[時事英文] 從 Most Dangerous Place 文章,看經濟學人寫作邏輯
最近大家好像都在討論這一篇文章, 我們來聽一下前總統府英文演講撰稿人Andrew Yang的觀點吧:
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Economist 經濟學人這禮拜發表了一篇聳動的文章:The Most Dangerous Place on Earth: https://econ.st/3tbpZWT
雖然有些人覺得 Economist 寫的東西很無聊 (我以前在美國外交研究所,每個同學都這麼覺得),但他們的寫作邏輯嚴謹度是非常高的。
他們怎麼寫?
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The Most Dangerous Place on Earth: America and China must work harder to avoid war over the future of Taiwan
📌 文章架構:
1. Premise 前提:台海平衡建立在一個「矛盾」上
2. What if...:如果發生戰爭,會有多恐怖
3. Premise is weak:前提的平衡,比我們想像還要脆弱...
4. Reason 原因:武力侵台,對中國來說越來越可行了
5. Counter argument:但習近平真的想要冒這個風險嗎?沒人知道
6. Recommendation:所以台美要努力讓中國覺得武力不是一個選項
邏輯:
- 建立前提
- 然後探討不同發展方向會有什麼後果
- 我們有什麼理由/證據告訴我們會往哪個方向發展?
- 最後:在這種不確定下,我們該怎麼做?
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📌 標題的組合是聳動的一句 "most dangerous place on earth" 加上 call to action - 一定要努力避免戰爭。
這個是不錯的標題組合,大家不妨沿用:抓住注意力,然後給結論。
不過老實說,副標有點弱。因為 "work harder to avoid war" 是所有專家都講了幾十年的。標題太重要了,應該要有點新的東西,或是寫的很具體。而且拜託,如果有人叫你 "work harder",你會不會覺得:「廢話」?
就算我們簡單看內文,也可以生出更具體的副標:
- Has war become a viable option for Beijing?
- The strategic ambiguity over Taiwan is breaking down
- Time to remove war as an option
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好,文章開始:
The test of a first-rate intelligence, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. For decades just such an exercise of high-calibre ambiguity has kept the peace between America and China over Taiwan...
Today, however, this strategic ambiguity is breaking down. The United States is coming to fear that it may no longer be able to deter China from seizing Taiwan by force.
📌 這個告訴讀者 (他們教育水準普遍非常高,但可能不大熟悉台灣),台海的平衡一直是一個矛盾的平衡,而這個平衡也許無法繼續維持了。這樣寫提高戲劇張力,吸引讀者。
他們這個開頭,其實也是伏筆,晚點會繞回來。
*引用 Fitzgerald 的話本身慢逗趣的,展現了他們的文學素養 lol。
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下一句告訴大家,台海戰爭對世界的後果有多恐怖:
War would be a catastrophe, and not only because of the bloodshed in Taiwan and the risk of escalation between two nuclear powers. One reason is economic. The island lies at the heart of the semiconductor industry. TSMC, the world’s most valuable chipmaker, etches 84% of the most advanced chips.
但他們反而把他們認為「最重要」的部分,放在後面:
The bigger reason is that Taiwan is an arena for the rivalry between China and America. Although the United States is not treaty-bound to defend Taiwan, a Chinese assault would be a test of America’s military might and its diplomatic and political resolve. If the Seventh Fleet failed to turn up, China would overnight become the dominant power in Asia. America’s allies around the world would know that they could not count on it. Pax Americana would collapse.
📌 最後一句最關鍵:如果美國不阻止中國,其他盟友會知道:美國可能不會來救我們。
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然後,他們就回到開頭的伏筆了:
To understand how to avoid conflict in the Taiwan Strait, start with the contradictions that have kept the peace during the past few decades. The government in Beijing insists it has a duty to bring about unification—even, as a last resort, by means of invasion. The Taiwanese, who used to agree that their island was part of China (albeit a non-Communist one), have taken to electing governments that stress its separateness, while stopping short of declaring independence. And America has protected Taiwan from Chinese aggression, even though it recognises the government in Beijing. These opposing ideas are bundled into what Fitzgerald’s diplomatic inheritors blithely call the “status quo”. In fact, it is a roiling, seething source of neurosis and doubt.
