2023-09-17 Links

Daily Reads:

Ethan Mollick synthesises the findings of a new paper on the implications of AI augmentation by consultants in Centaurs and cybords on the jagged frontier. Falling asleep at the wheel is a major risk, and the levelling of skills is a massive upside.

In this 2013 opinion piece in the New York Times titled When Deviants Do Good, Tina Rosenberg explains an effective alternative to the seagull style of outside help for local problems.

QOTD:

No problem stays solved in a dynamic environment.
– Russell Ackoff

Music:

Australia is holding a referendum to change the constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia. Singer songwriter Paul Kelly has a new single If Not Now. I first learnt about Vincent Lingiari’s fight for his people from PK’s song "From Little Things Big Things Grow"

2023-09-16 Links

[! Warning]
This is my reading links from today. There may not be anything interesting for you 🙂

I learnt how to create a callout block and that there are 12 distinct callout types in Obsidian! Here, I’m using ‘Warning’. This may not render in WordPress.

Daily Reads:

Erik Schon has put together a collection of Wardley Maps for inspiration. It’s time to review how they are built, and to use them for a project I’m about to propose, the one that I watched today by random was this talk called "Saving Your Business" by Cory Foy This write up is a lot more interesting for practical application

A recommendation from John Naughton to read this New Yorker piece on "The Transformative, Alarming Power of Gene Editing" by Dana Goodyear

From Sahil Bloom’s newsletter: Reverse Engineering Your Ideal Life at 80! Dr. Peter Attiah describes the Centenarian Decathlon as “the ten most important physical tasks you will want to be able to do for the rest of your life.”

[!Quote]
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Music:

Mark Knopfler Live at Madison Square Garden, 2019

2023-09-15 Links

Daily Reads:

I like how Dan Reich has explored the differences between a SaaS business and a Consumer Packaged Goods sector.

Amelia Wattenberger created an app that highlights sentences by how abstract or concrete they are. An interesting application of ChatGPT tokens.

Rob Walker always has thoughtful ideas on how to pay attention. I wish I had thought of this myself 😅 Make a short recording of a sound you would miss if you could never hear it again.

Roger Martin has sage advice on the stupid – and dangerous cost reduction projects

Seth Godin: The MVP and Fear. Why not think of the SVA (Smallest Viable Audience) that you can delight instead?

QOTD:

"Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is." – Ernest Hemingway

Music:

Isto covers Hank Williams’ Honky Tonkin’

2023-09-14 Links

Daily Reads:

Stowe Boyd argues that diversity has to begin right at the beginning of the recruitment process.

I’ve continued reading [[Furr – The Upside of Uncertainty]] & [[Seneca On the Shortness of Life]], and started the first skim through [[The Journals of Anais Nin]]. Digital reading will commence when I’m ready to stare at screens 🙂

QOTD:

We are going to the moon. That is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself. – Anais Nin

Music:

John Prine at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco, 2017

2023-09-13 Links

Daily Reads:

37 Signals have a new product called once.com and their launch copy makes for interesting reading.

Tom Nolles voices aloud what’s been on my mind about "Digital Transformations". I’ve noticed a spate of self-congratulatory posts from people I know claiming success or ‘great progress towards success’. The reality is about as far as the moon is from earth.

More Ben Werdmuller: Who actually makes money (or not) from AI?. I hadn’t heard the term effective accelerationism or e/acc before: Technocapital can usher in the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness.

Adam Mastroianni: Let’s build a fleet and change the world

Cory Doctorow essay in Wired based on his new book: Tech Exceptionalism

QOTD:

Stories surround and penetrate us; they bind us together. – Madeline Ashby

Music:

Elle & Toni – The Big Rock Candy Mountain

2023-09-12 Links

Daily Reads:

Jim Nielsen’s observation about the double standards between software and LLM‘s is spot-on.

Ted Gioia: Why is music getting sadder? as measured by songs in the minor key.

I attended Sydney Uni’s Sydney Ideas talk on Disinformation this evening. Tried my hand at speed-note taking. The Talk will be hosted online at some point, and somewhere around here. These are my notes.

Live note-taking at an event. Expect errors and omissions.

Host: Farz Edraki
Joanne Gray, Sydney Uni
Micah Goldwater, Sydney Uni
Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow at Boston University

What makes disinformation influential & problematic?

  1. Distinction between misinformation & disinformation
    Misinformation is accidental. Disinformation is a lie, an intentional falsehood, for the benefit of the person dishing it out.
    People lied before, and didn’t have an audience. Now, lies can get halfway around the world before truth can get its shoes on.

  2. Psychological processes

    • MG:
      Narrative provide explanations. Our brains look for the patterns, and disinformation provides a compelling yet incorrect view of the world. We know very little about the world.
  3. What roles platforms play in distributing mis/disinformation?

