The Mental Pivot Newsletter: No.6
In this issue: What is a mental pivot? Conversing with books, the Gartner Hype Cycle, and variety of curated links.
For me, a mental pivot is the act of discovering something that expands my perspective, challenges a preexisting belief or otherwise opens my mind to new ideas and different ways of thinking. Some of these ideas might be trivial and some might be more impactful. The relative influence of some ideas is hard to gauge in the present, but only becomes clear at some future date. My goal with this newsletter is to share the small number of ideas that I’ve encountered through reading, listening, and observation.
The end goal remains the same: learning constitutes an active and good-faith engagement with a broad spectrum of ideas. The (long term) hope is that we improve our thinking, become better versions of ourselves, and can better empathize with others (family, friends, and especially strangers). If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re likely engaged in a similar journey.
Now onto the updates...
What’s New on the Blog:
1. The Conversation We Have with Books
A short piece in which I revisit some key lessons from Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren’s “How to Read a Book.”
I was struck by one of the best lessons it proffers when reading for understanding: to read a book effectively there must be an ongoing “conversation” between the reader and the author. “Reading a book is a kind of conversation. You may think it is not conversation at all, because the author does all the talking and you have nothing to say. If you think that, you do not realize your full obligation as a reader—and you are not grasping your opportunities.”
2. Articles and Podcasts of Note (Week of 10/12/2020)
This is my weekly roundup of interesting links and internet finds. You can read the complete post, but here are the highlights:
AI Is an Ideology, Not a Technology: Thoughtful piece from Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl. “An understanding of AI focused on independence from—rather than interdependence with—humans misses most of the potential for software technology.”
Asterisk: Did someone really write an article about the history of a single typographical symbol? They did, and it was a refreshingly fun and informative look at something easily ignored but quite useful.
In 1989, USC Had a Depth Chart of a Dozen Linebackers. Five Have Died, Each Before Age 50: Tragic story about the steep physical and psychological toll of American football.
Inside the Strange New World of Being a Deepfake Actor: Incredible (and somewhat disturbing) look at how deepfake videos—that look authentic—are made.
The Inside Story of MacKenzie Scott, the Mysterious 60-Billion-Dollar Woman: How do you stake out your path in the world when your ex-husband is the richest man in the universe? A closer look at the novelist, philanthropist, and first employee of Amazon.
Our Mind-Boggling Sense of Smell: “How your brain processes the complex chemistry of smells is closer to doing mathematics than mapping.”
Podcast: Heavyweight—Jimmy and Mark: Poignant story of four boys who went on a 240-mile unsupervised bike trip in 1974. Their paths diverged immediately after, but 45 years later we look at the very different ways that experience influenced each of them. A great reminder on how different people derive divergent meaning from the same event. Heavyweight’s new season just started, so it’s a great time to get into this podcast (episodes are about ordinary people reconciling an event, person, or experience from the past).
Podcast: Hidden Brain—Beyond Doomscrolling: Guest Steven Pinker (always worth listening to) talks about the challenges of seeing progress and good when everyone is focused on what’s wrong with the world.
Podcast: Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy: Ravikant (another favorite of mine) engages in a 2-hour conversation with Tim Ferriss covering a wide range of topics about happiness, decision-making, and technology trends.
Podcast: Not Overthinking—How to Understand Things: The Abdaal brothers discuss a blog post by Nabeel Quereshi as well as the ideas of Seymour Papert and Constructionism—learn through making and experience.
Worth It/Not Worth It
Paid subscriptions are the antidote to the advertising-laden “free” content. I regularly trial different subscription services to see what’s worth paying for and what’s not.
Here’s my verdict on two services I recently evaluated:
The Dithering Podcast ($5/month): This is a subscription-based podcast in which John Gruber (DaringFireball) and Ben Thompson (Stratechery) explore current tech and business topics. Episodes are released three per week and feature a brisk running-time of 15 minutes max. If you’re a fan of Stratechery—a subscription business strategy blog—you’ll likely love this podcast (there’s also discounted pricing for Stratechery subscribers). I appreciate the short running time; it means less idle chit-chat and more substance. Verdict: WORTH IT.
