Freya India, writing in After Babel:

When so few seem interested in being a person, isn’t that the best time to be one? Maybe this is a moment for optimism. You just have to be human.

[…]

To have your own voice you need to venture out into the world. You need to take risks and try things, you need experiences and adventures…So go outside, say yes to things, be scared and excited and uncomfortable. Feel your hands shake before you speak, your legs ache after a long day, your face flush when asking her out. Experience it all, the real world with all your senses, the fear of getting lost, the relief of finding your way, the hands of another person. Look people in the eye and learn about the world from living in it.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on his decision to start an online bookstore in the 1990s:

The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called the regret minimization framework. I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and look back on my life and I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have. And I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. And I knew that that would haunt me every day. So when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.

With unavoidable uncertainty and wild problems, sometimes regret minimization is the best paradigm we have.

Basecamp’s Jason Fried’s brief discussion of product development should be required reading for anyone who designs software, including EHRs, PACS, dictation, or whatever new dumb AI implementation someone is pitching to revolutionize healthcare (but that no one talked to an actual doctor about).

The critical tension is the balance between making features obvious, easy, and possible. You have to have opinions, and you have to choose, because being everything to everyone isn’t an option.

From Developmental Editing by Scott Norton:

Few pleasures are as great as the taste of a fresh idea. A new insight melts in the brain like chocolate on the tongue. Whether the insight is unprecedented in human history or news only to yourself doesn’t matter; the first time a thought occurs is always magic.

That magic is so fickle, perishable. I always find the strong desire to capture as much of it as possible, and the more I can horde upfront the better chance I have of making it to the finish line of anything.

Kevin Kelly, adding 101 new bits to his growing collection of pithy advice. A few of my favorites:

• Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.
• Try to define yourself by what you love and embrace, rather than what you hate and refuse.
• Read a lot of history so you can understand how weird the past was; that way you will be comfortable with how weird the future will be.
• 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 patience you need for big things, is developed by your patience with the little things.
• There is a profound difference between thinking less of yourself (not useful), and thinking of yourself less (better).
  Avoid making any kind of important decision when you are either hungry, angry, lonely, or tired (HALT)

From a highly enjoyable “So you wanna de-bog yourself” (about getting “unstuck”) by Adam Mastroianni:

“Declining the dragon” – a medieval knight metaphor for getting unstuck: Sometimes I’ll know exactly what I need to do in order to leave the bog, but I’m too afraid to do it. I’m afraid to tell the truth, or make someone mad, or take a risk. And so I dither, hoping that the future will not require me to be brave.

Everybody thinks this is a bad strategy because it merely prolongs my suffering, but that’s not why it’s a dumb thing to do. Yes, every moment I dither is a moment I suffer. But when I finally do the brave thing, that’s not the climax of my suffering—that moment is the opposite of suffering. Being brave feels good. I mean, have you ever stood up to a bully, or conquered stage fright, or finally stopped being embarrassed about what you love? It’s the most wonderful feeling in the world. Whenever you chicken out, you don’t just feel the pain of cowardice; you miss out on the pleasure of courage.

Medieval knights used to wander around hoping for honorable adventures to pop up so that they could demonstrate their bravery. They were desperate for big, scary dragons to appear. When I put off doing the brave thing, I am declining the dragon: missing an opportunity to do something that might be scary in the moment but would ultimately make me feel great.

The whole post makes for great early January reading.

From The World I See, a memoir by the godmother of AI, Dr. Fei-Fei Li:

This, collectively, is the next North Star: reimagining AI from the ground up as a human-centered practice. I don’t see it as a change in the journey’s direction so much as a broadening of its scope. AI must become as committed to humanity as it’s always been to science. It should remain collaborative and deferential in the best academic tradition, but unafraid to confront the real world. Starlight, after all, is manifold. Its white glow, once unraveled, reveals every color that can be seen.

Modern Illustration is a delightful online archive of vintage (c.1950-1975) illustration curated by Zara Picken.

On living in a tumultuous, uncertain world, from the Free Press’ Abigail Shrier:

Overinvest, never underinvest, in people around you and in those you love. Particularly in a world with poor visibility, they are the closest thing any of us has to security. Give the community you inhabit a real shot and make a go of ensuring it succeeds.

