Inspired by the great Tom Whitwell, I've assembled a list of 52 Things I've Learned in 2020. My hope is that you'll find useful insights, but my guarantee is that you'll find a few fun pieces of trivia to discuss at (socially distanced) parties.

The learnings are roughly grouped according to my interests, including Public Policy, Creativity and Design, History, The Future, Technology, Global Affairs, Health, Money, and US Politics.

Public Policy

1. Needle Exchange Programs are Ridiculously Cost-Effective:  A $1 government investment in needle exchange programs produces $6 in government savings, almost entirely by reducing the transmission rate of HIV. (source)
2. Blue Lights Prevent Suicide: 20 years ago, the Japanese installed blue LED panels on platforms to prevent suicide. A 10 year study found an 84% decline in suicide attempts at stations where lights were installed, with no decline at stations without lights. (source)
3. A Basic Income is Better than a Jobs Guarantee: Only about 15% of the jobless are your traditional unemployed people looking for a new job. 60% are disabled. Disability has doubled over the past twenty years and continues to increase. A Jobs Guarantee won't actually help most people who are unemployed. (Scott Alexander)
4. Cement produces more air pollution than all the trucks in the world combined: Manufacturing the stone-like building material is responsible for 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than what comes from all the trucks in the world. (source)
5. Justice Takes a Backseat to Emotion: After the LSU football team loses a game, juvenile court judges in Louisiana hand out sentences that are 6.4% longer on average. Sentence length correlates with how far a judge lives from LSU, with the longest sentence lengths handed out by judges who live closest to LSU. (source
6. 1/3 of White Harvard Students Haven't Earned Their Spot Through Academic Merit: A staggering 43% of white Harvard students are legacies, athletes, or children of donors. Of those, around 75% would have been rejected if not for their special preference. (source)
7. Being Good Looking is a Privilege, Part 476: In one study, unattractive criminals were fined 3 times more than attractive criminals for moderate misdemeanours. However, appearance doesn’t seem to influence verdicts of guilt or innocence (Tom Whitwell).

Creativity and Design

1. People are Endlessly Creative (or Terrible Spellers): ~15% of daily searches on Google have never been searched for before. (source)
2. Small Design Changes Make a Big Difference: One Dutch bike manufacturer reduced shipping damage by 70-80% simply by printing the image of a big flatscreen TV on their boxes. (source)
3. The Best Way to Give Writing Feedback: Use the acryonm CRIBS. Note anything that is Confusing, Repetitive, Interesting, Boring, or Surprising. (David Perell)
4. Silly Mistakes Happen to the Best of Us: In 1999, the $125m Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because one team was using inches, the other was using centimeters. (source)
5. Sequencing Matters: The first item in a buffet is taken by 75% of diners, even when the food order was reversed. 66% of all food taken comes from the first 3 items, no matter how long the buffet is. (David Perell)
6. Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered by the word "No". (Wikipedia)

History

1. "Carrots are Good for Your Eyes" was an Anti-Nazi Scheme: The myth that carrots are beneficial for eyesight started as a military disinformation campaign in WWII by the Brits. They didn't want the Germans to realize that the RAF were shooting down so many enemy planes because they had radar, so they made up a lie about carrots that got stuck in the popular consciousness. (Smithsonian)
2. The Craziest Piece of History No One Told Me About: In 1800s China, a man claiming to be the brother of Jesus started a church. By the end of the story, 20 million people died in perhaps the bloodiest civil war in history. Fact is crazier than fiction. (Wikipedia)
3. When You Don't Have a Lot, Make Use of What You Have: The Romans used to use stale urine as mouthwash. Due to the ammonia in the urine, it actually worked pretty well! (Smithsonian)
4. America Did Not Start as a Democracy: Only 6% of the population was eligible to vote when George Washington ran for president. (Wikipedia)
5. The Black Plague May Have Driven the Rise of the West: The Black Death kills over 40% of Europe's population. Some historians think that the resulting labor scarcity increased the bargaining power of peasants in the West, which led to the end of serfdom and to higher standards of living. Since the Plague was not as deadly in the East, the equivalent institutional changes never took place. [MIT Sloan]

The Future

1. Internet History is Evaporating, and the Future is the Victim: 70% of links within the Harvard Law Review and 50% of URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions do not link to the originally cited information. (Harvard Law Review)
2. Deaths of Despair are Rapidly Rising: Between 1999 and 2017, midlife mortality from drug overdoses increased by nearly 400% (from 6.7 deaths/100,000 to 32.5), alcoholic liver disease increased by 40.6% (from 6.4 to 8.9), and suicide rates increased by 38.3% (from 13.4 to 18.6). (Dr. Peter Attia)
3. Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. (Scott Alexander)
4. Virtual Goods Will be a Trillion Dollar Business Someday: According to SuperData, virtual marketplaces generated $109 billion in 2019, 85% of which came from the purchase of virtual goods. (Morning Brew)
5. The Age of the American Internet is Over: 80-90% of internet users are now outside the USA, there are more smartphone users in China than in the USA and western Europe combined, and the creation of venture-based startups has gone global. American policy preferences will no longer govern how the internet develops. (Benedict Evans)

