Month: June 2024

“One of the key edicts of management cybernetics is that “it is not necessary to look inside the black box in order to understand its behaviour”. But this is only true a) if you’ve made the right decisions about how to divide things up into black boxes and b) if you’re prepared to accept that the behaviour of the black box might often be really quite illogical or pathological. Most of the time, corporate decision-making systems are what Beer called “muddy boxes” – the extent to which you can understand the internal workings depends on how much effort you are prepared to put in. And in my view, it’s often important to spend at least some time wiping the glass on the muddy box, to be sure that you have an accurate picture of the true inputs and outputs”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/being-legible-to-oneself

“A notebook crackles with potential energy. Between the covers, myriad scribbles hold ideas, observations, quotes, anxieties… This is pure thought, suspended in time. Only when an idea is extracted from the book and exposed to daylight does it start to decay. Nothing lives up to the original idea, or at least nothing lives up to the feeling you had writing down that original idea. Structures are imposed on stories, third-party requirements; “Can it be more like…” The original note is the spark of life. As soon as it leaves the womb, it starts to die.

Even the act of writing itself is a process of decay; the translation from thought to word dilutes and distracts. And when you make up stories for a living, they only ever really get worse. Sure, there are good bits, upticks on the graph, but generally the feeling of a new idea is as good as it gets. Everything after that is a compromise”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/bits-of-the-minds-string

“Look, I could talk your ear off about how the tech aspect of this alone improves the odds for these new publications. (Content management is business strategy! Open distribution platforms are fundamentally politically radical!) But the more important thing is that regular people, people who aren’t nerds who’ve spent two straight decades worrying about how insufferable writers in Brooklyn can make money publishing snarky but smart shit on the web, are finding value in this work”

https://anildash.com/2024/06/14/the-new-alt-media/

“Economic termites describes where these same forces get into the mostly unseen business foundations of our society and profiteer.

These termites are in the infrastructure or guts of business, like recruiting services, construction equipment or software, the industrial gasses that go into chemicals and electronics, and so forth. It’s the stuff you don’t see that makes our world turn, there’s fortunes to be made, and bottlenecks to foster.

They also explain a dynamic we all face, a profound wariness in our society, a sense that stuff just costs more and is more difficult, for no discernible reason. Added up, these end up sapping our faith in the American system, because they make what seem like simple problems become not just unsolvable, but not even capable of being diagnosed”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-termites-are-everywhere

“But then, who’s counting? New York mega-projects always take way too long and cost way too much. At least, now that it’s open, commuters from Long Island must be really happy with their shorter commutes? Right?

Unfortunately not.

Here’s the thing: the MTA, the parent agency of the LIRR, built this very expensive new terminal. But they didn’t buy new trains, which were needed to adequately service the terminal.”

https://www.joshbarro.com/p/congestion-pricing-a-good-idea-died

“The thing is… this is kind of how the ideas industry functions in general, these days. Many, many arguments that find their way into the public consciousness have this general two-faced nature, a more incendiary side to generate publicity and a more equivocal side to evade criticism. I don’t exonerate Kendi for the deficiencies of his thinking, at all, but I do think that advancing a more provocative version of academic ideas as a way to garner attention and then retreating to a more limited and qualified version of those ideas when challenged is just how it works. (I will leave it to you to determine if things have always been this way or if this is a new development.) And yeah, I mean… alas. This stuff isn’t good. But it’s how things work”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-think-ibram-kendi-is-just-an-academic

“It seems too cheap and on-the-nose to point out that in their unwavering confidence and abstract relationship to the truth, large language models like GPT-4o project a kind of intelligence that most closely resembles the intelligence projected by the founders and investors and ambitious little freaks behind this generation of generative A.I. applications. But, you know, if Leopold Aschenbrenner impresses you I can see why “the talking computer that confidently bullshits in order to tell you what you want to hear” would also impress you”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/who-is-leopold-aschenbrenner

“In the social-media era, websites and article formats became more generic in order to fit in the templates of feeds and search results. I think in the near future we’ll see more differentiated websites and presentations, not in a scroll-y HTML5 way but the sense of new interactions and bespoke interfaces. My experience of the NYT should be very different than the Washington Post, and not just in the sense of two different iPhone apps. Scarcity is value that someone — consumers and / or advertisers — will pay for”

https://onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/voice-taste-trust-scarcity

“So a little public money on the front end could save a lot of money and eliminate a lot of corporate extraction on the back end. Tax prep is one of those areas in which the long, neoliberal push away from public goods really hurt society, on both fairness and cost; what should be a niche industry catering to people with truly complicated tax situations instead became a functional extension of the government, with a complicated and easily abused qualifying process leading to heaps of waste”

https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-twilight-of-big-tax