Category: reading list

Why is populism growing?

So in combination we have
1) a re-centralization of financial capital and personal capital,
2) reasons to believe that even if economics were net doing well there are certain countries (US) and demographics (white male) we might suspect are doing relatively worse than they were historically,
3) social capital becoming stronger and more distributed, and
4) people no longer believing in their personal growth–which is the source of all alignment.

An in-depth discussion on the NPC meme and what it signifies.

NPCs are characters with scripted dialogues and no original thinking. In modern parlance, the word has a pejorative connotation and describes people who are products of mass culture.

How much of it is true and why are people offended when being referred to as NPCs?

The Dunbar number is often associated with the number 150 being thrown around. That is a disservice to the ideas and implications of Dunbar’s theory.

Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans where he hypothesizes:

“… there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”

However, ideal group size varies depending upon the mission/purpose of the group (survival or leisure). Group satisfaction, trust and thus efficiency are functions of the Dunbar number and have multiple discontinuities.

At Uber, we test most new features and products with the help of experiments in order to understand and quantify their impact on our marketplace. The analysis of experimental results traditionally focuses on calculating average treatment effects (ATEs).

Since averages reduce an entire distribution to a single number, however, any heterogeneity in treatment effects will go unnoticed. Instead, we have found that calculating quantile treatment effects (QTEs) allows us to effectively and efficiently characterize the full distribution of treatment effects and thus capture the inherent heterogeneity in treatment effects when thousands of riders and drivers interact within Uber’s marketplace.

For those who have never met or spoken to Sar Haribhakti, he has a vibrant personality and a very unique background. This interview covers a wide diversity of topics, ranging from Sar’s upbringing to how he thinks about startup studios to much much more.

PS – Sar is one of my favorite follows on Twitter. You should probably be following him if you’re reading this list. His twitter is @sarthakgh

An exploration of the idea – What if you could take an equity stake in an individual?

Super long read but worth the time. 

I was chasing down a rabbit hole on whether razors can be made from ceramics given their hardness and long shelf life and came across this blogpost.

This guy knows his shit – the video is him using a ceramic knife to shave. :O

The idea is probably worth exploring commercially. 

Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).

This is a lovely article on institutional archaeology (figuring out why stuff works because the institution is so old that reasons and instructions are forgotten, only processes remain). 

Prashant is the co-founder of AltCampus – a code bootcamp that is free until you get a job.

I like his optimism and bullish view on India’s future. 

Over the past few decades, labor force participation has sharply dropped for men ages 20-34.

Theories about the root cause range from indolence, to a lack of skills and training, to offshoring, to (perhaps most interestingly) the increasing attractiveness and availability of leisure and media entertainment.

In this essay, we propose that the drop in labor participation rate of young men is a result of a combination of factors:
(i) a decrease in cost of access to media entertainment leisure,
(ii) increases in both the availability and
(iii) quality media entertainment leisure, and
(iv) a decrease in the marginal signalling utility of (conspicuous) consumption goods for all but the highest earners. 

Super long but worth the read. Ties in nicely with the NPC article and the one shared last week on Sex robots. 

Depression has been called the common cold of psychiatric disorders, and at this point, huge numbers of Americans take antidepressant drugs. But there may be a better way, since resistance training treats depression.

“Optionality is the property of asymmetric upside (preferably unlimited) with correspondingly limited downside (preferably tiny).”

“If you ‘have optionality,’ you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur. (The key is that your assessment doesn’t need to be made beforehand, only after the outcome.)” 

Sex is consistently underrated as a driver of innovation. Yes, space exploration helped us develop the technology for things like cochlear implants, powdered (machine) lubricants and scratch resistant lenses. Lust has furthered the development of cash transfers, point-of-view filming and video chat. I predict that historians of the development of artificial intelligence are going to see sexual gratification as one of the phenomenon’s great motivators. Evolutionary psychology can give us insight into how sex robots are going to develop and the ramifications they’ll have on society.

In short, if somebody successfully inserts themselves between you and your customer, they can exercise tremendous control over you, including taking a big chunk of your profits or outright killing you.

This is one key insight in Ben Thompson’s famous Aggregation Theory: modern marketplaces get their power from aggregating the demand side. And that’s a much better position than the old way of trying to own the supply side.

After coming up for air, Srinivasan checked in with a mentor for some encouraging words to keep him going — and got a reality check instead. “He asked me: ‘How are you going to fix this? How are you going to grow the team and systems fast enough?’” Srinivasan says. “And that’s when it just hit me: this is what hypergrowth feels like. And we’re not even remotely ready for it. We were only looking one square ahead of our pain points but in reality, we needed to think six to 12 months ahead and work backwards to design the processes that would get us to the scale to handle this growth.”

