Byrne Hobart
Longreads
- Frederik Gieschen on reading and more. This essay was circulating again after Warren Buffett announced his retirement, and it points out that, while Buffett does read a lot, he was also constantly traveling to meet people in-person, calling people, etc. Investing is a mostly solitary job, but even if you have a reading-centric approach one of the fastest ways to know which 10-Ks should be on the top of your stack is to ask someone smart what's going on in their corner of the world.
- Carrie McKean in The Free Press on contrarian indie data journalists during Covid. Setting aside the object-level politics, what's interesting is reading this as a look at how transparency in government works in practice. In theory, when the government releases abundant, granular data about an important issue, like the pandemic, it means that anyone can review it and suggest changes in policy or identify problems with the numbers themselves. In practice, public health authorities were very reluctant to actually do this. Most of the time, it is a good idea to trust authorities rather than random commentators, and even if those commentators have lots of data and detailed arguments, many of them will be wrong—by far the easiest way to make a compelling, contrarian, data-driven argument is to misunderstand something about the data you're looking at. But in this case, the independent analysts had about as much experience with data on pandemics in wealthy, modern countries as anybody else, i.e. none. So that heuristic failed, and naturally the people who got things right that the CDC etc. got wrong have every reason to feel salty about it.
- Ryan Khurana has a piece I wanted to write, on "liquid content," or what the world looks like when you can use AI to represent any piece of content in any medium you like—books into podcasts and vice-versa is obvious, but you'll be able to do much more ("I'd like the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the form of a hip-hop album, please!"). This convergence is already happening, in forms like automatic captions on videos, and as it continues the concept of a shared canon will get even more confusing.
- Applied Divinity Studies returns with a review of Nadia Asparouhova's new book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. It's a fun piece, with most of the content being a series of nested footnotes on the nature of parasocial relationships with intellectual influences. The book itself seems to also have this flavor, as a meta discussion about the nature of virality. It used to be a great idea to share your ideas for free, but at some point that switched from an option to a future, i.e. it could turn out to be a big liability after all.
- Patrick McKenzie interviews Zac Townsend on the life insurance business, and Zac's crypto-focused implementation thereof. Any time you're building "X, but for Y," one of either X or Y will be trivial and the other will be the hard part. In the case of crypto, a permissionless, open ecosystem means that it's a great tool by default for some financial products, but the life insurance industry is not at all designed to be open and permissionless. The piece has some good discussions of how life insurance fits into financial planning, but also great digressions on how there's a two-sided adverse selection problem: insurers don't want to insure people who are secretly sicker than they seem, and policyholders don't want to spend a lifetime paying for a policy only for their heirs to inherit zero. Regulators mostly focus on solving the latter (fortunately for them, ripping off a life insurance company implies a degree of patience, responsibility, and selflessness that cuts against actually being willing to defraud).
- In Capital Gains this week, we're looking at why companies occasionally have a single metric that becomes their overwhelming focus, but this is temporary.
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- I'm interested in talking to readers who are in, or know about, the mining industry, with a particular emphasis on which parts are seeing the fastest software adoption. Cycles are long, but they turn.
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