The Mental Pivot Newsletter: No.3
Welcome to the 3rd installment of the Mental Pivot Newsletter. Greetings to all the new subscribers. As always, I hope the contents below serve to pique your curiosity, expand your thinking, and take you down some interesting rabbit holes.
By the way, the Mental Pivot Blog celebrated its first anniversary this week (with 134 posts to boot). I aim to maintain the same level of momentum and enthusiasm as I head into the blog’s second year.
Now on with the updates...
What’s New on the Blog:
1. Book Notes: “The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
Mindset and behavior, according to Housel, are the keys to financial success rather than a keen understanding of financial markets, securities, and investing strategies. Regardless of whether you fully accept this thesis, there’s a wealth of useful ideas in this book (almost all of which are applicable to life in general and not merely personal finance). Read my summary and book notes.
For those wanting to sample Housel before reading, take a look at the Collaborative Fund blog where he writes. He also wrote a short article on the topic in 2018 (a precursor to the book). Here are a pair of podcast interviews on the topic of his new book: The Capital Allocators podcast and Bloomberg’s Masters in Business podcast.
For my next installment of Book Notes, I’ve shortlisted The Elephant in the Brain (about hidden motives and human selfishness) and Thinking in Systems: A Primer (a helpful framework for understanding complexity and solving tricky problems).
2. Articles and Podcasts of Note (Week of 09/21/2020)
This is my weekly roundup of interesting links and internet finds. You can read the complete post on the blog, but here are the highlights:
The Cheating Scandal that Ripped the Poker World Apart: A middling player goes on an inexplicable winning streak in a series of live-streaming tournaments.
The Possibility of Life Without Money: Thought provoking piece that explores cashless and free-at-point-of-use transactions. Note that the author, Nathan J. Robinson, is an ardent socialist (I am not, but I do appreciate opposing viewpoints).
Seeing Like an Algorithm: Eugene Wei explores the intriguing idea of algorithm-friendly design by analyzing TikTok. His articles are always fascinating and insight-dense (I always take copious notes reading him).
The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite: GPT-3, state-sponsored media manipulation, fake personas, fake institutions, automation. Yikes.
Transracial Adoption: “I’ve Been Accused of Kidnapping My White Child”: Touching story of a Ugandan man who adopts two white boys in the USA.
What Is Math?: “A teenager asked that age-old question on TikTok, creating a viral backlash, and then, a thoughtful scientific debate.”
Why Bryson DeChambeau Wins: You don’t have to be interested in golf to appreciate this story (I’m no fan of the game). The “mad scientist of golf” bucks conventional wisdom and employs scientific thinking and experimentation in his quest to be the best.
Podcast: Country of Liars: Host PJ Vogt explores the origins of QAnon and its early activity on 4Chan and 8Chan. The phone conversations with 8Chan founder Fredrick Brennan are especially compelling.
The rest of this week’s link roundup can be read here.
Odds & Ends:
Billionaire investor Ray Dalio is working on a new book called “The Changing World Order.” While you can preorder the book on Amazon (to be released early 2021), he’s posted large chunks of the book on his website which you can read for free. Calling them excerpts is a misnomer, it’s effectively an online book. You can read it here. I love free stuff from smart people.
Protip: If you read books on a Kindle, the Ray Dalio book can be sent to your Kindle device (on a per chapter basis) by using the awesome and free Push to Kindle service.
Newsletter readers may be familiar with Dalio’s bestselling book, Principles. Less familiar is an informative short film he made called “How the Economic Machine Works.” The video well worth the 30 minute runtime.
I found a recent article titled “All the Jobs I Failed to Get” refreshing. The author based his post on Johannes Haushofer’s “CV of Failures.” Failure—especially public expressions of it—are always edifying and appreciated.
In a similar introspective vein, I appreciated Elisabeth Irgens post “To All the Jobs I Had Before” in which she catalogs the lessons learned from her 15 years of work.
StudyFinds.org is on a mission to democratize research studies by providing readable, jargon-free summaries. I’m on the fence with these guys (the conspicuous advertisements and social media sharing widgets don’t help). It looks more like an entertainment play than serious information source. There is need for a credible resource in this space.
Kevin Lewis’ roundup of academic studies is well executed and offers more gravitas than StudyFinds. His blog, Daily Findings, curates recent research papers that are thematically related. Given that most academics can write serviceable abstracts, Daily Findings is a great way to stay abreast of recent research (it’s also much easier to digest than the popular SSRN website).
