Terry Pang

The future is wild: My take on the next 100 years

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The only way you can predict the future is to build it.

Alan kay

Yes I know, prediction is largely a futile enterprise. But in order to make sense of ever-shifting trends, it’s important to take a step back and look at the long arc of humanity. We need to take a stratospheric view above the meanderings of daily life and contemplate where we are headed as a species.

Thinking in such large timescales filled with vast unknowns can be a dizzying experience. I’m generally optimistic about the future - I believe that the frontier is limitless. There is nothing in the laws of physics that constrain knowledge acquisition and technological advancement. Most of the squabbles and problems we face today are just technicalities - problems that will evaporate in the face of unstoppable technological progress. Everything is hypothetically tractable and solvable with the right ingenuity.

Why you should always choose action

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a dumb meme from the office. But it actually serves as a potent reminder to me from time to time.

How many times have you not done something because there wasn’t time to “do it properly”? Or perhaps you didn’t have time to finish something entirely, so you just didn’t do it.

I started becoming aware of this weird mental bug recently. The realization hit me when I was researching Zone 2 cardio. Long story short, the article mentioned that the optimal session length should be 50 mins, at which point I realized I only had around half an hour of free time that day so I was about to drop it off my list. That was until I read the end of the paragraph that said: “But remember, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Any amount of Zone 2 cardio is beneficial”

AI for noobs: How machine learning works

Fri, 26 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re here, it means that you’ve succumbed to the madness of AI and have finally made a decision to see how it all works. There are many explainers out there, but I feel like most are too simplistic with buzz-wordy sounding terms or dive too deep without providing good intuition. I hope I can thread that needle and provide a good primer for noobs that I wish I had when I started. By the end of this article, you should have a rough understanding of how all these terms like AI, machine learning, neural networks, large language models etc.

Who will win in the next phase of AI?

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

Arthur C. Clarke

There is now very little doubt that AI will be the next major platform shift. But who will be the winners in AI? I’ve sketched out some hypothetical scenarios and the conditions required for each type of player to win. While this is highly speculative and it’s often a futile endeavour to make predictions, it’s still a fun thought experiment.

Important startup metrics to know

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the startup universe, many of us spend hours gazing at the constellation of colorful dashboards and densely arrayed sheets. We obsess over these magical figures, refreshing them incessantly and scanning for clues of movement - a continuous source of joy and misery.

We obsess over these numbers because metrics matter. Good metrics give a snapshot of how well a company is performing and provide signals for course correction.

So what metrics should you actually be looking at? What do VCs look at when analyzing a company? I’ve compiled the key metrics from VCs/investors like Andrew Chen, David Sacks etc, along with my own firsthand experience. Caveat: This list is by no means exhaustive and is likely biased by my own experience in terms of importance. For a broader grasp of startup mental models (covering product to marketing), you can view my previous post here.

What you see isn't real: How brains actually perceive things

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Look around you. As you scan the surrounding scene and form the crisp, detailed view of your environment, I want you to realize that what you’re seeing isn’t actually real. It’s actually a “guess”.

Yes, you heard that right. What you’re seeing isn’t technically real. It’s literally a hallucination, a best guess, a fabricated illusion - whatever you want to call it, it’s simply an internally generated model that feels real to you.

Web 3.0: Why you should care about it

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A radical future may be upon us. Largely hidden from mainstream observers, there has been an influx of smart money and talent into a potentially game-changing version of the internet.

You’ve probably come across terms like Web 3.0, defi, crypto, metaverse - signs that part of this future is already here. As with many groundbreaking phase transitions, there will be plenty of false starts, hype cycles, and mistimed investments. That being said, there’s still a high probability that this future will be realized in one form or another, so it’s worth paying close attention to.

How to be happy

Sun, 18 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve always had a natural aversion to any self-help, new agey spiritual advice. Unfortunately, I realized that I wasn’t exactly the happiest person either.

I figured I was too clever to learn fluffy things about “being happy”. This presented an obvious problem.

But eventually, I randomly stumbled unto the science of happiness, along with other philosophical concepts derived from Stoicism and Buddhism. I never took any of the supernatural bits seriously, but there were things along the way that I’ve learned.

