Interessant3 #167 | The Resilience of Sisu,Desalination Economics, Genetics & Meritocracy
By Duarte Martins••686 words
Finnish cultural concept - “sisu”
Sisu describes a distinctly Finnish form of determined courage: a quiet, stubborn resolve to push beyond perceived limits in the face of hardship, often invoked in stories of war, harsh winters and long, difficult projects.
It is related to, but not identical with, grit. Grit is steady long-term persistence over years, whereas sisu is more like an emergency reserve that activates in acute adversity when the rational response might be to stop.
Modern psychological takes on sisu frame it as part of resilience: a mix of perseverance, tolerance for discomfort and commitment to personally meaningful goals, with the caveat that unexamined sisu can slide into unhealthy self-sacrifice or refusal to seek help.
Sisu is a useful mental model for surviving volatile environments: cultivate the ability to endure and act through tough stretches, but pair it with feedback loops, data and the willingness to change so that perseverance does not become become a result of the sunk-cost fallacy.
Practically, sisu can be nurtured by training controlled adversity (physical effort, cold, complex tasks, hard conversations), building a narrative of “I have handled hard things before,” and tying effort to a clearly articulated “why” that makes the extra push psychologically coherent rather than masochistic.
Conceptually, sisu sits near Stoicism’s endurance, Jewish tikkun olam and Japanese gaman, but with its own flavour. Stoicism is about rational self-mastery and calm acceptance, whereas sisu is more raw and combative, a refusal to yield. Tikkun olam frames perseverance as repairing the world, and gaman stresses quiet, socially harmonious endurance, while sisu is anchored more in gritty survival and identity.
Rowan Jacobsen - “Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here”
In less than two decades, Israel has pivoted from existential water crisis to surplus, with plants like Sorek, Ashkelon and Hadera now able to supply roughly 600 million cubic metres of desalinated water each year, covering about 55 percent of domestic needs.
Technological advances have slashed costs: Sorek produces around 1 000 litres of drinking water for about 58 US cents, leaving Israeli household water bills on a par with or below many US cities despite the energy-intensive process. For example, they tackled biofouling using porous lava stone to trap microorganisms before they reach the membranes, reducing the need for harsh chemical cleaning and cutting operating costs.
Surplus water is becoming diplomatic capital, from Israel’s supplies to the West Bank to the planned 900 million dollar Red Sea - Dead Sea Canal project with Jordan and the Palestinians, which would share desalinated water and help stabilise the shrinking Dead Sea.
This leads me to think about my home country of Portugal, where every summer there’s a national conversation about desalinisation. These Israeli figures are genuinely competitive in the water-stressed south of Portugal, where land is drier and large infrastructure exists to distribute water from Europe’s largest artificial freshwater lake to the rest of the region.
Nature Human Behaviour paper - Genetic influence, education and occupation in Soviet vs post-Soviet Estonia
This study asks how much individual differences in educational attainment and occupational status are shaped by genetics versus environment, and whether that balance shifted as Estonia moved from Soviet communism to a more market-based, meritocratic system.
The authors find that DNA differences explain roughly twice as much variance in education and occupational status for people educated in the post-Soviet era compared with those educated under the Soviet regime.
The key conceptual claim is that higher genetic influence in the post-Soviet cohort can be interpreted as a marker of more meritocratic selection: when overtly environmental barriers and privileges are reduced, differences in talent and traits partly influenced by DNA have more room to translate into educational and occupational outcomes. Socialism in essence mutes merit.
