
Coolest Things I Learned in 2018 - jonsfkid
http://www.perell.com/blog/coolest-things-2018
======
twodave
> Instead of arbitrarily memorizing things, look for the explanation that
> makes it obvious.

This is a higher learning method that I’ve always found most natural. I don’t
memorize stuff, I try to understand it instead. That said, there is still
great value in the classical learning model—if you don’t know the terminology
of the subject it’s difficult to reason about that subject.

~~~
ergothus
Every time I switch to a new area I try this, and every time it causes me
great frustration.

Learning materials arent setup to this, (and possibly brains). You have to
learn enough fundamentals (usually via rote) before you can get overarching
themes.

At my newest job I am trying to soak in the fundamentals as opposed to rote
practicing them before putting any conscious effort at understanding them, but
it is too soon to say if it is working. My stress level is dramatically down
though.

~~~
whatshisface
Different people have different balance of skills. I like to use highschool
chemistry as the litmus test. On the extremes there are people like me,
stereotyped as successful physicists or engineers that love the math side but
hated memorizing the tables of ions (poor ability to memorize, good ability to
reason), and the people that are stereotyped as successful biologists that
hated the math in their chemistry courses but memorized the entire periodic
table just by looking at it (tremendous ability to memorize, poor ability to
reason). Of course there are also all the people in-between. If you lean
towards memorization, obviously if you need an answer, your best bet is to
remember when someone told you the answer. If you lean towards reasoning, your
best bet is to conceptualize a few fundamentals, and derive the answer on the
spot (because you have no hope of recalling it.) This difference means that
some people are naturally suited for some fields of study over others, for
example the usefulness of recall in biology where everything is a huge tangled
web of interacting parts. Another example of these stereotypes in action is
the meme that engineers can't spell (which makes sense in the English
language, because spelling has little in the way of overarching structure and
is mostly recall).

The point of all this being, you have to recognize where you stand on the
reasoning-recalling spectrum and adjust your learning strategy accordingly.
Something that works for someone on one end might not work at all for someone
on the other.

~~~
fossuser
I don't really buy this as a real difference.

I suspect that the memorization is just brute force via flashcards or practice
and that's more straightforward for people to 'study'. The other method of
deriving and actually understanding is generally harder and usually relies on
existing knowledge you learned in previous grades (it gets harder to use that
method over time if you haven't been). It's also something the teacher may not
be capable of either depending on school district.

I'd guess for a large percentage of people they never learn the non-
memorization form of studying because they're never really exposed to it and
because it's often not rewarded (sometimes it's punished). The brighter kids
might pick it up anyway, but I'd suspect they could do the brute force
memorization like the other kids if they similarly weren't as capable of it.

~~~
whatshisface
> _The other method of deriving and actually understanding is generally
> harder_

It's fallacious to think that one type of action can be harder than another
type of action, when within each class of actions there is a wide variation in
difficulty. Thinking from first principles is not harder than memorization
when the first principle is Newton's first law and the memorization is every
chemical component of cellular metabolism. Another example of the fallacy
would be thinking that the humanities are innately easier than physics: sure,
a two-page essay is easier to write than a two-page solution, but you can go
in and crank up the number of pages per day a humanities professor is expected
to write until it is as hard as you want (it turns out that to some extent
this has already happened, you would be surprised if you found out exactly how
much output they are expected to have).

