12: Best of 2020: Global trends,docs,books,movies,and more..
I spent a couple of hours going through my notes of the last 9 months. In this post, I present to you the best content i’ve come across. Enjoy!
The best books I’ve read in 2020:
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life
Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
The best Documentaries I’ve seen in 2020:
My absolute favorite conversations/talks/podcasts/audio of 2020:
Favorite articles/essays of 2020
In this section, I’m only including the most important pieces of writings I’ve read in 2020:
Favorite Masterclasses of 2020:
The best Stand-up performances I’ve watched in 2020:
My favorite twitter accounts of 2020:
This section includes accounts with the highest signal/noise ratio. I learned a lot from these people:
Favorite Tweets of 2020:
ARK's Big Ideas 2020 deck is here—a year of research packed into 80 slides covering AI, robotics, autonomous, genomics, bitcoin, and more.
Download: ark-invest.com/big-ideas-2020
Here are 5 slides that really hit it home. Thread:
A 20-year-old broke student is much wealthier than a 70-year-old multimillionaire. Value your real assets.
“All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.” E Rutherford
Tips from a doc who lived to 105:
1. Don’t retire, or do so long after 65
2. Take the stairs, keep weight down
3. Find a purpose, keep busy
4. Rules are stressful; try to relax them
5. Know docs can’t cure everything
6. Find inspiration, joy & peace in art
Advice is overrated.
If you want to start a business, do it. If you want to start investing, do it. If you want to go to school, do it. If you want to have kids, do it. There's never a perfect time to do anything worth doing in life. Trust your instincts. Filter out the noise.
Nikkei’s top story today— new stats released by Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy shows that the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers published by China surpassed that of the US in 2017.
asia.nikkei.com/Business/Scien…
Am I the only one who finds genetic enhancement of humans *much more palatable* than brain implants? Genes are hard to target; there's no "gene for obedience to the communist party". But mixing brains and centralized digital tech risks eroding our strongest domain of privacy.
Visible talent is the result of years of effort applied in the same direction. It looks sexy at the outcome level, but it’s incredibly boring at the micro level.
When I interviewed my first CEO, I didn’t know what I was doing
When I went on my first podcast, I didn’t know what I was doing
When I taught my first college class, I didn’t know what I was doing
You never know what you’re doing until you do it
There is a connection between spelling and being smart though. Most people learn spelling by reading, and as Charlie Munger said, "In my whole life, I have known no wise people — over a broad subject matter area — who didn’t read all the time. None. Zero."
The Generative Age: AI will do for content production what the internet did for distribution.
What happens when the cost to produce a movie like The Avengers goes from $350M to 30 cents?
Battery prices are falling by double-digit percentages every year. Over the last decade they're down by 87%.
This is a technological revolution.
Timothy B. Lee @binarybits
75 year olds today aren't the 75 year olds of 30 years ago.
Today's seniors are both physically healthier and mentally sharper.
Link 1: academic.oup.com/biomedgerontol…
Link 2: link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Bet on the internet, bet on decentralization, bet on crypto, bet on encryption.
Over the long term these will prove to have the most enduring global constituency, despite the coming age of national balkanization.
All that nostalgia for idealized visions of the 1990s, or the 1950s, or whatever historical period, but in video game form.
Hollywood set designers have already done a lot of the work. Need a tool to scan period films and upload 3D models of all clothes and objects.
No scientific law prevents 100 people who find each other on the internet from coming together for a month, or 1,000 from coming together for a year. As that increases to 10,000 and beyond, we may begin to see cloud cities materialize out of thin air.
Notifications. Masquerading as tiny and helpful but in reality psychologically invasive and damaging to the brain - interrupting complex thought, forcing (expensive, taxing) context switch, spiking dopamine, making thought reactive instead of proactive.
"The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think."
— Marc Andreessen
@cleantechnica Definitely not. Smartwatches & phones are yesterday’s technology, Neuralinks are the future.
this mind-reading stuff is getting pretty good
Self-Supervised Natural Image Reconstruction and Rich Semantic Classification from Brain Activity
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Interesting and somewhat disturbing. The % of people earning more than their parents has collapsed... via @wef
Can't find an example of major innovation where experts who knew too much made change happen! Amazon vs Walmart, Tesla vs GM, Spacex vs. Lockheed, Twitter/Youtube/FB vs media, Genentech vs pharma, AirBnB vs hotels, Uber vs. taxis,... Experts can explain "why not" instead of "why"
Paul Graham @paulg
@vkhosla Yes. Steve Jobs forbade his early iPhone team from hiring anyone who had worked on phones before. Nokia’s execs told me, on day of launch, that Cupertino didn’t know how to build phones. Hah!
Favorite Youtube Videos of 2020:
The best movies I’ve seen in 2020:
My favorite TV-shows of 2020:
If you have recommendations of your own, feel free to share them with me.
Until next time