My last day in San Francisco. The city has the perfect combination of density and natural beauty. I’d say it’s underrated, but looking at property prices I’ll switch to “appropriately rated”. Will come back. And soon.
There is a big change in how Generation Z and whatever follows deals with technology, and of course it is parent-driven. Our eldest is a 6th-grader and we are among the youngest, if not the youngest, parents in her class.
We were both in our late 20s when she was born, which was considered geriatric in Serbia but is practically a teenage pregnancy for DC standards. While most of her classmates have smart phones, she is not getting one until she has a driver’s license — whenever that happens — and will have to live the hard-knock life of Apple Watch at school and the iPad at home.
To our older friends this is nearly child abuse. However will they develop socially, they ask, as if TikTok were a social network and grammatically incorrect emoji-laden texts the only means of communication. Won’t they miss out on important interactions… on their way from home to school and back, I guess? Friends our age and younger don’t yet have middle schoolers, but most agree with our stance. Dumb phones and/or smart watches are good enough for safety. Roblox et al on a tablet can replace the hour-long conversations over landline phones of generations past. So what need exactly does an iPhone fill, other than assuaging the fear of missing out?
Not everyone in a generation is the same, of course, but there are overall tones. In keeping with the economic hardship, stunted maturation, and the general pessimism of the millennials, I predict our tone to be “not so fast, young’uns”. By the time our youngest is in 6th grade, seven years from now, the smartphone tweens should be in the minority.
📚 Finished reading: Talent by Tyler Cowen, and I don’t yet have an answer to my question on its Straussian — Tylerspeak for hidden — meaning. The book is despicable in some places: are you sure you want to pick people committed to their families if that means they will choose to spend time with them over doing more work? — yes, this had struck a nerve — and admirable in others: how to help people who are far from the center of the action in their selected field to even imagine what they can achieve?
I would place it in the “narrow, temporary” quadrant of the breadth/timelessness 2-by-2. It is not for everyone, and it won’t last very long. To pick an example, Cowen and Gross suggest that employers should increase their profile — by blogging, writing books, doing podcasts, basically by doing what Tyler is doing — to increase their profile and the reach of their “soft” network and, ultimately, get more self-referrals from prospective talents who have heard about them. If everyone was to do this, would be it of net benefit to the whole system? I would argue not: the benefit would be to the most prolific and vocal talent-seekers at the expense of an immense amount of noise and all around confusion. And fifty years from now, will people have known about podcasts and blogs? Lindy says no. This doesn’t mean that the book is bad! It’s just not one of the “great” books.
Compare this to my gold standard of a broad/timeless — great — contemporary book: anything from Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, which is coincidentally what taught me about the Lindy effect. If everyone were to internalize its views and the dense network of mental models it brings to the extend they can, and act accordingly, the world would be a bit less of a madhouse. The concepts it talks about being about probability, it is also timeless.
So if your goal is to read only “great” books, well, first of all don’t read anything that came out in the last 5–10 years. But if you want to read “great” book candidates — which I am, let’s be clear, not trying to do this year but may try for 2025 — well, in that case, feel free to give Talent a pass.
The news of San Francisco’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. What a delightful town.
January 7, 2024
It’s my first time in San Francisco today, and waiting at SFO’s designated spot for my Lyft ride I am stunned — stunned, I tell you — by how many BMWs, Lexuses and Teslas are used for ride sharing. An interesting data point.
In anticipation of the new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack arriving by mail — alas, the new delivery date is February 15 — I have been mulling over the more unusual mental models I’ve adopted since first reading about the latticework. The latticework is a mental model of its own — a meta-mental model, if you will — and you would do well to adopt some all of Mungers. The five I list here aren’t the models you will find in the Almanack, but I would not have identified them as such and remembered them were it not for Munger’s wisdom.
The links are to Wikipedia and journal articles, for now, but I hope to write a detailed account of my own for each, you know, once I get around to it.
Activation energy, especially as it relates to motivation and administrative inertia;
Epiphenomena as real and tangible things and not nuisances to be brushed aside, which I realized via both Hofstadter and Girard;
Phenotypic plasticity, which we take for granted at the level of an organism (in an environment of caloric abundance mammals will get fat) but not so much at higher and lower scales, i.e., cells and societies;
Carcinization, the nature’s attempt to evolve every crustacean into a crab five separate times, or, as I like to see it, nature’s way of telling us that hyper-optimization is seductive but ultimately a dead end — and again, mind the scale.
These five are interconnected in interesting ways, and if you arrange the arrows just right they do for a mini-lattice. Kudos to Munger for finding the right term. Munger discussed his own mental models in detail in the Almanack and they form a larger, but still loose, network.
The web of mental models is, of course, Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, built so densely and interconnected so profusely that Branko Milanović was right to laud is as a new type of writing. And in fact of the five models I listed, the first one — Waddington’s probability landscape — is a neat bridge between Taleb’s investigations and the other four. But that is a discussion for a future time.
January 6, 2024
Currently reading: Talent by Tyler Cowen 📚 and so far the book is… reprehensible? If Cowen and his co-author Daniel Gross are serious about their recommendations on hiring then they are deserving of contempt — more on the specifics once I finish the book. But Cowen is a fan of Straussian readings; my Straussian reading of Talent is that people who take the book’s advice to heart without questioning its underlying premise are the contemptible ones.
Of course, that could be my own ego-defense mechanism talking. Surely I couldn’t have been reading and listening to Cowen for so long and not have realized that he was a sociopath.
The Washington Post reports another wave of covid is coming to America. Well, it certainly came to our household. And much like the first time around, I got it days after a vaccine — just my luck. At least this time it’s only 3 days of sore throat and runny nose, and not a full week of high fevers.
