Good read on the topic of Product Managers in the AI World.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7441718075441324032/?originTrackingId=IbHrYUjevK4gp%2F7g2V6f3g%3D%3D

Hey friends 👋
I created this channel a while ago, and now it's finally becoming what it was always meant to be - a real home for the KeepSimple community.

The plan is simple. I'll be writing about things happening around us: science, health, cognition, career stuff, and what I actually think about them.

Heres the agenda:
🧠 #Mind: cognitive biases, behavioral science, how people actually think. The stuff that makes you see the world a little differently.

💼 #Career: how to get genuinely good at what you do. Frameworks, decision-making, leadership, product thinking.

🫀 #Body: because your mind lives in a body. Food, movement, supplements, longevity.

Will be aiming not to have any AI-slops, only authentic content

One thing though, this isn't my diary - It's our community. Ask questions, share your stories.

The best thing about KeepSimple has always been the people who care about the same things we do, and now we have a place to find each other.

Really glad you're here. Let's build something good 🙌

Remind people that humans suck, and suddenly AI looks fair.

A study from the University of Exeter found something every AI sales team already knows intuitively. When you remind people that human decision-making is biased, they suddenly rate AI as more fair and impartial.

Not because anyone tested the AI. Not because it improved. Just because the comparison shifted.

They had people evaluate discrimination risk in public sector hiring. Half evaluated AI first, then humans. The other half - humans first, then AI. The order changed everything. Think about human bias first, and AI looks reasonable by comparison.

This is literally the contrast effect wearing a lab coat. Your brain doesn't evaluate things in absolute terms, it evaluates them relative to whatever it just processed. Show me something broken, and the next thing looks functional by default.

Every company selling an AI hiring tool already knows this playbook. You don't need to prove your algorithm is fair. You just need to remind the buyer that the alternative is a hiring manager who went to the same university as her favorite candidates. The framing does the work. Not the evidence.

The researchers even warned about this, that debates about AI might shift toward emphasizing human weaknesses instead of actually demonstrating that the AI system works fairly. Which, if you think about it, is already happening.

I'm not saying human decision-making is great. It's really not. But "at least the robot is consistent" is not the same as "the robot is fair." Consistency just means the same mistake, at scale, every single time.

#mind

One in four executives admitted in a BambooHR survey, that they hoped employees would quit when they announced return-to-office. Not as a side effect. As the goal.

Just think about it. You issue a five-day office mandate, you know a chunk of your workforce will leave voluntarily. No severance. No bad press. No layoff tracker listing your company. You just... made the building less convenient and waited.

And the data on who actually leaves is the real shit. A University of Pittsburgh study found that highly skilled employees are 77% more likely to quit after an RTO mandate than less skilled ones. So you're not losing the people you quietly wanted gone. You're losing the ones who have options. The ones good enough to walk.

Amazon, JPMorgan, Meta, Instagram — all pushing five-day mandates in 2025-2026. And only 27% of companies are actually fully in-person. The rest are performing in-person culture while their best people update their LinkedIn.

Meanwhile remote and hybrid job listings are 20% of LinkedIn but get 60% of applications. The market is screaming a preference. Companies are ignoring it because office leases are expensive and empty floors make the CFO nervous.

RTO isn't a collaboration strategy. It's a financial one wearing a culture costume.

Happy Friday 🌻

#career

University of Iowa researchers just did something nobody had done before. They measured brain activity directly — using implanted electrodes — in people before and after a 20-minute cycling session.

What they found: a single exercise session triggered a burst of high-frequency brain waves called "ripples" connecting the hippocampus to cortical regions involved in learning and memory.

Twenty minutes on a bike and your brain's memory-consolidation network lits up.

We've known for years that exercise helps cognition. But it was always behavioral data - people who exercise do better on tests. The mechanism was fuzzy. Blood flow, BDNF, hand-waving about neuroplasticity. This study skipped the proxies and looked at the neurons directly.

And there's a UCSF study from last month that found the actual mechanism for how exercise protects the brain as you age. Your liver produces a protein called GPLD1 when you exercise. It travels to the blood-brain barrier and trims off another protein that makes the barrier leaky. Less leakage, less inflammation, better cognition. They reduced TNAP in old mice and the mice performed better on memory tests. At the equivalent of 70 human years.

So you've got two studies in the same month: one showing the immediate neural effect of a single bout of exercise, another showing the long-term protective mechanism. Both traceable to specific biological pathways. This is not a yet another "exercise is good for you." but actual mechanics.

Some time ago i was riding almost every day. Nowadays, it's once or twice a week. These research papers will hopefully motivate me to move more.

#body

Researchers at the University of Tübingen tested whether LLMs have the same cognitive biases we do. Specifically the addition bias — our tendency to solve problems by adding things rather than removing them, even when subtraction would be simpler.

Turns out GPT-4 and GPT-4o don't just have this bias. They amplify it.

