Highlights from today’s Jeff Bezos’ talk in Turin 🇮🇹:

“Advice to young people: go work to a company where you can learn best practices”

I fully agree: it should also apply to politicians, educators, and other high-leverage roles.

1/N “You can be an entrepreneur within a company; good companies don’t eject mavericks but empower them.”

I add: it’s so important to select a great first job and first boss; it’s sad it’s mostly left to chance, esp. comparing how much time is spent studying and how little interviewing.

2/N

How to kill a country's education system, in 10 simple steps

1) Give teachers tenure, so bad ones can't be fired.

Also, do not train them on how to teach, and do not provide on-the-job coaching. Act as if education were important for students but not for teachers.

1/10 Make better students study longer so they spend their prime years out of the workforce and delay the compounding of job skills.

An excellent way to also lower fertility rates, by the way.

2/10

We interviewed @linaashar, founder of Dreamtime Learning, who has very interesting thoughts about education.

Some of my favorite quotes:

“I keep teaching kids about their brains and their behavior in every session. Because if kids can master their brains, their thoughts, their actions, and therefore their behaviors, they're going to be successful. That's a given. But if they master only what is calculus, or what this is and what that is, even though they may get an A+, success is not a given. Because you can master content, but if you have to master yourself, you're lost.”

(link at the bottom; 1/7) “We do not [as society] design the education system or the learning sessions in the way their brain actually works.”

2/7

I recently got a small grant (courtesy of Kanro, Vitalik Buterin's foundation) to produce some educational materials regarding the pandemic response.

These 10 one-pagers are the first batch of educational materials.

Any feedback?

1/10 Some more background about the one-pagers. They are meant for people who are already onboard with the need to properly react to an eventual future pandemic but don't have the vocabulary or examples to explain to others what they can do and why.

2/10

What do I think an educated society means?

Nothing about graduation rates (literacy rates, yes).

Instead:
– Knowing what matters for society to work well
– Being able to find a value-adding role in society
– Having learned that personal improvement is achievable

Not banal

1/6

https://twitter.com/89729328/status/1781547422067408997

1) Knowing what matters for society to work well

Things such as:
– What brings prosperity?
– What did countries that were wealthy and democratic do (or didn't do) that caused them to become poor or totalitarian

Seems banal, but…

2/6

BEYOND THE CHECKLIST

A problem of many organizations is that they are aware of the needs of employees (impact, recognition, growth, fair salary, etc) but fulfill them as they would with a checklist: let's do this superficially, checked, done.

Some examples (& solutions) ↓

1/8 Example #1: recognition.

Many companies and managers know that employees want recognition.

But they fulfill this need in a very superficial way. With a small internal award, a certificate, etc. Top red flag: it's HR-driven and/or feels cringe.

2/8

Whenever we desire an outcome but not the actions that would make us achieve it, we end up with inaction, busywork, shortcuts, excuses, and, ultimately, frustration.

(a thread of highlights from the first chapter of my book "The Control Heuristic")

1/14 You probably do not have a decision-making problem, but an action-taking one

2/14

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE DELEGATION

1) Minimize the chance of misunderstandings:

Explain:
– what's too little
– what's too much
– common mistakes 2) Explain why you need it done.

Not who asked for it. What it is for. What happens if it's not done. (And what happens if it's not done well enough.)

Tasks whose rationale isn't explained relevantly are done badly and/or at higher emotional cost

Footnotes are my favorite feature of my book Ergodicity (from which the screenshot below is taken).

In fact, there’s plenty of bolded text in the footnotes.

