A Quote I Am Reflecting On
“Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.”
- Lao Tzu
What I Am Reading
Book
What You Do Is Who You Are: How To Create Your Business Culture
Written by Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz has written one of the best books of 2020.
What You Do Is Who You Are resonated deeply with me because it taught me to think about business culture through:
Examples of Culture Done Correctly
Tactics and Strategies
The Osmotic Relationship between People and Decision-Making
Horowitz kicks off the book by talking about four figures of history who he thinks nailed culture perfectly- Toussaint Louveture, the Samurai, Shaka Senghor, and Genghis Khan. The first half of the book is made up of the biography of the individual (or group, in case of the Samurai) and how their vision of culture is mapped to the world of business. Very rarely do you find books that draw lines between the Bushido and Slack.
The second half of the book covers tactics and strategies on how to really establish a business culture. Horowitz highlights that at the heart of the tactics and strategies lies a core message: culture is a way of making decisions within the company when nobody is looking.
One of the reasons I rate this book higher than Patty McCord’s Powerful is because Horowitz nailed everything I felt was lacking in McCord’s book. He helps you think through first principles, offers guidance by looking at the lessons of history, and highlights the osmotic relationship (powered by culture) between people and decision-making.
RATING: 4/5 ⭐
Blog Post
AlphaFold: A Solution to a 50-year-old Grand Challenge in Biology
Written by DeepMind
In a year plagued by bureaucratic ineptitude and excessive politicization of the mundane every day, there have slight rays of hope. Shining brightest of the lot is DeepMind’s AlphaFold.
In 1994, Prof. John Moult and Prof. Krzysztof Fidelis co-founded the biennial Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP). The CASP is a biennial blind assessment to catalyse research, monitor progress, and establish the state of the art in protein structure prediction. It is both the gold standard for assessing predictive techniques and a unique global community built on a shared endeavour.
The main metric used by CASP to measure the accuracy of predictions is the Global Distance Test (GDT) which ranges from 0-100. In simple terms, GDT can be approximately thought of as the percentage of amino acid residues (beads in the protein chain) within a threshold distance from the correct position. According to Prof. Moult, a score of around 90 GDT is informally considered to be competitive with results obtained from experimental methods.
In the results from the 14th CASP assessment, released today, our latest AlphaFold system achieves a median score of 92.4 GDT overall across all targets. Even for the very hardest protein targets, those in the most challenging free-modelling category, AlphaFold achieves a median score of 87.0 GDT.
All across Twitter, there has been a lot of talk on whether AlphaFold will be the first Machine Learning Algorithm to win a Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. While there is certainly a case to be made, I believe that technology alone is not the answer. It is the combination of technology and human creativity that is the engine of human progress. Any attempt to separate the two will be catastrophic.
That being said, AlphaFold is a remarkable achievement by the DeepMind Team and the AlphaFold Team.
Here’s a great video from Lex Fridman for more details.
Tweet of the Week
Meme of the Week
What I Am Listening To
Podcast
Slack Founder Stewart Butterfield on Leadership Styles, Decision Making, The 3 Levels of Wealth, and Why Effective Entrepreneurship is like Parkour
The Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings
Slack was just sold to Salesforce for $27.7 Billion. There isn’t a better moment than now to share this podcast.
In this interview, Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack, talks about:
How he thinks about the relationship to money
His management and decision-making style and philosophy
Books that have most inspired him
Highly recommended.
What I Am Watching
Video
The Heartbreaking Nature of the Nobel Prize
From Lex Fridman (feat. Alex Flilippenko)
This is an incredibly fascinating discussion between Lex Fridman and Alex Filippenko, Professor of Astronomy at UC Berkeley.
Alex talks about the complex relationship between the criteria of the Nobel Prize committee in selecting winners and the vastness of the scientific network that actually make powerful discoveries come to life, i.e, despite scientists standing on the shoulders of giants, only three people (arbitrarily defined by the Nobel Prize committee and not by Alfred Nobel himself) are allowed to win the Nobel Prize every year.
Alex tells us that the lives of many, many scientists are ruined by this kind of thinking.
Interesting how the dynamics of the relationship between humans and machines might change if, let’s say, AlphaFold wins the Nobel Prize before several humans who’ve actually spent years of their lives working on the protein-folding problem.
Movies
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
One of my problems with films based on books is this duality:
The book is more vivid than the film
The film is more vivid than the book
For example, the Harry Potter books are more vivid than the films. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (Part 1) is more vivid that Mario Puzo’s book.
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy is one of those rare series of films which strike the perfect balance between the author’s text and the filmmaker’s vision. It’s a powerful film because I watched the films before I read the books and the visual language of Peter Jackson’s films helped my ability to vividly imagine the world created by JRR Tolkien.
Peter Jackson’s LOTR Trilogy is absolutely timeless and a prime example of what happens when the author’s and the filmmaker’s vision of the (fictional) universe is absolutely in sync.
Thank you for reading Don’t Be Boring (#24).
You can follow me on Twitter. My handle is @vigneshs1994.
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Wishing you an awesome week ahead.
– Vignesh