In physics, the memorization is easy and the first principles are hard. In
biology, the memorization is hard but the first principles are few. That's the
origin of why people with biased strengths are better suited to one or the
other.

~~~
fossuser
I don't really disagree, but I think you've set up a bit of a strawman - in
the general case I think one is more often harder than the other. You can
obviously look at extreme outliers for contradictory examples, but the general
case is more interesting/common.

There are also some things that are harder or easier for people because we
have innate hardware for certain things. Recognizing facial expressions (or
really interpreting any sort of visual input) compared to doing complex math
in your head. The Type 1 vs. Type 2 systems from thinking fast and slow - some
things are generally easier for humans compared to other things.

------
Kurtz79
"To survive a Northern winter, bees change the composition of the swarm by
shrinking the overall population, caulking the hive, getting rid of the
deadweight males (i.e., ALL of the males), and laying just enough eggs to
preserve a minimal survivable population through the winter and into spring.

They cluster together in the center of the hive, keeping the queen in the
center, shivering their wings to create kinetic energy, occasionally sending
out suicide squads to retrieve honey stores from the outer combs. They lower
their metabolism by creating a cloud of carbon dioxide in the hive."

Thanos would approve of bees' survival strategies.

Jokes aside, what I always found really impressive is how bees deal with
hornets, which are way bigger and their natural predators:

[https://www.livescience.com/19078-bee-ball-cooks-
enemies.htm...](https://www.livescience.com/19078-bee-ball-cooks-enemies.html)

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
The bees would teach Thanos how stupid his idea was by surviving year after
year, because cutting a population in half does almost nothing. This is one of
the things that have irked me the most about the Avengers movies, they
propagate his idea as somehow making any sense at all, when in fact it is
doing a great disservice to the world by not teaching them about populations
and use of resources. A reduction of the universe's population by half would
be made up for quite quickly as if nothing had ever happened and billions or
trillions slaughtered for nothing. In cancer treatment you usally need at
least a log kill or preferably multiple log kills to affect change. A better
snap of fingers would have probably been to teach the universe to use less and
recycle more or teach how to use contraception.

[https://www.endurocide.com/knowledge-base/blogs/log-
reductio...](https://www.endurocide.com/knowledge-base/blogs/log-reductions-a-
beginners-guide-2/)

[http://www.d.umn.edu/~jfitzake/Lectures/DMED/Antineoplastics...](http://www.d.umn.edu/~jfitzake/Lectures/DMED/Antineoplastics/GeneralConcepts/CellKillHypothesis.html)

~~~
CleaveIt2Beaver
They literally title him "The MAD Titan" because everyone agrees his plan is
idiotic. I'm not sure it gets more obvious than that.

That said, it made a lot more sense in the comics when he was doing it because
he fell in love with Death herself.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Yes if they made him seem more crazy in the movie, I think that would have
been a good tack. As is, it feels like we are supposed to take him seriously
and he just seems too stupid to know his plan won't work so I can't. Maybe he
is a thinly veiled reference to Trump, now that I think about it.

------
NasKe
That list of word is incredibly misleading. Basically all those words come
from "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows", which in turn is:

> a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig

Meaning, those are all made up words by "John Koenig". The project is cool,
but I think don't think is right to treat those as "real" English words.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Why not? New words are invented all the time, and they can end up being part
of the regular vocabulary. "noob" is an example coming from the gaming world.
"Yeet" might become one, who knows?

All I'm saying is, if there's a need for a word to express something, it will
evolve and it will become part of the language. Here's a list of new words
added to the Oxford dictionary, for example:
[https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-
january-2018/](https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-january-2018/).
"commodify" is one that I've seen used a lot already. "hangry" is a slang ish
words that has been promoted to a dictionary word, too.

------
weliketocode
_Old Status Symbols:_

Luxury goods

Position of authority

Busy-ness

Endorsed by establishment

 _New Status Symbols:_

Fitness

Position of influence

Flexible schedule

Creative Output

Self-actualization

Independent

\--> First time I've read this, but great incite that I've certainly seen as
well.

~~~
yitchelle
However, this is totally based on its cultural context.

~~~
jimbokun
Status symbols always are, almost by definition.

------
adontz
Whenever there is a market fad/phenomena with low or no barriers and a flood
of entrants—the best strategy is often: Be the arms dealer.

The lowest profile players in high-profile, low-barrier industries are almost
always the most profitable.

Don't sell wine, sell barrels.

Don't make movies, create animation software.

Don't own restaurants, build the restaurant supply company.

