Editor’s Note
Between running two simultaneous user studies and interviewing pediatricians, I didn’t have much time to put into the newsletter today, but I hope to return with a full episode next week!
Until that time, I hope you enjoy the episode, and please do make sure to reach out with any questions and/or thoughts!
Cheers,
Robinson
What I’m Reading
A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st century is a provocative exploration of the tension between our evolutionary history and our modern woes that oscillates between fascinating and frustrating.
Written by the evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein – who gained notoriety as culture war martyrs when they resigned from Evergreen College in 2017 – A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st century argues that by disregarding the facts of evolved human nature, the modern world is less healthy, less happy and pretty much, heading for collapse.
At the center of their argument is a mental model that I will take with me from here on out: There always exists a trade-off between any two traits and in any system where there are trade-offs and competition occurs between different hypotheses about what the efficient frontier between those traits is - evolution occurs.
I emphasized efficient frontier in the previous paragraph because I think that is an important metaphor to import into this mental model. The efficient frontier is a concept from finance used to describe
the set of optimal portfolios that offer the highest expected return for a defined level of risk or the lowest risk for a given level of expected return. Portfolios that lie below the efficient frontier are sub-optimal because they do not provide enough return for the level of risk. Portfolios that cluster to the right of the efficient frontier are sub-optimal because they have a higher level of risk for the defined rate of return.
Or in layman's terms, the efficient frontier is the set of portfolios that maximize your bang for your buck. A species, business, a meme cannot be defined by its approach to a single trade-off, it is defined by its approach to a portfolio of trade-offs.
When you take this concept of a “portfolio of trade-offs” and apply it to evolution, it helps form a more accurate understanding of “survival of the fittest”. Fitness is not the most muscular person at the gym or the person with the best resting heart rate. Instead, fitness can be thought of as a portfolio strategy of all the different trade-offs this actor will make based on the environmental niche they are operating in. In other words, whether the portfolio strategy is optimal or not is dependent on the environment.
Classic examples of the types of trade-offs that might be part of an organism’s profile are speed vs. might, growth rate vs. carrying capacity, stress response, the timing of reproduction, and offspring quantity/quality (r-selection vs. k-selection).
As you can likely intuit from the example above and your own lived experience, these evolutionary tradeoffs are not confined just to the biological world, we see them in our own lives all the time. From our personal lives and how to allocate time to our economic lives and where to allocate money, to how our workplaces decide to allocate resources or position products/services, we have a portfolio of trade-off decisions in just about every facet of our lives.
So, and here’s “the big idea”: if we accept the premise that in any system where there are trade-offs between traits and competition occurs between different hypotheses about what the efficient frontier between those traits is - evolution occurs, then we can safely say that just about every system we inhabit - whether work, school, economic, biological or cultural - is an evolutionary system.
That this is the case has profound implications, chief among them that, whether in the fields of economics, business strategy, or self-help, we should be applying evolutionary thinking to nearly every facet of our lives.
This is also what the authors attempt to do in The Hunger-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st century, unfortunately, as noted above, they don’t always do so successfully. Where Heying and Weinstein are strong is in describing the dynamics of evolvable systems, where they are less strong, is in prescribing prescriptions based on those dynamics.
Some of the prescriptions– offered in bullet points closing each chapter are boiler point and not debatable (get more exercise; get more sleep); others are oddly specific (go barefoot more often), and some are just plain weird (don’t let markets get involved in music or comedy). But as far as I could tell, little of it appears to be based on actual research.
And throughout the book, much of the studies they do cite, are based on flimsy data. For example, when they say that water fluoridation is “neurotoxic” to children based on one reference to a “pilot study”. Or when they lazily repeat false information from other pop-science books, such as the “fact” that all known species sleep (some, including certain amphibians, don’t!). Or in the final chapter, in where they embrace the “degrowth” movement.
This all stands in stark contrast to the personas they exude, which are, I’m sorry to say, incredibly annoying. As you get further into the book, you find yourself rolling your eyes more and more as they congratulate themselves for their choice in monogamy or the outcomes of their parental choices - too often treating anecdotes from their own experiences as hard science.
In other words, the authors were forced to make a trade-off between an advice book that reflected their own personal philosophies born from subjective experience and a book teaching evolutionary thinking and they were unable to find the efficient frontier.
That said, as I noted at the top of this review, the book did contain some important concepts and mental models that I will take with me going forward. You can find the book and those mental models here.
What I’m Listening To
London jazz scenesters Danalogue and Betamax, who make up two-thirds of The Comet is Coming (with Shabaka Hutchings), veer from astral synths to spacey atmospheric tones to post-punk disquiet with a Sun Ra lightness on their highly anticipated fourth full-length album, Dopamine.
Dopamine is a brilliant concept album inspired by a sci-fi theme in which robots have taken over the world, and humanities attempt to destroy them. Featuring upcoming free jazz punk vocalist Nuha Ruby Ra on the gloriously belligerent title track, the album as a whole is an almost perfect slice of ultra-modern jazz.
Listen to it here.
Worth your Time
Crypto Bezos (Not Boring) - What kind of business would Jeff Bezos start if he was getting started today? Similar to how Amazon was built to take advantage of the native dynamics of the web in order to deliver the best customer experience, today Bezos would start a company built to take advantage of the dynamics of web3. Specifically, the alignment of consumer and brand, similar to what I wrote about here back in Week 13.
Sid Meier and the Meaning of “Civilization” (New Yorker) - How one video game tells the story of an industry.
Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition (Oxford) - This paper shows show that if solar photovoltaics, wind, batteries, and hydrogen electrolyzers continue to follow their current exponentially increasing deployment trends for another decade, we achieve a near-net-zero emissions energy system within twenty-five years. In contrast, a slower transition (which involves deployment growth trends that are lower than current rates) is more expensive and a nuclear-driven transition is far more expensive.
Six Rules That Will Define Our Second Pandemic Winter (The Atlantic) - The pandemic keeps changing, but these principles can guide your thinking through the seasons to come.
Tokens are a new digital primitive, analogous to the website (cdixon) - A16z resident prophet (Chris Dixon) argues that major computing waves generally have two eras: the skeuomorphic era and the native era and the implications of what happens during the transition between eras.
Facebook Grew Marketplace to 1 Billion Users. Now Scammers Are Using It to Target People Around the World. (ProPublica) - ProPublica identified thousands of Marketplace listings and profiles that broke the company’s rules, revealing how Facebook failed to safeguard users.
Contemporary Art on Instagram
As I’ve recently ventured deeper into the contemporary art rabbit hole one app is there holding the door open for me. That app is, of course, Instagram. Instagram is at its best when serving as a visual medium to connect the masses with art. I frequently use it to discover new records. As mentioned above, I recently have become more enchanted with contemporary art - specifically paintings, so here are a few of my recent favorites that Instagram has helped me to discover.
https://www.instagram.com/thaimainhard/
https://www.instagram.com/garykomarin/
Jordy Kerwick @badreljundigallery
https://www.instagram.com/jimmy_ralsmark_art/