Friday’s Finds

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@vtg2 — “I’m beginning to think ‘hindsight is 2020’ was some kind of message from a future time traveler that we all misunderstood.”

@ComplexWales — “I had a teacher who filled the bell in Drama Hall with foam. As more students arrived, they simply joined in & it sometimes lasted a whole day. A few teachers kicked off but got nowhere. The headmaster didn’t believe in separating children by their date of manufacture.”

The Clothesline Paradox — I was reminded of this recently by Andrew Jacobs

“It’s called the “Clothesline Paradox.” The author, Steve Baer, was talking about alternative energy. The thesis is simple: You put your clothes in the dryer, and the energy you use gets measured and counted. You hang your clothes on the clothesline, and it “disappears” from the economy. It struck me that there are a lot of things that we’re dealing with on the Internet that are subject to the Clothesline Paradox. Value is created, but it’s not measured and counted. It’s captured somewhere else in the economy.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

Lyall Taylor — “Garry Kasparov once said that one of biggest mistakes chess players make is trying to ‘undo’ a bad move, when in reality, once a bad move is played, it is already a whole new game and an entirely fresh mindset is required.”

Peter Stoyko — “I think of sunk-cost as being too invested in a wrong path and reluctant to make a change of course. This is acknowledging a wrong change of course then trying to get back on the old path, which is no longer relevant because the course change sets up new strategic considerations.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

PatrickTanguay — “School pre-covid: Teach them all exactly the same thing, sitting in rows. Prepare them for cubicle + factory work. Post-covid: Sit them at the kitchen table, on the couch, let them learn what they can amidst overworked anxious people, doing Zoom calls. Prepare them for gig work.”

@ChrisCorrigan — “RSS is sweet because is delivers news without triggering chemicals. It works at the pace of ‘newspaper on the doorstep’ compared to the stream of social media.”

@JasonHickel — “Capitalism structurally compels us to work and produce beyond society’s actual needs. And the more we produce, the more we have to consume, to mop up overproduction. Consumption becomes a structural imperative — a form of labour in itself. The consumer is not sovereign, but serf.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“We have art so that we shall not die of reality.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, via @AnthonyMartinFaria

@dsearls — “Future epitaph: ‘I used to be talent. Now I’m just content’.”

@MelissaPierce — “This quote from the movie ‘The Two Popes’ is pretty much everything: ‘Truth may be vital, but without love, it is unbearable.’ Would that I take this gem to heart for even a third of my interactions.”

@malia_adil — “These days on Social Media, everybody is engaged either hosting, boasting, or posting. Wonder, who is listening?”

@JasonFried — “Remember, remote work is not office work remotely. It’s a different way to work. Mostly asynchronous, long stretches of uninterrupted time, fewer meetings (meetings are a last resort), and fewer hours with more impact per hour.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@qcroll — “The century of the speaker is over: Once, we did everything for the speaker’s convenience, gathering in one place. Now, we do everything for the community, because speakers, sponsors, and the audience trust us to gather the best people.”

@bhargreaves — “Everyone crowing about a permanent remote future where they live in Boise but earn their current NYC/SF salaries is gonna be real pissed when they discover they’ll live in Boise but earn Manila/Bucharest salaries.”

@yaneerbaryam — “Bureaucracies exist in order to say no. They wouldn’t be needed if they said yes. So the people who rise to the top, and the culture, are an automatic ‘We don’t do that’.”

@delphina777 — “propaganda does not need to be persuasive, only pervasive — its secondary purpose is to convince — its primary purpose is to exhaust”

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Every fortnight — now known as a decade — I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” —Peter Drucker

But in our knowledge economy, says Drucker, “if you haven’t learned how to learn, you’ll have a hard time. Knowing how to learn is partly curiosity. But it’s also a discipline.”

@mathemagenic — “When experts open up and become part of sense-making networks, their expertise travels to become part of informed choices of non-experts. It’s a better option than pushing packaged solutions via authority lines assuming that people are not able to understand complex matters.”

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Every fortnight — now known as a decade — I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

The Fourth Doctor — “The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.” via @GarethLPower

@alexia — “If you are the smartest person in the Zoom, then you are in the wrong Zoom.”

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Every fortnight — now known as a decade — I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it.” —Viktor Frankl, via @nuri_numinous

@JoyceCarolOates — “is anyone else experiencing a distortion of time? each day feels monumental & tomorrow seems totally unpredictable; one week ago feels like one month; the future feels foreshortened, like a blank wall just a few inches away. past crises, like raging wildfires, near-forgotten.”

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Every fortnight — and what a fortnight it has been! — I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

6 March — “You’re not going to see public health, let alone pandemic preparedness, at the top of the priority list for this White House.” —The Long Now Foundation

7 March — “It’s interesting seeing all the universities that disparaged distance education as not proper suddenly being converted to the benefits of online education.” —@mweller

9 March — “Shoutout to all the Zoom engineers keeping the servers up and running as usage skyrockets for personal and business communicationss — can’t imagine what would happen if they had an outage, let’s hope we never find out.” —@CallMeVlad

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.” —Freeman Dyson 1923-2020

@RonEdmondson — “One Critical Leadership Error: Assuming what you’re hearing is all that’s being said.”

@curtisogden — “Perhaps too starkly put, but we might consider the difference between “networking” and “network weaving” as the difference between thinking of others for our own sake and thinking of others for their sake or the sake of the larger whole.”

@rhappe — “Communities are, at their core, the way people have always come together to learn. They provide the space, relationships, collisions, and trust necessary to create shared meaning, to iterate on emergent ideas, and to norm new patterns and behaviors.”

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