Dan Hon: s17e09: What does it take to trust?; The Young Lady’s Illustrated Tour Guide (more)

Tim Harford: Who’s responsible for our accountability problem? I was recently scheduled to present my Cautionary Tales podcast live on stage as a curtainraiser for a podcast conference (more)

Bruce Sterling: Futures of Cybernetics (bad auto-transcript of video). Cybernetics might have a Revival (more)

Dan Hon: s17e04: You don’t want an intelligent assistant; Protocols, Not Platforms (more)

Adrian Hon: A Thousand Primers, Not Just One. Andy Matuschak’s essay, Exorcising us of the Primer, highlights the limitations of Neal Stephenson’s influential The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. (2024-07-10-Matuschak ExorcisingUsOfThePrimer) (more)

Kevin Munger: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer. There has been growing interest in cybernetic socialism over the past decade, starting with Eden Medina’s history Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Evgeny Morozov’s article on Cybersyn in the New Yorker, and a chapter on the enterprise in Leigh Phillips’ and Michal Rozworski’s book The People’s Republic of Walmart. (more)

Frank Miroslav Review: The People’s Republic of Walmart. Let me begin by saying that I’m glad this book exists. Phillips and Rozworski are upfront about their book not containing any radical new insights into questions of economic planning, but instead they compile arguments made by others in a highly readable format, something that those on the left who argue for economic planning have needed for some time. (more)

Bushra Farooqui: The Ghost of "The Old Curiosity Shop" in "The Diamond Age". While re-reading Stephenson, it’s helpful to consider Diamond Age from the lens of its traditional predecessor, the allusion that lingers between the pages, unspoken, but felt—Charles Dickens’ dark 1840 tale, The Old Curiosity Shop. (more)

Ash Maurya: The Right Way vs. The Battle-Tested Way for Driving Breakthrough Innovation. I often get initial pushback from other coaches when I first present my step-by-step continuous innovation roadmap: The biggest objection typically centers around ordering business modeling before customer/problem discovery. (more)

Belief that a particular Model of Reality represents Absolute Truth. (more)

A collection, typically of WebLog entries. Kinda like a Top Ic. Bigger buckets than KeyWord-s. (more)

David Pereira: Are You Doing Product Management or Bullshit Management? Product professionals become powerless because they are not the ones calling the shots. Top management believes in knowing best what to do and expecting product people to follow their orders. In reality, you start doing bullshit management instead of product management. At some point it becomes a Bullshit Job. (more)

part of Customer Development process, part of Product Discovery (more)

Ash Maurya: Problem/Solution Fit (not Product/Market Fit) is the first significant milestone of a startup. Getting to product/market fit (the inflection point in the hockey stick curve) takes roughly two years, and 80% of products never find it. (more)

Ash Maurya: Learn qualitatively, verify quantitatively. While methodologies like Lean Startup draw a comparison between science and entrepreneurship, the goals of scientists and entrepreneurs are quite different. (more)

Nick Denton qualifying Steven Den Beste's diatribe on Dealing With Terrorism. Steven says What they want is to stay with their traditional Culture and for it to be successful, and that isn't possible. We can make them rich through aid, but we can't make them successful because their failure is not caused by us, but by the deep flaws in their culture. Their culture cannot succeed. It is too deeply and fundamentally crippled... I am forthrightly stating that it will be necessary to destabilize the entire Middle East, which puts me exactly counter to European Foreign Policy. (more)

Ben Hunt: Joe Biden and the Common Knowledge Game. ....why coronations and executions are held in public – not so a crowd can see the new king or the hanged man, but so a crowd can see a crowd seeing the new king or the hanged man. Common knowledge is why sitcoms have laugh tracks, why American Idol has a live studio audience, and why professional sports teams pipe in crowd noise. (more)

Andy Matuschak: Are Tools for thought: science, design, art, craftsmanship? J.C.R. Licklider...If you want to help make good on this destiny—to invent human-computer interfaces which radically expand human cognition and creativity—then what do you actually need to do? How does progress happen? (more)

Ben Hunt: The Long Now, Pt. 2 - Make, Protect, Teach. Every three or four generations, humanity consumes itself with the fang and claw of fascism and collectivism. Every three or four generations, we eat our own. This is that time. This is the Long Now. 2019-07-31-HuntTheLongNowPt1Ticktock Today’s note is about my political response to the Long Now... I’m trying to provide an alternative to the abstracted world of narrative and cartoon that rules our mindfulness from the top down, in favor of a concreted world of actual human beings making things and protecting each other and teaching each other. (more)

Venkatesh Rao on Fifth-Generation Management, which doesn’t actually exist yet. The idea of generations in management, in the form I’m going to lay it out, is causally related to the idea of generations of warfare, and in particular the idea that contemporary styles of warfare strongly shape future styles of management (more)