Wisereads Vol. 108 — Alex McCann on the death of the corporate job, Wuthering Heights, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Gelong Thubten's Handbook for Hard Times: A monk's guide to fearless living, complete with a meditation prompt. This week, we're sharing Emily Brontë's Gothic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, just in time for the fall season.

Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇

As a reminder, you can also explore and save our community's most highlighted content inside Reader. If this content in general isn't your vibe, please feel free to unsubscribe altogether.

Otherwise, we welcome you to reply to this email with any feedback you might have! 🙂

Many corporate professionals are now candid about using their 9-to-5 jobs to fund the work they truly care about. Writer Alex McCann captures the surreal nature of this arrangement: "It's like a corporate version of the emperor's new clothes, except everyone can see the emperor is naked, everyone knows everyone can see it, but we've all agreed to keep complimenting his outfit because our mortgages depend on it."

Writer Rogé Karma wonders if AI might be the next email: a tool that feels productive but actually slows us down. His deeper concern, though, is how the hype could unravel. "Generative AI would not be the first tech fad to experience a wave of excessive hype. What makes the current situation distinctive is that AI appears to be propping up something like the entire U.S. economy. More than half of the growth of the S&P 500 since 2023 has come from just seven companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. These firms, collectively known as the Magnificent Seven, are seen as especially well positioned to prosper from the AI revolution."

Early in your career, being technically strong might be enough. But as you grow, Data and AI Engineering leader Josh Swords explains, you’ll need to bring more to the table to create impact and advance. "The biggest gains come from combining disciplines. There are four that show up everywhere: technical skill, product thinking, project execution, and people skills. And the more senior you get, the more you’re expected to contribute to each."

Author and professor Arthur C. Brooks explains that boredom is essential for working through life’s biggest questions and finding meaning. "If every time you're slightly bored you pull out your phone, it's going to get harder and harder for you to find meaning, and that's the recipe for depression and anxiety, and a sense of hollowness, which, by the way, are all through the roof."

As a partner at a16z, Andrew Chen has analyzed more than his fair share of retention curves. In his latest tweet, he shares hard-earned insights: "You can’t fix bad retention. No, adding more notifications will not fix your retention curve. You can’t A/B test your way to good retention," and "Retention goes down, it doesn’t go up. And weirdly, it decays (oh, does it decay) at a predictable half life. Early retention predicts later retention."

OpenAI’s latest paper digs into why large language models continue to confidently give wrong answers, comparing evaluations to multiple-choice exams that reward guessing. "When uncertain, students may guess on multiple-choice exams and even bluff on written exams, submitting plausible answers in which they have little confidence. Language models are evaluated by similar tests. In both settings, guessing when unsure maximizes the expected score under a binary 0-1 scheme that awards 1 point for a correct answer and none for blanks or IDKs."

Emily Brontë published only one novel, but Wuthering Heights has haunted readers for over a century. When the kindly Mr. Earnshaw brings home a ragged foundling named Heathcliff, he sets off a storm of jealousy and revenge that entangles two Yorkshire families and echoes across generations. As the weather cools in the northern hemisphere, we’re craving an atmospheric classic to ease us into fall; Wuthering Heights fits the bill.

"I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. And this is one: I'm going to tell it - but take care not to smile at any part of it."

This edition of Wuthering Heights is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Sophia Sun, an AI product manager, writes futureproof: a newsletter about designing a career, building products, and staying creative in the age of AI. From 7 skills I'm betting on to future-proof my career: "Building and conveying your conviction: There's something energizing and irreplaceable about conviction that isn’t 'manufactured,' but earned. Not from skimming AI summaries or leaning on secondhand data, but from lived experience."