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January 21, 2023
52 Things I Learned in 2022
In no particular order, here are a bunch of things I learned last year:
Public Policy
- Plastic recycling is a myth. Of the 51 million tons of plastic waste US households produced in 2021, just 2.4 million tons (5%) were recycled. Mostly because plastic that has food waste on it is very hard to recycle. (Boston Globe)
- Homelessness in America is a mind-bogglingly large problem. In London, there are ~640 people sleeping on the street each night. In LA county, with the same population, the number is 48,000. That’s a 75x in per capita homelessness. (LA, LONDON)
- Maybe foreign aid doesn’t work? “Africa has seen trillions of dollars in foreign aid over the past 60 years, yet per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, while the mass majority of its population remains in poverty.” (Kevin Owocki)
- Maximum age caps on public office are a no-brainer. Chuck Grassley, 89, who was born before the invention of the chocolate chip cookie, will serve another 6 years in the Senate. Joe Biden was born closer to Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration (March 4, 1865) than his own (January 20, 2021). (@CharlotteAlter)
- Ketamine is an excellent option for treatment-resistant depression. In one study, 70% of patients with treatment-resistant depression who were started on an oral antidepressant and intranasal esketamine improved, compared to just over half in the group that did not receive the medication (called the placebo group). (Yale Medicine)
- Justice is not just. Applicants are 1.5% more likely to be granted asylum by a US judge the day after their city’s NFL team won. (via Tom Whitwell)
- Guns are fucking dumb. Over the past 2 years, more school aged children have died from guns than on duty police and active duty military combined. (CNN)
- Americans need better schooling. As of 2019, only 54% of Americans accept the theory of evolution. (Kottke)
Tech/Science
- We should all be paying more attention to global warming. Globally, nineteen of the last 20 years are now the warmest on record. Not great.
- The Internet isn’t done growing. 37% of the world’s population, 2.9 billion people, have never used the Internet. (via Tom Whitwell)
- Detective Math, on the case. According to Benford’s Law, in any large numerical data set, “1” will be the leading digit ~30% of the time while “9” will be the leading digit only 5% of the time. If this distribution doesn’t hold, the data you’re looking at is likely fraudulent, like in the case of the 2009 Iranian elections.
- Building things has gotten wildly more expensive. Today, it costs $62 million to replace 8 escalators in New York. In 1931, it was $41 million to build the entire Empire State Building. Even accounting for inflation, one would think better technology would make it cheaper to build things. It doesn’t! (@aborgurbacs)
- Perhaps it is a bad thing no companies can control their AIs. LLMs like ChatGPT are astonishingly good, but they are primarily trained to be helpful. They are not trained for accuracy. This means that they “hallucinate” facts and details in the spirit of being helpful. One of my favorite essays of the year. (Scott Alexander) (Another example)
- The era of Social Networks has ended. Once upon a time, we saw posts from friends and people we knew. Now, Facebook, Tiktok, and others shape your online life around the algo-sorted preferences of millions of strangers around the globe. (Scott Rosenberg)
- Modern science is built on billions of dollars of free labor. Globally, scientific journal reviewers spent more than 100 million hours on peer reviewing journal articles in 2020. That’s 15,000 years of labor, worth $1.5 billion USD. (source)
- When it rains, it pours: invention edition. Felix Hoffman invented aspirin and heroin 11 days apart. (Dan Shipper)
- Crisis is the midwife of invention. People have been metal detecting since 1881, when Alexander Graham Bell invented a device to find the bullet lodged in President James A. Garfield. (NY Times)
Global
- Americans are narrow-minded because most of them never leave. 57% of Americans have never lived outside their home state; 37% have never lived outside their hometown. (Steve Hind)
- The war in Afghanistan was mind-bogglingly expensive. The United States spent more than $2.3 trillion on Afghanistan over two decades, or roughly $300 million a day for twenty years. (CFR)
- Don’t fuck with a drunk Finn. Finland tracks what percentage of murders were committed by men who were drunk. It has been above 50% for almost the entire time the statistics were recorded (@armandDoma)
- Your mental map of Africa is wrong. The North Coast of Africa reaches a latitude as far north as Norfolk, Virginia in the United States. The southern tip is parallel to Buenos Aires Argentina. (StoryMap)
- South America should be called South-East America. The entirety of the continent is east of Jacksonville, Florida. It’s closer to Africa than it is to Houston, Texas. (StoryMap)
- Europe is much more north than you think. London is on the same latitude as Calgary. Venice and Minneapolis. Rome and Chicago. New York and Madrid. (StoryMap)
- “Prime Minister of Pakistan” seems like a hard job to keep. No prime minister of Pakistan has ever completed a full term in office. (Tyler Cowen)
- The good life has a lot of carbs in it. 94% of the entire population of Paris lives within a five minute walk of a bakery. (@parisyimby)
- What is happening in Russia? 2.8% of men ages 30-39 in Russia are HIV positive (and this is likely a big underestimate) (@alexeyguzey)
Life Advice
- Everything has two prices. The first price is paid in currency to gain possession of the thing (book, budgeting app, etc). The 2nd price is what you pay in effort in order to make use of the thing. A budgeting app is actually $5 + 45 min/week. Paying only the first price is about the same as throwing money in the garbage. (Raptitude)
- Leverage vice to get people to act virtuous. Stockholm created a lottery - drive below the speed limit, and you get a chance to win all the fines for people that drove above the speed limit. Reduced speeds in the area by 22% (@JoePompliano)
- You don’t have to be original. 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln. Don’t be discouraged if “it’s been done before”. [Chris Hladczuk]
- Busyness is a form of laziness. That’s it, that’s the thing I learned. I say it to myself all the time now, and recommend you do too. (Uri Bram)
- Good conversations have lots of doorknobs. The goal is to create “affordances” (features of an environment that allow you to do something). Physical examples: doorknobs, handles, benches. Conversational examples: digressions, confessions, bold claims. (Adam Mastroianni)
- Build your career on Dirty Work. Find an exciting team, one that really needs you to get work done, and then tackle the unpleasant work that everyone avoids. You’ll rocket up the org. For example: QA, documentation, tech debt, answering product questions, etc. (Stay Saasy)
- The simplest eye workout known to man. The 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes of screenwork, look at a spot 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This will reduce eye strain and is easy to remember (or program reminders for).
