Saturdays are all about longform links on Abnormal Returns. You can check out last week’s linkfest including a look at the long road to becoming a cashless society.
Quote of the Day
"Conveying accurately our own personal hallucination to someone else, is the central problem of being human. Everyone's brain makes a little world out of sensory input, and everyone's world is just a little bit different."
(Adam Rodgers)
Work
- Under what conditions will technology have a meaningful effect on employment? (slatestarcodex.com)
- Automation is freeing up engineers to work on more creative things. (wsj.com)
- The weird world of saturation divers who spend weeks living in a pressurized environment. (atlasobscura.com)
Business
- Business lessons learned from Jess Lee of Sequioa Capital. (25iq.com)
- What do business schools actually teach? (theguardian.com)
Psychadelics
- Michael Pollan on how the use of psilocybin could merge biological and psychotherapy. (lithub.com)
- An excerpt from Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence." (nytimes.com)
Society
- How the American 'aristocracy' has consolidated its position over time. (theatlantic.com)
- An excerpt from Steven Brill's "Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall-and Those Fighting to Reverse It." (time.com)
Longform
- Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft are often lumped together but their strategies and moats differ dramatically. (stratechery.com)
- The market for introductory economics textbooks has not kept up with changes in the field. (behavioralscientist.org)
- Scientists should spend more time gathering good data and less time looking for statistical significance in small samples. (fivethirtyeight.com)
- Barry Ritholtz's presentation on the 'fine art of failure.' (ritholtz.com)
- Lessons from five books on how to break (bad) habits. (bakadesuyo.com)
- The curse of the open floor plan is not just in offices. (theatlantic.com)
- Don't kid yourself: we are all a part one tribe or another. (wired.com)