 SPOTTING AND RESPONDING TO THE ONSET OF HYPERGROWTH:
 – RULE #1: SHAPE YOUR ORG CHART TO MOLD YOUR PRODUCT
 – RULE #2: PUSH STRATEGY SETTING DOWN THE CHAIN OF COMMAND
 – RULE #3: THINK IN 3D TO VISUALIZE WHAT’S MISSING
 – RULE #4: PUT PEOPLE OVER STRUCTURES, COMBINING TEAMS IF YOU HAVE TO 

BrainNet allows collaborative problem-solving using direct brain-to-brain communication.

The proof-of-principle network connects three people: two senders and one person able to receive and transmit, all in separate rooms and unable to communicate conventionally. The group together has to solve a Tetris-like game in which a falling block has to be rotated so that it fits into a space at the bottom of the screen.

The signals consist of a single phosphene to indicate the block must be rotated or no flash of light to indicate that it should not be rotated. So the data rate is low—just one bit per interaction.

For a couple years, registered Airbnb users have been able to star the properties they browse, and save them to a list. But Gebbia’s team wondered whether just a few tweaks here and there could change engagement, so they changed that star to a heart. To their surprise, engagement went up by a whopping 30%. The star, they realized, was a generic web shorthand and a utilitarian symbol that didn’t carry much weight. The heart, by contrast, was aspirational.

Probing the reasons why a heart was so different from a star, they eventually landed on the concept of Wish Lists.

The world of football has reached a crossroads. Self-important functionaries and authoritarian countries are marring the sport with backroom deals and covert plans for a new league. Today, DER SPIEGEL is launching a multi-week series disclosing their secrets.

The Vision Fund, and more generally the Saudi money behind it, is a classic fin de siecle undertaking. It is The Greatest Fool in a private equity world that must find greater and greater fools for their investment funds to work here at the tail end of a very long and very profitable business cycle. The Vision Fund and its Saudi money isn’t just a lucky break for both the financiers and the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. It is an answered prayer.

And here’s the crazy thing … the Khashoggi murder could blow this all up. Not just the WeWork deal. Not just the next mega-fund that SoftBank puts together. But this fund. The Vision Fund.

And if the Vision Fund is no longer viable as a player in Silicon Valley, then I don’t think the unicorn valuations are viable, either.

The rise of virtual restaurants and Uber Eats’ explosive growth.  

To avoid being surprised when the company you work for is acquired, you need to understand what preferences are, why they’re important, and how you can negotiate around them.

Nearly a century ago, Harvard College moved away from admitting students based solely on measures of academic performance. In the nineteen-twenties, the concept of diversity in admissions arose in response to the fear of being overrun by Jewish students, who were considered strong on academic metrics but lacking in qualities of character and personality.

That Harvard plan developed into a holistic admissions process, which has, for decades, expanded the notion of diversity beyond geography. The aspiration to assemble a class that is diverse in myriad ways, and the practice of considering many factors alongside academic accomplishment, among them personal qualities and racial background, became influential at many institutions that saw themselves as responsible for socially engineering the American élite.

The story of Paytm and turbulence it has been facing from all sides – not easy to run a business in India.

The e-commerce company has so much information about us that it’s become expert at shilling us things we didn’t even know we needed. No wonder its advertising business is booming.

Many iconic technology companies began with concepts that were new to the industry. In hindsight, the narrative goes something like this: Founder built thing X. Y bought it. Then all of a sudden Z started using it. Next thing you know, the world of computing was changed forever… history was made!

The reality is far less magical, linear, or smooth. One of the biggest myths founders have is that people will immediately see the value of the product they built, whether in understanding what it is or in paying for it. This is especially true in “pre-chasm” markets, where you might have a few early adopters who totally get it — but there’s also a deep chasm between them and later, more mainstream users. Most startups fall into this chasm instead of successfully crossing it.

In fact, it’s not unusual for even the most magical products developed by world-class teams to suffer from years of little or no growth before eventually taking off. So how do you know that you’re in this kind of market-readiness or market creation situation — that you “need more time” — as opposed to, say, not having product-market fit?

Buzzwords and anxiety fill the hallways as Hollywood giant tries to maintain a winning culture amid breakneck growth. 

Just like many other intelligent fanatics, there was no instant success. It took Glen Bell 15 years and four false starts just to get into a position to succeed. The power to endure is the winner’s quality. If you learn from your mistakes and don’t give up, you win.

