Posts

Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross about self-improvement in Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World: If a person improves, say, only 1 percent a year in terms of productivity, it will take about seventy years for that person’s productivity to double. Probably you can’t wait that long, and maybe a mere doubling isn’t so impressive anyway. For that person, what you see is what you get. But say a person can improve by 35 percent a year. Read more...

Farnam Street has a very good article explaining some of the techniques used by Nobel Laurette Richard Feynman for evaluating information. The topic is relevant as ever. A large part of wisdom is knowing what to ignore. A large part of expertise is knowing where to place your attention. Feynman’s recommendations are distilled in 7 points: 1. Decide whether the other person truly knows their stuff or is mimicking others. When asked a direct, honest, intelligent question, and the person doesn’t know the answer, does he admit that he doesn’t know the answer? Read more...

Enrique Dans about what TIkTok is about: Some people spend all day creating something stupid, and others spend all day watching them (oh, sorry, it can be used for other things… in 0.05% of cases). No wonder that even if TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a chinese company, the Chinese government limits TitTok’s use by young people to 45 minutes a day. Read more...

In The Art of Reading: How to be a Demanding Reader, Shane Parrish writes that “reading a book, for any reason, is essentially an effort on your part to ask the book questions (and to answer them to the best of your ability).” There are 4 questions you must ask about any book you read: What is the book about? What is being said in detail? Is the book true, in whole or in part? Read more...

Marshall Goldsmith, in his book The Earned Life, writes that it took him decades to understand why otherwise intelligent people could hold values and believes that didn’t make sense to him: If you know a person’s referent group—-to whom or what they feel deeply connected, whom they want to impress, whose respect they crave-—you can understand why they talk and think and behave the way they do. You don’t have to agree with them, but you are less likely to dismiss them as brainwashed or uninformed. Read more...