Author: neil

40 ways to let go and feel less pain

I’m perturbed that I keep getting links to LessWrong: 100 Tips for A Better Life:

100. Bad things happen dramatically (a pandemic). Good things happen gradually (malaria deaths dropping annually) and don’t feel like ‘news’. Endeavour to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and dismal view of the world. 

A little help to find/define/sharpen your Life Principles

Colin Newlyn writes a substack on decrapifying work (and if that isn’t a word, it should be).

on GPT:

• • • Gary Marcus is critical of GPT – continuing yesterday’s megathread from Nathan Labenz
    • GPT coming to your Office products!

On the YT watch list: Robert Caro & Robert Gottlieb in conversation at the New York Public Library

Investing a little extra into my slideware gives me much greater control over my storytelling in presentations. I’m grateful to this insanely talented, creative and generous gentleman on YouTube for the inspiration to lift my own game a notch (and many more to aspire to climb)

Geoff Marlow: Culture is inherently an embodied experience, brought to life through the clues, cues, signs and signals picked up from seven channels. He brings to life research from the 1990’s on organisational transformation, with the 7 channels of culture: Persuasive communication, participation, role modelling, expectancy, structural rearrangement, extrinsic rewards & coercion.

Ed Brenegar on Synthetic Awareness. Ed’s writing often resonates strongly with me. I’ve said to him in one of our first interactions that his writing gave me a vocabulary to think about myself in a way I’ve not been able to before.

On ChatGPT (this is going to be a standing item for a while?):

• • An experiment on using GPT3 for therapy. Interesting implications all around.
  • Frustrated with inaccuracies about LLM’s & ChatGPT from Gary Marcus, Nathan Labenz sets out to correct the record on LLM’s in a Twitter megathread. A fascinating read.

 

Scott Belsky’s Predictions for 2023

Is the quality of Talks at Google deteriorating? I’m not going to link to any here, but I’m finding that the signal to noise ratio has been steadily decreasing of late. Interviewers are awestruck with their guests, seem to do little to no research on the topics or the guests, and the video/audio/lighting are like from the 90’s.

On GPT:

• • NY school bans OpenAI’s ChatGPT over cheating worries.
  • Tyler Cowen says get on and learn how to use it. “In the short run, using GPT for ideas and inspiration will be more important than using it for copy. “
  • More explanations about how GPT – specifically the transformer actually works

 

Cassie Robinson on bringing awareness and competence of this quote, in Funding The Third Horizon:

“the future is not necessarily somewhere we go, it’s somewhere we live, but we’re not so aware of it.”

ChatGPT is a bullshit generator, say Aravind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor in this entertaining read. It is still useful in some cases, for example where truth doesn’t matter aka in writing fiction.

Sahil Bloom’s 23 actions to improve your 2023 has some gems

QOTD Ray Bradbury:

“Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.”

 

Om Malik’s “we are certified addicts to attention” is my QOTD. In his post titled “Why Internet Silos Win“, Om’s observation rings true for me:

If we didn’t care for attention, we wouldn’t be doing anything at all. We wouldn’t broadcast. Instead, we would socialize privately in communication with friends and peers.

Warp News has an optimistic take on AI unleashing creativity

Learning to paint takes years of practice. With AI, everyone who wants to paint just needs to learn how to use AIs that paint.  When we, via AI tools, also can create music, other types of audio, and video – and of course combine them – even more creativity will be unleashed. This creativity has so far been trapped, but can now come out. That unleashed creativity will create millions of jobs and tons of human progress. The number of designers, artists, and writers will increase dramatically.

Richard Merrick is on my “do not miss reading” list. Here’s one reason. Thanks to Ed Brenegar for drawing my attention to his work.

Pioneering a New Paradigm: A link to a link from a link is how I found this, and I’m glad I did!

In spite of popular slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as people interact and work together. When local efforts connect as networks, then commit to work as a community of practice, a new system emerges at a greater level of scale.

Stephanie Green reminds that people are meaning-makers, and to always put your audience front of mind when creating any visualisations of your data

 

Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown YT fame explains convolutions. I had watched part of this video a little while ago, & had put it out of my mind (I’m a nerd but not that much of a nerd, who am I kidding?). Yesterday I came across this paper that predicts micro-spatial economic growth using neural networks, using daytime satellite imagery (as opposed to the nighttime lights that have been used previously), and with better results. The technique they used involves convolutional neural networks, so a good time to go back down that rabbit hole again. I won’t claim to understand it well enough to explain it to someone (yet). Their Github repo is here

Jason Zweig’s 2017 post on “resolutions” was referred to again by Rob Walker (of the Art of Noticing fame). Making some of these my own through the course of this year. A favourite:

Eat more crow. It’s the most nutritious of all brain foods.

Albert Wenger’s “Philosophical Start to 2023“:

try to find middle paths between ignoring threats and despairing about them, between dismissing opportunities and glorifying them, and between asceticism and hedonism.

John Zimmer found a TikTok video of a year3 teacher that had plenty of lessons for public speakers everywhere on the power of a prop.  He also links to a previous post with some excellent examples of using props in corporate presentations.

I’m wrestling with the ideas & arguments that Brink Lindsey posits in his unmissable substack called “The Permanent Problem“. (The line is inspired by the economist John Maynard Keynes’ claim, “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”). In this essay “The Global Fertility Collapse“, he paints a rather grim outlook that has its roots in the successful improvement in living standards of a majority of the world’s population.

 

John Hagel, Increase the power of your narratives.  Distinguishing between stories & narratives has been a practical way to improve my communication, both with myself and with those around me. Re-reading this multiple times during the course of the year.

DeepMind, UCL Course on Reinforcement Learning. My colleague Andrew has been telling me about this for a while. After (finally) watching the DeepMind AlphaGo documentary yesterday, I finally started to watch the series.

Doug Savage’s cartoon on New Year Resolutions

VC Fred Wilson has a 2 part post on his observations on 2022 & his predictions for 2023. TL;DR: Buckle up for a tough few months, and keep eyes peeled out for opportunity.

Ben Kuhn: Why & how to write on the internet. Worth reading in full. There are several rabbit holes to go down if you care about any of it.

 

 

 

Terrence Eden explains:

We have to accept that failure is an option. More than that, it is an inevitability. We have to make peace with the fact that False Positives and False Negatives can only ever be reduced – not entirely eliminated.