be able to act in order to establish causality. e.g. you THINK X is a causal factor for Y, but the quickest way to verify is to go do X. Then stop. Then start again.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

So I’m just starting on Accelerated Expertise and my god is this a heavy lift. I’m going to leave these book screenshots here and see if anyone picks up on the bombshell implications.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

6/ That core shared mental model is basically a triad. For convenience we'll name it first, before diving in: a) Supply b) Demand c) Capital This is taken from her 2010 chapter in Informed by Knowledge (snippet below):

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

Wow I just read a 2000 word blog post saying that data teams don’t have product market fit and that’s a problem. Let’s see if I can do an alternative take in the space of one tweet:

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 months

But also I've been testing process control over the past 1.5 years, and the overwhelming reaction I get from software folk (after teaching them these methods) is "my god, we software engs are some of the least data driven folk out there." 70% gross margins hide a lot of sins.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

6 months

Wrote a review of @aprildunford ’s Sales Pitch on Goodreads. It’s bloody good. You should read it. I can’t wait to test it in practice (though I don’t currently have any opportunities to do so — Commoncog doesn’t do B2B sales — yet!)

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

8/ The set of techniques that allow you to extract mental models of expertise is called 'Cognitive Task Analysis'. It's been around for 30 years now. You know how experts can't really explain how they 'know' things? Yeah. CTA gets around that.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

3 years

11/ Here's how they do it: 1. They identify the domain experts. 2. They do CTA. 3. During CTA, they collect details of difficult cases to build a case library. 4. They turn that case library into a set of training simulations. 5. They sort the scenarios according to difficulty.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 year

Yesterday I talked about 2 ideas: 1. “Management is prediction” — good operators are able to predict business outcomes. 2. W. Edwards Deming’s “there is no truth in business, only ‘knowledge’” (knowledge = that which helps you predict). Ok here’s one more implication.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

11 months

I feel so deeply seen by @eugenewei ’s latest piece, a beautiful eulogy to Twitter’s demise. Also I am extremely pleased by this paragraph.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

4 months

Was saying to a friend that one way to get really good distribution is just writing really, really, good shit. Pity my last essay (Becoming Data Driven, From First Principles) took 1.5 years lol.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

There’s a surprising number of things in business that I can’t write about because it requires too much context to set up for. But really most of the underexplored, interesting, and useful stuff lies there.

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

13/ It turns out that experts in ill-structured domains DON'T reason from first principles as much. They tend to reason from past cases instead! (Sure, they may TALK about concepts and principles, but the concepts are clusters of cases in their heads.) Read:

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

2 years

Haidt starts out by saying that most GenZ are curious and want to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas. He pushes back on the notion that most of them are entitled … but would say that most of them are undersocialised:

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@ejames_c

Cedric Chin

1 month

The secret about Commoncog is that actually everything is about epistemology.

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