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- 69: Notes To Self
69: Notes To Self
Swing Dancing, Over-Optimizing, How To Experience Poetry, Fun Facts, Power Family Tree
Luke Clancy
June 20, 2025
Yo, it’s Luke!
Been dancing a lot recently, like a lot a lot…aaaaaand it’s awesome.
That said, here is your weekly dose of 5 noteworthy ideas & things I learned about last week. Click on the blue links to dive further on that topic.
Take a few min and let your jaw drop.
This was a fantastic read on the evolution of poker, which serves as a good example for a broader societal trend — over-optimizing for the wrong thing.
We focus on metrics while forgetting about style + soul.
We miss the point.
My notes:
You can solve the game, but you can't solve the experience.
You can optimize the strategy, but you can't optimize the soul.
Some advice: go places without looking at your phone. Play games you’re bad at without googling the strategy. Read books without checking reviews. Let your kids disappear sometimes.
This is great rant on understanding poetry. It helped me enjoy reading poems even more.
My notes:
Assume there’s nothing there for you to understand.
The poem is not an act of communication. Instead, it is an act of prompting. The poet is approaching you as a language model, supplying a series of prompts that you’re supposed to run in your head—and it’s the thing that happens inside you that matters.
Poems, like sex, like meditation, like music, like art, is an explosion of presence—a visceral, odd, and emotionally intriguing flavors of presence. And then? The experience is gone, and the day resumes.
Don’t try to get the A, crack the code, join the club— just let it enter you, let it magic you, let it exist in your body; give it some power, some puppetry, let it be a vital force moving within you.
A bolt of lightning contains about ¼ of a kilowatt-hour of power. Even with recent energy price rises, it’s only worth about 9 pence.
Racing driver Ross Chastain qualified for a championship by using a move he learned while playing a Nintendo racing game when he was 8 years old. [Alana Hagues]
A deep learning model trained on 85,000 eyes can tell male from female eyeballs with 87% accuracy but no one knows why. [Edward Korot & co]
In the 1920s, new car sales were falling, so the industry promoted the term ‘jaywalking’ to blame accidents on pedestrians, rather than aggressive drivers. [Peter Norton via Clive Thompson]
5. Power Family Tree (Me)
This is one of the most random fun facts I’ve ever written about, and I love it!
So, take Sigmund Freud (godfather of psychoanalysis).
His nephew was Edward Bernays (godfather of propaganda). Cool.
Well, Bernays’ great-nephew was Marc Randolph (the founder of Netflix).
Impressive fam.
Thanks for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday! If you liked this edition, send it over to a friend who would like it too 🤝
Cheers,