Hi! I hope you’ve had a good week. Lately, I’ve been enjoying stringing together similar articles one after the other, and I’ve done that this week too. It’s not explicit, but almost serendipitous.
In other announcements, after a period of thinking about it, I started a Twitter for Kat’s Kable. It’s @katskable. As of now, my idea is for it to be a place for me to post links without too much commentary. I don’t want to have “one more thing” to manage, but this sort of minimal feed is easy, and I think I can even automate it somehow. If you have any suggestions, please let me know by replying to this email (or DMing the Twitter account). If you find it difficult to manage and read and process a million emails a month, maybe the Twitter feed is something that would be valuable to you.
If you got this from a friend and want to subscribe, here’s the link. Also, if any of the links are paywalled and if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, try opening the link in incognito mode in your browser; it usually works. It does for me.
1. It’s Okay to Be Good and Not Great
I loved this piece.
A wonderful case study is Eliud Kipchoge, who just shattered the marathon world record. He’s literally the best in the world at what he does. Yet Kipchoge says that the key to his success is not overextending himself in training. He’s not fanatical about trying to be great all the time. Instead, he has an unwavering dedication to being good enough. He recently told The New York Times that he rarely, if ever, pushes himself past 80 percent—90 percent at most—of his maximum effort during workouts. This allows Kipchoge to string together weeks and weeks of consistent training. “I want to run with a relaxed mind,” he says.
2. When Did It Became Impossible to Say, ‘I Don’t Know’?
Going forward from the previous piece, this one is about some serious problems with the image that leaders “should” have. In my field, physics, it’s generally taught to be a good thing to admit what we don’t know. Every paper we write starts with some history of the problem we’re trying to solve, and ends with a precise statement of what’s been done and what’s still unknown. It’s a good maxim to base the process on; why aren’t politicians and other leaders (and many people too) as willing to generally admit, “I don’t know.”?
3. Against Advice
Giving advice is iffy. Generic advice is almost banal; personalized advice is hard to give. My personal pet peeve is when someone says to me, “you should do xyz”. Do you have strong opinions too? I find myself agreeing quite a bit with this article.
It would be really nice if information that could transform someone’s values was able to be handed over as cheaply as driving instructions. In such a world, people could be of profound assistance to one another with little investment in one another’s lives. The myth of advice is the possibility that we can transform one another with the most glancing contact, and so it is not surprising that one finds so much advice exchanged on social media.
4. ‘I Live With My Parents and I’m Miserable!’
Ask Polly is a GREAT column – I get email updates, and it’s marvelous. “Polly” is Heather Havrilesky, and she’s a wise and funny woman who writes an advice column in response to someone in some sort of emotional turmoil. I loved this one so much. Here’s an excerpt from Polly’s answer.
You are beautiful and very, very young and full of light and your life is just beginning. Backsliding is just what you do at age 25. Everyone does it, over and over again. You are generous and open-hearted and you feel your parents’ words, every word, so painfully, so completely. You’re incredibly sensitive, and that’s a nice quality. But today, it’s time to stop feeling their words and feel your own. It’s time to stop trusting them and trust yourself. Take their love and feel that, but leave their bad messages about who you are on the sidewalk, like a leash that a very determined dog bit right through, because she knew she was destined to be the queen.
5. I Wanted a Mobile Art Studio. So I Built One, in the Back of a Honda.
Wendy MacNaughton is awesome and nobody can challenge that.
6. Do Elephants Have Souls?
Really, really long article. But it’s a lovely exploration into the minds and souls of elephants. What’s important is a disclaimer: the minds and souls of elephants, as we see it. From our perspective and given our benchmarks and experiences, we can conclude that elephants are smart, have memory, emotions, etc. However, it’s totally possible that they experience things that we cannot even imagine, because those aren’t things we normally experience. I will confess: I haven’t read this piece in its entirety, because hey, that physics PhD won’t complete itself, but even if you just skim through, you’ll see a lot of interesting anecdotes, facts, and free-flowing writing.
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7. Are Animal Experiments Justified?
Well, isn’t it the day to have nicely flowing and connected articles one after the other? Should we, or should we not, experiment on animals? Mammals in particular have similar physiology and genomics to us, and if we’re developing new drugs and chemicals, from a ratioanl point of view it makes sense to test on animals. However, where’s the line to be drawn? I personally feel like cosmetics should never, ever be tested on animals. But what about drugs? In particular, what if animal testing is the only way to move drug development forward, in some cases? And another thorny dilemma is: if animal experiments will speed up the process, is that okay? I think not. Do you have any views on this?
8. Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry
I liked this piece from WIRED. Justifiably, tech as an industry has received a lot of flak for hacking brains and our psychology, for not respecting their users’ privacy, and treating social networks and their other products as abstract machines and algorithms, not as manifestations of human culture and interaction. At the same time, technology can do (and has done) so much. This article is almost like a half-embarrassed apology that reads like: look, technology hasn’t done as well as it should have. But it still can. I think it will, but other tech CEOs have to think like me.
9. The struggles of an open source maintainer
When I talk to my friends who work in other fields, I enjoy knowing about the various intricacies of their work. Here, the blogger antirez talks about his experiences maintaining an open source project. Not just any project, but a large project for which he’s actually being paid to work (I don’t think this is the norm for open source).
I don’t believe in acting fast, thinking fast, winning the competition on time and stuff like that. I don’t like the world of constant lack of focus we live in, because of social networks, chats, emails, and a schedule full of activities. So when I used to receive an email about Redis back in the early times of the project, when I still had plenty of time, I was able to focus on what the author of the message was trying to tell me. Then I could recall the relevant part of Redis we were discussing, and finally reply with my real thoughts, after considering the matter with care. I believe this is how most people should work regardless of what their job is.
10. It’s More Than Just the Shot
Lastly, since the NBA finals are about to begin, here’s an excellent article about Steph Curry, (arguably) the best three-point shooter in basketball history ever. I love basketball because there’s so much happening in each play. Ten people are absolutely streaming/swarming across the court, and they’re setting such elaborate strategies. Anyway, the game is live now, and I’m watching. So see you later.
See you next week. -Kat.