FT: ““Creative destruction” was first popularised in the 20th century by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, though its roots can be traced back to the writings of Karl Marx. The Marx-Schumpeter hypothesis is that, over the arc of history, the fastest-growing and most dynamic economies have moved fast (the creative bit) and broken things (the destructive bit). Economic dynamism can be measured along a number of dimensions, including the number of firms entering and exiting a market, the number of workers being hired and fired and the pace and scale of public service reform. Research has shown these measures help determine the intensity of innovation and so are good leading indicators of productivity and economic growth, backing up the Marx-Schumpeter hypothesis.”
Kevin Kelly: 50 Years of Travel Tips. “There are two modes of travel; retreat or engage. People often travel to escape the routines of work, to recharge, relax, reinvigorate, and replenish themselves— R&R. In this mode you travel to remove yourself from your routines, or to get the pampering and attention you don’t ordinarily get, and ideally to do fun things instead of work things. So you travel to where it is easy. This is called a vacation, or R&R. The other mode is engagement and experience, or E&E. In this mode you travel to discover new things, to have new experiences, to lean into an adventure whose outcome is not certain, to meet otherness. You move to find yourself by encountering pleasures and challenges you don’t encounter at home. This kind of travel is a type of learning, and of the two modes, it is the one I favor in these tips…Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses, or naval history, or dinosaur digs, or jazz joints will lead to far more adventures, and memorable times than a grand tour of famous places. It doesn’t even have to be your passions; it could be a friend’s, family member’s, or even one you’ve read about. The point is to get away from the expected into the unexpected.”
Rashesh Shah: “In India you need what I call a bifocal approach. Because India is a strange country. For example, when we (Edelweiss) became 25 years old, we were also 100 quarters old. Each of the 100 quarters has been horrible. But the 25 years have been great…My real passion is endurance because it’s amazing how the human body deals with endurance. The same thing applies to business, which is about endurance not about the sprint, especially in India…I have another analogy—you don’t run 42km at a time, you run one kilometre 42 times. So doing it again and again, quarter after quarter, you just keep on doing it.”
NYTimes: “The old Silicon Valley model dictated that start-ups should raise a huge sum of money from venture capital investors and spend it hiring an army of employees to scale up fast. Profits would come much later. Until then, head count and fund-raising were badges of honor among founders, who philosophized that bigger was better. But Gamma is among a growing cohort of start-ups, most of them working on A.I. products, that are also using A.I. to maximize efficiency. They make money and are growing fast without the funding or employees they would have needed before. The biggest bragging rights for these start-ups are for making the most revenue with the fewest workers.”
Vox: “AI companies like OpenAI are using the term reasoning to mean that their models break down a problem into smaller problems, which they tackle step by step, ultimately arriving at a better solution as a result. But that’s a much narrower definition of reasoning than a lot of people might have in mind. Although scientists are still trying to understand how reasoning works in the human brain — nevermind in AI — they agree that there are actually lots of different types of reasoning. There’s deductive reasoning, where you start with a general statement and use it to reach a specific conclusion. There’s inductive reasoning, where you use specific observations to make a broader generalization. And there’s analogical reasoning, causal reasoning, common sense reasoning … suffice it to say, reasoning is not just one thing.”
