Category: Thinks

The Economist on Brazil’s decline: “After the military dictatorship in 1964-85, the country got a new constitution that returned the army to barracks, a new currency that ended hyperinflation and social programmes that, with a commodity boom, began to ease poverty and inequality. A decade ago the country was flush with oil money and had been awarded the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. It seemed destined to flourish. Brazil failed to seize the opportunity…Consecutive governments made three mistakes. First, they gave in to short-termism and put off liberal economic reforms. Second, in their efforts to shield themselves from the fallout of Lava Jato, a huge anti-corruption probe, politicians have resisted reforms that would curb graft. Finally, Brazil’s political system is a millstone.”

Why every student must learn cognitive science: by Vishnu Agnihotri. “Learning about ‘how learning works’ can help students develop more effective learning habits. For example, ‘mind wandering’ is a major issue for students and research shows that being able to focus attention in the first 5 minutes of a study session (‘settling in’ period) increases the ability to focus throughout the session. Chunking information into meaningful groups helps retention. Also trying to ‘retrieve’ what has been learnt (write down or speak what was learnt) is far more effective than reading the content repeatedly, underlining it etc.”

The Real Problem of Social Media Discourse: by Arnold Kling. “It’s not the falsehoods coming from a minority. It’s the bad taste of the majority.”

Technology Review on how AI is learning how to create itself: “The history of AI is filled with examples in which human-designed solutions gave way to machine-learned ones. Take computer vision: a decade ago, the big breakthrough in image recognition came when existing hand-crafted systems were replaced by ones that taught themselves from scratch. It’s the same for many AI successes. One of the fascinating things about AI, and machine learning in particular, is its ability to find solutions that humans haven’t found—to surprise us. An oft-cited example is AlphaGo (and its successor AlphaZero), which beat the best humanity has to offer at the ancient, beguiling game of Go by employing seemingly alien strategies. After hundreds of years of study by human masters, AI found solutions no one had ever thought of.”

FA Hayek: “In civilized society it is indeed not so much the greater knowledge that the individual can acquire, as the greater benefit he receives from the knowledge possessed by others, which is the cause of his ability to pursue an infinitely wider range of ends than merely the satisfaction of his most pressing physical needs. Indeed, a ‘civilized’ individual may be very ignorant, more ignorant than many a savage, and yet greatly benefit from the civilization in which he lives.” [via CafeHayek] In the same post, Donald Boudreaux has many economics book recommendations.

Read: The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

This Centuries-Old Trick Will Unlock Your Productivity: by Ingrid Rojas Contreras in NYT. “Using self-mesmerism I felt overtaken on a cellular level by a serene form of concentration. I began to accumulate pages and finish my projects.”

Poverty Reduction and Economic Growth: by Lant Pritchett. “Broad-based growth, defined as the process that raises median income, is far and away the most important source of poverty reduction. There is no instance of a country achieving a headcount poverty rate below 1/3 of its population (at moderate poverty line of $5.50) without achieving the median consumption of that of Mexico. This is not to say that there do not exist anti-poverty programs that are cost-effective and hence should be expanded, or, conversely, that there are anti-poverty programs that are not cost-effective (or even have zero impact on poverty) and should be cut back or eliminated. Analyses of these types of programs would enable a more efficient use of resources devoted to poverty reduction. But large and sustained improvements in global poverty will almost certainly have to focus on how to raise the productivity of the typical person in a poor country, which is a key source of national income growth.”

David Perell: “Writing gets easier when you think of yourself as a painter, where each draft is a sketch that builds up to the final painting at the end. People freak out about first drafts because they write them as if others will see them. Artists take a different approach. Knowing that nobody will see their sketches silences the eye of judgment so they can play with ideas.”

