Hello, fellow human. It’s nice to have you here. This is Humanics by me, Alex Oliveira. Thank you for stopping by!
Here you will read my take on various topics, from mental models, game theory and philosophy, to less abstract ones like technology, engineering and science. Are you aware of the AI revolution happening behind the world scenes? Did you know we’re on the verge of having fully autonomous cars driving around us, ready to displace millions of workers? Are you aware of the big human goal to start colonizing Mars by 2030? Are you aware of mental models that can help us sintetize intricate problems with low cognitive load? Have you considered the effects of micro-management on problems at scale? Have you considered that, perhaps, the key to success could be explained by risk management? Oh boy, I do have so much to talk about.
But first, why don’t I introduce myself? For the past 15 plus years—and I already feel old just saying that—my full time job has been building software and systems. I worked for dozens of US and european customers in the past decade and had opportunity to experience, first-hand, the cultural differences among countries. And that’s extremely valuable because, after all, it’s how humans interact that dictates success.
Like Charlie Munger, I try hard to avoid having an opinion unless I can articulate the other side’s argument. Unfortunately, making sense of the reasoning behind contrarian ideas is tricky on its own, given the horrendous cognitive dissonance in today’s chaotic society. But, no matter what we try, we can’t have a rich understanding of a subject unless we’re able to look at it from different angles, and that’s what I’ll attempt to do here.
I do feel like having both a vantage point and disadvantage in that regard. See, living outside the US (for now)—albeit working for US companies— I’m not bombarded daily with much of the media biases affecting people over there. On the other hand, the quality of our opinions is but a function the information we consume, and my sources will always be biased. I’m sorry, I can’t claim purity (can anyone?). But hey, here’s the positive side: the mere mental exercise of filtering information is a reward in and of itself.
“Why Humanics?”, you ask. That’s the word for the study of human behaviors and affairs. With the advent of AI, robotics and the technological dogmas, we often lose sight of the effects our progress have on our civilization. Companies cargo cult principles to improve output while ignoring their collaborators’ voices. Bits and code are taken as holy grail, but they can only go as far as the quality of the teams involved. Everything we do circles back to the individual. Humanics is my attempt to expose an ocean of modern topics without losing sight of the best invention ever made: ourselves.
Some times, I’ll just write simpler pieces aggregating the interesting things I’ve seen lately. Those will probably be mostly bullet points with emojis 🙊 and GIFs. Please leave comments so I better understand what you like most.
I don’t want to monetize this in the near future, and even if I do, my main articles will always remains free. I hate newsletters that flood my inboxes, so don’t expect more than 20 emails per day! Joke aside, I want to respect your time and focus on quality over quantity. I love reading an interesting post on a misty Sunday morning, and I hope you will too.
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p.s. I want to send kudos to Substack for supporting RSS, tech which I love so much. The ease of use (just append /feed
) is testament to the platform openness.