I cut my own hair. It’s not great and it’s not terrible if you look from afar. It’s a monstrosity if you look closely. Something like a cross between Hitler Youth and The Beatles. But it works great on Zoom calls. I got rave reviews from my manager and colleagues which made me think about couple of things:
Things are way harder when you look at them closely so people saying that online learning and YouTube DIY is going to teach you everything are probably wrong. I think a more nuanced view would be that learning something online is a great way to get started but eventually most people would need to collaborate with others. So my pet theory is that people would pay more for learning communities than they would pay for live classes or tutorials.
The ability to concentrate and create narratives is going to be what makes humans more valuable that robots. I think we would eventually have robots that can replace the $15 SuperCuts haircut (which would have been immensely valuable to me 8 hours ago) but probably not ones that can replace a $40 haircut. I remember the first time I got one of those and two things that stand out is the experience of the salon and the skill of the barber - the precision, the care, working around the weird contours of my scalp.
There is also something to be said about fidelity when working from home. I think one of the most underrated wins of this (as a male) is that you can no longer size up a person based on soft handshakes, great posture or tailored shirts. Those virtue signals have been replaced by good voice, Zoom backgrounds, good camera set up. And we are still early enough in this scenario for people to invest in all of this and most people are still figuring it out. Good time to be fumbling introvert figuring things out before the habits set in and everyone becomes a podcaster with a deep, raspy voice like Roman Mars
On the topic of predicting behaviors and the future world - Everyone’s predicting the future and we are all (including expert predictors) inching very close to conceptualizing astrology. Reading predictions on Twitter makes me feel like we have abstracted over time for all the possibilities in a post-covid world, much like astrologists making directional guesses on how the future may turn on. I’m not saying this is bad but it would be fun if all the Nate Silvers, Mary Meekers and Faucis of the world title their predictions as Horoscopes. The horoscope for CEO’s of bailed out industries look kind of good: You’re most likely to wake up with a lot of dollar bills in your account which may give you the urge to buy back some stocks, which is not unlike you at all. Indulge your desires today, who knows may be tomorrow you’ll feel like furloughing a few thousand non essential staff.
Links of the week
David Brin: Our Favorite Cliché — A World Filled With Idiots…, or,Why Films and Novels Routinely Depict Society and its Citizens as Fools - Relevant to the times we live in where its fashionable to cite every institution as incompetent
Underutilized fixed assets by Kevin Kwok - Been thinking about this week. The businesses that come out of this/are in this crisis have fixed assets that they have to repurpose and reimagine. What would that look like? Professional chefs as teachers, movie houses repurposed for private shows
Up and down the layer of abstraction - On looking at systems closely
Where there’s muck there’s brass - timely ready on solving gnarly problems, of which now there are plenty