Consumption Weeks 51
My notes from some of the media I consumed this week.
Contents
12 thoughts on incentives
https://twitter.com/george__mack/status/1738533937343803439
- Don’t ask your barber if you need a haircut.
- “I can fix the $32 trillion US debt problem in 5 minutes. You pass a law that when there’s a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members congress are ineligible for re-election” - Warren Buffett
- 33% of British criminals were dying en route to Australia in the 1700s. Britain switched from paying sea captains for every passenger who walked on the ship to paying them for every passenger who walked off. Immediately, the survival rate shot up to 99%.
- How to waste your time: Try to defy the laws of physics – or try to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
- “Never attribute to conspiracy what is more easily explained by incentives and incompetence.” - Naval
- During the 1980’s, the government of Athens came up with an idea to limit pollution: Odd-numbered and even-numbered license plates. On dates with an odd number, the odd plates could drive. And vice versa. The rich people just bought another car – with even worse emissions. The streets got more jammed and the pollution got worse.
- “If you reward profits alone, it’s the dumbest thing you could do. Employees will quit advertising and start shrinking the business” - Buffett
- If video games teach us one thing: If you want to motivate humans, frequent rewards are more addicting than one-off rewards.
- In Hungary, every woman who gives birth to 4 children or more never has to pay income tax. Prediction for the next 2 decades: As populations decline, every government will be focused on child-bearing incentives.
- “I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.” - Munger
- If a person tells you why their thing is great (city, relationship, or job) - take it with a pinch of salt. If they tell you why it’s terrible - take it like a handful of gold. If someone swims upstream against their identity and incentives, it probably holds some deep truth.
- Skinner’s Law: If procrastinating, 2 ways to solve it: Option 1 - Make the pain of inaction > Pain of action; Option 2 - Make the pleasure of action > Pleasure of inaction. The person with a gun to their head and crack cocaine at the finish line doesn’t need motivation.
Tags: Psychology, Motivation, Incentives
The 24 Universal Character Strengths, in One Graphic
Tags: Personalities, Traits, Strengths, Attitudes
A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002442
- Rodent tears contain social chemosignals with diverse effects, including blocking male aggression. Human tears also contain a chemosignal that lowers male testosterone, but its behavioral significance was unclear. Because reduced testosterone is associated with reduced aggression, we tested the hypothesis that human tears act like rodent tears to block male aggression. Using a standard behavioral paradigm, we found that sniffing emotional tears with no odor percept reduced human male aggression by 43.7%. To probe the peripheral brain substrates of this effect, we applied tears to 62 human olfactory receptors in vitro. We identified 4 receptors that responded in a dose-dependent manner to this stimulus. Finally, to probe the central brain substrates of this effect, we repeated the experiment concurrent with functional brain imaging. We found that sniffing tears increased functional connectivity between the neural substrates of olfaction and aggression, reducing overall levels of neural activity in the latter. Taken together, our results imply that like in rodents, a human tear–bound chemosignal lowers male aggression, a mechanism that likely relies on the structural and functional overlap in the brain substrates of olfaction and aggression. We suggest that tears are a mammalian-wide mechanism that provides a chemical blanket protecting against aggression.
Tags: Behaviour, Aggression, Male-Female Dynamics, Dating, Relationships
Visualizing 60 Years of Stock Market Cycles
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/60-years-of-stock-market-cycles/
Tags: Investing, Stock Markets
Ranking the Top S&P 500 Stocks by 5-Year Returns
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-sp-500-stocks-return/
Tags: Investing, Renewable Energy, Solar, AI
The Woman China Couldn’t Control
- The story of Jang Ching, also known as Madame Mao, the woman whose ambitions and relentless pursuit of power occurred during China’s turbulent Civil War era and the Cultural Revolution.
Tags: China, History, Politics, PR, Propaganda
This piece of paper could revolutionize human waste
- Flat to 3D paper-based packing peanut replacement using kirigami!
Tags: Innovation, Packaging, Recycling, Plastic, Waste, Logistics
Big Ideas in Tech for 2024 | Andreessen Horowitz
https://a16z.com/big-ideas-in-tech-2024/
- American Dynamism
- 21st Century Public Safety
- Smart Grids Will Power an Increasingly Electrified World
- Cost-Effective Swarming for Defense
- Software Eats Atoms via Tech-First Buyouts
- New Applications for Computer Vision and Video Intelligence
- A New Age of Maritime Exploration
- Bio + Health
- Democratizing “Miracle Drugs”
- Programming Medicine’s Final Frontier
- Enabling Our Healthcare Workforce to Do More
- AI Will Supercharge the Future of Health
- Consumer Tech
- Voice-First Apps Will Become Integral to Our Lives
- Narrowly Tailored, Purpose-Built AI
- AI Tools Will Teach Kids
- Code-Free AI Generators Spark New Behaviors
- Creativity Gets Supercharged
- Crypto
- Entering a New Era of Decentralization
- Resetting the UX of the Future
- The Rise of the Modular Tech Stack
- AI + Blockchains Come Together
- Play to Earn Becomes Play and Earn
- When AI Becomes the Gamemaker, Crypto Offers Guarantees
- Formal Verification Becomes Less, Well, Formal
- NFTs Become Ubiquitous Brand Assets
- SNARKs Go Mainstream
- Fintech
- The Rise of the Developer as Buyer in Financial Services
- Tech Helps Community and Regional Banks Compete
- Financial Professional Services Get Supercharged by Software
- LLMs Capture New “Foundational Customer Units”
- New Tools for Banking and Trading
- AI Will Push Latin American SMBs to Go Digital
- AI Will Be the Key to Higher ROE
- Games
- Gaming: Where Alpha Geek Technologies Get Their Initial Product Market Fit
- AI-First Games That Never End
- Games Become “Everything Simulators”
- From Chatbots to Avatars: AI Companions Go 3D
- The Next Disney is a Game Company
- Anime Games Go Mainstream
- A New Generation of UGC Game Developers Emerges
- The Minecraft Generation Ignites the Survival-Crafting Genre
- Growth-Stage Tech
- New Modes of Storytelling, Beyond Text-Based Chat
- CRM Will Be Powered by AI Data Collection
- The Consumer AI Battleground Moves from Model to UX
- Infra + Enterprise
- AI Interpretability
- Creativity Reimagined
- B2B AI Products Embedded in Your Workflow
- The New “Division of Labor”
- LLMs Advance Robotic Process Automation Systems
Tags: Innovation, Predictions, Technology, AI, Crypto, Healthcare
Hangover Whopper - DM9 client
- Thinking about the end of year festivities, Burger King Brasil and the DM9 agency innovated with another campaign: now anyone who wants help to combat their hangover the next day will be able to receive exclusive discounts on famous sandwiches of brand: the Whopper Jr. Double, Whopper and Whopper Double.
Tags: Marketing, Promotion
Love Songs
Tags: Love, Relationships, Songs, Music
Pornhub 2023 Year in Review
https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2023-year-in-review
Tags: Porn, Data Analysis