Post-pandemic life-work re-assessment is resulting in an unexpected wave of employees quitting their jobs. Bitcoin has no innate value – but this doesn’t stop it being valued and increasingly so. Fake human data risks messing up the algorithms. Post-pandemic and zoom weary we are re-assessing who our friends really are. Re-assessing our life-sleep balance and placing the value on sleep it merits is the best health move we can make.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“We should think of sleep as the very best life- and health-insurance policy you could ever wish for” (Matthew Walker in the last article).
ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Erica Pandey, “Great resignation” wave coming for companies
(Axios, 14 June 2021)
This article depicts a post-COVID outcome that (to our knowledge) nobody had really predicted. In the US, surveys show anywhere from 25% to upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs – a new phenomenon called “The Great Resignation”. It is caused by workers who have had more than a year to reconsider their work-life balance and career paths, and as the world opens back up, many are deciding to give in their notice and make those changes they’ve long been dreaming about. This is primarily a US phenomenon but it also happening in much of the rich world and expanding fast (reads in 2-3 min).
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Eswar Prasad, The Brutal Truth About Bitcoin
(The New York Times, 14 June 2021)
This short read effectively debunks the Bitcoin myth. The most famous cryptocurrency has no intrinsic value and is not backed by anything, but its devotees believe that, like gold, its value comes from its scarcity (which, alone, can hardly be a source of value). The bottom line is this: Bitcoin investors seem to rely on the greater fool theory – all you need to profit from an investment is to find someone willing to buy the asset at a higher price. However, despite its vagaries, Bitcoin has set off a revolution in money and finance that will ultimately affect every one of us, for better and for worse (reads in 5-6 min).
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Karen Hao, These creepy fake humans herald a new age in AI
(MIT Technology Review, 11 June 2021)
“Synthetic-data companies” now offer on-demand digital humans that generate data used for deep learning used in finance, insurance, health care and whichever other industries require it. Such companies offer a compelling alternative to the expensive and time-consuming process of gathering real-world data and are therefore seen as a panacea. Real data is messy, riddled with bias and privacy regulations make it hard to collect, while synthetic data is pristine and can be used to build more diverse data sets. But it has its limitations: if it fails to reflect reality, it could end up producing even worse AI than messy, biased real-world data (reads in about 7-9 min).
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Jane Hu, What Did Covid Do to Friendship?
(The New Yorker, 11 June 2021)
Among a broader reflection on the meaning of friendship, this article makes it clear that the pandemic has reoriented our economy of attention, redefining the limits of who and what we could care about. COVID has revealed that some relations of friendship were more of convenience than anything else. “When restricted to texting and phone calls and the odd celebration on Zoom, one gradually learns which relationships are sustained by enduring fondness and which will crumple amid structural collapse” (reads in about 7-9 min).
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Matthew Walker, The new science of sleep: Everything we know about how it affects your health and brain
(Science Focus, 10 June 2021)
Walker is one of the world’s foremost authorities in the science of sleep (and recent author of “Why We Sleep”). In this short distillation of his book, he explains what happens if we have too little sleep, why we need a minimum of seven hours a night, why sleep keeps our brain healthy, why we dream, and much more! In short: sleep is the single most effective thing we do each day to reset the health of our brain and body: “It’s an extraordinary elixir that can help you age well and live longer” (reads in around 10 min).
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