1. Rethinking Fast and Slow in Data Science by Cassie Kozyrkov, Chief Decision Intelligence Engineer, Google, for Hackernoon. Data Science methodology still tends to follow a waterfall approach. Cassie compellingly argues against this – even for traditionally linear projects based on medical research. “The best source of inspiration for a bulletproof final version is the collection of lessons learned along the way to an MVP.”
  2. 9 Things You Should Know About TensorFlow by Cassie Kozyrkov, Chief Decision Intelligence Engineer, Google, for Hackernoon. Ever since I first learnt about Tensorflow, I’ve been excited about it’s potential for widespread ML adoption. Cassie sums up the main Tensorflow news, based on the talk at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco.
  3. Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang for Nautilus. This is an old one but I’ve been referring to it again and again – I’ve been working in a high-intensity, high-competition environment for a while now and too often the metrics “ # work hours” and “output” get muddled up. While they may be correlated, the examples in the article demonstrate that high-quality work hours with space for rest and relaxation are a key driver to for real results.
  4. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Reading a lot of Kahneman’s papers during my studies I thought I wouldn’t benefit from this book. Boy, was I wrong. Not only does Kahneman’s book hold its ground in the times of the replication crisis, but I found that his writing style helped me reach an above average content retention rate.
  5. Who Needs Democracy When You Have Data? by Christina Larson for Technology Review. For some months now, news about China’s AI-based surveillance system has made the rounds.  The West faces the same question of how to handle an increase in surveillance and tracking, looking at China can help us figure out what we want and we don’t want our future system to look like.
  6. 7 Areas of Game Theory That Can Help You Understand the World by Zach Cresswell. The other day I was listening to a podcast with Bret Weinstein, where Bret emphasized the importance of game theory in understanding the world. Zach created a quick summary of the different elements mentioned by Bret.
  7. Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points by Scott Alexander for LessWrong. For anyone keen on delving deeper into the world of Game Theory, here is a great article on Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points. The comments are an added delight.
  8. This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe by Carl Zimmer for the New York Times. This article about a mutation of crayfish that clone themselves provides a brilliant example of how cloning can be a brilliant short-term strategy but create fragility in the long  term. Variation via sexual reproduction creates robustness to react to changes in the environment or ward off diseases.
  9. Why the pessimists are winning, for now by Gideon Lichfield for MIT Technology Review. Talking with peers in the tech field I encounter a lot of techno-pessimism these days. Gideon summarizes the change in perception and the challenges we currently face.
  10. Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind by Yuval Noah Harari for Wired Magazine. Only a few generations ago, a human’s life time was relatively stable. With the faster pace of technological change we’ll find ourselves in continuously morphing environments. “Though the adult brain is more flexible and volatile than was once thought, it is still less malleable than the teenage brain. […] If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whooooosh.”