The Generalist: “Beyond the shadow of its whales, social media teems with smaller players. Spend a little time in your phone’s app store, and you’ll discover a vibrant ecosystem of sub-scale apps riffing on established use cases and experimenting with new ones. More interesting than the individual applications are the strategies startups are attempting. Often these approaches work in concert, but they are discrete enough to be isolated. Four, in particular, are worth highlighting: focusing on close friends, counterpositioning on ethical or political grounds, moving beyond advertising, and winning the next great use case.”
Packy McCormick: “The only answer is differentiation. Call it novelty, creativity, mutation. Follow curiosities down deep rabbit holes and emerge with unique ideas. Partake in vivid and varied adventures to build up a set of experiences that is unique to you. Run away from the areas in which you are average and towards those where you might be special. Start a company because the world needs it, and because if you don’t start that specific company, no one else will. You don’t need to be the world’s best brain surgeon; you might be the world’s fastest pumpkin carver. And when you find those areas where your curiosity, skills, and personality meet, lean in so hard that you create a Personal Monopoly no human or machine can touch.”
Cal Newport: “The critical mind-set shift is understanding that even minor [task switches] are productivity poison. That’s the foundational message. We used to multitask, and then research came out and said you can’t literally multitask. Your brain can’t have your inbox open next to the memo you’re writing while you’re also on the phone. So everyone, in the first decade of the 2000s, said: I turned off my notifications. I do one thing at a time. But what we didn’t realize is that even when you jump over to check the inbox and come right back, it can be just as damaging as multitasking. When you looked at that email inbox for 15 seconds, you initiated a cascade of So if you have to work on something that’s cognitively demanding, the rule has to be zero context shifts during that period. Treat it like a dentist appointment. You can’t check your email when you’re having a cavity filled. You have to see it that way…Slow productivity is all about identifying alternatives. I’m trying to develop this notion of productivity that’s based on, at the large time scales, the production of things you’re proud of and that have high impact, but on the small time scale, there’s periods where you’re doing very little.”
Eamonn Butler: “Trade delivers more than higher income alone, however. It also delivers a better quality of life. Plainly, richer countries can afford to spend more on things like education, better healthcare and a cleaner environment. But these and other quality-of-life benefits are also promoted through new ideas, practices and processes coming from abroad.” [via CafeHayek]
Arnold Kling: “Imagine what happens if you deny the possibility that you could ever be deceived or that you could be unable to comprehend a complex phenomenon. Your intuition tells you that you could not possibly be wrong. This intuition is what philosophers label naïve realism...Naive realism would tend to make citizens overconfident in their opinions concerning public policy. If I believe that I have the solution to a problem, then I will be pretty darned impatient with leaders who do not solve the problem. Naive realism on the part of public officials is a serious drawback. If the officials are sure that their views are correct, then they may undertake bold interventions without regard to the risks, unintended consequences, or coercion that is embedded in their policies.”
Thomas Rid after using ChatGPT in the classroom for five days: “[It] brought two related features of artificial intelligence in education into sharp relief: the first is that all that talk about plagiarism and cheating and abuse is uninspiring and counterproductive. Yes, some unambitious students will use this new tool to cover subpar performance, and yes, we could talk about how to detect or disincentivize such behavior. The far more inspiring conversation is a different one: how can the most creative, the most ambitious, and the most brilliant students achieve even better results faster? How can educators help them along the way? And how can we both use machines that learn, and help learn, to push out the edge of human knowledge through cutting-edge research faster and in new ways?”
