The one with Sagan, Munger, The Beatles and Jevons Paradox
Issue #1
Welcome to the inaugural weekly newsletter from The Commonplace Chronicle*. Each Tuesday I will bring you information that will prepare you for an exciting, yet uncertain, future. I’ll cover timeless mental models, cutting edge thinking, and new ideas emanating from the intersection of seemingly unrelated disciplines. The Commonplace Chronicle is starting as a simple and accessible weekly newsletter, but I hope to bring a podcast offering online along with other community building features if the newsletter is well received.
Thanks for taking this initial leap with me. As always, I would love direct feedback. If you have some, please email me at eric@commonplacechronicle.com and I will read and respond to all the emails I receive. Oh, and if you like what you see here, please consider recommending The Commonplace Chronicle to friends and colleagues. Referrals are the highest compliment I can receive.
Welcome to the fold.
* A commonplace book is a collection of quotes, ideas and information gathered for future reference and inspiration, acting as a “thinkers journal”. Hence the name of this newsletter, the Commonplace Chronicle.
What’s Interesting
+ Continuous Improvement: How It Works and How to Master It - “The typical approach to self-improvement is to set a large goal, then try to take big leaps in order to accomplish the goal in as little time as possible. While this may sound good in theory, it often ends in burnout, frustration, and failure. Instead, we should focus on continuous improvement by slowly and slightly adjusting our normal everyday habits and behaviors.”
+ Charlie Munger on why people are so unhappy - “The world is not driven by greed, it is driven by envy.” (video)
+ EconTalk: The Music and Magic of John and Paul (with Ian Leslie) - “So, this is stunning. There's two things that just blew me away. The entire time of the Beatles as public phenomena is six plus years, seven-ish, maybe eight if you count all the way through, Let It Be. But, their time together in the recording studio is--it's roughly six and a half, seven years…” (podcast)
Meditations
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)
Mental Model of the Week
Jevons Paradox
In it’s simplest form, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use therefore reducing the amount of that resource needed for a single application. However, as the cost of the resource drops (if the price is highly elastic), the result is overall demand increasing, causing total resource consumption to rise. (Source: Wikipedia)
Jevons first noted this paradoxical situation when, in 1865, he observed the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries after technological advancements increased the efficiency of coal with the aim of reducing coal use.
The Jevons paradox has been back in the news recently. Tech leaders posited that the introduction of DeepSeek’s less expensive AI model would further accelerate AI adoption and, therefore, companies like Microsoft would “make it up on volume” as the saying goes. The Economist’s Free Exchange argues that the case for AI may not be that simple.
On The Night Stand
“Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist” by Liz Pelly - “Along the way “PFC” — perfect fit content — was concocted These are cheap tracks — generated by anonymous musicians — that Spotify put into playlists for listeners who, they said, wouldn’t know the difference. Twenty songwriters supplied 500 different noms de plumes and produced thousands of such tracks. They even invented bogus bios for these pseudonyms. How many of these tracks are actually generated by AI? No one can say.” Excerpt from Steve Provizer’s review in The Arts Fuse.
“Mood Machine” is an interesting look at how “playlisting” and the artist payment system developed by Spotify have impacted the music business. The content of the book was excellent, though I felt that the writing and the structure of the book could have been better. That said, anyone interested in the evolution of music in the streaming era should give Pelly’s book a read.
In Heavy Rotation
+ Harvey Danger: The King James Version - The sophomore release from the band best known for the single “Flagpole Sitta” is considered to be their masterpiece by their fans and was critically acclaimed, but never broke through to the masses. It is time to revisit this album in its’ 25th anniversary year.
Still Curious?
+ To Scale: TIME - On a dry lake bed in the Mojave, a group of friends build a practical scale model of time: 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution, and our place within it. (video)
+ Why are bands mysteriously disappearing? w/ Rick Beato - In the first half of the 1980s there were 146 weeks where bands were number one. In the first half of the 1990s there were 141 weeks where bands were number one. In the first half of this decade, the 2020s, there were only 3 weeks where bands were number 1. 3… (video)
+ The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same - “These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn’t been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point.”
Thanks for reading and please refer a friend (or ten) if you find value here at The Commonplace Chronicle.
Until next week,
Eric