Jerry Lettre

Weather & Business Strategist. University Instructor.

WeatherStrategy LLC Helps Your Organization Deal With The Uncertainty And Impact Of Weather & Climate.

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

Why Some Employees Stop Speaking Up Even When They See Problems https://t.co/HgcbqnmG1k

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

Interesting donation.

What Dartmouth’s $25 Million Gift Signals To Applicants https://t.co/uHs9KduaBn

[Dakota Smith @weatherdak]

This is something I have never seen before on satellite.

Clouds perfectly outlining roads.

Just incredibly neat imagery of Houston, Texas this morning.

Massive shoutout to @Emokwx who discovered it.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Chicago philosopher wrote one book in 1940 proving that 95% of the books you have read in your life, you didn't actually read, and Charlie Munger has been telling people to read it for 50 years.

His name was Mortimer Adler.

He spent 40 years at the University of Chicago, ran the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and built his entire career on one uncomfortable observation about the people around him.

Most adults who called themselves well-read had not actually read a book in the real sense even once. They had run their eyes over the pages, registered the words, formed a vague impression, and put it back on the shelf.

The book had passed through them without ever entering them.

In 1940 he wrote How to Read a Book. It has stayed in print for 86 years.

Charlie Munger recommends it. Naval Ravikant recommends it. Fareed Zakaria recommends it.

Every serious thinker who builds a career on absorbing information eventually finds their way to this book, and the reason is that Adler had isolated something nobody else was naming clearly.

There are four levels of reading. Almost everyone is stuck on the second one. The fourth level is so different from what most people call reading that you have probably never done it in your entire life.

Level one is elementary.

You learn it as a child. You decode the letters into words and the words into sentences. You finish the sentence and understand roughly what it said. This is reading the way a 7-year-old reads, and almost every adult on earth has stopped developing past this point in some quiet way.

Level two is inspectional.

This is skimming. You move through a book quickly to figure out what it is broadly about. You read the back cover, scan the table of contents, glance at a few paragraphs, and form an opinion. Most adults who claim to have read 50 books a year are actually doing this. They are inspecting books, not reading them. They walk away with a vague sense of the argument and almost none of the evidence that supports it.

Level three is analytical.

This is the level Adler said most people have never properly experienced. You take one book and you wrestle with it for as long as it takes. You identify the question the author is trying to answer. You map their argument from front to back. You write your disagreements in the margins. You force yourself to articulate, in your own words, what the author is claiming and why. The point is not to finish the book. The point is to argue with it as if the author were sitting across the table from you. Most people never do this once in their life, because it is exhausting and slow and feels nothing like the reading they were taught as children.

Level four is the one almost nobody knows exists. Adler called it syntopical reading. The word means "across topics," and the technique is something closer to running a small private research lab in your own head.

You pick a single question that actually matters to you. How does power corrupt people. Why do civilizations collapse. What makes a marriage last. How does a person change their own mind. Then you assemble five or ten or twenty books from different authors, different centuries, different traditions, all of them taking a swing at the same question.

You do not read any of them cover to cover. You move between them. You find the chapter in book three that addresses the same question as the chapter in book seven. You force those two authors to argue with each other inside your own head.

The book stops being the unit of reading. The question becomes the unit. And the authors become voices in a conversation you are now hosting.

This is the level where reading stops being consumption and starts being construction.

You are no longer absorbing what someone else thinks. You are building a position of your own out of the friction between people who disagreed.

Adler argued that this is the only level of reading where you stop being a passive receiver of other people's ideas and start being someone who can produce ideas of their own.

The reason Charlie Munger has been recommending this book for 50 years is that this is exactly how Munger has always thought. He calls it building a latticework of mental models. The technique he is describing is just syntopical reading applied for a lifetime.

You take the strongest insight from psychology, the strongest insight from biology, the strongest insight from economics, and you stack them against the same problem until something new falls out the bottom.

The reason most people never reach level four is not that it is intellectually difficult. It is that it is logistically uncomfortable. It requires you to keep multiple books open at once.

