Roblog

77 posts from 2023

• 19 December 2023

  Filed under: economy

  In 1970s Ireland, pubs briefly replaced banks

  In 1970 the staff at Irish high-street banks went on strike for six months. Ordinary punters found themselves unable to cash cheques or withdraw money, living as they did in those pre-ATM days where all transactions had to be performed in person.

  So local pubs and shops stepped up to fill the need:

  “Pub-goers would bring their salary payments into the pub and convert them into cash from the register, often hanging out for a few pints afterward. While nobody knew exactly when the strike was going to end, pub owners were generally optimistic and willing to trust that their regulars’ checks would be honored post-strike.”

  The actions by pubs kept the economy afloat and saved countless local businesses. It was possible for them to play this role because they had many of the same qualities that a small-town bank would have, namely knowledge of their customers’ creditworthiness and strong social connections to enforce obligations:

  “At this point, pubs were arbiters of actual loans. Pub owners also often had a reasonable idea of their patrons’ level of income, net worth, and reliability in paying bar tabs, putting them in what could be seen as an even better position than a bank lender to evaluate the overall risk profile of a borrower.”

  #

• 

  12 November 2023

  Filed under: organisations

  All I want for Christmas are some strategy credits

  Businesses sometimes claim credit for doing the right thing. Before applauding them, you have to figure out whether the right thing was also the easy thing.

• 12 November 2023

  Filed under: orso

  Orso: Week 21

  I’ve been keeping weeknotes since starting my consultancy, Orso. This week is week 21, featuring beans, generic agency propositions, healthy sweets and free cash flow. #

• 6 November 2023

  Filed under: food

  James Hoffman and Rory Sutherland

  I enjoyed this discussion between Rory Sutherland and everyone’s favourite softly spoken coffee YouTuber, James Hoffman.

  One idea that stuck in my mind, from Rory:

  “Consumer whimsy in aggregate leads to far better markets. If consumers all bought cars to the same formula, cars would be absolutely wonderful according to the five points that consumers factored in but dreadful according to every other aspect. Consumer whimsy contributes to quality and variety.”

  #

• 5 November 2023

  Filed under: society

  The Friendship Dip

  Anne Helen Petersen on “the friendship dip”, that period of life where making and maintaining friendships becomes particularly hard:

  “I call this period the The Friendship Dip. And I think it makes a lot of us miserable. First in our late 20s and 30s, when we don’t really have a name for what’s happening but can nevertheless feel it….and then in our late 30s, 40s, and 50s, as the extent of the wreckage becomes clear and we attempt to rebuild.”

  #

• 5 November 2023

  Filed under: crypto

  John Lanchester on SBF

  I wrote last week about Sam Bankman-Fried and the corruption of noble causes. The LRB just published this tour de force from John Lanchester, reviewing both Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite and Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up. Lanchester is, it’s safe to say, no fan of SBF:

  “Going Infinite is wildly entertaining, surprising multiple times on pretty much every page, but it adds up to a sad story, even a tragedy, for its central character and for all the people who lost so much thanks to his actions. Lewis, whom I know, is charming and amenable to charm; he likes SBF and is amused by him. I don’t feel the same, mainly because SBF, as well as being reckless with things that don’t belong to him, and deeply arrogant about his own intellectual superiority, is unredeemably careless about people. ‘The notion that other people don’t matter as much as I do felt like a stretch,’ he once said. A worthy insight, but SBF doesn’t act on it: in Going Infinite he repeatedly, compulsively, acts as if other people don’t matter at all. He plays video games during meetings and conversations, fails to be where he’s said he’ll be and do what he’s said he’ll do, and in general does exactly whatever he feels like doing, all the time. A detail: ‘I watched as Sam entered the empty townhouse, opened a closet, and, without so much as a glance at the row of empty hangers, tossed the ball of clothes onto the closet floor. We then drove together to the airport and returned to the Bahamas.’ The person whose job it will be to pick up those clothes, as far as SBF is concerned, does not exist.”

  …and yet, by the end, he feels oddly sorry for him as he stares down the barrel of decades in prison. I felt exactly the same when reading Going Infinite. #

• 

  22 October 2023

  Filed under: knowledge

  Beware of geeks’ daring grifts

  Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial continues this week, and Michael Lewis’s “Going Infinite” rockets up the bestseller lists. What can it teach us about the corruption of good intentions and the limits of a statistical worldview?