    • Joanne Gray
      Economic logic of platforms for
      Design features for individual users
      Collective endorsement of information that is seen on FB. Everyone believes it therefore it must be true.
  4. Amplifiers
    Pipeline of disinformation: Dis-informers > Amplifiers > Believers
    Cracking down on amplifiers provides the biggest solution.

    Question: role of ActivityPub/Mastodon

  5. MG (missed this question)

    • lost control of their lives, conspiracy theories offer a way of taking back control (narratives provide explanation – heroes, victims, villians)
    • Example of Qld school shooter
  6. Follow up question (also missed this one 🙁 )

    • specific demographics that are susceptible to
  7. Nuanced cultural context

    • Denialism caused by disinformation. Weaponised information usually has a
    • Information re vaccines with 5G microchips came from Russian in early 2020.
    • Lies are free but the truth is behind a paywall
    • Russians had a competing vaccine – Sputnik5 was a vaccine
  8. What did the platforms do about the misinformation?

    • Platforms don’t have obligations, an American set of values (innovation is good, regulation is bad, self-regulation)
    • "Absolute" Free-speech ideology – you can’t stop free speech.
    • Right to free speech <> right to amplification. (Free speech is about speaking truth to power without fear of persecution)
    • We don’t need to take the US position on free speech
  9. What can be done about spread of disinformation?

    • Pre-bunking! Can you get ahead of the spread, and warn people about the motivation? Seems to be more effective than stopping spread of disinformation
    • However, can’t be scaled, or be anticipated.
    • De-bunking (afterwards)
    • Pre-bunking works on the primacy effect – discredit the liar before people hear the lie.
  10. 10 steps that individuals can do to to fight against disinformation

    • Goal of disinfomation is to make you feel helpless.
    • Understand what’s going can help
    • Use the word "disinformation" where it applies. It is a war. Don’t share the story if you can’t know it is true.
    • Write to the advertisers instead!
  11. Policy regulation

    • Legislation that civil society gets better access to the data that is currently black boxes
    • Obligation is reactionary – to bad content. Shift to make the companies responsibility to protect or prevent people from being exposed to harmful content/ disinformation
    • Platforms are the gatekeepers, must be made responsible
  12. Australian Fed bills in progress.

    • Fear of ‘free speech infringement’

"You cannot change someone’s mind. Be kind, respectful, protect the relationship"

QOTD:

True progress towards peace looks like a collaborative world where we consider ourselves to have kinship with everyone of all religions, skin tones, and nationalities, and where every human being’s life has inherent value. It looks like building foreign policy for the benefit of all people, not the people of one nation. It looks like true, vibrant democracy. It doesn’t look like performative flag-waving, drone strikes, religious intolerance, homogeneity, or surveillance campaigns. – Ben Werdmuller:

Music:

Mary Gauthier – Mercy Now

2023-09-11 Links

I’m continuing my theme of spending time on reading physical books, physical exercise or walks, people I love, writing & practising a song on the guitar. I did it again today.

Daily Reads:

Emma McAleavy hates resumes, and shows how to invest your time in better, more useful things instead.

Sahil Bloom describes the Stanford experiment which almost immediately captivated my attention. I What’s the highest return possible on a $5 investment in 2 hours? (The winning team) realized that the most valuable asset was not the $5 or the 2 hours of time for the challenge, but the presentation time in front of a class of Stanford students. Avoid the distractions, ask fundamental questions, and select the leveraged approach.

An interesting perspective on Why haven’t LLM’s solved NLP already?

QOTD:

I love the way a train of thought leaves the station. Something is said or noticed, and before we know it, off we go. A carriage full of ideas talking to each other, pulled along by the engine of curiosity. – Richard Merrick

Music:

The Django song Montagne Saint Genevieve that caught my attention, wanting to play this as well as I can. Still working through it.

2023-09-10 Links

Daily Reads:

Learning a bit more about Vera Birkenbihl’s thinking tools – the ABC List and the Analografitti, and attempting to use them in my own consumption. There are echoes, parallels, and overlaps with Mortimer Adler’s "How to Read a Book". Learning to distinguish between the kinds of knowledge I’m consuming and using the appropriate tool for effective assimilation is my never-ending objective.

via Darius Foroux on Nietzsche: "Amor Fati" or "Love of one’s fate" is a principle that Friedrich Nietzsche made famous. Learn to accept the events you cannot change or control, and find the value in them. I thought for long that it was Stoics who introduced this concept: they did speak freely about this but not as explicitly as Nietzsche did. (The other concept from Nietzsche’s philosophy is the idea of perspectivism – there is no such thing as objective truth or universal values.)

Robin Hanson explores how signalling drives down fertility rates. The world over, population growth rates are declining rapidly. After decades of fear that the earth was getting overpopulated, the economic argument is now starting to look at the potential consequences of not enough ‘new’ people, while the ‘old’ people live longer. Hanson’s observations are worth considering, even though there are no solutions without serious tradeoffs.

