Category: Uncategorized
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Complexity bias in AI application
For 17 years, scientists at Australia’s Parkes Radio Telescope were chasing mysterious radio blips, nicknamed perytons, that stubbornly defied explanation. First detected in 1998, these fleeting signals closely resembled fast radio bursts (FRBs), which some excitedly speculated were astrophysical in origin. But they didn’t behave like anything out in space. They appeared only during the…
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On the value of ignorance
I loved listening to Rory Stewart’s podcast series on the long history of ignorance. It’s a wonderfully thought-provoking and counter-intuitive premise for an intellectual exploration and Stewart delivers it well. In the series he makes the argument for how we should embrace ignorance as a fundamental aspect of human existence, and why exploring what we don’t…
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On DeepSeek and hiring experience
There was an interesting detail in Ian Leslie’s latest newsletter about DeepSeek: ‘DeepSeek explicitly hires inexperienced programmers. They’ve said their ideal employee has 3-5 years of experience and that if you have 8 or more they won’t even consider you. In industries that exist at a frontier of rapid innovation, experience is a burden, knowledge…
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Do social media algorithms flatten culture?
It’s a good question. Years ago I wrote about different types of content curation, positing that there were three main types – algorithmic (we see stuff because of algorithms), professional (people who are paid to curate such as editors and commissioners) and social (we see stuff because friends/people we follow think it’s worth sharing). I added…
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The Six Types of Wealth
I have a sticky note on the wall in my office which lists the six types of wealth: Money, Time, Relationships, Health, Knowledge, and Experiences. I put it there as a constant reminder that there are different types of wellbeing and wealth, not just financial. It’s a deceptively simple but powerful way to think about…
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When collaboration gets in the way
We’re used to thinking of collaboration as a universally good thing. Leaders rightly strive to promote a culture of cooperation, contribution and knowledge sharing in the organisation (full disclosure: I’ve consulted and run workshops on this very thing). Employees get assessed on how collaborative they are. Endless tools are created to support it. And yet…
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If the Chinese invented everything, why didn’t they rule the world instead of Europe?
This is a fascinating short video featuring the science historian James Burke in which he explains a very convincing theory for why so many major inventions originated in China (often hundreds or even thousands of years before they became popularised in the West) and yet were never used in the way that Europeans used them.…
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Creativity from Constraints
Adam Morgan (of EatBigFish) has literally written the book on how constraints can catalyse creative or different thinking. He used a great example of this in his Firestarters episode which I recorded some months back. For the 2006 Le Mans race Audi were developing a brand new race car to take their performance at the…
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Writing changes how we think about the world
I came across this lecture by Larry McEnerney from the University of Chicago Writing Program over on LinkedIn and I got so much from it. Larry makes some wonderful points about writing better. He talks about how we’re taught to follow the rules of writing rather than thinking about how our writing can be valuable…
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QWERTY, and lessons on user-centric design
Why are keyboards set out in the way that they are? Why aren’t the letters in alphabetical order? It turns out that the answer to these questions reveals a brilliant piece of user-centric thinking. After some early attempts at creating writing machines which were less than user friendly, inventors Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel…