Becket U curates the best resources in Math, Physics, Computers, Microeconomics, Game Theory, and Persuasion. With this knowledge, you will understand how the world works.
Undiscovered #072: Short Consideration Spans, Power of Small Spaces, Teaching for Agency
#072: Short Consideration Spans, Power of Small Spaces, Teaching for AgencyHi 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 discuss how people's attention spans aren't being destroyed, how small spaces have shaped the most culturally significant changes in the world, how to teach young children for agency, and more. Let's dive in: People Have Short Consideration SpansA common criticism of the younger generation today is how short-from video and modern media are destroying attention spans. Reading this tweet by Julian Shapiro put a new idea in perspective: People don't have short attention spans: • They finish 3 hour Joe Rogan episodes • They binge 14 hour shows They have short *consideration spans:* they must be hooked quickly. Point: Don't fear making great, in-depth content. But, ensure your first minute is incredible. It's completely true. One thing I ask anyone who tries convincing me to watch a trendy show is, "Is it good? Or is it just new?" With abundance comes the freedom of selection, and freedom of selection means content must consistently rise above the increasingly noisy online world. The 'hook' of whatever you do ends up being the most important thing. This means the title of your posts should immediately spark interest to read the first sentence, which the first sentence should hook readers to read the whole thing. This is true for landing pages of your business, the opening sentences of cold outreach, and anything else today involving copy. The Power of Small SpacesWhere does culture begin? Simon Sarris released an article in 2024 exploring this question, but I recently found myself rereading it. It's called Small Spaces, and it discusses the historical role smaller cities have in shaping culture, creating innovative technology, and having more industrial output than larger cities. The one example Sarris uses is Palo Alto and how it produced Silicon Valley. He starts off by posing a question: "New York is no stranger to wealth. But it's worth stopping in Palo Alto for a moment to winder why, if the largest metropolises ought to have all the advantages in the world, the tiny suburb of a tiny city has been so successful at creating technology companies for decades, while New York has been a comparative failure." Inherently we know the cities tend to congregate and specialize in a specific industry. Los Angeles is entertainment, New York is finance, San Francisco is tech, D.C. is politics. Paul Graham has another famous, tangential article called Cities and Ambition, where he discusses how certain cities 'whisper' what you should focus on. But it's worth looking at Sarris' idea here in depth. He says that "journalists write monthly articles declaring cities all over the globe as the next Silicon Valley" and goes on to describe some of the variables that go into that, but the one that stuck out the most to me was him discussing remoteness. Besides there being adequate housing inventory making cost of living cheaper in these places, it seems the remoteness mirrors its ecological counterpart in producing 'rare specimens'. Sarris discusses this beautifully:
Remoteness, in some sense, seems to be an advantage. No one disagrees that people in metropolises are more fashionable. But it must also be the case that people in such places are much more concerned with mental fashion, too: spending a lot of time thinking about what everyone else thinks about. This was the problem Noyce ran into, but I think it repeats often. And I think everyone actually agrees with this sentiment, culturally. We see this repeated, at least intuitively, with culture. When the traveler wants a big experience, he goes to a big city to see big things. But when he wants an “authentic” experience, he must eschew the most well-trodden places, possibly the cities themselves, to find it. He must seek out places that have not yet been touched by “tourism”, he must find the people and places that still have remoteness — places that continue to live in a world of their own. Big places and small places each have their own insularity, but they look to very different things.
Ecologically, remote places produce rare specimens. The inverse is also true: as biomes become less remote, we tend to see biodiversity loss, sometimes rapidly. With very high connectivity, a few species—sometimes invasive—tend to dominate. I suspect this is true culturally, too. As the country becomes more connected, as culture shifts to media made elsewhere, we may lose some of the ferment that we have relied on in the less-connected world.
There is an advantage in being somewhere the rest of your contemporaries are not. It produces rarity, unique thought patterns, and potentially cultural and economic growth. The article is a quick 10 minute read, but the idea will linger in your mind. How To Use Grok Most EffectivelyGrok is quickly becoming one of the most powerful and widely used AI models, and in order to get the most out of it, it's important to understand how to prompt it effectively. Elon Musk himself recently quote tweeted @toolandtea who offered a handy visual guide of all the Grok-3 Prompting Hacks:
Teaching For Agency"Agency" is the hot new buzzword in tech that many are claiming is in short supply. With so many people talking about agency, it might also be worth trying to define it. Perplexity offered the following: "Agency refers to the ability to take initiative, make decisions, and act effectively, which is increasingly valued because intelligence—such as knowledge or problem-solving—is now widely accessible through tools like AI. In simpler terms, being proactive and capable of execution matters more than just being smart in today’s world. The closest philosophy I have comes across stems from Aaron Stupple's book, The Sovereign Child. There are many unconventional approaches to be found in it, but that's exactly what makes it so good. The fundamental idea is that kid's need to learn and deeply understand things themselves, usually stemming from life experiences. Sometimes, the only way to gain agency is to live without it, so that we spur ourselves into action. Keeping in theme with the above, Simon Sarris also has an excellent article on educating for agency in his Substack post, School is Not Enough. To Be Loved is To Be ChangedA picture and accompanying text that left an impression on me, from @hearthkeeping:
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Becket U curates the best resources in Math, Physics, Computers, Microeconomics, Game Theory, and Persuasion. With this knowledge, you will understand how the world works.
#074: Growing from 2k to 105k Users in 15 Days, Vibe Coding Video Games, Becoming Eloquent 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 how one app recently grew their user base from 2k to 105k in 15 days, the ultimate guides for learning independent video game development, how to become more eloquent, and more....
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#071: Individual Groups Change History, Problems People Love Working On, Jeff Bezos' Final Amazon Letter 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 how small groups of people have consistently changed the course of history, what a stranded baby humpback whale can teach us about leadership, Jeff Bezos' final...