curating talent, crazy times & the unvaccinated
CC#22 - meeting the OPEC, Roam vs. Obsidian & moving to Denmark.
Hey there an welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Hey everyone! Quite some turbulent weeks we have behind us here in Austria - new chancellor, new corruption scandal and lots of uncertainty regarding the political future. To my fellow Austrians - if you feel a bit lost in keeping up with all of this, I can recommend you two articles (rather neutral fact collection, rather not so neutral write up of the whole Kurz-story) and this meme. Let’s hope for the best (whatever that may be)!
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
💉 The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think
The loud, ideological anti-vaxxers exist, and it’s not hard to understand the anger directed at them. All this may make it seem as if almost all the holdouts are conspiracy theorists and anti-science die-hards who think that Covid is a hoax, or that there is nothing we can do to reach more people. Real-life evidence, what there is, demonstrates that there’s much more to it.
🌟 Tyler Cowen is the best curator of talent in the world
Key Learning: Making a fuzz about a program and pouring lots of effort into promotion, is not the only way you can curate real talent. Under the right circumstances, keeping a low profile while focusing on quality works (even better?).
Tyler has identified talent either earlier than or missed by top undergraduate programs, the best biotech startups, and the best biotech investors, all without any insider knowledge of biotech. In comparison, Forbes 30U30, MIT Tech Review TR35, or Stat Wunderkind, and other industry awards that highlight talent are lagging indicators of success. It’s hard to find an awardee of these programs that was not already widely recognized for their achievements among insiders in their field.
Sometimes, observing the past is not enough to predict the future. What if the “rate of change” is growing exponentially, not linearly?
By connecting to the internet, any individual human can access all human knowledge. Things that took thousands of people millennia, centuries, or years to develop can be used and remixed by one person in one second. We have more building blocks than ever before, and we can use those building blocks to make new building blocks more quickly.
The takeaway is that human knowledge compounds, we build new things on the shoulders of giants at a faster and faster pace, and our brains are not good at understanding all of that in the moment.
If you pause, though, you can feel it happening all around us, right now.
Food for Thought.
🍖 Have humans reverted back to being hunters (of likes) and gatherers (of followers)?
🍽 How come that still today one can find supporting evidence for literally any kind of diet?! Why does humanity still have so little knowledge about nutrition?
As seen in “Why Most Nutrition Studies are Wrong”:
Random Cool Stuff.
🖼 When prompted to create a modern art work for an exhibition around people’s relationship with work, danish artist Jens Haaning sent two blank canvases to the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art. He called his work “Take the Money and Run”.
🕸 I am a big Notion-lover but have been contemplating adding RoamResearch or Obsidian to my stack of note keeping/life admin/second brain tools for a while. After reading some articles (I can especially recommend this detailed comparison) and giving both tools a try I am currently leaning towards the Obsidian-way of life. The main arguments for me are [1] pricing (Obsidian is free), [2] local storage (Obsidian stores your notes on your computer, meaning you can work without internet connection and you have full data sovereignity) and [3] the look of the UI (Obsidian’s graphs are just much more beautiful). But would be curious about personal experiences - hit me up if you’ve used one (or both) of these tools and have encountered some further (dis-)advantages.
🚀 20 wise tweets to end your week.
My update.
Last week I got the chance to participate in the Vienna Energy Scholars Program - a program for students & young professionals centered around the future of energy, organized by the City of Vienna and, well …. OPEC. Discussing with employees of the OPEC secretariat and getting to know this organisation from the inside truly gave me a new perspective on energy matters although I certainly do not agree with all their points (see picture).
Only a couple of days left in Vienna. Still feels quite surreal that I will leave this city 🎡. But also excited for Copenhagen - see you 🔜