Wisereads Vol. 36 — Get Better at Anything with Scott Young, advice from Kevin Kelly, and more
Last week, we shared Growth of the Soil, a Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian novel by Knut Hamsun. This week, we're sharing a preview of Scott Young's upcoming release on the science of learning, Get Better at Anything.
Because our team is traveling back from our offsite in Norway, this week's Wisereads edition is more streamlined than usual. But don't worry: normal programming resumes next week.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
101 Additional Advices
"There should be at least one thing in your life you enjoy despite being no good at it. This is your play time, which will keep you young. Never apologize for it."
The Indispensability of Risk
"The bottom line on the quest for superior investment returns is clear: You shouldn’t expect to make money without bearing risk, but you shouldn’t expect to make money just for taking risk. You have to sacrifice certainty, but it has to be done skillfully and intelligently, and with emotion under control."
Why you need a "WTF Notebook"
"There's no faster way to totally sink my credibility, as a new team member, by making a huge fuss over something that's not a problem, or that the team doesn't see as a problem, or that there's already an effort to fix, or that there's a really simple way to fix that I just didn't see at first... the WTF Notebook gives me a place to park the impulse to fix it now, damn it! until I have more context for deciding what to work on first."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Mark Zuckerberg - Llama 3, $10B Models, Caesar Augustus, & 1 GW Datacenters
"From wherever you sit there's going to be some actor who you don't trust. If they're the ones who have the super strong AI, I
think that that's potentially a much bigger risk."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
How the Navy Seal fall asleep within 2 minutes
"When should you do it? The 4-7-8 method is a natural tranquilizer you can use anytime, anywhere... Your secret weapon against restless nights."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants
"Taken together, the development of more advanced AI assistants – and their potential for deep integration into our political, economic, social and personal lives – may herald a new phase in our relationship with AI technology; one in which questions about alignment with our individual and collective goals, interests and values come to the fore."
Hand-picked book of the week
Get Better at Anything
Scott Young's meticulously researched upcoming release, Get Better at Anything, explores the three keys to learning: observing others, practice, and feedback. Each key is broken down into four maxims and illustrated through case studies and stories, beginning with a look into how livestreaming transformed the Tetris leaderboards by allowing players to watch and imitate each other's techniques.
"Contrary to our species' presumed superiority, the researchers found that children and apes performed similarly on puzzles involving spatial, quantitative and causal reasoning… The clear exception was in social learning, where the toddlers were easily able to solve a problem when given a demonstration, but virtually none of the apes could… The cliché of mindless learning, 'monkey see, monkey do,' has it exactly backward. Imitation is the foundation for human ingenuity."
Scott is generously sharing the introduction with Readwise users. If you enjoy the preview, we encourage you to preorder a full copy before it comes out May 7th to take advantage of Scott's stack of preorder bonuses: access to his course on motivation, a fireside chat, and all four of his self-published books.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Scott H. Young
Scott, also a programmer and entrepreneur, writes regularly on everything from memory to motivation and habits on his blog. From My 7 Rules for Happiness: "A major philosophical tension in the pursuit of happiness is the conflict between accepting things as they are and striving to change them for the better. There is a third way: accepting the broadly unchangeable factors of your life while seeking to make the most of the things under your control."