Technology

1. Amazon Prime is Essential to the Fabric of America: 82% of American homes have Amazon Prime, more than voted in the 2016 election, have a pet, attend church, or decorate a Christmas tree. (Scott Galloway)
2. The Big 3 Are The Main Beneficiaries Of The Venture Boom: Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. (Chamath Palihapitiya)
3. Software Matters More than Hardware: With today’s algorithms, computers would have beat the world chess champion already in 1994 (instead of 1997) on a contemporary desk computer. (hippke)
4. Public Markets Lead to Short-Termism: Less than a third of S&P companies actually have R&D budgets. This is largely due to the fact that R&D can take years to produce meaningful revenue benefits.
5. There's a Tsunami of Data Created Every Hour: More data is created every hour in 2020 than was created in all of the year 2000. (Seagate)

Global Affairs

1. Hindu Nationalism Runs Deeper in India than I Knew: The RSS, a Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, runs 30,000 schools, the largest network of farmers and social-welfare organization in the slums, the 2nd largest network of trade unions, and spawned the BJP, India's most powerful political party. (Wikipedia
2. The Caste System is Alive and Well in Indian Marriages: Only about 5% of marriages in India are between members of two different castes. (Wikipedia)
3. Non-Chinese People Don't Want to Live in China: Sydney, Australia alone has more foreign-born residents than mainland China. (Tyler Cowen)
4. The UK Conservative Party (a.k.a the Tories) Have a Realllllly Old Support Base: In 2018, the party received twice as much money from dead members, through wills, as from the living. (BBC)
5. Shutting Down Nuclear Power is a Really Bad Idea: After Fukushima, Germany shut down 50% of its nuclear power plants. This study estimates that this decision cost Germany $12 billiondollars, mostly from the cost of 1,100 excess deaths since then attributable to local air pollution from coal plants. (Alex Tabarrok)

Health

1. Don't Get Surgery on the Weekends: You are 44% more likely to die if you have surgery on a Friday (1.44%) compared to a Monday (1%). That jumps to 82% is you have surgery on a weekend. (Dan Ariely)
2. Depression Dulls Your Senses: Depressed people have worse sense of smell, and people with worse sense of smell are more likely to get depressed. We already know that depression decreases visual contrast, causing the world to literally look washed-out and gray. (Scott Alexander)
3. America is Obese Partially Because Everyone is Eating Fast Food: Every day, about 84 million adults in America eat fast food. (Centers for Disease Control)
4. Zinc Dramatically Helps with Colds, If You Take a Lot Quickly: Most studies suggest that it'll shorten the cold by 12-48%. Nasal discharge goes down by 34%, congestion by 37%, and muscle ache by 54%. But you need to take a high dose, roughly 80 mg/day, started within 24 hours of the first symptoms. (Source
5. The Amish are Remarkably Healthy: The Amish outperform the English on every measured health outcome. 65% of Amish rate their health as excellent or very good, compared to 58% of English. Diabetes rates are 2% vs. 8%, heart attack rates are 1% vs. 6%, high blood pressure is 11% vs. 31%. (Scott Alexander)
6. Calorie Counts are Mostly Lies: Labels on American packaged foods miss their true calorie counts by an average of 18%. The information on processed frozen foods misstates their calorific content by as much as 70%. (The Economist)
7. American Offices are Tougher than I Thought: 48% of employees in the US alone have cried at work. (Ginger)

Money

1. Wealth Fades, Quickly: 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the 2nd generation, and 90% by the 3rd. (h/t Marshall Haas)
2. People are Less Rational than You Think: People spend more on lottery tickets than movies, video games, music, sporting events, and books combined. (David Perell)
3. The US is Rich. Really Rich: If the United Kingdom was a US state, it would be the third poorest by GDP/capita, only Arkansas and Mississippi are lower. (Wikipedia)
4. Tesla is Big. Really Big: On July 14th, Tesla's market cap started the day by gaining "a GM" (+$35B) and ended the day by losing "a BMW" (-$42B). (Jim Bianco)
5. Everything Important Costs Wayyyy More Than It Used To: In the past 50 years, housing costs have gone up 50%, education costs have doubled, college costs have dectupled, health insurance costs have dectupled, and subway construction costs have dectupled. (Scott Alexander)
6. The Best Companies Move Faster than I'd Think Possible: Developing and launching the iPod in 2001 took just 41 weeks, from the very first meeting (no team, no prototype, no design) to iPods shipping to customers. (Patrick Collison)

US Politics

1. You Think Tensions are High Today? There's Nothing Compared to the 1970s: During an 18 month period in 1971-72, there were 2,500 domestic bombings reported, averaging out to more than five a day. (Tyler Cowen)
2. Republicans Believe Some Crazy Things: As late as July 2016, more than half of Republican voters doubted that Obama was born in the US, meaning they did not view him as a legitimate president. (Adam Serwer)
3. School Shootings are the New Normal: March 2020 was the first March without a school shooting in the USA since 2002. (Robert Klemko)
4. People Who Say They are Politically Independent are Mostly Not: Looking at decades of election data, political scientists found that self-described independent voters today are more loyal to a single party than voters who described themselves as “strong partisans” were in the 1970s. (Ezra Klein)
5. Mormons Really, Really Like the Constitution: 94% of Mormons believe the constitution is divinely inspired. That's only two points lower than the percentage that believes the Book of Mormon is divinely inspired.(The Atlantic)
6. Budget Cuts are Killing the Tax Police: Audit rates for those making more than $1 million/year have fallen by 81% over the past decade. Millionaires now get audited at the same rate as those making $20,000/year. (Center for American Progress)

If you enjoyed this list, you'd love my newsletter, More Every Week, where I share these kinds of insights on a weekly basis. Sign up for free here.

Special thanks to Brij Dhanda and Sanah Dhanda for reading drafts of this.

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