astukari Newsletter #69 - The Revolution of Knowledge Transfer
Hi friends,
I’m thinking of rebooting my Instagram account, because if you try going on there all you can see is me advertising my articles. Not a whole lot of great content. I think my Twitter solves this pretty well because I can just make a sentence-or-two-long tweet based on something I’ve written on the blog. Similar idea for Youtube. For Instagram I’d like something that fits the photo format, but I’m not a great artist nor photographer. Have ideas for what I could do to spruce things up? Reply to this email with your idea :)
🔨What I’ve Been Making
I Am Not Your Friend - Alright, perhaps this is a little misleading since I referred to you all as friends at the very beginning of this newsletter. Jokes aside, we’ve been seeing an interesting mini-evolution in the human psyche in terms of parasociality, or believing that people are your close friends when they are not. This seems to be related at least somewhat to the rise of the Internet. But why?
My 5 Tips Towards Reading Books - Long promised and well overdue, here are my five tips towards reading books. I imagine some people will disagree with a few (or all) of these, but this is the method that works best for me. Feel free to try it out!
[For those who prefer audio, there are now video summaries for Biological Evolution, Cultural Evolution and The Ben Carson Effect]
📚What I’ve Been Reading
The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer - Many people say that the greatest thing the internet did was provide a forum for all the world’s people to communicate with one another. But I would argue that its greatest achievement was actually a derivative of that — providing a forum for knowledge transfer specifically. This article uses YouTube as a specific example but you can really put in any learning service created over the past 20 years in that spot and it will still make sense.
The New American University - Disclaimer: I did go to ASU. But the interesting part about this article has nothing to do with any particular university — rather, the repositioning of the university as a place that shapes thought leaders, not grooms them. The traditional university system involved a group of old men examining your application and determining how much potential you had, then giving you resources correlated to your potential. If they thought you could be an all-star, you went to Harvard and got all the support in the world. If they saw you as unfit, you went to (at best) a community college where you might find a place at the local career fair. The New American University model changes this, instead saying that the onus is on the university and not the student to develop them into all-stars. So far, it seems to be working; since implementing NAU, Arizona State has leapfrogged other institutions, going from being ranked in the top 200 US schools to the top 40. It’s also become the largest university system in history, with over 120,000 students. This could be what saves education.
Curators All the Way Down - Most people online have been clamoring about the creator economy recently (see the last post in this list), but there are a few people here and there talking about something rather interesting: the curator economy. Instead of creating things themselves, they use their penchant of taste to gather the best info and use that as their business model. This readings section can be seen as a small-scale version of that. While I’m skeptical of its ability to generate income, I will be following this idea into the future.
Hardware and the Metaverse - Last biweek we talked about the metaverse. This biweek we’re talking about the metaverse. As I said, it’s the number one fad of August! Anyway, out of all of Matthew Ball’s articles on the metaverse, this one struck me as the most interesting. It looks at some of the biggest emerging technologies and explains how they could be positioned for the metaverse. Whether that will actually end up being true is another topic, but it is interesting to see the trends that technology is taking us.
Can you make money as a thought leader online? - And, of course, it would not be an episode of the Astukari Newsletter without an article on the creator economy. This one goes over some of the biggest Hivemind creators in the past year and how they ended up building out their income generator. As you can tell by the article name, the theme is “writing random shit online and hoping that it sticks with some people”. Sounds familiar!