Friday’s Finds

Every fortnight, since 2009, I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@EmilyHaber [German Ambassador to USA] — “Hannah Arendt, a German Jew, political theorist and philosopher, was born on this day in 1906. One of her many legacies: Totalitarianism can flourish where people systematically refuse to engage with reality, and are ready to replace reason with ideology and outright fiction.”

@NeinQuarterly — “Our discontent. It can’t wait til winter.”

@JasonHickel — “Capitalism produces ecological crisis for the same reason it produces inequality: because the fundamental mechanism of capitalist growth is that capital must extract (from nature and from labour) more than it gives in return.”

@DavidOBowles — “I’ll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.
Most classroom practice is astrology.”

@edmorrison — “Teams are the smallest unit of systems change. And within teams, the smallest unit of change is the conversation.”

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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.

“Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. Invite one to stay.” —Maya Angelou

@Tom_Peters — “Sunday reminder to leaders. The way you have behaved in the last 6 months and will behave in the next 6 months will define your entire professional career. (David Brooks: ‘resumé virtues’ [‘accomplishments’] versus ‘eulogy virtues’ [what folks say at your funeral])”

@DebraWatkinson — “If we walked into a store with a lit cigarette — wait no one does that nowadays, but we once could and did. This anti-mask thing is so much more than political. It is anti-society.”

@CriticalLearner — “At some point, I have to remember my grandfather’s advice — you can’t say the right thing to the wrong person — at which point it is best to move on.”

@CarvingThought — “‘Research’ is often disguised procrastination. Iteration is the key to rapid learning.”

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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.

@csessums — “My new favorite definition of Gamification — the process of pouring behaviorist chocolate over instructionist broccoli. Via @bjfr.”

@white_owly — “A lecturer told us a story of a woman who had lived in abject poverty most of her life. She was taken on a tour of an affluent area — an almost utopian existence. She glanced around and said ‘there must be a lot of extremely poor people somewhere nearby’.”

@GWillowWilson — “I never want to hear another bad word about cultural practices of the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Celts etc. now that we have ‘a pyrotechnical celebration of fetal genitalia burned down 100k acres in 2020’ in our history books.”

@marklittlenews — “Truth is social media [e.g. Facebook] did take power from old gatekeepers and democratise information. But reality is a new algorithmic gatekeeper with a proven record of promoting lies and undermining democracy.”

@BallouxFrancois — “I had never fully realised until now that the reason pandemic brought down so many empires and kingdoms in history, wasn’t the death toll, but the fear, the sense of doom, the irrationality and the disunion they unleashed.”

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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.

Dr. Dipshikha Ghosh — “A 28yo woman died of post-covid myocarditis today. She was asymptomatic and treated at home and then developed complications after being declared negative. Let that sink in.”

Learning to live with Covid 19 coronavirus is not a viable option

What experienced epidemiologists do is to systematically identify and critique the totality of evidence, something most commentators on the subject simply do not have the skills or experience to do. This systematic and critical approach is particularly necessary when examining evidence about Covid-19 infection because it is hugely influenced by the setting in which the infection occurs.

How OCAD’s Dori Tunstall is rewriting the rules of design education

There’s a lot of talk about how design is going to save the world after COVID-19. I approach that talk with a sense of cynicism, because design hasn’t even addressed how it’s harmed communities for the last few hundred years. It’s only been in the last couple of months when all these brands like Mrs. Butterworth, Aunt Jemima, and the Washington Redskins moved away from racist representations of Black and Indigenous people for entertainment or consumption purposes.

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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.

“Any idiot can impose and exercise control. It takes genius to elicit freedom and release creativity.” —@DeeWHock

“LinkedIn is bragging that ‘member engagement has hit a record high’, which I’m sure is due to how great LinkedIn is, and has nothing to do with 30 million people being laid off and desperate for work.” —@MeetingBoy

“When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.” —Hannah Arendt

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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.

“Only a few know how much one must know, to know how little one knows.” —Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

“Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.” —Donella Meadows, 2008, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.” —Marshall McLuhan, 1969, Counterblast

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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.

Rosalyn Yalow — “The excitement of learning separates youth from old age. As long as you’re learning, you’re not old.”

Aristotle — “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” via @marksstorm

@WallyBock — ‘I’m 74. When people ask me if I’m retired, I answer “What would I retire to?”‘

@malpani — “The sharing economy has become a shearing economy, where platforms like Uber, LinkedIn and Airbnb keep the cream and we all get fleeced.”

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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.

@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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