他們一一列出台美中三方的立場,然後指出:把這個叫做 "Status Quo" 根本就很荒唐啊!這個真的很 roiling, seething, neurotic (要強調的這麼誇張嗎...)。
📌 我發現 The Economist 很喜歡把最重要的結論放在最後面。其他刊物/作者可能會把重點放在最前面:"What Fitzgerald's diplomatic inheritors blithely call the "status quo" is in fact a roiling, seething source of neurosis..." 然後再列出三方的立場。
這可能也跟 The Economist 自認的讀者群有關:我認識會看他們東西的人,都是在家或是辦公室,真的坐下來好好看的,所以把重點放在後面還 ok,因為很多讀者會好好看到最後。但你如果寫給「瞄過去」的讀者,就請把重點放在段落最前面。
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🔎 需要更多的分析嗎? 想看完整文章的同學請按個讚和留言「從 Most Dangerous Place 文章,看經濟學人寫作邏輯」。
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Presentality系列文章:
📌 看貝佐斯致亞馬遜股東的最後一封信,學一些英文寫作小撇步
https://bit.ly/3xCN1cC
📌 英文演講實用的結構與技巧
https://bit.ly/2PHu3Ax
📌 在演講中的四種敘述角度
https://bit.ly/39tNUtv
📌 詩人Amanda Gorman的英文演講技巧
https://bit.ly/39sI3on
non stress test 在 AppWorks Facebook 的精選貼文
Interview with A Founder: Conor McLaughlin (Co-founder of 99.co)
By David Wu (AppWorks Associate)
Conor McLaughlin was previously the Co-founder and CTO of 99.co, the real estate marketplace in Singapore and Indonesia. He spent six and a half years at the startup, whose backers include Sequoia Capital, 500 Startups, and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, helping to grow it into a $100 million company. As a member of AppWorks Accelerator #21, he is currently working on his next big project, a yet-to-be-named language learning startup.
【What advice do you have for first-time founders?】
First, you need to decide: do I want to run a sprint or a marathon? For a sprint, you may be open to acquisition from the beginning, delay non-startup aspects of your life, give yourself two years where you drop everything to test an idea, choose to raise more money earlier on and thus be more diluted, or do anything else that implies a shorter time horizon. Typically 1-5 years - this can lead to a major boon in a short period of time if executed well. If you decide you are in the sprinting business, you will most likely be pushed toward binary outcomes because of how many investors and employees you have on your cap table. As a first-time founder, you need to be clear with yourself on what you are willing to put on the line. As Reid Hoffman says, it’s like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down… hopefully you build a plane in time.
If you are running a marathon, you are deciding that your competitive advantage is consistency over intensity. You are in this for 10, 15 years. With this time horizon, you will realize you need ways to metabolize stress and maintain emotional, spiritual, and mental health. You need to maintain relationships with friends, family, and romantic partners. When you are looking at this 10 year period, you realize the people around you can only put up with so much. Unfortunately, while work is something people can generally bounce back from, there are many things in life where you cannot - an example is your relationship with your partner. If you’re going to run a marathon, you need to be clear with yourself about what time you have for other aspects of your life and what time you have for your company. Eventually you need to learn what the right speed is where you can run as long as possible. It’s amazing how often it is that those people that keep going, assuming you have chosen the right problem to solve, eventually find daylight. Part of that is just lasting long enough.
Second, you need to revisit and continually ask yourself: should I still be running a sprint or a marathon? Circumstances change. Maybe you sprinted for the first two years to secure interesting results and funding; now it's time to transition to a marathon and clean up the life debt a bit. Or inversely, maybe you're finally leaving the trough of sorrow and it's time to sprint for a bit. Most founders will be in a long distance race with periodic sprinting. From my observation, founders most often stop because of two reasons: They either A) run out of money or B) run out of energy. There’s plenty of advice out there for scenario A (hint: don’t). But in my experience, scenario B is far more pernicious and dangerous to would-be successful founders. If you are in a marathon but fail to pace yourself and run it like one long sprint, you are unlikely to make it to the end.
Much founder advice speaks to this: Don’t let your startup make you fat. Exercise 5-10% of the time. Pick up a hobby outside of your startup. Go home for holidays. All of it leads back to one thing: You need to take care of yourself. Because injury will be far worse for your progress than being a little slower. “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast”, as the US Navy Seals say. This is surprisingly difficult advice for intrinsically motivated founders to follow, because in the event of failure, it makes them vulnerable to the thought, “Well, you didn’t work hard enough.” But for those that already have the hustle, your job is to avoid the moment of epiphany where you look in the mirror and think, “This isn’t worth it.”
All founders will have to sacrifice some things. The point is to not sacrifice everything. It will make you more resilient. Not less. It will give you the space to see situations more objectively and make better decisions. And most importantly, it will let you love what you do because it will remind you that the work isn’t just in service of yourself, it’s in the service of others. I do not think you can judge hard work over a day, or even a year, but I do think you can judge hard work over 5-10 years. Hard work is not just about the next 1-2 months. There will be times when you need to run as fast as possible, but if that is happening all the time you are probably not being smart about the situation. So don’t hurt yourself, be consistent, keep disciplined, and keep going.
Lastly, focus on your metaskills. Public speaking, reading, writing - skills applied in every aspect of your life. Generally what they reflect is learning how to think better. As a founder you need to think about - how can I think more clearly, be more creative, rigorous, analytical? As Warren Buffett and others have said: I have never seen a successful person that did not read as often as they could. Actual books and long form scare a lot of people. That’s your competitive advantage. Read blog posts from smart people, follow smart people on Twitter, listen to podcasts. Always be focused on how you can develop yourself to think better. Fostering the habit of improving your thinking will foster discipline in yourself. And discipline will let you turn that rigorous thinking into action.