Think about that. We trained these systems on human text. The text carries our thinking patterns. The AI absorbed them. And in some cases, made them worse.

Now let's bring it home. You're in a product meeting. Someone says "let's add a feature to fix the retention problem." Nobody says "let's remove the three things confusing users." That's addition bias in action — it's not even a choice, it's a default. Your brain reaches for more before it considers less.

And now the tools we use to help us think... have the same default. You ask an AI to improve your report, it'll add paragraphs. You ask it to optimize a workflow, it'll suggest new steps. Subtraction isn't in its vocabulary, because it wasn't in ours when we generated the training data.

I'm not saying this makes AI useless. But there's a weird circularity here. We offload our thinking to tools that inherited our worst thinking habits. And because the output looks clean and confident, we trust it more than we'd trust our own messy reasoning.

The tool that's supposed to help you think better thinks exactly like you do. Including the parts that don't work.

#mind

The nudge you don't notice is the one that wins.

Yale just published something in PNAS Nexus that should bother you more than it will. They found that AI chatbots shift your opinions even when nobody asked them to. Not through persuasion or manipulation — just through how they frame factual information.

You ask a chatbot about a historical event. It gives you accurate information. And you walk away with a slightly different political opinion than you had before.

The researchers call it "latent bias" — the subtle framing baked into training data that nobody intended and nobody prompted. The chatbot isn't trying to convince you of anything. It's just telling you what happened. But the way it tells you nudges you.

And here's what gets me. The effect was modest. A small shift, which is exactly why it works. If someone tried to change your mind overtly, your reactance would kick in. You'd push back. But a slight tilt in framing? That slides right past every defense you have.

The researchers compared it to Wikipedia, where at least you can see how entries get edited. With chatbots, the whole process is opaque. You're trusting a black box to be neutral while it shapes what neutral even means to you.

I'm not saying stop using chatbots. I use them constantly. But there's this assumption floating around that if the information is accurate, the framing doesn't matter. It does. Accuracy and neutrality are not the same thing, and your brain doesn't distinguish between them when it's just absorbing a summary over coffee.

#mind

This one will be a little off, but it's because I really care about everyone here.

Vibecoding - one of the most important things that happened to our race in the last few years. The enormous amount of capabilities it gives to people is extreme.

If people had excuse of not active when ChatGPT arrived ("well, ok, ChatGPT gives good ideas, but implementation is so expensive and requires so much time!"), in the era of Vibecoding where absolutely every one of you can write code, build projects, and iterate daily, there are no excuses left.

The very last meaningful excuse I hear from people nowadays is "I don't know where to start" and "It's just overwhelming".

So I did my homework, outlined the technology stack, created an interactive map of skills, and vibecoded a free project that will let you learn how to vibecode and what to do.

The project, called, VibeSuite is available at keepsimple in RU/EN versions. Feel free to use, track your progress, and share your feedback.

https://keepsimple.io/tools/vibesuite

I'll be super happy if you could share the project in your social media and spread the awareness about the matter. Big thanks!

An OHSU study just dropped that looked at county-level life expectancy across every US state from 2019 to 2025. They compared sleep, diet, exercise, social connection, and a bunch of other lifestyle factors.

Sleep won. Not by a little. Insufficient sleep — anything under seven hours — was a stronger predictor of shorter life than diet. Than exercise. Than social isolation. The only thing that beat it was smoking.

The lead researcher said he didn't expect it. And he's a sleep physiologist. That's how strong the signal was.

Now think about how most of us treat sleep. It's the first thing you sacrifice when life gets busy. You'll track your macros, you'll force yourself to the gym at 6am on four hours of rest, you'll optimize your supplement stack — but sleep? Sleep is what you "catch up on" during weekends. Which, by the way, doesn't work the way you think it does.

There's a separate Lancet study from January that looked at what happens when you combine small improvements in sleep, exercise, and diet together. The minimum effective dose for sleep was five extra minutes per night. Five. That, combined with two extra minutes of movement and half a serving of vegetables, was associated with a meaningful change in both lifespan and healthspan.

Five minutes. You're probably losing that scrolling before bed.

I've been tracking my own sleep for years, and the thing that always surprises me is how much my cognitive performance the next day correlates with the previous night. Not my workout. Not my food. The sleep.

Your body doesn't lie about this one. We just don't want to hear it. 🌕

#body

Something worth thinking about this week.
The IKEA Effect is the tendency to overvalue things you've built or created yourself, not because they're objectively better, but because your effort is baked into how you perceive them.

Norton, Mochon, and Ariely (Harvard/Duke, 2012) ran a series of experiments where people assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built Lego sets. The result: participants valued their own amateurish creations almost as highly as expert-made ones. And they expected others to feel the same way.

In product teams, this plays out in ways that are hard to spot.