It requires you to take notes that nobody is going to grade. It requires you to abandon the goal of finishing books and replace it with the goal of answering questions.

This is also why AI just changed everything Adler was teaching.

NotebookLM, Claude, and tools like them let you do syntopical reading at a speed that would have looked like magic to a Chicago philosopher in 1940.

You upload 10 books on the same question. You ask the AI to surface every place those authors agree and every place they contradict each other.

The technique Adler said almost nobody on earth had reached can now be run on a Sunday afternoon by anyone with a laptop and one good question.

The technique was always the unlock. The bottleneck used to be time. The bottleneck is now curiosity.

Most people will keep reading the way they always have. A book at a time. Eyes over the pages. No question driving it. No other authors in the room. Adler called that level two for a reason.

You are not behind on your reading list.

You are behind on the level you are reading at.

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

"Surround yourself with people that push you to do and be better. No drama or negativity. Just higher goals and higher motivation. Good times and positive energy. No jealousy or hate. Simply bringing out the absolute best in each other." Anonymous https://t.co/5cnonJ2ryJ

[Warren Buffett Believes @BarrenWuffett1]

Warren Buffett believes "You are only looking for 3 qualities in people (you hire): Enthusiasm, Intelligence, and Integrity."

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

George Carlin Was Years Ahead Of This Time #georgecarlin #standup #stand... https://t.co/Y1FsilHB16 via @YouTube

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A Oxford PhD student got flagged for submitting AI-generated work.

His advisor called it the most sophisticated research process he had seen in 20 years.

The student had not used AI to write a single word.

Here is the workflow that got him reported.

He starts every essay with a diagnostic he calls brutal. He dumps his rough argument into Claude and asks one question: what are the three weakest logical jumps in this reasoning, and where would a hostile examiner attack first? The AI does not write his essay. It destroys his draft, and then he rebuilds from whatever survives.

Most students using AI are doing the opposite. They hand Claude a topic and ask it to write. He hands Claude his thinking and asks it to find every place where that thinking falls apart. The difference between those two approaches is the difference between outsourcing your brain and sharpening it.

The second step is the one that made his advisor go quiet. He uploads the five most important papers in his field alongside his draft and asks Claude what claims in his argument contradict or oversimplify what these authors actually found. Most PhD students cite papers they have skimmed once. He cites papers he has been forced to genuinely reckon with, because Claude keeps catching the places where he got them wrong.

The final move is almost unfair. Before he submits anything, he pastes his conclusion and runs one more prompt. He asks what a philosopher of science would say is missing from this argument and what assumptions he is making that he has not defended. His essays come back from reviewers with phrases like unusually rigorous and demonstrates rare critical depth, and his committee has no idea that the depth came from a machine asking him harder questions than any human in his department was willing to ask.

The academic integrity hearing lasted three hours. The panel asked him to rebuild his methodology from scratch in the room. He opened his laptop and showed them exactly how the workflow ran, prompt by prompt. They did not just clear him. They gave him the highest grade in the department's history and asked him to present the process to faculty.

Here is what that story actually means. What took most PhD candidates six months of back-and-forth with advisors, he was compressing into a single session because he had figured out something almost nobody else has. AI does not make your thinking better by replacing it. It makes your thinking better by attacking it faster than any human critic ever would.

He was not using AI to write. He was using it to think harder than he could alone.

The tool is the same one everyone has. The workflow is the part nobody is teaching.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

Interesting...
Polar vortex forecasts gain months of lead time with new climate-based method https://t.co/AJft0B6Ff7

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

@Dan_Jeffries1 He needs to understand the Jevons Paradox and how it may affect employment in the future.

[K @ThatSpringerNH]

The recent discovery of huge lithium deposits in New Hampshire and Maine. The closest "major" towns to the largest deposits are Hanover, NH and Berlin, NH. This could re-invent Berlin. https://t.co/EMSE1k1HHz

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

Wow.

[Yohan @yohaniddawela]

A single GPU can now calculate hundreds of global weather scenarios in under 60 seconds. The exact same task requires a supercomputer and hours of brute-force physics.

Google DeepMind recently released WeatherNext 2. The model beats the previous state-of-the-art system on 99.9% of weather variables across a 15-day forecast window. It achieves this massive jump in accuracy using a new modelling approach called a Functional Generative Network.

Meteorologists categorise weather data into two buckets:

1. Marginals are isolated data points, like the precise temperature at a specific location or the wind speed at a certain altitude.
2. Joints are the massive, interconnected systems that form when all those individual elements interact.

The researchers hid the joint systems from the model during training. They only taught it the isolated marginals. When they turned it on, the model skillfully predicted the massive, complex systems anyway.

The architecture forces an 87-million-dimensional output distribution through a 32-dimensional mathematical bottleneck. To survive this severe constraint and still produce accurate individual data points, the neural network has no choice but to learn the underlying physics linking everything together. It figures out the weather because that’s the most efficient way to solve the maths.

The practical results are immediate. The model gives forecasters a full 24-hour advantage in tropical cyclone tracking compared to the previous leading system. It maps extreme wind speeds and heatwaves with unprecedented precision.

We’re watching a pretty big shift in predictive capabilities. The machine is deducing the structural reality of planetary weather from isolated fragments of data.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A MIT professor taught the same lecture every January for 40 years, and every single time it was standing room only.

I watched it at 2am and it completely rewired how I think about communication.

His name was Patrick Winston. The lecture is called "How to Speak."

His opening line hit like a truck: your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas in that order.

Not your GPA. Not your pedigree. Not your IQ. How you speak is what separates people who get heard from people who get ignored.

Here's the framework he drilled into MIT students for four decades.

He said never start with a joke. Start by telling people exactly what they're going to learn. Prime the pump before you pour anything in. He called it the "empowerment promise" give people a reason to stay in their seats within the first 60 seconds.

Then he broke down the 5S rule for making ideas stick: Symbol, Slogan, Surprise, Salient, and Story. Every idea worth remembering hits at least three of these.

The part that floored me was his "near miss" technique. Don't just show what's right show what almost looks right but isn't. That contrast is when the brain actually locks something in permanently.

His final rule before any big talk: end with a contribution, not a summary. Don't recap what you said. Tell people what you gave them that they didn't have before they walked in.

I've used this framework in pitches, interviews, and presentations ever since watching it, and the results are not subtle.

Patrick Winston passed away in 2019, but this lecture is still free on MIT OpenCourseWare. One hour, watched by millions, and it costs absolutely nothing.

The most important class MIT ever put on the internet isn't about code or math. It's about how to make people actually listen to you.

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

https://t.co/T6GtZWjpUo

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

Deer sniffing the backyard camera.

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

Behavioral science says people who say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ without thinking twice usually display these 9 quiet personality traits - Silicon Canals https://t.co/emGXxWzdME

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Steve Jobs literally predicted the iPhone, the Internet, AI and the next 50 years of technology in a single speech from 1983:

[Clark Wilson @clark_wils46212]

@newstart_2024

[Jerry Lettre @weatherstrategy]

Interesting point of view...

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Richard Feynman’s savage takedown of pseudo-science still burns in 2026:

“Social science is an example of a science which is not a science. They follow the forms… but they don’t get any laws. They haven’t found out anything.”

He goes harder:

Experts who “sit at a typewriter and make up” claims — “organic food is better,” “this diet cures everything” — as if it’s settled science, when no rigorous experiments or checks have been done.

Feynman:

“I know what it means to really know something.
How careful you have to be. How easy it is to fool yourself.
I see how they get their information… and I can’t believe that they know.”

The Nobel physicist calls it straight: most of what passes for “expert” opinion is noise dressed up as knowledge.

In an age drowning in TikTok “science,” influencers, and clickbait studies — Feynman’s 1:52 rant feels more relevant than ever.

Who’s the biggest pseudo-expert that grinds your gears right now?

Clip is timeless fire — watch it and feel the clarity.