A fair shot means that you should get a level playing field, no matter your skin color, your zip code, who your parents are, where you went to school, or how much money you started with in your pocket.

A fair shot means you can take an idea, work hard, and turn that idea into new wealth, new jobs, and new opportunity. That’s what entrepreneurs do.

This year, at the Kauffman Foundation, we’ve analyzed the barriers entrepreneurs face accessing capital, and we’ll publish a report later this fall. The bottom line: We’ve found that at least 81 percent of new businesses don’t access either venture capital or bank loans. That indicates they might not be accessing critical institutional capital they need to have a fair shot.

Now, the good news. Entrepreneurship is becoming a proven tool to address some of our biggest economic challenges. The research evidence is more and more compelling.

Entrepreneurship is a pathway open to every city in the nation to grow jobs – not just for one anointed city.

Entrepreneurship even helps combat poverty. For every 1 percent increase in the rate of new businesses started in a state, there is a 2 percent decline in the poverty rate.

A closer examination of data reveals that benefits of economic growth are not as concentrated as imagined earlier. 

Pursuit of achievement is often spurned by an ego-driven hunger, often a hunger for validation (in my eyes). Some of the most successful people I know are, deep down, wildly insecure. Some of the most secure people I know are really mellow; the most secure, accomplished people I know are those who wanted to get up to bat and take their best swing possible, and are satisfied that they did their best and randomness controlled the rest of the outcome.

I think pursuit of accomplishment is most healthy when it is done without a need for validation.

In the beginning of the video, Don Valentine asks, why is Sequoia successful? He says that most VCs talk about how they finance the best and the brightest, but Sequoia focuses instead on the size of the market, the dynamics of the market, and the nature of the competition.

This is, of course, super interesting because in many ways it’s contrarian to the typical response that investing is all about “team.”

In this essay I write about how two technology applications in India – ‘fintech’ and Aadhaar – are being implemented to verify and ‘fix’ identity against the backdrop of contestations of identity, and religious fascism and caste-based violence in the country. I don’t intend to compare the two technologies directly; however, they exist within closely connected technical infrastructure ecosystems. I’m interested in how both socio-technical systems operate with respect to identity.

In my post about the Dunbar Number I offered some evidence on the levels of satisfaction of various group sizes based on some empirical data from online games. There I was able to show that even though the Dunbar Number might predict a mean group size of 150 for humans, that in fact for non-survival oriented groups the mean was significantly less, probably between 60 to 90.

I also offered a second hypothesis, that there is a dip in satisfaction level of groups at around the size of 15. Unfortunately, I could only offer anecdotal evidence that this threshold existed.

In summary this research offers me another widget for my social software toolbox: in any group process look for the commons, allow participants to participate in identifying defectors; determine what the costs are for such identification (which may be as simple as requiring some attention or charging for such punishment); and encourage participation in the common good by punishing those who do not participate in seeking out defectors.

Founders Fund partner Cyan Banister says capitalism saved her life.

Banister, who has made early bets on companies including Uber, SpaceX, and Postmates, was once a homeless high-school dropout who believed that corporations were pure evil. One paycheck, she said, is what fundamentally uprooted her entire world view.

Twin pitchfork-wielding mobs, the political right and left within the United States have become mimetic doubles of one another. They don’t know why they started arguing. At this point, all they know is that they hate each other.

“Networking.” What a word. When I left grad school in 2015, networking was for slick-haired salesmen, former jocks, and social parasites in general. Real heroes built better mousetraps and the world beat a path to their doors. But then I looked at what real successes actually do – they lead a balancing act between connecting and building. 

What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime rituals for educating the young, but only we subject them to “commencement” speeches grandly informing them that today is the first day of the rest of their lives.

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan.

More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people’s identities. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people.

The ads use black and white photos: we’ve been around for a long time.  Even the advertising campaign self-referentially broadcasts this– it has been the same since 1996, i.e. longer than a 40 year old has been in the market for an expensive watch to notice it wasn’t always thus, reinforcing the longevity of the brand.

I know you probably figure this ad isn’t for you because you’re not a railroad baron or a Rothschild, but ask yourself a question: have you seen this ad?  Then it’s for you.  Time to learn why they know you better than you know yourself.

Thiel invested in and promoted Facebook not simply because Girard’s theories led him to foresee the future profitability of the company, but because he saw social media as a mechanism for the containment and channeling of mimetic violence in the face of an ineffectual state.