👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
The Myth of Panic:
Catastrophe presents a leadership class with a terrible contradiction. On the one hand, the perception that leadership is not equal to the unfolding calamity erodes the legitimacy of any ruling class. Leaders understand that Heaven’s Mandate rests on their effective prevention of and response to crisis. On the other hand, the chaos inherent to disaster inevitably reduces leadership’s ability to control—or even stay aware of—the events by which they will be judged.
😱 The Fear of Crowds is strong—Palladium Mag
Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped:
Many of the problems that were uncovered are linked to the poor quality of the data that researchers used to develop their tools. Information about covid patients, including medical scans, was collected and shared in the middle of a global pandemic, often by the doctors struggling to treat those patients. [T]his meant that many tools were built using mislabeled data or data from unknown sources.
🤓 Data is not the New Oil (it's the New Sand)—MIT Technology Review
A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge:
Yet what really has the spreadsheet users charmed is not the hard and fast figures but the “what if” factor: the ability to create scenarios, explore hypothetical developments, try out different options. The spreadsheet, as one executive put it, allows the user to create and then experiment with “a phantom business within the computer.”
🤷♂️ …and then the tool shapes us—Back Channel
🎧 Listening
"Peak Facebook":
So he built this platform where the kind of content which could be considered toxic or unsafe can move very fast and can be very popular. The dilemma he is in now, about censorship versus safety, is one he created for himself. It's possible to envision a Facebook that isn't as big a problem.
Stephen Levy—Danny in the Valley (Apple, Spotify)
Sales Mixology:
What can be, if a business really cares enough to train people—make sure they are hiring the right people first—and train them to a level that they not only do their job but they feel safe to be asking questions. That they challenge their own training methods, and that they are looking for more. At the end of the day they then understand that their position is vital in the greater scheme of that business.
Michael Sherlock—The Wicked Podcast
The Substack Economy:
[T]he Internet a decade ago, or 15 years ago, when you would go and have a bunch of blogs that you liked, and scroll through to see what people's thoughts were on these blogs. And then you would have discovery because they all would have blog rolls with their favourite blogs, and then you would click through and you would have some that you liked enough to read them regulary. That, to a large extend, got washed away when we all made the social media sites our home.
Linda Lebrun—Infinite Loops
📬 Suggestions?
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