Fire & Motion 40

3 月 24 日

Stin's reading note.

Fleeting Quote

Region-beta Paradox: People can be better off when things are much worse. While moderate situations prompt endurance, crisis triggers action.
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When assembling furniture, start by tightening all the screws to 75%, then fully tighten them once all components fit together. This principle extends beyond furniture.
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Behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or the actor wouldn't do it. That means every single time you're demeaning somebody or yourself or you're coming up with a New Year's resolution, what you're doing is denying a sense of what you're doing and saying "oh you should have done something different."
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Once something is obvious and working, people tend to underestimate it.
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If you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
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When we lack real problems, we create imaginary ones; when we lack meaningful work, we perfect the unimportant.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DEwM0ixSm4L/

Out-of-League

🏅 Agency, Innovation & Growth: Reflections from Edge City Lanna by Rania Hashim

🏅 Life at the Edge by Jack Mielke

🏅 The Short Case for Nvidia Stock

🏅 The Tradition of Knowledge Behind ASML

🏅 d/acc: one year later

Reading

📄 Machines of Loving Grace

I believe that in the AI age, we should be talking about the marginal returns to intelligence, and trying to figure out what the other factors are that are complementary to intelligence and that become limiting factors when intelligence is very high.

What limits AI is not AI itself, but those that are closely related to it.

📄 Plurality philosophy in an incredibly oversized nutshell

Plurality the vibe: the general theme that (i) we should understand the world through a patchwork combination of models, and not try to stretch any single model to beyond its natural applicability, and (ii) we should take connections between individuals really seriously, and work to expand and strengthen healthy connections.
Plurality-inspired mechanism design: there is a set of principled mathematical techniques by which you can design social, political and economic mechanisms that treat not just individuals, but also connections between individuals as a first-class object. Doing this can create newer forms of markets and democracy that solve common problems in markets and democracy today, particularly around bridging tribal divides and polarization.

In [Georg Simmel's] view, humans are deeply social creatures and thus their identities are deeply formed through their social relations. Humans gain crucial aspects of their sense of self, their goals, and their meaning through participation in social, linguistic, and solidaristic groups. In simple societies (e.g., isolated, rural, or tribal), people spend most of their life interacting with the kin groups we described above. This circle comes to (primarily) define their identity collectively, which is why most scholars of simple societies (for example, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins) tend to favor methodological collectivism. However, as we noted above, as societies urbanize social relationships diversify. People work with one circle, worship with another, support political causes with a third, recreate with a fourth, cheer for a sports team with a fifth, identify as discriminated against along with a sixth, and so on. As this occurs, people come to have, on average, less of their full sense of self in common with those around them at any time; they begin to feel "unique" (to put a positive spin on it) and "isolated/misunderstood" (to put a negative spin on it).

📄 50 Years of Travel Tips

If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance. They fulfill their filial duty and you will get easy entry into a local’s home, and a very high chance to taste some home cooking. Mother, driver, and you leave happy. This trick rarely fails.

Crash a wedding. You are not a nuisance; you are the celebrity guest! The easiest way to do this is to find the local wedding hall where weddings happen on schedule and approach a wedding party with a request to attend. They will usually feel honored. You can offer the newlyweds a small token gift of cash if you want. You will be obliged to dance. Take photos of them; they will take photos of you. It will make your day and theirs. (I’ve crashed a wedding in most of the countries I have visited.)

When visiting a foreign city for the first time, take a street food tour. Depending on the region, the tour will include food carts, food trucks, food courts, or smaller eateries. It will last a few hours, and the cost will include the food. You’ll get some of the best food available, and usually the host will also deliver a great introduction to the culture. Google “street food tour for city X.”

When asking someone for a restaurant recommendation, don’t ask them where is a good place you should eat; ask them where they eat. Where did they eat the last time they ate out?

If you detect slightly more people moving in one direction over another, follow them. If you keep following this “gradient” of human movement, you will eventually land on something interesting—a market, a parade, a birthday party, an outdoor dance, a festival.

To book a train anywhere in the world outside your home country, your first stop should be The Man in Seat 61 (https://www.seat61.com/), a sprawling website which will conveniently help you book the train you want.

A few laundry detergent sheets in a tiny ziplock bag weigh nothing and won’t spill and are perfect for emergency laundry washing in the sink or shower.

Sketchy travel plans and travel to sketchy places are ok. Take a chance. If things fall apart, your vacation has just turned into an adventure. Perfection is for watches. Trips should be imperfect. There are no stories if nothing goes amiss.

On how to join a more vivid local experience, do something that's a bit counter-intuitive, and detect a general but better movement from destination to destination. Also on some practical tips to travel slowly, conveniently, and with an imperfection in mind :)

📕 How Countries Go Broke: Introduction & Chapter One

It pays to build up savings in the good times so there are savings to draw on in the bad times. There are costs to having too much savings as well as too little savings, and no one gets the balance exactly right.

📕 How Countries Go Broke: Chapter Eight to Eleven

In my opinion, the real bond yield is the most important number to watch in the financial world. That is because it shows what real return you can certainly get (i.e., free of inflation risk and default risk) on your wealth, which is the most foundational rate for all capital markets. To earn more than that rate, one has to earn it through cleverness. Even more importantly, it is the best single indicator of whether it is better to be a borrower-debtor or a lender-creditor—e.g., when real interest rates are low, it is much easier to borrow money and convert it into profits than when real interest rates are high. As such, it is a great tool for central banks to use to modulate credit and economic activity. As shown, the real bond yield has averaged about 2% over the last 100 years, which is a rate that is neither too low for borrower-debtors nor too high for lender-creditors. The period of great differences from this 2% were periods of excessively cheap or excessively expensive credit/debt that contributed greatly to the big swings in the Big Debt Cycle.

📕 How Countries Go Broke: Chapter Fifteen and Sixteen

The two things that we should expect not to happen, but if we see them happen should be viewed as big red flags going up that are signaling that the real value of money and debt are at great risk, are 1) another round of quantitative easing to increase liquidity and force real interest rates down and 2) the central government gaining control over the central bank.

More specifically, a cut in interest rates is even more powerful than the estimate I gave you because, besides lowering government debt service payments, interest rate cuts would boost asset prices, which would raise capital gains tax receipts and be stimulative to the economy, and raise inflation, which would raise tax revenues. It’s also worth noting that 1) the second-order effects of cutting spending would be negative for economic activity and thus negative for income taxes and 2) the second-order effects of raising taxes would also be negative because of the reduction in spending and economic growth.