My recent thoughts
Understanding unvaccinated people
- Germany has one of the lowest vaccination rates in Europe at 69% currently . Unvaccinated people are currently in lockdown. The parliament are considering whether to make corona vaccines mandatory. 1
- I am vaccinated. However, I sympathise with people who are unvaccinated. In any complex area, misunderstanding is inevitable.2 If I didn't know the basics of biology and immunology, I would also be very resistant to accept a state's wish to insert something into my body.3
- I think that my resistance would be enhanced if I had grown up in a country that tried to monitor every citizen’s thoughts. Yesterday, I chatted to someone who was born in Berlin in 1989 when it was part of East Germany. He later discovered that the Stasi (the East German secret police) had a file about him. The Stasi’s file described him as "potentially subversive", due to his family's history. The Stasi created this record about him when he was 6 months old.
Finding the best book
- I have been thinking about how there are so many published books: the number of ISBN-registered books was ~130M in 2010.4 Yet there is no effective way to search through the ocean of content to find the best material for you.5
- Given the volume of content, there is a good chance that the books that I know are insignificant in personal impact compared to the optimal books for me. The ‘best’ books are somewhere in the world, undiscovered by me.
- A large number of optimal book candidates, probably the majority, are inaccessible to me. Maybe, like my godfather who published several children's books but is uninterested in marketing, they are sitting on someone's shelf or hard drive.
- Focusing on the content that I could access, existing recommendation systems seem flawed. They either: a) emphasise profit, providing recommendations based on content that people with similar interests have read that the company has in stock, or b) are biased by advertising spending to show you popular and mediocre content .
- For example, Amazon asks me to buy the 'Lean Startup' by Eric Ries several times a week. In contrast, there must be so many amazing, life-changing books out there that I could access right now by clicking the browser bar at the top of this page, and pressing a few keys on this keyboard. But I don't know what to type.
- I wonder what a personal content recommendation system, which aimed to find the best possible content for you would look like. I'll think more about this. However, I bet that it wouldn't ask me to read Eric Ries.
Personality change-death
- I have been thinking about how people's personalities change at different rates. This might sound a bit obvious. One person who exposes himself/herself to new things - perhaps by changing jobs or moving to live in a different country - is very likely to change at a ƒaster rate than the person whose life has less variation.
- This personality change effect can be strong and personally jarring. For example, during the last few months I had a long conversation in-person with someone that I knew 10 years ago.
- I was struck by how much had changed since we had last spoken. It felt like I was speaking to someone with no similar interests. The person seemed alien to me: entirely conventional, fairly unambitious, and highlighted no flaws in the things that I was saying.
- It was disappointing that the aspiring, contrarian person - who I remember knowing - is effectively dead. I suppose the principle is that everyone changes, but at very different speeds and directions.
Nomad money tracker - part 1 of 4 products in 8 weeks
- As part of exploring what product to focus on next, I am building a small product every fortnight for the next 8 weeks.
- I started on Monday. The current product is aimed at people who live abroad and have multiple bank accounts (i.e., nomads or expats).
- I have been losing track of various pots of money across different bank accounts. So, I am building this primarily for myself.
- Currently, 3 days into building, users can connect their bank accounts. The dashboard will then show them any future spending in any of their accounts automatically.
- Let me know if you would be interested in trying the product when I launch :) I will send out beta invites after I finish.
Outro
- With this newsletter, I achieved my goal of writing 25 consecutive weekly newsletters, beginning with newsletter 1 on 23 June. In that time, the newsletter has changed from a series of notes to a series of oversized tweets.
- Next up, I am considering doing: a) A tech-trends or general interest podcast, perhaps with an email transcript (I like the idea of interviewing the very interesting people who read this newsletter), or b) Longer form writing. I would be interested to know what you think.
- I hope that you are having a MEGA week.
Tom :)
What about the right to control your body?
My general view that ignorance leads to apparently malicious or selfish choices reminds me of this: https://www.the-philosophy.com/socrates-ignorance
Also, it is true that the newer the technology, the less information you have about its long-term harm. For example, to most people today, the idea of inhaling addictive smoke into your lungs seems like a clearly bad idea. But the long-term effects of smoking were not clear in the 1950s.
I note that pouring intoxicating poisonous fluid into your stomach is still popular today.
https://mashable.com/archive/number-of-books-in-the-world
This applies to pretty much any media, including books, articles, blog, films.
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