Games, Gels, and Goodness
your Saturday roundup
Professionally, I focus on creating social benefit startups. In my Saturday morning emails I share what I’m learning and thinking. Topics range from better living and parenting to business and philosophy.
Moral Ambition. From the author of Utopia for Realists, comes the new book Moral Ambition. A clarion call to be idealistic and achievement-oriented. It’s a more accessible, story-filled, version of 80,000 hours with a wider aperture on worthy causes. The Guardian opinion piece summaries the book well. He calls out the tendency of some to be idealistic and not act. He argues against letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And he provides inspiring role models while emphasizing they lack superpowers. He wants the (young?) reader to come away understanding that you can do a lot of good without being superhuman or sacrificing all else you care about. The most shocking thing in the book is the claim that ~45% of Harvard alumni go into finance or consulting. We can do better! I love that the book ties into an online community. See you there?
2x2 common in management consulting used to bash consulting Adam Comes Closer. While I’m pro planned children, I’m also pro contraception, and I believe men should take much more responsibility in this area. That’s why I’m encouraged by the growing momentum for new male contraceptive options. Imagine a long-lasting, reversible alternative to condoms and vasectomy, one that doesn’t rely on hormones or daily compliance. It’s closer than you might think. Contraline (where I’m an investor) recently shared early results from human trials of their injectable gel, which functions as a reversible male contraceptive lasting around two years. For parents: would you require your minor son to use something like this? And what ripple effects will this have on our culture?
LLMs for Games. Did I mention our younger kids have been building web-based games with ChatGPT? They’ll describe the kind of game they want like a guessing game with drawings, a fish swimming around, or a simple maze. Then ChatGPT writes the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for them. They paste the code into CodePen’s editor, and voilà, it works. When they want to tweak something, I sometimes challenge them to dive into the code and figure it out themselves. Other times, they’ll ask ChatGPT to make the change. Are they learning to code from scratch, the old-fashioned way? No. But they are learning something. That’s better than playing a game someone else made. Have your kids tried this yet?
Until next time,
Miles