Rajesh Jain

WSJ: “Many people spend two full days a week on email and in meetings alone, new data shows…“People feel quite overwhelmed, a sense of feeling like they have two jobs, the job they were hired to do, but then they have this other job of communicating, coordinating and collaborating,” said Jared Spataro, who leads Microsoft’s modern-work team and who spearheaded the research. Granted, communicating and going to meetings are a big part of the job for many workers, especially managers. Yet, many workers and bosses say all of the time spent talking and collaborating isn’t necessarily improving workplace communications.”

Robert Rubin: “At the heart of my own approach is “probabilistic thinking,” the idea that nothing is 100 percent certain and that everything is therefore a matter of probabilities. Whether my choices would affect a few people or millions of people, my preferred tool for applying probabilistic thinking has always been the same: a simple yellow legal pad. On my yellow pad (or more recently, my iPad), I’ll list possible outcomes in one column, and then my best estimates of the probabilities associated with those outcomes in another. My goal has never been to quantify every aspect of every decision; that would be impossible. Instead, my yellow pad has become both metaphor and means, a way of applying a questioning mind-set and incorporating probabilistic thinking into the real world. There are, of course, decisions throughout my life that looking back I should have made differently. But the yellow pad has served me well, allowing me to think in disciplined ways about risks, probabilities, costs and benefits, and substantially increasing my odds of making the best possible choice.”

Harold Demsetz in 1982:”Competition in a private property system is expected to guide resources to those uses that maximize the value of production secured from them. This value is measured by what consumers are willing to pay, making due allowance for the implicit value of leisure and other goods consumed outside the formal market arena. The profit criterion stops uses of resources that would result in more cost than benefit as these are measured by the money votes of consumers.” [via CafeHayek]

Matt Rickard: “There’s WebGPU shipping in Chrome, providing a more general interface to the underlying GPU APIs. In addition, WebGPU lets developers use new native accelerations like Apple Metal, Microsoft Direct3D 12, and Vulkan. This means that GPU acceleration in the browser won’t just be used for drawing on a canvas. Matrix multiplications in Tensorflow.js are already supported with a WebGPU backend. There are a few LLMs that have added support for it as well. WebGPU makes browsers start to resemble a more traditional operating system.”

William Deresiewicz: “AI operates by making high-probability choices: the most likely next word, in the case of written texts. Artists—painters and sculptors, novelists and poets, filmmakers, composers, choreographers—do the opposite. They make low-probability choices. They make choices that are unexpected, strange, that look like mistakes. Sometimes they are mistakes, recognized, in retrospect, as happy accidents. That is what originality is, by definition: a low-probability choice, a choice that has never been made…Low-probability choices are leaps: lateral and unpredictable, associative and idiosyncratic. Where do they come from? Inspiration, we say, a word that explains by not explaining.”

The Generalist: “Here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about finding great ideas. Tolerating failure. To foster a creative environment, you must make yourself comfortable with failure. A 2009 study demonstrates the impact of incentivizing experimentation among life scientists. When funded by a more permissive, long-term-minded grant, scientists achieved breakthrough innovations at much higher rates than peers receiving stricter grants. The beginner’s mind. We are told that having a “beginner’s mind” can be a gift when analyzing a problem. The novice can often find solutions to which the expert is blind. A 2014 paper suggests that’s more than just rhetoric. When prompted to develop novel ideas, the study found that those with the least overlapping expertise were most ingenious.”

Paulo Savaget: “I didn’t start with the goal of studying workarounds. I bumped into workarounds after I had already started. This research was mainly driven by an interest, but also a frustration. I was frustrated with my previous experiences working as a consultant. I had worked with many organizations worldwide on projects that ranged from the evaluation of projects with traditional populations in the Amazon to working in favelas in Brazil to [working with] large organizations—OECD, for example—and in more business-like contexts…One [surprise] when I started working with hackers was, “Can other organizations be like hackers? Could I understand hackers [enough] to create a framework, or a playbook, that could help organizations make impact more quickly and more resourcefully?” Then after working with hackers, I realized that many other organizations were already hacking, and that hacking is not limited to computer systems. It applies to all kinds of systems, like education systems, sanitation, healthcare, financial systems; whichever system you can think of, you can hack. There were many organizations—these organizations that I call scrappy because they’re feisty, they’re resourceful, they operate in the margins of systems.”

