I…love this song (and the others). I helped my daughter write a book, but this dad wins the next level by immortalizing the songwriter of a generation.
Regarding a study of remote work looking at 500,000 Americans with “remotable jobs,” Prof Emma Harrington, one of the ‘Home Alone’ study’s authors:
When one person is out of the office, it impacts people who remain in the office, so even an on-site worker in a remotable job may now be lonelier because their colleagues choose to work from home.
They conclude that remote work “substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health.” The reality is assuredly varied and more complicated, but the impact of remote work on onsite work is, as suggested, pretty clear.
On the same note, a fantastic short visual essay on writing: Do It 14,000 Times Slower With This One Trick
Three separate quotes from different parts of Nikhil Suresh’s “AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making” that work together:
But the broader reality is so much worse: people who have no background in the technology at all actually believe what they are saying. As a general rule you should avoid getting into business with a liar, but if you must, you can at least reason with them even if only in private. A true believer is much more threatening because they are impervious to even inducement by self-interest.
[…]
This is to say that we’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.
[…]
The net result of this is that almost every large organisation that I am aware of is no longer able to focus on anything important, unless they are one of the (very) few organisations where AI happens to address their highest priorities. They cannot buy sensible software, hire competent talent, communicate honestly with executives about the state of projects, or undertake any sort of sensible initiative.
The whole thing is very much worth reading. (Those of you who read too many articles on the internet may remember his 2024 gem, “I Will !$%!!$% Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again”)
At least the cryptomania BS a few years ago was unintuitive enough that it was ignored by most businesses despite the desperate pivots and grifting. Adding a useless AI chat feature or calling your platform “AI native” is an easier sales pitch and management obsession than “It’s the same thing…but on the blockchain.”
Most leaders barely understand their own business, let alone the real impact of AI in recent years on their industry, the current contours of AI abilities, or the likelihood of purchased solutions and implementations maturing gracefully in a rapidly changing field. Most people don’t even know if the hard part of the job is generating the answer or verifying it. AI is magical, and yet we’re still firmly in the everyone-is-lying part of the hype cycle.
He writes a cogent summary in the middle of the article:
“Please dear God, do not let it be on earth as it is on LinkedIn.”
David Epstein, author of Range, writing about Herbert Simon’s notion of “satisficing” in the NYT as part of his promotional blog tour for his new book, Inside the Box:
Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is “good enough for me” rather than “the best out there,” and that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices, instead of haunted by the ones they didn’t make.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first used the term “flow” to describe states of complete absorption in an activity, put it well. By making up one’s mind to invest in a choice, regardless of more attractive options that may come along later, “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.”
Delightful. Both feet fully in as opposed to one foot out. Assuredly hard to always employ in a world where social media functions as “an infinite comparison engine,” but delightful.
From Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday:
The purpose of knowledge is action.
Too much study and not enough doing creates a paucity of knowledge, a shelter of naïveté, no matter how smart you are.
There are things that make sense on the page but do not survive contact with events.
We are living in a world where information is getting ever cheaper and ever more abundant. It still takes work to use it.
Isaac Asimov (from a 1988 interview), providing a different perspective on trust, incentives, and guardrails:
It’s insulting to imply that only a system of rewards and punishments can keep you a decent human being. Isn’t it conceivable a person wants to be a decent human being because that way he feels better?
From the ending of Leonard Mlodinow’s Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior:
We choose the facts that we want to believe. We also choose our friends, lovers, and spouses not just because of the way we perceive them but because of the way they perceive us. Unlike phenomena in physics, in life, events can often obey one theory or another, and what actually happens can depend largely upon which theory we choose to believe. It is a gift of the human mind to be extraordinarily open to the theory of ourselves that pushes us in the direction of survival and even happiness.
From Om Malik’s “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World,” an essay about “our zeitgeist of half-truths”:
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
Lots of lies work well in a wide variety of contexts, including businessmen selling stories and prognosticators retconning their predictions into reality. Malik argues that most of us want those tidy deceptions:
…Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs.
As Malik points out, the people of influence spending trust and other symbolic capital don’t need to be right; they need to be believed.