What I Read This Week - 4.21.24
Weekly finds from across the internet.
Hey Everyone,
Happy Sunday and welcome back to What I Read This Week, coming to your inbox from Greensboro, NC today.
It’s been a great week, which kicked off by receiving our World Series rings back in Arlington on Monday. Hard to describe the feeling of putting it on your finger, especially when you consider all of the effort and sacrifice that went into turning a dream into reality. In case you missed it, here’s how they turned out (in one word, incredible):
Now, lets get to some more “shiny” content. This week, thoughts on:
Mounting injury rates for pitchers in baseball, and why there is no simple answer
Exercise as an assassin for cancer cells
The role of experimentation in creating the future
And more
Enjoy!
- CG
Sports/High Performance
Pitchers and Injury Rates - Ben Brewster, Tread Athletics (~8 min)
Mounting arm injury rates for pitchers across professional baseball are a hot topic of late. While the rate of injuries early in this season may not be entirely abnormal compared to recent years, the issue is magnified as a result of the names involved. There may be more top-tier pitching talent on the injured list right now than at any point in the history of the game.
Currently, I’d describe the debate as murky at best. There is a cacophony of opinions from a variety of different perspectives, each adding a unique angle to the conversation. Each looking for a reason to point to, a scapegoat to bear the burden.
I’m not sure there is a singular rationale for what we are seeing. Instead, it’s like a wide variety of factors are combining to produce the effects we are seeing. Ben lays this out well in his thread, citing a variety of potential factors such as:
Higher velocities across the game
Pitching through fatigue
Higher workloads at younger ages before ligaments are fully developed
Higher velocities at younger ages (again, before ligaments are fully developed)
Year round-throwing
Ramped up early season intensity as a function of evaluation
Changes in pitch frequencies, with pitchers throwing increasingly more breaking balls
A decrease in the use of sticky substances for gripping the baseball
The pitch clock and
Mechanical factors
The jury is still out here, and there is much work to be done in order to solve the problem. But while we work towards a solution, nuanced takes like these from Ben that recognize the variety of factors at play can help us avoid the temptation to pin blame on one culprit alone.
Health/Fitness
Exercise as a Cancer Killer - Dr. Rhonda Patrick (~ 1 min)
A great nugget from Rhonda at Found My Fitness, in which she shares some recent findings on the relationship between cancer and exercise. According to newer research, high intensity exercise has the power to serve not only as a preventative strategy against cancer but also as a supportive treatment. In fact, a recent study showed that patients with stage 3 colon cancer who also engaged in aerobic exercise had a 40% reduction in reoccurrence and a 63% reduction in mortality.
The potential mechanism at play underneath the surface is fascinating, and relates to how your blood moves through body. Higher intensity exercise is related to faster blood flow, which in turn creates an intense shearing force on circulating cells. Cancer cells appear to be more susceptible to degradation by the stress caused from these forces and thus are more likely to be destroyed by rapid blood flow than normal cells.
Wild stuff, and yet another feather in the cap for intense exercise.
Storytelling
Writing Is Thinking: Learning to Write With Confidence - Steph Smith (~15 min)
I have followed Steph for a little bit as a function of her work at a16z, but went down the rabbit hole after listening to her interview on David Perell’s How I Write. That podcast led me to this older piece on her process for growing as a writer/storyteller, which contains some valuable insights. A couple that stuck out:
Writing is Thinking - To write well means to think well. Oftentimes it is not the writing that is difficult, but rather the thinking behind it. And just like a muscle, it can be trained with consistent practice.
Reduce the Activation Energy - Just showing up can be the most difficult part. But there is no path to improving at the thing without doing the thing. Step 1 is to reduce the energy needed to start.
Decouple Steps of the Process - In order to think clearly, we need space. Writing is no different. Whatever our individual processes, creating ‘line breaks’ in between them can be a helpful way to allow for us to transition smoothly from one to the next.
The Future (AI, Tech, etc.)
Reid Hoffman on How AI Might Answer our Biggest Questions - Every (~8 min)
Reid Hoffman’s resume is impressive, to put it lightly. Co-founder of LinkedIn. Former member of the PayPal mafia. Early investor in companies such as Facebook and AirBnb. Suffice it to say that when Reid talks about the future, I find it wise to listen.