I ALWAYS KNEW IT!

~~~
lasagnaphil
All those cryptocurrency exchanges, they're the true winners of the
nonsensical Bitcoin craze...

And similarily, NVIDIA really profitted a lot from the deep learning boom by
selling all those GPUs to datacenters at a high cost...

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
>All those cryptocurrency exchanges, they're the true winners of the
nonsensical Bitcoin craze...

Absolutely! There are financial geniuses in the cryptocommodity game, but
their business model has nothing at all to do with coin prices.

------
deathwarmedover
I like how Bezos' fridge quote is planted OVER one of his kid's drawings.

~~~
purephase
Yeah, I thought that was odd/funny. Like he just put it there for the picture
or something.

~~~
andrepd
Nah, I'm sure a ruthless mogul is very concerned about "making the world a
better place" :^)

~~~
hinkley
When someone posts a quote or motto that sounds hypocritical it’s a good bet
that it’s an aspirational quote.

I think it says something that he felt the need to put a quote like this on
his fridge at 50 years old. But maybe he’s becoming self aware. Next Bill
Gates transformation perhaps?

(It’s also pretty common in this age group for people to seek community and
worry about their legacy)

------
fb03
I really enjoyed:

World GDP animation by country:

\- it is insane how near japan got to us even being such a small country

\- kudos to china for falling way out of the race to the top and then "out of
the blue" reaching #2 at the very end -- shows exponential growth

How camera lenses change the way we look:

\- at the first shot with the 20mm or so lens, the guy's nose looks huge and
funny compared to the rest of the picture.

\- at the biggest lens the overall face looks very well rounded and good
looking. insane change!

~~~
beat
Reading _Factfulness_ got me to pay attention to per capita GDP growth rates
over decades, as opposed to static comparisons at the moment. China blew my
mind. Their per capita GDP has increased around 130x (in constant dollars)
since 1960, from the $60/year range to over $8000/year. I now use it as a
rebuttal to the stock assumption that Western-style democracy, capitalism, and
individualism are the only route to prosperity.

It also got me thinking of the "developing" nations relative to the history of
western nations. We sneer at the impoverished slums of the "Third World",
without recognizing that was what America and Europe looked like, not that
long ago. It's just a phase between an illiterate agrarian society and a
modern prosperous middle class.

~~~
earthicus
I think Russia itself could be used as another example of your rebuttable if
you look a bit further back in time. At the end of the 19th century the
country was still extremely agrarian - _far_ less developed than the other
great powers. But by the 1960s it had essentially made up for a century of
lost time, at which point the famous stagnation set in.

The classic line is something to the effect of 'capitalism is the best system
of generating wealth, but not for distributing it'. That does seem wrong. Once
the innovations exist, systems like russia or china seem to successfully and
efficiently reproduce the wealth generation. What happens after they have
caught up to some baseline of industrial prosperity is a different economic
issue altogether. I don't think we have enough examples from modern history to
draw any sweeping conclusions.

~~~
beat
I'm no expert, but it seems to me we're seeing something like a phase change
in economics... nations start illiterate and agrarian and are basically stable
for a long time, then they go through this sudden (2-3 generations) shift to
modernism, and then... they're stable again. America isn't fundamentally more
prosperous now than it was a generation ago. Worse, what economic growth is
happening seems to be efficiently concentrating at the top. And it's not just
America. European nations are like this too, Japan is like this. Eventually,
China will probably be like this.

What's the next phase shift? That's an interesting question. I'm hoping for
the abolition of work.

------
andyidsinga
> Avoid boring people.

Corollary: people aren't always as boring as they may seem - digging in a
little, asking questions - I often find what people are doing outside of work
(which seems to be the default "interesting or not" metric) can be rather
interesting.

~~~
francislavoie
I think you missed the point of that section, the meaning is "don't be boring,
try to be interesting". But I agree with you (when assuming the other
meaning).

~~~
andyidsinga
yeah - I was thinking about the noun vs verb thing too - after my initial
reaction & comment. hmmm.

------
ghosthamlet
My All-Time Favorite Writing Advice

"When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes
powerfully concentrated.

You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction.

The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable
commodities. In return, you the writer must give him something worthy of his
gift to you.”

— Steven Pressfield

\---------------------------------------------------------

﻿Simple Writing Tricks

One of the simplest ways to improve one's prose and to keep a reader's
attention is simply to vary sentence length.

The cadence of breathing and speaking tends to mimic the frequency of the
brain's ability to process words and sentences.

------
ak39
Interesting read. Thank you very much for posting.

I also read about a Hubble Extreme Deep Field image in December last year. I
am still left flabbergasted that that image exposes only the space of the
night sky covered by your thumbnail if you had to extend your arm straight in
front of you. Just a thumbnail. And these are galaxies, not stars! Each one
with hundreds of billions of stars.

