Tag: rss_source

“It was impressed upon me regularly that ‘scapegoating’ – the practice of laying blame for a society’s woes upon an identifiable minority – was one of the great recurrent evils of mankind’s history, and a moral failing that pretty much meant you were responsible for Holocaust-level evil. Is this no longer a term of shame and disgrace in our society? The GOP, and others, have never fully stopped scapegoating of course, but it was so clearly shameful one had to be coy about it”

https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/i-know-what-happened

“I would actually be quite interested if any of the current objections to flexible work ever get repurposed for the AI revolution. “If all these tasks are done by AI, how will our junior staff serve their apprenticeship?” “This is a relationship business and you can’t build trusted relationships with AI content”. Will we ever get CEOs sending all-staff emails saying “It has been a valuable experiment and I appreciate that some colleagues feel that AI has improved their productivity, but we work best when we work as a team, and that means a team of human beings. So, allowing six months notice for those colleagues who need to adapt their arrangements, we will be a no-AI company once more starting from Labor Day”. I have an intuition that they won’t”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/a-more-subtle-cost-disease

“Just as smell, our most nebulous, non-literal sense, has the ability to take an indefinable scent and trigger precise memories, there is something specific about certain images that are so imprecise that they pull from our entire consciousness to organize meaning”

https://onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/our-camera-rolls-our-selves

“For the first time in many years, I was participating in a system where I was acutely aware that there were adults in the room. Adults who do not have recourse to blaming Deloitte when things go wrong, for whom the phrase “post-mortem” means something decidedly more serious than yet another flaccid meeting on why the tenth project in a row has failed”

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/why-i-will-always-be-angry-about-software-engineering/

“It’s absolutely true that the tone and content of the videos people consume on TikTok or Instagram affect their understanding of the world around them–but so too do their non-phone experiences, their relationships, their jobs, their mental states, their social worlds, their spending habits, etc. Why do doomers and reactionaries so thoroughly dominate the feeds of young men? Is it something about the specific form of the TikTok feed? Is it billionaire astroturfing? Is it that videos like this are what that audience wants, for reasons largely external to TikTok?”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-electorate

“What makes a belief enticing, in turn, seems to be some mixture of comprehensiveness (does it provide a lot of answers), intuitiveness (does it feel correct based on what you already know), flattery (does it make you feel superior for knowing), and relevance (does it allow you to do something in the real world). Beliefs and belief systems that check these boxes are very attractive when we’re young, because they can provide a shortcut to many of the things we crave in early adulthood — certainty, confidence, authority, independence”

https://jjmccullough.substack.com/p/on-political-naivete

“I’m sorry to constantly repeat this point, but politics is a game of tug-of-war, and the center is nothing but where the middle of the rope ends up. The extremes pull the middle. So if you’re someone with milquetoast liberal squish politics, you should hate Democratic triangulation and timidity as much as I do. Because Republicans relentlessly pulling the rope to the right, while Democrats refuse to pull the rope to the left, has gotten us to a place where conservative policy wins even as conservative candidates lose”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/on-the-occasion-of-this-election

“Theoretically, the mysterious “Algorithm” (which is nigh-on worshipped, despite the fact that it’s just a glorified ratings system that attempts to predict the future by looking at the past) can tell us what will be a hit and what won’t.

Hence the industry now spends hundred of millions of dollars on action movies that were apparently written in crayon, starring people called Chris, directed by project managers”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/dont-give-them-what-they-want

“The idea of a billionaire sugar daddy buying and “stewarding” your institution as a charitable legacy project sounds kind of nice compared with alternative ownership structures (private equity, Macanese gambling syndicate, the GRU). But it’s fatally condescending to those newspapers and magazines. A good rule of thumb is: If the billionaire that owns you is not trying to influence you to hurt his political enemies, it’s because you don’t matter very much”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-does-jeff-bezos-non-endorsement

“The political “lessons” are more or less insurmountable – in this unfortunate world, we have to live with the fact that big projects are going to be led by people who come across well at interview, and that this is very much less than perfectly correlated with ability to do the job.

But the really crucial lesson would be “if something is going wrong, review whether it is viable and don’t hesitate to reverse course; abandoning a failed idea early is a good thing which should be to your credit”. Instead, the UK policy structure seemed to learn “don’t attempt anything big, because if it fails you will be blamed”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/shadow-of-the-groundnut