📚 Micro reviews of articles on stupidity & surviving crises

Links I recommend reading: helpful advice for starting new jobs, insights about using LLMs in non-depressing ways, & thoughts on tech that didn't involve bureaucracy when improving our lives.

It’s been about six months since I shared micro-reviews of thought-provoking things I’ve read — the last edition was about thinking rigorously — so now seems like a good time to share the articles I’ve read that were quite interesting but not firmly enough in my bailiwick to spark a complete essay all their own.

• Ted Gioia
  shared an enormously interesting (and popular!) reading list for learning about human stupidity — infinitely more interesting than the 2024 summer reading list from MIT. I’ve earmarked it for when my kids are old enough to appreciate it, so we can work thru it together one summer. I particularly liked that it includes novels as well as nonfiction, and I took a great deal of inspiration from the way it’s structured like a self-paced academic course.

• This article about maintaining a WTF notebook was ostensibly written for people transitioning onto a new team at work, but I think it has great advice for anyone orienting themselves in a new community — whether you’re starting a new school, joining a new social group after a disruptive move, living with a new roommate, or just getting involved with volunteering with a local charity. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut for awhile, but keep track of weird things you see, try to figure out why they are the way they are, and then if you can come up with potential improvements, politely discuss the idea. On a related note, the apocryphal “five monkeys” / “monkeys and bananas” experiment does not entirely survive the replication crisis, which is kind of heartening and kind of depressing.

• Speaking of, Dalton Mabery had a great article about how depressing it is when AI products try to do the hard work of thinking “for” you instead of facilitating it. It really hits home for me because there was a chunk of time when I was so demoralized by LLMs that I didn’t have any motivation to write. Now that I've learned more about them & found ways to have them help me save time instead of feeling pressured to let them write for me, it’s better — for precisely the reasons Dalton outlines.

• A friend of mine recently got a promotion, and asked myself and some others in our group chat for some “real talk” about how we felt about one-on-ones, since the internet is full of conflicting information. I shared this article about one-on-ones from Ben Horowitz with him. Ever since I’ve moved to full-time and started having regular one-on-ones at work, I’ve been genuinely startled at how effective they are at surfacing productivity improvement ideas, making sure I’m aligned with leadership on prioritization, and just giving me an opportunity to feel heard.

• This article about the history of refrigeration was interesting, particularly from the perspective of libertarian worldbuilding. Apparently, refrigeration has been implemented almost entirely commercially: “It’s never been in the service of a grand vision, by someone thinking about how best to feed the city, or the best way to promote health, or economic outcomes, or sustainability, or our relationship to the land.”

• Here’s an interesting argument from

  Florian U. Jehn
  that societies endure crises by relying on institutional robustness, strategic elite behavior, and the capacity for adaptive reforms. The claim itself has implications for historical narratives in general, but what I really like is that it’s based on a dataset that spans the beginning of recorded history until around the beginning of the 20th century.

• My fellow etymology nerds should check out this article about the history of ‘orange’ not least of which because orange is one of those tricky words that kids get exposed to very early but which rhymes with basically nothing.

• Jake Fuentes
  on lessons from failed startups is aimed at founders, but I think it’s useful for the rest of us who care about being productive, too. The jist of “you need to know what you're doing in order to achieve it” is true in any field, whether you were trying to figure out who to market your product to or figure out what to make for dinner.

• On the topic of failure… at various points in my life, quitting has been the right choice. I’m on my third career at this point, so this article by

  Allie Volpe
  about when to know when it’s time to quit brought up a lot of emotions for me. I thought it was particularly comprehensive and well-written.

• This list of impactful habits from

  Leonardo Creed
  is for engineers, but contains a lot of good advice for anyone who cares about personal knowledge management. Don’t be a data hoarder; don’t get super attached to your notes. It reminded me of how I tried using git to have perfect version control — at the end of the day it was so complicated and annoying that it was never worth retrieving anything. Every time I wanted to roll back, it was just too much of the nightmare. I prefer treating my messy notes a bit like how forgetting is good for your memory.

Somewhat relatedly, if you haven’t clicked through to the website for this newsletter lately, I recommend it, if only for a chance to take a gander at all the pretty art that goes along with each article. Midjourney has really leveled up, and I swapped my logo around a bit.

I’ve also been revamping my public notebook as I reorient myself to my fiction writing process now that my daughter is almost weaned. My current work in progress is called The Dungeon Crawler’s Wife and takes place in the Voidnodes universe. I have no intentions of publishing it; it exists as a framing device to help ground all the neat academic stuff I like to learn, and frankly being a financially successful author is more work than I expect to have time for any time in the next thirty years. Still, hopefully it’s fun to poke thru and see how it all connects to my nerdy academic interests. Feel free to pop into my Discord server or shoot me an email if you see anything you’d like to discuss further.