What I learned in 2023

So It Turns Out, #54

Hi,

So here are some things I learned last year:

So It Turns Out A Man Learned Some Lessons

1. There are few things kinder or more humbling to my Midwestern heart than when some of my closest friends, and some of my newest ones, have vouched for me in my job search this year. I cannot explain enough how much it’s meant to me. The long-term plans are still up in the air, but I have some really exciting things I’m doing in the short term, and I’m deeply filled with gratitude.

2. The advantage of the millennial lifestyle subsidy is that if you’re suddenly time rich and income poor after being time poor and income rich, your personal expenses are very possible to scale down, fairly quickly. (Relatedly, the DC Capital Bikeshare system and DC’s bike lanes are wildly underrated by comparison to Uber/Lyft. You can get across town during rush hour in 30 minutes with an e-bike for $3.00!)

3. America’s Test Kitchen has excellent advice, and enables you to literally cheat by stacking hundreds of hours of don’t-fuck-it-up experimentation into a single YouTube video, such as:

   1. Spaghetti cooks faster and better when you place it with non-boiling water in a pan and then heat it. (But the America’s Test Kitchen video on it is only on Instagram, so enjoy this other video instead):

   2. A turkey recipe executed by a novice, optimized on hundreds of hours of training by experts, can still impress your friends who are actually good chefs¹:

4. Canonical tier ranking of major new bars visited:

   1. Super: Bar de las Brujas (CDMX), Handshake (CDMX), Xaman (CDMX)

   2. A: Allegory (DC), Limantour (CDMX)

   3. B: Handshake Basement Annex (CDMX), Hanky Panky (CDMX; nails the “what-if-John-Wick’s-set-designer-made-a-restaurant” vibes)

   4. C: Bar Chinois (DC), Harvey’s Bar (Lexington, KY), King’s Ransom (Alexandria, VA)

   5. D/F: Baltra Bar (CDMX, wildly overrated on both service and menu)

5. “A dath ilani tragedy isn't about the triumph of Evil over Good. It's about the triumph of erroneous reasoning and ill-coordination over everyone."

6. If someone hasn’t been doing something for a long time that they say they want, it’s not that they don’t want it. It’s that their needs and wants are so complex and tangled that they can’t truly want anything other than to stop hurting.

7. There is more return in identifying your own ugh fields than you might imagine. That doesn’t mean you’ll succeed at it, just that you’ll be more frustrated retrospectively later.

8. You can be a business guy for many years, but you don’t really realize the rhythms of American capitalism until you open a store on Amazon, and find yourself literally hip-deep in boxed orders ready to go out on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. (Relatedly to 7, doing this is also a great way of amplifying the “ugh field” voice in your own head until it’s loud enough to really hear — the boxes have to go out no matter what!)

9. Most people can impress you if given even a little permission. Unfortunately, some impressive acts are antisocial ones, so modern American society goes around giving out very little permission, and indeed convincing people that permission is needed where it is not. Give your friends and colleagues more permission.

10. Almost every odd story you might hear while living in Los Angeles about the earliest days of the RAND Corporation makes more sense after spending time with researchers who are staring the AI revolution/apocalypse in the face. And anecdotally, a pretty common belief among AI researchers is that 2024 is going to be a very weird year…

Dave, all of this seems great, but can you boil it down into a metric that we can collectively bet on with fake internet money?

Disclosures:

Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or David Letterman.

1. Yes, obviously this is an AI metaphor too. When your Large Language Model lossily compresses all of human internet civilization into itself, most things are…