Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkeness. Upworthy.
â˘đ"A banana contains the same amount of radiation as a person would get from living next to a properly maintained nuclear power plant for one year"@NYTpic.twitter.com/pb4gF7m090
— James Pethokoukis âŠď¸â¤´ď¸ (@JimPethokoukis) November 17, 2024
Observations
A pro / con list means the answer is no.
every decision i've ever made that wasn't an instant "hell yes" has been a mistake. every pro/con list is an admission the thing isn't worth it. the path God has laid out for you is so obvious it feels like getting bludgeoned with an anvil. no analysis makes a bad decision good
Be able to pull yourself to c-minus at just about any task
Be able to identify which parts of a project need an A+
Be able to find the people who can do an A+ on those tasks
Be able to work with those people and help those people work with each other
If you try and tell people 5 interesting things about your product / company / cause, theyâll remember zero. If instead, you tell them just one, theyâll usually ask questions that lead them to the other things, and then theyâll remember all of them because it mattered to them at the moment they asked.
Modern social media rewards information abundance, so if you find yourself with a product / company / cause that has lots of benefits, tell each of those story one at time. People are more likely to remember it and it gives you more to post.
78 percent of Christmas hits were penned before 1990. From Canât Get Much Higher. Also: âAccording 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%.â
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 lab by Ben Reinhardt in Works in Progress. Lots of this resonated for me in my work at Macro Oceans, even though our materials arenât novel in the same way that say carbon fiber was in the 1960s. Thereâs 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 isnât 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 ânaturalâ or nothing. Then I saw natural athletes fall behind when they didnât 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 Americaâs 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, youâre either going to double down on whatâs possible or expand into the adjacent possible. All the moves are directly related to your current momentum.
âFor an increasing proportion of software itâs more helpful to think of it as content rather than softwareâ â Daniel Kuntz
âThe 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 youâre going to make something, it doesnât take any more energy â and rarely does it take more money â 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 itâs really great.â - 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 didnât 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 Georgiaâs progress (or lack thereof)in legalizing online sports gambling.
Online sports gambling would be all upside for me. I know Iâd 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 shouldnât allow it. Many people arenât 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 isnât 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 â 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 canât get from Wikipedia.
That did not happen with these two. Iâm not sure how much of that is the author, who doesnât 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 didnât 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, Zwingliâs 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 doesnât 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 arenât 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 âBeing a professional means doing your job on the days you donât feel like it.â He wrote one of my favorite books, Breaks of the Game, which is so good because itâs insanely well sourced. I imagine him getting up, heâs got a cold and itâs 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.Â
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, thatâs crazy.
- Creator: Well, itâs actually my third YouTube channel. Iâve 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.