I'm graduating this year, and this is what happens when I have the holidays and a bit more free time to think and write.
A university student is a pluripotent stem cell, with an infinite fractal of possibilities ahead of them. But, they must leave behind infinite possibility if they want to actually **be** anything. https://nicholasachow.substack.com/p/the-purgatory-of-endless-possibility
Saving calories for the foods that I enjoy more. Also intermittent fasting I guess.
Another perspective: deep thinking is also just rapid iteration of ideas and patterns within your head, all without context switching.
Been thinking about different definitions of "risk." 1) risk as volatility 2) risk as probability of permanent loss 3) risk as the residual when you think you've thought of everything Any other framings of risk that people find helpful?
It’s Steven Pressfield’s Resistance at play. Both the professional and the amateur feel fear. The difference is that the professional moves towards it in pursuit of their craft.
In a multiple iteration game, you’d want to mix in some randomness, wouldn’t you? Some variation on an epsilon-greedy strategy seems to work well.
Honestly, that's a reason why I tend to sleep on the earlier side — then I never get hungry and have midnight snacks.
I find his original "How to get rich" episode great too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-TZqOsVCNM
A philosophical approach to why I find builders and thinkers fascinating: https://nicholasachow.substack.com/p/builders-and-thinkers
My general approach is to try to put myself in more rooms where I'm the least knowledgeable person in the conversation, and then learn from those around me as quickly as possible. It's hard though.
I think Federer and Nadal were both youth soccer players — perhaps that's why their footwork was so good?
If you're interested in the longer version of this argument: https://nicholasachow.substack.com/p/m-shaped-people
My controversial opinion is that we'll need more of these polymaths in the future, since human institutions and complex systems become much more interwoven and interdependent through time. Therefore, you're going to need more orthogonal primitives from different disciplines to sense-make correctly.
The classic example is da Vinci, but some other polymaths come to mind: - Ben Franklin (politics, random inventions, writing, statescraft) - Gottfried Leibniz (calculus, law, philosophy) - Buckminster Fuller (engineering, math, architecture) - Richard Feynman (safe-cracking, bongos, also physics apparently?)
Wonder what kind of cool insights topic modeling or other NLP methods would uncover?
Any particular exercises you like for the weights?
The quality of your questions is the quality of your life (or interview in this case). Lex asks some simple and very powerful questions that everyone has always wondered but is often too embarrassed to ask themselves.
But this also begs the question to everyone who answers, is there really anything stopping you from developing this skill and ability today?