Perspectives

Daily Reads:

I listened to the 2023 Nobel Lecture by Dr. Katalin Kariko & Dr. Drew Weismann. For the record, I felt dumb, and yet amazed at the creativity and imagination that gave us the CoVID vaccines.

I had the privilege of listening to and discovering some incredible scientists who live in town. Prof. Toby Walsh was one of them, & his paper on "The Meta Turning Test" is one I’m currently attempting to read and understand. He also recommended his latest book

Gaping Void: The Power of Changing Your Mind

QOTD:

a sign of epistemic humility is speed. Anyone can change their opinions slowly, over years, sneakily sliding from a wrong view to a right one so subtly that they can pretend they were on the right side the whole time.
– Gaping Void

Music:

Sanya Vrancic’s mandolin cover of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game is, wicked.

Daily Reads:

Jim Nielsen shares his workflow on taking and publishing notes.
I’m fascinated by how simple this looks – and know enough about my own habits to know that beneath that simplicity is a great deal of discipline (or habits) that will take me another lifetime to learn.

Om Malik on AI’s bumpy road ahead
Work involving physical presence and craftsmanship continues to be valuable. Work that’s expanded to fill time (isn’t that much of the corporate world?) that involves computers is being automated. AI as augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence is a different way of looking the mania sweeping the world.

Rob Walker features Dan Heath on this post titled Why (and how) to ask Craft Questions.
Heath featured recently in Dan Pink’s podcast. I went down the rabbit hole and this was a fun read, and one that gives me ideas on how to ask good questions of people I likely won’t have deep conversations with, but will still want to connect.

I listened to several conversations on Dan Heath’s What it’s Like podcast, but the one with Howard Hart, who spent 35 years as a stadium beer vendor was the first, and the most moving of them.

Ryan Holiday: A reminder to say NO. I don’t have people to say no to at the moment, but I do have a lot of things on my "todo" list that I should/could.

Winston Churchill’s Five Golden Rules for communication:

• Begin strongly.
• Focus on one theme.
• Use simple language.
• Draw a picture in the listener’s mind.
• End with an emotion.

A celebratory video of Dr. Katalin Kariko & Dr. Drew Weismann by the UPenn.
HT: Ewan McIntosh for both

Very Clever play on words!

Erika Gezmer has some solid advice for me, and for all the job searchers out there.

QOTD:

Almost everything spoken by the retired Howard Hart on the first episode of Dan Heath’s What It’s Like podcast. Just listen to it.

Music:

Florist: Spring in Hours

Daily Reads:

Listened to Rishad Tobaccowala interview side hustle expert Chris Guillebeau on his podcast What Next. It prompted me to follow Chris’ podcast – Side Hustle School and listen to several stories of side hustlers earning their first $1,000. The stories are <5 minutes long, and reflect on both the successes and failures of getting there. He’s done over 2500 episodes, which is stunning discipline.

In Regretful accelerationism, Ben Thompson comes around to the idea that despite the riches of the internet for his personal benefit, there is merit in humanity finding ways back to what is real.

His post also had the phrase Schelling point so had to look it up. It refers to a solution or focal point that people tend to use in the absence of communication because it seems special or relevant to them. Named after Thomas Schelling who introduced it in the context of Game Theory. It’s based on common knowledge, knowledge that everyone knows everyone knows.

Is the idea of unit economics back in business vocabulary? I’ve heard it mentioned in nearly every recent product podcast recently. Making a profit on each unit of product or service guarantees that the company will be profitable at whatever scale it reaches. For the last 20 or so years in the cheap finance world, that seemed like a quaint idea, but is now coming right back into fashion.

Efoso Ojomo is a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institue for Disruptive Innovation. He argues in this post that corruption is ‘hired’ to make progress. When society offers few legitimate options to make progress, corruption becomes attractive.

Matt Webb shares a framework for exploring Generative AI as a tech savvy org.

QOTD:

I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content.
– Ben Thompson ^QOTD

Music:

Zach Bryan: Something in the Orange

Daily Reads:

Another light reading day.

