An Insight a Day

The Value of Recorded Knowledge

These days, most people would reach for their phones when they want to write something down. But before the advent of digital technologies, the only way to write something down is via pen and paper. Or rather, ink and a surface to write on.

Without this seemingly simple technology, there would be no recorded knowledge. Everything we will ever know would have to be passed down verbally, generations after generations. And without a means to record knowledge, how far do you think we can advance our civilization?

Knowledge takes time to learn, and even after having learned something, there's always a chance we might forget or misremember. So we will always risk losing our knowledge and technologies every few generations, especially when the only person in the tribe who has the know-how dies before passing it down to someone.

This is why books and other forms of recorded knowledge are so powerful. They are the foundation of our civilization and are one of the main reasons for our evolutionary success.





Taking the Time to Think

From the book A World Without Email, a brief look at George Marshall, the US Army chief of staff during World War II, on concentration and big picture thinking over being responsive.

Those who retained access to Marshall were provided a clear structure for their interactions, turning briefing the general into an exercise in controlled efficiency. You were instructed to enter his office and sit down without saluting (to save time). At Marshall’s signal, you would begin your brief while he listened with “absolute concentration.” If he discovered a flaw or something missing, he would become angry that you hadn’t noticed and resolved the issue before wasting his time. When you finished, he’d ask for your recommendation, deliberate briefly, then make a decision. He then delegated taking action on the decision back to you.

Perhaps Marshall’s most striking habit was his insistence on leaving the office each day at 5:30 p.m. In an age before cell phones and email, Marshall didn’t put in a second shift late into the night once he got home. Having experienced burnout earlier in his career, he felt it was important to relax in the evening. “A man who worked himself to tatters on minor details had no ability to handle the more vital issues of war,” he once said.

Marshall focused his energy as a manager on making key decisions that would impact the outcome of the war. This was a task for which he was uniquely suited. He then trusted his team to execute these decisions without involving him in the details. As Eisenhower recalls Marshall telling him: “[The War Department] is filled with able men who analyze the problems well but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.”

It seems clear that Marshall would have rejected the claim that it’s more important for managers to be responsive than thoughtful. The report on Marshall’s leadership style emphasizes on multiple occasions the general’s commitment to concentration, especially when it came to making key decisions, when he would exhibit “thinking at a fantastic speed, and with unmatched powers of analysis.” The report also emphasizes the attention Marshall invested in “reflection” and big picture planning—trying to stay a step ahead of the complicated landscape of problems presented by global warfare.

Marshall was more effective at his job because of his ability to focus on important issues—giving each full attention before moving on to the next. If he had instead accepted the status quo of the War Department operation, with sixty officers pulling him into their decision making and hundreds of commands looking for his approval on routine activity, he would have fallen into the frantic and predictably busy whirlwind familiar to most managers, and this almost certainly would have harmed his performance. Indeed, if something like a hyperactive hive mind workflow had persisted in the 1940s War Department, we might have even lost the war.

[...]

The key lesson I want to extract from Marshall’s story is that management is about more than responsiveness. Indeed, as detailed earlier in this chapter, a dedication to responsiveness will likely degrade your ability to make smart decisions and plan for future challenges—the core of Marshall’s success—and in many situations make you worse at the big picture goals of management. In the short term, running your team on a hive mind workflow might seem flexible and convenient, but in the long term, your progress toward what’s important will be slowed.

A World Without Email

If you're interested in the full case study, you can read the original report here.





Scary vs Dangerous

Something that's scary isn't necessarily dangerous, while something that's dangerous isn't necessarily scary.

Public speaking is scary, but it's not dangerous.

Consuming random pills from the pharmacy isn't scary, but it's stupidly dangerous.

Don't confuse scary with dangerous, their correlation isn't as strong as you think.





Finding the Time to Do Stuff

While time might seem like the limiting factor, it's not what we lack. We all have time, every one of us is blessed with 24 hours a day to spend on whatever we want. It might be more accurate to say you're spending your time elsewhere on things you deem to be more important. You know, prioritizing certain tasks over others.

Suppose you spend 12 hours a day at work, including your commute, leaving for work at 8AM and arriving home at 8PM. You still have 4 hours to do whatever you want and still get 8 hours of sleep. Would you prioritize being productive or working on your personal projects during those 4 hours? Or would you rather spend that 4 hours relaxing, winding down, and getting ready for bed? Don't forget that you still have to shower, eat, and do your other routines. The problem isn't only in finding the time and deciding which tasks to prioritize, you also have to consider the amount of mental and physical energy it requires.

