Friday’s Finds

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.

“One day historians will view ant-vaxxers the same way they viewed climate deniers and those who drowned women because they were witches.” —@DavidPrice

“When the virus is circulating in a vaccinated population, variants that are more rapidly transmitting are selected for — those are vaccine evading variants. By vaccinating without shutting down transmission we are promoting vaccine evading variants.” —@YaneerBarYam

“Maybe the problem is that we shouldn’t be looking to politicians for leadership. There’s nothing saying anyone we elect at virtually any position have any abilities to succeed in times of this. We need to develop a civic self-efficacy where we join together with those around us.” —@ClayForsberg

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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 next Friday’s Finds post will be on 24 September, as these will now be posted the last Friday of each month.

“Twitter is a place where you can watch people who don’t read books argue with people who write them.” —Mark Safranski

“It’s far better to adapt your organisation to the future than to try and force everyone back into the past. This ‘return to the office’ has more to do with status symbols, fragile executive egos, and idiocy than shareholder value. It is bonkers — Hybrid [work] is just a way of saying ‘let us have the future but just like the past because we’ve spent lots of money on the past’. It never works but we never seem to learn.” —@SWardley

“Vaccinated people are like wet logs, unvaccinated like dry kindling. COVID is the fire.
Can wet logs catch fire? Yes.
Can wet logs SPREAD fire once they catch flame? Sure.
But it’s MUCH harder to start a fire with wet logs, and nearly impossible when there’s no more kindling.” —@AuforGA

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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 Twitter Paradox — “I loathe the fact that Twitter is a place where I am exposed to profound thoughts and new experiences, as well as a breeding ground for hate and harassment.” —@TheWorstDev

Before Tom Peters, before Peter Drucker, we had Mary Parker Follett by @TimKastelle

“There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.” —Mary Parker Follett

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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. After a two-week hiatus I will slowly get back to more regular blogging.

@PicardTips — “Picard management tip: Keep group meetings short. Take your time with one-on-ones.”

@DThom_ — “Universities: let’s be leaders and innovate, innovate, innovate. Also universities: let’s not mandate vaccines unless everyone else does first.”

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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 hardest part of teaching: Having to justify to students that what they’re learning in school is relevant and will be useful in the future.” —@AnaFabrega11

The Most Precious Resource is Agency

Agency is the capacity to act. More subtly: An individual’s life can continue, with a certain inertia, that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most people today more-or-less know what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life—being in some kind of school (the “doing” is almost more “being told what to do”). Beyond that age there is of course the proverbial worker, in modern stories usually an office worker, who is often so inert that he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality (that forces him out of his inertia, and in doing so the story begins).

Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you. Most famous people go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a message boy is one opportunity, asking how to operate the telegraph is another. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan. And of course no one has to write a book, or start a company. But imagine instead if Carnegie or Da Vinci were compelled to stay in school for ten more years instead. What would have happened?

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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.

“Always urgent, but never specific. That should get the result you want.” —@MeetingBoy

“Saying it’s ‘post-pandemic’ because your regional lockdown is over is like saying it’s ‘post-climate change’ because the flooding in your town receded.” —@emorwee

“Vaccine efforts, and much of public health for that matter, are about convincing and manipulating people rather than providing them options, data, or decision-making tools. The base assumption is that the public is stupid and that the information they get must be carefully controlled and metered. That approach doesn’t work well in a networked information-rich environment. To compensate for this and achieve planned outcomes, network technology companies are being enlisted to actively control, censor, and manage public discussions on public health. NOTE: we saw this happen with [US] politics in 2019.” —@JohnRobb

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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.

@A_AMilne — “My father used to say that the third-rate brain thought with the majority, the second-rate brain thought with the minority and the first-rate brain thought for itself. Where there was uncertainty, where opinions differed, I would have to decide for myself.”

COVID19 original coronavirus + variants of interest & concern so far + country where they were first found:

– SARS‑CoV‑2 (China)
– Alpha (UK)
– Beta (South Africa)
– Gamma (Brazil)
– Delta (India)
– Theta (Philippines)
– Iota (US)
– Kappa (India)
The pandemic is not over yet.
—@NRGomes

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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 do admin exactly like I clean vomit: Hold breath, enter without looking, do something, retreat, retch, wipe eyes, breathe, repeat.” —@ChristoMove

“Most doctors are rather good with healthcare of individuals, but not that good with mathematics & large scale human behaviour analysis.” —@autiomaa

“You catch highly contagious new-variant Covid-19 when you INHALE air that an infected person has EXHALED. This is more likely with CLOSE CONTACT, CROWDED PLACES, and CLOSED SPACES (3Cs).” —@TrishGreenhagh

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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.

“If you focus on sickness, you’re going to end up with doctors as the key actors. If you focus on well-being, you’re going to end up with communities as key actors.” —@CormacRussell

“Collaboration is a necessary technique to master the unknown. Academics are slow to explore and understand the process. For now, practitioners provide the best laboratory to learn the complexity of collaboration.” —@EdMorrison

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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.

@DavidBoxenhorn — “The most important thing is the ability to survive until you get lucky.”

@ProfCharlesHaas — “I am glad to be in a field that is enriched by assimilating knowledge from other fields, rather than one that tries to maintain a monopoly of wisdom on the basis of credentials.”

Right now, it’s hard to imagine that any global pandemic could ever fade into a routine fact of history.

But Esyllt Jones says that is what occurred with a previous worldwide disaster, the Great Influenza of 1918.

That pandemic faded despite a death toll in the tens of millions, and the loss of entire families and communities.

The public health historian notes that: “There are decades of almost complete neglect of (the 1918 influenza) as a historical subject, during which many of the survivors died.” —CBC Ideas

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