Links - 12/18/2023
“Part of investing and calculating intrinsic values is if you get the wrong answer when you get through — in other words, if it says don’t buy, you can’t buy just because somebody else thinks it’s going to go up or because your friends have made a lot of easy money lately or anything of the sort. You have to be able to walk away from anything that doesn’t work. And very few things work these days. You also have to walk away from anything you don’t understand.” —Warren Buffett (1997)
How Are You Different? - by Ian Cassel (LINK)
Google’s True Moonshot - by Ben Thompson (LINK)
Shipping firms avoid Red Sea as Houthi attacks increase (LINK) [For more on the effects of all of this, see Ryan Petersen’s thread on X, a thread from BJ Armstrong on X, and a video from What is Going on With Shipping? from this weekend.]
Behavioral Science in the Backcountry [H/T Linc] (LINK)
Value Investing with Legends Podcast: John Armitage - Navigating Macroeconomic Shifts (LINK)
Another Podcast: AI and Everything Else (LINK)
Hidden Forces Podcast: What’s Driving the Fall in Oil Prices? | Rory Johnston (LINK)
Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones vs. Smart Kids (video) (LINK)
“When I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don’t know where I’m going…. Efficiency and invention are sort of at odds, because real invention, not incremental improvement—incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor. In everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I’m talking about real invention, real lateral thinking. That requires wandering, and you have to give yourself permission to wander.” —Jeff Bezos [Source]
“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” —Amos Tversky
“Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.” —Robert M. Pirsig
“The problem with physics is that most of the days we don’t make any major headway (on our projects). That’s why you should do other stuff: listen to music, meet good friends. There’s one exception to this rule: If you find a solution for a given problem, you work 24 hours a day and forget everything else. Until the problem is solved in its entirety.” —Stephen Hawking