[AKN #42] How to find the truth, trashy sign, the pace of growth in the 1900s
another krappy newsletter #42, now with a new format!
Sup homies?
I moved last weekend so I am coming to you live from my new place in San Francisco! And golly gee is the view of the city landscape from my window gorgeous! I can see it from where I am writing this! Let’s see if the majesty of the beauty reflects itself in my writing.
While Fox News would have you believe that SF is on fire right now, I will have you know that it is not fire season. There is simply a growing homeless problem, a mass exodus of tech workers, and a criminal friendly DA that has substantially increased the number of citizens who feel unsafe leaving their home. But now SF has me so I think it is primed to turn around.
Before I get started, I would like to announce a change in formatting for another krappy newsletter.
The mission of another krappy newsletter is to make Tuesday suck less. The way I do this is by creating the content I wish would have showed up in my inbox every Tuesday as I sat there all depressed and deflated. Namely, I try to showcase one (or all) of three things:
A thought provoking piece to get my mental wheels spinning
A dank meme or something funny to change my emotional state
A great product, author, or additional content to plug the hole in my life with additional consumption/consumerism
As I reflected on that, I thought to myself: Why don’t I just produce the newsletter that does all three of those things every week?
So I will be changing up the format to make sure that every single week I hit all three of those points.
To do that I will be introducing a new outline for the newsletter.
I introduce to you…The “Live. Laugh. Love.” outline.
That’s right. I am going full sophomore year sorority girl on you.
This is what you can expect from each section:
Live. In this section of the newsletter, I will cover thought provoking topics. This can take the form of:
Ideas, concepts or musings such as preference falsification, networking, or hiring advice
Deep dives on technical subjects such as why the Challenger blew up, how viruses and vaccines work, or the absurdity of the vaccine supply chain
Personal experiments such as diet, meditation, or journaling
Laugh. The best use of the Internet is when it surfaces pieces of content that make you laugh really hard. Things like:
Love. I will talk about things I love. Things like:
Amazing products
Courses I have taken and greatly enjoyed
Authors who are producing amazing content
Or sometimes just really fun facts that make you say “OMG I love that!”
There still won't be a “theme” or a “niche” to this newsletter. At its heart, I always want it to remain “a newsletter about nothing.” But it is hard to sell people who don’t know me on reading about nothing…
So every Tuesday, if you follow the newsletter, you will receive:
1 thing that will make you think
1 thing that will make you laugh
1 thing that you will love
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: How do you know who to listen to?
The biggest lesson I learned from the pandemic was you should think for yourself.
Over the last year, the dangers of groupthink have been exposed on both sides of the political aisle.
A quick rehashing of the extreme swings we have watched on both sides:
On COVID risk:
Left
Beginning of the pandemic: COVID as a meme. “COVID-schmovid!”
End of the pandemic: COVID as religion. “All hail the mask.”
Right
Beginning: We need to shut down all travel into the country!
End: But those were our weakest 500,000 Americans…
On Vaccines:
Left
Beginning: Vaccine is a pipe dream! Mask is forever!
End: If you don’t get a vaccine, you are the scum of the Earth.
Right
Beginning: Trump made these! We should bypass clinical trials!
End: Bill Gates made those so I’ll pass.
Human biases have been on full display as we allow certain opinions in and keep others off limits based solely on emotion rather than logic. We cling to our in groups and dig our heels in when presented with the counter opinion. This is not a new problem, but never before has identifying when this is happening been more important.
As I have written before, the defining issue of the information age revolves around identifying truth. With terabytes of data coming at us at all times (including this newsletter!), how do you identify the truth?
As of May 18, 2021, my answer: follow great Twitter accounts.
Twitter is a great way to quickly get a high level understanding of the strongest opinions on both sides of a debate. It allows for this to happen because of two qualities:
Twitter forces people to condense their message. The character limit forces people to get to the point. This brevity makes it such that you can read many bite sized diverse opinions about a topic. Which is great because it is not always possible to read several well written books on a subject and get an informed opinion.
Twitter has a network effect that rewards the people who are consistently correct. If you are right on Twitter consistently, you start to gain a reputation for being right. Plus if you were right and you wrote about it before it happened, you can always point back to your tweets where you predicted it correctly. This is much stronger than fallible human memory.
It is actually crazy how following a few great Twitter accounts can put you years ahead of people in understanding something. If you are interested in trying it out, here is a list of a three great accounts that have helped me stay ahead of the pandemic:
They also post other content that would make other people discount their opinion but You can disagree with these people. But they have a pretty strong track record through COVID of being correct about a diverse range of subjects. Also when they are wrong they admit it. Which doesn’t seem to happen a lot in print news media.
LAUGH: Trashy sign
LOVE: The pace of growth in the 1900s
This graphic is absolutely mind boggling. We went from barely knowing how to fly to landing a human on the moon. I wonder if the development of the COVID vaccine will go down as our generations pace of scientific progress meme.
What do you think of the new format of the newsletter? Email me or leave a comment below. Promise to hit you back with an artisanal, hand-crafted response.
Closing time
You don’t have to go home, but you can subscribe here:
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
ILY,
K. Rapp
I'm a simple man, Kevin. I'm here to laugh. That's why I need you in my life. As long as that happens, then you can deliver me the goods in whichever way you see fit.
PS That pillow is amazing.