Past startup founder. Built and operated startup accelerators in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Rome. Studies unintended consequences, unit economics, and timing. Uni prof.
Reminds me of the story about the red (and not great tasting) honey bees were making in Brooklyn... from sipping up liquid from the local maraschino cherry factory.
30 years ago in college, at a physics club talk, I got my first intro to string theory. I didn't understand it but was intrigued enough to go to a small one-off seminar led by Prof. Greene. About 15 people around a table while he spoke. I kept thinking I was too ignorant of the subject matter to be able to ask a question. But nobody asked any questions.
One of the best opening sentences, from the book Propaganda by Edward Bernays: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
The 2001 telecoms crash drove benefits for companies that came later in the availability of inexpensive dark fiber after the bubble popped. WorldCom, ICG, Williams sold off to Verizon, Level 3, Teleglobe, and others. That in turn helped future Internet companies gain access to plentiful and inexpensive bandwidth.
Cable telephony companies such as Cablevision Systems, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner, used the existing coaxial connections into the home to launch voice services.
If you want happiness through writing, write only for yourself. Never check site visitor analytics, comments, shares. Only care if you're enjoying the writing. To make it easier you can also write under a pseudonym.
Some of my worst habits formed seeing early posts go viral and then getting addicted to that endorphin hit. The amount of time I wasted checking analytics and new subs would probably equal the time it would take me to write 10 more posts or read a couple books.
Better than asking "is college worth the cost," and getting into ROI calculations per major is asking "could we provide a similar (or better) educational and social experience at a fraction of the cost"? To that the answer is yes.
I did a lot of my blog and book writing before these AI tools, but now I show my readers images of handwritten notes and drafts (more out of interest than demonstrating proof of work).
Interesting measurements for something I've been tracking since 2018 (Google Duplex). When there is next to no cost for misuse of voice AI, it's profitable to fool people, the calls can be made from international jurisdictions, and there is no enforceability, you'll get these scams.
I happened to have been assigned Moby Dick in 9th grade English class. Foolishly put off reading it until the night before the book report was due. Got about 1/3 of the way through and went through life thinking it was boring. Fast forward decades, I'm now reading it for real. It hilarious, it's pause encouraging, I love it! (And I'm still only 1/3 through.)
While Bannister’s 4-minute mile record is used as an example of a psychological barrier, there’s also a reinterpretation of the meaning behind his record. Before his 1954 race, the record for the mile stood at just over 4 minutes (4:01.4) for 9 years. While speed records were set during WWII, they were all set by Swedish runners (Sweden being neutral in the war). The record today, which has stood since 1999, is 3:43.13. It's not a round number, so as a result gets less attention. Maybe that's why we don't think of it as a psychological barrier.
This being a snapshot in time, how would the claim change if we looked at the past? Do the explanations fade if you look back in history at empires in hot parts of the world, like the Egyptian, Mauryan, Persian, Akkadian, Mesopotamian, Carthaginian, Songhain, Incan, Aztec, Mayan...
You're thinking of Clubhouse? Raised around $200M. Fast up and down. The behavior our old startup had noticed 10 years earlier was that while people were happy to engage with audio only, retention was tough unless there was something more. For us that meant focusing on the health-related talks. Patients and their doctors and support group leaders took the talks as part of the recovery process. Very different retention came from that.
I've been interested in this general question for a while. Years ago I ran a startup that connected strangers for spoken conversations. After tests, we kept it to audio only - no video, no text, no profile info. That was what kept the conversations civil. Add video, or text, or profiles and behavior changed (basically became a dating site). Results: F-M talks were only about 10% longer than F-F and M-M talks.
(Longer-term we focused on connecting people recovering from serious health issues.)
That story is very Chesterton Fence. If Chesterton was working in a canal instead of walking on a country path. There's a balance between preserving memory and maintaining and benefitting from that knowledge and choosing what not to remember.
When Kurt Cobain shot and killed himself in 1994, his widow went on TV to say that what he did was wrong. Cobain’s death then did not result in others’ killing themselves (known as the “Werther effect”). Robin William’s suicide 20 years later, however, did result in more deaths as the story spread widely.
But otherwise, I do agree that we should preserve institutional memory and that putting processes over people can lead to forgetting.
Reminds me of how AT&T continued generating revenue from renting landline phones many years after it became legal to own and connect your own equipment to their network.
From science fiction author Charles Fort in his 1931 book titled Lo!
“If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as to how to become a leaf or a root.
I love the execution on this. It's powerful because it overlaps with different approaches (adjacent possible, inflection points, dominant design, creative destruction, opportunity curves, the multigenium, hype cycles, Cambrian explosions, tech leapfrogging...) and also just lets you click around to explore.
I've been interested in the timing of new inventions and how they sometimes go on to become successful innovations. This visual tree is a great resource.
Many forms of ignorance include the failure to recognize something that you experience.
There’s a scene in Michael Lewis’ book The New New Thing that chronicles a tear in a sail on Netscape investor Jim Clark’s mega yacht, the Hyperion. That ripped sail, way up on the 194-foot mast, stops the trip.
The Hyperion had at the time, the most advanced electronic monitoring and control systems. Yet, it took a crew member, a rare sailor among those on board, to notice a strange whipping sound, climb up the mast, and verify that the giant sail was ripping in the wind. While everyone on board was exposed to the same sound, few noticed that it was unusual. Fewer knew how to investigate and determine that the problem existed.