Sam Altman: “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity…I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups.”

Economist: “China’s rapid rise is slowing down…This change in economic trajectory is the subject of fierce debate among China-watchers..They are thinking again about China’s clout and its rivalry with America. One view is that Chinese power will fall relative to that of its rivals, which could paradoxically make it more dangerous. In a book last year, Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, two scholars, popularised a theory they called “Peak China”. The country faces decay, they argue, and has reached “the point where it is strong enough to aggressively disrupt the existing order but is losing confidence that time is on its side”.”

Andy Kessler: “New jobs are always created. Search-engine optimization barely existed two decades ago, and entire industries sprung from it. Imagine the boom in AI-optimization jobs. Plus, augmentation outruns automation—workers use new tools to enhance existing jobs and create higher-paying ones. Progress will always eat people, which means we need education, training and temporary safety nets to help workers make the transition to better jobs.”

Debashis Basu: “For a poor country to become prosperous and reduce income inequality, it has to record high growth (not sporadic growth) over many years to be able to lift millions of people from poverty; this is possible only if inflation is low (2-3 per cent), interest rates are low, and the currency is stable. But India’s actual inflation and interest rates remain high while the currency has weakened, reflecting internal economic weakness — it is just like high body temperature reflecting the presence of some infection. In the case of the economy, that infection is corruption, which creates a higher-cost economy, reduces investment, saps enterprise, lowers productivity, and ultimately shows up in inflation, a weak currency, high interest rates, and reduced consumption by the masses. Reducing corruption is not just a moral issue but an economic one, especially if we have the dreams of becoming an economic superpower.”

WSJ: “Investors in [India’s] startups are coming to realize that online spending is driven only by a minuscule percentage of spenders from India’s overall internet population and that it might take a while before the spending power is more evenly distributed. According to a recent report by Blume Ventures, only about 45 million users account for 50% of online spending out of the overall 850 million Indians using the internet. India has also seen a sharp drop in consumption outside the top 30 million households. Only 26% of India’s households earned more than $10,000 in 2021, according to a Morgan Stanley report last year. This is a sobering reality for those such as McKinsey Managing Partner Bob Sternfels, who declared that it isn’t the decade but rather the century that belongs to India.”

Shane Parrish: “If someone admits they made a mistake, have the grace to let it go. Holding it over them ensures they won’t be quick to admit they were wrong in the future. Outcome over ego.”

Entrepreneur First: “We believe that building technology startups will become the ‘default’ career path for the world’s most ambitious people. I argue three things below. First, that digital technology is the most recent in a series of ‘technologies of ambition’ that have enabled ambitious people to maximise their impact over the last millennium or so. Second, that technology entrepreneurship is likely to become the dominant ‘technology of ambition’. Third, that new institutions will be needed to channel, focus and amplify this new ambition.”

Robert Caro: “Explore a single individual deeply enough and truths about all individuals emerge.” Dwarkesh Patel: “Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson are not only the best biographies I have ever read – and not only the best histories I have ever read. They’re perhaps the best books I’ve ever read.”

