Grant Gochnauer: Awesome Humans — Issue #192
Awesome Human
How I practice at what I do — marginalrevolution.com
“Following up on my post a few days ago, about the value of deliberate practice for knowledge workers, a number of you asked me what form my practice takes. A few of you were skeptical, but it is long since established that practice improves both your writing and your memory, so surely it can do much more than that for your thinking. Here is a partial list of some of my intellectual practice strategies:”
Generalise, don’t specialise: why focusing too narrowly is bad for us
Great read! I’m currently in the middle of this book and it’s fantastic: “Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World by David Epstein”
“The long read: The 10,000-hour rule says intense, dedicated practice makes perfect — at that one thing. But what if breadth actually serves us better than depth?”
We’re told that too much screen time hurts our kids. Where’s the evidence?
“While it is true that some research suggests that young people who report higher social media use show slightly lower levels of wellbeing, most of these findings are unreliable and their conclusions might amount to little more than statistical noise. These problems are well known to scientists working on the topic, but many commentators don’t know — or don’t care — that they are cherry-picking from an evidence base riddled with errors. What’s more, sitting in on the psychiatry conference in London, you’d have had no way of knowing this is shoddy science. Instead of speculating about technology effects, we need to test how social media and life satisfaction influence each other and to do so over time.”
How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion — praxis.fortelabs.co
“When you experience an emotion without knowing the precise cause, you are more likely to treat that emotion as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world. This is known as affective realism. Affective realism causes us to experience supposed “facts” about the world that are in fact created by our feelings. It can leave us trapped in an emotional world of our own making, without realizing that we are the ones who imprisoned ourselves.”
How To Make Your Relationship Amazing: 6 Secrets From The Top Marriage Researcher — www.bakadesuyo.com
“John Gottman is the leading researcher on marriage and romance. Here are some of his surprising tips on how to make your relationship amazing.”
Healthy Human
Doing these five things could decrease your risk of Alzheimer’s by 60 percent, new study shows — SFGate — www.sfgate.com
“Here’s a to-do list for preventing dementia, new research suggests: Ditch red meat, take a brisk walk to the grocery store, do the Sunday crossword and stick to one glass of wine at dinner.”
The Fish Is Boneless. (Fishless, Too.) — www.nytimes.com
“Several companies are developing sustainable, plant-based or laboratory-made seafood alternatives. It might help the planet, but will anyone eat it?”
Scientists close in on blood test for Alzheimer’s — www.cbsnews.com
“An Alzheimer’s blood test “doesn’t have to be perfect” to be useful for screening, one expert explained”
Human Builders
Lessons from Keith Rabois Essay 3: How to be an Effective Executive
Excellent!
This week’s essay is on how to be an effective executive: “Running yourself” and “Running your team”. This is inspired by a talk Keith gives to some of our portfolio companies’ executives.
The future of work in America: People and places, today and tomorrow
“But the national results contain a wide spectrum of outcomes. A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, The future of work in America: People and places, today and tomorrow, analyzes more than 3,000 US counties and 315 cities and finds they are on sharply different paths. Automation is not happening in a vacuum, and the health of local economies today will affect their ability to adapt and thrive in the face of the changes that lie ahead. The trends outlined in this report could widen existing disparities between high-growth cities and struggling rural areas, and between high-wage workers and everyone else. But this is not a foregone conclusion.”
5 product marketing tips to help your startup cross the chasm — blog.usejournal.com
“If you’re in product marketing at a growth-stage startup, your job pretty much boils down to one thing: helping your company cross the chasm.”
An interactive documentary series about our changing relationship to work and money — www.earn-a-living.com
Nifty! “An interactive documentary series about our changing relationship to work and money”
The Role of Professional Services in a SaaS Business — kellblog.com
“Over the past year, I’ve developed one of these pithy mission statements for professional services, also known as consulting, the (typically billable) experts employed by a software company who work with customers on implementations after the sale:
Professional services exists to maximize ARR while not losing money.”
History of Public SaaS Returns and Valuations — medium.com
“Detailed description of the history of publicly traded SaaS companies.”
Future Humans
Deep Aging Clocks: The Emergence of AI-Based Biomarkers of Aging and Longevity: Trends in Pharmacological Sciences — www.cell.com
“First published in 2016, predictors of chronological and biological age developed using deep learning (DL) are rapidly gaining popularity in the aging research community. These deep aging clocks can be used in a broad range of applications in the pharmaceutical industry, spanning target identification, drug discovery, data economics, and synthetic patient data generation. We provide here a brief overview of recent advances in this important subset, or perhaps superset, of aging clocks that have been developed using artificial intelligence”
HyperFoods: Machine intelligent mapping of cancer-beating molecules in foods — www.nature.com
“Recent data indicate that up-to 30–40% of cancers can be prevented by dietary and lifestyle measures alone. Herein, we introduce a unique network-based machine learning platform to identify putative food-based cancer-beating molecules. These have been identified through their molecular biological network commonality with clinically approved anti-cancer therapies.”
Inside Starshot, the audacious plan to shoot tiny ships to Alpha Centauri — www.technologyreview.com
“Starshot wants to build the world’s most powerful laser and aim it at the closest star.”
Elon Musk’s Neuralink looks to begin outfitting human brains with faster input and output starting next year — techcrunch.com
“Neuralink, the Elon Musk-led startup that the multi-entrepreneur founded in 2017, is working on technology that’s based around ‘threads’ which it says can be implanted in human brains with much less potential impact to the surrounding brain tissue vs. what’s currently used for today’s brain-computer interfaces.”
One More Thing
Alternative theory of gravity makes a nearly testable prediction — arstechnica.com
A massive simulation done with a “chameleon” theory of gravity.
