Bits and Paradoxes - 19
Think real hard
Hi,
I hope you are doing well. I am still having health problems and can't focus on the screen much (reading and writing are out of the picture)!
One thing I have been pondering deeply is about critical thinking. Yes, probably I am going deeper into the “meta” realm. But I let it be for now.
The week started out reading this thought-provoking write-up which has stirred me up in some ways.
Have you ever had a sensation that someone's life advice (or lesson) isn’t working for you? At first, it seems to work, but fails eventually. Do you feel frustrated about your inability to execute that advice? I am sure it's not only me.
How do you cope with the inability to execute advice?
[Figure: A stick person (me) with thought bubbles…]
One realization I had is that we often treat such advice as prescriptions, not as principles. We don't think hard (enough) and rather accept them at face value.
For instance, we try to replicate a note-taking workflow from someone. It seems to be effective for them. But it doesn't stick out to us because we are trying to imitate one-on-one. We don't realize that we are not the same and that there are tons of natural (and artificial) parameters that don't match up.
Instead of feeling frustrated, we could try thinking hard about their process. Why are they using this particular workflow? It could be that they are maintaining a blog, and this workflow helps them to streamline their writing process. On the contrary, we are simply doing a ton of research and want to maintain technical notes. For that, we'd want to read research papers a bit differently than books or articles. We'd want to categorize those readings based on the problems we are trying to solve….and such…
There isn't any "one-rule to rule 'em all" principle either. Rather we can try various tools at our disposal to figure out life. (Damn! Such a heavy statement…but absurd…)
Anyway, this quote from Joseph Tussman seems to make sense touching upon locus of control:
“What the pupil must learn, if he learns anything at all, is that the world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.”
Patreon CEO shares his most epic failures
Jack Conte | 35 min
This is one of the best talks I've listened to in a while.
(Please stop right here and watch it. Seriously!)
I feel so inspired by Jack’s story. Normally, startup/founder talks show off their success and future vision. But here Jack takes us into his journey of struggles and failures, especially as a creator. He talks “emotionally” how nothing worked for him despite giving his best. He tried a lot of "awesome" (and inspiring) things, yet his works rarely got any traction, let alone monetary values.
The idea of making content creators financially independent has the seeds on Patreon’s foundation; provide them the values (including money) to motivate them to create good content continuously.
After going through a lot of Jack’s vlogs, especially with Casey Neistat — this, this and this — I am really amazed by his enthusiasm to do things. His energy and creativity are so contagious (and beautiful).
There was a particular moment in this video (timestamp 29:41) where he almost tore up, reminiscing on all the money he had spent for a video. I felt that.
Nevertheless, one thing that stuck out more than anything else is that nothing works in life. There will be a lot of duds that goes into the trash. However, as Jack says "Being a creator isn't easy, it's all about how you ride out the failures.", it shouldn't stop you from doing things. Keep on trying. You should be able to ride the failures, no matter how frustrating it is. (I guess...)
Side note: I also love this quote from a very paradoxical person…me… :/
Life’s all about hacks, stitching things together hoping that something will work out.
This also got me thinking about 1000 true fans who can greatly affect the direction of a content creator’s work. Of course, despite “playing the long game” narrative, motivation matters a lot; it flows from fans to the content creators and back to the fans — a positive feedback loop. On that note, I think “fan” is an overblown word. I’d say “supporter” resonates well in this case.
Reading
Learning to build conviction
Ben Kuhn | 6 min
Conviction is a confidence that your idea is good enough, that it’s worth throwing a lot of effort behind. It's about having confidence in your actions. It's about your leadership in decision-making.
Normally we are pretty confident in lower-stakes tasks and decisions such as:
Scheduling a meeting the next day.
Fixing a known, less harmful bug in the code.
Deciding the type of food to consume during lunch.
Helping an intern to understand an algorithm.
Helping our close friends financially.
The outcomes are mostly immediate for these decisions. Hence, there’s a lesser risk. However, stakes become high when impacts aren’t immediate. That is when you see results after a long time (say 2 months), it’s harder to make decisions. Such higher-stakes decisions, as Ben points out, are:
How to prioritize between different potential large-scale code improvement projects.
