Source: Dealing with Hard Problems, by Richard Rusczyk
We ask hard questions because so many of the problems worth solving in life are hard. If they were easy, someone else would have solved them before you got to them. … the whole point of research is to find and answer questions that have never been solved. You can’t learn how to do that without fighting with problems you can’t solve.
Source: The US startup is disappearing
Fewer of the country’s most-educated workers are becoming entrepreneurs, and it’s happening across the American business landscape.
Source: Six Books We Could and Should All Write – The Paris Review, by Anthony Madrid
1. The Diary of Samuel Pepys
2. Aubrey’s Brief Lives
3. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
4. Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas
5. The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
6. Li Zhi’s A Book to Burn
Six books anybody could write. You wouldn’t need any talent to produce these. All you’d have to do is stick with it.
…
Just to refresh: I’m saying one should compose (1) a book about oneself, (2) a book about others, (3) an anthology of favorites, (4) a book about words, and now I’m adding (5) a book of lists. [(6) a book of completely unacceptable views]
Source: The Psychology of Money – Collaborative Fund, by Morgan Housel
Go read the whole thing.
investing is not the study of finance. It’s the study of how people behave with money. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. You can’t sum up behavior with formulas to memorize or spreadsheet models to follow. Behavior is inborn, varies by person, is hard to measure, changes over time, and people are prone to deny its existence, especially when describing themselves. … The finance industry talks too much about what to do, and not enough about what happens in your head when you try to do it.
This report describes 20 flaws, biases, and causes of bad behavior I’ve seen pop up often when people deal with money.
Optimism is a belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favor over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way. The simple idea that most people wake up in the morning trying to make things a little better and more productive than wake up looking to cause trouble is the foundation of optimism.
If you see someone driving a $200,000 car, the only data point you have about their wealth is that they have $200,000 less than they did before they bought the car. … Wealth, in fact, is what you don’t see. It’s the cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The renovations postponed, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. It’s assets in the bank that haven’t yet been converted into the stuff you see.
Source: AI winter is well on its way, by Filip Piekniewski
OK, so we can now train AlexNet in minutes rather than days, but can we train a 1000x bigger AlexNet in days and get qualitatively better results? Apparently not…
So in fact, this graph which was meant to show how well deep learning scales, indicates the exact opposite. We can’t just scale up AlexNet and get respectively better results – we have to fiddle with specific architectures, and effectively additional compute does not buy much without order of magnitude more data samples, which are in practice only available in simulated game environments.