• 22 October 2023

  Filed under: creativity

  The future of agencies

  In the spirit of making public predictions in order to get my thinking straight, I had a think about the industry I work in most: the world of communications agencies. What does the future hold for them? Is it possible to feel out what might happen in the next decade? Nothing particularly good, I don’t think:

  “No economies of scale. Limited demand-side growth prospects. A model that delivers the benefit of productivity increases to clients, not agencies. Limited opportunities for further M&A. This all paints a bleak picture of the last decade for the big four, and a bleak picture of the prospects for the industry in general.”

  #

• 22 October 2023

  Filed under: evolution

  Rotating locomotion in living systems

  I had a random thought today: why haven’t wheels evolved in nature? They’re so straightforwardly useful, hence their ubiquity in human-designed mechanical devices, and yet they don’t seem to have emerged in nature – despite billions of years of evolution and lots of other highly complex things emerging through that process.

  As ever, Wikipedia pulled through. (What a brilliant human achievement it is.) It’s probable that the wheel is unlikely to emerge through evolution because it’s only useful in its full form, rather than its intermediate forms; you’d have to reach it in one fell swoop, rather than gradually. As Richard Dawkins notes in Climbing Mount Improbable:

  “The wheel may be one of those cases where the engineering solution can be seen in plain view, yet be unattainable in evolution because it lies [on] the other side of a deep valley, cutting unbridgeably across the massif of Mount Improbable.”

  #

• 19 October 2023

  Filed under: ai

  Don't Fire Your Illustrator

  A thoughtful and pragmatic post from the fine-art-trained – but technology-savvy – Sam Bleckley, on the limitations and the plausible future usage of generative AI for illustration.

  “This doesn’t mean illustrators will stop drawing and become prompt engineers. That will waste an immense amount of training and gain very little. Instead, I foresee illustrators concentrating even more on capturing the core features of an image, letting generative AI fill in details, and then correcting those details as necessary.”

  #

• 19 October 2023

  Filed under: data

  Data Viz Project

  A beautiful collection of data visualisations, with descriptions, strengths and weaknesses, and a taxonomy that allows you to explore other visualisations that do a similar job. #

• 

  15 October 2023

  Filed under: knowledge

  Selling peaches in a market for lemons

  Lots of professional service industries demonstrate certain lousy qualities in which hucksters prosper and it’s hard to tell who’s good and who’s bad. Why is that, and what can you do about it?
• 

  8 October 2023

  Filed under: meta

  Rebooting Roblog

  Some thoughts on who and what this blog is for, and what I’m going to write about in the near future.

• 8 October 2023

  Filed under: crime

  The strange case of Edmond Safra

  The Safra family, Brazil’s premier gang of private bankers and secretive mega-billionaires, are in the news at the moment because of a messy succession dispute worthy of… well, Succession.

  “‘It’s Alberto against the world,’ says Robinson, adding that the family will be keen to stop the case going before a jury. She says once you reach court ‘the cat is out of the bag… I can’t imagine anyone, especially people of this enormous wealth and legacy, want their business aired like that.’”

  Given all that, it’s worth digging into this fascinating story from 2000, about the mysterious death of Alberto’s uncle in Monaco and the much-rumoured family links to money laundering, organised crime and the international drugs trade. #

• 8 October 2023

  Filed under: knowledge

  Dan Davies’s one-minute MBA

  Dan Davies recently recalled this blog post from 2004, that was particularly famous at the time in what was then called the “blogosphere”. Davies was fantastically prescient about the Iraq War, correctly predicting the shitshow it was to become. He attributes that correctness to three things, things that he actually learned at business school:

  1. “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.” If someone appears to be telling lots of lies about an idea, or seems at least to be fudging the truth slightly, there’s a good chance that the idea is a bad one. Good ideas stand on their merits.

  2. “Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless.” If someone has demonstrated that they’re a liar, you shouldn’t trust anything they have to say. You shouldn’t attempt to “shade downwards” their predictions towards reality; you should reject them wholesale.

  3. “The Vital Importance of Audit.” A public that fails to audit the accuracy of its pundits and its politicians, and gives known liars the benefit of the doubt, gets what is coming to it.

  In summary:

  “The secret to every analysis I’ve ever done of contemporary politics has been, more or less, my expensive business school education (I would write a book entitled “Everything I Know I Learned At A Very Expensive University”, but I doubt it would sell). About half of what they say about business schools and their graduates is probably true, and they do often feel like the most colossal waste of time and money, but they occasionally teach you the odd thing which is very useful indeed.”

