Join 📚 Quinn's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .
Inversion: Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant. Instead of asking, “How can I help my company?” you should ask, “What’s hurting my company the most and how can I avoid it?” Identify obvious failure points, and steer clear of them.
50 Ideas That Changed My Life - David Perell
perell.com
The Map is not the Territory
Summary:
Humans often confuse maps with territories, despite evidence from various disciplines.
We wrongly assume that what we measure is what matters, but our values may not have quantifiable metrics. Biometric data can oversimplify complex discussions on health.
This conundrum becomes more significant when considering governance on a larger scale.
How do we count and operate a nation state wisely?
Can social science inform smarter political economies? We must escape the false clarity of information systems that lack collective wisdom.
Transcript:
Speaker 3
There are maps and there are territories and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know What we should measure and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn't even always have a metric and even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can include the other factors that determine health or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions Of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively. What should we count to wisely operate a nation state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of political economy? And how can we escape this seductive but false clarity of systems that reign information but do not enhance collective wisdom?
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
The Small Animal Replacement Problem in Animal Advocacy
Summary:
Choosing a meat tax as a form of advocacy may seem logical, but it can actually lead to a shift in consumption from red meat to white meat like chicken and fish.
This shift increases the number of animals farmed overall, which is known as the small animal replacement problem.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
The vast difference in choosing one campaign over another and how much difference you can have between the two. But actually, not only that, just highlighting the damage you can do. That was so enlightening for me. I think I've never thought about it like that before. I think specifically we were working with an organisation on whether doing a meat tax would be an effective form of advocacy. On the surface, you're like, oh, meat tax, yeah, it makes sense. It's the same as cigarette, alcohol or other kind of syntaxes that we have in the UK. It's just put a tax on me and then less consumption, less demand, etc. Then just kind of flippantly thinking about it in that sense and then the team did an in-depth report and actually kind of long story short. I would recommend going and reading the report if you're interested. But essentially consumption moves generally from the red meat from an environmental or health perspective and that's what in the UK, that's the only way that could be passed is through An environmental or health committee. Yeah, like a carbon tax on food products, that kind of thing. Right, exactly. And actually all that does is move consumption from red meat cows to white meat, like chicken and fish. And so actually for looking at numbers, comparatively farming one cow versus 50 chickens that it would take to be comparable, the numbers are huge and even more so for fish and probably Shrimp as we were talking about before. So actually just that shifting consumption was going to increase the amount of animals that were farmed. And so all of a sudden within a short space of time, we've gone from, or I certainly did, I feel like the team have more experienced some more skeptical and it's called the small animal Replacement problem. And we've been talking about this for a long time.
Introducing — How I Learned to Love Shrimp
How I Learned to Love Shrimp
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise