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| Notes | Description | Topic | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kris Abdelmessih's reading recommendations on decision making under uncertainty | He endorses Credic Chin’s blog, Annie Duke, and the books “Decision Traps”, “Winner’s Curse” and “The Laws of Trading” | Risk & Uncertainty | Kris Abdelmessih Books |
| Todd Simkin on teaching by judging the decision process, not just the results | When people discuss decisions that they’ve made, try to shield the person giving feedback from knowing the results | Risk & Uncertainty | Shane Parrish Todd Simkin Human Nature Human Interactions |
| Todd Simkin on the principle of charity in conversations, negotiations, and trading | The principle of charity is about thinking the best (in all relevant dimensions) of anyone whom you interact with | Life Wisdom | Todd Simkin |
| Todd Simkin on conversation techniques that seem dull but actually help others think and reason | The mere act of verbalizing an issue helps us seeing it from a different perspective. Also, “I wanna help. Tell me more” | Life Wisdom | Todd Simkin Human Interactions |
| Todd Simkin on how to calibrate and improve your probabilistic assessments | Experiment (detachedly) and compare results with what you expected. Note: this works with repeatable, frequent events | Risk & Uncertainty | Shane Parrish Todd Simkin Probability |
| Todd Simkin on overcoming cognitive biases by communicating well with the right kind of group | Being able to bring in other people to the decision process in a constructive way beats anything else in truth finding | Risk & Uncertainty | Shane Parrish Todd Simkin Human Nature |
| Todd Simkin on Lev Vygotsky’s ideas of teaching by finding the apprentice’s zone of proximal development (ZPD) | There’s a zone of things that you know. Somewhere outside of it is the ZPD, where you can move into with proper support | Learning & Teaching | Todd Simkin Lev Vygotsky Jean Piaget |
| Shane Parrish and Todd Simkin on cognitive shortcuts, belonging, and tribalism | We can’t reason all from first principles. We need rules. Avoid wrapping identities up into the rules of tribes though | Life Wisdom | Shane Parrish Todd Simkin Human Nature |
| Munger’s investing style has been more audacious than Buffett’s | “Munger was willing to borrow money to make money, whereas Buffett had never borrowed a significant sum in his life” | Investing | Charlie Munger Warren Buffett |
| Charlie Munger recounts the pivotal steps of his professional life | Interviews and excerpts recounting the major career transitions that Charlie Munger has gone through | Towards Greatness | Charlie Munger Career Biographical Anecdotes |
| Charlie Munger on why “full-time” multidisciplinary thinking is not for everyone; but learning the big ideas is | The path for most people is to specialize, get good at something society rewards, and get very efficient at doing it | Life Wisdom | Charlie Munger Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Career |
| Charlie Munger on avoiding too much top-down theorization about ethics; better to engage with life practically | If you’re sure about what’s right, you’re on the wrong track. Do something every day where you’re coping with reality | Life Wisdom | Charlie Munger Career Moral & Ethics |
| Charlie Munger explains Warren Buffett’s extreme success | A passion for getting money since childhood. A very high IQ. A lot of energy. And he also got a flying start | Towards Greatness | Charlie Munger Warren Buffett Career |
| Gian-Carlo Rota on the advice we give others | “The advice we give others is the advice that we ourselves need” | Life Wisdom | Gian-Carlo Rota |
| Moisés Naím on corruption in South America and the link between commodity-based economies and populism | “In countries where commodities are +50% of exports, give me the price and I’ll tell you what the political mood is” | World Affairs | Moises Naim Venezuela Corruption |
| Horace Dediu on how the iPhone might be solving the innovator dilemma | It delivers things that nobody asks for but then everybody wants; avoids things that a few demand but most won’t use | Business | Apple Horace Dediu Disruption Theory |
| Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger on when it is time to buy a house | “I bought it when the down payment was 10% of my net worth.” Returns are “7-8%, figure out your own equation from that” | Investing | Warren Buffett Charlie Munger |
| Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger on how long it takes to dig an economic moat | In fast-changing industries, quickly developing a moat might be possible. But what comes quickly, may go just as quickly | Business | Warren Buffett Charlie Munger Sustainable Competitive Advantages |
| Charlie Munger on his golden rule, to deserve what you want | “I had the idea at a very early age that the safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want” | Life Wisdom | Charlie Munger Moral & Ethics |
| Charlie Munger on not trying to be a prodigy, just trying to avoid the inanities, including the inanities of the prodigies | “It’s remarkable the long-term advantage we’ve gotten by being not stupid; instead of trying to be very intelligent” | Life Wisdom | Charlie Munger Career |
| Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger on what they admire about each other | “What I like about Warren is the irreverence. We don’t have automatic reverence for the pompous heads of all civilization” | Life Wisdom | Warren Buffett Charlie Munger |
| Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger on how they first met | “Both of our wives thought, ‘My god, another one’” | Life Wisdom | Warren Buffett Charlie Munger Biographical Anecdotes |
| Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger on friendships and the benefits of choosing to be a high-quality person | Figure out the qualities you like in other people. Be a person who exhibits the very same qualities you admire in others | Life Wisdom | Warren Buffett Charlie Munger Moral & Ethics Human Nature |
| Michael Nielsen on writers’ open moves | “The title, first sentence, and first few paragraphs are a promise to the reader. Do you care about their experience?” | On Writing | Michael Nielsen |
| Charlie Munger on China’s remarkable success under a peculiar model; Adam Smithian capitalism but no free speech | “What the Chinese have proved is you can have a screamingly successful economy with a fairly controlling government” | World Affairs | Charlie Munger China Adam Smith |
| Charlie Munger’s cautious comments on recent US fiscal and monetary policies | “It was politically impossible to do big stimulus rapidly. Their weapon was to print money and reduce interest rates” | World Affairs | Charlie Munger Monetary Policy U.S. Dollar Inflation Bitcoin Fiscal Policy Trade Policy |
| Charlie Munger on what it takes to get very far ahead in life, and what’s attainable by “non-naturals” | To win big, you must discover what your special advantages are (if any); otherwise competition will beat you easily | Towards Greatness | Charlie Munger Homer Joe Stewart Henry Singleton Warren Buffett Pierre Fermat Blaise Pascal Li Lu Career |
| Richard Hamming on legal challenges computers face in medicine | If human doctors make a mistake but have shown ‘due prudence’, they’re forgiven. If a machine errs, whom do you sue? | The Future | Richard Hamming Artificial Intelligence Medicine Moral & Ethics |
| Nima Arkani-Hamed on the important skill of turning big ideas into sharp questions | The greatest skill of research? The process of turning big ideas into sharp questions that you can actually work on | Towards Greatness | Research Physics Nima Arkani-Hamed |
| V. I. Arnold on the perils of “pure” deductive-axiomatic mathematics | “In the middle of the twentieth century it was attempted to divide physics and mathematics. The consequences turned out to be catastrophic” | Learning & Teaching | Math V. I. Arnold |
| V. I. Arnold on mathematics being an experimental science | “Physics is an experimental science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap” | Natural Sciences | Math Physics Modeling V. I. Arnold |
| V. I. Arnold explaining the physical intuition behind some math concepts | Arnold teaches how to think about determinants, groups, and smooth manifolds in a less-abstract way | Natural Sciences | Math V. I. Arnold |
| V. I. Arnold’s book recommendations | List of books on Math and Physics that the Russian mathematician mentioned in his famous speech in Paris, 1997 | Natural Sciences | Math Physics V. I. Arnold Books |
| Patrick McKenzie on crafting a narrative for decisionmakers then solving backwards to the artifacts that would create it | “Write about things you would have found surprising 5 years ago in a way that you would have found maximally compelling” | Business | Marketing Storytelling Patrick McKenzie |
| Daniel Gross on the similarities of Swedish House Mafia’s creative process and Apple’s design process | “A torrent of ideas plus very fast editorial decisions” | Creative Process | Apple Swedish House Mafia Daniel Gross |
| Michael Nielsen on writing as an antidote to the illusion of understanding | “I once said hyperbolically to a friend: ‘I believe I could barely think before I began to write seriously’” | Learning & Teaching | Michael Nielsen David Chapman Bertrand Russell Visakan Veerasamy |
| Michael Nielsen on the risks of writing | “Good writing is often risky. You think things through so deeply you create a unique point of view. That’s scary” | On Writing | Michael Nielsen Being in Public |
| Michael Nielsen on how hard it is to write well | “I deleted one chapter and started from scratch 6 times. Each overall draft was revised end-to-end maybe 5-10 times” | On Writing | Michael Nielsen Paul Graham Alexander Grothendieck Hard Work |
| Harj Taggar on how, in conversations, human motives get in the way of truth seeking | Even if the stated goal of a conversation is getting closer to the truth, human nature often causes detours | Life Wisdom | Human Interactions Human Nature Harj Taggar |
| Julia B. on the limitations of animal models | 1 in 10 successful mouse cancer interventions makes it; none of the 300+ in Alzheimer’s has proven effective in humans | Aging | Research |
| Gwern Branwen on OpenAI’s bet in the scaling hypothesis | Gwern shares his views on the current landscape of research in artifical intelligence | The Future | Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Gwern Branwen GPT-3 Google Brain DeepMind |
