#76 How Curious! AI Demystified, Rebel Ideas, and Ask vs Guess Culture

Plus How to Do Great Work, The Retirement Trap, Noise Cameras, and much more!

Sep 06, 2023

Happy September, and welcome to the 76th issue of ‘How Curious!’✌️

Last month was full of travel. After a hiking holiday in Italy, I hopped between Munich, Cork, Prague, and Berlin before returning to Cork again. It’s always great catching up with friends and family, but I’m excited to chill in one place!

That place is Haarlem, just outside Amsterdam. I plan to spend the majority of the next few weeks there. If you’re nearby, do let me know!

💡 Quotes

Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more. - Paul Graham

Err on the side of starting. Which is easier when starting means starting small - Paul Graham

Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired. You retire by saving up enough money, becoming a monk, or by finding work that feels like play to you. - Naval Ravikant

📚 Books

🤖 You Look Like a Thing and I Love You

This book demystifies the world of artificial intelligence (AI) with wit, humour, and accessible insights. The author explores how AI algorithms work—and sometimes how they don't- through funny anecdotes and easy-to-understand explanations.

From AI-generated ice cream flavours to bizarre computer-composed pickup lines (from which the book's title derives), the author illustrates the oddities and eccentricities of AI training and results. Whilst AI has incredible potential, it's still far from perfect.

The problem with designing an AI to screen candidates for us: we aren’t really asking the AI to identify the best candidates. We’re asking it to identify the candidates that most resemble the ones our human hiring managers liked in the past.

A team at Stanford University once trained an AI to tell the difference between pictures of healthy skin and pictures of skin cancer. After the researchers trained their AI, however, they discovered that they had inadvertently trained a ruler detector instead — many of the tumors in their training data had been photographed next to rulers for scale.

As leading machine learning researcher Andrew Ng put it, worrying about an AI takeover is like worrying about overcrowding on Mars.

💡Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking

In "Rebel Ideas", Matthew Syed explores the importance of diverse thinking in today's complex world. He outlines real-world examples, including the intelligence failures of the CIA before 9/11 to emphasise that while individual intelligence is important, collective intelligence — the kind that emerges from diverse teams — is vital for innovation and problem-solving. The book doesn't just focus on the diversity of race, gender, or background, but digs deeper into cognitive diversity. Syed argues that different experiences, perspectives, and thinking processes are invaluable assets in our interconnected world.

This hints at the danger with homogenous groups: they are more likely to form judgements that combine excessive confidence with grave error.

When it comes to simple tasks, diversity is a distraction. You just want to hire people who are smart, fast, knowledgeable, whatever. Things are not just different, but the polar opposite, when it comes to complex problems.

The deepest problem of homogeneity is not the data that clone-like teams fail to understand, the answers they get wrong, the opportunities they don’t fully exploit. No, it is the questions they are not even asking, the data they haven’t thought to look for, the opportunities they haven’t realised are out there.

📚 View my digital bookshelf here to see my ranking of all my previous reads.

🎙️ Podcasts

🏄‍♂️ Kai Lenny: The World's Most Versatile Surfer On Adventure, Risk, & Turning Fear Into Fuel
In 2021, I attended a big wave surf competition in Nazaré, the home of the world’s largest waves. Since then, I’ve taken an interest in the sport. As a spectator, certainly not a participant! Kai Lenny is one of the world’s best big-wave surfers and an all-around incredible talent in most water sports. I enjoyed watching the ‘Life of Kai’ series; this recent podcast episode is also great.

🧑‍💻Des Traynor - Real Talk about AI and Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.340]
Des Traynor is a Co-founder and the Chief Strategy Officer of Irish tech unicorn Intercom. Intercom is renowned for having a top product team and is quick to embrace new technology. This podcast is an amazing discussion about Intercom’s approach to large language models, Des’s thoughts on AI startups, and investing.

This podcast is an absolute must for anyone building AI or SaaS products.

🚀 #314 Paul Graham (How To Do Great Work)
As the founder of Y Combinator, the best startup accelerator in the world, Paul Graham holds legendary status in the startup world. His essays are extremely popular, and this podcast discusses his latest post. - “How to do great work”.

There are many reasons curious people are more likely to do great work, but one of the most subtle is that by casting a wide net, they're more likely to find the right thing to work on in the first place. Okay, so back up top, when in doubt, optimize for interestingness.

In most cases, the recipe for doing great work is simply work hard on excitingly ambitious projects and something good will come of it.

Originality is the presence of new ideas not the absence of old ones.

🏆 Best of the web

❓ Ask vs guess culture
’Ask culture’ and ‘guess culture’ refer to different expectations and behaviours when making requests. Ask culture involves asking for what you want, even if it seems unreasonable, while guess culture involves only asking for something if you're pretty sure the other person will say yes.

The clash between these two cultures can lead to frustration and misunderstanding in personal relationships and the workplace. To navigate this clash, it can be helpful to understand the differences and to gradually lean more into ask culture, while also being comfortable with people saying no.

🔊 Amsterdam to use "noise cameras" against too loud cars
After living in London for several years, I grew to hate the noisy motorbikes that echoed through the city. I’m still surprised they’re allowed on the roads. If I were to stroll down the street blaring a fog horn, I would be reprimanded quickly! This move by Amsterdam is an interesting initial step to curb noise pollution.

🧓 The Retirement Trap
Society has a common approach to retirement. One where we grind and work hard until we’re 65+ in the hope of being happy and doing everything we wanted to do. I think this is deeply flawed, and I do my best to shape and live a life I don’t need to retire from. This short podcast and article explore the perils of deferred happiness, the retirement trap, and the beauty of the designed life.