Join 📚 Quinn's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .
Balancing Intellectual Exploration and Action
• There is an anti-pattern in certain podcasts that overemphasizes intellect and underemphasizes action.
• Consuming knowledge from brilliant people can be stimulating, but it may lead to overthinking and under-practicing.
• It is important to balance intellectual comprehension with taking action, initiating projects, and practicing.
• Encouraging agency, initiative, entrepreneurship, and proactive energy is crucial.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
One piece of the puzzle, I think, is that there's an anti-pattern of podcasts, especially in the game, B space and related sort of sense making intellectual philosophical spaces, Which is I'm concerned about an overdoing the intellect and an underdoing the action. You know, there's all of the people that you interview on your show. They're brilliant people. You know, and it's like, every time I can get a new episode of my favorite podcast and listen to this person and be like, wow, they're so smart. And it's really stimulating to listen to these smart people that can communicate really clearly. And the concern that I have is that people get into a habit of just consuming knowledge, just listening to more and more different people and assembling this sort of like pristine map Of how they think reality works. And maybe they start a little bit to think about how they might initiate some kind of community or some project or something that they're interested in, but still they do this thing of Like way over engineering and overthinking it and under practicing, under experimenting. And so my energy is to try and interfere with that tendency and push people more towards their agency, more towards their initiative, their entrepreneurship, their get up and do it Kind of energy.
EP51 Richard Bartlett on Self-Organizing Collaboration
The Jim Rutt Show
One of the most effective tools for building a culture of trust is simply saying, “I trust you to do the right thing.” Backing those words with action shows people that you’re serious. Larry once had about 40 people reporting to him in a research unit of a major consulting firm. As a manager, he was expected to read and approve all travel and expense forms. Since many of these consultants traveled extensively, this would have meant spending a half-day or more on paperwork each week. This struck him as a tremendous waste of time and energy that did not add any value to his unit. At a group meeting, he told the team that he trusted them to stay at a Marriott rather than a Four Seasons hotel, and that he wasn’t going to dive into their expense reports. He realized that the cost of not trusting the group would be far greater than an infrequent upgrade from coach to business class. This not only gave Larry time to do more worthwhile work, but it added to the group’s social capital.11 They knew they were trusted and proved to be trustworthy over the years.
The Smart Mission
Edward J. Hoffman, Matthew Kohut, and Laurence Prusak
Feeling like a speck in the wind amongst massive Societal systems
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I mean we have thousands of years of human history where you know since the agricultural revolution and the dawn of city-states it's just been constant change and one could argue that On a longish you know say century timescale we haven't been at equilibrium in 10,000 years what's next right how are all these nested feedback loops churning around between you know Societal structure and environmental structure to change the shape of society in the next couple hundred years Peter Turchin probably knows this better than I do but this is where I think thinking about these things at population scales rather than individual scales is it really helps me because when I think about things at the individual level like what can I do how do I live in the society right I find myself slightly distraught about like well I don't know I'm just a speck in the wind getting blown around by this maelstrom of society by trying To sort of think about the way the whole system is of all thing I can see it's not that I'm hurtling through space it's that we're all hurtling through space together in similar ways and That creates patterns that can then be identified what do you do with those patterns well then you know you get a professorship and you get to talk about it that helps sometimes
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise