What We’re Reading (Week Ending 29 November 2020) - 29 Nov 2020
Reading helps us learn about the world and it is a really important aspect of investing. The legendary Charlie Munger even goes so far as to say that “I don’t think you can get to be a really good investor over a broad range without doing a massive amount of reading.” We (the co-founders of Compounder Fund) read widely across a range of topics, including investing, business, technology, and the world in general. We want to regularly share the best articles we’ve come across recently. Here they are (for the week ending 29 November 2020):
1. Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine – Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Thomas, Noah Weiland, David Gelles, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Denise Grady
Moderna’s goal was to get from a vaccine design to a human trial in three months. The design came quickly. “This is not a complicated virus,” Mr. Bancel said.
Dr. Graham said that after China released the genetic sequence of the new virus, the vaccine research center zeroed in on the gene for the virus’s spike protein and sent the data to Moderna in a Microsoft Word file. Moderna’s scientists had independently identified the same gene. Mr. Bancel said Moderna then plugged that data into its computers and came up with the design for an mRNA vaccine. The entire process took two days…
…By early fall, political pressures that had been building all year burst into the open. Federal regulators were trying to issue guidelines to ensure enough follow-up of clinical trial participants to make sure the vaccines were safe, but White House officials were blocking them. The president was attacking F.D.A. officials as antagonists intent on thwarting his re-election.
Dr. Bourla had been dragged into the political thicket, in part because of his own promises that Pfizer expected clinical trial results by October. The president ballyhooed that deadline on the campaign trail, and tried to publicly link himself to Pfizer’s leader.
Dr. Sahin, of BioNTech and Pfizer’s partner, said Dr. Bourla was trying to manage “an uncomfortable situation.” But when the president went after the F.D.A., Dr. Bourla drew a line, deciding that public confidence in a vaccine was at stake. “We had statements against the F.D.A., the deep state, et cetera, that really were concerning for me,” he said. “We needed to speak up.”
He called Alex Gorsky, the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson, another leading contender in the vaccine race, then recruited leaders from other companies. Together, they drafted a statement that said the industry would “stand with science” and follow F.D.A. guidelines. By Sept. 8, nine companies, including Moderna, had signed on.
2. Why Everyone’s Suddenly Hoarding Mason Jars – Jen Doll
But Marisa McClellan, a canning expert and cookbook author who’s a brand ambassador for Ball (yes, even mason jars have brand ambassadors these days) says we’re simply in a cycle that — along with economic recession — tends to happen every 10 years or so. In times of economic insecurity like the last recession in 2009, when McClellan started her Food in Jars blog, people turned to canning to soothe their fears, and mason jar sales took off.
This pattern happened in the Great Depression and World War II, when canning surged and there were mason jar sales spikes and lid shortages; again during the back-to-the land movement in the 1970s and ’80s; and again as people prepared for the Y2K disaster that never came. Now, in a time of pandemic, employment upheaval, political turmoil, a growing distrust in our established systems, the jars are once again in high demand.
In other words, there may be no better barometer of the state of our economy than the mason jar.
3. How To Think For Yourself – Paul Graham
There’s room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but in practice there’s a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of work where it’s essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds where it’s not.
I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid, because it’s one of the most important things to think about when you’re deciding what kind of work you want to do. Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I suspect most people’s unconscious mind will answer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to. I know mine does.
Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you’re going to be unhappy. If you’re naturally independent-minded, you’re going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you’re naturally conventional-minded, you’re going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research.
One difficulty here, though, is that people are often mistaken about where they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded. Conventional-minded people don’t like to think of themselves as conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything. It’s just a coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers’. And the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state them publicly…
…Fortunately you don’t have to spend all your time with independent-minded people. It’s enough to have one or two you can talk to regularly. And once you find them, they’re usually as eager to talk as you are; they need you too. Although universities no longer have the kind of monopoly they used to have on education, good universities are still an excellent way to meet independent-minded people. Most students will still be conventional-minded, but you’ll at least find clumps of independent-minded ones, rather than the near zero you may have found in high school.
It also works to go in the other direction: as well as cultivating a small collection of independent-minded friends, to try to meet as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups of peers. Plus if you’re part of several different worlds, you can often import ideas from one to another.
But by different types of people, I don’t mean demographically different. For this technique to work, they have to think differently. So while it’s an excellent idea to go and visit other countries, you can probably find people who think differently right around the corner. When I meet someone who knows a lot about something unusual (which includes practically everyone, if you dig deep enough), I try to learn what they know that other people don’t. There are almost always surprises here. It’s a good way to make conversation when you meet strangers, but I don’t do it to make conversation. I really want to know.
4. There’s Always a Chart – Michael Batnick
If you’re looking for evidence that shorts have thrown in the towel, and therefore now’s the time to get cautious, there’s a chart for that.
If you’re looking for evidence that actually, an absence of bears doesn’t mean an overwhelming amount of bulls, there’s a chart for that too…
…If you’re looking for evidence that strong breadth is bullish and not bearish, you guessed it; there’s a chart for that too….
…If you’re looking for something to confirm your view, you’re going to find it. Whether it’s a data point that supports your ideas or a contra data point that negates it, thereby making you even more confident, then you’re going to find that too.
5. The Tweet That Led To A Science Paper About Galactic Crepuscular Rays – Phil Plait
Y’all should know Judy Schmidt’s name by now. I’ve linked to her work many times here on the blog; she’s an image processing wizard, taking raw images from Hubble and turning them into ridiculously beautiful art.
