Kaiser Fung joins Andrew Gelman to challenge that intuition:
That statement is true if there is nothing else in the system but X and Y. In any real-world system, there are more than two relevant factors.
Author: neil
[Music] Tuba Skinny: Won’t You Be Kind To Me
[Link] The Everybody Knows Fallacy
Miriam Dickler urges us to
…step out of our bubbles to ask someone if we’re being clear. And to trust them when they tell us we aren’t.
[Link] The Fierce Nerd
Paul Graham’s essays are riveting. In this one, he’s got some good news & bad news for fierce, competitive nerds.
Do read it.
[Link] The Defining Scarcity of Our Times
In a series of blog posts, Albert Wenger posits that there’s plenty of capital, but
the defining scarcity of our time is attention, not capital.
[Link] How to Ask Useful Questions
Josh Kaufmann shares some practical ideas, whether you’re asking for information, advice, help, clarification or agreement.
If you want useful answers, learn to ask better questions. In most cases, you’ll need to tailor the form of the question to the type of information you’re seeking.
[Music] Gareth Pearson Mr Spontaneous
[Link] Doc Searls on Apple vs Adtech
Doc Searls isn’t convinced that Apple is fully serious about privacy:
If Apple was fully serious, your iPhone would be set to not allow tracking in the first place. All those trackers would come pre-vaporized. And Apple never would have given every iPhone an IDFA—ID For Advertisers—in the first place…
Defaulting the master Tracking setting to ON means Felix has to tap “Ask App Not To Track” for every single one of those hangers-on. Meaning that one click won’t vaporize all those apps at once. Just one at a time. This too is misleading as well as unserious.
[QOTD] Ruth Bader Ginsburg
“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
[Link] Dave Winer on How Tech Comes into Existence
It’s not uncommon that we complain about the bugs in the technology we use. Dave Winer, who’s been developing software for over 4 decades, sympathizes:
many people don’t understand why all the bugs don’t disappear at once. Or why I made the software do something they don’t like. Because they don’t see a process. How can you blame them, even if they were here with me, all they would see is someone typing at a keyboard, going for walks, hanging out. How that turns into functionality, they don’t even know that it does turn into functionality.
The Aeon article linked to in his post is worth a read too