1/ In September 1993, then-Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold wrote his landmark memo "Road Kill on the Information Highway", laying out a dozen-ish predictions on the rise of the internet

27 years later, I think it's a super interesting case study. Let's evaluate the predictions -

2/ PREDICTION #1: The rise of a surveillance society - police bodycams, CCTV, 24/7 personal recording, and deepfakes

GRADE: A-

Pretty close!
3/ PREDICTION #2: Telecommuting, an end to the "tyranny of geography" and gerrymandering

GRADE: B-

Alas, the electoral college still matters today. The WFH prediction hits closer, but turns out it took two and a half decades + a pandemic to get things going
4/ PREDICTION #3: Telco convergence - phone companies become cable providers and vice versa

GRADE: A-

Honestly this one was a bit of a layup, although it took 15 years longer than anyone expected
5/ PREDICTION #4: The rise of online neo-banks

GRADE: C

Three decades later, and physical banks still exist. Neobanks have a presence in emerging markets, UK, and basically nowhere else. Regulatory inertia: officially a thing
6/ PREDICTION #5: "Newspapers are in probably the worst situation of any form of print media"

GRADE: A+

Frankly I was shocked by the prescience of this section. Newspapers were once local advertising monopolies. The internet broke that monopoly
7/ PREDICTION #6: "Television broadcasters are some of the most likely fodder for roadkill of any of the current media companies"

GRADE: B+

Pretty much right, but 21 years too early. Broadcasters kept growing until 2014
8/ PREDICTION #7: The internet will expand the market for Hollywood content. Also, Blockbuster is toast

GRADE: A

The iron law of media investing is that over any long enough timeframe, value inexorably accrues to the content owner
9/ PREDICTION #8: Traditional PCs will be replaced by lightweight, low-end internet terminals

GRADE: C+

Say what you will about low end disruption, but after all these years I still don't want to use a Chromebook
10/ In retrospect, most of Myrhvold's predictions were pretty good. His call on the print media was spectacularly right. His calls on TV, Hollywood, and telcos took a while, but ultimately happened. Telecommuting and 24/7 surveillance are still shifting in realtime...
11/ The one catch? Timing

Nearly all these predictions took 15-20+ years to play out. WFH is still 25+ years in the making. Nothing in the memo (except shorting newspapers) would've been investable on any reasonable timeframe

Predicting the future is easy. Making money is hard!

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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)
First thread of the year because I have time during MCO. As requested, a thread on the gods and spirits of Malay folk religion. Some are indigenous, some are of Indian origin, some have Islamic


Before I begin, it might be worth explaining the Malay conception of the spirit world. At its deepest level, Malay religious belief is animist. All living beings and even certain objects are said to have a soul. Natural phenomena are either controlled by or personified as spirits

Although these beings had to be respected, not all of them were powerful enough to be considered gods. Offerings would be made to the spirits that had greater influence on human life. Spells and incantations would invoke their


Two known examples of such elemental spirits that had god-like status are Raja Angin (king of the wind) and Mambang Tali Arus (spirit of river currents). There were undoubtedly many more which have been lost to time

Contact with ancient India brought the influence of Hinduism and Buddhism to SEA. What we now call Hinduism similarly developed in India out of native animism and the more formal Vedic tradition. This can be seen in the multitude of sacred animals and location-specific Hindu gods