#066: How to Educate Kids, What Chinese Social Media is Really Like, Jevons Paradox

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will take a look at some of the best books on educating kids, what Chinese social media is really like, what the artist behind Calvin and Hobbes thinks about living a meaningful life, and more.

Let's dive in:

On Education & Kids

After visiting Alpha School in Austin last week, I decided to go on a spree of ordering the best books I could find on how to interact with children, educate them, take them seriously, and build them with confidence.

I usually don't order a stack of books like this unless it immediately goes to the top of my list of what I'll read next. I intend to finish all of these as quickly as possible:

Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows (recommended by Avi Schiffmanwho states, "This is still the most influential non fiction book I've ever read. I think this way for every problem big or small now"
The Sovereign Child by Aaron Stupple (recommended by Naval, claims it is "The single most important book on parenting that I've read")
Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy (caught being read on the sidelines by football player A.J. Brown during a recent playoff game, resulting in a viral moment)
Values by Marva Collins
Marva Collins' Way by Marva Collins
Ordinary Children, Extraordinary Teachers by Marva Collins
The World According to Mister Rogers by Fred Rogers
The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King

Shane Parrish's Mental Models Summarized

Shane Parrish is the creator of Farnam Street, a site that shares some of the most useful and timeless knowledge found anywhere in the world. He recently published four volumes worth of mental models that he labels as 'the thinking tools of history's greatest problem-solvers'.

They include mental models around General Thinking Concepts, Physics/Chemistry/and Biology, Systems & Mathematics, and Economics & Art. If you are a fan of physical copies of books, these are all fantastic to have.

But Shane recently shared a summary of all the models from the book series as a blog post on his website. It's a helpful way to synthesize and look at all the tools in one place, allowing you to get a feel for the ideas before buying the books.

Jevons Paradox - Efficiency Increases Consumption

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas recently quote tweeted Box CEO Aaron Levie, who stated, "As AI makes it far easier to generate code, we won't just build the same amount of software, but faster and cheaper. Instead, we'll build vastly more software to go after more things."

Srinivas' reply was "Jevons Paradox needs to be taught in schools and colleges." So, here we go:

Jevons paradox, also known as the Jevons effect, is an economic phenomenon where technological progress that increases the efficiency of resource use leads to increased consumption of that resource, rather than reduced use. This counterintuitive outcome occurs because improved efficiency typically lowers the cost of using a resource, which in turn stimulates greater demand.

The paradox is named after English economist William Stanley Jevons, who observed in 1865 that technological improvements increasing the efficiency of coal use led to increased coal consumption across various industries.

The Jevons paradox occurs when the rebound effect, which measures the difference between expected efficiency gains and actual consumption, exceeds 100%. This means that the increase in demand more than offsets the initial efficiency improvements, leading to higher overall resource use.

What Chinese Social Media is Really Like

The big news in social media is the impending TikTok ban scheduled to take place on January 19th. In response, protesting teens are flooding to another Chinese app, RedNote, where they are directly interacting with Chinese citizens and performing a...cultural exchange.

Lots of different takes started to float around as far as how social media in China works. The 'Internet's Creative Director', Oren John, had some takes from his personal exposure to Chinese social media, due to many of his product sourcing relationships coming from China:

lets talk about what chinese social media is actually like, since poor takes are rampant

first - the chinese are GLUED to their phones, you think america is bad, you haven't seen china. Kids are lost in phones, adults will be texting riding a moped, screentime is terrifyingly high

second - they dont have tiktok, they have douyin, and also wechat (picture whatsapp plus payments, plus facebook essentially) has built in video... the video feed content on these is not like tiktok, it is far more like snapchat, there is business content, information, news, but majority is brainrot, national inquirer level stuff, lots of just weird weird filters and things that are extremely culturally foreign to westerners, and you can scroll that feed or just your friends and their stories, posts etc on wechat that is very sane and like old facebook for lack of a better example

third - the youth, hipper people etc are on little red book, which is essentially instagram - carousels, videos, but a static feed you select to watch, lots more artful, interesting content, but it is still... half very weird, half chinese influencers doing their best american influencer impressions

live shopping is huge, but picture it more like tv - workouts where you can buy what their wearing, breakdowns of new products you can buy, conversational, tiktok shop but everything, lots of small businesses that only sell via live shopping

none of these networks will replace tiktok for american users, and you don't want to use them, and their consumption habits are not something we can learn from or expect to adopt... the cultural consumption of media is fundamentally different

Bill Watterson On Creating a Meaningful Life

Bill Watterson is the artist and genius behind the beloved comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. As we progress into an increasingly AI-driven world, we may think of only a select few types of jobs as being desirable or "fulfilling". Watterson's thoughtful take on what it means to create a meaningful life stuck with me recently:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

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Always wishing you the best,

J.B.

Becket U

Undiscovered #066: How to Educate Kids, What Chinese Social Media is Really Like, Jevons Paradox

#066: How to Educate Kids, What Chinese Social Media is Really Like, Jevons Paradox

On Education & Kids

Shane Parrish's Mental Models Summarized

Jevons Paradox - Efficiency Increases Consumption

What Chinese Social Media is Really Like

Bill Watterson On Creating a Meaningful Life

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