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Luca Dellanna Profile picture
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4 Jan, 10 tweets, 3 min read
MY TOP THREADS OF THE YEAR

1/ Mimetic societies

2/ Costly signaling – the forgotten management tool
3/ On cargo cults and the pandemic
4/ The Ludic fallacy

5/ Cargo cults and the pandemic

6/ Wittgenstein's ruler

7/ You can also find all my Twitter threads here Luca-dellanna.com/my-twitter-thr… and everything I published in 2020 here: Luca-dellanna.com/everything-2020

I'll continue posting here tomorrow.
8/ Quotes from Orwell's 1984 to match the current state of the markets
9/ Pareto prioritization

10/ Why is ergodicity important? An example

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More from @DellAnnaLuca

Luca Dellanna Profile picture
6 Jan
SEMANTIC WARS

In the physical past, power was monopoly on violence.

In the digital future, it is about controlling who processes information and how.

(Thread, 1/N)
2/ First, a note. The distinction is not so black and white. For example, the use of force can still be relevant in the digital world (e.g., coercion).

As another example, in many dystopias, power is monopoly on information enforced through physical means.
3/ But the point is, the logic of violence determines the structure of society. And what is valuable and how it can be seized is a key input.

(examples over the next tweets)

Read 14 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
5 Jan
Theory vs practice
Also, the idea that North Korea is ranked third-last should have been a tell.

Isolation and authoritarianism seem an advantage here.
So, let's see who are the IYI who worked on the pile of BS that is this report.

"The GHS Index is a project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHU) and was developed with The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)"
Read 9 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
4 Jan
ON EDUCATION & DEFAULTS

Imagine if, to learn Spanish, people used to go live for one year in a Spanish-speaking country.

Then, someone said, "Nah, let's have them sit for 4 years in classrooms in a country that speaks another language, and charge them $150k for that."

(1/6)
2/ Imagine if degrees took different amounts of years to complete, based on the complexity of the underlying field. For example, 5 years for engineering and 1 year for gender studies.

Then, someone proposed: "Nah, let's make them all last 4 years."
3/ Reversing default choices is the best way to let opportunity costs emerge. Below, some more examples.
Read 6 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
4 Jan
About 45% of Italian high-schoolers spend 3 hours a week for 5 years studying a dead language: Latin.

A thread on educational debt.
2/ First, let me clarify that I have nothing against Latin as an option.

But I don't think it should be mandatory for almost half of the population, for 3 hours a week.

It's not useless, but there are opportunity costs.
Couldn't we teach English instead? Or coding?
3/ Imagine if Latin weren't taught today, and someone said, "we should remove teaching coding and reduce the number of hours teaching English to instead teach a dead language for 3 hours a day to half of the population."
Read 16 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
29 Dec 20
ON GETTING MOTIVATION – OPTIMIZE FOR BITE-SIZED IMPROVEMENTS

I can pinpoint very clearly the moment in which you lost motivation: the moment you stopped receiving clues that you were improving.

(thread, 1/N)
2/ We use to say that motivation drives improvement, but it’s the other way around.

We are wired for continuing at whatever venture we receive frequent clues we are improving at – including inconsequential activities, such as videogames.
3/ For some, videogames represent both the peak intellectual effort of their days and the peak inconsequentiality of their actions.

As irrational and wasteful as it looks, it is coherent with the way our brain works.

(see below)
Read 16 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
24 Dec 20
THE LINDY PRINCIPLE, GENERALIZED

The Lindy Principle, from Taleb's "Antifragile", uses age to infer information about life expectancy.

Here, I propose an intuitive justification and I explore practical uses other than estimating life expectancy.

(a thread, 1/N)
2/ For a person, every year of life reduces its conditional life expectancy. A 70 years-old is expected to live 14.4 more years, and a 71yo is only expected to live 13.7 more years.

Conversely, the longer a book is on the NYT bestseller list, the longer it's expected to stay.
3/ In Antifragile, building on Mandelbrot, Taleb writes the Lindy Principle as:

"For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy.

For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy."
Read 25 tweets

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