1. What Data Can Do by Hannah Fry at The New Yorker. Data helps make sense of a complex world. But too often it lends a false sense of objectivity, as the questions asked and the motivation for asking play a fundamental role in the outcome. “It’s possible for two things to be true: for numbers to come up short before the nuances of reality, while also being the most powerful instrument we have when it comes to understanding that reality.”
  2. Moore’s Law for Everything by Sam Altman. A call to prepare society for the fourth technological revolution — the AI revolution. “Moore’s Law for everything” relates to the halving the prices of goods/services every two years as AI advances production. Altman suggests a national equity fund as a form of basic income to redistribute wealth.
  3. How Intelligent Could Life Be Without Natural Selection? by Arik Kershenbaum for Nautilus. Would artificial life still follow the rules of natural selection? Zooologist Kershenbaum argues that even with a “intelligent” strategy, many of the principles we use to understand evolution would still apply — making artificial life indistinguishable from life created through natural evolution.
  4. The Dao Of Daos by at Packy McCormick Not Boring. I’m still rather sceptical of decentralized decision-making. Sure, there’s enormous potential in making creators/users also owners, but if my experience as a product owner has taught me anything, it’s how difficult it is to bring everyone to the same informational level  in order to make decisions — and that compromise pleases no-one.
  5. Book Review: Antifragile by Scott Siskind at Astral Codex Ten. I remember first reading Taleb’s Antfragile six years ago, sitting high up on a rooftop café in Leeds. Just as Siskind, I found many of Taleb’s ideas highly useful, while generally struggling with his tendency to oversimplify and fit data to his hypotheses.
  6. What Has Covid-19 Taught Us About Remote Work? by Matt Clancy. Remote work seems to have been more beneficial than anticipated by many. However, a lot of the studies mentioned focus on e.g. call center workers, which tend to be far more focused on routine than e.g. work in a startup, where inspiration and collaboration (often triggered by a casual chat while waiting for coffee) are immensely important.
  7. GPT-3 Powers The Next Generation of Apps at OpenAI. A long, long time ago (actually 9 months), OpenAI caused waves by releasing GPT-3, its autoregressive deep-learning language model with 175 billion parameters. More than 300 applications use it for semantic search, summarization, sentiment analysis, content generation, or translation. OpenAI gives an insight into some of those apps.
  8. The Ghosts In The Data by Vicki Boykis. Implicit knowledge within expert communities but isn’t written down — perhaps because no-one finds it interesting enough to write about it, perhaps because it’s difficult to access for a novice. Boykis ruminates on what kind of “ghost knowledge” exists in the data world.
  9. From The Idea To The Business, And How To Turn the Ship Around by Karan Singh. Great three-part read on how the founder of Ginger, a mental health startup, tackled the challenges of building his company. Including product experimentation, pivots, running out of cash, leadership change, and maintaining his own mental / physical health. On a tangent, I love the phrasing small, entrepreneurial tiger teams. Tangent two: He mentions the phrase, “the obstacle is the way”, which is an excerpt from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Always enjoy a good shout-out to the Stoics.
  10. The Mathematics Of How Connections Become Global by Kelsey Houston-Edwards at Scientific American. Percolation theory can be used to investigate network behaviour and the results of randomly adding / removing nodes. The core insight of percolation theory is that as the number of links in a network gradually increases, a global cluster of connected nodes will suddenly emerge. Hence it can help explain when e.g. a meme goes viral, a product dominates a market, or a disease becomes a pandemic.