RRR10: Summer's Gone, Acadia National Park, When To Challenge Feedback, Bard Extensions, and THE NBA IS BACK BABY!
☀️😶🌫️🏞🏔🌄🌊🤔🤖🏀🏀
Home at last…
What a few weeks it’s been! I’m feeling exceedingly happy about this past summer.
Yes, summer is over. At least it is for those of us in the northeastern U.S.
We’re cruising in for a cold landing… nothing gets me quite as animated as the good ole “daylight savings”, since, you know, you can save daylight just by arbitrarily calling it an hour earlier. Magic! 🪄🧙♂️.
I tried my hardest to extend the summer with three straight weeks of New England based travel. First, Portland, which I wrote about in RRR9.
Then, my family and I went to Rhode Island for vacation the week immediately after the Labor Day holiday here in the U.S.
The weather was accommodating for a beach vacation, as the weather spiked up into the 90s for likely the last time this year. There’s something about swimming in the ocean on a hot day that makes your soul smile 😃.
Last but not least, I shared with you all on last weeks edition of “Quick Hits” that I was in and around Bar Harbor, Maine, for my good friends wedding.
I also mentioned the wedding was up in the air thanks to Hurricane Lee (truly, no pun intended). Well, the happy couple made the bold decision to move the wedding forward to Friday, in order to ensure their nuptials. It worked out!
Still, we hung out in Bar Harbor that whole weekend. We lost power at the hotel in the wee hours of Saturday morning and didn’t get it back until around the same time Sunday. It was fun to hang with friends, sip some beers, and play cards while all hell was breaking loose outside.
I did capture a video in the middle of the storm, but after a few adult beverages I had too many choice words for the hurricane to share the video on this family friendly platform 😅😅😅.
In Recent Times…
My friend and I were in Bar Harbor for the entirety of last week leading up to the Friday wedding. As I mentioned last week, we hustled into Acadia National Park each day after work to do some hiking / sight seeing:
I’m sad to say this was only my second visit to one of the U.S. national park areas, my first being the Everglades. I definitely want to see more…
♣️♣️ One of the benefits of this week away was my friend and I conducting an in person Junto club! ♣️♣️
Between working, getting out to the park, and celebrating our good friend on his wedding weekend, there wasn’t as much time as we would’ve liked to hash out the meaning of our lives 😆.
However, we did get some time while we were hiking to explore some thoughts around morality, happiness, purpose, the nature of the universe, and much more. I guess we still made the most of our time together!
My personal favorite prompt was the question of whether there was a man made invention more impressive than the human body.
I quickly came to my own conclusion that the answer was no, but my friend disagreed.
What do you think? 💭🤨🧐🙇🏻♂️🧠
Make sure you take some time to ponder important questions that might help give you direction. I would especially recommend this when you’re around good company.
Readings of The Week
“Genetic Similarities Between Unrelated Look-Alikes” by Peter Attia
Have you ever met someone who reminds you so much of another individual you know? It could be because those two people share more in common than you know. Some interesting things I learned through reading this article:
The human genome is made up of approximately 3 billion DNA base pairs, but 99.9% of this DNA sequence is identical across all humans. The remaining 0.1% accounts for all phenotypic variation across our entire species, and 90% of this variation appears in the form of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – commonly-occurring differences in a single DNA base at a specific genomic position. Each individual has an estimated 4-5 million SNPs, and how closely related you are to another person is associated with the number of SNPs you share. For example, siblings share between 84-87% of SNPs, but more extended relatives, such as first cousins, share 75-77% of SNPs.
99.9% of DNA base pairs being identical seems a little high to my pea-brain. 99.9% is almost 100% 😂.
In all seriousness, it’s pretty cool they can put numbers on how similar your SNPs are in comparison to your siblings vs. first cousins.
And more…
Prior research has investigated how much of who we are is determined by our genes compared to our environment. One of the most famous was the Minnesota Twin study, which looked at monozygotic twins raised together or apart and compared measurable factors like IQ (70% based on genetics) and more subjective aspects such as personality traits (15-55% based on genetics).