【I imagine running the “race” has been especially tough this year. How have you gotten through 2020?】
I have leaned on routine and community. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to foster discipline in myself. I make my bed every morning, meditate every morning, make sure that I go to the gym 3-4 times a week. There’s so much uncertainty in both the world and the entrepreneurial space. Keeping certain things consistent gives me a spine to my life that I can fall back on. If I’m not feeling well, my discipline takes over and I’ll go to the gym. That helps me relieve stress - falling back to routine and having some mainstays of consistency and structure.
And community - it’s been the big mental health zeitgeist of this year. Everyone is recognizing that without the people around us, our mental health diminishes. Joining AppWorks was very intentional so I could surround myself with like-minded people who could question me, hold me accountable, and inspire me. And also just forming personal connections where I felt that I was still taking care of my mental health by connecting with others. Being a founder is an incredibly lonely journey. In the early days, there’s not a lot of people around. Later, when you do hire lots of people, you need to be the boss, the leader - for certain things, you can’t tell the employees everything, and even if you do, there will always be a bit of distance. You need people to relate to - people want to be seen for who they are, and appreciated for what they give. When you are a founder, sometimes it’s hard to feel that you are seen. So I intentionally put myself in situations where I can be inspired, be held accountable, and more importantly connect with others, and feel that I’m not alone. And that me and my co-founders are part of a communal journey with those around us.
【When you talk about how to run the race, I get the sense that you’re drawing from previous experiences and, perhaps, mistakes. What are the mistakes you’ve made in your founder journey and the takeaways?】
I think you could take a calendar, point to a random week, and we could list out all the mistakes from that week (laughs). I do subscribe to Steve Jobs’ philosophy: mistakes will happen, but mistakes happening means we are making decisions. Not making decisions is perhaps the biggest mistake. It’s often the reason for frustration, loss of speed, loss of momentum - so many of the issues you encounter in startups. Not making enough mistakes is probably the #1 mistake that I’ve made.
Second, going back to my advice to first-time founders, is not understanding what game I’m playing. Not understanding that all the money in the world is not going to be worth it if your spouse or partner decides to leave you because you have relegated them to a second-class citizen in your life. I think I forgot that at points. There is more to life than just the company.
Third, be careful about who you choose to work with. At minimum, if you’re doing a standard 8-9 hours at the office five times a week, that’s a lot of time with those people. You want to like the people that you work with - you want to know they’re high integrity, you want to respect their values, and you want to have common values. Choosing the right people that give you energy rather than take it away just makes running the marathon so much easier.
【We welcome all AI, Blockchain, or Southeast Asia founders to join AppWorks Accelerator: https://bit.ly/3r4lLR8 】
non stress test 在 โปรแกรมเมอร์ไทย Thai programmer Facebook 的最佳貼文
แนวทาง
ด้านสถาบัตยกรรมและฮาร์ดแวร์ (สำคัญมาก)
1) ทำ load balancing (นิยมกัน)
2) ฝั่ง server ทำเป็นฟาร์ม (server cluster)
3) database ทำเป็นคลัสเตอร์
4) หรืออาจแยกเป็น data center (ลงทุนเยอะหน่อย)
5) เพิ่ม spec ฮาร์ดแวร์
6) network ต้องพยายามให้มี bottleneck น้อยสุด รวมทั้งขยาย bandwidth
7) หรือจะออกแบบเป็น microservices
8) หรือจะออกแบบเป็นระบบคิว
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ฝั่งซอฟต์แวร์
1) ใช้แนวทาง Aysnchronous ผสมด้วย
เพื่อป้องกันการทำงานของ I/O ที่มารอกัน ( Non - Blocking/IO )
2) กระจายการทำงานไปยังคลาวนด์ หรือเว็บเซอร์สวิส
3) เลี่ยงการเขียนคิวรี่ที่ไปทำให้ฐานข้อมูลทำงานหนักไป
4) งานไหนที่รอนานเกินไป ก็เลี่ยงให้ไปตั้งเวลาทำงานหลังบ้านทีหลัง ไม่ควรให้ระบบอื่นรอจนจราจรติดขัด
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ต้องเทสก่อนใช้จริง (สำคัญสุดยอด)
1) ทำ load test
2) ทำ stress test
3) ทำ performance test
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อ่ออย่าลืมเอาระบบไปตากแดดจะได้ไม่ล่ม ....อุ้ยอันนี้ล้อเล่น
สุดท้ายอย่าเชื่อว่าไม่มีระบบใดในใต้ล้าที่ไม่ล่ม
เพราะ Google และ Facebook ที่ว่าแน่ ก็เคยล่มทั่วโลกมาแล้ว
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✍ เขียนโดยโปรแกรมเมอร์ไทย thai programmer
non stress test 在 Nonstress Test Explained - YouTube 的推薦與評價
This HD video by Prof. Ajit Virkud explains the basics of non stress test which is done for fetal well being assessment. ... <看更多>