What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Kaiser Fung opines, in the context of all the analysis re CoVID-19 vaccines :
The key lesson is if you don’t have experimental data, the data analysis gets a lot more complex (more stimulating, but also fraught with risk). The analyst must release full details of the analysis; otherwise, it’s impossible to evaluate its merit.
In the hands of law enforcement, this data could be evidence. But at every other moment, the location data is reviewed by hedge funds, financial institutions and marketers, in an attempt to learn more about where we shop and how we live.
This new data set offers proof that not only is there more interest in location data than before, but it is also easier to deanonymize. It gets easier by the day. As the data from Jan. 6 eerily demonstrates, it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.
Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson show , in this NYTimes Opinion piece, how insidiously apps leak information, whether users know it or not
A perspective worth considering: what should middle management actually be doing?
Think of the role of the direct manager in performance management. Ultimately, it’s not about the system. It’s not about the form. It’s about whether your direct manager helps you understand the value of your work and how it fits into a broader strategy. It’s about coaching. It’s about real-time feedback delivered by a human. I think we’ve undervalued those elements, tried to systematize them away with data, with systems, with tools. Meanwhile, workers are asking for better leaders, better apprenticeships, better coaching. When we try to disintermediate the role of a good midlevel leader, I think we do this at our peril.
Ms. Grossman, writing about Gamestop’s fall, rise & fall & fall & …:
In the long term, fundamentals *should* matter. because the value of having the market in the first place isn’t to make people rich but to help channel investment to viable businesses. If it doesn’t fulfill that function it’s time for real reform.
HT FS Blog, 10 Lessons of an MIT Education:
Lesson Five: You don’t have to be a genius to do creative work.
The idea of genius elaborated during the Romantic Age (late 18th and 19th centuries) has done harm to education. It is demoralizing to give a young person role models of Beethoven, Einstein, and Feynman, presented as saintly figures who moved from insight to insight without a misstep. Scientific biographies often fail to give a realistic description of personality, and thereby create a false idea of scientific work.
Prof Max Bazerman’s book “Better, Not Perfect“:
Bazerman’s guiding light is the philosophy of utilitarianism, which teaches the goal of creating the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But he tempers that with the principle of “maximum sustainable goodness,” a term he coined based on the environmental concept of “maximal sustainable yield”—that is, the amount of goodness that a person can achieve over time without depleting their ability to do good in the future.
Read it here
You can hide unclear thinking in a slide deck; you can’t hide unclear thinking in a narrative memo
Just read the entire thing.
That feeling of deep satisfaction at the end of a working day is rare for many workers across the world. We are alienated, and have been for centuries. We have to work in order to survive, but while we are told to love what we do and that our workplaces are our families, meaningful work that also pays the bills is harder and harder to come by.
A fascinating article in Vice.
Dr. Nick Morgan borrows a couple ideas from neuroscience:
We tend to identify ourselves with our feelings, so that controlling or eliminating them seems like a strange, perhaps Machiavellian, thing to do.