I may be in the minority, but I had no idea that most of IQ is based on genetics 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️.
“How the Federal Government Can Encourage Innovative Housing Policies that Improve Supply and Affordability” by Jenny Schuetz
This reading is RRR as a service… RRRaaS? (More fun with SaaSifying acronyms later).
It’s extremely brief, but you could read the entire testimony here or watch a video of it here (the recording actually starts at 23:30 as an FYI, because why would the gov’t edit out the 23 and a half minutes of idle time from the video 😁).
This is a national crisis that isn’t in the mainstream yet in a meaningful enough way. Sure, you get the occasional “this housing market is tough”, but the discourse needs to be focused on how we can remedy the situation. Younger generations are seriously being crushed by the lack of affordable housing 😢.
A quick aside before we delve into Junto Club…
Last week was extremely rough for me 🥺. I had every expectation of publishing RRR10 on that Monday or Tuesday, but I couldn’t help myself feeling a bit off. That is, off enough to cut back greatly on the amount of hours I was writing on Monday and Tuesday to take rest. I even skipped my post-work gym routine both days. By Wednesday, I was coming down with a fever. I don’t think I formulated a coherent thought from that point until late on Sunday evening.
It’s a huge disappointment because I take timeliness with this newsletter extremely seriously, even if I don’t always achieve it. I had recently given myself a “pass” for failing to post an edition while I was on vacation two weeks earlier, so it was extremely difficult to give myself another pass in this instance. With that being said, I was absolutely under the gun of this mystery virus (I did test negative twice for COVID, and I didn’t present with classical flu symptoms either).
When the dust had settled, I had shed 8 pounds. A lot of that appears to have been muscle, which tells me I did the right thing letting my body fight from the comfort of my bed. I’m thankful to have an immune system that has me writing this as of Monday the 25th.
It will be a grueling week of recovery, but I’m looking forward to putting in the work to get my mind body and spirit back on track. I can’t wait to start hammering that publish button more frequently this fall 🥂.
Junto Club ♣️
When is it appropriate to accept feedback as it is given, and when is it more fitting to challenge the narrative of that feedback?
It’s my theory that this is a defining question of our lives, in that it defines how, when, and the rate at which we grow.
For example, consider you are executing plan A in a given scenario, and let’s assume it is the optimal approach. On the other hand, you’re being told to execute plan B instead. What if this direction comes from an elder, someone who is held in regard by the public, or a trusted (but under-qualified) confidant? How much will power do you have in that moment to stick to your guns? How do you know that you yourself possess quality judgement?
If perfection in decision making did exist, it certainly does not in this type of scenario. What are the real factors influencing the decision? Let’s say you and the counter party have broken it down at all levels of detail and can’t come to an agreed approach. It’s now come down to you as the decision maker. Do you let self-doubt creep in, or are you supremely confident?
If you’re not confident, you’ll go with option B every time and take the less optimal route.
If you’re supremely sure of yourself, you’ll win in this scenario, but lose every time the optimal path is actually plan B 😂😂.
Understanding biases, having coherent discourse and analysis, and judging for understanding (do they truly “get” the situation, can they repeat back to me the same fact patterns that I understand) is the way that I think truly savvy decision makers draw appropriate conclusions.
Understanding biases
A classical example would be a child saying to a parent, “hey, I want to do this because it could benefit me in enormous ways and has virtually no risk” (think of going to a party in high school to socialize). The parents say no immediately because to them, there is higher perceived risk because there is no reward for them personally. Plus with your kids, you’re likely to tolerate way less risk than you would with yourself.
Having coherent discourse
When making a decision (or formulating an opinion), you need to actually discuss the issue at hand in an appropriate level of detail with someone if you’re going to consider their feedback. Think of U.S. political discourse, where the voices that dominate the room are on the polar ends of a spectrum of ideas. Nuance is left at the door in the U.S. public discussion around politics, and that is the opposite of coherent. I wouldn’t refine my political ideals based on the homogenous messaging seen on social media, but I would do so after a conversation where the details around a specific subject were discussed thoroughly.