When to keep working on the plan for a tricky technical project, and when to bias towards action and ship it.
What kind of hiring bar is reasonable, and how to build an interview process that reliably upholds that bar.
The situations become more complex when you are the main person to make decisions, especially if you are from a more technical (engineering?) background (like programmer?). I think this is a legit issue.
Here, Ben talks about applying the first principles to his decision-making process. Since most of the higher-stakes tasks are full of uncertainty, it is better to divide them into fundamental ones and execute them. (See: Research as a stochastic decision process)
Another point that resonated with me is instead of asking the mentors immediately about a certain problem, it's better to anticipate their responses beforehand. This helps in thinking thoroughly about their actions which reinforces our mental models.
These non-transferable decision-making skills are tacit knowledge that can only be learned through experience.
The reason I resonated with this “building conviction” narrative is I was in a similar position in the past (I still am but with different roles). During my time as a co-founder, I had felt that my leadership was accidental and that I lacked experiences to make higher-stake decisions. I lacked confidence so much so that my anticipation of something going wrong made me eerily pessimist.
Now, I guess I have overcome that fear to some extent. Although I still lack confidence on many things, from a "researcher” (tinkerer) standpoint, I have embraced the philosophy of "learning through observation and tinkering". And this lacking in confidence has more to do with my imposter syndrome than my lack of experiences.
This not only applies to my professional life but also on everyday life such as financial decisions, preparing myself up for side projects…
The hidden costs of constantly shipping new things
Michal Bugno | 8 min
This read made sense from a software engineering lens. But it can have more reach in other fields too. Some key insights are:
Iterate more. Don't just think. Act!
Maintain a consistent culture. The culture and the environment highly affect us. (We shape our tools and they shape us)
Document properly. Documentation is one of the important aspects of every organization. It helps in standardizing many processes and reduces the friction in (re)assessing various components (like code, meetings, etc)
(Again, thinking harder plays a crucial role here too.)
Digital pregnancy test (scam?)
It seems to be an analog device in disguise. It isn’t doing anything fancy (or new). Rather it’s using the traditional paper test the result of which is shown digitally on the screen.
Perhaps, there’s a psychological reason for this as people are likely to judge “digital technology” to be more trustworthy. Perhaps, this trustworthiness correlates with “expensiveness” in general?
Maybe, people prefer a concrete “YES/NO” answer which this digital rig provides. With the traditional paper test, it might be confusing to reach a conclusion just staring at the paper markings.
From the hacker news thread:
The Twitter thread clearly points out that the electronics serve strictly as an intermediary layer between the paper test and the user. They just binarize the paper reading. This in turn gives a false psychological sense of security ("it's the computer that says it, not me"), without any credible benefit.
#Watching
The Psychological Rollercoaster Experience
mystiverse | 8 min
Life's all about feedback loops, some positives, and many negatives.
The positive feedback loop is where an input creates an output which in turn creates more input. That is to say, we should strive for doing things that can amplify our life positively. We can do this by measuring our current output and comparing it with the previous one. This helps in aligning our tasks (and achievement) with our intended goals.
For instance, while doing workouts (say push ups), we track our reps and compare if we have improve or not. If not, we move slowly towards strengthening our muscles more. (See: James Clear's slow gains.)
How Your Friends Influence Your Mindset and Behaviour
Shu Omi | 5 min
This quote summarizes everything:
"You are the average of the five people you spend the time most with."
Relating to the feedback loops above, we should surround ourselves with people that can create positive feedback loops; people who give us positive vibes, and motivate us.
I am starting to realize the importance of friends and the circle. I kinda suck at connecting with them in general. Most of the time, I don't make any efforts in connecting. No wonder “Love and Belonging” has its spot on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Now, if we look at this from the “online presence” perspective, it's a bit weird. We live in an online era where we "seem" to have many connections, where friends are counted as the size of the “following”, yet we don't quite feel at home.
Therefore, it's a conundrum to find like-minded people. To answer that, we can look directly into Twitter and the likes. There's a rising trend of Twitter friends and private communities (Slack channels, Discord servers and many more) where people share their knowledge with each other. And in doing so, they are also exposing their contents to a wider audience.