If crime skyrockets, if you must leave the city, if our great civilization goes bust, you won’t regret the time you spent taking your kids and their friends out for ice cream. You’ll all carry with you memories that will bolster you wherever you go. Do all these things right up until the very moment you decide to make a change.

Here is the tough love you requested: You won’t regret having wholeheartedly invested in your home and community for as long as they are yours. I can almost guarantee, at the end of your journey, you won’t lament, “Civilization collapsed. I needed to flee. And meanwhile, I’d just bought this damn sofa.”

Paul Ford, writing in Wired about post-bubble normalized (i.e. boring) AI:

People often wonder how to get back to the vibes of the early, heady days of the internet. It’s easy: Crash the global economy and leave lots of young people with keyboards and spare time. Make it boring. That’s what’s interesting.

In real life, you can—to an exent—choose your community and who you hang out with. Online with social media, that’s much, much harder. This is a good video (“Something Strange Happens When You Trace How Connected We Are”) from Veritasium, and if you’re busy, that link takes you to the section on how the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma works when you add in network effects. Game theory tells us not to feed the trolls.

“For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it.” – LA Paul

I’m running low on my stash of Cometeer coffee. If you’re interested, you can get $20 off your first order + free shipping and help subsidize my terrible caffeine addiction. (Full review here. Not an ad, but I’ve been ordering for the past three years and I really do like cheaper coffee.)

“Shame is a dream killer” and 64 other helpful short notes from Seth Godin.

Morgan Housel, “Little Ways the World Works”:

Chamath Palihapitiya once noted that however fast your business grows, that’s the half-life for how quickly it can be destroyed. So many companies, flush with cheap money from previous years, are learning this right now. Every business and every industry has a natural growth rate – push beyond it and short-term growth comes at the cost of long-term quality, and eventually survival.

After 40 years, Spaceballs is set to return. Mel Brooks, a national treasure, will, incredibly, be over 100 if it comes out in 2027 as planned. My son is overdue to see the original.

From Obsolescence Rents: Teamsters, Truckers, and Impending Innovations, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research:

We consider large, permanent shocks to individual occupations whose arrival date is uncertain. We are motivated by the advent of self-driving trucks, which will dramatically reduce demand for truck drivers. Using a bare-bones overlapping generations model, we examine an occupation facing obsolescence. We show that workers must be compensated to enter the occupation – receiving what we dub obsolescence rents – with fewer and older workers remaining in the occupation. We investigate the market for teamsters at the dawn of the automotive truck as an á propos parallel to truckers themselves, as self-driving trucks crest the horizon. As widespread adoption of trucks drew nearer, the number of teamsters fell, the occupation became ‘grayer’, and teamster wages rose, as predicted by the model.

“Obsolence rents” is a neat phrase. I remember a friend growing up whose aging father made a great living maintaining legacy systems in the nearly defunct computer language COBOL.

The toddler puts on a show of having an argument, but they are holding a tantrum in reverse. If they ‘win’ the argument, no tantrum is needed. If they lose, they can tell themselves that they tried but the other person deserved the tantrum because they didn’t listen.

– Seth Godin, “How to win an argument with a toddler” (P.S. You can’t)

Giving advice and selling can’t be the same thing.

Nassim Taleb, pithily summarizing a lot of problems. For example, the core problem of much of the financial planning industry.

I signed up for my Threads and my Bluesky accounts in addition to OG Twitter/X or even LinkedIn a while back but never started really using them (@benwhitemd across the board, links above–give me a follow?). I’ve now set those up so that I can more easily share tweets of new blog posts across all platforms to account for reader preference (and I even added the cute little logos to my sidebar here).

It’s an incredible privilege to work at a place and live in a country that is willing to set aside money to answer these existential questions. I heard a phrase the other week, existential humility, and I really liked that. We’re this complex life form that has evolved over billions of years to the point where we can ask these questions — and yet we’re perhaps not the only ones in the universe. And if we could know that for certain, that would be humbling in the most wonderful possible way.

– Astronomer Vanessa Bailey in Dave Eggers’ “The Searchers,” a profile on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

If you haven’t yet read an explainer on “AI”, I consider Jeremiah Lowin’s “An Intuitive Guide to How LLMs Work” to be a good one.