MONTHLY MULLING 💡
WORDLE, Mental Chatter, And More Mental Models
Hi👋
Tapan here.
Monthly Mulling is a bi-monthly newsletter sending the best ideas from the web to your inbox for free. High signal. Low noise.
Happy Sunday y’all!
📈 We are trying to grow our CBM YouTube channel (please subscribe😀) and have been analysing a lot of content. Psychology plays a huge part on YouTube! And this process has been fascinating🤯
If you watch a MrBeast video (or any video from a big channel), he is trying to capture your attention right from the thumbnail, title, first 5 seconds, and then the entire video. If you’re interested in what biases and models are being used, let me know in the comments below😎
Currently,
📖What I am reading: 100 to 1 In The Stock Market by Thomas Phelps
📺What I am watching: As I said before, a lot of MrBeast videos! Also, this interesting video by Vox on why ski jumpers hold a V position while jumping.
Onwards🚀
💭MULLING
🧠 Thread On 40 Useful Concepts by Gurwinder (Twitter: 7 mins)
I am currently spending a lot of time on Twitter and my timeline is currently flooded with threads. Here is a favourite from this week👇🏽
The 5 concepts I liked👇🏽
🙉 Noise Bottlenecks: Consuming online content makes us feel like we're learning, but 90% of the content is useless junk: small talk, clickbait, marketing! We're filling our heads with noise, which is drowning out the signal. As such, we feel we're getting smarter as we get stupider. Read my article on the Knowledge Pipeline.
🗼Belieft Perseverance: Our opinions are like bricks in masonry; each supports & is supported by others. Changing a belief means tearing down all beliefs atop it. Such demolition is hard to bear (easier to live with a skewed building) so people will rarely let that 1 brick budge.
😵💫Hyperbolic Discounting: Just as objects far away seem smaller, so do things far into our future. As a result, we are inclined to choose immediate rewards over future ones, even when these immediate rewards are much smaller.
📰 Van Restorff Effect: Things that stand out are more likely to be remembered. As such, news stories that are most unrepresentative of reality tend to be our most persistent representations of reality.
🙄 Relative Privation: An all-too-common fallacy where people dismiss a concern because something else is worse.
“How can you talk about X when Y is happening?”
By this logic, how can anyone ever talk about anything other than literally the single worst thing in the universe?
🟩 Solving Wordle by 3Blue1Brown (Video: 30 mins)
Wordle has taken over the world. You must have seen these boxes all over your feed.
Wordle 238 (4/6)
⬛🟨🟨🟨⬛
🟨🟨⬛🟨🟨
🟨⬛🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
So, this channel built a bot that uses information theory to solve the daily word.
Apparently, CRANE is the best starting guess and the most efficient!
But his bot like a true psychopath, even after getting green in the first attempt ignores the letter in the second attempt to make the overall score more efficient🤯
A warning - the video gets really nerdy and talks about entropy, information theory, and word frequencies. But all of it is well explained.
📚 TREAT YO’ SHELVES
You can find my favourite books on my site and add me on GoodReads.
🙉 Chatter: The Voice Inside Our Heads by Ethan Kross
Summary: We all have voices in our heads. Sometimes, these could be self-destructive. Ethan explains what these voices are and how to harness them. It’s a book that can be skimmed.
Important Lesson: Here are some tools that you can use to control the chatter-
1. Engaging in distanced self-talk: talking in the third person helps better gauge the problem
2. Imagine advising a friend
3. Change your perspective: be the spider on the wall and look at the problem from a distance
4. Time travel mentally: it's called temporal distancing. I talked about this in my article on the regret minimization framework.
Favourite Quote: “Your mood is defined not by what you did but by what you thought about.”
🎙PODCAST - COLD BREW MONEY
If you’re a listener, thank you so much! Can I ask you to share the podcast with one friend/family this weekend? It will help us grow the podcast.
We have started publishing two videos per week so won’t post all of them in this newsletter (subscribe to the link above for all videos👆🏽).
But here are the most viewed from the past few weeks.
🪄 Magic Formula Investing For Beginners!: Imagine a simple formula that creates a list of businesses to invest in, sell them after one year, and refresh the list. This formula exists and it’s called the Magic Formula by Joel Greenblatt. Check out the video👇🏽
📈 Mohnish Pabrai’s Free Lunch Portfolio: This has become our most viewed video quickly! Pabrai picks 15 stocks every year as part of this free lunch portfolio. You’re getting free stock picks from a superinvestor!
We are tracking the portfolio returns in this sheet.
📉 Meta Is Dead: Meta ($FB) is our largest holding as part of CBM Portfolio and it crashed! We discuss our thoughts in this episode👇🏽
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