Duck Alignment Academy

What you’re measuring is different from how you measure it

Start with understanding the “why?” behind what you’re trying to measure. Then figure out the measurements, knowing they’ll be imperfect.

Posts

Your prose is not code; it will not fail because you forgot a semicolon. Prefer being understood to strict adherence to grammatical rules.

Resources

When you document how to execute a process, that ensures you’ll do it right the next time. This helps your future self and your successors.

Posts

Acronyms can be confusing when they’re unfamiliar to your reader. Err on the side of explaining, even if you don’t think you need to.

Resources

Making someone feel heard doesn’t mean doing whatever they want; it means they feel like you’ve made a good faith effort to understand them.

Posts

Put the important part at the beginning of your post or email. Don’t assume people will read the whole thing.

Resources

If you can’t come up with a sentence or two that says why you scheduled the meeting, you should consider what that implies.

Posts

The idea of helping your competitors might be hard to accept, but when we work together, we all do better.

Posts

The Flywheel Theory says that the long term sustainability of a community project depends on having someone who can keep the momentum going.

Talks

Deadlines are easy to set and hard to meet. So how do you set deadlines that aren’t hard to meet? It’s not hard!

Posts