Commonplace note is a personal compilation of knowledge - quotes, stories, and my observations on artilces I read on topics that interest me. These range from wealth, learning, networking, life, spirituality, homeschooling, and more.
I try to explore an idea out in public (in line with my learning framework), sometimes even without agreeing to it. Think of these as scrap notes.
With spread of misinformation (and accelerated by GenAI tools), we need tools to identify misinformation. This site lists 20 different tools.
I was interested in tools to spot AI-Generated content. Here are 3 tools listed there:
If you try to minimize Errors of Commission, you will end up with Errors of Omission. And if you try to minimize Errors of Omission, you will end up with Errors of Commission
Vikas gives three examples of how these two errors are interlinked.
If you attend all phone calls, it’s an error of commission and you will end up wasting your time attending spam calls. If you avoid all calls from unknown numbers you might miss an important call - probably a family member or friend calling from an unknown number or from the passport office informing you of status of your passport application (happened to me).
Both errors have a cost and it is impossible to avoid them. So what could be a strategy?
Vikas provides Jeff Bezos as an example. Amazon committed an error of commission to develop Fire Phone which flopped. It had a cost.
But that mindset of "better to make errors of commission than errors of omission" is the same mindset that led Amazon to launch Kindle, AWS, Prime and so many other services.
Avoiding errors of omission is safe. But as Ken Robinson shared in his TED Talk:
If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original
Jeff Bezos himself writes:
As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments.
Another reason not to avoid errors of omission: You can’t analyse those mistakes. Your errors of omission are invisible. As Buffet wrote in his "Letters to shareholders" in 1992,
Typically, our most egregious mistakes fall in the omission, rather than the commission, category. That may spare Charlie and me some embarrassment, since you don’t see these errors
Do we have to live with this conundrum? Can we resolve it? As Vikas asks,
How can you want the upside of innovation but not the downside?
Vikas goes on to decipher a framework from Amazon’s play book.
cut down on projects that are not working out and double down on those that are working. Those that work out tend to payoff exponentially!
I follow this in stock market investing. I have a framework to analyse companies. Since I have fixed amount of money to invest, I have to allocate capital correctly. I have no crystal ball to look into the future.
I buy all the stocks that fit the framework. After that, I wait a year. I validate my hypothesis. If a stock is working, I double down and accumulate as much as I can. I get rid of stocks that don't perform according to my hypothesis.
So I commit both errors of omission and commission with significant stress on commission.
I've done the same with my career. It's been a long path for me being a people manager, consultant, startup founder, and software architect. I've taken as many chances as I can. Afterward, I pushed and doubled down on whatever worked and I loved, which led to a fulfilling career.
In summary:
Edward Thorp on longevity:
The goal is to have a long life that’s also a healthy, productive one. As opposed to being in assisted living somewhere.
I want such a life. I want to be active until the last minute and be dead.
So what to do? Two things:
I think of it as having two parts. One I’ll call defense, in which you minimize the chance of really bad outcomes of one sort or another. And you try to eliminate weak links. It just takes one weak link to finish you off.
This leads to proactive defenses like regular checkups or vaccinations and managing overall risks.
On offense, exercise is one of the magic bullets. The evidence is that if you exercise a moderate amount, you can probably add half a dozen years to your expected life span.
Two types of exercises:
My exercise has two parts. It’s aerobic, and it’s strength building. So I spend some time walking or maybe an occasional short jog. And then I spend time in the gym just building strength, particularly core strength. I can do two chin-ups and 15 pushups. Not a lot, but still pretty good for 91.
And then there’s diet. What one eats makes a huge difference.
From rest of the article:
You cross off a “to do” list tasks of little consequence. You cross off a “results list” the fulfillment of progress in your life.
Tech gives superpowers to people.
For good or ill, technology is a force multiplier. It enables. Unlocks.
As a lead in Nuxt project, Dan come across plenty of pull requests (PR). He lays out two rules for PR. Though he talks wrt to PR, the points are applicable for larger context.
Never let an LLM speak for you
Never let an LLM think for you
I use LLMs regularly. I use it as a brainstorming partner as well as to rewrite whatever drafts that I write — from policy docs to blog posts.
But as Dan says, whatever I goes out from me should I have my stamp on it. I shouldn't let LLM think for me or speak for me.