Interessant3 #141 | 🧪Career Experiments, 🤖Innovation Surplus, ☯︎Virtuous Balance
Three Interesting Things for W/C 2025-05-18
Experimenting with a different format this time, let me know what you think of it:
1. Tim Urban, “How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)”
Conventional wisdom isn’t your friend: society hands down outdated “career-tunnel” advice; your task is to become CEO of your own path.
The framework: map a Want Box (authentic yearnings) against a Reality Box (what’s actually attainable). Their overlap, the Option Pool,is where viable choices live.
Diagnose motivations: the “Yearning Octopus” exposes conflicting drives and fears, helping you clean noise out of the Want Box.
Judge feasibility with maths: Progress = Pace × Persistence. Talent, chef-like first-principles thinking, focus and stamina combine to shrink the distance to any “success star”.
Think in dots, not tunnels: modern careers are a string of experiments; choose the next dot, test the hypothesis, and pivot when evidence or personal growth demands. Contentment comes from running the best experiment you can today, not from predicting dot #4.
🔗 How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) – Tim Urban, Wait But Why
2. William D. Nordhaus (NBER Digest, Oct 2004), “Who Gains from Innovation?”
Schumpeterian profits are surprisingly small: across 1948-2001, firms captured only about 2.2 % of the total social surplus generated by US innovation; consumers absorbed the rest through lower prices.
Appropriability differs by sector: patents and strong property rights (e.g. pharmaceuticals) let producers keep a larger slice; public-domain knowledge (e.g. weather forecasting) drives prices down instead.
A simple model links surplus capture to three parameters: innovation-driven TFP growth, the instantaneous appropriability ratio and profit-depreciation, showing that even fast technical change needn’t translate into high profits.
Dot-com lesson: investors in the late-1990s “New Economy” implicitly assumed appropriability near 90 %; Nordhaus’s estimates (~7 %) imply innovators could net $0.4 trn, not the $6 trn baked into market valuations, helping explain the bubble.
Macro angle: productivity-driven wealth effects raise consumption, but only about one-third as much as they lift potential output, the so-called Greenspan effect.
🔗 Who Gains from Innovation? – NBER Digest, Oct 2004
3. Golden Mean (Philosophy)
Core idea: virtue lies in the mean between excess and deficiency; the Delphic maxim mēden agan (“nothing in excess”) anticipates Aristotle’s treatment in Nicomachean Ethics.
Classical examples: courage mediates between cowardice and recklessness; political balance blends monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.
Cross-cultural echoes: the Buddhist Middle Way, Confucian Zhongyong, Jewish Musar literature and Islamic, Hindu and Christian moral teachings all promote moderated conduct.
Narratives of moderation: myths like Daedalus warning Icarus to “fly the middle course” reinforce the danger of extremes.
Modern relevance: the principle underpins contemporary virtue ethics, behavioural nudging toward balanced living and political theories favouring mixed constitutions over dogmatic ideologies.
🔗 Golden Mean (Philosophy) – Wikipedia
Join us next week for three more intriguing topics that challenge the norm and expand your horizons! ✌️
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