Misc

Miscellaneous is often where the gems are.

Misc

Energetic Aliens

  • What accounts for the difference between “cognitive stamina and observed levels of energy between individuals“?
  • This article is a really interesting start on understanding these so-called “energetic aliens” – people who can work hard, consistently and obsessively.
  • Examples include George Church who “after finishing his undergrad in 2 years, worked 100 hour weeks in the lab during grad school, famously getting kicked out due to not attending classes because he was just so absorbed in his research.“
  • As well as – Napoleon, Robert Moses, Alexander Grothendieck, Paul Erdos, Isaac Asimov, Honore de Balzac, Danielle Steel and more.
  • Absolutely worth a read.
Misc

Reservations

  • Wonderful article about how reservations are taking over our lives.
  • “The end result of this movement is that our access to real world experiences is experiencing a kind of digital enclosure.“
  • The master of this new world are Disney Theme parks, which the author covers in all their planning glory.
  • The latest pinnacle here is the Disney Genie app – though consumers aren’t fans (the launch video has 13k dislikes vs. less than a 1,000 likes).
  • The big issue is likely the attached chart – Disney ticket prices have outpaced wage growth for years (Source).
Misc

Wang Huning

  • Must read profile of Wang Huning.
  • “A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.”“
  • “Wang Huning is arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today.“
Misc

The Monty Hall Problem

  • 🚪🚪🚪Three doors.
  • Behind one is a car 🚗. Behind the other two are goats 🐐.
  • You pick a door. The gameshow host opens another, revealing a goat.
  • You can choose to stay with your original choice or switch. What should you do? [Give it a try!].
  • The Monty Hall problem became famous when a columnist, Marilyn vos Savant, known as the world’s smartest woman, said you should switch, resulting in hundreds of letters, including from the brightest minds in mathematics, arguing she was wrong.
  • This engrossing article by Steven Pinker shines a bright light on this dilemma.
  • “People’s insensitivity to this lucrative but esoteric information pinpoints the cognitive weakness at the heart of the puzzle: we confuse probability with propensity.”
  • “A propensity is the disposition of an object to act in certain ways. Intuitions about propensities are a major part of our mental models of the world.“
  • Probability is “the strength of one’s belief in an unknown state of affairs“
  • “The dependence of probability on ethereal knowledge rather than just physical makeup helps explain why people fail at the dilemma.“
  • “They intuit the propensities for the car to have ended up behind the different doors, and they know that opening a door could not have changed those propensities. But probabilities are not about the world; they’re about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability.“
  • Surely there is an analogy here to investing.
Misc

Lab Grown Meat

  • Lab-grown meat is all the hype right now.
  • Yet according to this article, reality is very far away, if not unachievable.
  • First, you need a bioreactor facility – even one that is equivalent to 1/3 of all the volume of the entire biopharmaceutical industry today would only yield 22m pounds of lab-grown protein or 0.02% of US meat production.
  • To get to 10% of global meat consumption in 2030 you need 4,000 of these at a cost of $1.8 trillion.
  • The bigger problem is these are live animal cells and hence are very vulnerable to any contamination. Bacteria would crush these cells as they grow much faster, while viruses would infect as the culture has no immune system. These cascade shutting down entire production facilities.
  • The solution – clean rooms – are very expensive.
  • Full paper on the topic and h/t NZS Capital (which lists many other problems from the article).
Misc

Remystifying Supply Chains

  • A really beautiful must read piece written by a self-professed supply chain nerd.
  • Weaving in analogies that bounce in time – from the internet age to husbandry – supply chains are brought to life.
  • “Supply chains are a new class of engineered-emergent artifact, one that includes a few other globe-spanning things like the internet, the air travel system, and low earth orbit, that exist at a level of Gaian phenomenology, terraforming, and planet-scale husbandry. We only ever catch local glimpses of these things.” 
  • “We have to understand these beasts, in all their evolving, learning glory, while living within their bellies.“
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