Monthly Links, February 2024

Res Extensa #58 :: The prospects of geothermal power, screenshot essays, honing your craft, working with GPTs, and reducing complexity

Screenshot Essays

Inspired by a post from David Perell a couple weeks ago, I started posting "screenshot essays" on Twitter — short form single page ideas that fit in a screenshot. A few of them so far:

• Don't Confuse Motion and Progress — A reminder that “busyness” doesn’t imply productivity.

• The Two Enlightenments — Comparing David Deutsch’s two similar-but-distinct branches of the Enlightenment: the “British” and the “Continental” model. (actually got a reshare from Prof. Deutsch himself)

• Build for Yourself — Exploring the benefits of building products for yourself.

• Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity — There’s a big difference between being simplistic and simple. (expanded into RE 56)

It's been a fun experiment. Let's me write up shorter ideas in bite-sized chunks. Makes them easier for people to read, more shareable, more consumable. Will continue.

---

The Power of the Earth

From

The Works in Progress Newsletter

, this feature dives into the state of geothermal power — from the geographic limitations, challenges with drilling kilometers deep, and the prospects of using millimeter waves over physical hardware for drilling boreholes.

Woskov is now an advisor to a start-up, Quaise, that was spun out of MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2018. Quaise's plan is to use millimeter waves to vaporize bedrock, which is the solid rock that lies beneath soil. This method, if feasible, would make it possible to create holes as deep as 20 kilometers. At those depths, rock is 500 degrees Celsius: superhot rock, as it's called. Pumping water into superhot rock gives us supercritical water, water pressurized and heated beyond 373 degrees Celsius, at which point it has the low viscosity of a gas, the high density of a liquid, and an energy density not far off from that of fossil fuels. Supercritical water is so energy-dense that a successful attempt to commercially harness it would be, in the words of the volcanologist and petrologist Mike Cassidy, a 'complete game changer'.

---

Amateurs Obsess Over Tools, Pros Over Mastery

Adam Singer

reminds us to work on our craft, hone our skills. Not buy new tools and toys and expect them to take us where we want to go:

True pros understand the importance of honing their craft, regardless of the tools at their disposal. They embrace the philosophy of Bruce Lee, who famously stated, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." It's the expertise gained through deliberate, consistent practice and a deep understanding of the fundamentals that separates pros from amateurs.

I wrote about a similar theme in Try the Basics First, recommending focusing on core behaviors and habits before you get concerned about specific techniques, tools, processes, or systems. Tools should help you improve your craft, not shortcut over it.

---

Epistemic Hygiene

Here's

Kasey Klimes

with a great piece on maintaining intellectual honesty in your team.

This crops up often on all teams. You hear singular instances made plural — "customers are asking for" — but when you probe within, really it's one customer asking, about a thing we merely project will be of interest to others. It's the hidden projection that needs to be exposed. We need the facts on the ground otherwise make good decisions, and exposing these epistemic "white lies" and exaggerations is essential. The corporate game of telephone will twist the details once they leave the source, so we at least need the origin to be grounded in reality.

The earlier a team can practice good epistemic hygiene, the better. Once an unsubstantiated claim has taken on the veneer of truth and especially once critical decisions have been made on its basis, it becomes painful to course correct. Investments have been made, promotions planned, stakeholders appeased, and no one wants to lose face. Even in earlier-stage companies where these politics are less pronounced, the same mindset can still infect the product development process.

I don't think you need hard facts guiding every decision. In fact, that's impossible. But you should have intellectual honesty about claims (I love Kasey's term: "load-bearing claims") vs. hiding the ball (or not having the rigor to even understand the claim).

---

---

You Should Be Playing with GPTs at Work

Lenny Rachitsky

makes the case for experimenting with custom GPTs for your work. If you haven't seen them, custom GPTs let you pre-train custom ChatGPT bots for specific types of responses, queries, and questions.

Once you get the initial version set up, you can then upload "knowledge"--decks, PDFs, spreadsheets, and any other documents that give the GPT more information on your specific context and company. For example, you can upload your roadmap, your company values, your career ladders, etc. The more you give it, the better it does. Think of it like onboarding a person--what context would you want them to have to do their job well?

ChatGPT and Perplexity have become regular fixtures in my day-to-day — both work and leisure. CGPT is one of the first places I go now to explore an idea, even before Googling around and reading. I use it all day long for product research, copywriting, prompting for ideas, data modeling, and more and more each day.

I even built a custom GPT to quiz you on your geography trivia: check out GeoMaster for yourself.

---

On Simplicity: Reducing Complexity

Following this month's theme on simplicity,

Stefan Lesser

writes about what it means to reduce complexity — the process of simplification.

While removing parts is a necessary requirement for simplicity, it is not sufficient. Simplicity is not the absence of complexity.

He quotes Christopher Alexander:

More important than reducing complexity is how we organize the complexity that is there. Simplicity is not the absence of complexity, but the superior organization of complexity.

We don’t really want to get rid of complexity, because complexity is what makes things interesting. Things without complexity are boring and trivial. Comprehensible complexity fascinates us.

I love this idea. We want to distill the unnecessary complexity into its essence. Removing all complexity completely isn't the objective. There's a level of complexity — and I love this term, "comprehensible complexity" — that gives ideas, products, films, books, everything texture and life.