habits over goals, compounding craziness & the effect of prayer

CC#24 - Teleworking, Nigerian princes, the obesity pandemic & econometrics in Norway

Nov 14, 2021

Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.

Hei! Writing to you this week from Bergen, Norway. Hope you had as much of a sunny day as I had! Have fun with this week’s selection of articles, tweets and bites of inspiration!

Things I Enjoyed Reading.

🎯 Don't Goal. Habit.

It’s not (always) about the big hairy audacious goals. Mostly it’s about the small steps every day.

When we feel motivated, we think that we can set ourselves billions of goals and we can reach them all.
Realistically - life happens.
You go into survival mode.
You fall back on what you would “usually do” = your Habits.
BUT you can make that “Survival Mode” whatever you want it to be.

🤖 The First Rule of Machine Learning: Start without Machine Learning

Yes, it’s cool to make ‘sth with artificial intelligence’. Yes, machine learning is a powerful tool that will transform many industries. But no, it’s not the first solution that you should turn to when trying to answer a question with data.

Guess what’s Rule #1 in Google’s 43 Rules of Machine Learning?
Rule #1: Don’t be afraid to launch a product without machine learning.
Machine learning is cool, but it requires data. Theoretically, you can take data from a different problem and then tweak the model for a new product, but this will likely underperform basic heuristics. If you think that machine learning will give you a 100% boost, then a heuristic will get you 50% of the way there.

🤪 Compounding Crazy

What does it mean for our (near) future if human progress is not, as often assumed, linear but exponential?

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.

💻 The great teleworking divide - what professions could/couldn’t work remotely?

Philip N Cohen @familyunequal

Now you know: Percent teleworking because of the pandemic, by occupation and month

🍟 Although I am not entirely convinced of the alternative theory presented in this article, it still seems very likely to me that there is more to body weight than just calories in, calories out. Maybe we should reevaluate current ‘mainstream’ knowledge about how our metabolism works?

A Chemical Hunger – Part II: Current Theories of Obesity are Inadequate | Overall carbohydrate intake from 1980 to 2010 in the United States. Figure prepared by Stephan J Guyenet.

🍗 Many people put a lot of hope in the alternative meat industry and expect lab meat to replace a substantial part of “real” meat production in the near future - this report takes a more pessimistic viewpoint. According to the authors, large scale production of lab grown meat is not feasible from a scientific point of view and will never be able to reach a competitive price level (their optimistic prediction for lab grown meat is around 45$ per pound, chicken currently sells for 1.5-4$ per pound in the U.S.).

Random Stuff.

🚀 To the outside it often seems like successful people are just good at well… almost everything they do. In reality, I think most of these people also have a long list of ideas that didn’t work out as planned - we just never get to see them.

@levelsio @levelsio

🍰 Only 4 out of 70+ projects I ever did made money and grew 📉 >95% of everything I ever did failed 📈 My hit rate is only about ~5% 🚀 So...ship more

🙏 Reminder: Don’t be fooled by appearances. Just because sth looks like science doesn’t mean it is science ;)

🤴 Why is it that most scam emails are just so obviously scam?

Jitha Thathachari @jithamithra

Ever wondered why email scammers are so sloppy? Like, maybe we'd believe them if they weren't a "Nigerian prince". If they didn't make silly spelling mistakes. What if I tell you the mistakes are deliberate? What if I tell you, this is actually marketing 101? 🧵👇

My update.

Took part in the smart city challenge (kind of a hackathon) - had lot’s of fun learning about smart buildings and thinking of ideas on how to increase energy efficiency in municipal buildings. Shoutout to the team from Station CPH for organising 🤗
Spent the past week in Stavanger to attend an econometrics course by Magne Mogstad from the University of Chicago. Definitely helped me to understand econometric methods and their applications better - can’t wait to try my hands at implementation!

Enjoy your start into the week! 🏃‍♀️

CuratedCuriosity