[Hi everyone, I announced this last week internally and am now moving it, unchanged, to the public forum. Welcome again, Mary!]
Hi InnerHexers Everyone, you all know and love Mary (previously known as chipmanaged, short for micro(chip)managed, but now just @mary) such as from her classic guest post and even way before that, she was instrumental in pulling off Precommit-To-Recommit aka Beeminder’s New World Order which is the only change to Beeminder so far to have immediately, permanently, and single-handedly doubled revenue. And a million other things. She’s pretty brilliant and amazing and understands Beeminder arguably better than Bee and I do.
We wanted an excuse to work with Mary (not to mention befriend her in real life, which we did years ago) and finally got one recently due to her taking a bit of a break from academic philosophy. We’ve now made her “chief executive intern” and the goal is for her to become COO/CFO – managing projects, hiring, deciding what we can afford, etc. The main goal is helping us grow enough that we can say we have a COO/CFO with a straight face (though I’m not sure any company should use any title with “chief” in it with a straight face). Her work visa / university restrictions / whatever (she’s Canadian and a grad student at Brown) prevent her from officially having a job title like COO for now but it’s ok to say (even publicly [which, hey, this now is]) that that’s our intention.
(Oh yeah, and she has a bunch of business-y credentials that I won’t bore you with but suffice it to say we’re lucky to have this caliber of help! And being an academic philosopher makes her ridiculously fun to argue with, if you’re into that sort of thing. As I obviously am. So if you notice Mary and me writing novels to each other about the Platonic ideal of continuous beeminding or something, make sure to tell us to snap out of it! We’ve been all focused on real/immediate work so far, figuring out new task management systems, running the new year’s survivor contest, newbee onboarding, etc, and still having a ton of fun with it all. There’ll be time for the philosophical stuff later!)
I love the idea of an academic philosopher deciding on whom to hire! That might be in parts because I recently got exposed to philosophy myself. A friend of mine (doing his Ph.D. in theoretical CS) is creating a logic to reason about arguments exchanged on Twitter about Brexit. Almost daily I get thrown some excerpts from his philosophy books about “How to Argument” and at first many of them were super mundane and I wondered just how anyone could sit through writing so many pages about such trivialities. But they went to “what did I just read?!” really quick!
Coincidentally today I listened to the Philosophy Bites podcast about possible worlds and how you can model things as sets of possible worlds and that only a reality without contradictions can be a possible world, etc. and that, too, started very very simple but was surprisingly fascinating in the end.
And I liked how there was one philosopher whom’s name I forgot who proposed that all these possible worlds actually exist but apparently most philosophers aren’t sure whether they want to join in on that assumption.
Also Plato. I really would like to have a word with Plato.
Anyways I digress. Welcome @mary!
I’m afraid I know very little about his work. I think he built some mathematically-based arguments on top of or inspired by Lewis’s modal realism, but I’m pulling that from the deep, dark corners of my memory, and could completely be misremembering.
Thanks for the kind words, Danny. And thanks to everyone for the welcome.
I’ve been in love with Beeminder since I stumbled across it in a Lifehacker article six years ago. It helped me finish my Master’s thesis and pick up some good habits (and get rid of some bad ones: I swear much ******* less now). Having the opportunity to work on something I love with awesome people… well that’s the dream, isn’t it?
Like @dreev said, my first major projects are newbee onboarding, expanding some of our operational systems (sexy!), and running the new year’s survivor contest, but I have a couple of other treats for long-timers that I’m hoping to announce in coming weeks, too.
Feel free to drop me a DM or an email ([my first name]@beeminder.com) if there are things you want to chat about or ideas that you have that I can steal and take credit for!
And thanks for letting me be a part of this quirky, improvement-focused, funny, cooperative community.
We’ve been all focused on real/immediate work so far, figuring out new task management systems, running the new year’s survivor contest, newbee onboarding, etc, and still having a ton of fun with it all. There’ll be time for the philosophical stuff later!)