Hobbies promote self efficacy (the belief that you can do hard things) when:
they are very serious but dissimilar to your work (e.g., a scientist that is a committed rock climber)
they are not particularly serious, but similar to your work (e.g., coding on a side project for a software engineer)
Hobbies begin to reduce self efficacy when they are too serious and too related to work (e.g., intensive blogging for a technical writer)
When written out this is pretty intuitive, but nice to see on paper. Making a personal commitment to find at least one hobby that is truly dissimilar from my work by the end of the year next year. From the Journal of Vocational Behavior via Range Widely.
Humans are not the only animal to domesticate other animals. Black garden ants keep aphids in a manner similar to how humans keep livestock. Via Kevin Kelly.
Simon Wilson on how to code with LLMs. His point around manual testing certainly matches my experience!
Musings
You don’t own the story, but you do own the execution.
A common thread I noticed between Paul Graham’s The Origins of Woke and Tanner Greer’s The Euro American Split: the importance of generational change in culture change. We are always either rebelling against or seeking the approval of our elders.
Having a new child is like meeting your spouse, having your first date, falling in love, and marrying them in the span of a moment.
Being boring is a choice.
A little bit of fun
A half baked business idea: The Anti-Recruiting Firm: You identify the lowest performers at your company; we land them plum roles at your rivals, simultaneously improving your productivity while tanking the competition.
The Polymerist on the Courtship of Sampling. Making a self reminder to write down my thoughts on this one at some point.
Things I learned
The only right protected in the main body of the US Constitution is the right to intellectual property (remember that the Bill of Rights were amendments added later). It seems fitting to me that in the American Brain, the right to own ones ideas is even more primal than the right to free speech. Also, the first patent examiner for the United States was none other than Thomas Jefferson. Via ChinaTalk.
People need a certain amount of structure to create bonds. You need the conference schedule to create the interactions that lead to friendships. It’s like the coral for the fish.
“It never gets easier you just go faster” - Greg LeMond
Culture and values are underrated for explaining the behavior of people and nations. This point was made by Prof. David Kang on ChinaTalk when describing why Asia doesn’t exhibit the same international relations patterns as Europe, but it also made me think of the book I’m listening to Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. When someone’s values and their material self interest align, you always know what they’ll do. When they conflict, though, often people’s values win out over what would narrowly benefit them.
Pine needle tea has more than 100 percent of the vitamin C of orange juice — Nautilus
The value of returned purchases in the United States would make it the 16th largest economy in the world — Rohit
Musings
“Great problems have to be discovered; often the solution of the problem is only a tiny part of the story, most of it is really about discovering the problem.” — From Michael Nielsen, ~Quick thoughts on research:~ (found via Zheng Dong Wang)
OceanMade has announced pre sales of its Kelp Pots. These seed starter pots use kelp pulp to retain water instead of the traditional peat. The kelp pulp used in these pots is a byproduct of Macro Oceans beauty ingredient, Big Kelp Hydration. I’ve gotten a chance to see some of these up close and I’m really excited to see them coming together. It’s a small example of a big dream: using traceable, ocean farmed kelp products as an alternative to higher impact terrestrial sources. Due check them out if you’re a gardener.
Worth your time
Michael Lewis’s story about Chris Marks, a public servant who “led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States”, is fantastic. Some gems:
At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured. (And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.)
And
People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure. But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.
And
Roof bolts were indeed more efficient and effective than timber supports in preventing chunks of roof from wounding miners. But they were expensive to install. The coal mine companies had, in effect, figured out how few roof bolts they needed to use to maintain the same level of risk their miners had endured before their invention
Noah Smith on Japaneseurbanism. Having zones that restrict certain activities rather than prescribe what can be done seems like a small change with a big impact.
The first awesome conclusion of the model does the eval is that we will achieve every evaluation we can state. Recall that evaluations must be legible, fast, and either a good approximation of a wanted capability or useful itself.
And:
Two years ago, ~Demis Hassabis enumerated~ three properties of problems suitable for AI: a massive combinatorial search space, a clear objective function to optimize against, and lots of data or an efficient simulator.
All of the world’s gold is estimated to fit in one 20 meter cube — BBC
There are more people under the age of 25 today in Africa than there are in all of Europe — Stephen Kotkin
Musings
All large scale changes should be presented as a return to the past.
I wonder what it would look like to restructure local government around an escalating set of reviews. Imagine filing for a building permit where:
The first level of the form is evaluated by AI with the ability to appeal
The second level goes to a human
The third level goes to a supervisor
The second and third levels become new evaluation cases. This already happens today at places like YouTube, but imagine bringing it to your local government.