The Chomp #020

Hey Everyone,

Welcome back to The Chomp—your weekly dose of the best content from the internet and beyond, designed to expand your mind and get you thinking. Let’s dive into it.

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Quick Bites

• Standing on the Shoulders of Solitude: Newton, the Plague, and How Quarantine Fomented the Greatest Leap in Science: “When Cambridge sent its students home, a young man obsessed with mathematics, motion, and light, whose illiterate father had died three months before his birth, who worshipped a “God of order and not of confusion,” and who had begun his university studies by performing servants’ work for wealthier students in exchange for tuition, bundled his prized books and headed back to his mother’s farm.” As we continue along with mass social distancing, it’s interesting to see how the world dealt with similar measures in the past. In 1664, England went into quarantine due to the plague, and as a result, Cambridge sent all its students home. One of those students was Isaac Newton, and during his time stuck at home, he just happened to come up with his revolutionary law of gravity. While something as profound as the concept of gravity might not arise from quarantine this time around, it’s important to remember that some good ideas will undoubtedly come out of this that make our lives better in the long run. (3 min)

• Knowledge Debt: “Knowledge debt is like financial debt. It’s a tool - you need to use it wisely to make a profit. Imagine you want to start a small business. Taking on some debt upfront in order to make more in the future can be a great decision. But like financial debt, you’ll need to define the parameters of your debt appropriately to your situation.” The concept of knowledge debt is something I feel like I’ve been aware of for a long time, but never really had a term for or spent too much time thinking about before reading this piece. In it, Amir Rachum does a great job of distilling an idea that we’re all vaguely aware of into a framework you can actively leverage and keep top of mind. (4 min)

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Deeper Dives

• The World After Coronavirus (Yuval Noah Harari): “A big battle has been raging in recent years over our privacy. The coronavirus crisis could be the battle’s tipping point. For when people are given a choice between privacy and health, they will usually choose health.” To get us to the other side of this pandemic, governments around the world are making quick decisions to put emergency measures into place—some of which will inevitably become normal fixtures of life going forward. Decisions that might typically take years are now being made in days. In this timely essay, Yuval Noah Harari outlines the implications some of these decisions will have in shaping our future. Well worth the read. (13 min)

• Black Swan Events: “This week’s unemployment filings, compared to the last half-century, are considered by frequentist statistics as a 30-sigma event: less likely to happen than if you had to select one atomic particle at random out of every particle in the universe, and then randomly again select that same particle five times in a row.” As a chaser to the essay I recently shared on Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility, check out this follow-up piece that dives into his closely related theory of black swan events. A black swan event has three characteristics: it’s unpredictable, has a large order of magnitude, and is retroactively explainable. This is more or less exactly what we’re experiencing now with economic reaction to COVID-19, so definitely worth checking out—even if you’re already somewhat familiar with the theory. (12 min)

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Media

Bill Gates has been an incredible force in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. This recent interview he gave with the Financial Times offers up his perspective on the work he’s doing as well as his thoughts on how we can best move forward. Highly recommended.

Tweet of the Week

Daily Stoic @dailystoic

The best leaders rarely talk how things ought to be done, their actions speak for themselves.

Song of the Week

Apple Music Link

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Books

Currently Reading

Recently Read

• This was an inspiring quick read filled with tangible examples of overcoming obstacles—big and small. The writing is blunt and gets straight to the point, which I always appreciate. Perfect for an extra bit of motivation to stay the course as we continue along in this truly weird world of COVID-19. (5/5)

• As I’ll tell anyone who asks me, Robert Caro is the best biographer ever. Period. Words can’t do justice in describing the unique ability he has to chronicle the lives of the subjects he’s written about. I learned more about New York and how it became the city it is today through this book than by living here for the past six years and spending my entire life around it combined. Robert Moses had an unfathomable impact on shaping modern-day New York, and this book succeeds beyond any expectation that can be set in telling his story. (5/5)

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Parting Thoughts

This Week in History

• On April 9th, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. This effectively ended the Civil War, in which an estimated 620,000-750,000 Americans were killed. (Source)

“Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.” — Isaac Newton

If you found something that piqued your interest this week, please help me out in expanding the reach of The Chomp by forwarding it along to a friend or sharing it with others in your network. Until next week.

-Cody