Culture
- More gold, more gay. There are ~15% more same-sex couples in counties that had gold rushes than counties that didn’t. Gold rush countries had typical male-to-female ratios of 7-to-1, which in turn produced sexual norms that persist 150 years later. (Science Direct)
- Gender fluidity is going mainstream. About 5% of Americans under 30 are transgender or nonbinary, up from 1.6% of 30-49 year olds and 0.3% of 50+ people. Unclear to me if we were undercounting before, or if normalization makes more people comfortable coming out now. Probably a mix of both. (Pew Research Center)
- A lot of good slang started in the medieval ages. Medieval beds used ropes tied underneath the mattress to support it. The tighter the ropes were, the better the bed was. Hence “Sleep Tight” (source)
- Youth culture will increasingly become Indian culture. Globally, one in five people below 25 is from India. 47% of Indians, about 650 million, are below the age of 25. (Shruti Rajagopalan)
- Eugenics works (in horse racing). 18 of the 20 horses that raced in last year's Kentucky Derby were descended from Secretariat (Juliette Kayyem)
- Karens killed the name Karen. In Britain, there was not a single baby born named Karen (nor Nigel). There were, however, 15 babies named Lucifer. (Harry Wallop)
- We’re born with social behavior patterns. When you talk with someone, you subconsciously imitate their facial expressions. Even more incredible: blind people do, too! (via Kent Hendricks)
- Modernity is machoism. In Victorian times, treadmills were used as punishment and to prevent idleness, with English convicts condemned to trudge for hours a day. (NY Times)
- Anonymous musicians were a big deal before and will become a big deal again. Circa 1000 AD, songs became enormously popular even as the creators of the music remained anonymous. Now, with our AI generated playlist culture, the same pattern is re-emerging. (Ted Gioia)
Money/Business
- Search is an unbelievably profitable business: Bing’s 2020 revenue hit $7.7B, more than Snap ($2.5B) and Twitter ($3.7B) combined. And they have less than 10% market share! (@TrungTPhan)
- Big fat Indian weddings are a big fat business. Indian weddings are the 4th biggest industry in India, ahead of cars, steel, and technology. (@VenkatAnath)
- Be more adventurous with your experiments. At Bing, 2% of experiments led to 74.8% of gains. Experiments have a power-law distribution - best to just do as many as possible. (University of Chicago Press)
- Worker cooperatives can work. The 7th largest company in Spain is the Mondragon Corporation. It employs ~82,000 people. Managers on average earn no more than 5 times as much as the lowest page worker in the cooperative. I’m not the socialist I once was, but it’s always nice to see examples like this in the real world. (Wikipedia)
- You can work faster than you think. It took just 16 days to plan the Central Park Zoo. (The Power Broker)
- Life is cheap (kind of). It costs about $4,000 to save a life in the developing world, according to the Effective Altruist community. In contrast, American insurance values a single year of healthy life for an American at $50,000. (New Yorker)
Crypto
- Crypto has been and will continue to be an emerging markets story. “But about 66% of crypto users live in the developing world. More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America.” (Scott Alexander) Only 2 of the top 20 countries by crypto adoption are “developed market” countries. (@Chainanalysis)
- DeFi tends toward power law distributions. The top 5 DEXes have 85% of all DEX trading volume and the top 2 lending platforms have 90% of the total capital. To win in DeFi, build something novel. (Joel John)
- DAO Governance doesn’t work for financial planning. Sushi had a $1 billion treasury at the peak of the bull market. It now has only ~$13m, a 99% drop. (Dune Dashboards). Sidenote: 85% of the DAOs tracked by Chainalysis have their treasury in a single asset - if that describes you reach out to Mesha Finance.
- Stablecoins are the best use case for crypto, and Circle is the best business in crypto. Circle gets interest on the 80% of reserves it holds in 3-month Treasury Bills. Assuming $200-500b in USDC in circulation in 2030, that would be $5-12 billion in revenue.
- A fake job offer took down the world’s most popular crypto game. Ronin, the side-chain used by Axie Infinity, was hacked for $540 million (!!) after an engineer mistakenly downloaded a fake job offer PDF from the North Korean Lazarus group. (The Block)
- Physical money is going the way of the dodo. 41% of Americans said this year that none of their purchases in a typical week were in cash. Bullish on digital assets becoming more normalized. (Pew Research)
Readers who are also good at math will notice that this is actually more than 52 things. Consider it an interest payment since I didn't post this until late January 😊😊
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