Wisereads Vol. 166 — Finding Focus by Dr. Zelana Montminy, Christopher Marquis on The Case Against Business School, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It, by former MythBusters cohost Adam Savage. This week, we're sharing a preview of Dr. Zelana Montminy's Finding Focus: Own Your Attention in an Age of Distraction.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
The Case Against Business School
Coming from Christopher Marquis, a professor who's taught at Harvard, Cornell, and Cambridge, the argument in favor of shutting down business schools seems a little less absurd. "The modern business school is designed to promote dealmaking, simplification and optimization. This mind-set has escaped containment and has spread to the wider world. Business-educated elites increasingly populate political leadership, bringing with them a transactional view of public life. One investigation found that out of 45 current heads of state who had studied in the United States, 10 were business majors, and six of those also earned M.B.A.s."
Neural Networks Are Already Clean
Interpretability researcher Nick Cammarata argues neural networks are far more legible than the field, himself included, long assumed. "So there were two explanations for polysemanticity, and I helped propose both. In some ways, they're opposites: generalization groups similar things together and superposition groups unrelated things together. Superposition is the one the field bet on and, until recently, so did I. But I now think recursive generalization was basically right."
How the Claude Code team does code review
While the team building Claude Code more than doubled their merged PRs, they cut the revert rate by over 40 percent. The secret is in being intentional about when humans are part of the review process, explains Addy Osmani. "Now, review runs continuously, more like spellcheck while you write. Most changes have been reviewed and fixed by Claude at least once before a human is asked to look. This catches most routine mistakes, and saves team attention for higher-level questions and scrutiny."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
What Sitting All Day Does to Your Brain and Body | Keith Diaz
Even regular exercisers face risks from sitting all day, says exercise scientist Keith Diaz. His lab searched for a fix: "The answer we found was a five-minute walk every half hour. This reduced the blood sugar spike after eating by about 60 percent. That's the size of reduction you would expect to see if you put someone on medication to manage their blood sugar levels."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires...
After 48 hours with SF billionaires and AI founders, Greg Isenberg came home with 21 learnings, including a new litmus test: "At dinner, someone asked the table, 'If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?' HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey
Thirty-five years of goal-setting research, summarized by psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham in their classic 2002 paper, shows why setting vague goals backfires. "We found that specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than urging people to do their best... In short, when people are asked to do their best, they do not do so. This is because do-your-best goals have no external referent and thus are defined idiosyncratically."
Hand-picked book of the week
Finding Focus
Most of us know what it's like to pick up our phones for a quick task and lose twenty minutes, or finish a busy day wondering where our attention went. In Finding Focus, clinical psychologist Dr. Zelana Montminy explains why concentrating has become so difficult and what we can do about it.
Drawing on the science of attention, she explores how sleep, nutrition, exercise, and digital distractions affect our ability to focus. She also shares practical techniques for improving memory, managing distractions, and being more present in everyday life, including a 21-day plan for building better habits. Montminy recalls her own wake-up call while answering a work email at a red light:
"Waiting in my car at the intersection, I seized the moment of downtime to answer a work email. As I finished up, feeling pleased that I'd completed this task so efficiently, I became aware that my son was loudly pleading from his seat. 'Mom, I'm talking to you!' I hadn't heard a word he'd said."
If you enjoy the preview of Finding Focus, you can pick up a copy wherever you get your books.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
School of the Unconformed
Ruth and Peco Gaskovski write School of the Unconformed, on family, education, and staying grounded in the "Machine Age." From Art is in the 'I' of the Creator: "The power of AI art rests not in its originality, but its stunning conventionality. AI art is the glorification of the average."