RRR20: Zero-Sum Thinking, Non-Linear Living, The Erosion of Consciousness, Unlikely Coalitions, and New Hoop Content?
💭📈🧠😢🤝🏀
I’m weirdly invested in understanding how other people think. This is not exclusive to certain “types” of people, either. Something that seems to be pervasive across human thought is viewing most issues through a zero-sum lens.
It goes something like, one party’s gain must come at another party’s loss.
There are certain areas of life where that seems to be largely true. Anywhere you see direct competition, there are likely to be zero-sum elements.
However, what happens when we incorrectly view something as inherently zero-sum? The results can be tragic.
We often miss out on mutual gain, or, win-win opportunities.
Think of all the places where a zero-sum mindset might cause disastrous results:
International Affairs
Personal Relationships
Business
Politics
Education
Investment
Agriculture
Social Programs
Rather than viewing healthy debate over challenges and opportunities as deathmatches where there is a clear winning and losing ideology, rigorously searching for mutual benefit opens the door to new approaches that will improve humanity. Widespread advantage is out there, but we need to resist the temptation to simplify the world around us into black and white.
Distilling complex issues down into simplistic trade-offs is a surefire strategy for missed opportunity and human conflict.
Hey, speaking of zero-sum thinking and missed opportunity…
What is the negative externality of subscribing to Ramblings, Readings, and Rebounds?
It’s 100% free, and the newsletter comes out about 1X a week, so there’s no bogging down of your inbox.
However, there are immense positives!
You can read a little bit about things you didn’t know would interest you. You can find reflections that bring you more joy and happiness in your every day life. You can support someone’s work at the cost of nothing besides some light thinking. What’s not to love?
In Recent Times…
In RRR15, I wrote about how my body was starting to break down from overexertion.
I’ve now picked up a rather serious injury in my left ankle / foot, and I have to decide the right path forward.
Path number one would be rest it from stressful activity (i.e. no sports) for an extended period of time.
Path number two would be to be extremely proactive trying to heal / strengthen the area, while still allowing myself to put it under duress during exercise, maybe with the added stability of a strong brace.
I have a basketball league that is slated to start in 8 days, adding rapid impetus to my decision making process.
In any event, my takeaway here isn’t that I feel sorry for myself, or that this misfortune is unusually cruel. Instead, it’s just the latest reminder that progress and well-being are not linear.
When you start in a new field, expertise often comes from the mistakes made, rather than perfect execution from day one.
When you start dating someone, it takes time to build deep connection. Again, mistakes are made.
When designing and building a product, how much work gets thrown out completely?
Have a look at my chess rating over time:
This is why they call it trial and error, not trial and success.
Keep on keeping on, no matter what your striving for. It’s only when we stop trying that we put progress and well-being in jeopardy.
Content of the Week 📖🎙📺
Sabrina vs. Steph
It’s NBA All-Star Weekend, which means there’s the usual mix of some fun, and totally lame competitions.
The best one so far in my opinion took place last night, where WNBA sharpshooter Sabrina Ionescu took on Steph Curry in their own personal three-point shot contest.
I loved it for a few reasons:
For starters, I think it’s awesome that the WNBA was being represented on a huge night for the NBA. It is a great way to get more people interested / familiar with the WNBA stars who are, quite frankly, amazing.
Secondly, I was really interested to see who would win! Sabrina got to shoot with the smaller WNBA ball, but had to back up a few feet from what she is used to and shoot form the NBA three-point line. It is a seriously deep shot.
Both players put on an awesome performance, and would have more than held their own in the official NBA three-point contest that had taken place right before hand. Look at Sabrina shooting the skin off the ball on her first two spots!
It was extra impressive to me considering they tried to blind all the players with that ridiculous LED court…
An Average NFL game: More Than 100 Commercials and Just 11 minutes of Play, by Zachary Seward
For five months of the year, the National Football League dominates Sundays in the United States; it’s more popular than church.
The NFL’s popularity is all the more remarkable when you inspect the fare it has to offer each week on television. An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes.
Someone make it make sense…
Salon: Reading for Pleasure and Going Beyond Words: Events, Practices, by Frederik Gieschen
…our saturated, distracted, and divided society struggles with quite a lot, including a lack of meaning, loneliness, the dating quagmire, and rampant addiction (not to mention the ‘real’ crises like climate, AI, cold wars, hot wars, and the war for your attention). Despite its physical comforts, the present has become profoundly discomforting and disorienting.
