What I Read This Week - 2.11.24
Weekly finds from across the internet.
Happy Super Bowl Sunday to all those that celebrate!
Trying something new this week - a section I’ll call ‘What I Read This Week’. I’m constantly getting asked by friends/coworkers to share any insightful pieces of content I’ve come across of late, so figured I would open source those here.
So without further ado, here are some things that caught my eye and made me think over the past week - grouped by various themes.
Health & Fitness
Sahil Bloom Training Plan (~7 min)
An insightful, detailed training program from someone that practices what he preaches. Regardless of whether you are training for a marathon or not (I am decidedly not), this thread provides quality information on strategy for running, lifting, nutrition, and recovery.
Cancer Incidence in Under 50 Adults on the Rise (~8 min)
A sobering read detailing a recent report from the American Cancer Society showing that incidences of certain cancer rates are on the rise in younger adults. Whether a result of improved screening access or hidden changes in our daily environments, I can’t help but think this speaks to the importance of taking your health into your own hands, the younger the better. I’m also interested to see how the philosophy on early detection will evolve in the coming years. It is a personal belief that this is actually a misnomer: what we often think is ‘early’ is in fact frequently too late. We should be doing much more, much sooner than we think when it comes to screening if we want to improve long term outcomes.
Storytelling
Comedians as Storytellers (~ 2 min)
Quick read from Nathan Baugh that provides a behind the scenes look at how comedians workshop their content to find tight, compelling jokes they know will resonate with their audience. The iterative nature behind the process is a great insight into the art of storytelling - getting to a crisp message is a process of trial and error. Find ways to test your stories before they are ready for the main stage.
Shiny Dimes - Are You Trying to Say Too Much? (~2 min)
A concept I’ve been running into a great deal lately: the more you say, they less you are heard. The broader your scope, the more confused your readers and listeners become. The art of storytelling is saying less better, and David is arguably the best source on the internet for what this looks like in practice. If this concept interests you, I highly recommend his podcast How I Write where he teases out insights from many of the world’s best content creators.
New Technologies (Crypto, AI, etc.)
Farcaster & Decentralized Social Media (~12 min)
An insightful piece from an excellent crypto focused writer in Zeneca discussing the merits behind Farcaster - a crypto native decentralized social media platform. This is a space I’ve been following for the past couple years, as centralized social media (Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok, etc.) have some clear negative repercussions - content ownership, de-platformization, value accrual, etc. Farcaster is making serious strides in solving some of these issues, and has seen a meteoric rise in interest over recent weeks as a result.
How AI Works (~8 min)
Excellent piece in which the author argues that the principles underpinning AI and Large Language Models are much simpler than we assume. He provides a helpful analogy through the lens of food that contextualizes LLMs for what they are: ‘next dish prediction machines’, seasoned with a dash of mathematics and heap of big data.
Mental Models/ Frameworks
A Map is Not a Blueprint: Why Fixing Nature Fails (~11 min)
A discussion of real world applications of one of my favorite mental models: The Map is Not the Territory. Nat applies this framework to some real world examples from the domain of science - Crisco, lobotomies, synthetic fertilizers, and more - to highlight how creating mental ‘maps’ of a problem can have unintended consequences when it comes to the nature of complex systems.
Gardening for Great Outcomes (Gestation Period Mental Model) (~2 min)
Eric provides a helpful model for how to think about achieving good long term outcomes - the ‘Gestation Period’. Like plants that require careful cultivation to produce fruit, many of life’s great outcomes require an irreducible amount of time and daily investment.