A very thoughtful long essay: Jeff Lonsdale’s 2020 predictions

Below are some of my favorite bits, and here’s the full essay.

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A very small subreddit will have experts happily engaging with neophytes, while a place with a large commentator base will often put discussions around tribal dynamics first and foremost.

You can say things about people you could never say on Twitter or in blog format. This makes for a golden age of podcasting that might not last as long as we would like.

In a move called the yellow economy, protesters are using apps that lets them know which businesses are in favor of the protests so they can support them and ignore the so-called blue businesses that are owned by people who support the CCP and current establishment in Hong Kong.

There will be a continuing fight between governments who want cheap telecom technology and are willing to expose their infrastructure to the Chinese and those who want to stick to systems that implicitly allow surveillance by the US and its allies.

Korea already implemented a Cinderella law, doesn’t let kids under the age of 16 play between midnight and six o’clock in the morning. But that wasn’t enough for some mental health professionals in Korea, who saw games as a cause of problems among young men, and they lobbied the World Health Organization to add an internet gaming disorder to its International Classification of Diseases. The WHO announced in 2019 that it will include the disorder in the its 2022 ICD.

Making games is expensive, and anything that can be done to derisk games is going to be done. This isn’t new. Farmville, the first major success on social, was really just a remix of Harvest Moon. League of Legends is a version of Dota, modified to increase the twitch gaming and remove aspects that overly complicate the game.

One thing that has been underrated this past decade is that most people were only cancelled after they let themselves be cancelled. Trump is the politician who blew this open, he didn’t let any allegation, true or false, bring him down. The people most at risk from cancel culture are the individuals and institutions who have enthusiastically wielded the tools of cancel culture.

the court of public opinion is stronger than before and it is vital to come out swinging against false allegations that other people see as credible. Making a lukewarm apology and then disappearing from public life is the equivalent of ceding the field to your enemies. For those looking for a non-Trump model for how this plays out, Carlos Ghosn’s very public pushback on the allegations made against him by Japan’s prosecutors and Nissan will serve as a template for others who have been unjustly accused.

Favorite highlights from Disunited Nations by Peter Zeihan

Disunited Nations is my second Peter Zeihan book. The first was Absent Superpower. I also shared favorite highlights from that one; there was so much information and nuance that I reached Kindle’s limit on same-book highlights.

All highlights below are copied verbatim from the Kindle version:

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Near the end of the Imperial Age in 1920, there were about fifty countries. As of 2020, the count is over two hundred. Remove the Order and what has enabled many of these countries to form, survive—even thrive—will fade away.

Dozens of assets contribute to national survival and power, but these are the big four:
-Viable home territories, with usable lands and defensible borders
-A reliable food supply
-A sustainable population structure
-Access to a stable mix of energy inputs to participate in modern life

There can be a darker side too. If it’s easy to move goods and people and ideas, it’s also easy to move troops. Cultural merging, or assimilation, is not the only way to “unify” a territory. Hunting down dissident and minority groups is more straightforward. Again, the American Midwest is a premier example. The Native Americans never had a chance. Similar unification-via-obliteration unfolded in most of the world’s countries with flatlands, most notably in the North China Plain, the Northern European Plain, and the vast open spaces of North Africa and the Middle East.

Many make light of what it means for the Chinese population to have an extra 41 million men under age forty who will never marry. The two most common concerns are how unmoored males might threaten social stability (legitimate) and how the Chinese government might be willing to throw a few million extra men into a military meat grinder just to get rid of them

Women are now more likely to live in cramped, coastal, urban quarters where they hold upwardly mobile white-collar or light manufacturing jobs their entire careers, while men are more likely either to live in different provinces in the poor interior or to work as undocumented migrants in China’s economic underbelly.

About the only thing that encourages people to have more kids is for people to have more space. That’s why Germany did have a baby boomlet during a period they understandably don’t enjoy discussing: the Lebensraum era of the late 1930s, when Germany was busy annexing its neighbors and getting physically bigger.

As Hastings Ismay, NATO’s first secretary general, so famously put it, the alliance’s raison d’être was “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”

Europe now faces simultaneous, interlocking crises: currency, finance, banking, monetary policy, supply chains, inequality, migration, oil, natural gas, electricity, demographics, consumption, exports, imports, Libya, Syria, Turkey, Russia. (Perhaps even America?) It gets worse: Any response requires that all European states agree on how to prioritize and address each problem.

A cohesive French identity as early as the fifth century, a full half millennium before the English and twice that before the German. From the French core in the Beauce,

The longest, most successful, and least bad-blood-ridden foreign relationship the Americans have ever had with anyone has been with the French.

Fourth, for the four new regional powers—Turkey, Iran, Japan, and Argentina—allaying American concerns and courting American goodwill will be essential to long-term success.

Notes from a Jonathan Haidt TED talk: “Sports is to war as pornography is to sex”

I was going over old TED talk notes and found this gem. Seems especially relevant today:

Here are my notes:

  • openness and comfort with new experiences are traits strongly correlated with liberal political attitude
  • worst idea in psychology: “mind is blank slate at birth”
  • in reality we’re pre-programmed with a lot: “nature provides a first draft”
  • “sports is to war as pornography is to sex”; way to exercise our ancient drives
  • basis of morality, his 5 best candidates for that “first draft”:
    1. harm/care — feel compassion
    2. fairness/reciprocity — ambiguous evidence whether it’s found in other animals
    3. in-group/loyalty — found in animal kingdoms, usually very small or among siblings, only in humans does it expand to large groups
    4. authority/respect — in humans, this is based more on voluntary interest and feelings of love sometimes
    5. purity/sanctity — food is becoming very moralized these days
  • think of these as channels, moral equalizers
  • liberals care more about 1 harm and 2 fairness; conservatives carry more about 3 in-group, 4 authority, 5 purity
  • all of these are relative
  • in most countries, less debate about harm and fairness, most are about #3, 4, 5
  • most people start fair, then cooperation decays if there’s no punishment, but if there’s punishment, cooperation increases in successive rounds
  • liberals speak for weak and oppressed, conservatives speak for order and tradition; this forms a balance
  • in religions you find same thing: yin and yang, Vishnu and Shiva (in fact, some icons show the two deities as the same body)
  • “If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease” – Sengcan, a Chinese Zen Patriarch
  • believes a key moral insight from history – supported by today’s science – is that we’re inclined to form teams and fight against other teams

Startup advice that’s too good not to share: “More than one benefit is a negative”

Advice from the legendary Andy Rachleff (Wealthfront, Benchmark) on how to find product market fit:

  • Savor surprises
  • Look for the good and double down on it
  • Stealth doesn’t matter
  • Don’t evaluate your growth hypothesis until you confirm your value hypothesis
  • The best ideas can come from the most unlikely team members
  • Word of mouth trumps promotion
  • Slowing decay can be more valuable than adding users
  • More than one benefit is a negative
  • Foolishness is the price of genius

See @daveambrose twitter thread for the complete list and more! :-)