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:

1. How to lie with statistics

2. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

3. Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

4. How Will You Measure Your Life?

5. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

6. On writing well

7. I Will Teach You to Be Rich

8. Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

9. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

10. This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

11. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

12. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

13. The last question

14. The little book of talent: 50 tips to improving your skills

15. Letters to a young scientist

16. You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

17. The unbearable lightness of being

18. Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

19. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

The best Documentaries I’ve seen in 2020:

1. Capital in the 21st century

2. Shenzhen: The silicon valley of hardware

3. City of the future: Singapore

4. Jodorowsky’s Dune

5. The social dilemma

6. AKINCI

7. 20000 days on earth

8. Hypernormalization

9. Merhants of doubt

10. The great hack

11. Mike Wallace is here

12. We need to talk about A.I

13. Homecoming: A film by Beyonce

My absolute favorite conversations/talks/podcasts/audio of 2020:

1. Reif Hoffman and Patrick Collison

2. Talking Tech with Mark Zuckerberg

3. Primo Levi’s the periodic table

4. Science of Laughter

5. Turning the tables

6. The future of human and robot interaction-Davos 2020

7. Hack Club AMA with Patrick Collison

8. Hack Club AMA with Elon Musk

9. Lex Fridmen interviews Joe Rogan

10. 3Blue1Brown and the Beauty of Mathematics

11. Endurance, Scott Kelly

12. Mark Zuckerberg talks to Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison

13. Eric Weinstein’s Controversial New Approach to Theoretical Physics

14. Joe Rogan Elon Musk conversation #2

15. Joe Rogan Kevin hart

16. Joe Rogan Naval Ravikant

17. Joe Rogan David Sinclair

Favorite articles/essays of 2020

In this section, I’m only including the most important pieces of writings I’ve read in 2020:

1. The parable of talents

2. Black Swan book review

3. Zero to One book review

4. The obligatory GPT-3 post

5. The secret of our success

6. Why books don’t work

7. Why you should stop caring what other people think

8. How you know

9. Advice- Patrick Collison

10. Write like you talk

11. How to write usefully

12. The day you become a better writer

13. What should you do with your life

14. Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

15. Spaced repetition for effective learning

16. How to be an expert in a changing world

Favorite Masterclasses of 2020:

1. Paul Krugman teaches economics and society

2. Neil DeGrass Tyson teaches scientific thinking

3. Chris Hadfield teaches Space exploration

The best Stand-up performances I’ve watched in 2020:

1. Joe List: I hate Myself

2. Russel Peters: Deported

3. Aziz Ansari: Right now

4. Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers

5. Dave Chappel: Killin’ them softly

6. Gad Elmaleh: American Dream

7. Ricky Gervais: Humanity

My favorite twitter accounts of 2020:

This section includes accounts with the highest signal/noise ratio. I learned a lot from these people:

1. David Perell

2. Andy Matuschak

3. Sam Altman

4. 𝔊𝔴𝔢𝔯𝔫

5. Jason Crawford

6. Andrej Karpathy

7. Nassim Taleb

8. Lex Fridman

9. Michael Nielsen

10. Daniel Gross

11. Paul Graham

12. Laura Deming

13. Patrick Collison

14. Matt Clifford

15. balajis.com

Favorite Tweets of 2020:

James Wang @jwangARK

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:

Orange Book 🍊📖 @orangebook_

A 20-year-old broke student is much wealthier than a 70-year-old multimillionaire. Value your real assets.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

“All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.” E Rutherford

David Sinclair, PhD @davidasinclair

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

cnb.cxJapanese doctor who lived to 105—his spartan diet, views on retirement, and other rare longevity tipsDr. Shigeaki Hinohara had an extraordinary life for many reasons. For starters, the Japanese physician and longevity expert lived until the age of 105. Here’s what he preached about how to live a longer life.

Kyle Tibbitts @KyleTibbitts

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.

Yuka C Koshino | 越野 結花 @YukaKoshino

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…

vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin

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.

balajis.com @balajis

It may be possible to regenerate human limbs.

Shane Parrish @ShaneAParrish

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.

Matthew Kobach @mkobach

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

Paul Graham @paulg

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."

Naval Ravikant Bot @NavalBot

"Trade money for time, not time for money. You’re going to run out of time first." - @naval

Thibaut @Kpaxs

Everything becomes interesting if we focus on it properly.

Arram Sabeti @arram

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?

arr.amThe Generative AgeAI can already create photorealistic faces, objects, and landscapes. Video isn’t far behind. We can already recreate any voice. GPT-3 can already write dialogue and movie plots almost indisti…

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

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

There's been a lot of bad news and worrying trends in recent years, but one huge positive trend has been the falling costs of batteries. It means not only better and cheaper tech but easier solutions for climate change. https://t.co/yO9DtzXWHF https://t.co/MXxzZ4HKgc

Robert Wiblin @robertwiblin

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…

balajis.com @balajis

VR will make it possible for people to live in previous time periods.

balajis.com @balajis

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.

balajis.com @balajis

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.

balajis.com @balajis

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.

wired.comSoftware Is Reorganizing the WorldWhen cloud formations take physical shape, neither their scale nor duration has an upper bound: We may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and ultimately cloud countries. At first this sounds rather implausible. Perhaps the internet will spur a wave of internal migrations as online communit…

Andrej Karpathy @karpathy

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.

Paul Portesi ن​ @paulportesi

The information is free but the time is expensive.

Mckay Wrigley @mckaywrigley

"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

Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill

Nice: Correlation doesn’t imply causation 👍

Elon Musk @elonmusk

@cleantechnica Definitely not. Smartwatches & phones are yesterday’s technology, Neuralinks are the future.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb

The rarest (and most valuable) thing on this planet: a clear mind.

Naval @naval

All self-help boils down to "choose long-term over short-term."

Alex Naka @gottapatchemall

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…

jeroen blokland @jsblokland

Interesting and somewhat disturbing. The % of people earning more than their parents has collapsed... via @wef

Vinod Khosla @vkhosla

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

In many different fields, outsiders overestimate the value of ideas and underestimate the difficulties of execution. So it's probably a good strategy for learning about any new field to ask "why is execution harder than it seems to outsiders?"

Robert Scoble @Scobleizer

@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!

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

The fertility decline across the Muslim world has been astonishingly rapid.

Favorite Youtube Videos of 2020:

1. World's Fastest Pitch - Supersonic Baseball Cannon

2. Is success luck or hard work

3. Lockdown Productivity: Spaceship you

4. How John Woo intensifies action

5. Simulating an pandemic

6. Dream Sequence-Adult Swim

7. Unlimited resources from space- Asteroid mining

8. Unboxing spot- the 75000$ robot

9. Parasite’s perfect montage

10. The secret of flocking birds

11. Card tricks with Jeff Bezos

12. How to actually read more books

13. Weekend Wednesday

14. Dune trailer

15. Limitless is a bonkers franchise

16. Dune Cast Q and A with Stephen colbert

The best movies I’ve seen in 2020:

1. I’m thinking of ending things

2. The invisible Man

3. Archive

4. The art of racing in the rain

5. The Nightingale

6. The insult

7. Birds of Prey

8. Redline

9. Baahubali 2 :the conclusion

10. The Darjeeling limit

11. The sticky fingers of time

12. Appleseed Alpha

13. Titan A.E

14. Winter Sleep

15. Story of Ricky

My favorite TV-shows of 2020:

1. Devs

2. Upload

3. Undone

4. Looking for Alaska

5. Defending Jacob

6. The Mandalorian

7. The Great

8. After Life

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If you have recommendations of your own, feel free to share them with me.

Until next time