So I suppose this is why a lot of people recommend doing things early in the morning before the workday starts. It's something I struggled with for a really long time because I generally have trouble waking up and have this preference for staying up late to work on stuff. So in the coming weeks, I'm going to try doing things before the start of my workday and see how it goes.





Lessons From Clearing Out My Unread Emails

Is it normal to have 20,000+ unread emails? Probably not, but it's the situation I find myself in after adding up all the unread emails I have over 3 different email addresses (excluding my work email, that one rarely exceeds a few hundred unreads).

Having that many unread emails is not a big problem as I can just mark them all as read. The problem is that they create a lot of digital clutter, especially since most of them are newsletters and expired-and-no-longer-relevant emails that I need to clear out. Of course, I should have no issues marking everything as read and calling it a day, right?

In reality, things played out a bit differently. The fear of missing out meant that I was constantly filtering the unread emails by sender and manually marking them as read after glancing through the subject line, just in case there's anything important. In the end, what could've been done in 5 minutes took away my Saturday afternoon instead. Such is life, but in exchange, I've learned a few not-so-valuable lessons along the way.

  1. In hindsight, I should've just marked everything as read and be done with it.
  2. Old emails expire, any unread emails older than a few months or a year can generally be marked as read without worrying too much.
  3. About 95% of these unread emails are newsletters, the remaining 5% are mostly notifications, calendar reminders, and other stuff I actually care about.
  4. It seems like I've stopped using email to communicate with people a long time ago (excluding my work email).
  5. There is a big difference between how I use my personal email vs my work email. One is often neglected and checked sporadically, and the other is overused and checked way too often.
  6. Saving emails or newsletters to be read later generally doesn't work, by the time you want to read them, more would've arrived and you might just end up overwhelmed.
  7. I need a strategy for email management, I have too many email addresses and they are all used for different purposes, i.e. mostly as logins for various online/offline accounts or services, and newsletters.
  8. If you received any newsletters you don't plan to ever read or don't want to read anymore, unsubscribe immediately.
  9. Some newsletters stop sending you emails if they detect you aren't opening them, they do this via tracking pixels. While others don't want you to stop sending you emails, so they make it hard for you to unsubscribe.
  10. I find myself wishing there was a way to receive newsletters via RSS feeds, and it turns out, there is!
  11. I wonder if there's a better way to do all this, maybe this book might have some answers.
  12. It's not just emails, I think we have way too many tools for communication in general.




It Doesn't Get Any Easier

Writing daily is not exactly an easy task, and it's all too easy for your brain to come up with excuses. But the thing is, if you take it easy and skip today, will you do it again tomorrow?

Doing something once is easy, you know it'll be over once you're done. But doing something again and again, day after day? It can get tiring pretty quickly, especially since you'll be battling the same blank page, the same resistance, and the same excuse every time.

Is there a trick to getting over it? Not really, everyone who runs a marathon gets tired eventually, it's what you do with the tiredness that counts. In short, it doesn't get any easier over time and you just have to deal with it.

HT Rohan Rajiv





Misleading Statistics

A while ago, someone raised a concern that one of our equipment was underperforming. From the utilization report, he showed us that it was hitting the max_limit only about 40% of the time whereas other similar equipment were hitting it around 90% of the time.

After looking at the actual data, it turns out that particular equipment has been repeatedly operating in and out of the max_limit, giving the illusion that it only ran at max about 40% of the time. In reality, it was operating at a similar level of performance compared to the other equipment. How did this happen?

To help you visualize, imagine two cars both with a maximum speed of 100km/hr driving along the highway. From the statistics, car A was seen hitting the max 100km/hr around 90% of the time whereas car B only 40% of the time. And yet, they both reach their destination at roughly the same time, how did this happen?

It turns out, unlike car A, car B's speed wasn't at a constant 100km/hr. It was constantly fluctuating in and out of the 100km/hr, momentarily dropping to 98km/hr before going back up to 100km/hr, only to drop back down to 99km/hr and go back up to 100km/hr again, and so on.

What can we learn from this? Statistics, as useful as it is, can be very misleading sometimes, especially when you rely too much on the summarized report instead of looking at the actual data.





Surfing the Idea Wave

It's getting late and I should really go to bed, yet here I am, staring at a blank screen trying to write something. A flash of insight is all I need, yet, the more I yearn for it, the less likely it will come. Sometimes, the best thing I can do is to just stare at the blank page and hope for the best.

I like to think that there are no shortages of ideas out there. Sometimes, I see ideas like the ocean waves that never stop coming. And as a surfer, there are only so many waves you can catch. Of all the amazing waves out there, you will miss most of them simply by being either at the wrong place, or at the wrong time, or both.

