🔥 The Fireside #6

What is making me think 🤔

📰 Why You Should Stop Reading News

[Highly recommended] We spend hours consuming news because we want to be well informed. However, the news is by definition something that doesn’t last. As news has become easier to distribute and cheaper to produce the quality has reduced.

🍟 How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food - NYT

As growth slows in wealthy countries, Western food companies are aggressively expanding in developing nations, contributing to obesity and health problems.

🗳 First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge

First Principles tinking breaks down true understanding into building blocks we can reassemble. It turns out most of us don’t know as much as we think we do.

😖 The Evolution of Anxiety: Why We Worry

Thousands of years ago, when humans lived in an Immediate Return Environment, stress and anxiety were useful emotions because they helped us take action in the face of immediate problems. Unfortunately, we don’t live in such environment anymore.

What I'm reading 📚

After reading “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline (it’s a great book, 100 times better than the movie), I’m currently reading “Finite and Infinite Games” by James Carse.

I don’t have a strong opinion about this book yet. It swings from painfully difficult and boring to brilliant and mind-bending. Some ideas have made me think so much that I can totally understand why the person who recommended me this book said “it will dramatically change the way you experience life”.

PS: You can find the free pdf here.

Other things from the web 🤓

(That may or may not make you look smart at dinner parties)

How David Fincher Hijacks Your Eyes - YouTube

NASA's stunning video of the Lagoon Nebula will put your dumb life in perspective — Quartz

In case you thought your problems were of any significance whatsoever, a new NASA video of the Lagoon Nebula is here to remind you that they absolutely are not.

Humanity Keeps Getting Smarter

IQ scores are rising almost everywhere… except, for some reason, in Scandinavia.