Friday’s Finds

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

“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.” —Hermann Hesse, via @johnkellden

@johncutlefish: “Teams are often too busy, too highly utilized, too reactive, and too pressured to do the deep work required for sensemaking. Building shared understanding is messy, difficult, and time-consuming. It’s not ‘efficient’.”

@smakelainen: “Code by even a great programmer has ~4 bugs per 1,000 lines of code. Cars today have 150M lines of code. So, even if all of the automotive industry coders were great (they’re not), we’d be talking over half a million bugs on wheels. Isn’t that comforting? (no, it’s not).”

‘A beginner’s guide to critical thinking:
1. Start with a thought
2. Ask “Is this true?”
3. Ask “What makes this true?”
4. Ask “What’s another way to look at this?”
5. Ask “Why?” at each step
6. Reassemble first thought’ —@markpollard

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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.

“To believe that our beliefs are permanent truths which encompass reality is a sad arrogance. To let go of that belief is to find safety.” —Ursula K Le Guin (1929-2018)

@jessfraz: “Hire people who automate themselves out of a job. And then keep giving them jobs.” via @DustinKirkland

@Acuity_Design: “Hack events rush to solution doing/making. I’m still trying to frame the problem.”

@white_owly: “We can’t celebrate a shift to a short-term gig economy and complain about individual short-termism in the same breath.”

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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 live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 – 2018)

“Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption, and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.”  —Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 – 2018)

“Society is at a transition point. Behaviors at all scales have similar challenges: Making relationships that work.” —YaneerBarYam

“Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it’s not satire, it’s bullying.” —Terry Pratchett, via @ShaulaEvans

“Enterprise software: Built by people that won’t use it, purchased by executives who won’t either.” —@SwiftOnSecurity

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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.

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” —Ray Bradbury, via @holdengraber

@_Amanda_Killan: “Libraries literally aren’t just a place to obtain books for free. They’re one of the few public spaces left in our society where you’re allowed to exist without the expectation of spending money.”

@dougkleeman: “Before you criticize something, find three things you actually like about it first. It works when reviewing creative work, but it also makes you a more pleasant human being.”

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Every second Friday I review what I’ve noted on social media and post a wrap-up of what caught my eye. I do this as a reflective thinking process and to put what I’ve learned on a platform I control: this blog. Here are what I consider the best of Friday’s Finds for 2017.

Quotes

“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” —John Dewey (1916)

“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.” —Assata Shakur, via @IamMzilikazi

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” —@kasparov63

“History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.” —A. J. P. Taylor via @RayBoomhower

@DonaldHTaylor: ‘In Turkish you never ask “Did you understand me?” It’s rather rude. Instead, you say “Anlatabildim mi?” – Was I able to explain?’

“Human beings augmented by other human beings is more important than human beings augmented by technology” —@eskokilpi

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.” –Ursula K. Le Guin via @HaymarketBooks

@Richard_Florida: “Cities need to be places of chance encounter and eccentricity, rather than exclusivity and segregation.”

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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.

US Net Neutrality Debacle will Impact People in Canada

“It’s time to clearly and directly call for Canada’s big telecoms to be split apart so that our telecom networks can be open to a range of independent providers and community-based solutions, operating in a decentralized market. The U.K. and others have adopted this “structural separation” approach to telecom markets, where the old telecom operates parts of the network the network but a range of providers service users.

Let’s be clear – the centralization of wealth and power is increasing in many facets of our society, not just telecommunications. We can’t tweak our way out of this or hope a few enlightened bureaucrats and politicians will stand up to entrenched interests.

Let’s acknowledge the centralization of power that is under way and the deepening democratic deficit that is inherent to that kind of structure. Secondly let’s align towards a common goal of a decentralized economy based on collaboration (not competition), equal opportunity, open participation and shared prosperity.”

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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.

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” —W.E. Demming via @DaimenHardie

@projectania: “Don’t just think hierarchy. Think networks of influence. Be prepared to switch from predictability and compliance to disruption and goal-driven surges and back again, depending on the need or context.”

The Jobs that AI will Create – MIT Sloan Review

• Trainers: “human workers to teach AI systems how they should perform”

• Explainers: “bridge the gap between technologists and business leaders”

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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.

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time — none, zero.” —Charles Munger via @JimHays

@raesmaa “Don’t read everything you believe.”

“In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.” —Carl Sagan via @themadstone

“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.” —G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

@EskoKilpi “The most underutilized resource still waiting for discovery may be our ability to cooperate.”

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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 am currently in Helsinki, via Oslo, and then off to Stockholm. So my selections may be influenced by my local surroundings.

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.” –Ursula K. Le Guin via @HaymarketBooks

@MrAlanCooper: “The entire tech world is gonna be gobsmacked when they finally realize the solution is to take more time and think about people more.”

@EskoKilpi: “We are going to have a new kind of company that is to your data what your bank is to your money Storing it, keeping it safe and investing it.”

@White_Owly: “We can’t celebrate a shift towards a gig economy *and* complain about short-termism in the same breath.”

@Indy_Johar: “Societal Truths are a complex social product of linked & extrapolated scientific facts & correlations – dependent on high fidelity trust & governance. Where trust & governance has been destroyed – people return to making decisions on faith – be it Brexit or any other religion.”

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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.

“Data will lead you wrong if you pay attention to that and don’t pay attention to people.” — Bozoma St John via @MarkFederman

@KevinDoyleJones: “Markets are collective consenual reality.”

@ChrisCorrigan: “There is never a point to failing if you aren’t doing it with rigorous attention to learning.”

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