Publicity is the hard work of getting media outlets and social media influencers to talk about you. Hustle for attention and mentions. Public relations is the much harder work of engaging with inte…
[written by claude.] Here’s the thing about ChatGPT that nobody wants to admit: It’s not intelligent. It’s something far more interesting. Back in the 1950s, a Russian linguist na…
Weeknotes 347 - Preventing the Moloch trap of collective intelligence through designing the right intentions. And more on last week’s human-AI-thing news and beyond.
Not smart is a passive act, remedied with learning, experience and thought. Stupid is active, the work of someone who should have or could have known better and decided to do something selfish, imp…
Everything flows from the strategic decisions we make early in the process: Choose your landlord. The rent is due every month. The place we set up (whether it’s a retail storefront, a social …
“If it breaks, we’ll know how to fix it.” Old cars had an oil light, and that was about it. Often, we build things hoping they’ll work. But complex systems are more resilien…
Typesetters did not like the laser printer. Wedding photographers still hate the iphone. And some musicians are outraged that AI is now making mediocre pop music. One group of esteemed authors is d…
There two different times that we need to prioritize work and we should be using completely different approaches to that prioritization, for each stage.
This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the ris…
Game theory has a lousy name. When most people think of games, they think of commercial stuff for kids, like Chutes and Ladders or possibly Monopoly. But a game is simply a system where humans, fac…
A sea slug sees far more colors than you do, and you probably see more than a profoundly color-blind person. Who’s right? We each carry our own version of reality, our own story about what ha…
That’s a complete reversal of how it used to be. Colleges used to be measured by how many books they had in the library. Access to courses was restricted. If knowledge was power, controlling …
At sea level, water boils at 100 degrees C. It doesn’t matter how much more heat you use, steam is what you get. It turns out that water this hot makes lousy coffee. Tea too. And an amp turne…
Verbosity is the new brevity. Google felt like a miracle. We could type just a word or two (“blog”) and it would magically guess what we wanted and take us there. This shortcut spread f…
This week, we announced the winners for the previous Pet Hacks contest and rang in our new contest: The One Hertz Challenge. So that’s got me in a contesty mood, and I thought I’d share a little bi…
Cynthia Kurtz has been working hard at distilling and releasing her body of work in Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) for the past few years. Her collection of four books on working with storie…
The outcome of our work can be easy or difficult to predict. It’s not hard to determine if a bridge is going to fall down or if code is going to compile. The scientific method and statistics …
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The Joy and Pain of Learning New Things as an Older Human
From an excerpt of his new book, It’s Only Drowning (Amazon), David Litt writes about the frustrating and humiliating experience of learning how to surf at the age of 35.
Yet I didn’t quit. I returned to the dog beach twice more the week of m