Parties, pickleball, cataracts

Lux Recommends #473

Twenty-one rules for a good party, why we love pickleball, how cataract surgery became the world’s most frequent procedure. Plus “If you’re not solving for pain, then what the hell are you doing?”

From Lux Capital

This week, we co-led the funding of Nilo Therapeutics, a startup looking to harness neural circuits to restore immune homeostasis, with $101 million in series A capital with our friends at The Column Group and DCVC Bio.

Josh Wolfe also appeared on Annie Duke’s “Decision Education” podcast to talk about his unconventional approach to venture investing and decision-making under uncertainty. They discuss how you spot opportunities hidden in plain sight, how to distinguish between “nice-to-have” vs. “must-solve” problems, how to leverage inside versus outside views for better decision-making, and why understanding human nature is as critical as understanding technology when investing in the future.

For nostalgia’s sake, we had Annie on the Riskgaming podcast back in early 2023 when she launched her new book, Quit. It’s still a great listen (and the book’s still a great read).

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From around the web

1. Rules for fun

My brain is still on vacation, so this week I want to start off by talking about parties — specifically, what makes a good one. Luckily my good friend and long-time Riskgaming participant, Uri Bram, has some rules over at Atoms and Bits. The next time I put together something for Riskgaming, I’m keeping #20 in mind!

20) Let me repeat that: Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that’s thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.

Uri also has a very fun new game out. Person Do Thing would help any party along, and it is available digitally and as a card game.

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2. A big dill

With Uri’s rules in mind, I’m going to keep the rest of this newsletter as varied and lively as possible … so let’s talk pickleball. This week, our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman enjoyed

Derek Thompson

’s exploration of how the sport explains American culture. As it turns out, in all things, we just like to jump on trends — and those trends tend to follow pretty predictable evolutions.

I named this internal mechanism the law of “familiar surprises”: Most people like things that are optimally new without being so novel as to generate disfluency or confusion. People constantly seek out new songs but prefer those with familiar tones and chord structures. People often watch new movies and yet as Hollywood has learned more about consumer tastes, the box office has become more dominated by familiarity: sequels, adaptations, and reboots. Just as they do with baby names, Americans seem to gravitate toward new sports and fitness trends with a comfortable level of novelty that is in conversation with the previous dominant trend.

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3. Sight for sore eyes

We have our party activities. What about some conversation? Did you know that humans have been doing cataract surgery for about 4,000 years, and that the procedure used to involve using a curved needle to push the cataract toward the back of the eyeball? I did not. But that imagery, via ophthalmologist Sangeetha Aravinda in Asimov Press, is definitely never leaving my brain. Today’s methods are better, but we still have work to do.

Disparities in access not only take a toll on public health but also on the economy. The global productivity loss due to vision impairment is estimated at $411 billion annually. Cataracts account for a large fraction of this burden, especially in individuals between 50 and 75 years of age who are either still working themselves or role as a caregiver allows other family members to work. Thus, cataract surgery can not only change a single patient’s life but also the economic trajectory of their entire household.

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4. Ghost of yogh past

Also: Ever wondered why the letter “g” in the English language can make so many different sounds (especially when combined with “h”)? Sam got a kick out of

Colin Gorrie

’s “The strangest letter of the alphabet.” As it turns out, the weirdness has to do with yogh (“ȝ”), a medieval English letter that represented two distinct sounds: a y-sound and a now-lost “gh” sound (as in Scottish “loch”). The letter eventually disappeared due to the printing press, although it survived longer in Scotland, where printers substituted “ȝ” for “z,” which is why Scottish names like “Menzies” and “Mackenzie” contain a “z” that doesn’t sound like one. Another bit of food for thought:

English spelling is so complex that we’ve made mastering it into a competitive sport: what would be the point of a spelling bee in a language with a predictable spelling system? Where’s the fun unless you have to sweat a little as you struggle to recall whether this particular word is one where “‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’” doesn’t apply?

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5. In the fold

Onward to food. Din Tai Fung, which started in the United States as a family-run suburban LA strip mall restaurant 25 years ago, is now America’s highest-earning restaurant chain. Under CEO Albert Yang, the family has driven growth by obsessively focusing on guest reviews, standardizing operations (every dumpling must have exactly 16 grams of filling, 5 grams of dough, and 18 folds), and refusing to franchise or go public to maintain quality control. If you get a chance to check it out, you should.

When the brothers began managing the American business, which operates separately from the international arm, the brand began focusing more on data and guest feedback, with Yang calling high guest ratings his “north star.” Yang, who earned a Cornell University degree in hotel administration in 2015, and his team obsessively monitor reviews on Yelp and Google, and corporate bonuses are tied to good reviews. In the restaurant industry, the most common complaints usually center around cold food or inattentive service. To address the former, Din Tai Fung increased cook times on certain dishes to ensure hotter temperatures. For the latter, he’s got a program of intense training. “It’s just nonstop—‘How do we improve the guest experience?’” says Yang as a pot of oolong tea arrives steaming hot.

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From Riskgaming