Hello, have a great week!
Articles to Read.
How to make video calls almost as good as face-to-face
I spend a lot of my day on video calls. Wave is a distributed company, so they’re the main way we communicate. But compared to talking in person, they feel unnatural:
Most people have low-quality microphones and webcams that make them look and sound bad.
There’s a lag between when you say something and when the other person hears it, making it hard to navigate conversational turn-taking.
If you’re using headphones, you can’t hear your own voice very well.
Because of echo cancellation, you often can’t talk when someone else is also talking, which makes the conversation flow less well.
I started wondering how much nicer video calls would feel if I fixed these problems. So I spent way too much time fiddling with gear and software. This post summarizes what I’ve learned.
Collectively, these recommendations have had a pretty big impact: when talking one-on-one to friends with equally good setups, I’ve been able to go 4+ hours without feeling fatigued.
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We Learn Faster When We Aren’t Told What Choices to Make
In a perfect world, we would learn from success and failure alike. Both hold instructive lessons and provide needed reality checks that may safeguard our decisions from bad information or biased advice.
But, alas, our brain doesn’t work this way. Unlike an impartial outcome-weighing machine an engineer might design, it learns more from some experiences than others. A few of these biases may already sound familiar: A positivity bias causes us to weigh rewards more heavily than punishments. And a confirmation bias makes us take to heart outcomes that confirm what we thought was true to begin with but discount those that show we were wrong. A new study, however, peels away these biases to find a role for choice at their core.
A bias related to the choices we make explains all the others, says Stefano Palminteri of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM), who conducted a study published in Nature Human Behaviour in August that examines this tendency. “In a sense we have been perfecting our understanding of this bias,” he says.
Using disarmingly simple tasks, Palminteri’s team found choice had a clear influence on decision-making. Participants in the study observed two symbols on a screen and then selected one with the press of a key to learn, through trial and error, which image gave the most points. At the end of the experiment, the subjects cashed in their points for money. By careful design, the results ruled out competing interpretations. For example, when freely choosing between the two options, people learned more quickly from the symbols associated with greater reward than those associated with punishment, which removed points. Though that finding resembled a positivity bias, this interpretation was ruled out by trials that demonstrated participants could also learn from negative outcomes. In trials that showed the outcomes for both symbols after a choice was made, subjects learned more from their chosen symbol when it gave a higher reward and when the unchosen one would deduct a point. That is, in this free-choice situation, they learned well from obtained gains and avoided losses.
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Warren Buffett Says This 1 Simple Habit Separates Successful People From Everyone Else
"The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything."
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Enjoy the Best, Not The Latest, Media
A while back I watched a mediocre film and complained to a friend, who told me, “Well, they need to make something to satisfy the crowd of summer moviegoers”. While I understood, I didn’t agree.
Such content is so common there’s even a name for it — potboiler. This is a book written not for a creative or literary or otherwise worthwhile purpose, but only to make money, literally to boil the pot to cook food for the author.
Don’t watch the next film or other marketing-driven content. Enjoy the best, irrespective of when it was made. In my opinion, the best film is Mulholland Drive from 2001. The best TV series is Star Trek: The Next Generation from the 90s. The best album is Entheogenic’s Spontaneous Illumination from 2003.
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Color blindness is an inaccurate term. Most color-blind people can see color, they just don't see the same colors as everyone else.
There have been a number of articles written about how to improve graphs, charts, and other visual aids on computers to better serve color-blind people. That is a worthwhile endeavor, and the people writing them mean well, but I suspect very few of them are color-blind because the advice is often poor and sometimes wrong. The most common variety of color blindness is called red-green color blindness, or deuteranopia, and it affects about 6% of human males. As someone who has moderate deuteranopia, I'd like to explain what living with it is really like.
The answer may surprise you.
The most important lesson is to not assume you know how something appears to a color-blind person, or to anyone else for that matter. If possible, ask someone you know who has eyes different from yours to assess your design and make sure it's legible. The world is full of people with vision problems of all kinds. If only the people who used amber LEDs to indicate charge had realized that.
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Peak Newsletter? That Was 80 Years Ago
In the 1940s, journalists fled traditional news outlets to write directly for subscribers. What happened next may be a warning.
In the 1930s, as today, the shift to newsletters arose amidst a crisis of confidence in the newspaper industry and was enabled by the spread of new technology. Though the first mimeograph had been licensed at the end of the 19th century, a mass-produced version of the machine ballooned in popularity around World War II. Now, regular people could become their own publishers for a one-time cost of just $50 to $100—equivalent to about $500 to $1,000 in today’s dollars. Radical poets like Allen Ginsburg used mimeographs to sell chapbooks, while genre aficionados relied on them to print science-fiction fanzines. Mimeographs also fueled the growth of marginalized communities: Some of the earliest gay publications, like the 1950s lesbian newsletter The Ladder, ran on the machine.
But there was another reason that media newsletters started to take off around the 1940s. At the time, public trust in mainstream media was wavering. Newspapers were making good money, but they were also increasingly turning into a monopoly. From 1923 to 1943, the number of US towns with at least two daily papers dropped from 502 to 137, according to media historian Victor Pickard’s book America’s Battle for Media Democracy. Congress threatened to investigate.
At the time, the popular perception was that newspapers were a bastion of conservative, not liberal, politics, driven by the interests of big business. By the end of the 1930s, many papers were fiercely opposed to the New Deal and to labor organizing, stances that would alienate large numbers of readers. As Pickard shows, the growing market consolidation, paired with these ideological concerns, led thousands of Americans in the 1940s to pack panels with titles like “Is the American Press Really Free?”
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More to Check Out:
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- Cities Experiment With Remedy for Poverty: Cash, No Strings Attached
- Why is Snowflake so valuable?
- Do things that don’t require scale
- Sonos is spying on me… (and you)
My Update:
Missed sending out the newsletter last week. Apologies! Hope you are doing well amidst these wild times. 2020 has truly been a bizarre year. I’m doing my best to maintain somewhat of a routine—focusing on what’s important and trying to say no to distractions. Not easy, but feel lucky to be in a position where I can at least try!
I’m still in San Diego until the end of October. Deciding where to move next.
Finally got running shoes!