In this interview with Every, Reid shares a unique perspective on how AI will shape our future through the lens of philosophy. Through his lens, AI is yet another example of how humans evolve with the world around us. Reid shares the perspective I have written about here before - that technology and humans have a bi-directional relationship. Humans influence technology, and technology influences humans.
As he says in the interview:
We’re not static as we are constituted by the technology that we engage and bring into our lives… Part of what we’re doing with AI and LLMs is creating tools to help accelerate that cultural/digital evolution.
In other words, AI will shape us in nearly as many ways as we will shape it. And due to the pace at which this change is occurring, it is more important than ever for us to pay attention to the underlying mechanisms at play from a more human level.
Let us not go blindly into the dark.
The Window of Opportunity is Here - Nat Eliason (~4 min)
Found this to be a good thought piece by Nat on how technology impacts both quantity and quality.
Throughout history, technology has shown a bias towards the former over the later - improving scale but not necessarily improving the standard. The printing press led to many more books published, but that says nothing about the quality of the books themselves. We can see this today with the proliferation of social media and online writing - there is more content than ever before as a result, but is that content actually any better?
Yet while this has been true up until now, Nat argues that AI is changing the game. From his perspective, it is a unique technology in that it not only helps you do something more efficiently but also helps you do something more effectively. Specifically in regards to writing. With tools such as Claude and ChatGPT, you now have a personal ghostwriter/editor that can enhance the quality of your output in ways never before possible.
Now is the time to take advantage - the “Window of Opportunity” as Nat calls it. Don’t get stuck in neutral.
Crypto Social Experiments - Maria Shen (~7 min)
This is a great read on some of the experiments being run in crypto, specifically from the social coordination perspective. From my view, highlighting projects like those listed here is critically important. Doing so provides a counter to the perception problem crypto has faced since its inception.
The industry as a whole takes a good deal of flak, with many viewing it solely as a casino for tokens and JPEGs. Right or wrong, one can understand where this comes from. Narrative is often driven by hype cycles, of which crypto is the king - big swings in price actions lend themselves to big swings in reactions. And at the top of the list every time the chart turns red is the never-ending question “where are the real use cases?”.
I think this line of questioning misses the point in many ways. First and foremost, the line of questioning is often disingenuous - I find it hard to believe you can take a real, honest look at the current landscape and fail to identify ‘use cases’. Bitcoin (hard capped monetary policy) and Ethereum (smart contracts) alone are enough to lend the space credibility.
Secondly, asking the question as if they must exist today is naive. The truth is this - crypto is a mechanism through which to take a new lens to old ideas, ones that have existed for centuries. The rules of money. Social coordination. Incentive structures. Property Rights. This list could go on and on. These ideas have formed the bedrock of our world for centuries - do people really think that we are going to figure out the definitive path to making them better overnight?
No, we certainly won’t. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Solving these problems requires both new technology and new lines of thinking. The latter often leads to the former, but once the technology is in place we must learn how it is best applied. This is where we are today - rewriting the fundamentals of society requires constant iteration.
So sure, much of crypto is a casino. But there is an entirely different — and more important — section that you’ll miss if you don’t pay attention. At its core, crypto is an idea factory. It is society’s version of an R&D division, taking new ways of thinking about the world and bringing them to light through technology.
Doing so takes time, and iteration. But make no mistake - where many ideas will fail, the ones that succeed and reach the final version will change how humans operate forever.
Personal Growth
How I Tricked My Brain Into Liking Running - Erik Vance (~4 min)
Found this to be a quick, insightful read on a couple of strategies we can implement to take something we don’t particular like — but know is important for us — and turn it into a habit.
One of the main takeaways for me: find a way to make it enjoyable.
Sure, a 3 min ice bath is probably going to suck. Same with those hill sprints or a 5am Barry’s class. But through the lens of reward bundling, there are small things we can do to make whatever it is we are trying to start suck less. And, dare I say it, perhaps even come to find ourselves enjoying it.
This is where the “treat yourself” line of thinking comes into play - bundle something you like into the action of the thing that you don’t. This could be something as simple as lighting a scented candle for the start of your home workout routine. Or in my case, a pot of coffee and a sparkling water next to my computer when the time comes to write.
Over time, the things you bundle start to blend together as one. In the process, your perception of the thing you hate becomes skewed toward the positive by the things you don’t.
Like trying to down a smoothie with spinach, it’s a hell of a lot easier if you just add a little bit of fruit.