Bonus Edition Wk79
3 more ideas to expand your thinking
I confused the dates and ended up scheduling this week's post for Sunday. I am amazed to see how many of you checked your emails on a Sunday! Hats off to your enthusiasm to discover something new - even on a Sunday.
I understand that some of you start the Monday morning with a quick read of this newsletter, so I am sharing a short bonus post today with 3 reads to open your mind to some new ideas.
Enjoy reading & have a great week ahead.
1. Ways to think about a metaverse
This essay from Benedict Evans suggests a couple of ways to understand “Metaverse” or “metaverse”. His emphasis is on not getting bogged down in the most popular narrative & interpretation of this idea. Like most technology breakthroughs (and fads), we cannot see the complete picture today. The curious and the crazy ones will keep at it and may be able to make something worthwhile.
2. No, you’re not entitled to your opinion
Patrick Stokes builds on his idea - “You are only entitled to what you can argue for.” He does a fairly good job defending it in the post. Some compelling arguments worth considering. We may not be made accountable for our opinions, but it will be wise doing our bit in building it to be worth defending.
The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.
3. Fast
In #65, we had visited some of the questions that Patrick Collison finds interesting. Today, we cover another post from his personal website. In “Fast”, he shares some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.
The examples span from the Eiffel Tower to Disneyland to discovery of Covid-19 vaccine. A good piece of history & trivia around some of the products that shaped our world.
This post gets interesting towards the end when Patrick poses the following question: The physical infrastructure projects enumerated above occurred before 1970 to a disproportionate degree. Why?
What follows is a bunch of hypotheses from thinkers & experts of this field. We’ve seen so many infra projects move a crawling pace closer home as well. It’ll be interesting to know if someone raised & tried to answer such a question for our country as well.
Before we sign off, here’s a quick link to this week’s main post. A lot of interesting things to explore there, in case you’ve not been there yet.
That's all for this Monday, folks!
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