A few examples in this thread.

https://twitter.com/benkershner/status/1667196711373099009

The recent wealth tax increase in Norway was expected to bring an additional $146M in yearly tax revenue

Instead, an estimated $54B-worth of ultra-rich left the country, leading to a lost $594M in yearly wealth tax revenue

A net decrease of $448M+

(sources and calculations ↓) The Guardian estimates the wealth of the relocated millionaires at 600B NOK, or $54B. That would have been taxed at 1.1%, which means $594M in wealth tax lost

Norway raised NOK 16.1B = $1.46B in wealth taxes in 2019 (page 3 of the PDF below); increasing the wealth tax from 1% to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Today is Autism Awareness Day, so here is an example to visualize autistic perception

(continues below, 1/6) A visual representation of perception on the Autism Spectrum (mild)

[2/6]

HIGHER EDUCATION IN 2023

As student debt reaches new highs every day, it’s more urgent than ever to look at ways to reduce the costs of degrees. Here are some ways to do that. First of all, we should shorten degrees when possible.

After all, isn’t it strange that most degrees have the same duration regardless of the complexity of the underlying field?

Some degrees can and should be shortened.

If you haven't read yet @patio11 on banking crises, you really should.

A few highlights in the thread just to get you interested, but I strongly recommend the full article: bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/bankin… A reminder that the crisis is over not when the fire is extinguished but when the flammables are secured

Last week, I published this paper.

Let me explain a key few points (thread) First of all, you can find the paper to download here

osf.io/sp5z3

Now, what are the paper's implications?

No: whether masks have a large effect depends on how many wear it.

If I always wear a mask but my wife never does, she will eventually infect me → numbers would show masks don't work.

If we both wear masks outside, we don't get infected → numbers would show masks work well.

https://twitter.com/KyleBumpus/status/1628264658351321089

It's a bit like closing half the holes on a sinking ship, then the ship sinks anyway, and finally declaring closing holes doesn't work.

It does work, and concluding anything different would be a disservice to sinking ships around the world.

PROMPT ENGINEERING… FOR MANAGERS

If you tried one of this new apps that have an AI generate images for you, you'll know that asking for the right thing doesn't matter; you also need to ask *right.*

The same applies to people management.

Here is how to ask to get things done: Many managers delegate too abstractly.

This gives a false impression that the delegated task is clear, until the delegee goes back to their desks and realizes that, in fact, they don't really know what they've been delegated in practice.

1/12

A good thread on eleven questions that the EU (which just banned sales of combustion cars starting 2035) should answer on the challenge of mass electrification.

Some underrated highlights:
– do we have enough copper, which isn't green to produce?
– relative outsourcing to China

https://twitter.com/_happycactus_/status/1626108842969899009

More importantly, I'm wondering if it's appropriate that a group of people who produced the GDPR banners and a botched COVID response should be in charge of deciding whether to issue *fast* bans of currently-pervasive structures.

Unintended consequences, are they understood?

Exactly. IMHO forcing the transition to electric cars without first having forced proper maintenance is a bad idea at best

and suicidal at worst, if the transition is forced too fast (the EU wants to finish in 12y), with concerns on the infrastructure needed to support it.

https://twitter.com/aledeniz/status/1625866153544278016

Transitioning to electric 100% of a country's vehicles is much, much harder and painful and costly than transitioning 30%-70%.

It means reaching places hard to reach, forcing customers with extremely bad tradeoffs, no backup in case of electric outage, etc.

During the recent Ergodicity Economics conference, I got asked a very interesting question: how can we quantify non-ergodicity?

A tentative solution would be to compute the ratio between the outcome of X participants performing an activity once and the outcome of one participant performing it X times (and perhaps apply a log to the ratio).

But this solution comes with problems.

"Aspirant calibration" seems under-invested by public education

How many great jobs are shunned because of false beliefs about them (and how many bad jobs are accepted because of the previous point)?

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1625112208412917760

When I was in high school, I didn't want to study engineering because I believed it would only lead to boring jobs.

Then, my English teacher organized an "alumni day" with former students a few years into their careers, and we got to ask questions.

Life-changing.

Under-done.

15 MANAGEMENT QUOTES

Clarity is not micromanagement, but lack of clarity is lack of management.

People only voice a fraction of their doubts. The rest shows up later as indecisiveness, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness. Employees love when their manager, while delegating a task, makes explicit what would be too little and what would be too much.

Don’t aim to be clear enough so that you can be understood, but aim to be so clear that you cannot be misunderstood. That’s superclarity.