~~~
hashmymustache
On that point, the site hosted a low res version of it as far as I could tell.
The actual image is hosted on NASA:
[https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/690958main_p1237a1.jpg](https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/690958main_p1237a1.jpg)

~~~
ak39
Thanks!

------
eugenekolo2
The photo for "There is a restaurant in Los Angeles called Brunch Near Me,
presumably to trick Googlers." is showing Brooklyn, not Los Angeles. I don't
know if this restaurant is in LA or in Brooklyn.

[https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55576406e4b02e4679105...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55576406e4b02e4679105dc2/t/5c2b63c72b6a28bef1b33770/1546347469447/Brunch.jpg?format=1500w)
That's Sheepshead Bay near Coney Island in Brooklyn.

------
PunchTornado
Two points:

1) Jeff Bezos' quote on the fridge is the maximum of lame. This is the guy
that treats his employees really well and cares about them more than about his
personal wealth, right?

2) Avoid boring people. Why? Some people are just boring through no fault of
their own. A series of misfortunes brought them into that stage. There are
stuff to learn from boring people to and they deserve attention and love like
any other.

~~~
Loughla
>Avoid boring people

My experience is that this one-off is generally used as a way to be a dick to
people who live a life you don't agree with, or that is opposed to your own.

I have yet to meet a boring person. Everyone is a hot weirdo when you really
get to know them.

It's a matter of overcoming your own ego and realizing that your 'boring' is
just another way of living.

Subsequently, those sort of bullshit phrases always serve to piss me off
really, really badly. Who are you to tell someone else that they're boring?
They're just living their lives. Why not take a minute to get to know them? If
they try to drag you down and make you something you're not, then yes, avoid
them. But just to make a snap values judgment on whether their life has value?
No.

~~~
Torgo
Try going on a couple blind dates.

------
melling
I see that he has “sell shovels to the gold miners” on his list.

[https://www.ciscoinvestments.com/eureka-shovels-jeans-iot-
go...](https://www.ciscoinvestments.com/eureka-shovels-jeans-iot-gold-rush/)

~~~
wpq0
Reminds me of the graphic card vendors and ASIC manufacturers who profit off
people who rush into cryptocurrency.

------
n4r9
> In a Big Craze, Be the Arms Dealer

This is clearly true but I wonder how much it's an artefact of the Western
economic model. I came to a similar insight in the last couple of years, which
was "the companies skimming the most cream off the top, are often the most
abstracted away from providing a concrete benefit to society".

It's like there's this inherent recursive aspect to shareholder capitalism.
The profitable businesses are those which provide a service to businesses
which provide a service to businesses which... which provide a service to the
public.

~~~
yellowstuff
All of FANG seems like a counterexample. But in general it is probably true
that the most profitable activities are very scalable, which is the opposite
of concrete, hands-on interaction with the public.

~~~
icebraining
> All of FANG seems like a counterexample.

Not really; both Facebook and Google basically only make money by providing a
service to businesses, and even for Amazon, the most profitable area (AWS) is
B2B.

------
scarejunba
Love this collection.

> _The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable
> commodities. In return, you the writer must give him something worthy of his
> gift to you_

Great stuff! Always easy to forget this.

And that picture of GDP over time. Amazing to watch China come online despite
the late start. A titan wakes.

------
alttab
"The same traits needed for outlier success are the same traits that increase
the odds of failure… So be careful blindly praising successes or criticizing
failures, as they often made similar decisions with slightly different levels
of luck."

I think this was Ray Dalio in his TED talk.

------
rhlala
Avoid borimg people.