Speaking of academic research, the good people at Improbable Research recently announced the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize Winners. The Ig Nobels are what the Razzies are to the Oscars: a satirical award that celebrates the trivial, odd, and chuckle-inducing scientific research. This year’s physics prize went to a pair of scientists who determined experimentally “what happens to the shape of living earthworm when one vibrates the earthworm at high frequency.”
iPhone users have had a week to get acclimated to the new iOS 14. I was scratching my head trying to understand the latest changes until my daughter started sharing TikTok videos with me chronicling the ways young people are using the highly customizable widgets feature to create “aesthetic AF” home screens for their devices. You can read about the trend on CNet and The Verge. Or, you know, you could just go to TikTok before it’s shutdown for good.
Roam Research, developers of a popular note-taking app, announced a big funding round at a reported $200 million valuation. Nathan Baschez writes about the implications in “Roam’s Road Ahead.”
On the topic of note-taking apps, Annotate.tv recently launched and is doing for video what Airr is doing for podcasts. Users can sign up for a free account which lets you annotate up to 5 videos each month (they also offer paid tiers). I demoed the service and it works well (I might do a full annotation of the Ray Dalio video cited above).
Oblique Strategies is a creativity tool first published in 1975 by musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt. The original product consisted of a set of 113 cards. Each card contained an interesting creative constraint or idea meant to encourage creative solutions, overcome creative blocks, and expand thinking. Cards recommend ideas like “emphasize repetitions,” “decorate, decorate,” and “turn it upside down.” Here’s the full list. Josh Harrison has an online version of Oblique Strategies (just reload the page to get another random selection). It’s a great approach to getting your brain unstuck.
FWIW, filmmaker Richard Linklater had a great scene in his 1990 film Slacker on the topic of Oblique Strategies (am I revealing my Gen X bona fides?). You can watch the clip on YouTube for a chuckle and trip down memory lane.
If you were concerned about Spotify’s content acquisition strategy in the podcast space (a medium that has long defined by openness, free distribution and free speech), there are already rumblings about the multi-year deal podcast superstar Joe Rogan signed. Rogan is allegedly facing backlash from Spotify employees for his controversial opinions and guests. Digital Music News offers more details: “Spotify Employees Threaten to Strike If Joe Rogan Podcasts Aren’t Edited or Removed.” I don’t always agree with or endorse Joe Rogan, but I don’t appreciate censorship. Podcast journalist Nick Quah offers up additional thoughts in a piece titled “Joe Rogan Is Already a Headache for Spotify.”
Glenn Greenwald considers the reasons why there’s a media and liberal backlash against Joe Rogan despite the fact that Rogan is generally left-leaning. Hint: It’s because he is culturally conservative (e.g. he likes MMA, makes crude jokes, etc.). You can read about it in this article from The Intercept and ponder issues of ideological orthodoxy.
I’m halfway through the Netflix documentary film, The Social Dilemma (90-minute runtime), which offers a searing critique on social media, privacy, surveillance, the attention economy and media manipulation. Here’s the official trailer if you want to get a taste.
Lastly, The Great British Bake Off (aka The Great British Baking Show for the American audience) is back. I don’t count myself a fan of many TV shows, but this is one of them. Netflix is airing season 11 starting Friday, September 25. New episodes will be posted in the USA 3 days after they’re aired in the UK. You can read all about the challenges the show dealt with in trying to film during the pandemic. Lastly, it sounds like judge Paul Hollywood’s famous handshakes have been swept into the dustbin of history.
Tip on accessing the 3rd party links in this newsletter: In the event that any of the above links are paywalled or have free article quotas, you have several options to bypass. Specifically:
Open an incognito browser window and load the site (some browser call this feature “private browsing”).
Try running the link in a service like Outline.com.
Try searching for the article via Google.com and click on the search result. Some sites (WSJ, for instance) don’t paywall direct referrals from Google.
If your browser offers a “reader view” use it and see if it renders the full article (works with sites that load the full article client-side and block paywall with a JS interstitial).
Use the Internet Archive’s wayback machine (enter the url of the content you want and view an archived copy of if it’s available).
Clear your cookies and load the site (in the event the site is using a simple cookie-based implementation).
Paying for content is always an option, but so long as sites offer the content for free, I’m sure most will prefer the preceding options.
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Alternatively, you can also read the full archive of posts, book notes and link roundups on my blog: https://mentalpivot.com.