There’s science there, too, like a weird nebula she and I tried to figure out in a nearby galaxy. We never really reached a conclusion on that one, but sometimes what she does leads to not just science, but a science publication.
And in this particular case it started with a tweet:
“Looking at this new pic of IC5063 (from Barth’s Prop15444), trying to figure out if I can make a color image… hmm maybe not, but are these cones I’m straining to see real, I wonder?”
This is a Hubble image of the sorta nearby galaxy IC5063, which is about 160 million light years away. It’s a disk galaxy, though it’s hard to tell in that image. What Judy was straining to see are what look like rays of light coming out from the center, very faint, just barely above the background levels of the image.
A lot of astronomers follow her, and a conversation started (click through the tweet above to see the whole thing). Dr. Julianne Delcanton suggested they look like ionization cones: Intense light from the center of the galaxy blasts out and zaps gas around it, creating glowing triangles of light in images. We all agreed it does look like that (especially after Bill Keel processed the image to enhance the rays), and then, after Judy asked if they could be shadows, one of us (cough cough) suggested they do look like crepuscular rays: Opaque stuff deep in the center of the galaxy blocks the light in some directions but not others, so you see bright and dark rays fanning out, like rays of light from the setting Sun (crepuscular means relating to twilight)…
…This idea of torus shadowing had been speculated for a while, but never before seen. So this is a first! And it’s all because Judy loves processing Hubble images, saw something funny, and decided to throw it out to the community on social media.
6. Happiness Won’t Save You – Jennifer Senior
More than 40 years ago, three psychologists published a study with the eccentric, mildly seductive title, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” Even if you don’t think you know what it says, there’s a decent chance you do. It has seeped into TED talks, life-hack segments on morning shows, even the occasional whiff of movie dialogue. The paper is the peanut butter and jelly sandwich of happiness studies, a staple in any curriculum that looks at the psychology of human flourishing…
…There were flaws in the study — its design, alas, was as crude as an ax — but you can see why it became famous. It had an irresistible takeaway: Money! It doesn’t buy you happiness! Perhaps even more fundamentally, it had a sexy, almost absurd, premise. What kind of mind would think to pair lottery winners and accident victims in a research paper? Who in academic psychology had such a cockeyed imagination? It was social science by way of Samuel Beckett….
…The answer to that question is a fellow by the name of Philip Brickman, a 34-year-old rising star at Northwestern University. He was warm, irrepressible, spellbinding to talk to; his mind was a chirping hatchery of ideas. Unlike so many of his peers, his preoccupations had little to do with cognitive processes. Rather, they had to do with matters of the heart: how we cope with adversity; how we care for others; how we form commitments, subdue inner conflicts, wrench meaning and happiness from this brief life.
“He wanted the world to be a more humane place,” his closest friend, Jeffery Paige, told me.
So for Brickman to come up with a study like this one made perfect sense. It was idiosyncratic, humanistic and, above all, relevant: Does money fulfill us? Does irremediable damage to the body cause irremediable damage to the spirit? Can we simply adapt to anything?
What, ultimately, do we need to carry us through?
Not long after publishing that study, Brickman left Northwestern for the University of Michigan, where he’d become the director of the oldest and most storied arm of the Institute for Social Research. It was a prestige gig, an honor often reserved for academics at the pinnacle of their careers. Paige, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Michigan, told me he thought Brickman was destined for the National Academy of Sciences one day.
We’ll never know. On May 13, 1982, at the age of 38, Philip Brickman made his way onto the roof of Tower Plaza, the tallest building in Ann Arbor, and jumped. It was a 26-story fall. The man who’d done one of psychology’s foundational studies about happiness couldn’t make his own pain go away.
7. The Road Ahead after 25 years – Bill Gates
Twenty-five years ago today, I published my first book, The Road Ahead. At the time, people were wondering where digital technology was headed and how it would affect our lives, and I wanted to share my thoughts—and my enthusiasm. I also had fun making some predictions about breakthroughs in computing, and especially the Internet, that were coming in the next couple of decades.
Next February, I’ll release another book, this one about climate change. Before it hits the shelves, I thought it would be fun to look back at The Road Ahead and see how things turned out.
As I wrote in The Road Ahead, we tend to overestimate the changes that will happen in the short term and underestimate the ones that will happen over the long term. That is certainly my experience with the book itself. I was too optimistic about some things, but other things happened even faster or more dramatically than I imagined…
…One thing I wrote about that hasn’t happened yet—but I still think will happen—is the way the Internet will affect the structure of our cities. Today the cost of living in a dense downtown, like Seattle’s, is so high that many workers (including teachers, police officers, and baristas) can’t afford to live there. Even high earners spend a disproportionate percentage of their income on rent. As a result, some cities are arguably too successful, and others are not successful enough. It’s a real problem for our country…
…The Road Ahead has a lot in common with my new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Both are about how technology and innovation can help solve important problems. Both share glimpses into the cutting-edge technology I get to learn about.
One thing is different: The stakes are higher with climate change. As passionate as I am about software, the effort to avoid a climate disaster has a whole other level of urgency. Failing to get this right will have bad consequences for humanity. But you can also see the glass as half full. There are huge opportunities to solve this problem, eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions, and create new industries that make clean energy available and affordable for everyone—including people in the world’s poorest countries.
Disclaimer: None of the information or analysis presented is intended to form the basis for any offer or recommendation. Of all the companies mentioned in this article, we currently have no vested interest in any companies mentioned. Holdings are subject to change at any time.
