Tweets on underrated ideas by Ethan Mollick and Derek Thompson. Makes me want to think about the ideas that have had the biggest influence on my recent thinking/doing. The first ones that comes to mind are:
- Small, consistent effort is much more impactful than major, intermittent effort in the long run.
- Sunk cost fallacy. I’m not a huge fan of the simplistic version of this (never make decisions based on past investments), but find that it can be quite useful to deemphasize the past when making decisions about the future.
- Always assume good intent. And if not that, at least assume there is a good reason for that thing (or person) being the way it is. I realize the former sounds naive at first, but I think it is true much more often than we tend to believe. In general, people don’t want to fuck over other people or the world and want to be good. In rare cases that this isn’t true, there is almost always a good reason that isn’t X is just bad.
Those aren’t from work or education, just what seems to be true after nearly forty spins around the sun1.
Update: This tweet is a hard disagree with 3). Her critique is mostly in the instututional (corporate) context when used as a justification for abuses of power. It was good to get a counter opinion on this the same day I wrote it down.
Music
- Judee Sill. One of the first signees to Asylum records in the early 70s, friends with Graham Nash and part of the Laurel Canyon scene, her self-titled album was apparently pretty successful. Unfortunately, drugs happened and not much else after that. I had never heard of her and am happy to have found her work.
Apps
- Ear and Rhythm training. A lot of things aren’t suited to app format, but I think ear training is! Probably rhythm training too. I’ve been happily using The Ear Gym and Complete Rhythm Trainer (both for android, not sure if there are iPhone versions), but there may be better ones out there.
- Semantle. QC introduced this much improved (and aggravating) wordle-inspired game that uses semantic embeddings to help you try and guess the word of the day. It can be quite unexpected and trying to find that common line through each of the words you guess is really tricky.
News
- The Fehmarnbelt! Amazing! I should have been an engineer :upsidedown_down_face:
Though I guess they could all be formulated as economic principles: 1) marginal cost/benefit, 2) I guess this is an explicit economic principle, and 3) incentives matter. ↩︎