Great interview with Admiral James Stavridis, where they talk about his path, his connection to reading, and what he learned from Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Lots of good topics on things like leadership, grit, purpose, and the value of giving yourself to something
Are Businesses Scaling Back Hiring Due to AI? – Liberty Street Economics
The answer is not really, but AI usage is up among firms. As knowledge about the usage cases for AI improve, I think it’s likely that the areas that AI excels in will be disproportionately impacted. It’s interesting to see that most firms are expecting to retain workers and retain them
The biggest implication of how firms are using AI in my opinion is in the softer and harder to quantify areas of marketing and business analytics. The effectiveness of AI is subjective to the inputs that are given to it. And while AI certainly can assist those working in both fields, in my opinion the embodied human experience (with all its biases and heuristics) is a better medium with which to make these incredibly complex decisions.
How David Hume Split Literature from Philosophy – AEON
An interesting take on the split between the types of philosophical inquiries. I think often we overlook the value of literature and stories in teaching us, possibly because the authors of the media we consume are unconcerned with teaching or illustrating a specific point and more with entertaining. Literature can be a great source for teaching us how to live, even if we need the more analytical and general philosophy to reach our first principles.
Speaking of first principles, I think the same goes for learning how to be excellent in whatever field your in. You need general principles, but the principles don’t mean anything until you can translate them into action. For myself, as I’ve connected general principles I’ve learned with the stories of people I know or have read about, they become real, and I learn how to implement them in my own life.
By Wallace Stegner
Crossing to Safety on Amazon
Crossing to safety is a book about greatness, chaos, and the fibers that bind people together. It follows the relationship between two couples, Larry and Sally Morgan and Sid and Charity Lang, and the quiet but deep relationship that they develop over decades of friendship. It is a book about what makes life worth living, especially within the bonds of marriage and friendship, and what makes life hard.
Crossing to Safety impressed me with its juxtaposition of the desire for order and the chaos that consumes life. The two couples started off hopeful for a life filled with meaning, but economic and health setbacks make their goals difficult to attain. Despite this, the lack of order didn’t damage the relationships, if anything, they simply exaggerated the characteristics that were present before. Love, compassion, and industry grew alongside contempt, friction, and control.
xviii
Largeness is a lifelong matter, you grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn’t, its teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you’re large because you can’t stand to be small.
pp. 191
Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, wikthin hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
pp. 98
Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else – pathway to the stars maybe.
I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.
pp. 207
“Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?” I said. “We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.”
pp. 239
“… Youth hasn’t got anything to do with chronological age. It’s times of hope and happiness.”
Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self control when the next challenges comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina — how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. in another experiment, people are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when faced with a difficult cognitive task.
Thinking Fast and Slow, pp. 41-42
While incredibly powerful, we only have so much energy to expand. A study done by Baumeister showed that when faced with tasks that are ego-depleting, people have a lesser ability to resist temptation or persist in difficult tasks.
This phenomenon shows up everywhere. When doing something difficult, we can feel our attention pulled towards other things that are easier in the short term. When working on a tough essay or problem, we feel the desire to escape from the effort and check our phones or email as our brain tries to find an easier way to do tough things. The same thing happens when we are thinking through things. Despite our knowledge and intelligence, our brain wants to find a way that causes the least amount of ego depletion, so instead of thinking through first principles, we are pulled towards the answer that seems the easiest, convincing ourselves that the reasoning is sound to avoid deeper thought.
Coming from a non-technical background, I really don’t like the idea of the US government investing in intel. Thompson frames the decision differently, making the argument that for the sake of national security Intel needs to survive. It has a lot of problems and has been mismanaged and misdirected, but giving up on them won’t open the space for a new competitor to arrive. If anything, letting the market take its course would just relegate the US to chip (and therefore geopolitical) inferiority. I highly recommend reading this.
Full Report from Stanford
WSJ Article
This feels a little concerning as someone who very soon will be looking for an entry level job, but the findings reinforce my view that projects and exploiting opportunities to gain experience are as important as classroom learning.
Video Link – Newel of Knowledge
Fairly interesting video about the psychology of doing hard things. He had a pretty interesting perspective on the maximum amount of dopamine our brains can produce. Opting for activities that produce dopamine quickly (unhealthy foods, tv, youtube, skimming articles, etc.) reduces our ability to do activities that produce slow dopamine (exercise, deep work, real connection, etc.).
https://calnewport.com/what-if-ai-doesnt-get-much-better-than-this/#more-16650
Cal Newport is a great writer, and his insights on to why AI coudl be plateauing for the time being are insightful. AI is good at being general, but it is crowdsourcing it’s knowledge, so until we figure out a way to teach AI to reason and judge whether the knowledge that it gets is true (i.e. until we figure out a new way to train AI) progress is likely to stagnate.
https://substack.com/@torstenw/p-160819332
An interesting read on best practices when dealing with AI research, treating AI more like a tool or an intern rather than a professional that implicitly knows everything. Learning how to develop good prompts is key to leveraging AI.