Retire, Energy, Burnout, Singularity, Pivot tables
Some great reads from the internet this week
Retire
We are constantly told that not having to work is the ultimate goal. It’s the highest form of freedom, right? But this idea misses a larger point—work is about much more than money. Work is part of your identity. It’s about your role in society and can be closely tied to your purpose as well.
If you think that work is only about collecting a paycheck, then you either don’t enjoy the type of work you do or you don’t like the people that you work with. In that case, I understand why not having to work can seem so great. It’s far better than a job you hate. But if you think that financial freedom will solve all of your problems, think again. There is too much evidence suggesting otherwise
Energy
Humanity's exceptional relationship with energy began hundreds of thousands of years ago, with our discovery of fire.Fire did much more than just keep us warm, protect us from predators and give us a new tool for hunting. A number of anthropologists believe fire actually refashioned our biology.
Anything that allows an organism to get energy more efficiently is going to have huge effects on the evolutionary trajectory of that organism. Cooking transforms the energy available from food. The carbohydrates, proteins and lipids that provide our bodies with nutrition are unravelled and exposed when they are heated. That makes it is easier for our digestive enzymes to do their work effectively, extracting more calories more quickly than if we ate our food raw.
Burnout
For years, burnout has been treated as a homogenous syndrome, when in reality people’s experiences with burnout vary greatly. “Burnout is considered a uniform condition with relatively consistent symptoms resulting from prolonged exposure to chronic stressors in the workplace. […] Clinical experience, however, shows that burnout is manifested in different ways that can be classified depending on the level of dedication with which individuals cope with work-related tasks
God is, by definition, the greatest being that we can imagine; a God that doesn’t exist is clearly not as great as a God that does exist; ergo, God must exist. This is known as the ontological argument, and there are enough people who find it convincing that it’s still being discussed, nearly a thousand years later.
God isn’t the only being that people have tried to argue into existence. Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever.
Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control
Right? No, wrong! Read on to discover why!
Pivot Table
Software developer Pito Salas was at the time working in research and development for Lotus, looking into how people typically utilize spreadsheets. Salas saw that users would often use spreadsheets to try to calculate summary statistics by categories (often referred to as crosstabs).
Salas decided the world needed software that would make those calculations simple. Rather than enter formulas, users would be able to point and click to get those summary statistics. The Lotus team called this tool “flexible views,” but today similar tools are called “pivot tables”
Thanks for reading through.