Rita McGrath and M. Muneer:: “The core idea of discovery driven disruption (DDD) is that rather than creating an expensive, risky plan for an uncertain venture, one must break it into stages. At each stage, identify and test assumptions, ideally at lowest possible cost and time. That will de-risk ventures and make an early exit possible if things don’t turn out as expected. Instead of fearing failure, one can then turn the question into: ‘What is it worth to our organization to learn something?’ Whatever the outcome, if the answer is found to be worth the investment, it need not be written off as a failure.”

The Socialist Algorithm: by Geoff Hodgson. “We may dream of socialist democracy, but in the end we must learn from history and from analysts who show the dangers or impracticalities of socialist solutions to the problems in the world. In short, statist socialism cannot co-exist with democracy and with the protection of human rights.”

Thomas Sowell: “Given how prone all human beings are to mistakes, in all kinds of institutions, one of the most important characteristics of any decision-making process is its ability to recognize and correct its own mistakes. Businesses that do not recognize their own mistakes, and change course in time, can face bankruptcy, even when they have been very successful in the past. Individuals suffering the painful consequences of their own bad decisions have often been forced to change course in order to avoid impending catastrophe, and in many cases have ended up with great personal fulfillment and insight going forward. Various governmental institutions, however, have major built-in barriers to changing course in response to feedback. For an elected official to admit to having made a mistaken decision, from which millions of voters are suffering, is to face the prospect of the end of a whole career in disgrace.” [via CafeHayek]

The dangers of decision fatigue: from The Economist. “Taking a break can boost productivity…Mental activity can result in physical exhaustion, as anyone who has spent a day in successive meetings can attest. In the middle of a business trip, nothing can seem more enticing than the solitary silence of a hotel room, with no clients to amuse or placate in sight. Breaks can also boost creativity. It is easy for the brain to develop tunnel vision when it is working hard. There are times when the mind needs to roam free.”

Meritocracy, Not Democracy, Is the Golden Ticket to Growth: by Adrian Wooldridge. “The price of abandoning it will be less wealth and more poverty…The surest sign that a country will be economically successful is not the health of its democracy, as some liberals like to think, or the leanness of its government, as some free-marketers imagine, but its commitment to meritocracy. Singapore is a soft authoritarian power. But it has transformed itself in a few decades from a poverty-stricken swamp into one of the world’s most prosperous countries, with a higher standard of living and a longer life expectancy than its old colonial master, because it is perhaps the world’s leading practitioner of meritocracy. The Scandinavian countries have some of the world’s largest governments and most generous welfare states. But they retain their positions at the top of international league tables of prosperity and productivity in large part because they are committed to high-quality education, good government and, beneath their communitarian veneer, competition; in other words — meritocracy.”

James Otteson: “What markets enable, then, is extensive networks of cooperation. Indeed, the networks can become so vast that it might be literally impossible to know or trace them all. Adam Smith claimed – in the eighteenth century – that an attempt to trace out all the links in even a single chain of cooperation “exceeds all computation.”” [via CafeHayek]

Rita McGrath: “Here’s the problem – today’s successful business is almost certainly not tomorrow’s. While this sounds utterly obvious, many companies don’t seem to deal with resource allocation in a way that recognizes this problem. For most managers, running a large, successful business is what put them in the powerful positions they have. Contemplating shrinking that business or redeploying its assets and capabilities to somebody else’s business is not in their own personal best interest. The result is that valuable resources – people, actually, even more than money – get used to shore up the position of businesses that are starting to fade. This may eke out a little more time for the managers in charge, but it can put an organization at a devastating disadvantage by the time the declining fortunes of a once-powerful business are obvious to everybody.”

How Journaling Can Help You Live Your Best Life: from WSJ. “Just 10 minutes a day of writing can be effective, says an author and life coach who suggests: ‘make yourself the hero in a story of your own making.’” Lara Zielin: “What makes journaling most effective is this idea of welcoming stillness and reflection. Where we get stuck is that in our culture everything is screaming at us to not stop.”