It is your fault if you cant find what it is interesting in others.

~~~
francislavoie
You missed the point of that section, the meaning is actually "try not to bore
other people"

------
rodolphoarruda
A company's cash-flow in practice, which is a bit different from what it looks
like in the books.

------
ryanmercer
The AI faces... wow.

~~~
jmhobbs
I'd love to see a source on that one, it's hard to believe otherwise.

edit: I reverse image searched one of the faces and found this,
[https://bgr.com/2018/12/18/nvidia-ai-fake-faces-
look-100-per...](https://bgr.com/2018/12/18/nvidia-ai-fake-faces-
look-100-percent-real/)

It's not generating them from whole cloth, but it's still very impressive.

~~~
twtw
What would "from whole cloth" even mean for this?

~~~
jmhobbs
Honestly, I'm not even sure. After watching the nvidia youtube video, I
retract the statement. This is pretty amazing.

~~~
ryanmercer
And it's basically just the beginning too.

Deepmind has also been creating landscapes, portraits and animals (the tennis
ball, the horror of the tennis ball!!!)
[https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/02/deepmind-ai-can-
generate-...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/02/deepmind-ai-can-generate-
convincing-photos-of-burgers-dogs-and-butterflies/)

------
DoctorOetker
the "hold a mirror up to nature" quote attributed to Tom Hanks is in fact a
classic Shakespeare quote (I don't know if he was the first however, perhaps
he in turn got it elsewhere)

You may also wish to read this page on mirrors and Shakespeare (hard to
imagine for us, and now mirrors or reflective decorations look kitsch, but
during the introduction of quality mirrors they were _high tech_ , so back
then this was almost science-fiction play)

[https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/08-1/kellglas.htm](https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/08-1/kellglas.htm)

------
cphoover
Bird navigation... wow amazing. It's like they have a natural HUD for
navigation.

~~~
enriquto
you can argue that our own visual system is actually a "natural HUD for
navigation" also

------
stronglikedan
Is it normal for professional soccer players to be so blatantly afraid of the
ball?

~~~
dwags
what an odd question. Ping pong is the only sport I can think of off the top
of my head that I wouldn't be absolutely terrified of a professional athlete
blasting a ball/puck/thing at me and even then just because i'm not terrified,
that ball would still hurt pretty good

~~~
yakshaving_jgt
About 16 years ago I was playing in a ping pong tournament, where the forfeit
for losing would be you had to allow the winner to take three shots at your
bare stomach.

I remember many of the guys who lost had rather large purple welts on their
stomachs, akin to a paintball wound.

This wasn’t professional level either. This was a bunch of Australian
teenagers having fun in the evenings.

------
rhlala
Remind me a lot the exelent book 'l' enciclopedie du savoir relatif et absolu
' of Bernard weber.

------
miguelmota
Very interesting findings. Learned some new things. Thanks for sharing

------
juddlyon
"A flower is a weed with a marketing budget."

~~~
dorkwood
You just brought back a childhood memory of my mother weeding the garden. I
didn’t understand why _these_ plants were bad but _those_ plants were good.

------
antoineMoPa
> Flight is still the most advanced and spectacular human invention.

Ever heard of birds/insects?

------
pba
This article (post?) is the 2019 version of chain mail. Weak insights, no
academic substantiation. I had to stop reading at the 'words for emotions'
part.. 'sonder' and the rest are not dictionary words; they were made up by
some guy. Yet this ridiculousness continues its way around the internet..

~~~
076ae80a-3c97-4
'Sonder' is most certainly a word!
[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sonder](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sonder)

~~~
msla
Yes, _Sonder_ is a word in German which means "special", as in the German term
_Sonderweg_ which is the German equivalent of "American Exceptionalism"
("German Exceptionalism", I suppose).

~~~
bn-usd-mistake
The German "sonder" referred to in this branch of the conversation (i.e.
meaning special) is not a word on its own but a prefix for other words [0]
(remember that germans like to build words from multiple separate parts and
words).

While "sonder" itself is a word, it means something different when used on its
own (without) [1].

0:
[https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Sonder_](https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Sonder_)
1:
[https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/sonder](https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/sonder)

