Temple of Curiosity 001: three ideas worth chasing

Airlines have been running the same experiment on you for forty years¶

dynamic pricing isn't new, it's just gotten better instruments.

Revenue management, the discipline behind airline seat pricing, started in the 1980s as a defensive move against low-cost carriers undercutting fares. The surprising part isn't that prices move, it's how directly the underlying demand curve gets exposed once you know what to look for: the gap between a Tuesday fare and a Friday fare is a measurement, not a trick.

Why this matters – the takeaway: any market with perishable inventory and segmentable demand will eventually look like this. Concert tickets and hotel rooms already do. Worth watching for it anywhere "sold out" and "discounted" coexist in the same week.

Spaced repetition works, but not for the reason most apps advertise¶

the interval matters less than the act of nearly forgetting.

The learning research behind spaced repetition keeps finding the same thing: the benefit comes from retrieving a memory right at the edge of forgetting it, not from any particular schedule. Apps that space reviews by a fixed formula are approximating this, not guaranteeing it.

Why this matters – the takeaway: if a flashcard feels trivially easy every time you see it, the interval is too short and you're wasting reviews. The difficulty of recall, not the calendar, is the signal to watch.

A small essay on reading slowly¶

why the shape of an argument survives longer than its summary.

This issue's essay on the site argues that slow reading isn't about comprehension, it's about retention of structure over bullet points. Read it here.

Why this matters – the takeaway: if you only ever read in one sitting, you may be optimizing for having read something rather than for still having it.

Closing thought: every issue this year has had at least one item that started as an unrelated rabbit hole. That's not an accident; it's the whole premise of this newsletter.