Books
I've been catching up with my reading lately. It has been a good month.
I've been catching up with my reading lately. It has been a good month.
I've found that a lot of advice out there on having effective meetings boils down to the idea that a significant portion of the value you get out of something comes from a relatively small portion of it.
A few weekends ago, it snowed like it does once in ten years. It was everywhere, and there was a lot of it. It was fun at first – we made a snowman, went sledding, made snow angels, the usual things one does with snow.
The easiest thing to do when you're recruiting talent is to find people who you can have a beer with, which means essentially that you find more people who think like you do, whose mental models of your problem and solution space largely overlap with yours.
Telugu movies have been around for almost a hundred years now. Yet, in all this time, there have been barely a dozen directors, fewer than 5 screenwriters, and one songwriter who've all been women.
Every time we interact with someone (or something), we make judgements and jump to conclusions. And more often than not, we think our judgments and conclusions are warranted.
It is easy to get lost in the narrative of rent-seeking vs wealth-creating activities, and the growing wealth inequality, if we don't question the underlying assumption of where value really comes from.
I just finished reading this book. This was a interesting dive into the managerial practices at Netflix (from the CEO's perspective, for the most part), and how Netflix thinks it helps them thrive. It has its fair share of confirmation and survivorship bias, but it had some valuable insights. Here are my takeaways:
I've always believed that there is no such thing as objective truth. My truth is merely my version of whatever objective reality is (as always, Farnam Street tells it better).
Reading through Good economics for hard times, I ran into this:
Comparative advantage is the idea that countries should do what they are relatively best at doing.
The idea here (my interpretation, anyway) is that even if you are better are doing everything, you're only (in the long run) going to end up better off in the free market doing what you're relatively best at doing.