52 Things I learnt in 2024
Previously: 2023, 2020. Inspired by Tom Whitwell, who has been doing this since 2014.
The saying ‘Straight from the horses mouth’ comes from times where horses were traded. Knowing the age of the horse was important but the traders were unreliable, but it turns out examining the horses teeth was useful proxy. So they got the age of the horse ‘straight from the horses mouth’. Via Claude
A lesson that can literally save lives: drowning does not look how you think. “Of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening.”
You can measure the rise and fall of Roman empire by measuring levels of lead in ice sheets in Greenland, because lead was a pollutant in production of silver coins.
Insurance can be a positive sum transaction. “Even though insurance is an expected loss, it helps us earn more money in the long run.”
There are many creative ways of using forecasting/probabilistic predictions in your personal or work life, e.g. to help prioritize tasks or overcome psychological blockers.
The number of doctors in the USA has been stagnant for many years. Bryan Caplan predicts it is because of government quotas, and that this is one cause for increased medical costs.
There is ongoing work to formally verify the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem using Lean, and you can read a recent progress update from 2024 Dec.
A person with over $1,000,000 of gambling losses is offering to get married with somebody who has that much capital gains, in order to share a cut of the resulting tax savings.
With initiative, patience and doing the basics right (e.g. “It is surprising how much edge ‘let me google that’ gives you, 26 years after Google was released.”), Henrik Karlson transformed the art gallery he worked at - and converted his job from cafe assistant to ‘do whatever you want’.
Somebody found a 19-card combination in Magic the Gathering that deals infinite damage if and only if the Twin Prime Conjecture is true.
People are studying the possibility that plants are conscious.
A woman has business as a professional bridesmaid - where she pretends to be a bridesmaid at people’s weddings. Via Mastroianni’s article arguing that there is a niche for everyone in society.
Iran allows people to be paid for giving their kidney as part of kidney transplant.
There are widespread misconceptions of how society’s views has changed over time, e.g. how have people’s views on abortion or gun crime or racism changed over time.
Most conversations go on longer than both participants want.
Everyone - including you - should host more events. And you should use nametags.
There is a highly unusual group of diseases known as ‘prion’ diseases, which connect a Venitian 1700s family who struggled to sleep, a cannibalistic Papuan tribe and mad cow disease.
Self-replicators arise just from random interactions, without any explicit goals or optimization.
By focussing on production, you get a different perspective on why the allies won World War 2. E.g. limiting the supply of oil to Japan has greater impact than the US bombing campaigns.
The combination of 100Hz, 150Hz and 200Hz sounds *lower* than just 100Hz by itself.
Three principles for good advertising copy is ‘Make it concrete, make it falsifiable, make sure only you can say it’. Great example from Nike: “Worn by supermodels in London and dads in Ohio”. Bad example from some university: “Don’t just get a job. Change an entire industry.”
The ‘spectrum’ in ‘autism spectrum disorder’ is *not* about lying on the autistic part of some ‘non-autistic to autistic spectrum’. The spectrum refers to the fact that there are many different possible symptoms associated with autism - a spectrum of symptoms. And it is not just about social skills, but physical skills/symptoms too, e.g. lack of proprioception.
Auftragstaktik is a method of command and delegation where the commander gives subordinates a clearly-defined objective, high-level details, and the tools needed to accomplish their objective. The subordinates have clear operational freedom, which leaves command to focus on architecting strategic decisions. Originally developed by the Prussians to defeat Napolean, but applicable in modern management settings.
There is a school dedicated to ‘radical attention’ in New York, the Strother School of Radical Attention.
Emily Oster summarizes the most impactful decisions (according to the data) parents make, and how most things parents worry about have negligible (measurable) impact. Getting a doula during child-birth is one of the top recommendations.
By introducing a fake ‘bummer currency’ and letting the invisible hand do its thing, chores were done much more efficiently, with people doing chores they most liked / least disliked.
Despite anti-discrimination or anti-affirmative action rules, elite universities can create proxies for race that allow them to control the ratios as they wish. And East Asians are particularly discriminated against.
The fastest way to run might be to use all four of our limbs. Current 100m record using all fours is around 15s.
