What’s Next — Bias, Elderly, Futureby Jordan Gonen | 1.15.2018
by Jordan Gonen | 1.15.2018
Yoooo 👋 Two weeks into 2018, how are you feeling about this year?
Tons of interesting content in this week’s newsletter, hope you enjoy 👇Articles to Read.
In Hawaii And Just Got The Scariest Alert Of My Life:
HONOLULU — On Saturday morning, I was basking in my usual routine, waking up with my yawning dog, walking upstairs to receive a macchiato made by my husband.
The caffeine began to hit me. I was reclining on the couch, listening to the birds chirping outside the windows of our secluded jungle home and reading the news on my phone — when, suddenly, it started vibrating and I saw this all-caps message:
My heart started racing. Was this real?
I re-read it.
“THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
I jumped off the couch and ran downstairs to find my husband. He was in the bathroom. I screamed at him through the wall: “Did you get the message?!”
Complexity Bias (Great Long Read):
Complexity bias is a logical fallacy that leads us to give undue credence to complex concepts.
Faced with two competing hypotheses, we are likely to choose the most complex one. That’s usually the option with the most assumptions and regressions. As a result, when we need to solve a problem, we may ignore simple solutions — thinking “that will never work” — and instead favor complex ones.
To understand complexity bias, we need first to establish the meaning of three key terms associated with it: complexity, simplicity, and chaos.
Advice for First Time Founders (FROM YC):
1. What are some things that you should’ve known as a first-time founder but did not?
2. How did you learn them?
3. How did they help?
The essay details answers from a number of founders.
The Generation that Tech Forgot:
There’s a group of people who comprise a third of the US population, account for half of consumer spending, and have more discretionary spending than any other category. Yet, with a few exceptions, they have gone virtually ignored by Silicon Valley and they report that marketers don’t understand or pay attention to them.
People over the age of 52 — baby boomers and their parents — are the most active and valuable consumer group, by far. But in our experience, most tech companies and investors haven’t even considered how to reach them.
The Fight for the Future of Local News:
Last year, hyperlocal coverage proved as vital as ever — and also faced some of its worst cutbacks yet. Can an embattled industry find new ways to support the oldest form of journalism?
One Friday afternoon last summer, eighty thousand newly printed copies of The Sun were sitting on our printing company’s loading dock in rural Wisconsin, waiting to be picked up and mailed. Nearly a thousand miles away, at our editorial office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, we were tying up loose ends before the weekend. Then the phone rang.
It was someone calling on behalf of an inmate at a maximum-security prison who’d submitted a piece about prison gangs for our Readers Write section. Unaware that the upcoming issue had already gone to press, the inmate had discovered a glaring mistake, one that he wanted us to correct: We’d neglected to sign his piece “Name Withheld.” In the cover letter sent with his submission, he’d asked us to preserve his anonymity because he feared reprisal from gang leaders. Somehow we’d overlooked his request and printed his name — eighty thousand times.
We Don’t Talk Enough About Money in Silicon Valley:
“Look, I’m incredibly thankful for this industry. It made me a millionaire.” The person seated across the table from me went through a series of facial microexpressions as I said this — surprise, disgust, analysis and finally, calm. We don’t really talk about money in Silicon Valley. At least not in public in a personal way with near strangers. We *speculate* about people and wealth a shit-ton — based upon a company’s last fundraise, based upon current stock price, based on the market price of BTC — but we don’t really talk our own situations, challenges, learnings.
What is happening to our country, and our universities? It sometimes seems that everything is coming apart. To understand why, I have found it helpful to think about an idea from cosmology called “the fine-tuned universe.” There are around 20 fundamental constants in physics — things like the speed of light, Newton’s gravitational constant, and the charge of an electron. In the weird world of cosmology, these are constants throughout our universe, but it is thought that some of them could be set to different values in other universes. As physicists have begun to understand our universe, they have noticed that many of these physical constants seem to be set just right to allow matter to condense and life to get started.
More to Check Out:
– Google Brain’s Research Year-in-Review
– Nintendo’s Extra Lives
– How the Sub-Saharan African Startup Sector Grew
– First Principles of Product Management
– Senior Citizens will lead the self-driving revolution
– Why is Will Smith trying to be the next Jake Paul?See My Full Reading List
My Update:
– Have been roaming around NYC for the past week. Have already learned and experienced so many new things! Also, have been walking a ton.
– Headed to Barcelona on Tuesday. Should be super fun.
– Podcast/audio-book recommendations?
– Been posting photos from my traveling here. Also, I passed 690 days in a row for my daily blog.
By jordangonen on January 15, 2018.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.