#095: Most Beautiful Section Books, 17-Year- Old Math Prodigy, Ideal Coaching Framework

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 beautiful section books, what Paul Graham views as the most safe jobs in the age of AI, an unconventional framework and approach that defines good coaching, and more.

Let's dive in:

David Macauley Section Books

A long lost obsession has resurfaced in my life. I had vague memories of these books when I was younger that had pictures of different historical buildings and objects, each split in half to see what was going on inside. Almost like "Where's Waldo?" except with real history and no frustrating striped man on the loose.

The ones I was the most familiar with were Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections. It contained diagrams of castles, helicopters, coal mines, steam trains, space shuttles, and more. What makes them unique, is that each of the illustrations are based on the actual plans or architects' drawings of each building and machine.

I loved those books and thought they were the only 'section books' out there. That was until @Pronatalism introduced me to the works of David Macauley.

Macauley also makes section books, but they have a more distinct artistic style. They are in pure black and white compared to the color format of Stephen Biesty, and the illustrations cover unique angles, building diagrams, and more.

Looking through some of what's available online, I'll most likely start with Cathedral, Mill, Underground, and City.

Paul Graham Says What Jobs Are Safe in the Age of AI

"Find a kind of work that you're so interested in that you'll learn to do it better than AI can." This is the advice Paul Graham distills into a sentence after a mini thread exploring what occupations are 'most safe from being taken by AI". He expands on this by saying AI, in its current form, is good at 'scutwork'.

In one of the following sections, we'll explore what Balaji Srinivasan views as being AI's main strength, which is handling the 'middle' of tasks while humans take care of the 'ends'. This is basically to come up with the task in the first place, but also quality control the work produced by AI is to ensure it meets an acceptable standard.

Graham says the "most interesting consequence of this principle...is that it will become even more valuable to know what you're interested in. It's hard to do something really well if you're not deeply interested in it".

"Her First Degree Will be a PhD"

​Matt Bateman called my attention to an incredible discovery within the world of mathematics. Seventeen-year-old Hannah Cairo disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a longstanding question in harmonic analysis. Her method built such a creative counterexample that experts are rethinking much of what they thought they knew about waves and mathematical functions.

Hannah’s background makes her achievement even more fascinating. She was homeschooled in the Bahamas, taught herself advanced math online, and jumped straight into graduate-level research before even finishing high school.

This discovery has major implications for both pure math and real-world technology, particularly in fields like signal processing and wireless communication that depend on wave analysis. As she heads off to the University of Maryland for her Ph.D., people in both academia and industry are eager to see what new problems she’ll tackle next.

Most impressive of all? Just like Bateman said in his original tweet, "her first degree will be a PhD".

Balaji Latest Thoughts on AI

​Balaji Srinivasan wrote a new Substack article titled, "AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic", along with 10 other thoughts on AI.

Like previously mentioned, he believes AI systems are best used for the “tedious middle” part of work, handling bulk analysis or processing, while humans remain crucial at both the start and finish. In this vision, people provide the context, define the problem, and critically evaluate the outputs, making decisions that matter most.

He argues that the real value comes from “amplified intelligence,” where the combination of human judgment at the ends and AI muscle in the middle leads to the best performance. For Balaji, this collaborative workflow mirrors how we already interact with AI today: humans ask the questions, AI crunches the data, and humans again review or apply the results.

Instead of thinking about AI as something that will fully replace people, Balaji believes the future belongs to those who work with multiple AIs under clear, decentralized rules. The big idea is that human creativity and judgment stay in charge, while many robust AIs push progress from all directions.

Belief + Good Tutelage = Success

​Jim Harbaugh is one of the most unconventional coaches in all of football. Regardless of personal feelings around him, there's no denying he has a special way of connecting and getting the most out of his players.

​Trey Lance, a quarterback originally taken as a high draft pick but quickly written off due to an injury, is a new addition to Harbaugh's team. It's been a long road back for Lance, and one that has undoubtedly come with struggles and potentially self doubt.

But this is where Harbaugh shines. There was a clip of him on the sidelines with Lance, hitting his shoulder pads and chest enthusiastically, with Lance doing his best to conceal a huge smile.

The original tweet by @EvanSowards says "You can literally see the confidence bar in Trey Lance start to rise. The cure to the quarterback problem is literally to just believe in them."

This coupled with Joe Holder's astute follow up saying "Allegory for life here Belief + good tutelage (usually) = success". and you have one of the best and most simple frameworks around coaching possible.

Sometimes, you just gotta believe.

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J.B.