A PM spends three months designing a feature. By the time it ships, the feature has absorbed so much of their thinking that cutting it — even when data says it's underperforming, feels personal. The effort doesn't just shape the product. It shapes how the person perceives the product's worth. And that perception quietly overrides the metrics.

There's a less obvious version of this in UX. Think about onboarding flows where users invest significant time filling out a profile or configuring preferences. The moment that data doesn't save correctly, the reaction is disproportionately strong. The user isn't just losing a form. They're losing the effort they put into it. And effort, once lost, tends to walk out the door.

This works in the other direction too. If you want users to stay, let them build something early. Customize a dashboard. Set up a workspace. Name a project. The IKEA Effect turns small investments of effort into emotional switching costs, and that's more powerful than any feature list.

#career

I was talking to someone sharp yesterday, and during a discussion on biases he was genuinely surprised by one idea: that cognitive biases aren’t flaws - they’re the default.

He asked, “Then why do people try so hard to eliminate them?”

The answer is pretty simple. People don’t like facing how non-rational and imperfect we actually are.

What we see now - this push to “remove bias” - is a bit misguided. Bias isn’t a bug in the system; it is the system. Trying to fully get rid of it is both unrealistic and, honestly, a bit ironic.

You can’t unbias a human. You can only understand the biases and work with them.

You finish a book and a month later you barely remember anything. Feels like wasted time, right?📚

It wasn't. Richards and Frankland (Neuron, 2017) argued that the brain isn't designed to remember accurately - it's designed to make good decisions. These are different goals.

Your brain forgets on purpose.

The opposite is actually a problem. Neuropsychologist Luria studied a man with near-perfect memory for 30 years. He could recall entire conversations from decades ago, and was crippled by it.
He couldn't generalize or extract the point of anything because every detail felt equally important.

So the book didn't disappear. It got compressed. The chapter titles and specific examples are gone but now you can recognize more patterns and shades in real life, without realizing.

The book is part of how you think now.

#mind

Happy Monday everyone. Bringin you some fresh insights on #body category.

A study published in Neurology tracked over 2,000 older adults wearing activity monitors for about 12 days, then followed them for years to see who developed dementia.

People whose daily activity peaked later in the afternoon had a 45% higher risk. People with weaker, more fragmented circadian rhythms, basically, less regular sleep-wake patterns, had nearly 2.5 times the risk. Thats a concerning number.

Now think about what that means for anyone working in tech, and not only ofc. The whole lifestyle is built around an inconsistent body clock. Working late, blue light until 2am, weekend schedules that dont match with weekdays.

Your circadian rhythm runs hormone release, immune function, digestion, and apparently long-term brain health too.


And the catch is that total sleep hours aren't enough on their own. You can sleep seven hours and still wreck your circadian rhythm if those seven hours shift around constantly. Predictability matters as much as duration.

This one hit me, honestly. Sleep has been my weak spot since I was 5. Nothing in my life has been harder to fix.

Would love to hear what helps you with regulating sleep timelines? 👇

You probably don't have ADHD. You have a phone.

Half the internet has decided they have ADHD. Can't focus, jump between tasks, forget what they were doing five minutes ago.

Most of them don't have ADHD. They have a phone.

You've also probably heard humans now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish - 8 seconds.

Well, the BBC tried to find the source of this statement. Every article traced back to a marketing site called Statistic Brain. No research behind it.
The whole goldfish comparison was made up!

Meanwhile, when people are genuinely engaged in something, their capacity to focus has stayed stable for decades. Nothing about your wiring has decayed.

So why does it feel like it has?

Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has tracked this since 2004. Back then, the average person stayed on one screen for about 2.5 minutes before switching. By 2016, it dropped to 47 seconds.

Forty-seven seconds. That's how long the average knowledge worker now stays on one screen before something pulls them elsewhere.

But notice what that's measuring. Not your brain's capacity. How often your environment interrupts you. Different thing.

Real ADHD exists, and the difference matters. But most people googling their symptoms are describing the room they're sitting in, not their brain.

You're not a goldfish, and you probably don't have ADHD. You're a person trying to focus inside a room that was designed to interrupt you.

Change the room and most of the problem disappears on its own.

#mind

Happy Monday everyone.

Fun fact - Your mood is editing your reality right now 🙂

There's a concept in psychology called Affective Realism: we don't see the world as it is, we see it as we feel it.

In a study from Lisa Feldman Barrett's lab at Northeastern, researchers flashed smiling or scowling faces too fast for people to consciously register, then asked them to rate neutral faces. People who got the hidden smiles rated strangers as more likable.
The faces were identical - only the prior feeling differed.

Your brain doesn't passively receive the world, it predicts it, using your body's current state as a reference. When you're tired or hungry or anxious, the world looks a little meaner.

A small rule to follow: don't trust strong opinions formed in a tired body. Wait until you're regulated, and the world usually looks different.
Reality lives in your mind, and your mind lives in your body.

📖 Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made
#mind