Synthesis - Issue #4

Tim Urban’s Wait But Why is some of the best long-form writing on the web. You should read all of his latest series, “A Sick Giant”, but one chapter is especially relevant to understanding our shifting national discussion about systemic racism. “The American Brain” isn’t about racism per se, but rather an entertaining examination of the Overton Window a model used to understand how collective opinions change over time (and sometimes do so very, very quickly).

Spotify’s market cap jumped by $3B in the 24 hours following the announcement of their $100M exclusive deal with Joe Rogan for his podcast. Supercast makes the case that podcasters like Rogan are getting the short end of the stick:

The term “panpsychic” was a new one for me, and while this comes off about as odd as you’d expect with a headline like that, it reminded me of another piece from Tim Urban called Game of Giants, which describes how easily people can ascend and descend an “Emergence Tower” – almost simultaneously operating at the level of an individual, a family, a tribe, a town, a country, etc. And what does it mean if that emergence tower does indeed go down as well, through the level of cells and then atoms, and perhaps even electrons? Certainly fodder for a dorm-room discussion over some good edibles, but also maybe there’s some truth to it, depending on how you define “consciousness”:

🙃

I’m pretty sure I was a lot better at finding my way around a new city (and back again) on foot before I had GPS on my phone, and it seems I’m not the only one:

I don’t naturally ask good questions.

So I long ago started collecting good ones I heard other people ask.

When I spotted this list on Twitter from @LennyIce it was like striking gold.

🙋

I’m not sure I agree with the author’s conclusion here that we should always be setting some sort of goal or challenge to “work” on, but this is still worth a read as a reminder of how hard we must work to be satisfied with doing nothing:

(BTW meditation really helps with this. I wrote a list of 10 great books to get you started.)

The distinction drawn here between apprenticeship and deliberate practice seem like just semantics to me, but I learned a lot by reading this, and appreciated the introduction to “Naturalistic Decision Making” (NDM).

One of the most maddening habits of journalism is to treat every issue as if it’s just a difference of opinion (for the sake of balance 🙄). This piece offers some relevant historical perspective:

I still don’t understand how Zoom pulled off the marketing coup of the decade by becoming the Official Video Conferencing Service of the COVID-19 Pandemic, but if like me you were horrified to learn that they intend to keep letting law enforcement snoop on free users, you should check out Jitsi, a free, secure open-source alternative.