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.

@curtisogden: ‘Overheard: Drucker said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. I say repeatedly that ‘Systems eat culture for lunch’ [What Drucker really said was, “Culture—no matter how defined—is singularly persistent.”] .

@katrynadow: “Consulting teaches you are only as good as your last gig, so reputation is critical.”

Twenty Filters that influence the way we see things, by @FSonnenberg

1. Mental filter. Some folks have blinders on. They view situations from one perspective — they’re unable or unwilling to see other viewpoints.
2. Black or white. Some people focus on extremes and exclude everything in-between. They see everything as good or bad, right or wrong, all or nothing.
3. Overgeneralization. Some folks turn a single situation into a sweeping generalization. They assume that because “one teacher is lazy,” the whole school is terrible.
4. Labeling. Some people label a group based on the behavior of a few members.
5. Jumping to conclusions. Some folks reach a conclusion without any evidence to support their claim …

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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 given is not given unless it is taken, and taking is an act of interpretation. Always.” —@dweinberger

“The most important skill to learn is how to distinguish between confident people, and people who actually know what they are taking about.” —@existentialcoms

“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

Conway’s Law: “Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”

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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.

@Kasparov63: “To play the victim despite holding power, one needs dangerous enemies. If they don’t exist, they must be created or their threat inflated.”

@kevin2kelly: “Humans are experts at inefficiency. All art, discovery, innovation, creation, are inherently inefficient. Efficiency is for robots, not us.”

We didn’t lose control – it was stolen, HT @josemurilo

“Let me state it plainly: Google and Facebook are not allies in our fight for an equitable future – they are the enemy.

These platform monopolies are factory farms for human beings; farming us for every gram of insight they can extract.

If, as Tim [Berners-Lee] states, the core challenge for the Web today is combating people farming, and if we know who the people farmers are, shouldn’t we be strongly regulating them to curb their abuses?”

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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.

“An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.”—Nina Simone, via @PENamerican

“It seems my latest hobby is finding interesting artists to follow on Instagram. Art as a refuge etc.” —Hugh MacLeod

“I studied critical thinking for my PhD thesis. What we’re missing in the world isn’t critical thinking as much as it’s listening and empathy.” —@Bali_Maha

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

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”—Franklin Roosevelt via @lisarosa

“Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.” —Simone Weil + “Only the good has depth that can be radical.” —Hannah Arendt via @monk51295

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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 finishing three weeks in Europe so many of these posts reflect the interactions I had in Copenhagen, London, and Antwerp.

@umairh: “Fascism counts on you. Not on your support. But on your denial.”

@meacoopa: “every liberal democracy realizes early on there are some positions which must prima facie be aggressively excluded from public discourse … Fascism wriggles into democracies by insisting on the right to be heard, achieves critical mass, then dissolves the organs that installed it.”

@dabeard: “No science, no evidence, no truth, no democracy”

@SwiftonSecurity: “Trust me – modern information systems are a panopticon you are not qualified to defeat alone. Journalists are a very valuable resource here.”

@yonatanzunger: “Something you can do: Write down what happens in the news every day. Keeping a notebook helps remember, see trends, avoid gaslighting.”

Seth Godin: “Blogging is free. What matters is the meta-cognition of thinking about what you’re going to say…” via @dorait

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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 Copenhagen, the most bicycle friendly city in the world. This edition is dedicated to one of my favourite activities.

Math myth-busting some of our worst urban planning misconceptions,  via @mobi_bikes

“A common political argument is that bike and transit riders should ‘pay their own way’. A study in Vancouver however suggested that for every dollar we individually spend on walking, society pays just 1 cent. For biking, it’s eight cents, and for bus-riding, $1.50. But for every personal dollar spent driving, society pays a whopping $9.20! Such math makes clear where the big subsidies are, without even starting to count the broader environmental, economic, spatial and quality-of-life consequences of our movement choices. The less people need to drive in our cities, the less we all pay, in more ways than one.”

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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.

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

@SamuelPepys: “To the Coffee-house, and sat long in good discourse with some gentlemen concerning the Roman Empire.”

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights

Article 1

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

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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 2016.

Quotes

@Tom_Peters: “Presidents rarely get good advice. Every ‘presenter’ presents a totally biased solution–often suppressing competing evidence.”

@atduskgreg – “Machine learning is automated bureaucracy. It spits back the systemic biases we feed it in feature vectors, training sets, reward functions.”

“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” —H.L. Mencken, via @normsmusic

@HughCards: “As the Internet makes everything cheaper, access to real networks (Harvard, Wall St., Silicon Valley etc) gets even more expensive.”

“Power not only corrupts, it addicts.” —Ursula Le Guin, via @ndcollaborative

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” —Marcus Aurelius — via @MickFealty

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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 most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” —Stephen Biko, Speech in Cape Town, 1971, via @marick

“We talk and we share and we point out what is true. The answer to bad speech is more speech” — @Snowden on TechCrunch

Visualization for understanding is a powerful way to communicate complex or new ideas. Used effectively and openly, visualization can help us progress in our collective understanding.

Here are some examples of visualizations for understanding that I have recently found through my professional social networks.

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