Sapient Capital: “As you become more fitted into your niche, your area of expertise, it discloses more information back to you. An elite martial artist squaring off in a bar fight will instantly notice the balance of his opponent, striking distance and potential weapons nearby. This gives him more options for action. He literally inhabits a richer world, and this makes him more powerful than an average person. He quite literally “sees through the matrix.” When it comes to understanding the connection between “openness” and wisdom, the expert is more open to the world, and the world is more open to him. So when Charlie Munger “reasons by analogy” he’s reaching back into his case studies to find a relevant comparison to the current situation. By extracting and recombining multiple pertinent details (what Cedric calls “fragments”), he might literally be seeing a pattern nobody else can see, which is why he can invest in a totally differentiated way. Like the cardiac nurse, he’s observing the entire whole, rather than applying a single concept to the situation. The apex of wisdom is a sage. His disciplined usage of his attention has helped him become flexible, because he can literally see more and act decisively with less effort. But his domain isn’t limited to stock markets, a tennis court or a chessboard. He sees the whole world that way, and he is more powerful within it. It’s why sages are associated with miracles of congruence like snapping one’s fingers to make a thunderstorm appear. They have harmonized with deep reality and act from within it, rather than the modern man who too often tries to rigidly impose his rules from without.”

Morgan Housel: “Venture capital is a tail-driven business. You’ve likely heard that. Make 100 investments, and almost all of your return will come from five of them; most of your return from one or two. Correlation Ventures crunched the numbers. Out of 21,000 venture financings from 2004 to 2014, 65% lost money. Two and a half percent of investments made 10x-20x. One percent made more than 20x return. Half a percent – about 100 companies – earned 50x or more. That’s where the majority of the industry’s returns come from. It skews even more as you drill down. There’s been $482 billion of VC funding in the last ten years. The combined value of the ten largest venture-backed companies is $213 billion. So ten venture-backed companies are valued at half the industry’s deployed capital…A takeaway from that is that no matter what you’re doing, you should be comfortable with a lot of stuff not working. It’s normal. This is true for companies, which need to learn how to fail well. It’s true for investors, who need to understand both the normal tail mechanics of diversification and the importance of time horizon, since long-term returns accrue in bunches. And it’s important to realize that jobs and even entire careers might take a few attempts before you find a winning groove That’s how these things work.”

Marc Levinson in 2020: “The [cargo-shipping] container era began in April 1956, when the Ideal-X, a converted tanker left over from the war, carried fifty-eight aluminum containers on its deck from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas. No one imagined this concept would turn the world economy upside down. It was conceived with an entirely different purpose in mind: to shave a few dollars off the cost of moving trucks between North Carolina and New York.” [via CafeHayek] Donald Boudreaux: “It cannot be said too often: Entrepreneurial innovation is inseparable from capitalism. It is indispensable not only for economic growth but even for the maintenance (if such were our goal) of our current standard of living. (When objective facts on the ground change, innovation is necessary to deal with these changes. If, say, a source of raw materials dries up, innovation is necessary to find new sources or sufficient quantities of acceptable substitutes.) Yet industrial policy necessarily is hostile to innovation because innovation necessarily is not part of the industrial-policy plan. The fact that industrial policyists continue to ignore this reality should embarrass them. Alas, it seems not to do so.”

Julia Angwin: “Nearly all of the tech platforms developed extensive and detailed rules banning hate speech after finding that the first thing that happens on a new social network is that users start tossing slurs at one another…But fear is weaponized even more than hate by leaders who seek to spark violence. Hate is often part of the equation, of course, but fear is almost always the key ingredient when people feel they must lash out to defend themselves.”

WSJ: “Many countries are competing to be the “plus one,” with Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand and Malaysia in particular contention. India must still overcome entrenched problems that have kept it a bit player in global supply chains. Its labor force remains mostly poor and unskilled, infrastructure is underdeveloped and the business climate, including regulations, can be burdensome. Manufacturing remains small relative to the size of India’s economy. Nonetheless, after decades of disappointment, it is making progress. Its manufactured exports were barely a tenth of China’s in 2021, but they exceeded all other emerging markets except Mexico’s and Vietnam’s, according to World Bank data. The biggest gains have been in electronics, where exports have tripled since 2018 to $23 billion in the year through March. India has gone from making 9% of the world’s smartphone handsets in 2016 to a projected 19% this year, according to Counterpoint Technology Market Research. Foreign direct investment into India averaged $42 billion annually from 2020 to 2022, a doubling in under a decade, according to central bank figures.”