What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Books, & links to all kinds of stuff I found interesting
Research suggests that David Graeber’s Theory of Bullshit Jobs – that many workers experience their jobs as being comprised of meaningless tasks in which they have to appear productive – doesn’t entirely hold true.
Some reporting on this:
Graeber was wrong about the various trends he believed in — the percentage of bullshit jobs and their increase — but he was right about the capacity of bad managers to turn a perfectly good job into bullshit.
John Naughton’s contrasts the implications of Lean/JIT in two industries, cars & computers:
… both had found themselves caught in a perfect storm that one had weathered and the other hadn’t. This storm bought three forces simultaneously to bear on an unprepared world: the fragility of a global supply chain on which both industries critically depended, the exigencies of US-China geopolitics and a pandemic that, more or less overnight, transformed the way large parts of the industrialised world worked.
Philip Napoli’s opinion column in WIRED on the dismal readership & failure of DJT’s blog:
The failure of Donald Trump’s blog is, then, yet another indication of the massive power that the platform giants hold over the content that we consume. But it’s a reminder that we bear responsibility for voluntarily ceding this power to them, and enthusiastically embracing the push model of the web over the pull.
A few days ago, Doc Searls wrote a multi-part post on Apple’s advertisting & adtech surveillance. John Gruber challenges his argument:
For all the criticism Apple has faced from the ad tech industry over this feature, it’s fun to see criticism that Apple isn’t going far enough. But I don’t think Searls’s critique here is fair. Permission to allow tracking is not on by default — what is on by default is permission for the app to ask. Searls makes that clear, I know, but it feels like he’s arguing as though apps can track you by default, and they can’t.
The fact that they both blog in public, regularly, makes it possible to ‘listen’ in on these conversations & learn a thing or ten.
Matt Locke makes the argument for the need for a better metaphor for data, although he says he doesn’t have an answer just yet:
The discussions around data policy still feel like they are framing data as oil – as a vast, passive resource that either needs to be exploited or protected. But this data isn’t dead fish from millions of years ago – it’s the thoughts, emotions and behaviours of over a third of the world’s population, the largest record of human thought and activity ever collected. It’s not oil, it’s history. It’s people. It’s us.
I’ve been reading a lot of John Hagel’s work recently, appreciating both his writing style and more importantly, the ideas that he generously shares with the world. John’s new book, “The Journey Beyond Fear“, was published last week & is on my reading list.
In this blog post, John again outlines the three components of the “passion of the explorer” (he’s written and spoken extensively about this subject), & urges everyone to discover their own:
The passion of the explorer is something that we all have within us, waiting to be discovered and nurtured. If we want to make the journey beyond fear, we need to make the effort to find that passion and pursue it, not just on nights and weekends, but in our day jobs. It will help us to turn a world of mounting performance pressure into a world of exponentially expanding opportunity
“Research that makes people laugh, then think” is what the IgNobel Prizes celebrate, since 1991
In 2020, the IgNobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Christopher Watkins & 8 others, for trying to quantify the relationship between different countries’ national income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth kissing.
They explain what they did, & why they did it in this short podcast.
Through a comic, Connie Jin illustrates the numbness she felt dealing with large numbers – and how she learnt to deal with it.
via NPR
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.