Startup mental models: The ultimate playbook

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The startup scene is a chaotic and surreal world. Unicorns and decacorns are magically willed into existence through rituals of blood, sweat, and code. In order to thrive in this strange place, you need a relentless focus on the future. Having an irrational sense of optimism with a dose of masochism is another prerequisite to withstand the onslaught of emotional highs and lows. To a fledgling startup trying to find its feet, the real world offers a ruthless command: Grow or die.

No nonsense guide to living better (Part 1): Habits

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There are only 3 things that affect your outcomes in life.

Luck
Decisions
Habits

You can’t control luck. There’s just an inherent amount of randomness that’s unavoidable. So that leaves us with decisions and habits.

It’s important to make good decisions. You can do that by building a framework of mental models - curating useful concepts and creating a deep understanding so that you can apply them to decision making. Here are some that I’ve collected: mental models. Decisions are like forks in the road that are loaded with potential energy. They set the overall trajectory, primed to fire in a certain direction, but your final outcome is dependent on the other thing within your control, your daily actions or habits.

Ant colonies to brains: How complex systems rule the world

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

What do ant colonies, brains, social networks, and economies have in common? As it turns out, quite a lot. They are all examples of complex systems.

When Stephen Hawking was asked this question at the turn of the millennium: “Some say that while the 20th century was the century of physics, we are now entering the century of biology. What do you think of this?”

To which he replied: “I think the next century will be the century of complexity”.

Human life isn't priceless

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s my controversial statement for today: Human life is not priceless. The argument that nothing can ever justify a single loss of life is just plain ridiculous.

If that statement brings about a sense of revulsion and you feel triggered by this cavalier dismissal of human sanctity, I don’t blame you. But just try to hold back the seething moral outrage for a minute and hear me out.

It’s common to say that you can’t put a price on life or that each human life has immeasurable value. The very act of calculating such value can be deemed as highly immoral; it appears to deconstruct and thus invalidate the inalienable dignity of any individual. Following this logic, it means that no single human life can be traded off at any cost. But we know this to be patently untrue. In fact, the choices we make every day implicitly impute a cost to a human life, whether through our direct/indirect actions or our through our complicity in a system.

Evolution: The secret to all of human behavior

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Why do we crave unhealthy food, hate exercising, desire to be rich, and want to look young forever?

Because it feels good? But why do these things feel good? If you wish to understand human nature and the fundamental cause of all our idiosyncratic actions, you have to understand evolution.

Every living thing you see today, from bacteria to blue whales, and even yourself, is a product of an ongoing 3 billion year-long game among replicators.

A short history of the entire universe, or an apple pie recipe

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“If you wish to make an Apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

Carl Sagan

This is my attempt to summarize the history of the entire universe into a single post. Understanding the deep history and underlying principles (entropy, complexity, natural and cultural evolution) are some of the most critical things you can possibly know about. What else could be more fundamental, more profoundly satisfying? As complex assemblies of particles, the very by-products of this deep cosmic history, we stand here as conscious, self-aware bags of atoms that can peer into the inner workings of reality and contemplate the nature of existence.

Base rates & statistics: How to be better at guessing

Sun, 07 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

You are probably bad at estimating things. But it’s okay, so is everyone else.

When random people were asked if they thought they were better than the average population at estimating things in general, almost everyone responded yes. This cannot obviously hold true consistently, because mathematically speaking, 50% of people would be worse and 50% of people would be better on average. The remarkable thing is, even after people were explained that fact and given a chance to revise their answer, most of them still insisted they were better than average.

Game theory: Red Queen effect, dictatorless dystopias, and capitalism

Sun, 07 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Whether you realize it or not, you are participating in a multiplayer game right now. They don’t just lurk behind glistening screens or on board games that result in incessant squabbling — they manifest themselves in every interaction with multiple people/agents/actors.

This was probably the most difficult model for me to articulate. Partly because it seems so esoteric, yet it’s so deeply woven into the nature of all competing systems.

Mental Models: Upgrade your thinking

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It might seem obvious that making good decisions is important, yet we spend very little time evaluating the quality of our past decisions and working on upgrading the frameworks to make better ones. Improving this toolkit massively increases your leverage on future returns. If you can increase the probability of making the right decision from a modest 60% to 70%, that figure rapidly compounds over years of decisions and provides over a thousand-fold worth of outsized returns in the long run.