Sanjeev Bhaskar reads Spike Milligan‘s letter home during World War II. Hilarious of course.

Lenny Rachitsky’s compilation of guests speaking about failures was useful.

Hal Elrod on the James Altucher Show referred to one of my own heroes, Jim Rohn. A fascinating episode, and James doesn’t hesitate to ask the uncomfortable questions.

Music:

The White Horse Guitar Club – A Rainy Night In Soho

Not a lot of reading opportunity today, both with preoccupations and the busy-ness of the season of apparent jolly.

Music:

Beth Hart: I’d rather go blind

Daily Reads:

Ash Maurya makes it simple: Just Start

Leo Babauta suggests an alternate way of thinking and dealing with a full inbox: a spiritual practice

Kaiser Fung (I’ve not linked to him in a while!) shares a powerful visualisation on expectations on investment returns between investors and professionals

Like a bridge, your presentation needs structure, recommends John Zimmer

QOTD:

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.
– Heinrich Heine, poet, journalist, and essayist

Music:

Carson McKee challenged himself to write and record a song in one afternoon. Only So Much

Daily Reads:

Ness Labs: how to remember what you read

John Durrant, Ordinary Mastery: Serving the unseen forces of creation, talks about listening, a topic I think is really important for my own explorations.

Bookmarked this AI Incidents database, will be as important as Molly White’s version on Web3

Bruce Schneier on AI & Trust

Semantic Memory (fact based memory) vs Episodic Memory (specific events). No episodic memory, and you can’t imagine the future! Fascinating reading on the Long Now – The moment I lost my sense of time

Tom Whitwell: 52 things I learned in 2023

Terence Eden on learning from a month of writing

Daddy-daughter podcast! This is such a cool thing that Cory Doctorow and his daughter Poesy have done for 11 years.

QOTD:

You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Music:

The Dead South – Broken Cowboy

Daily Reads:

Richard Merrick wonders where leaders came from before there were leadership course.

Sahil Bloom channels an old Buddhist story to ask: What burdens are you still carrying? in his newsletter.

It’s later than you think. Just read it.

QOTD:

If in doubt, read, write and talk until you find what you are here to lead.
– Richard Merrick

Music:

The Waterboys: A song for the life

Daily Reads:

Ben Werdmuller’s description of himself as being a Humanist Technologist" was the only thing I had time to read today.

QOTD:

A humanist technologist, then, is someone who uses multidisciplinary skills to help organizations use or understand technology in order to improve personal and social conditions.
– Ben Werdmuller

Music:

I’ grateful for Willie Nelson’s reminder to Just Breathe

Daily Reads:

Watching a craftsman at work is fascinating. Why violins have f-holes has a couple of videos that were captivating.

Charlie Munger has legendary status in many circles so there’s quite a few articles about him in my feed. Bob Ewing joins the dots with Charlie Munger, Machiavelli, Epictetus, and ChatGPT all in one place. Gaping Void illustrates some of Munger’s lessons in How we communicate is how we succeed.

Kent Beck writes a reference letter about himself but three years out into the future. Interesting approach to get clarity around what he wants to accomplish, and establish priorities.

I’m catching up (barely) with Cory Doctorow’s blog posts. This one, titled "If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing" tackles the one sided "terms and conditions" customers sign up to when the companies that sell you digital products can fuck you over at will by downgrading or changing features or the availability of features that you have already paid for.

HT Andrew Curry: Monica Ali Talking about AI’s and writing

Baldur Bjarnason, in Don’t be a correctness bully, makes the case that positive reinforcement alone can help someone change their mind. The idea applies in so many contexts for me right now.

Charlie Stross: Made of lies (and more lies) _LLMs don’t answer your questions accurately—rather, they deliver a lump of text in the shape of an answer

Benedict Cumberbatch reading a complaint of a notoriously grumpy playwright is a perfect end to my media consumption for the day.

QOTD:

Interpretations is the highest branch of the singer’s art.
– Harry Plunket Greene.

Music:

Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill sing "Fairytale of New York"at Shane MacGowan’s funeral