ā©š°Full steam ahead! š¢ #12
Cutting edge neuroscience, the impact of automation, explorations on how our ancient human brains think, tech acceleration, and a ton of podcast content. This is Issue #012 of Forward.
Do you ever wake up and feel the world is getting harder to make sense of? We usually donāt, for working in fintech has a way of opening the mind to wondrous new possibilities every second day. But some mornings, an unassuming Twitter scroll can leave the mind reeling.
Like this video of a monkey casually sipping a smoothie and playing Pong.
With his mind. š¤Æ
Itās a great lesson in humility. No matter how cutting edge you think your work is, someone out there is pushing the frontier even further.
A crash course in catch up
So how do you make sure you donāt get caught unawares by smoothie-sipping, telepathic monkeys? This breakdown of ARK Investās latest Big Ideas Report by Cathie Wood and Brett Winton goes over some key areas to keep an eye on. Advanced AI, autonomous vehicles, the impact of automation on the workforce, 3D printing, DNA sequencing, and of course ā Bitcoin. [40 min]
Got chips?
Speaking of Bitcoin, itās now in the news again, and not because of another volatile swing. This time, itās about mining.
In case you missed the news, the world is currently dealing with a shortage of semiconductors, those nifty little things that power everything from your Mac Pro to your smart fridge. The short version as to why is that setting up fabrication facilities for increasingly smaller and efficient chips takes a long time, and plans by major manufacturers to do so were derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. However as more consumer products get āsmarterā and demand begins to exceed supply, chipmakers have been struggling to keep up and prices have spiked, leading to delays in production across industries.
(If your new car is taking longer than expected to arrive, you know who to blame).
The Bitcoin rally hasnāt helped things, as more miners are attempting to build advanced computer systems (colloquially called ārigsā) to solve the complex math that produces (mines) new Bitcoin.
The price of progress. š¤·āāļø
Will the system withstand another crisis?
Since 2008, the voices rising up against the way financial systems are being run have been increasing in volume. Some sections consider the cries for caution by economists, journalists, and finance experts to be exercises in fearmongering, others have completely given up and put their bets on decentralized finance. But where does the truth lie?
In this documentary [42 min], DW looks for answers:
Welcome to Lifestyle OS
As humans, weāre always in this unique position of trying to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. Oftentimes, we make sense of the world around us through our understanding of ourselves via principles, frameworks, lifestyle choices, and religious beliefs. If we were to consider these as our individual āoperating systems, how big a part would our lifestyle choices play in how we see the world?
In this eloquent post, Doug Antin addresses how developed society (in which the lowest tier of Maslowās Pyramid represented above is largely taken care of) increasingly makes personal and political decisions based on the second tier.
š Lifestyle & Culture Are Human Operating Systems
The 3 pillars of intuition
In his bestselling book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman does a great job of furthering our understanding of our own decision-making processes. In a speech given at the World Business Forum in New York City, Kahneman shed some light on the concept of intuition, and how it must only be heeded (tempting as it may seem) when 3 specific conditions are fulfilled:
Regularity
Practice
Immediate feedback
Kahneman states that entities that operate in environments where they have a fair amount of all 3 at their disposal are more likely to get intuitive decisions right, as opposed to those that have 2 or less.
Examples of people who are often fooled into thinking they have accurate intuition: stock market participants. š
Examples of people who have largely accurate intuition: Chess players andā¦ married couples.
Charlie and I always knew that we would become incredibly wealthy. We were not in a hurry to get wealthy; we knew it would happen. Rick was just as smart as us, but he was in a hurry.
ā Warren Buffett on former investing partner Rick Guerin
Stuff we loved this week
Whenever Balaji Srinivasan appears on a podcast, itās usually an eye-opening exercise. This time, heās talking to none other than Tim Ferriss. In true Balaji fashion, Bitcoin and Ethereum come up, but so does everything from Ramanujan, drone warfare, and how to become ānon-cancelableā. Itās long [3hrs 44 min], but worth it. Bookmark and come back to it if you have to.
Canāt keep track of everything Elon Musk is up to? We found this book to be a great summary of the audacious plans SpaceX has for humankind, and what it takes to get there.
Is your feed as full of NFT content as ours? To give you a break from slam dunks and red pixels, hereās a howlarious video by Saturday Night Live that provides a refreshing new take on the hottest property in tech circles.
Food for thought
William Bernsteinās new book The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups dives into many topics: the pandemic, star managers, and investing for young people. Read the highlights here.
In our first Forward issue this year, we wrote about the Metaverse, and how an amalgamation of digital virtual experiences with the real world could be the future. If you still think about the potential of such a thing, hereās an interesting read encompassing the concept of the metaverse, what you can do in one, and its potential impact on the creator economy.
Itās hard to contemplate whatās coming next, but then we couldnāt have contemplated a world with telepathic monkeys either. The only thing we know for sure is: anything can happen, and weāll manage things when they do. As Morgan Housel says in this post:
āThe finance industry spent a decade debating what the biggest risk to the economy was. Was it tax hikes? Money printing? Budget deficits? Trade wars?Ā Setting interest rates at 0.5% when the proper rate should have been 0.75%?
And of course the answer was none of those. It was a virus.ā
Thatās all for this issue of Forward. If you think it made your Sunday morning a little better, please send it to your friends so they gain some insights on the weird, wonderful world we live in.
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Until next time,
Your friends atĀ NEO