Be passionate about the territory, not the map
This essay is inspired by the book Factfulness where the key idea explored is that the world has witnessed significant progress over the last few decades, but most people are unaware of that fact because they hold distorted views.
For example, most people overestimate the percentage of the human population living in extreme poverty (which is defined as having an income of less than $2/mo). It's 10% (as of 2017) but even the most educated people get it wrong.
Do we see reality as it is?
I discuss this question with Donald Hoffman who is professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. He studies consciousness and perception from an evolutionary point of view. His research has led him to make a bold claim that while we do not yet know what the underlying reality could be like. Rather, reality as we know it now - including space, time, and objects - is a useful fiction that evolution invented for us.
There’s an inherent tension between how an engineer sees the product under development and how a potential user sees it. Engineers get excited by the technological advances and configurability of the gadget. A user sees all such complexity as overwhelming and off-putting. It's easy for a creator to forget that the user has a life to live and using their product isn’t a highlight of her life. Rather, it’s likely a chore.
Do surgeries work? Most of us assume they do, but is there any scientific evidence that they do?
In this episode, I talk to Dr Ian Harris who is a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is a practicing orthopedic surgeon specializing in trauma surgery. Outside his practice, his research interests broadly cover the topic of surgical effectiveness and clinical research.
It’s common for entrepreneurs to cast a wide net early on and imagine their market to be huge. The logic goes something like this: if the market is worth a hundred billion dollars, then even if 1% of it is captured, the company will be making a billion dollars.
All this sounds good in theory but in practice, it never works this way.
In the first episode of Bold Conjectures podcast, I talk to Dr Anders Sandberg who is a Senior Research Fellow at Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University. His academic collaborators include nanotechnology pioneer Eric Dexler and the philosopher Nick Bostrom.
A massive, 100-part essay.
I recently finished this excellent short book titled What Has Government Done To Our Money. It's available on the Internet for free and I highly recommend reading it. But in case you want the key insights, here are my notes.
Determined to never let a crisis go to waste, I and rest of the leaders at my company reflected on how the year went by for us and the lessons that stood out. I decided that it'll be a good idea to publicly share these learnings, so here they are.
There are two ways an entrepreneur can fail: a) launch a product that nobody desires; b) launch a product that people desire but with no significant advantage over established competitors (hence give no strong reason for a customer to switch away).
These two failure modes have their analogous success modes: a) culture-led startup success where a new desire is discovered and fulfilled; b) technology-led startup success where new technology is used to fulfill an existing desire.
The business that dominates the market is often not the first but the one that learns from the first to finally get it right enough to penetrate the mass market. Think Facebook, not Myspace. Think Google, not Altavista. Think iPhone, not Blackberry. History is littered with late movers over taking first movers.
But why?