  #

• 8 October 2023

  Filed under: food

  Beigels Already

  If you’ve ever been to Brick Lane in London, you’ve probably noticed the two bagel shops (or, more accurately, “beigel” shops; the word is spelled and pronounced the cockney way, bye-g’l rather than bay-g’l). Legend has it that the second was started by the brother of the guy who ran the first, who wanted to prove he could make a better bagel.

  Both have flourished; there’s room for two bagel shops in the East End it seems, even after the demographics of the area have shifted, its Jewish population having moved on, replaced by a more South Asian one. They’re particularly popular late at night with the drunken party crowd craving something more kosher than a kebab.

  This short documentary from 1992 interviews the people behind the scenes and the late-night revellers in Beigel Bake, the newer of the two shops, and is an incredible glimpse at a bygone London. #

• 16 August 2023

  Filed under: ai

  The Imminent Enshittification of the Internet

  Cory Doctorow famously coined the term “enshittification”, to describe the process by which online platforms – from a combination of apathy and cynicism – tended to start out useful and then eventually become cesspools of awfulness.

  Gary Marcus observes the way that the muckspreaders that are LLMs have gone from covering the internet in a light spray to a gushing torrent. Search engines, social platforms, digital goods; all are becoming less and less useful as they digest and regurgitate incorrect, AI-generated information.

  “Cesspools of automatically-generated fake websites, rather than ChatGPT search, may ultimately come to be the single biggest threat that Google ever faces. After all, if users are left sifting through sewers full of useless misinformation, the value of search would go to zero – potentially killing the company.

  “For the company that invented Transformers – the major technical advance underlying the large language model revolution – that would be a strange irony indeed.”

  Related: Maggie Harrison’s recent “When AI is trained on AI-generated data, strange things start to happen”. #

• 4 August 2023

  Filed under: puzzles

  The Ant-Honey Problem

  A fun puzzle from Tim Urban at Wait But Why, the solution to which illustrates how simple solving a problem can be if you just find the right framing. (No spoilers here, obviously.) #

• 4 August 2023

  Filed under: culture

  Mirror Mirror On The Wall

  The singer Lizzo is in the news at the moment, for less-than-savoury reasons. Every time I see her mentioned I’m reminded of this great post from 2019, by Matthew Perpetua who was then at BuzzFeed.

  His thesis is that content that goes viral is often content that fulfils a specific need in its audience’s lives. Sometimes that’s a happy accident, a pleasant side-effect of authentic content made with integrity. But sometimes, when people become aware of the mechanisms of this virality, it’s a more cynical creation, the result of “cultural cartography”, a process of mapping out people’s needs and desires and working backwards from there:

  “Lizzo’s music is perfectly engineered for all of this, to the point that it can seem like it’s already gone through extensive A/B testing and optimization. It’s glossy and immediately accessible, but signals some degree of authenticity and soulfulness. It’s aggressively sincere and every song is clearly about a particular statement or relatable situation. It’s all geared towards feelings of empowerment, and given how many ads, shows, and movies want to sell that feeling, her songs are extremely effective and valuable…

  “I can’t hear Lizzo’s music without recognizing her cultural cartography savvy. A lot of music can achieve these goals without contrivance, often just as a natural side effect of an artist intuitively making resonant work, but Lizzo’s songs all sound very calculated to me… Lizzo has a good voice, and her songs range from ‘pretty good’ to ‘undeniable banger’ but I have mixed feelings about all of it because I know the game being played rather well, and because I’m uncomfortable with this self-consciously audience-pleasing approach to content creation becoming the primary mode of pop culture. I appreciate the value of empowering art… but fear mainstream culture further devolving into nothing but shallow exclamations of self-affirmation. We’re more than halfway there already.”

  #

• 

  30 July 2023

  Filed under: sense-making

  The usefulness of constraints

  Understanding constraints is essential to making sense of the world, and knowing when to add or remove them is essential to acting within it.

• 28 July 2023

  Filed under: fiction

  Numb at the Spectator summer party

  Sam Kriss’s brilliant saunter through the Spectator summer party:

