On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.” —@TerryandRob
“To think critically is always to be hostile — thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.” —Hannah Arendt
“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.” —Marie Curie
“The knowledge you take for granted could be life-changing for someone else. You owe it to the world to hit ‘publish’.” —@JustinSaaS
“One of my most important learnings as a facilitator has been that, to move forward together, agreement isn’t required as often or on as many matters as most people think.” —Adam Kahane
Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives & Hypercompetition
“If a critical mass of scientists become untrustworthy, a tipping point is possible in which the scientific enterprise itself becomes inherently corrupt and public trust is lost, risking a new dark age with devastating consequences to humanity. Academia and federal agencies should better support science as a public good, and incentivize altruistic and ethical outcomes, while de-emphasizing output.” —Environmental Engineering Science 2017-01-01
COVID-19: endemic doesn’t mean harmless
To an epidemiologist, an endemic infection is one in which overall rates are static — not rising, not falling. More precisely, it means that the proportion of people who can get sick balances out the ‘basic reproduction number’ of the virus, the number of individuals that an infected individual would infect, assuming a population in which everyone could get sick. Yes, common colds are endemic. So are Lassa fever, malaria and polio. So was smallpox, until vaccines stamped it out.
In other words, a disease can be endemic and both widespread and deadly. Malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2020. Ten million fell ill with tuberculosis that same year and 1.5 million died. Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to ‘normal’.
How The “Uber Economy” Is Killing Innovation, Prosperity And Entrepreneurship
The arrogance of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seems so outrageous—and so childishly naive— that it is scarcely hard to believe. How could an industry that has produced so little in terms of productivity seem so sure that they’ve been “changing the world” for the better. And how have they made so much money?
The answer lies in something called increasing returns. As it turns out, under certain conditions, namely high up-front investment, negligible marginal costs, network effects and “winner-take-all markets,” the normal laws of economics can be somewhat suspended. In these conditions, it makes sense to pump as much money as possible into an early Amazon, Google or Facebook.
However this seemingly happy story has a few important downsides. First, to a large extent these technologies do not create new markets as much as they disrupt or displace old ones, which is one reason why productivity gains are so meager. Second, the conditions apply to a small set of products, namely software and consumer gadgets, which makes the Silicon Valley model a bad fit for many groundbreaking technologies.
