flâneur

rafael reynal

1 followers · 7 following · 550 views

on the atlas — 28

highlights — 13

  • You really realize in, let's say, long-term private markets that the great filter for funds is their storytelling ability, fundamentally. Because their product, which is realized cash returns, take a decade. The thing that you are selling in the interim, whether it's through a quarterly update or your event or just your one-on-one conversations with your LPs, is really just narrative.
    Posting, Priests, & Private Markets - Colossus
  • Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own. They may be beautiful, terrible, awe-inspiring, exhilarating, pathetic, comic, or merely piquant. Literature gives the entree to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life, seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense, but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. My own eyes are not enough for me. The man who is contented to be only himself, and ther…
    On Writing - Rob Henderson's Newsletter
  • “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
    On Writing - Rob Henderson's Newsletter
  • “Every creative idea is a dialogue between you and yourself (masturbation); every creative act is a dialogue between you and reality (sex)… It's evident I am not a writer; but each post takes me hours to write, over days. I revise constantly, and still the result is-- well, this. However, at some point I have to overcome my strong wish to revise again (and again and again) and hit submit. First, even though every revision takes the same amount of time, the improvement from subsequent revisions quickly plateaus. Second, unless I hit submit, none of the revisions do anyone any good at all. I hav…
    On Writing - Rob Henderson's Newsletter
  • I’ll make a few edits, change a few things, and write a bit more. Sometimes I’ll send the draft to my girlfriend who proofreads it. It’s probably obvious when I skip this part. Inevitably there are more typos and grammatical errors on those weeks. Letting go of the fear of judgment and assuming nobody is going to read it anyway. That helped me a lot.
    On Writing - Rob Henderson's Newsletter
  • These procedures are not especially time-consuming. Wisdom tooth extraction requires a significant amount of preparation, but the actual surgical portion takes about five minutes. At an average cost of about $2000, that means for the duration of the surgery, an oral surgeon is generating $24,000 per hour. If an oral surgeon could do nothing but wisdom tooth extractions for 40 hours per week, they would generate $37 million of value per year and still take the summer off.
    Dentistry, Oral Surgeons, and the Inefficiency of Small Markets — LessWrong
  • While for most gamblers it is a harmless form of recreation, we know that some fraction become problem gamblers with potentially severe financial consequences. We study these financial outcomes using a large and comprehensive dataset on consumer finances known as the UC Consumer Credit Panel (maintained by @CAPolicyLab). This allows us to track all credit and debt outcomes for roughly 7 million Americans. We leverage this data and compare states implementing sports gambling to those that don’t and study both sports gambling of any type as well as online/mobile gambling specifically. We study 8…
    The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed — LessWrong
  • And that evidence came in the form of author Deirdre Barrett’s book Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. She writes “The most sinister aspect of TV lies in the medium itself. There’s a growing body of research on what it does to our brain.” Television, she explains, activates the orienting response. Orienting Response: the basic instinct to pay attention to any sudden or novel stimulus such as movement or sound. It evolved to help us spot and assess potential predators, prey, enemies, and mates. The orienting person or animal turns eyes and ears in the dire…
    Rejecting Television — LessWrong
  • He has accepted, as Bankman-Fried would put it, that we aren’t merely the average of our behavior but our own probability distributions. He has assessed the expected values, and, like Bankman-Fried, has elected the option of highest risk and highest reward. He’s taking a highly contrarian position on the margin, and he hasn’t done all that much to hedge the trade. The trial will make him look like a fool or it will make him look like a genius. But if there’s even a minimal chance that Bob committed not murder but merely negligent homicide, Lewis will not bring himself to write off his friend. …
    Michael Lewis’s Big Contrarian Bet | The New Yorker
  • He also learns that an adversary who proposes a bet is providing you with information encoded in the bet itself. When one interviewer asks him what the odds are that the interviewer himself has a relative who plays professional baseball, Bankman-Fried does the relevant math—how many professional baseball players exist, how many relatives most people tend to have—and figures that the answer is about one in one thousand. But then he stops himself—was the question chosen at random, or was it chosen because the interviewer had some personal connection to it? Bankman-Fried dramatically increases hi…
    Michael Lewis’s Big Contrarian Bet | The New Yorker
  • All the enterprise AI startups going after verticals have the right idea. Pick a market, deeply understand the workflows, build simple software to model the workflows, and use AI to augment the human judgment involved. Huge opportunity in 1,000’s of categories
    Startup Roundup #1: Happy Demo Day — LessWrong
  • Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press. He went over to his grandfather who was a grocer and he read the progressive grocer magazine, and he read articles on how to stock a meat department... What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on now for more than 70 years worth of data.
    Curius / Onboarding
  • Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press. He went over to his grandfather who was a grocer and he read the progressive grocer magazine, and he read articles on how to stock a meat department... What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on now for more than 70 years worth of data.
    Curius / Onboarding