Patrick McKenzie

Do those things that actually matter.

And some distractions proudly wave, I'm a distraction from everything that matters.

And some don't.

Some definitely say, I'm real work.

I definitely feel like real work.

And they're just not.

And so don't do the things that don't matter.

One cultural practice of the tech industry that I think it would be more important

salubrious for the broader civil society to adopt the concept of blameless postmortems.

We talked about earlier about who to blame for various failures, et cetera, et cetera.

I broadly believe that

there is some amount of blame which performs useful societal purposes.

Uh, and then beyond that, like the diminishing returns set in pretty quickly.

And we are, um, you know, the magic word in Washington is accountability.

We want accountability for failures, et cetera, et cetera.

People are terrified of accountability.

Uh, and, uh, that, uh, causes there to be fields of distortion around things that actually happened, mistakes that were actually made, opportunities that were not pursued, um, and similar.

And so, uh,

changing our general practice about how we accomplished accountability towards the direction of, okay, first, let's get a dispassionate record of what actually happened.

It's less important that it was a, you know, this named official.