Ryan Holiday’s note-taking method or commonplace book is the English version of the Zettelkasten method. I found the video in his blog post called 38 reading rules that changed my life. You say you don’t have time to read but what does the screen time app on your phone say? What does your calendar say?

I’ve not watched Spielberg’s 1977 Movies Alien Encounters of the Third Kind. This explanation of the five tones of alien language has been wanting to, but I’ll make do with the video included in this post for now. What starts with simple five tones ends in one of the most magnificent displays of color and music, suggesting that all it takes to connect is to speak and to listen.

QOTD:

Employees don’t get their value from their organisations. Organisations get their values from their employees. – JP Castilin

Music:

Vivid Consort perform Can She Excuse My Wrongs, written by John Dowland (1563-1626)

2023-09-09 Links

Dad’s taxi duties continue unabated, 10 hours of it today! In stationary minutes, I did read a few things, including applying a note-taking technique that Martin Weber shared, one inspired by Vera Birkenhal, to the book "The Upside of Uncertainty" by Nathan Furr & Samantha Furr. I’ve done the first reading of the book I’ll write up both the notes and my experience of this technique soon.

Daily Reads:

Kelly Corrigan: Words on Women & Strength and talking about her book "Lift"

(I’ve not watched this yet) Masterclass Live with Dan Brown promises another writing structure that has sold stories like ‘hot cakes’ as the late George Carlin would mock 🙂

Mr. Fulghum in full flight of the imagination. I’m saving this text here because his blog now only retains 3 recent posts.

AUTUMN HAIR

Out walking in the windy rainy twilight before supper this evening, I collected a bouquet of fresh fallen leaves. I like autumn leaves and the ways deciduous trees go about their business. 
Suppose people could do the same thing every fall.  
Hair would slowly turn shades of yellow and orange and red.  
(We would let our hair grow long at this season to show as much color as possible.)  
Imagine the conversations:  
“Your oranges are very sharp this year.”  
“That’s a nice shade of yellow you’ve grown.”
Then, little by little, like the leaves, the hair would fall out.  
Not to worry – it would quickly begin to grow in again – just as the buds of new leaves are already there on the trees right behind the loss of leaves.
“But we’d be bald,” you protest. Not for long, and bald is beautiful – sometimes.  
It is the absence of something that makes the presence of something a matter of delight.
For one thing, we would have an annual Hat Season –  
caps and scarves and hats of all kinds for indoors and out.  
And after that, Surprise Season, as our hair grew back –  
always in some strong new shade of natural.  
Or, through vitamins _(fertilizer)_ we might be able to opt for some other color for spring.  
I would try green one year – just to make it clear I was still alive and still growing.
In the trees now clean of leaves, the empty nests of birds are visible.  
One nest had been blown down by the wind.  
On examination, I was surprised to find quite a few long strands of human hair woven into it.  
Given the tensile strength of human hair, I would say the bird had a good idea for nest construction.  
Perhaps, when I clean out the hair from my brush, I should put the hair out near a bird feeder or birdbath come spring for the birds to use.  
I like the thought of my hair being woven into a nest way up in a tree.
Imagine, then, if our hair turned yellow and orange and red in the fall – and we put some out for the birds in spring – there would be these beautiful nests made – which we could then harvest in the fall and wear as hats while our hair grew back.  
Fall-ing Hair.  
Poetic recycling.

Bob Ewing shares the stages of public speaking success in The Arc of Progress as ‘Disappointment’ > ‘Breakthrough’ > ‘Delight’. Once we start practicing something we tend to expect a payoff right away.

QOTD:

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it – but all that had gone before. – Jacob Rils

Music:

Didn’t think this was possible but it was! Tom Petty & Chuck Berry rock and roll with Memphis & Roll Over Beethoven!

2023-09-08 Links

Another day of little reading. Spent time with the people I love and care about, and in great conversation with newly made acquaintances.

Daily Reads:

Ash Maurya: 4 pitches every founder should master

The Monkey Business illusion is even more startling when you have watched the previous version and know of the gorilla!

I cackled loudly at this episode of Black Books because one of the characters is a comically accurate representation of a person I know.

QOTD:

Management also needs to live with not being able to set specific strategic goals. Instead of managing the organization like a ship, steering it one direction or another, they need to concentrate on managing its capabilities, nurture the system it has, and plan around the kinds of outcomes the company is capable of instead of specific ones. – Baldur Bjarnason

Music:

I love this version of John Prine’s rendition of "Hello in There". The man was a captivating storyteller in verse and tune, using few simple chords and a basic picking pattern. It hurts to hear the truth: "Old people just grow lonesome, waiting for someone to say hello in there, hello".