Memes

I follow some channels like The New Atlas on youtube or Peoples Dispatch on Telegram that do a good job of sifting through the news and finding interesting stuff, and chat about news with some friends where we swap interesting stuff we find.

A lot of the news tend to be connected too. If you focus on understanding underlying causes, then you can get an idea of what to look for as well. For example, when the whole economic war with Russia started, the key aspect of it was what sort of stuff was being traded, and how being cut off from that stuff would affect Russia and the west respectively. And once you look at it from that perspective, you can start extrapolating. Europe needs energy, so can they replace cheap energy from Russia, so then you can look up what's happening in the energy markets, how much other countries can ramp up production, how much it costs to switch from pipeline gas to LNG, etc. And on Russian side, it was mostly high tech goods like phones, laptops, cars. So, you do a similar analysis to see whether Russia can replace that stuff easily or produce it domestically. And then you end up in a rabbit hole of supply chains, where manufacturing happens, etc.

I like to try and build a model of what I think is going on, and then see what I got right and what I got wrong based on how things are playing out. When I end up being wrong, then I try to figure out what I missed, and update my mental model. Having this kind of model gives you an idea what sort of news might be relevant and why, as well as how one piece of news might be connected to other seemingly unrelated news.