The concavity of fun and the Buddhas

During our pre-pandemic travels, my wife and I visited the King’s Palace in Thailand. The palace complex is of course on the UNESCO world heritage list and THE tourist attraction in Bangkok. It’s positively rococo.

But I came to realize, that the abundance of riches, gold and things to marvel at quickly fizzles out. After 100 golden buddhas you don’t really care how many more are there. You get it. There’s a lot.

At the same time – the cost of seeing these “Tier 1” tourist attractions tends to grow exponentially:

• The queues are longer
• The security more annoying
• The crowds – unbearable.

Because these are “the most famous” things in the world, EVERYBODY goes there. In the meantime, there are “Tier 2” points of interest, where the crowds are less annoying, the queues less painful, but the “awesomeness” only slightly lesser.

My working theory is that the awesomeness curve is concave but the annoyance curve is convex. At many of these “most famous places” they cross – like in Paris:

Strasbourg is a very beautiful city, with much smaller crowds and costs of going there, but delivers more than 50% of the Awesomeness that Paris does. My travel advice is: go to “Tier 2” cities.

Violetta has a fantastic explainer on Convexity .

Three surprising effects of the Internet

1. In one of the previous emails, I wrote about GPT-3 – a new kid on the block of Artificial Intelligence. Pieter Levels has turned it into a startup idea generator. He has been pretty vocal in the past about ideas being cheap and execution constituting the real challenge. Now he’s selling machine-generated ideas 🤣. Some of them are much better than those I’ve heard during startup events:
   • A company that’s building software for restaurants that helps them manage their menus, guest lists, and food orders.
   • A startup that helps students and other young professionals find other people their age who want to live together
   • The startup is building a digital platform to enable farmers to monitor and manage the health of their crops.
2. Human Genome has been here for about six million years. MS Excel only slightly shorter, but it has already won. Scientists have to rename some of the Human genes because MS Excel tends to automatically convert them to dates.
   It’s easy to point jokes and demand fixes on the Microsoft side, but the software update cycles in Academia tend to take a while. Scientists have control over the naming of genes, but not over the university purchasing department.
3. I highly recommend visiting the home page of the Yale Art School: https://www.art.yale.edu/

Question to ponder

Why don’t you do the things you know you should be doing?