Phil's Newsletter #15: Sképsis
How I practice what I do. What we can learn from New Zeeland's approach to COVID-19.
I’ve never been entirely satisfied with the name of this email newsletter: “Phil’s Newsletter”. It’s very non-descriptive. Who the hell is Phil, why does he have a newsletter and why should I care?
This morning I got a burst of inspiration and decided to rename the publication to Sképsis (σκέψης). Which is Greek for thinking, also meaning/related to inquiry, investigation, meditation, contemplation, examination, observation, consideration, etc. I feel that this better captures my intention with what I’m trying to create with this newsletter and my writing in general. Might change it later though.
As I’ve eluded to previously, I believe that writing is a tool for thinking. My goal is to think clearly about the world by reading and learning about it across a wide range of subjects. But reading alone doesn’t work very well. You need to apply what you’re learning and you need to make your knowledge compound on itself. We need ‘lived experiences’.
If you’re a programmer or a tennis player, it’s relatively straight forward how to become better at what you do, how to turn theory into practice. If you’re a knowledge worker of the more general sort or just someone who’s “interested in stuff”. How do you actually become better at that? How do you turn information into knowledge, knowledge into wisdom?
Writing, and in particular deliberate note-writing around what you learn and do, is a reliable way to make your learning more practical and long-lasting. Writing forces you to think clearly, to spell out your arguments and ideas in detail. It quickly divulges vague thoughts or inaccurate ideas to the light of day. It makes other people’s ideas your own by embedding it within your own web of knowledge.
Tyler Cowen wrote a blog post titled “How I practice at what I do”. Ever since reading it I’ve been obsessed with trying to figure out how to “practice what I do”, too. As an entrepreneur the skills I have to nurture and improve are numerous, vague, and hard to define. I have to be good at communicating, leading, selling, writing, strategizing, operating, thinking, influencing, and many other things.
In today’s world, entrepreneurship (founding and leading a company) is a specific instantiation of the more general area of knowledge work. Put differently, most entrepreneurs today are also knowledgeable workers. Knowledge work is the practice of refining, processing raw information into some kind of validated knowledge that can be further refined, sold, or used for other purposes. A lot of what these people do on a daily basis combines various kinds of skills, areas of knowledge, and hard-to-define practices. So how do you become better as a knowledge worker, how do you measure your progress?
As an entrepreneur or leader, but even as a knowledge worker more broadly, what ultimately matters is value creation for the market you or your organization are operating within. You get measured by the results of the organization you lead or work in. But as an individual worker, outcome-based measures like revenue or customer growth are hard to use when it comes to evaluating your day-to-day progress.
Inspired by Andy Matuschak’s writing, I’ve come to believe that good note-taking can be viewed as a fundamental unit of knowledge work. An input-based metric. Another way of putting this is; how many ideas have you generated, captured, and remembered today, this week, or this month? It’s certainly vital to turn these ideas into practice, but good ideas captured as reusable and extensible notes can be a useful leading indicator of your productivity as a knowledge worker.
This is a topic I’ll be exploring more in the future. I’ll leave you with this question from Tyler:
“What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”
Other interesting things I’ve come across
How New Zealand is Beating COVID-19 - New Zeeland has fared very well compared to most other countries, even compared to other countries in South East Asia. Certainly, their remote location has its benefits in this situation, but it’s clear that their strict and swift measures have paid off - at least so far. Although the “Swedish approach” to the crisis has been applauded by many lately, it also bears a cost. A cost that we don’t yet know is worth it. Sweden isn’t doing that bad compared to some countries, but the number of new daily cases aren’t going down as much as in other countries either:
It’s still too early to give any final judgments either way. There are many aspects to consider and there are many ambiguities and nuances to take into account when looking at the data. But New Zeeland’s approach probably has a few good lessons for other countries:
”The policy fix for COVID-19 implemented by the NZ government was simple. Close the border. Impose a 14-day quarantine on all new arrivals. Encourage social distancing and hand-washing. Impose a hard and early lockdown to snuff out new infections. Close down all non-essential businesses for five weeks. Ramp up testing. Ramp up contact tracing. Get new cases down to zero.”
2021 Scenario Planning for COVID-19 - I recently came across a presentation on LinkedIn detailing four possible future scenarios of the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s an excellent piece of research and thinking that will be useful in the short term and interesting to revisit again a year from now. I wrote a summary of the presentation that can be read in the article on Medium, together with the presentation itself.
Why Spotify bought Joe Rogan’s Podcast - I’m a huge podcast consumer. But I don’t use Spotify for podcasts since I prefer third-party players like PocketCast that currently have better functionality for listening to podcasts. Nevertheless, this is a huge move for Spotify strategically but probably a bad deal for the open podcasting ecosystem as a whole. Not surprising though, as this sort of centralization tends to happen over time in most industries, especially on the Internet. Maybe content exclusives like this one are what will get me back to listening to podcasts on Spotify eventually.
Science win. Try not to cry:
What you can believe vs what you must believe - When we encounter new statements or pieces of evidence that we want to believe we don't ask, should I believe this, instead we ask: can I believe this? Is there some piece of evidence that I can find that would make it okay for me to believe this?
On the other side, when you're presented with something that is counter to what you believe and you are faced with the question of: should I change my mind? You actually ask yourself: must I believe this?
Changing our minds about something is the very last thing we do when there’s nowhere else to escape to. When there is no possible way for us to maintain our sanity or social status. As long as there’s some conceivable way for us to retain our belief system, we will cherry-pick any evidence to support our beliefs or dismiss new evidence for any plausible-sounding reason we can find.
This and other related ideas are explored in-depth in the book The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, who also recently appeared on the Making Sense Podcast, where him and Sam Harris discussed this problem towards the end of the episode. Well worth the listen.Sci-fi Daily on Instagram- If you’re into sci-fi or like futuristic styles I’d recommend you to follow this account on Instagram. Personally I always find it inspiring to look at pictures or artworks like this. It makes me dream of a far high-tech future where we roam the stars and explore the cosmos…
Become a YouTube astronaut - Explore random new clips that were just uploaded to YouTube. This is probably a rather accurate view of what people are doing around the world right now.
These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like
DSC 1234
andIMG 4321
. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).
Stay safe out there,
/Phil