Wisereads Vol. 61 — Dario Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Shane Parrish's collection on thinking like history's greatest leaders, The Great Mental Models. This week, we're sharing a classic of subterranean sci-fi: Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
the quiet art of attention
Bill Wear (aka Stormrider), a technical author at Canonical, contemplates the discipline of mastering one's mind. "The only thing we truly possess, the only thing we might, with enough care, exert some mastery over, is our mind. It is not a realization of resignation, but rather of liberation. For if the mind can be ordered, if it can be made still in the midst of this restless life, then we have already discovered the key to a deeper kind of freedom."
Tap into the “Hemingway effect” to finish what you start
Ernest Hemingway used a trick that aligned with the findings of psychologists Bluma Zeigarnik and Maria Ovsiankina, who discovered that unfinished tasks create mental tension. "Because Hemingway left his work at an interesting moment, it became easier to return to his typewriter the next day. Think of it like a TV show cliffhanger. If you are interested in the story, you’re more likely to return to the show next season. Hemingway essentially incorporated self-made cliffhangers into his productivity schedule to maintain his desire to see things through."
Machines of Loving Grace
While Anthropic often highlights AI risks, CEO Dario Amodei shares his optimism about its applications for fields like biology and economics in his essay named after a poem by Richard Brautigan. "If our core hypothesis about AI progress is correct, then the right way to think of AI is not as a method of data analysis, but as a virtual biologist who performs all the tasks biologists do, including designing and running experiments in the real world (by controlling lab robots or simply telling humans which experiments to run – as a Principal Investigator would to their graduate students), inventing new biological methods or measurement techniques, and so on. It is by speeding up the whole research process that AI can truly accelerate biology."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Cabel Sasser, Panic - XOXO Festival (2024)
In rural Washington, Cabel Sasser happened upon an obscure McDonald's mural by forgotten artist Wes Cook, leading him to reflect on legacy. "I'm starting to realize that Wes Cook wasn't just a McDonald's mural guy. Wes Cook was a pivotal person in art and design that nobody knows… And I started thinking about that old expression, where we all die twice: when we die, and the last time anyone says our name."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
I distilled my 4 years of marketing lessons into minimalistic visuals
To make marketing messages stick, Yasmine Khosrowshahi suggests cutting to the heart of what customers want. Her tips include: "People don't care about your product. They care about what your product can do for them," and "Selling prevention is hard. Selling a cure is easy."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Measuring the Moat
Morgan Stanley researchers explore frameworks for assessing how companies sustain competitive advantages and deliver consistent value to investors. "Notwithstanding how hard it is to create value over time, there is lots of evidence that some companies do deliver persistently attractive returns on investment. And the degree of persistence for public companies in the U.S., both in terms of what they report and what the stock market anticipates, appears to rise and fall over time."
Hand-picked book of the week
Journey to the Center of the Earth
French writer Jules Verne penned many science fiction novels, but Journey to the Center of the Earth is perhaps his most beloved. In this ode to geology and cryptography, a professor and his cautious nephew decipher an ancient manuscript that leads them on a daring expedition to the Earth's core through the Icelandic volcano, Snæfelljökull.
"Our principle is, that books, instead of growing mouldy behind an iron grating, should be worn out under the eyes of many readers. Therefore, these volumes are passed from one to another, read over and over, referred to again and again; and it often happens that they find their way back to their shelves only after an absence of a year or two."
This edition of Journey to the Center of the Earth is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Pose Ponder
Grappling with what it means to be a good human in the Anthropocene, former professor Tracy Gustilo writes thoughtfully on philosophy, reading, note-taking, and travel. From A Philosophy of Travel: "I travel to learn — and I want to learn to travel well. I have no real desire to collect 'experiences' of places — just say No to bucket lists! My goal is to stretch to accommodate what's around me, and to try hard to see beyond whatever's become habitual and mundane at home."