Good, Very Good, Great

Dan Davies:

good bankers take clients to expensive restaurants, very good bankers take clients to very expensive restaurants, but great bankers meet clients for a sandwich in the pub

October 20, 2024

Agile abdicates decision-making

Charles Lambdin:

At the end of the day, Agile desperately needs something to fill the product strategy gap it left in its wake, and not because it failed at product strategy as much as it assumed it didn’t need to have one in the first place.

October 5, 2024

Another” is doing a lot of work in this headline

Quartz:

AIs thirst for energy has another nuclear plant coming online

October 2, 2024

Dimensionality

Dan Davies:

To a large extent, the debate about techne and metis, technical quantifiable knowledge versus embedded and tacit skill, is really about the curse of dimensionality.

The curse of dimensionality is about how doing things in complex (high-dimensional) spaces has different properties to doing things in simpler (low-dimensional) spaces.

Dan Davies again:

Really good racing analysts can systematically beat the odds by knowing a lot of these little rules of thumb, being really familiar with the form and having enough experience to know which statistical regularities are most salient for any given race.

That is, in complex spaces, it doesn’t matter how much techne you have, you need metis, too.

When you have enough metis you know when to rely on your techne. Davies:

They are also good at spotting which races are easiest to analyse and most likely to offer attractive odds, and good at not betting on the other ones.

August 29, 2024

Listening is the real job

When doing interviews it’s easy to ask closed-ended questions because we often know the sort of answer we’re looking for. So we bake that answer in to the question.

But you’ll get richer information, and be able to create more compelling insights if you listen.

If you’re following a script you’ll be waiting for the other person to finish their answer so you can move on to the next question. But if you’re really listening, you’ll be able to ask follow up questions which are much harder than scripted questions. You’ve got to come up with them in real time, while also listening, while also keeping the interview on track.

And that’s the real challenge.

June 22, 2024

Knowledge is Power

France is Bacon

June 22, 2024

Predicting the Future

Our task is not to predict the future; our task is to design a future for a sustainable and acceptable world, and then to devote our efforts to bringing that future about. We are not observers of the future; we are actors who, whether we wish to or not, by our actions and our very existence, will determine the future’s shape.

Herbert Simon

May 29, 2024

On Screwdrivers

Or, actually, what POSIWID means.

Dan Davies:

The purpose of a system is exactly what is being worked out every day, as that system reproduces and maintains itself, decides what events it is going to react to and how it is going to balance present interests and future possibilities. And so the doing of things is, identically, the creation of purpose.

I like that: the doing of things is, identically, the creation of purpose.

May 13, 2024

Seven fireplaces

Rick Perlstein had dinner with Marc Andreesen:

All that talk about human potential and morality, and this man afire to reorder life as we know it jokingly welcomes chemical enslavement of those he grew up with, for the sin of not being as clever and ambitious as he.

There is something very, very wrong with us, that our society affords so much power to people like this.

April 25, 2024

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