Writing is a lot like that. There are countless amazing ideas out there to write about, but you will miss most of them. Sometimes, it's because you didn't write the idea down and forgot about it afterward. And sometimes, you might still have the idea but the feeling or inspiration is long gone and you don't feel like writing it anymore.

Much like surfing, a lot of ideas happen in the moment. I've tried saving some ideas and putting them in my drafts folder, but most of them don't ever get to see the light of day. It's as if I can't just save random waves and expect to surf them at my own convenience. Waves have to be surfed in the moment, and I find that, for me at least, it's true for writing as well.

Now, I can go to bed.





Not Currently Available in Your Country

Depending on where you live, you might be fortunate enough not to encounter any geo-restriction errors, ever. Or, depending on where you live, geo-restriction errors might be what's stopping you from getting what you want.

Want to earn money on the internet? The classic advice is to start a website, or YouTube channel, or something, and make money off ads and affiliate programs. Or you could do a bit of freelance work or sell stuff on eBay or Etsy. Sounds easy, right? Well, that's assuming you can use PayPal to receive payments.

According to Wikipedia, there are 97 countries that can only send, but not receive, payments via PayPal.

Different countries have different conditions: Send only (Package Service allows sending only, valid in 97 countries), PayPal Zero (package suggests the possibility of enrollment, entry, and withdrawal of funds in foreign currency, but the user can not hold the balance PayPal account, operates in 18 countries), SRW Send - Receive - Withdrawal (the possibility of enrollment, input-output and the ability to keep your PayPal account balance in the currency and to transfer to the card when the user sees fit, operates in 41 countries) and Local Currency (SRW plus opportunity to conduct transactions in the local currency, 21 countries).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Global_reach

Similarly, Stripe only allows users in 43 countries to receive payments. And Amazon Affiliates? Only 17 countries are eligible to sign up for it.

But the good news is that, eventually, more countries will be supported. This isn't related to payment processors but take Spotify, for example. Before 2020, they only supported 79 countries. In 2020, they added another 13 countries, resulting in a total of 92 supported countries. But in 2021, they plan to launch in 80+ new countries, almost doubling the number of countries supported in 2020.

Hopefully, geo-restrictions will be a thing of the past as more and more people connect to the internet. But for now, I guess we'll just have to live with it. Well, those of us in the "Not currently available in your country" group anyway.





Automation and the Unemployment Problem

Here's a bit of rambling about the unemployment problem. Somehow, everyone talks about jobs as if it's one of the most sought-after things we ever want. But is it really? I know everyone wants to have a roof over their head, basic food and water, medical care, entertainment, and a few friends to share laughs with. But jobs? I don't think it's that high in our list of priorities.

The problem isn't unemployment, it's that we've built a society where money is needed for survival, and the most common way of earning money is to get a job. You know, work for someone else and get paid to do stuff. We've built a society where you pretty much can't do anything without money. Need a place to stay? Either pay up or live in the streets or under some bridge. Oh, and be careful not to trespass into private property. Need food? In this concrete jungle, the way to get food without money is the same way stray cats and dogs get their food, dumpster diving. Now you know how stray animals in the city feel?

The problem gets worse when you consider that robots and artificial intelligence are slowly taking over a lot of pre-existing jobs. Why get people to do manual labor when machines can do it faster and more efficiently? Why get accountants to do bookkeeping when it can be replaced by AI or software? And here's the thing, why aren't we reaping the benefits of the increased productivity offered by automation?

If 10 farmers can do the work of 1,000 farmers after being equipped with robots and machines, what do we do with the other 990 farmers? Politely ask them to leave and find other means of earning money? Why can't all the 1,000 farmers work fewer hours and enjoy the benefits of technology and automation? Why do we have to add the 990 farmers to the unemployment pool? In the end, who really benefits from having only 10 farmers?

Replace farmers with factory workers and the answer becomes clear, it's only the investors and shareholders who benefit. Investors put money into a company, expecting it to grow and give a return on investment. So what do companies do as technology advances? Reduce the workforce, spend less on employees, and give more to the investors. That way, more investors will come and invest in the company, resulting in more growth.

In the end, it only makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. Now that the poor are out of a job, and it's increasingly harder to find jobs due to automation, the economy will end up worsening. This is because the average buying power will decrease, resulting in less overall spending, which means a worsening economy.

It's ironic that workers are needed, not only to do work but to also serve as customers. If companies pay workers well, then the general public will have a higher buying power, which means that all companies, in general, will see an increase in sales. But, if companies cut pay or hire fewer workers, then the general public will have a declining buying power, which will result in a gradual decline in sales.

So what's the solution? I'm currently leaning towards universal basic income and finding ways to share the benefits of automation with the general public, not just investors and shareholders. But enough rambling for now, I'll write more once I've further organized my thoughts.