Social Studies 📘🧠

Social Studies is a newsletter with three components:

🐦 Tech Twitter News
Weekly and monthly summaries of the most interesting discussions, debates and advice on Tech Twitter.

🧠 Frameworks & Mental Models
Reviews of the most valuable concepts in the social sciences with case studies relating them to tech.

🤔 Profiles
Roundups of the best tweets and exclusive Q&As with leaders in tech, business and social science.

Go ahead and ✨smash that subscribe button✨ but if you need coercing, read on…

Feel free to DM me for questions or superpeer me for consulting!

🧠 Even Zuck was a Psych major

For a long time, I was ashamed to admit that I was a Psych major. The tech industry values technical prowess above all else. The gilded (Stanford) CS degree opens more doors on Sandhill Road than any other.

Don’t get me wrong. Being able to code is a superpower. But understanding how people tick… that is a superpower.

Brett Goldstein @thatguyBG

Psychology is the most underrated major in tech. UX, growth, management, etc all boil down to understanding how people think.

1:20 AM ∙ Jul 10, 2020

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It is telling that Naval, one of the most esteemed gurus on the tech industry includes five Social Sciences in his list of seven of the most (if not only) important subjects to study.

Naval @naval

Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

8:41 AM ∙ May 31, 2018

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Fundamentally, we build tech products for humans. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg was a Psych major or why Peter Theil cites philosopher Rene Girard more than any business framework.

Every product I’ve worked on, from an AR camera app to a B2B business data API, required an intimate understanding of how humans think to execute successfully.

Brett Goldstein @thatguyBG

Tech companies are behavior change companies: - get in strangers' cars (@Uber) - share silly videos of yourself with the world (@tiktok_us) - buy books on the internet (@amazon) - communicate with video instead of email/docs (@loom) Psych challenges = product challenges

6:17 PM ∙ Jul 15, 2020

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🥚 The Social Science renaissance has begun

There is an incredible wealth of research in the Social Sciences that can be applied directly to solving challenges in technology today. Individuals like BJ Fogg, Nir Eyal, and countless others have built careers on this, but this is only the beginning of the renaissance.

One of the biggest success stories in tech lately has been Tik Tok. In an interview in 2016, founder Alex Zhu shared the company’s user acquisition philosophy. It included references to concepts in Game Theory and Psychology.

A few years later, Eugene Wei wrote his seminal piece “Status as a Service” which outlines a holy grail of frameworks for building social media products - all built on Social Scientific theory.

Meltem Demirors @Melt_Dem

evergreen post from @eugenewei Let's begin with two principles: - People are status-seeking monkeys - People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital

eugenewei.comStatus as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the DayEditor’s Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series

2:59 PM ∙ Jul 7, 2020

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I believe Alex Zhu and Eugene Wei are emblematic of more of what’s to come.

🌎 Social Studies is the treasure map

The mission of this newsletter is to bring about the renaissance in applied Social Science. The idea is to give readers a tasting menu of different theories and case studies supporting them. My focus will be on driving actionable insights in concise, entertaining writing.

Here are some topics I’m thinking about covering.

social studies @__socialstudies

Get read for a fun summer 🧠

4:29 PM ∙ Jul 16, 2020

Social Studies also covers news from Tech Twitter:

🐦 Tech Twitter News - Weekly and monthly summaries of the most interesting discussions, debates and advice on Tech Twitter.

🤔 Profiles - Roundups of the best tweets and exclusive Q&As with leaders in tech, business and social science.

🤯 Things could get even crazier from here

The bubble in higher education is driving a massive movement towards unbundling. Twitter-native influencers are launching online schools for specific subject areas.

Brett Goldstein @thatguyBG

Short universities, long influencer-lead trade schools: - Short @columbiajourn, long Write of Passage by @david_perell - Short @HarvardHBS, long @beondeck by @eriktorenberg - Short @StanfordEng, long @LambdaSchool by @Austen What am I missing?

socialstudies.substack.com👉 The Unbundling of Harvard Has BegunCOVID19 has driven universities online but they can’t compete with modern influencer-lead alternatives

4:16 PM ∙ Jul 13, 2020

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While I’m no influencer yet, you don’t have to have a galaxy brain to follow this thread.

Psychology is one of the most popular majors in the United States. If you look at just the top tier institutions, Social Sciences in general outnumber Engineering, Business and all other categories by a long shot.

As traditional university education becomes unbundled over the next decade, Social Studies could become the modern, digital-native school for applied Social Science - think LambdaSchool, On Deck, or Write of Passage, but for Social Science.

But today, Social Studies is just a newsletter. Subscribe and see where it goes ✨