This leads to an obvious question: ‘now what’? What is there to be done beyond diagnosis, beyond more content?
I personally might not consider something like AI a crisis, but his point is well taken. We have a lot of problems we can’t even begin to deal with unless we deal with the problems stemming from our lack of ability to live consciously.
Living Consciously
Life may not always feel very short. Sometimes, what I did a few months ago feels like several evolutions ago.
However, I suspect that when we’re lying on our proverbial death bed (assuming we’re lucky enough to die of “old age”), life will have felt utterly too short.
That’s why we need to obsess over the question of how we can extract all the goodness out of life that is reasonably possible.
I’m here to posit that living intentionally, and with as much conscious thought as we can possibly muster, is the key to this question. If we can start identifying our true desires, our weaknesses, and our blind spots, we can start slowly crafting a life that is designed for us, instead of lives that are designed to steal our attention from pressing matters, and designed to make us feel unfulfilled.
Bidenomics Boosts U.S. Manufacturing Output and Jobs, Primarily in South, West
Investments pursuant to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS Act) will provide a significant boost to semiconductor, electric vehicle (EV) and battery manufacturing, which represent around 60% of total announced spending, Fitch Ratings says. Nearly half of all planned investments are going to the South.
I previously wrote about the need to invest in America outside of just coastal population centers.
With population centers being so concentrated on both coasts, opportunities and resources have also disproportionately centered there for a long time.
Perhaps the biggest factors that have lead to inequality in opportunity are both the transition of our economy to favor white collar jobs while manufacturing and production were offshored, and the growing concentration of the U.S. farming industry.
Mo Rushdy and Unlikely Coalitions 💲🧱
I recently stumbled across a great read in the Philadelphia Inquirer about “Mo” Rushdy, a developer who is making political inroads in an attempt to make Philadelphia even more affordable for the masses.
I thought it was interesting because Rushdy seems to have worked on both sides of the political aisle in order to secure a voice for himself amongst the party’s who can help him make a difference.
Rushdy boosted his profile by raising millions for multiple political action committees, and last spring — with the backing of Pennsylvania’s richest conservative — launched a controversial super PAC to attack progressives running for mayor and Council. He landed a spot on the Land Bank board and Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s transition team.
An interesting method…
… in 2009, amid the financial crisis, Rushdy and his partner, Lawrence McKnight, took over a stalled effort to build three Fishtown rowhouses. As the Riverwards Group, they’ve since built 709 homes with another 1,280 in the pipeline.
“We’re neighborhood developers,” Rushdy said. “We’re building product that targets the median income of Philadelphia. We cannot target the top 10%. That’s not who we are.”
Riverwards doesn’t use direct public subsidies. To keep prices down, they’ve depended on low interest rates, the 10-year property tax abatement, and cheap land.
Low-value land in neglected areas marked an opportunity for Rushdy. While other developers competed over condos or high-end rentals, he could target a different market and help revive neighborhoods like Kensington.
The bottom line is that the ideals Rushdy and Riverwards embody are sort of the opposite of progressivist solutions to solving housing affordability. Yet, a democratic mayor has chosen to work closely with him on figuring out how to revitalize neglected areas.
It’s an awesome example of why healthy debate, compromise, and willingness to take political risk are key ingredients to positive outcomes. We ought to build incentive structures into local government to achieve this sort of collaboration more frequently.
My Favorite Hoops Content
Have a look at this YouTube short from Jake Fisher. Just beautiful.
The slow motion, the sounds of the ball, the music, and the high resolution camera work that permeates the chaos of an NBA floor and unlocks the stunning beauty of well executed ideas.
It got me thinking, what would I need to start shooting things like this at my local gym when I play with my friends?
It would be fun to learn new skills and create the content. It would also be cool to have different scenarios on film to learn from by finding technical mistakes and identifying how to improve.
It’s definitely something I might experiment with this summer, which is the time of year my friends and I get pretty active in seeking out competitive runs.
Stay tuned!
That’s it for this week, folks. Some tunes below 👇🏻.
Curious - Midnight Star
Nereyda - Raulin Rodriguez
Throw It In The Bag - Fabolous
✌🏻.
Living consciously is an hourly responsibility 😂 finding myself working in reminders to continue working at it!