Chris Butler is a chaotic good product manager, writer, and speaker. He has over 20 years of product management leadership at Microsoft, Waze, KAYAK, Facebook Reality Labs, and Cognizant. He is now the Lead Product Manager at Google's Core Machine Learning team where he PM's the PM experience and strategy. Co-founder of the Uncertainty Project. https://www.theuncertaintyproject.org/contributor/chris-butler (more)
Venkatesh Rao: Lands of Lorecraft. In the last couple of years, I’ve become aware of some genuinely fresh management thinking from an emerging cohort of thinkers on the margins of the landscape of traditional institutions. (more)
Aaron Swartz describes Judea Pearl's attempts to use AI techniques to evaluate causality, not just correlation, with Social Science Statistics. One of the reasons I find these areas to be fertile grounds to try out new ideas is that, unlike AI, tangible rewards can be reaped from solving relative small problems. Problems involving barely 4 to 5 variables, which we in AI regard as toy-problems, carry tremendous payoffs in public health and social science.
Robin Sloan: At home in high-dimensional space. I’ve previously expressed enthusiasm about Val Town. Now, I’ve actually used it for something, and I can report that my enthusiasm has only grown. Val Town offers a lightweight web editor for TypeScript functions that can run in a variety of ways. (more)
Robin Sloan: Are AI language models in hell? The concluding item in this mini manifesto from Taylor Troesh, about “finishing projects together”, is lovely and enticing. It strikes me that the “never finished” nature of modern software is something Zygmunt Bauman might have observed and discussed, if he’d lived long enough to write a sequel to Liquid Modernity in, say, 2020. The feeling of maintaining a “live” “service” forever (we definitely need those scare quotes)rather than completing a coherent product … oof. (more)
Robin Sloan: Leverage. I’m just back from a couple of weeks in Japan. I’ve traveled there many times, and the trips, for all their diversity, always orbit a central feature: THE ONSEN. Hot springs. Public bathing. (more)
Uncertainty Project: Fielding Outcomes. When we make decisions in the face of uncertainty, we are making a “bet” on how the future will turn out. When the future arrives, we have a chance to take stock, to assess whether this outcome can teach us anything about how we make our decisions. (Thinking in Bets) (more)
Robin Sloan: The conservation of angular momentum. At this point in a book’s publication, the pieces come together and the pace accelerates — like a figure skater pulling their arms close to spin faster. (more)
Uncertainty Project: Improving strategic decision making in 2024. 3 Challenges for improving strategic decision making in 2024... (more)
Robin Sloan: A summer wind. Last week, I joined hosts V. V. Ganshanathan and Whitney Terrell on their Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast to talk about “social media after Twitter”. (2023-08-02 RobinSloanOnSocialMediaAfterTwitter) (more)
Robin Sloan: You could extinguish a star. As a reader, I’m skeptical of attempts to pin sensory experience to the page. The “better” the descriptive language, it seems to me, the more it actually obscures the experience (more)
Uncertainty Project: Exploring Causality and Complexity in Strategy. The idea of causality matters greatly, though, since as we apply our agency (as individuals, as organizations, and businesses) to take action, we base our choices on where we believe we can cause good things to happen. (more)
Robin Sloan: The Conspiracy Museum. REMARKS AS PREPARED BY WILLIAM K. SING, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM OF AMERICAN CONSPIRACY, FOR DELIVERY ON TUESDAY APRIL 16, 2041 (more)
Robin Sloan on Social Media After Twitter. Well, I think it’s a healthy thing. I think all these platforms have held on for a little too long. (more)
Robin Sloan: What would a wizard read? This new novel is my answer to that question (more)
Robin Sloan: Hit the lights. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s been a multimodal week. I’ve traveled aboard multiple ferries, several trains — including the new SMART line in Sonoma County, terrific — and, notably, my first robo-car, one of the whirring Waymos (more)
Robin Sloan: Lit up like a sparkler. There’s a way in which the modern media environment — maybe all media envroments ever — pushes against “I don’t know”. (more)
Robin Sloan: Muscular imagination. A future you might actually want to live in (more)
Robin Sloan: Is it drugs? I’m producing a limited-edition zine that I will mail to folks who have preordered Moonbound. (more)
This is the publicly-readable WikiLog Digital Garden (20k pages, starting from 2002) of Bill Seitz (a Product Manager and CTO). (You can get your own pair of garden/note-taking spaces from FluxGarden.)
My Calling: Reality Hacking to accelerate Evolution by increasing Freedom, Agency, and Leverage of Free Agents and smaller groups (SmallWorld) via D And D of Thinking Tools (software and Games To Play).
See Intro Page for space-related goals, status, etc.; or Wiki Node for more terse summary info.
Beware the War On The Net!
Current:
- head of product for an early-stage boot-strapped company
- founder FluxGarden for Digital Garden hosting
- wrote Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook Getting Things Done And Other Systems ASIN:B00HHJA5JS
My Coding for fun.
Past:
- Director Product Managment, NCSA Sports
- CTO/Product Manager at a series of startups: MedScape, then Axiom Legal, then Living Independently, then DailyLit, then AEP...
- founded Family Financial Future, personal-financial-planning nagware for parents
- consulting
- founded Teamflux.com, a hosting service for wiki-based collaboration spaces.
- founded Wikilogs.com, a hosting service for WikiLog-s (wiki-based weblogs).
Agile Product Development, Product Management from MVP to Product-Market Fit, Adding Product To Your Startup Team, Agility, Context, and Team Agency, (2022-10-12) Accidental Learnings of a Journeyman Product Manager
Big Levers, Theory of Change, Change the World, (2020-06-27) Ways To Nudge Future; Network Enlightenment, Optimistic Near Future Vision; Huge Invention; Alternatives To A College Degree; Credit Crisis 2008; Economic Transition; Network Economy; Making A Living; Varieties Of Info Technology Jobs; Generative Schooling; Product Oriented Unschooling; Reality Hacker; A 20th Century Economic Theory
FluxGarden; Network Enlightenment Ecosystem; ThinkingTools Interaction as Medium; Hypermedia Pattern Language; Everyone Needs Their Own ThinkingSpace; Digital Garden; Virtual ThinkingSpace; Thinking Tools Companies; Webs Of Thinkers And Thoughts; My CollaborationWare History; Wiki Proliferation; Portal Collaboration Roadmap; Wiki For GroupWare, Overlapping Scopes Of Collaboration, Email Discussion Beside Wiki, Wiki For CollaborationWare, Collaboration Roadmap; Sister Sites; Wiki Hack
Personal Cloud; 2018-11-29-NextOpenInfrastructure, 2018-11-15-BooksVsTweets; Stream/Flow Vs Garden/Stock
Social Warrens; Culture War; 2017-02-15-MindmapCultureWarSocialMediaEconomy; Cultural Pluralism
Fractally Generative Pattern Language, Small Tribe, SimplestThing, Becoming A Reality Hacker, Less-Bullshit Living, The Craft; Games To Play; Evolution, Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook, Getting Things Done, And Other Systems
Digital Therapeutics, (2021-05-26) Pondering a Mental Health space, CoachBot; Inside-Out Markov Chain