Judging for understanding
After explaining a situation or a decision you are weighing, does the subject offering you feedback demonstrate understanding of the key points that you’ve shared with them? In their words, do they display a mastery of the subject at hand. If not, it might just be a complex point that needs to be rehashed. However, it could be that the person just isn’t great at processing information into key points, considering important variables, and outputting a good product. Their feedback should probably be discounted.
Finally, I think another sure-fire way that someone could disqualify their opinion from consideration would be to act irrationally. In almost every case, I think this irrationality shows up by way of emotion.
Once someone becomes emotional on a topic, you can’t trust them 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️. It may sound super harsh, but it is the truth.
The first law of decisions is that emotions should not make them, or have a seat at the table when they’re being made. To get a bit nuanced, surely it is okay to consider future emotions when making current decisions 🤯.
If I know something is going to repeatedly make me upset, why would I enable it with a decision today?
Bard As A Personal Assistant (BaaPA?)
Google recently announced a suite of extensions for Bard:
For example, if you’re planning a trip to the Grand Canyon (a project that takes up many tabs), you can now ask Bard to grab the dates that work for everyone from Gmail, look up real-time flight and hotel information, see Google Maps directions to the airport, and even watch YouTube videos of things to do there — all within one conversation.
They’re clearly going for a personal assistant sort of vibe, and I don’t hate it.
Or, imagine you’re applying for a new job and using Bard to help with the process. You could ask Bard to “find my resume titled June 2023 from my Drive and summarize it to a short paragraph personal statement,” and continue collaborating on your new cover letter.
So far, I have experimented exclusively with the YouTube extension because I was intrigued to see if it had the ability to accurately summarize YouTube videos. So far the results are okay.
The pace in AI is ridiculous when you consider how a mere year and a half ago, the notion that a computer could spit out a summary of multiple YouTube videos in just 15 second time was unfathomable (by most).
I’m getting excited again! I want to commit more time to finding ways that AI can help me with my writing, but without generating a single word for RRR. Something about the idea of taking AI content and putting it in my work is repulsive to me 🤢🤢.
Germany Takes Gold, USA Fails to Medal, NBA Season Nearing…
I’m not going to make a big deal about the USA failing to medal. It’s not that cool as an American who loves basketball, but we didn’t send our A-team and we need to accept this is a rapidly growing game around the world. Athletes everywhere are also getting better?
I will, however, make a big deal about Germany simply because of one of my favorite young NBA players, Franz Wagner, showed he’s ready to be a star.
He has a silky smooth game, and possesses a great frame for the NBA. It’s all come together for him in the last year or so, and his future couldn’t be brighter.
Now onto the real news, which is that, put mildly, THE NBA IS BACK BABY!
Well, almost back. We still have a bit of waiting to do but the pre-season buzz is really starting to heat up. In the coming weeks, here’s what to expect from me:
The League Pass Rankings for all 30 teams
For those who don’t follow the league very closely, “NBA League Pass” is a subscription that allows you to watch on cable or stream any game in the NBA besides national TV games (which you almost certainly can watch anyways).
NBA Over / Under Predictions
I’m not a gambler at all, but this is the one arena I will dabble in each year. Last year (and I wish I was writing RRR to have documented it), I grew what I put in by 83.6%. Haven’t touched it since, so let’s see if we can keep growing it. 83.6% CAGR would be nice 😅.
RRR Power Rankings
Ranking teams into “tiers” of ability / season outlook
Players to Watch
Players we’ll track together throughout the year
I can’t wait to get started.
Thanks so much for reading, have a wonderful week ahead 🥂.
-Tiko
Glad you're feeling better -- health is the most important thing, and I'm reminded of that every time i'm sick!