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.

“Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.” —John Dewey

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” —@EnriquePenalosa

“We rarely appreciate all that our enemies do for us. They test us and make us stronger. They exploit our flaws, motivating us to correct them. They show us what we do not wish to become. So many memorable lessons. What fine teachers our enemies are.” —@TheStoicEmporer

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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.

“There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analysing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of not knowing” —Donella Meadows

“Any method that starts by asking you to imagine an ideal future is deeply suspect from a complexity perspective. Far too likely to give an excuse to avoid the reality of the present.” —@snowded

“As Socrates showed us, there exist few quicker ways to make enemies than to ask the right questions of those vested in the wrong answers.” —@MattPirkowski

“If everyone did their best, 95% of problems would remain.” —W. Edwards Deming

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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 first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.” —Vox 2020-01-04

“And I came to the sage, and I said, Master, I am lost in these dark and confusing times. What am I to do? And the sage said, My son, now is when you must find a reassuring platitude to cling to, and be sure not to examine it too closely.” —@StevenBrust

“If you have ever watched symphony orchestra you may have noticed how inefficient the musicians are. They are not utilised 100%. Most have below 50% efficiency. Imagine how good the music would turn out if all instruments were playing all the times. Such is the science of efficiency.“ —@HumanSelection

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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. Here are some of the best for 2019.

Word of the Year

@PhilosophyMttrs — “Word of the Year” — Ultracrepidarian — adjective noting or pertaining to a person who criticizes, judges, or gives advice outside the area of his or her expertise.

Media

“For years, a small hand lettered sign hung on the West wall of McLuhan’s Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. It read, ‘The important thing is to acquire perception, though it cost all you have’.” —Eric McLuhan, Poetics on the Warpath 2001 — via @McLinstitute

@GeorgeMonbiot — “If you asked me: ‘which industry presents the greatest environmental threat, oil or media?’, I would say ‘the media’. Every day it misdirects us. Every day it tells us that issues of mind-numbing irrelevance are more important than the collapse of our life support systems.”

@EikeGS — “Today everything runs on bestseller lists. You rarely find good books there. But the less people can cook, the more cookbooks are sold.”

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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.

@JohnRobb — “Significant philanthropic activity is a good indicator that you live in a dysfunctional society.”

@White_Owly — “It’s easy to criticise the system after you’ve made enough money from it to last a lifetime.”

@FearDept — “In tomorrow’s digital society you will have no rights but the opportunity to earn many privileges.”

@CognitivePolicy — “For everyone watching the political satire that has captured so much attention in recent years, ponder what happens when population pressure is too great — and inequality too severe — for any kind of prosocial behaviors to express at scale. You will see hints of worse to come.”

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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.

Not in a box. Not with a fox.
Not in a house. Not with a mouse.
I would not [retweet] them here or there.
I would not [retweet] them anywhere.
I would not [retweet the bots and spam].
I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.
—@CAFinUS

We give newspapers a free pass by calling them “the tabloid press”, as if the problem is the format. It’s not. The problem is the ownership. We should call them what they are. “The billionaire press”. — @GeorgeMonbiot

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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.

“Leadership is a serious meddling in the lives of others. Managers/leaders with poor self-awareness and not knowing how their behaviour affects staff do not get the best out of their teams.” —@shauncoffey

Was humanity simply not ready for the internet? via @monk51295

No matter how stupid and powerless we have been led to think of ourselves, we have at our fingertips — in our pockets, even — access to the near-totality of human knowledge and capacity.

It’s not too late to rise to this occasion. Omniscience requires good filtering. We may have gotten access to every piece of real and fake information ever produced but without the ability to discriminate between them. We got the intimacy of universal connectivity but without social skills to navigate it. We got perfect memory but without the necessary corresponding compassion for one another’s past missteps and failures.

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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.

When Francis Harwood, anthropologist, asked a Sioux elder why people tell stories, he answered, “In order to become human beings.” She asked, “Aren’t we human beings already? He smiled, “Not everyone makes it.” —Laura Simms, via @SophiaCycles1

“First they said they needed data about the children to find out what they’re learning. Then they said they needed data about the children to make sure they are learning. Then the children only learnt what could be turned into data. Then the children became data.“ —@MichaelRosenYes

“If you worked every single day, making $5000/day, from the time Columbus sailed to America, to the time you are reading this tweet, you would still not be a billionaire, and you would still have less money than Jeff Bezos makes in a week. No one works for a billion dollars.” —@_Floodlight

“The more I think about it, the more sure I am that the post-industrial revolution will be a moral revolution, or it will not be at all.“ —@EskoKilpi

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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.

I just had the dumbest fight of my professional career, which I assure you is saying something, and there’s not a day we actually disagreed. We just hadn’t talked voice.

Oh. Well then.

Talk. No really. Actually talk. Don’t play telephone. Pick up the telephone. Lunch. TALK.

Text has enough bandwidth to escalate conflict between humans, but not enough bandwidth to de-escalate. Base assumptions — what people actually want — can get wrong and stay wrong really easily, without low latency, high metadata exchange.

Never fight over text. —@dankami

@johnrobb — “Incoherence makes group decision making impossible … Incoherence arises from a ​distrust of information​ (due to misinformation/bias), a ​distrust of messengers ​ (due to a loss of fictive kinship), and a ​distrust of the medium ​ (due to corporate interference).”

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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.

@White_Owly — “Unconscious bias hangs out with plausible deniability. I’ve seen them together. They’ll deny it though.“

@EikeGS — “Today everything runs on bestseller lists. You rarely find good books there. But the less people can cook, the more cookbooks are sold.”

“Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.” —Edward de Bono, via @hemppa

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