Aizuchi is Japanese cultural norm of using little ‘interruptions’ or interjections throughout conversation, and is hard for foreigners to do correctly.
The tidal forces from the sun and moon have a measurable impact on particle experiments done in CERN.
Somebody has extremely vivid and fantastical imagery when they taste chocolate. For example: “A bell made out of wood, a canoe hollowed out from a log. Soft, weathered wood with no splinters, feeling almost felted beneath my fingers. Air, cavernous air, breath and wind, a sense of spaciousness. Something sacred. A sacred temple, the hollow tree where Maara and Tamara wintered. A cabin in the high mountains, shaded, near huge smooth gray stones (like around Lake Tahoe). A place of retreat and contemplation. What sand feels like to a sandsnake. Waking up on a sailboat to the gentle flap of the canvas sail above your head, shading you from the sun. Desert oases. I’ve never had a chocolate that tasted like old books before.”
Cain’s Jawbone is a murder mystery that apparently only four have solved. And 9 more highly unique books.
I do not understand basic probability. There’s a famous probability puzzle: You meet a parent and you find out they have two kids and that at least one of them is a boy. What are the odds the other is a girl? Intuitively, the answer is 50% - knowing the gender of one does not affect the other. However, based on the information provided, all you can rule out is the Girl-Girl combination, leaving the other three equally likely possibilities of Girl-Boy, Boy-Girl and Boy-Boy. So the odds of other being girl is actually 2/3. However, turns out the problem is actually under-specified, and with the most natural assumption, the answer is actually 50%.
The majority of people are bad at following written instructions, and you should adjust your expectations based on this.
This person created a 3D interactive visual that explains how mechanical watches work, and they are more intricate than you would imagine.
Most people define strengths as things one is good at. An alternative is to define strengths as things that energizes you, regardless if you’re good or bad at it. Knowing the difference is useful for finding your ideal work/career.
Given any two polygons, you can cut one into pieces (using only straight cuts) and recombine to form the other polygon, as long as they have the same area. The same is not true for 3D polyhedra.
The double split experiment is a standard demonstration of how photons interfere with themselves in space. Experiments have now shown light interfering with themselves across time!
A real example of Simpson’s paradox: Between 1992 and 2003, US literacy rates fell dramatically within every single educational category but the aggregate literacy rate didn’t change.
There is an experiment in Futarchy on Ethereum: where decisions are made based on predicted forecasts from a prediction market.
Somebody wrote a detailed account of how they were scammed for $50,000 dollars. A gripping tale.
By adding random noise to a ‘neutral’ face and asking people to rate which noisy faces have more of some property, you can discover sub-conscious features by taking the average of many ratings. E.g. what does a man vs woman look like, or a Moroccan, or what does depression look like?
An individual’s opinions or beliefs usually have a trend over their life, e.g. one person might become more conservative over their life. Tyler Cowen notes how this is counter-intuitive: if the trend is predictable, why doesn’t the human brain just jump ahead to the logical end point? (Search for ‘random walk’ to find exact point in transcript)
Video games are extremely counter-intuitive if you have never played before. For example, that the red bar on the top represents your health. Or, somebody tried playing Portal without realising you were meant to use the mouse.
Zvi makes a compelling case for having Sabbath in your life, regular days of no work, no decisions, no interruptions. ‘In Jewish law, it is permissible to break the Sabbath in an emergency situation, when lives are at stake. If something like the Orthodox Sabbath seems impossibly hard, or if you try to keep it but end up breaking it every week, then you should consider that perhaps, you are in a permanent state of emergency. This is not okay. You are not doing okay. So, how are you?’
There are numerous things one can communicate with the sentence ‘I like red’, including “I like red”, “I’ve recognized that group X is associated with the liking or disliking of redness, and would like to express my loyalties accordingly.” and “I just want you to know that I’m talking to you, the particular information doesn’t matter much.”
There is a version of Star Wars written as an Icelandic Saga.
Count Binface was a candidate in the UK General Election.
> a method of command and delegation where the commander gives subordinates a clearly-defined objective, high-level details, and the tools needed to accomplish their objective.
There is something deeply wrong with this civilization, if "getting a clear objective, and the tools necessary to accomplish it" is such a rare thing that it requires a German word to describe.