Category: Food for thought

Ok, so the title is a bit clickbaity. If you are appearing for an exam you of course need to remember what you read. But not everything that you read needs to be remembered.

Mo talking about how he reads and then forgets.

I read to forget. Even when studying or working on papers for a PhD, I approach texts with the same mindset: I’m not a storage device that needs to save all bits of information. I am more of a system of Bayesian beliefs, constantly evolving and updating in small, incremental steps.

[…]

From most texts, I only want two things: First, I want it to subtly alter my thinking, an incremental update that moves me towards a refined world model. Second, I want to pull out a few key pieces of information that I might use later in my writing.

This comment on Hacker News succinctly describes what Mo is talking about.

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

From Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail by John Gall

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

If you think about it, this is also applicable for evolution. Nature never creates new species. It evolves the existing ones. Single cell organisms to multi cell organisms. Leopard to snow leopard. Apes to humans.

This Hacker News comment by Spooky23 on the news that immunotherapy drug eliminated aggressive cancers in clinical trial.

I’m both sad and incredibly happy to read this. I lost my wife recently to a recurring metastatic melanoma. She was treated at MSK by an amazing team.

It was a terrifying diagnosis and literally would have been a guaranteed death sentence in 2017. In 2023, she had a very real chance of pulling through due to immunotherapy. Unfortunately some complications led to the worst outcome and we lost an amazing woman.

I remember that my wife said once that the everything she had on that journey was on the shoulders of those before. So maybe in some small way she helped with the research and a future mother, sister, wife, husband, son, dad will have hope where there was none.

Profound.

This post from Sustainable Views reflecting on the commenting culture.

Broadly speaking, the online platforms we use are not built for connection; they are built for engagement. This is universally true for all internet spaces, from stories to newsfeeds, for the intellectual and the plebian alike. And in the relentless optimization of user engagement, our social engagement is captured and rerouted from its original purpose. Instead of making friends, we are all performing for one collective internet stranger—a being that is sometimes brilliant, sometimes cruel, but always waiting to be impressed.

It somehow feels like interactions that might have grown a friendship have instead ended up growing ad impressions. This is not strictly true, but I can’t shake the feeling that it isn’t wrong either.

Some times I find tiny gems on Hacker News. Today was one of those days. This comment by a user going by the name lordnacho.

It’s the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it’s much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression.

You should talk to strangers. It’s never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There’s also the interesting effect that people will give you their innermost secrets, knowing you won’t tell anyone (I actually met a serial killer who did this, heh). For instance I was on a long haul flight earlier this year, and my neighbour told me everything about her divorce. Like a kind of therapy.

I also find when I have a real disagreement with someone, it’s a lot easier when you’re face-to-face. For instance, I have friends who are religious, in a real way, ie they actually think there’s a god who created the earth and wants us to live a certain way. Being there in person keeps me from ridiculing them like I might on an internet forum, but it also keeps them from condemning me to hell.

So folks, practice talking to people. Much of what’s wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.

Today I learned that we have something called nuclear batteries. For more than 50 years. James Blanchard talks about the genesis of these batteries, why don’t we use them anymore, what are its current applications, and more.

In 1970, surgeons in Paris implanted the first nuclear-powered pacemaker, and over the next five years, at least 1,400 additional people received the devices, mostly in France and the United States. Encased in titanium, the batteries for these devices contained a radioactive isotope—typically about a tenth of a gram of plutonium-238—and could operate for decades without maintenance. The invention provided relief to a population of people who previously needed surgery every few years to change out their pacemaker’s chemical battery.

Technically, they are not nuclear. They are radioisotopes.

The term “nuclear batteries” may evoke images of tiny nuclear reactors, but that’s not how they work. Nuclear batteries don’t split atoms with neutron bombardment. Instead, they capture energy in the form of radiation that’s spontaneously released when atomic nuclei decay.

Most research groups developing nuclear batteries are focused on harnessing energy from radioactive isotopes of nickel and hydrogen. In many nuclear battery designs, adjacent semiconductors absorb the radiation released by the radioisotopes’ nuclei and convert it to an electric current, much like a solar cell does. In other designs, thermoelectric devices convert the heat produced by the emitted radiation to electricity. So “radioisotope power source” is a better descriptor than “nuclear battery,” but for ease of language, I’ll use these terms interchangeably.

Simon Willison talking to Corey Quinn on AI’s Security Crisis. During the podcast Simon touches upon how his frequent blogging is the reason he has become valuable in the AI space. The bold emphasis is added by me.

So I’m a blogger, right? I blog I’ve my blog’s like 22 years old now, and having a blog is a superpower because nobody else does it, right?

The, those of us who who write frequently online are vanishing you, right? Everyone else moved to LinkedIn posts or tweet tweets or whatever. And the impact that you can have from a blog entry is so much higher than that. You’ve got more space. It lives on your own domain. You get to stay in complete control of your destiny.

And so at the moment, I’m blogging two or three things a day, and a lot of these are very short form. It’s a link to something and a couple of paragraphs about why I think that thing’s interesting. A couple of times a week, I’ll post a long form blog entry, the amount of influence you can have on the world if you write frequently about it.

I get invited to like dinners at Weird mansions in Silicon Valley to talk about AI because I have a blog. It doesn’t matter how many people read it, it matters the quality of the people that read it, right? If you are. Active in a space and you have a hundred readers, but those a hundred readers work for the companies that are influential in that space.

That’s incredibly valuable. So yeah, I, I feel like that’s really my, my, my ultimate sort of trick right now. My, my life hack is I blog and people don’t blog. They, they should blog. It’s, it’s, it’s good for you.

This wonderful post from Soonly talking about our metaphorical electric fences which stopped working years ago.

The person who reaches out first isn’t the weak one. They’re the one who discovered the fence is broken. They’re the one running free while everyone else stands on their safe little porches, barking at the world but never joining it.

Your breakthrough isn’t on the other side of productivity or success or self-improvement. It’s on the other side of that text you’re not sending. That call you’re not making. That “I miss you” stuck in your throat.

The electric fence between you and the people you care about? It hasn’t worked in years.

But you’re still standing on the porch.

Steve Wozniak responding to a comment on how selling off his Apple stock was a bad decision.

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Vishal Khandelwal explaining outcome bias.

…Outcome Bias, which leads us to judge the quality of a decision based on its result, instead of the thought or process that went into it.

So, as long as the outcome is favourable, we assume the decision was good. When it turns out badly, we blame the decision, even if it made perfect sense at the time.

…

The real problem is that outcome bias not only distorts our view of the past, but that it shapes our future decisions. If a bad decision leads to a good result, we often reinforce it. We do it again. Worse, we up the stakes. It becomes a habit. And like my friend, we trust the pattern until it breaks. When that happens in investing, it may lead to financial ruin.

Outcome bias also leads us to punish good behaviour unfairly. Imagine someone who stuck to their asset allocation plan, avoided chasing hot stocks, and rebalanced regularly, but ended up underperforming in a year when speculative bets did well. That person might feel foolish, even though they followed a sound process.

The irony is that the more disciplined your process, the more often you’ll look wrong in the short term.