Category: reading list

Anurag Mehra, professor at IIT Bombay, on the subversion of education and the rise of the coaching industry.

The authors of  “A Mind at Play”, Claude Shannon’s biography describe 12 lessons they’ve learnt from him. 

Equality is a pretty word, but for a thing that everyone agrees upon is desirable, nobody seems to agree on what it looks like. What’s the difference between contextual equality and contextless equality? At what scale should you switch from one to the other? 

Lambda School going hard on student outcomes, all driven by the power of incentives. 

SpaceX has repeatedly taken on the so-called impossible and done it. But Elon Musk may have taken a step too far when he presented in September 2016 a vision of long-term Mars colonization. Going well beyond his proposed Mars transport system, he spoke of a self-sustaining Martian city of a million inhabitants. Humanity, he said, could gain the advantage of a second home at which to avoid extinction if Earth became uninhabitable.

He discussed engineering, propulsion, efficiency, and finance, but the toughest limiter on colonization could be something far harder to engineer around. A critical factor that could well limit long-term Mars stays was missing from Musk’s narrative entirely: the relationship between Earth-evolved biology and Earth gravity.

The good and the bad from a Lambda School student. 

Manas Arora talks about finishing a difficult winter trek and a near miss to reinforce the message of always taking the mountains seriously. 

A lesson I’ve learn the hard way is that facts don’t always change minds. Peopling is hard. 

A brilliant review of Zero to One. 

Do some people have an unfair advantage because they like certain things over others? 

An excellent essay on how to communicate effectively and compress ideas. Straight from Amazon and Jeff Bezos, the master of PR and comms strategy.

The Principal Agent Problem with online dating. 

David is one of the most prolific creatives I know. This is a great article I’ve recommended to multiple friends on how to go about choosing what to read. 

On dealing with Impostor Syndrome. 

Pioneer is trying to reduce inequality of opportunity through a monthly leader-board style video game. 

A long, insightful read on Ben Casnocha’s learning during his time as Chief of Staff to Reid Hoffman. 

The Pyramid Principle or how to communicate in a structured fashion.

A profile of my favourite crime writer, the prolific Michael Connelly and his protagonist Harry Bosch. 

Sequoia’s new accelerator program. 

A detailed breakdown of India’s growing student debt problem fuelled by phoney private colleges. 

If you’re active on Twitter, by now you’ve probably heard of Lambda School — the online school where you owe nothing until you get a job.

If not, it’s probably time to start paying attention.

The future of education is here. 

Conclusion: If you want to create something important, randomness is more influential than focus.

Subject Matter: Where you live has a large effect on the type of randomness you encounter, thus shaping your thoughts, friends, and things you work on.

India’s population is expected to continue to grow until mid-century, reaching an estimated 1.68 billion in the 2050s. But an important piece of evidence tells us that population growth will come to an end: The number of children in India peaked more than a decade ago and is now falling.

What are the second-order consequences of this fact? How will this affect the economy? 

The mainstream of economics, then as now, pretty much tries to describe the economy as if it shouldn’t change. If it is changing, it’s changing towards an equilibrium, where it won’t have to change any more.

Schumpeter noticed that this is not how it works. Both the economy as a whole and individual businesses change constantly. His model of the latter, in his Theory of Economic Development, explains how some entrepreneurs make an unusually large amount of money.

There are three main parts.

First, almost all entrepreneurs don’t make an abnormal amount of money, even of the successful ones. They make the same amount as if they were doing the same job for someone else.

Obviously, some entrepreneurs do make a lot of money. This is the second part of Schumpeter’s argument. Those that make money, an entrepreneurial profit, do so by breaking the status quo. They innovate. They either get their inputs for less or they sell their outputs for more.

Third part of the argument: this entrepreneurial profit goes away over time. Competitors figure out that there is this extra money and they imitate the innovator. When this happens, the surplus or excess profit is worn away as imitators enter the market and compete with the innovator.

The special thing about having that much context, and people around who know & believe in you is how much they can frame the year that’s past, and the year ahead.

Your tribe has the context about you & your life — and can remind you, when you need it, of who you are, and who you can be.

This is an excellent example of how technology can help scale effective student outcomes. All driven by aligned incentives. 

This is a touching profile of Venkatesh Rao’s advisor. 

Everything is tech. Software has eaten the world (almost).

A great list of books to build your mental models. Except Nate Silver, don’t read that one.  

Sandeep Dwivedi grew up in a house that overlooked the ground where an 8-year old Cheteshwar Pujara learnt to bat from his cricket-tragic father. He witnessed the baby steps taken by India’s No.3, closely followed his rise up the ranks and has watched him bat around the world.

Ramit Sethi has called this the “Briefcase Technique,”saying that the best job applicants wait for a moment right after the pleasantries have ended and the basic information about the position has been explained.

It is here, after they have answered just enough questions to establish comfort and trust, that they reveal how much research they have done prior to showing up, by explaining all the things they’ve learned about the business, how they intend to improve it and exactly why they’re the right person for the job. This move, done politely but confidently, immediately separates them from all the other potential hires.

While travel does expand and stretch the horizons of what we know about the world, it is not the answer we’re looking for in times of unrest. To strengthen the health of the mind, the venue to do that in is the one we are in now.

This post is my adaptation of Seneca’s awesome letter to Lucilius on the subject of travel. I highly recommend that you check it out — along with all of Seneca’s other wonderful letters as well.

By pursuing ever-elusive gratification and trying to hang onto it, we do natural selection’s bidding—we seek the things that in the past would have contributed to genetic proliferation. We seek status, sex, material resources, and more and more of all of these things. The evaporation of the gratification they bring is natural selection’s way of getting us to keep pursuing them.

We see the influence of this survivalist mindset in our economic systems, ranging from Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” or Hobbes tying “self-preservation” to “self-interest.” In turn, scarcity reinforces zero-sum thinking, the destructive “I win, you lose” that masquerades as meritocratic competition.

A profile on Nassim Taleb. 

An interesting idea but one that is fairly small when you compare it with universities or other countries. 

The idea has a simple, Nordic ring to it: Start by teaching 1 percent of the country’s population, or about 55,000 people, the basic concepts at the root of artificial technology, and gradually build on the number over the next few year

Intelligence but via negativa.

Dan Wang on Moore’s Law, China, Writing and more.  

To me, good photo sessions are no different than good dates. Good dates are playful. Think about how many coffee dates that didn’t inspire you to be fully expressive. How might your actions, expressions and conversations be carried out differently if you were suddenly standing on a rooftop pretending to be a super villain with a partner in crime? Any good dating profile photo should reflect a subject’s most interesting and authentic self. I could only capture my partner like that when we were both caught up in the moment.

You have to create a moment in order to inspire people to fall into it.

It wasn’t about the camera. It wasn’t even about striking a good pose. It was about finding a unique connection through shared adventure, and being so effortlessly caught up in the moment that one couldn’t help but want to remember every second of it with photos.