Why a Newsletter?
I've been contemplating publishing a newsletter for some time now. I started sharing links here or there to one or two individuals, but it has grown to a larger and larger group of people. It's been difficult to remember who I've sent what and how to decide what to send who. It's come to this: sharing everything I've found interesting over the last week.
Books
ReWork by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson - Jason and David provided candid advice to people looking to build a startup or small business. It may seem like a niche read, but there is a lot to learn from startup founders. I found myself highlighting paragraphs upon paragraphs of advice and analogies that apply to any type of work. It's even a reason why I started this newsletter.
Some notable quotes:
Zero to One by Peter Thiel - Another book on startups. Peter knows what he's talking about. Of all the books I've read on startups, this is one of the best.
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli - I'm still digesting everything in this. if you're at all interested in physics and the concept of time, you should read this book.
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis - How can you say no to a book by Michael Lewis about risk? This book was eye opening and depressing. The federal government does so much for individuals in America, and you would never know it.
The Big Short by Michael Lewis - I'm impressed at how well the movie brought to life the story written by Michael. I've read about the financial crisis and heard first hand accounts of it, but this is the best and most infuriating of all of them.
I don't usually power through five books this fast, but these were all enjoyable reads.
Podcasts
Some extraordinary episodes from this week:
This Week in Algorithmic Bias - Not So Standard Deviations
Gregory Zuckerman on the Quant Revolution - Masters in Business
The Future of Blockchain and Financial Services with Chad Cascarilla - Invest Like the Best
The WeWork “Acquisition” (with Dan Primack) - Acquired
The Care and Feeding of Data Scientists: Becoming a Data Science Manager - Linear Digressions
Videos
Outside of bingeing Bon Appétit episodes to relax from exam stress, there was one notable video that I watched this week:
Mark Blyth - A Brief History of How We Got Here and Why
I'd like to spend some time over the coming weeks digging in to some of Mark's claims. I don't know enough to make a decision on whether his claims make sense, but I have to give him credit on a thought provoking talk. If anyone has related material that goes deeper into the details, I'd appreciate the link.
Articles
Technical Leadership Masterclass by Ruth Malan - Lately I've been thinking about decision making. This slide deck from Bredemeyer Consulting is one of those reads where I finish, start to dig, and end up down a rabbit hole. There are concepts discussed that will keep me occupied for a while.
Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path by Keavy McMinn - Managers, leaders, individual contributors – I am always interested in how people decided their career path and what drove them to that decision. It may be that I'm at a crux in my career where those decisions are also starting to happen.
The Care and Feeding of Data Scientists - This is the paper discussed in the Linear Digressions podcast listed above.
We’re Incentivizing Bad Science by James Zimring - I'm quite fond of the writer's analogies between the financial crisis and bad science. Incentives are powerful and lead to more unintended consequences that we can imagine.
The More the Fed Cuts, the More QE It Will Have to Do by Taps Coogan - Speaking of incentives.. The Fed did end up lowering rates on Wednesday, but this article is the best I've seen on the repercussions of those cuts on the repo market. It should go without saying how important liquidity is on corporate balance sheets given the recent economic history.
Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won’t Die by Matthew MacDonald - Microsoft Access haunts my dreams. He brings up many good points on why Access has been so sticky, and I think the same arguments could be said about Excel and VBA. The “Power User” of old hasn't left the enterprise quite yet, but it really should.
Apple 2019 10-K - It is shocking how quickly the growth of the iPhone has decayed – a 14% decline in net sales year-over-year. Services have grown to such a larger portion of Apple's revenue that I wonder how much more Apple can milk out of their die hard customer base.
Please Stop Explaining Black Box Models for High-Stakes Decisions by Cynthia Rudin - I could not agree more with the paper's premise:
“Black box machine learning models are currently being used for high stakes decision-making throughout society, causing problems throughout healthcare, criminal justice, and in other domains. People have hoped that creating methods for explaining these black box models will alleviate some of these problems, but trying to explain black box models, rather than creating models that are interpretable in the first place, is likely to perpetuate bad practices and can potentially cause catastrophic harm to society. There is a way forward – it is to design models that are inherently interpretable.”
GDP: A Digital Remix - The biggest takeaway from this report by ING:
“On conservative assumptions, we believe official data understates US GDP growth by 0.75% per annum and overstates inflation by 0.4% due to inadequate measurement of the digital economy and the exclusion of investment in certain intangibles.”
Buffett's Alpha - It doesn't surprise me that Buffett's stock picking and not his affect on management is the largest source of alpha. He is the best value investor in the world. You don't need to drastically change management like a 3M when you're that good at picking value.
Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations - I feel strongly about bias in algorithms and machine learning and the potential for abuse by those none the wiser. There is work that needs to be done, and regulators need to catch up quickly.
1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly - I've read this before, but Kevin's words never get old. This concept written about over a decade ago describes what I see in the maker community on youtube.
So You Think You Have a Power Law — Well Isn't That Special? - Power Laws come up all the time in actuarial work. I haven't read the paper the article is referencing, but the big takeaway for me was that sometimes are assumptions are flat out wrong.
SASE panel and The Moral Economy of Technology- I've been trying to formulate an opinion on technology and society. It's something I'm conflicted about. I don't think everyone being luddites is the answer, but I do see the negative consequences technology can create.