I’ve long desired to have a practice of periodically reviewing the information I’ve consumed so I’m going to dip my toes in the water with (hopefully) regular short posts of the best things I’ve read. Please check out the original content, the excerpts are just what jumped out at me most and may not make sense without a proper read.

This Is What Uncertainty Feels Like #

https://commoncog.com/blog/what-uncertainty-feels-like

“The problem here is that every move is a good move.” he sighed, “Or more accurately, every move is equally bad; every move might go wrong. There is no way to tell which is the right move to make.”

In a very particular sense, this experience that we’ve shared together over the past two months or so is a good thing. We now have an anchor to refer to whenever we want to remember what uncertainty feels like. And this is important, because humans need to feel in order to act effectively.

you can’t act effectively if you are paralysed by the unknown. You have to get used to the fact that you will never know if you are making the best decision, and take action with that sinking feeling in your gut. To do that, you have to expect the sinking feeling. You must be familiar with what uncertainty feels like.

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage #

https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

If capitalism is driven by a search for profit, the food delivery business confuses the hell out of me. Every platform loses money. Restaurants feel like they’re getting screwed. Delivery drivers are poster children for gig economy problems. Customers get annoyed about delivery fees.

You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It’s used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and increased prices. But is that even viable?

Third-party delivery platforms, as they’ve been built, just seem like the wrong model, but instead of testing, failing, and evolving, they’ve been subsidized into market dominance. Maybe the right model is a wholly-owned supply chain like Domino’s. Maybe it’s some ghost kitchen / delivery platform hybrid. Maybe it’s just small networks of restaurants with out-of-the-box software. Whatever it is, we’ve been delayed in finding out thanks to this bizarrely bankrolled competition that sometimes feels like financial engineering worthy of my own pizza trading efforts.

The more I learn about food delivery platforms, as they exist today, I wonder if we’ve managed to watch an entire industry evolve artificially and incorrectly.

The Power of Admitting Ignorance #

https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/posts/2020/power_of_admitting_ignorance

Prof. Kreck expanded a little bit on this answer and basically explained to me that it might takes years of studying to finally grasp all the nuances of the proof and, since it was not directly within his realm of expertise in topology, he was just as clueless about certain concepts than I was. The major difference being that he was more experienced at feeling clueless, and knew more concepts for addressing this feeling.

I realised that the power of truly mastering a subject lies in realising that you do not necessarily understand everything—and being honest about it!

I think it is important to be honest about what you know and what you do not know. Ignorance is not a moral blemish—pretending to be smarter than you are is (just as choosing to remain in a state of ignorance is).