Agile abdicates decision-making
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.
“Another” is doing a lot of work in this headline
Quartz:
AI’s thirst for energy has another nuclear plant coming online
Dimensionality
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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