Newsletter #48
Hey everyone,
Announcements
Slowly working on introducing people, but obviously I can’t do everyone at once so progress is slow but so far everyone involved seems to be happy about the recommendation ahaha
Movies of the Week
Seen
Hunger by Steve McQueen: Steven McQueen is one of my favorite directors. Many of you may know him for 12 Years A Slave (for which he became the first black filmmaker to win an Academy Award for Best Picture), but he also made Shame, which his one of my favorite movies. This was his debut, kickstarting his long-running collaboration with Michael Fassbender. This movie is a perfect example of the marriage of performance, narrative, and technique, with the latter not being the result of an engineered approach, but rather emerging from a deep commitment by McQueen to make us feel the pain of Bobby Sands as he slowly withers away during the Hunger Strike.
Anticipating
Nothing this week particularly piqued my interest.
Music Video of the Week
Kid Cudi — No One Believes Me by Craig Gillespie: Kid Cudi is one of my favorite artists, and his music videos often have very stylized shots to simulate the distorted sense of perception that’s part of his music. This one is a great example!
Paper of the Week
Blockchain and the Economics of Crypto-tokens and Initial Coin Offerings [paper]: By exploring the aspects of successful tokens related to monetary theory and game theory, the authors set up a valuation framework for crypto-tokens. Really great paper!
Weekly Shoutout
As many of you know, @Chuck works at Tezos and he recently shared with me the updates they made on their platform to make it very developer friendly. Everyone check it out!
Books
Make it Stick by Peter C. Brown: wonderful book about the insights cognitive science gives us about memory and how to learn things more effectively and more efficiently. It’s related to one of the papers I’m writing this year, but I highly recommend it to anyone who feels like they could improve their knowledge retention.
Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew. W. Lo: this is probably the most accessible and most comprehensive volume on the history of financial theory I’ve ever read. I think reading this book is a deep primer on financial market theory. It’s truly beautiful how it brings every insight from classical economics, mathematical finance, history, behavioral economics and evolutionary biology into a coherent story. It sometimes borders on the weirdly philosophical, and lots of random comments about academia, but it’s truly a book I wish I had read many years ago before I knew many of the references. If you are looking for an entry point into finance/economic theory, this is it!
Food for Thought
John Oliver on Rehab [video 19m]: Over the last few months I started researching addictions more because of its role in modern tech development, but it’s good sometimes to take a break from the scientific research around the phenomenon to keep tabs on the policy implementations dealing with probably one of the largest crisis facing the US these days.
SoftBank: Vision or Delusion [article]: even though it’s short, the article is packed with great informations about the internal structure of the Vision Fund, the largest VC fund in the world, and what the expected returns are in light of such structure. I am also willing to entertain a different scenario: what if Masayoshi Son is not actually looking to earn competitive returns, but instead pitched his investors on a philanthropic vision? After all, at his scale (over $100B), it’s impossible to earn the returns that much smaller PE/VC funds get anyway, so any substantially positive return is a win for his LPs, who purely on a regulatory basis they need on paper to demand higher returns but in practice know the fund will underperform.
Blockchain and Mechanism Design [video 27m]: obviously this fascinates me as a game theorist, but the talk is super accessible. If you are interested in blockchain at all, I think understanding the perspective of MechDesigners will be key.
Crowd Pleasers
The Meaning of The Joker’s Scars [video 8m]: this is all pretty standard but I really like that they pulled Nolan’s quote about how the character was carefully constructed in such a way that he couldn’t be humanized. Perverted twists on motivations make for a great villain.
Marc Andreessen on How to Build the Future [video 27m]: “the next Silicon Valley is the internet” and “the key to deal with rapidly changing world is to combine skills” are just a few of the great lines from this video.
Big Tech and Antitrust [video 57m]: really interesting debate with a diverse spectrum of viewpoints over one of the biggest economic issues facing our society in the 21st century.
Mind-Benders
Didier Sornette on Predicting The Next Financial Crisis with Dragon Kings [video 17m]: I am totally going to follow Financial Crisis Observatory and I’m blown away by the applications of Dragon-King models to healthcare! I’m also super intrigued by the idea of applying perturbations to complex systems to avoid crashes.
Mendelian Randomization: How to Use Genetics to Mimic Drug Trials [article]: this is honestly quite amazing. @Javier what are your thoughts on this? I wonder if 23andMe could become a platform for this kind of research.
Does Hollywood Ruin Books? [video 13m]: Hannah Fry, one of my favorite mathematicians, walks us through Burton’s Paradox, and its implications for book adaptations as well as for healthcare and dating.
Brian Singerman on Founders Fund’s Portfolio [27m]: I am just….I don’t know what to say other than this is awesome. One of the sharpest minds I’ve seen in a long time.
Have a great weekend!
Check out the collection of all of the past newsletters