The argument here is that "smart people are worse looking" is actually a case of _of the people you encounter_ smart people are worse looking, but that overall there is no correlation. This makes sense, but I think it's more complex. If you took the entire population, I think you could still conclude the "smart people are worse looking" if you define smart to include non-innate, learned behaviour, for the simple reason that good looking people have an easier time in life (getting jobs and so forth) and are therefore less compelled to spend time and effort becoming "smart". So there's a self-balancing aspect that produces these correlations in the general population as well.
This doesn't make much sense and I think may actually be another instance of this paradox. For example, why would having an easier time in life dissuade someone from putting in effort to become smart (by your definition of smart)?
Do you think people who have a hard time in life are compelled to study hard and succeed, as if somehow people living in poverty or in third world countries are putting in significant amounts of effort to become smart? Of course not, not because people in poverty don't want to be smart of course, but because they are compelled to deal with time consuming hardships.
People who have it easy in life are far more compelled to study, to the point that the term "scholar" is literally the Greek word for "leisure".
I wouldn't be surprised if you drew out two axis, one measuring an individual's hardship in life and one measuring how "smart" they are, you'd reveal how paradoxical your statement is. The overall population would show that hardship places a huge burden that inhibits ones ability to learn and pursue intellectual endeavors while having an easier time in life facilitates it... and yet if you then filtered out the bottom left group (hard life and low "smart" score), you'd see the exact inverse correlation that Berkson's Paradox is all about.
This is a great essay, better than some of Paul's other recent writing which has felt less inspiring than his old stuff. This feels in depth and written from the heart.
There is a recurring lesson with these type of threads: don't build a business that is dependent on an unstable, black-box algorithm of a mega-corp. If your business is so fragile that an algorithm update by Google causes you to have no customers, then you should have built a business with a bigger moat, brand recognition, etc. It sounds like this business was more of an SEO hack.
Even with brand recognition, it's hard to build a product review business that doesn't rely on Google. Until 2018, I was the head of insights at one of the largest online publishers in the U.S. 90% of the company's revenue was tied to organic search. Sure, branding helped to prevent huge impacts like the one that I saw, but plenty of our competitors suffered big drops that resulted in 100s or 1,000s of layoffs.
True, but I think it points to an inherent weakness in the business model. The reason it's so hard to build these businesses without relying on Google (and playing cat and mouse with their ranking algorithms) is because customers fundamentally don't care whether they get their content from you or someone else.
I find the more important question to be "how do you remember what you read?". I think (at least in my case) remembering more of what I've read would be a better investment in time than reading more, or better directing my reading. I would love to hear tips people have.
The best way I’ve found to remember what I read is to read books in a way that they connect, recently that was Antifragile and The Plague (which is talked about in the conclusion of the latter). I did the same with Digital Minimalism and Atomic Habits.
More time to tinker at home? Over the course of a couple weeks, I purchased four a two months back. A project I worked on inspired at least another person in my office to buy one.
> Has anyone noticed a shortage of Pi Zeros recently?
It has always been like that since day one with the RPi Zero, which was years ago.
The Zero has always been produced in very small quantities and sold at a loss so they could advertise that price, but the actual users who could get it at the advertised price are a small minority of those wanting to buy it. I gave up after 2 full years, and never regretted.
Now I'd rather spend some more quid and get different (and often much more powerful) boards that I can order in 1 or 1000 units and will be available without either being bundled with unnecessary stuff to inflate the price or locked to 1 piece per order.
Here's a big list of boards complete with spreadsheet tables to compare them.
Yes, I entirely agree. I often add one with my orders when I can because they are useful and the equivalent clone versions work out very expensive in the UK. They are in short supply because the margin on them must be tiny and it's not worth wasting much manufacturing capacity on them. I wish they would update the specs but I think that's very unlikely to happen as they'll lose the original $5 computer claim. I don't care if it got a little more expensive (again), I like the form-factor.
I think this is intentional. The Pi Zero is mostly a marketing device. It's advertised at $5 but unless you happen to have a physical store selling them near you, it's not really $5 because the shipping is never free and you can only ever by one. So it's more like $15.
Still not a crazy price, of course, I just dislike the misleading advertising.
The US has a very coveted position in the West, but the reach of this is getting smaller every year. Having root access to FAANG for instance is pretty useless in China, Apple is the only one of those five with any presence to speak of. And anything supply chain related China would be in the more powerful position.
