Ahoy there, welcome back. My week’s been busy, what about yours? I mentioned last week that I send out emails with excerpts from books that I read - if you want to be in, let me know by replying to this email. And as always, if there’s anything you want to say or suggest, in way of miscellany or feedback, I’m always all ears. Let’s get down to this week’s list.

If you got this from a friend and want to subscribe, here’s the link.

1. Productivity - by Sam Altman

Sam Altman, the president of world-famous venture capital firm Y Combinator, talks about productivity. I usually don’t like sharing things like this, but I found some nice nuggets that I don’t normally see here.

I try to be ruthless about saying no to stuff, and doing non-critical things in the quickest way possible. I probably take this too far—for example, I am almost sure I am terse to the point of rudeness when replying to emails.

Also, don’t fall into the trap of productivity porn—chasing productivity for its own sake isn’t helpful. Many people spend too much time thinking about how to perfectly optimize their system, and not nearly enough asking if they’re working on the right problems. It doesn’t matter what system you use or if you squeeze out every second if you’re working on the wrong thing. The right goal is to allocate your year optimally, not your day.

2. Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless and [Are Scores on the MBTI Totally Meaningless?](https:

//www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/201603/are-scores-the-mbti-totally-meaningless)
I’ve known about and studied the MBTI personality test for a while. While I won’t say that it’s useless, I’ve never subscribed to the thought that every person can be grouped into one of sixteen rigid categories. Knowing my MBTI type hasn’t helped me. Behavior that falls within the spectrum of a type is normal, and if it doesn’t, then it can be classified as something extraneous. Anyway, these two pieces were interesting because they have opposing viewpoints, and maybe this is just a large number of people in corporate life justifying the money spent on the test.

3. Should Some Species Be Allowed to Die Out?

This piece embodies something that I think (and do nothing) about recently. Some species just aren’t worth preserving, because the money and resources that go into them can be used to do something else too. How do we decide, though? And it’s also sad that we’ve reduced this too to a zero-sum game. Another interesting point is this: extinction is happening, but if it is because of invasive foreign species, is it not just quick survival of the fittest?

4. Meet the man living with Alzheimers who climbs the same mountain every day

Interesting! Someone who cannot remember the beginning of a sentence as he finishes reading it climbs the same mountain every day.

It’s a small sample, but Jair isn’t surprised. When asked why he walks – and indeed why he climbs the same mountain day after day – he offers two answers. First, the longer, more romantic one. “I’ve been up every single mountain in this country, quite a few of them more than once,” he says. “Coniston Old Man has got absolutely everything for everybody: steep climbs, gradual climbs, beauty spots, atmospherics. Very underrated mountain really. You get fantastic views and all sorts of phenomena: broken spectres, fogbows, which are very unusual, times when you’re looking over the clouds. I’ll have done all that, seen all that beauty, had my exercise and people are just getting out of bed.”

Jair smiles, and then offers a shorter, alternative version. “And it’s stability,” he says. “Something I can do.”

5. How Kiddie Pools of Kimchi Bind Korean Families Together

Kimchi is a Korean dish of fermented cabbage used like a pickle. It’s a massive thing! And surprisingly, nearly all of it, made during the winter, is homemade. This is a nice piece about why it’s important to culture, and what it embodies.

Every year, Kim’s mother improvises slightly, and later might complain if the result ends up slightly too funky or not quite funky enough. “I asked my mother why she never wrote down a recipe so she could get it just right every time,” she writes. “She scoffed and explained that a recipe for kimchi isn’t reliable. ‘You never know what you’re going to get from year to year in terms of quality of cabbage, the weather, and even the salt … You have to taste and smell. Always taste and smell because kimchi is always changing.’”

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6. Wishing I were John McPhee

John McPhee is now one of my favourite persons. I read his Draft No.4 last week and it was mesmerising. I’ve shared pieces about him earlier, and there can never be enough.

McPhee uses the same kind of self-imposed constraint in crafting a story’s structure. Structure, he writes, “has preoccupied me in every project I have undertaken” and it is the very thing that gives rise to his masterful stories, simple on the surface, with prudent mechanizations churning underneath. He doesn’t impose structure on his writing, but rather lets the story dictate it. Sometimes that process can take weeks of lying on a picnic table staring up into the sky, as he writes in Draft No. 4. Once the structure emerges, an act he writes is “seldom” simple, it should be “as about as visible as someone’s bones.”

7. What Does it Mean to Die?

This is the story of Jahi McMath, who was declared brain-dead by doctors in California, and who was then flown into New Jersey and kept alive on medical support. Why? Because New Jersey is one of two states in the US that separates death and brain death, respecting Jewish sentiments. When there, Jahi is very much alive, and even starts menstruating when she reaches the age. It’s crazy. The story is winding, about Jahi and her family, and about the whole big picture of brain death as well. I learnt a lot.

8. Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read

Reminds me of that quip in response to “Why do you read so much if you don’t remember it all?”: “The things you read make you up just like the food you eat: do you remember every single meal that you ate?”

A nice piece about memory, and the effect of the internet and digital memory. This is why I am an advocate of writing things down, and replaying things in your head within the first day of learning about or experiencing them. Related piece: Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge

9. Commentators reexamine physicist Alan Sokal’s purposeful 1996 parody paper

If you don’t know, in 1996 Alan Sokal wrote a parody paper that you should totaly read. Its contents?

The paper’s opening then asserted that “deep conceptual shifts” have “undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics” and that it has become “increasingly apparent that physical ‘reality’, no less than social ‘reality’, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” Also apparent is “that scientific ‘knowledge’, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it.” Moreover, “the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential,” such that scientific discourse, “for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.”
This paper was accepted into journals - does this mean something wrong with science and the system. Also: Peer Review: The End of an Error?

Again, fascinating. I never thought about it.

“Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country’s industrial might.”

Adios, then. See you next weekend (or not!?). Do we have a surprise waiting? - Kat