| Nabeel Qureshi on habits to cultivate if you are to really understand things | Qureshi comments on a few desirable traits of “intelligent” people that can, with effort, be learned | Learning & Teaching | Nabeel Qureshi |
| Michael Faraday recreated things from scratch to establish “ownership” over ideas | “He believed nothing without being able to experimentally demonstrate it himself, no matter how tedious the demo” | Learning & Teaching | Nabeel Qureshi Michael Faraday Biographical Anecdotes |
| The back story of PUBG, Fornite, and battle royale video games | Brendan Greene, modder and fan of “Battle Royale” and “The Hunger Games”, first brought “batte royale” to gaming | Business | PUBG Fortnite Hit-Driven Business |
| Charlie Munger explains what made the success of Coca-Cola possible | How Coke exploits the human biochemistry and psychology, and have successfully blocked competitors from doing the same | Business | Charlie Munger Coca-Cola Human Nature Sustainable Competitive Advantages |
| Patrick McKenzie on some of the benefits of writing online | @patio11 explains that essays are useful for 1-on-1 conversations and as “proof-of-work” in professional contexts | On Writing | Patrick McKenzie |
| Patrick McKenzie on how he “discovered” his online brand | Stats and what people were telling him pointed to a comparative advantage on the joining of marketing and engineering | Business | Patrick McKenzie Marketing Biographical Anecdotes |
| Patrick McKenzie’s anecdotes about finding and joining online communities | @patio11 tells examples of finding where “your audience” meets online and gradually injecting yourself in there | Business | Patrick McKenzie Marketing |
| José Luis Ricón on noise and/or programmed aging as root causes of aging | “Maybe cells don’t replicate perfectly; maybe the epigenome’s lost somehow. And second, a (potentially) programmed part” | Aging | José Luis Ricón Research |
| José Luis Ricón on death and the Stockholm syndrome | Or, how people can bend reality and think that a bad thing may be actually good | Aging | José Luis Ricón Human Nature |
| John Collison reading recommendations about the history of successful B2B companies | He likes the book “Softwar” and, in general, recommends searching for less “sugarcoated” history than the “official” one | Business | Books John Collison Business History |
| John Collison on the similarities of Uber and cable companies | Collison draws parallels between cable companies in the 1980-1990s and Uber in the 2010s | Business | Business History Books John Collison John Malone |
| John Collison on the jobs-to-be-done of accounting | Accounting has many jobs: taxes (gov’t), operations (management), creditworthiness (creditors), cashflows (shareholders) | Investing | Accounting Jobs-to-be-Done John Collison |
| John Collison on the challenges of accounting for R&D and intangible capital in software businesses | “How much are we paying to run the business (OpEx) vs How much are we investing in a long-lived advantage (CapEx)?” | Investing | Accounting John Collison Warren Buffett |
| John Collison on why the early 2000s had a Telco bubble, not a Dot-com bubble | “People don’t remember this, but by market cap, the 2000 bubble was really a Telco bubble and not an internet bubble” | Investing | Business History Bubbles John Collison |
| Horace Dediu thinking out aloud about the Apple Glasses | “Don’t force people into new behaviors, nor new aesthetics. Give users many options. Make a quantum leap in usability” | Business | Apple AR/VR Wearables Horace Dediu |
| Horace Dediu on how Apple is usually not a first mover | “Apple doesn’t actually firmly launch something until +2% of the market has been already explored through products sold” | Business | Apple Technology Adoption & Diffusion of Innovations Timing Horace Dediu |
| Horace Dediu on how Apple does beta testing | “Short-distance LiDAR might become a core technology for AR. So they’re putting it into an iPad almost as a beta test” | Business | Apple Horace Dediu |
| Horace Dediu on Apple Silicon as a source of competitive advantages for Apple | How hard it’d be for Microsoft or Google or Huawei to, without custom silicon, to develop new ideas in wearables or AR? | Business | Apple Horace Dediu |
| Elad Gil on product-market fit (again) | Elad Gil’s ultimate test for product-market fit, “Is it growing despite itself?” | Startups | Elad Gil Product-Market Fit |
| Stewart Butterfield on the famous Slack pivot | Butterfield tells the story of how and why Glitch, a gaming company, became Slack | Startups | Stewart Butterfield Product-Market Fit |
| Steve Jobs pitching the App Store | In 2008 Steve Jobs explained, in a eerily prescient way, how big of a deal the App Store was | Business | Steve Jobs Product-Market Fit Apple |
| Elad Gil on how he spots product-market fit | Elad Gil summarizes the signals that, from his experience, are good evidence of product-market fit | Startups | Elad Gil Product-Market Fit |
| Andy Rachleff on how he defines product-market fit | Andy Rachleff, who first coined the term “product-market fit,” explains how he came up with it and how he defines it | Startups | Andy Rachleff Product-Market Fit |