Everything on Substack ($20/month): This is a bundle of several popular newsletters including Dan Shipper’s Superorganizers (productivity), Tiago Forte’s Praxis (productivity), Nathan Baschez’s Divinations (business strategy), Adam Keesling’s Napkin Math (business strategy), and Li Jin and Nathan Baschez’s Means of Creation (passion economy). Unfortunately, this is an instance where the sum is not greater than its parts (at least not yet). Superorganizers is the best of the bunch, but cannot be purchased à la carte. Praxis is useful but doesn’t publish new content regularly. Means of Creation has potential, but has yet to find its footing. Verdict: NOT WORTH IT (YET).
Addendum on the Everything Bundle: as I was finishing my draft for this week’s newsletter, Everything announced the addition of a new newsletter from Nat Eliason, Almanack, to the bundle. Eliason maintains a blog and podcast I regularly consume and enjoy. I’ll have to reassess the bundle once this latest addition is factored in.
Odds & Ends:
Tech
Video: A Quarter Century of Hype looks at the Gartner Hype Cycle over the years. The Hype Cycle models a recurring pattern of market expectations for a given technological innovation over time; it consists of different phases like the “peak of inflated expectations” (i.e. when the hype is at its peak but the tech is unproven) and “trough of disillusionment” (i.e. when the hype collapses and sentiment turns negative) and eventual adoption of maturation of the technology. The tool can be useful for companies understanding when to adopt or invest in a new technology.
Music library and playlist utility SongShift recently announced changes to Spotify’s API no longer allow for the export of Spotify playlists to 3rd party services. In effect, Spotify is creating barriers for user lock-in (here’s DaringFireball’s criticism of this move).
FreeYourMusic is a competing service that still supports exporting your Spotify playlist (presumably bypassing the Spotify API via screen-scraping). I haven’t tried it—I used SongShift previously—but I may need it in the future is SongShift is permanently crippled.
Insider.com looks at Netflix’s tendency to drop the axe early and often on original series. While it might make short-run business sense, the moves frustrate fans and creators. Are these moves preventing shows from blossoming into greatness as so often happens once a program gains its footing after one or two seasons?
Google launched a new suite of tools for writers called the Journalist Studio. Fascinating to see how Google can bundle a host of disparate preexisting services to create a compelling new offering. It speaks to the depth of their IP portfolio and the challenge of surfacing tools in compelling ways to encourage different use-cases.
Learning
David Gross poses a provocative question for the rationalist community at the website LessWrong in a post titled “Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses.” I appreciate the range of possibilities offered.
If you’re a fan of LessWrong, it’s worth knowing about GreaterWrong which is an alternative UI for consuming the contents of LessWrong. It’s a fun tool for discovering content from the rich body of LessWrong topics that you might have otherwise missed.
For some insight to a mind that is clearly NOT stupid, check out Piotr Wozniak’s Supermemo Guru. The site is a public-facing collection of well-organized and extremely detailed notes about a variety of topics: sleep, learning, creativity, and memory.
Letter.wiki offers thoughtful public dialogue on a host of topics. The frontpage currently features explorations of race, gender, the justice system, free speech, and more. It’s the antidote to the invective and low-quality interactions that pass for “debate” on many other parts of the internet.
Fun Stuff
The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time: Who doesn’t love a good list? It’s tough to narrow down 100 titles from such an expansive genre, but there’s a surprising amount of breadth here. It goes to show that there’s much more to fantasy than just wizards and dragons.
The Surprising Origin of Fried Chicken: A look at the history (its origins might be Scottish?), culinary versatility, and enduring legacy of this amazing dish. Just thinking about it makes me hungry.
Coda
Richard Feynman’s famous quote from a 1974 speech is a good reminder to be humble and self-aware:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.
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