Why drive a stone up a hill when you know it’s going to tumble down the other side?
Ten things for you to consume this weekend.
1. 50 Ideas That Changed My Life
“23. Gall’s Law: 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.”
Related: The Great Mental Models
2. We Are All Confident Idiots
“In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.”
3. The Elephant in the Brain (Book Summary)
“The existence of hidden motives accounts for a lot of friction in personal relationships, but this expands to institutions as well. In many areas, our hidden agendas explain a surprising amount of our behavior, often a majority. When push comes to shove, we often prioritize our hidden agendas over the official ones.”
More generally, Johnathan Bi’s book summaries are great.
Related: Slatestarcodex takes on Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind
4. The Best Way To Exercise Self Control (Is Not To Exercise It At All)
“Why drive a stone up a hill when you know it’s going to tumble down the other side? Unless you’re cursed by the gods, there’s no reason to do this – you’re not Sisyphus. Instead of brute strength, be strategic; you might find that it’s much easier to achieve your goals.”
Related: Why You Need Uselessness In Your Life
5. What Does Good Retention Look Like?
Former Airbnb Product Manager Lenny Rachitsky documents in detail what good retention looks like.
“Although retention is widely considered to be the most important metric to get right when building (and investing in) a business, it’s also one of the least understood. Why? Because unless you’re a growth expert or an experienced investor, you’re often relying on anecdotes, dated blog posts, and misguided benchmarks. I ran into this problem myself many times when working with startups.”
Related: How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users
6. Chartering a Future for Hong Kong
“Last fall, when anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong drew global attention, Ivan Ko, a Hong Kong citizen with decades of experience in real estate and property development, began brainstorming with friends about how to create options for Hong Kong’s people in case the living situation there worsened. Over the last few weeks, with China’s passage of new national security laws, Ko’s fears were realized. He and his team have incorporated the Victoria Harbor Group to scout locations for building a new city in which the people of Hong Kong could continue their way of life.”
Related: City of Solitude - Wuhan After Lockdown
7. A History of Architects Mistaking Design for Politics
“This grandiose view of the discipline is common. It’s often taught in schools, where students are prompted to propose housing complexes intended to ameliorate various real-world refugee crises. When they graduate and get jobs at firms, they are often disappointed to find that their wealthy clients are not interested in such altruistic projects, but instead want to commission luxury condos or, at best, a museum.”
8. The Gospel According to Peter Thiel
“It took only a few hours for Gibson’s life to change. A colleague, he remembers, showed up at his desk and told him: “Oh, on the plane ride back from New York last night we came up with this idea. We’re going to call it the anti-Rhodes Scholarship,” a reference to the prestigious 118-year-old scholarship program that brings young scholars from across the former British Empire to study for free at the University of Oxford. “We’re going to pay people to leave school and work on things.”
9. Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?
“Here is what it means to work at a big company:
* Things work slowly, so relax. There are many people that have a hand in every aspect of a product decision.
* At a startup you are actively changing the world. That’s done now. Put that completely out of your head. You are cog in a machine. Instead focus on your assigned product, help your teammates, and just learn to relax.
* You, the individual, are not important. The product is important, the department that delivers the product is less important, the teams that comprise the department are less important than that, and so on. Again, accept the reality and just relax.
* Do your best. Unlike at a startup, generally you will have time to get things correct. This is the difference between competence and others who struggle to get things right and always appear to be in a hurry. There is no reason to be in a hurry.”
Related: Cal Newport, author of the excellent ‘Deep Work’ reflects on the shift to WFH: Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed.
10. Why Invest? A 22-Year-Old’s Tough Questions About Capitalism
“Q: Isn’t capitalism destroying the planet and causing massively unfair inequality of wealth?
A: For most of the history of the world, almost everyone was poor beyond imagining. Only over the last 250 years, the period over which capitalism has flourished, have a large number of people—in the billions— overcome poverty. Remarkably, just in the last year, researchers determined that half the population of the world already is middle class or wealthier.”
Most clicked link last week (9% of readers): Interestingly, it was my coda at the end of the newsletter: The story has gotten away from us…
Real quick:
Applied is a company I’ve invested in that operates on a simple idea: ignore their CV completely, and assess people on the basis of the quality of their answers to questions that relate to the job. Once you’ve hired someone using Applied’s blind sift method, you’ll feel embarrassed about the years you spent LinkedIn scanning and clumsily phone screening.
Applied’s founder Kate, and CEO Khyati, wrote an essay this week that’s worth your time: “It’s a pandemic of racism”: the failure of data, implicit bias and systemic discrimination”.
“Extrapolations show that on the current trend, it will take a staggering 58 and 139 years respectively for us to reach ‘neutrality’ in implicit racial and skin tone bias.”
I’m getting close to finishing the Turnbull memoir. The tick-tock of politics chapters are good, but the deep-dives into tax policy drag a little. For respite, I’m diving back into Barbarian Days, William Finnegan’s stunning meditation on a life of surfing.
“The particulars of new places grabbed me and held me, the sweep of new coasts, cold, lovely, dawns. The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see. Yes, I got sick sometimes of being an expatriate, always ignorant, on the outside of things, but I didn't feel ready for domestic life, for seeing the same people, the same places, thinking more or less the same thoughts, each day. I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity of the road.”
Tonight we’re staying near Castlemaine, in the Victorian Goldfields. My four-year old just ran into the house, breathless. “Dad, I need your phone to take a picture, I found a dead bird…”
It’s time to go outside.