Friday Fodder #18
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Let’s start out with the biggest thing this week.
Of course, since yesterday it’s back under $100k and we’ve had a flash crash down to $92k to kill the leverage. It’s almost like this is a volatile 24-7 traded asset!
On to the reading!
Timely
I Say Forbidden Things About Sports - I remember when the Atlantic Coast Conference didn’t include Pacific schools like Stanford and California, but what do I know? Ted Gioia knows more than me and he says there’s something rotten in sports.. that we’ve lost the reasons amateur sports were once celebrated.
San Francisco’s Equity-Based School Closing Plan - The SF school system has a budget crisis and a shrinking population and needed to close some schools. So it paid a Stanford professor to tell it to close - I’m sure you’ll be surprised here - all the high performing schools with large Asian populations. Just an idea, it’s off the cuff really.. maybe figure out what’s behind high-performing schools, keep them open, and try to emulate them?
Microstrategy Has Volatility To Sell - Matt Levine explains as only Matt Levine can exactly why MSTR 0.00%↑ is more valuable than the BTC assets it holds and the arbitrage it’s gaming with convertible debt offerings
End of Chrome Means AI Has Arrived - One way to think about all new companies is that they are either bundling or unbundling existing products and services. Here Doug Rushkoff - who coined “digiphrenia” - considers the timing of the regulatory focus on Google Chrome and why it coincides with the probable end of Google’s monopoly.
No, you are not on Indigenous land - It’s November 30th 2024 and center-left writers are finally able to have a reasonable conversation about the ridiculousness of land acknowledgements. Would this article have been written if Kamala had won? No idea, but the author should get nowhere near the credit they think they deserve writing this now. The time for courage was a few years ago.
Timeless
Ten Times As Much - One of my favorite quotes is from 8x Mr. OlympiaRonnie Coleman: “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.” Here’s another, from the magician Teller: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” Do more.
The Anarchist And The Hockey Stick - I am an Adam Mastroianni fanboy. I love his writing. An incredible reminder that a definition for science is utterly ineffable and requires a certain irresponsibility.
We Don’t Want Moral AI - Paul Bloom points out the fundamental error of the very idea of the “AI Alignment Problem”: We humans aren’t exactly aligned with each other.
Books
The Hidden Half by Michael Blastland - A gentle reminder that our models of the world maybe aren’t as great as we think they are. The models are wrong, or we’re too biased towards them, or other things are hidden in the noise, or any number of things. As Mark Twain says (and was chosen as the epigraph): “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”
Tweets
Cheers!