78 percent of Christmas hits were penned before 1990. From Can’t Get Much Higher. Also: “According to a report by CNN, about 52% of adults said they celebrated Halloween in 2005. In 2012, that percentage had jumped to around 72%. Over a decade later, ~the New York Times related~ that that percentage has slowly crept up closer to 75%.”
Transplant recipients can inherit memories and preferences from their donors from Adaobi Adibe. More on this here and here.
Worth your time
Getting materials out of the labby Ben Reinhardtin Works in Progress. Lots of this resonated for me in my work at Macro Oceans, even though our materials aren’t novel in the same way that say carbon fiber was in the 1960s. There’s an interplay between unique functionality (what the material does), scale (your ability to produce consistently), and price at each step along the journey. The art is picking use cases where your unique functionality isn’t blocked by your limited scale and high price.
I know from my own experience of studying martial arts in Japan that intense study brings rewards that are impossible to achieve by casual application. For a year I studied an hour a day three days a week and made minimal progress. For a further year I switched to an intensive course of five hours a day five days a week. The gains were dramatic and permanent, resulting in a black belt and an instructor certificate. Deep down I was pessimistic that I could actually learn a martial art. I thought you were either a ‘natural’ or nothing. Then I saw natural athletes fall behind when they didn’t practice enough. This, shamefully, was a great morale booster.
"Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture" and more from Katherine Dee.
The Marginal Revolution Podcast on Crime in the 1970s. They were somewhat pessimistic as the episode ended, but it made me much more optimistic about America’s future. The resilience of our society is really underrated.
AR binoculars that automatically identify birds anywhere in the world. Stupid great product idea.
Observations
Product market fit provides gravity for a business. Before you have it, moving in almost any direction might be a good idea. But after you have it, you’re either going to double down on what’s possible or expand into the adjacent possible. All the moves are directly related to your current momentum.
“For an increasing proportion of software it’s more helpful to think of it as content rather than software” — Daniel Kuntz
“The difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be.... But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy — and rarely does it take more money — to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to perservere until it’s really great.” - Steve Jobs
Sometimes caution is the riskier choice.
Politics is made up of both style and substance. I remember Tom Holland of the Rest Is History saying that Roman political parties didn’t break down on policy lines the way that ours do but on style: a conservative style vs a progressive style.
At this time in 2022, I was pro-online sports gambling. I wanted the ability to make small money bets. I enjoyed traveling to New York or Pennsylvania and being able to bet on teams and players I like. I followed Georgia’s progress (or lack thereof)in legalizing online sports gambling.
Online sports gambling would be all upside for me. I know I’d never bet more than I could afford to lose. Betting $1 is more fun for me than betting $100,000 because I can afford to lose the $1; the thrill is from making a prediction and seeing the result.
I changed my mind on this somewhere in the past couple of years. I now believe that unrestricted online sports gambling is a bad idea and we shouldn’t allow it. Many people aren’t like me and the costs to them and their families outweighs whatever fun I can have.
The Zvi has done a great job at cataloging the negative impacts: large increases in bankruptcy and domestic violence; large decreases in household savings all related to the expansion of online sports gambling. Expanding access to this addictive activity causes more people to get addicted and the consequences for them are catastrophic. At this level of cost, it isn’t worth it for me to be able to put $3 on SGA for NBA MVP. [0]
At minimum, we should be restricting access and possibly even preventing the maximum amount that an individual is able to lose — and making gaming companies liable if they go above that amount.
[0] Plus I can substitute with Manifold Markets, which is a prediction market where you can bet with free points is a great substitute for me. I just like being able to make the bets!
Sometimes when I read a biography of a thinker, I get a new appreciation for their ideas. Situating them in the actual life and time they were born in gives them a vitality you can’t get from Wikipedia.
That did not happen with these two. I’m not sure how much of that is the author, who doesn’t seem particularly interested in the theological minutiae of the early reformation, and how much is the sources, who mostly kick in when the men have already developed their ideas rather than as they were forming them, but I didn’t come away with an appreciation for why they felt so strongly about the theological issues that seem so remote to us now. Imagine having a fight over how much art is in a church!
What I did take away from the books is an understanding for why Switzerland and the US feel so culturally similar.
Here is Gordon describing Zwingli:
His calls for religious freedom were coupled with demands for liberty from tyranny, both religious and political.
This then gets exported to England through Jean Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor in Zurich. The English and Scottish reformed communities become very influential in the culture of the thirteen colonies. In a very real way, the cultural DNA of the US comes from the Swiss Alps.
One other thing that stood out: there was clearly a warmth and a charisma to the two men at the time that doesn’t translate. Both had large followings and deep relationships that inspired people to follow them through hardship. Calvin, as an example, taught lectures that were well attended and created many acolytes. They aren’t the austere caricatures that are passed down to us.
Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end. In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether people will buy it), usability risk (whether people can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have), and business risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business).
A great article on creative discontent from Celine Nguyen. One of my favorite David Halberstam quotes is “Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don’t feel like it.” He wrote one of my favorite books, Breaks of the Game, which is so good because it’s insanely well sourced. I imagine him getting up, he’s got a cold and it’s rainy. He would rather sleep in, but he pours a cup of coffee, gets in his car, and goes to have one more conversation with one more soruce. This one reminded me of him. Plus it lead me to the Ogilvy company principles:
Dogged determination is often the only trait that separates a moderately creative person from a highly creative one. Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Before them, obstacles vanish into thin air and mountains crumble into atoms.
And:
Conclusion: We are what we repeatedly do. Being very good is no good. You have to be very, very, very, very, very good.
How to build an LLM judge by Hamel Husain. Notice the role of the taste maker?
Musings
When I was a PM on the YouTube Creator team, a super common interaction I had with top creators when something like this:
- Me: How did your channel get started
- Creator: I just started one day and it blew up almost from the first video
- Me: Really?
- Creator: Yeah.
- Me: Wow, that’s crazy.
- Creator: Well, it’s actually my third YouTube channel. I’ve had a couple of others that never really went anywhere.
I must've had this exact conversation at least 5 times. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
One thing I notice is that super early stage companies have to do impossible things to make it to the next day… which sometimes leads to them being bad at assessing which super impossible things they can do and which ones they can’t. I think political progressives can be the same way. They have to by nature believe that wholesale change is possible but this blinds them to the things that can’t be changed.
With apologies to the boffins around the world who know more about this than I do, I think AGI arrived with GPT-4. Everything else is just a continuation on that theme.
The thing that’s great about Duolingo is that they’ve figure out how to turn aggressive gamification strategies towards a neutral to positive end
“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” — Frederik Pohl
When starting out, it’s easy to spend time on your strengths and ignore your weaknesses until much later. In fact the startup world often fetishizes a founder's particular strength. That is to say, if you know a particular founder is design-oriented, you expect to see some of the most beautifully designed things from them. Despite this, if you know you are capable of doing something, it can be beneficial to focus on the other things. Simply put: start with the stuff you don’t know you can do.
[Ed.: I remember a startup in which we, foolishly, passed on investing that had made such fast progress. When I asked them how they'd advanced so quickly they explained that they'd exclusively focused on things they were unsure would work.]
Creativity is not magic! Good ideas don't just come from thinking really hard! Good ideas come from arbitrage: knowing about areas and ideas and facts that your classmates don't know about. By definition, this is not going to be on your class syllabus