I totally suck at this, especially since I am trying to reduce my “online presence”.
The Last Campfire, Reflections in a Pandemic
Binary Worlds | 12 min
Although the theme is gaming, I found this profoundly moving. It makes so much sense during this pandemic.
The video ends with an optimistic tone for us to continue to hope and help each other.
Why Is It So Hard to Fix Traffic?
SciShow | 11 min
One answer lies in Braess's Paradox:
Adding an extra lane to a road can lead to more traffic congestion.
This might be because the new lane offers spaces for more vehicles. Hence, it's back to square one. The lanes get congested again. This also has something to do with Nash Equilibrium (when noone has any incentives to change their behaviour, an equilibrium is reached).
One very counter-intuitive solution to fix traffic is removing existing roads. Cheonggyecheon Restoration (South Korea) in 2005 helped to curb the heavy traffic by removing a route. People might have discovered other routes which they hadn't used before.
Also, this hacker news thread seems interesting; DeepMind uses Graph Neural Network to predict traffic.
#Listening
Building A Second Brain - Deep Dive with Tiago Forte
Ali Abdaal | Tiago Forte | 1 hr 46 min
I absolutely enjoyed listening to this conversation.
One profound piece of fragment I resonated with is the concept of “Productive Randomness”. If you are too focused and too structured, your life becomes mundane and boring. You should have some elements of chaos (and messiness) to make it fun.
It's not that you shouldn't organize your life. Sometimes, too much of structures breeds passivity.
Another fragment I really loved is to take life lessons from people as principles, not prescriptions. (See the introduction section of this blog.)
For instance, imitating what Warren Buffett consumes in his breakfast doesn't help you to become rich!
Overall, the conversation takes place around the following areas:
Imitation and creativity
Everything is a remix. Recycle ideas!
Heavy lifts vs slow burns
Heavy lifting is doing one single project/task at one time.
Slow burn is dividing a project into smaller chunks and acting upon them slowly.
Information as streams, not boxes
Instead of treating information from different sources as separate (and isolated) boxes, allow them to flow into each other.
Open loops and task management
Use closure effects efficiently to close open loops (pending tasks).
Long-term planning is good. However, life is messy and non-linear. So, be prepared for the ever-changing nature of life.
If a certain task is rolling over and over to the next day, it's probably time to re-think about that task.
#Fascinating
untools - tools for better thinking
I've been re-iterating a lot of things from here. It is a collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions, and understand systems.
I had shared this tool previously in Bits and Paradoxes - 08 too.
#Fragments
Story: The Last Question
One of my favorite stories from Isaac Asimov. I visit it once in a while for a change of air. :)
You can refer to this audiobook too.
Video: Strangers Meet Without Seeing Each Other (ep 3)
Beautiful and deep meaningful conversations.
#Music
Crywank - Tomorrow Is Nearly Yesterday And Everyday Is Stupid (Full Album)
Perfectly syncs with my solitude…
Vienna - Billy Joel
This timeless piece helps me to improvise with a lot of sadness and overthinking. Always makes me tear up. As I write this, I am crying while listening to it. I let it be! :)
Where's the fire, what's the hurry about?
You'd better cool it off before you burn it out
You've got so much to do
And only so many hours in a day
But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want or you get old
You're gonna kick off before you even
Get halfway through
When will you realize, Vienna waits for you
Also, this cover is so beautiful…
#Ending-Thoughts
I liked this tweet from Sam Altman on “The homerun theory of careers”:
That's all. I hope you had something to “think hard” about.
Also, if you find this newsletter in your “Promotion” tab, do drag it to primary inbox for visibiliy.
Signing Off,
Nish
PS: I am currently watching this video 3-hour Discussion on Metaphysics (Sheldrake, Dennett, Dyson, Toulmin, Sacks, Gould, Kayzer). This feels like one of the best crossovers of all time. Haha. Also, planning to re-watch the Before trilogy to reminisce about past feelings. :)
Thanks for the Jack Conte Video. Was an awesome, inspiring watch!