Today, I’m in my third week of Sabbatical! I’ve been doing a lot of reading and I’m feeling the urge to revive an old ritual of sharing what I’m finding interesting lately.
Not all bubbles destroy wealth and value. Some can be understood as important catalysts for techno-scientific progress. Most novel technology doesn’t just appear ex nihilo, entering the world fully formed and all at once. Rather, it builds on previous false starts, failures, iterations, and historical path dependencies. Bubbles create opportunities to deploy the capital necessary to fund and speed up such large-scale experimentation — which includes lots of trial and error done in parallel — thereby accelerating the rate of potentially disruptive technologies and breakthroughs.
I’ve been collecting notes on models, effects, paradoxes, and phenomena for the past couple of weeks. Today’s entry is brought to us by Alex Danco in Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury:
100 years after Jevons published his observation on coal, William Baumol published a short paper investigating why so many orchestras, theaters, and opera companies were running out of money. He provocatively asserted that the String Quartet had become less productive, in “real economy” terms, because the rest of the economy had become more productive, while the musicians’ job stayed exactly the same. The paper struck a nerve, and became a branded concept: “Baumol’s Cost Disease”.
Essentially, if one sector of the economy creates lots of well-paying jobs, then every other sector’s wages rise to stay competitive. The piece goes on to describe some of the strange AI-driven side effects we may see—like radiologist wages skyrocketing because they’re the mandated last reviewer for AI-managed tasks.
Yesterday, Willow and I set out to find mushrooms in our neighborhood. It was the first big rainfall of the season, and it rained steadily the whole time we were out. We came back soaked, but we found over thirty different species of #fungi! You can see a few of our favorites over on Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/p/dstokes/887447943539971168
There are so many reasons not to spend an hour wandering around in the rain. Turns out there’s one reason to do it anyway: sharing moments of wonder with the ones you love. 🌈
I’m taking up poetry for a bit. I’m not sure for how long. I’m not sure what I write will be any good. I’m not sure what it might awaken in me. With that said, I want to spend more time in my creative energy so I’m giving it a shot.
Here goes nothing.
we walk together
silently
you, slightly ahead
me, somewhere below
with every step
you drift forward
above the ground
i feel
your unease
i feel the distance
both traveled and ahead
i wait
for you to awaken
The concept of reversible and irreversible decisions is not new to me. I’ve read the shareholder letter where Jeff Bezos explains the idea using examples of one-way and two-way doors before. The question of when to make an irreversible decision, however, has always been “as late as possible” without much more guidance. I like the STOP, LOP, or KNOW framework—laid out by Farnam Street—aimed at preventing analysis paralysis related to irreversible decisions.
Consider my rule of STOP, LOP, or KNOW. If you stop gathering useful information (STOP), you’re about to lose an opportunity (LOP), or you know what to do (KNOW).
If you stop gathering useful information and there is no prospect of any on the horizon, make the decision. When you’re in charge of operations at a three-letter agency, you make many hard decisions with imperfect information. Once you’ve talked to all the people with useful information, it’s time to act. The problem is a lot of people don’t act. They sit waiting for some magical piece of information that might or might not come that will make the decision clear. I call this unicorn information. We know it’s out there, but we can never find it. You can’t wait for the unicorn, you have to decide. The people that waited for the unicorn didn’t last.
If you’re about to lose a meaningful opportunity, make the decision. Recently a big real estate opportunity came across my desk. While not impossible to reverse, it would have been prohibitively costly. As with any decision that involves a lot of money — the biggest check I’ve ever written, I dove into the details wanting to understand everything. At first, there was no rush to make the decision. When interest rates started to rise, the deal got a lot more attractive. My partner called and asked if I was in because it was going forward with or without me. I had to decide, or I’d lose the opportunity.
If you know what to do, make the decision. When you’re the boss, sometimes you have to let people go. While you can offer feedback and coach and hope things will change, sometimes you wake up and know what to do. Once you know it’s best for both parties to move on, the biggest mistake is waiting.
Every kid learns to play the “floor is lava” game, where you pretend that you'll get incinerated if you touch the carpet. Even toddlers can pick it up, which reveals something profound: very early on, we acquire the ability to pretend that fake problems are real. We then spend the rest of our lives doing exactly that.
Often, when I’m stuck, it’s because I've made up a game for myself and decided that I’m losing at it. I haven’t achieved enough. I am not working hard enough and I am also, somehow, not having enough fun. These games have elaborate rules, like “I have to be as successful as my most successful friend, but everything I've done so far doesn't count,” and I’m supposed to feel very bad if I break them. It’s like playing the absolute dumbest version of the floor is lava.
In Generational Change, Robert de Neufville talks about how change accumulates and compounds over time in ways that are difficult to track:
When I was born, in 1970, the average global temperature was 1°C cooler than it is today. There were about 3.7 billion people on Earth, less than half as many as there are now. Life expectancy in the US was about 71 years. Smallpox had not been eradicated; I was part of the last generation that was vaccinated against the disease. The per capita GDP of the US—now close to $70,000—was just $26,000 in today’s dollars, so Americans were much poorer then than they are now. ARPANET, the early ancestor of the internet, was switched on just a year before I was born. Intel had not yet begun to sell microprocessors commercially. Seven of the 10 largest companies in the world today hadn’t been founded.
His is a refreshing take on the annual reflection exercises that tend to pop up this time of year.
One of the most basic beliefs we carry about ourselves, Dweck found in her research, has to do with how we view and inhabit what we consider to be our personality. A “fixed mindset” assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled. A “growth mindset,” on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities. Out of these two mindsets, which we manifest from a very early age, springs a great deal of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness.
They go on to describe the genesis and consequences of fixed and growth mindsets, citing the research and findings of the book frequently.