👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Why Disagreement Is Vital to Advancing Human Understanding:
For intellectualists, the purpose of our reasoning capacity is to enable individuals to gain knowledge of the world. In the interactionist view, by contrast, reason didn’t evolve to help individuals reach truths, but to facilitate group communication and cooperation. Reasoning makes us smarter only when we practise it with other people in argument. Socrates was on to something.
🤬 17-minute read from Ian Leslie in Aeon
Weak Ties & Strong Intros:
“Suggesting the primacy of structure over motivation” - [..] the structure of the ties, is more important than the motivation of your strong ties. Said another way, while your strong ties are motivated to help you and actively working on your side they also generally know the same people you do, while it’s your weak ties that are likely to be able to connect you to opportunities outside your core network.
🏄🏻♀️ 15-minute read from Tom Critchlow in The Strategic Independent
Inside the Taiwan Firm That Makes the World’s Tech Run:
TSMC was under enormous pressure to come up with constant advances. So instead of combining lots of new technologies to double power every two years, it pioneered small advances annually. “People made fun of TSMC, saying, ‘Oh, that’s not a real node, but taking these baby steps helped them learn these new technologies. And they laughed all the way to the bank.”
🤖 17-minute read from Charlie Campbell in Time
🎧 Listening
Silicon Valley Part 2:
Software is basically the Philosopher's Stone for turning, quite literally, typing on a keyboard into changes in the real world. What is the easiest thing in the world to do? To sit back at a keyboard. And what's the hardest thing in the world to do? It's electing a new president, or create a new business, or convince all these cars to all of a sudden be picking up riders, or convince people to open up their homes and allow people to stay in their homes.
🧙♂️ 43-minute talk with Marc Andreessen on The Rest Is History
"Would Apple Hire Steve Jobs, Conservatives Hate Big Tech":
The key question here is the degree to which people are going to have a clear sensibility about what their convictions are, beyond hating the other side but actually defining some values, sufficient courage to actual speak out, and resilience to bounce back when they do find themselves in the throes of this stuff. And in the case of the tech industry, or industry more broadly, the product does suffer at some point.
🌪 112-minute talk with Antonio Garcia Martínez on The Fifth Column
The world's going 100% electric:
Batteries are a technology whereas fossil fuels are a natural resource, and they have very different intrinsic properties. With natural resources of any kind, the more you use them the more scarce they become to find and the more the price goes up. With technologies, the more you produce them, the learning curve, the price only goes down and anything that is not theoretical impossible becomes more and more likely to happen.
🔋 51-minute talk with Gene Berdichevsky on Danny in the Valley
📬 Suggestions?
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