Donald Boudreaux: “Modernity is not normal; it has been around for a paltry 0.1 percent of humans’ time on earth. And the reason modernity is not normal is that liberalism – the source of the division of labor and, thus, of modernity – is not normal. We humans are not genetically encoded to be liberal. Therefore, Hannan argues, there is every reason to expect that we humans will revert to our historical norm – the norm that is in our genes.The reaction to Covid-19 is powerful evidence that our primitive instincts remain alive and ready to reestablish their dominance over the happy accident that is the culture, and resulting institutions, of liberalism. The hysterical fear that Covid stirred in so many people – including in many who are highly educated, of a scientific mindset, and, until Covid, of a liberal bent – and the sheepishness with which people followed the “leaders” who promised protection from Covid prompts Dan Hannan to worry that 2020-2021 is the beginning of the end of modernity.Chances are high that he’s correct. And if he is, civilization as we know it will end.”

Shane Parish: “There are two types of talent: natural and chosen. Natural talent needs no explanation. Some people are just born better at certain things than others. While natural talent may win in the short term, it rarely wins in the long term. A lot of people who are naturally talented don’t develop work at getting better. Eventually, naturally talented people are passed by people who choose talent. How can you choose talent? When you focus all of your energy in one direction for an uncommonly long period of time, you develop talent. Results follow obsession.”

How API-based SaaS is redefining software: by Markus Suomi. “Many of us, as consumers, are spending more and more of our money on digital products and services rather than physical products. In addition, many of our physical activities and products now also have digital components. These trends are likely to increase over time. For example, our cars stand idle most of the time and are underutilized, which has led to software that enables efficiencies like carsharing services and other ways of increasing the utilization rate of physical products like cars. These products and components will become more efficient through digital services, and digital services will be built on APIs.”

Building Products at Stripe: by Ken Norton. “Go deep, move fast, and build multi-decade abstractions.”

Pierre Lemieux: “The public-choice school of economics, developed since the mid-20th century, assumes that an individual who moves from the private sector to the public sector, whether as a government bureaucrat or a politician, remains the same mostly self-interested individual. He does not metamorphose into an altruist angel. This view of “politics without romance” (to quote James Buchanan) led to new and fruitful explanations of government actions. We should expect that a president (or another top ruler) will, if not effectively constrained by institutions (constitution, laws, and other sets of established rules), redefine his own self-interest as the “public interest.” Even if he wanted to do good for all citizens, he would typically be unable to do so because not all of them have the same preferences about what is good for them; so he better promote the public interest that is good for him.”

Techcrunch has an interview with Ali Tamaseb, the author of Super Founders, “a new book aims to blow up assumptions about the best founding teams.” Ali: “Around 60% of these “super founders” started something earlier, and many actually lost a bunch of money; just 42% of them had a previous exit of $10 million or more, so the majority had “failed” in the world of venture capital. But [the data suggests that] practice makes perfect.”

How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life: by Steven Johnson, excerpted from his new book “Extra Life.” “Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism.”

Six Customer Data Points You Should Be Tracking: by Software Equity Group. “Tracking customer metadata helps you identify opportunities to improve sales efficiency, expand revenue, and increase retention. These metadata, typically captured through CRM or user level analytic software, provide important customer insights so you can deploy sales and marketing efforts on the segments with the greatest return on investment. Here are six customer data points every SaaS CEO should be tracking: customer size, industry, geography, active users, user persona, products and modules.”

The Unicorn Boom: Shareholder issues: by Akash Prakash. “Entrepreneurs must think through their choices on their listing venue, shareholder base, and valuations.”

Arnold Kling on how to make Twitter less rude: “Introduce a buddy system…Have each Twitter user designate a buddy to whom your tweets are directed. If my hypothesis is correct, then simply having a single person in mind who you respect would temper your rudeness as you tweet. And if enough people on Twitter temper their rudeness, then good manners would replace bullying and put-downs as social norms.”