Wisereads Vol. 7 — Moxie Marlinspike on career advice, the New Yorker on Dan Ariely's data manipulation, Reid Hoffman's ebook on AI, and more
Last week, we shared the entirety of Triangle Selling: Sales Fundamentals to Fuel Growth by Cory Bray, Readwise’s second ever paying customer. This week, we’re sharing Impromptu: Amplifying our Humanity Through AI, an optimistic take on AI authored not only by Reid Hoffman — PayPal alumnus, LinkedIn cofounder, and now Greylock partner — but also with help from GPT-4.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?
Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino built their careers studying how and when people cheat, but now they're the ones under scrutiny for fabricating data. "'When you look at [Gino’s paper], it just makes no sense,' [one professor] said. But, he added, 'even in safe spaces in my world, to bring up that someone is a data fabricator—it's, like, 'Our friend John, do you think he might be a cannibal?'"
How To Actually Grow On Social Media (What They Don’t Tell You)
Dan Koe’s first attempt at making it on Instagram was cringeworthy in hindsight, but the failure helped him learn the rules of the game. Now he has an audience of over 1.6M followers. "Social media growth is so straightforward that everyone overcomplicates it, or they don’t pay attention to it at all."
Career Advice
If Signal founder and privacy advocate Moxie Marlinspike had his druthers, young people seeking career advice would first explore life outside supporting structures altogether. But he has tips for those not willing to hitchhike to Alaska too. "As a young person, I think the best thing you can do is to ignore all [the selling points of the job] and simply observe the older people working there. They are the future you."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
How I remember everything I read with Readwise
Tiago Forte is well-known within our community for his cohort-based courses on building a second brain. Now he's writing bestselling books and filming YouTube videos. We're biased, but this latest video is perhaps the best primer on Readwise yet. "Readwise gives you almost the 80/20 value of an entire second brain with [an] extremely small amount of effort."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
10 concepts that explain the modern world
Everyone's heard of mental models such as Occam's Razor or the Pareto Principle. Jash Dholani distills some lesser known concepts such as The Centipede's Dilemma on overthinking: "Ask a centipede which one of its hundred legs moves the fastest and it forgets how to move." Or the Zebra Effect on conformity: "Scientists once put a big red dot on one zebra so he could be tracked & studied. Lions zeroed in on him and hunted him with ease."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Tao Te Ching
Derek Lin shares with us his translation of the Tao Te Ching, in which a mysterious sage known as Lao Tzu, Laozi, or simply "The Old Master", uses paradox to show us The Way. "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name."
Hand-picked book of the week
Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI
PayPal alumnus, LinkedIn cofounder, and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman teams up with GPT-4 in his newest book: Impromptu: Amplifying our Humanity Through AI. Together, they share an optimistic vision where AI amplifies human abilities rather than replaces agency and labor.
"There will be other missteps. Detours. Important course corrections. But how could there not be? Human progress has always required risk, planning, daring, resolve, and especially, hope. That's why I'm writing this travelog: to add my voice to those counseling all these things, hope most of all."
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Maggie Appleton's Garden
Designer, anthropologist, and self-described "mediocre" developer Maggie Appleton gently tends to her blog as if it were a garden with beautifully illustrated, longform essays on software interfaces, note-taking, and more. From Squish Meets Structure: Designing with Language Models: "We politely call this phenomenon 'hallucination.' Which is when language models say things that don’t reflect reality. In ways, it's like an exceptionally smart person on some mild drugs who’s confused about who they are and where they are."