  “So I did some mingling myself. This is how it would go. I would find myself in conversation with a very genial man in a linen suit, who would monologue at me extensively on some subject I’d never once before considered in my life—the different types of tweed and when it’s appropriate to wear them, or the perils and pitfalls of buying a French winery, or how difficult it is these days to find a maker of bespoke fountain pens that hasn’t been poisoned by woke groupthink. Eventually an editor would elbow his way over through the crowd with a smirk. I never thought I’d see the day, he’d say, Sam’s rubbing shoulders with the Tory cabinet. At which point I’d look again at the very genial man in the linen suit. I did recognise him from somewhere, I’d realise; some ministerial scandal, some unflattering papshot in the Guardian. I don’t really follow the news, I’d admit. Eric Gruggins, the editor would say, is the Secretary of State for Torture. Wait, I’d say, torture? The Right Honourable Eric would give a good hearty laugh. Well I don’t torture anyone myself, he’d say. Unless you count civil servants! This would fail to entirely pacify me. It’s about preventing torture, right? I’d say. Eric would smack his lips. With the departmental budgets we’ve got, he’d say, it may as well be! And then he’d discourse in the same jovial tones about how Britain could be Europe’s next big torture hub if only he had the funds, and about the incredible opportunities offered by something he called Torture 2.0.”

  #

• 27 July 2023

  Filed under: protest

  The Fight for the Right to Trespass

  A fascinating New York Times look at the growing campaign against the curtailment of the right to roam in England, an inspiring case of civil disobedience and democratic protest:

  “In Devon, local people began holding trespasses every month. As Hayes did while writing his book, they stayed well away from houses and stuck to actions that would be considered trespasses in England but legal in Scotland. Lewis Winks, a researcher and environmental campaigner who helped organize the gatherings, told me that it felt like being a detective in your own backyard: You were figuring out who owned what and why and suddenly realizing that there was a great deal more land around than you ever visited or even really noticed. Moving in a group, you felt empowered, almost immune to signs telling you that you didn’t belong. You also noticed, he added, that a country that some politicians liked to describe as full or overcrowded, and therefore in need of tighter borders, was full of open space.”

  #

• 26 July 2023

  Filed under: film

  Who Are the Japanese in Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’?

  Ryu Spaeth ponders the depiction – or lack of one – of Japanese people in the film Oppenheimer, an omission he finds strange given the historical intertwining of the two nation’s fates:

  “The legacy of the bomb, however, is more specific and concrete than Oppenheimer’s final vision of a world engulfed in nuclear fire. At the very same instant that the bomb created modern Japan in a burst of light, it also gave rise to the America we know today – America as superpower. Two new nations were born from this expression of the bomb’s divine power, and the cost of this transformation, like some ghastly blood sacrifice, were those 220,000 human beings who were either incinerated or succumbed to radiation poisoning, human beings Oppenheimer said were necessary to target to show what havoc the weapon could really wreak, which is to say that the inauguration of the American century would not have happened without the Japanese.”

  #

• 25 July 2023

  Filed under: art

  GRID WORLD by Alexander Miller

  A beautiful reminiscence on the power of grids, by Alexander Miller:

  “When I was a kid, my dad gave me a piece of paper with a grid printed on it. It consisted of larger squares than standard graph paper, about an inch in size. It was basically a blank chessboard. The columns of the grid were labeled with letters (‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, etc.), the rows labeled with numbers (‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, …). My dad then helped me draw a map of an imaginary island within the grid’s boundaries. I sketched the squiggly coastline of my island, forming a splattered blob shape, within which I added the obvious necessary features all mysterious islands require: forests of crudely draw trees, a mountain with a cave entrance leading to a secret underground network of caverns, an abandoned hut on the beach. There were variations of this game: sometimes the map was of a completely imaginary place, but other times we mapped a known area – like our backyard – and added fantastic elements.”

  #

• 

  9 July 2023

  Filed under: sense-making

  When enough is enough

  Sense-making involves knowing enough to act. But how do you know what “enough” means?

• 9 July 2023

  Filed under: advice

  How to Do Great Work

  Great life and career advice from Y Combinator founder Paul Graham:

  “Once you’ve found something you’re excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.

  “The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted.”

  #

• 9 July 2023

  Filed under: film

  Hipgnosis, the designers who changed the record sleeve for ever

  Anton Corbijn’s new film, about legendary album cover designers Hipgnosis, looks great.

  “Thorgerson and Powell were very different individuals, but that difference worked perfectly. Corbijn explains their dynamic: ‘They loved making things,’ says Corbijn. ‘One with great ideas and one with the technical skills to execute these ideas.’ He knows first-hand how demanding it is to deliver album design in its entirety: ‘I have done a lot of record sleeves in my life, but I’ve not designed that many. I may have taken the photo on the sleeve. Hipgnosis however, did everything. It’s amazing they came from nothing in a way. Neither of them were educated in the visual sense. They found ways to do the impossible.’”

  #

• 9 July 2023

  Filed under: politics

  Guam and the American military

  A fascinating New York Times piece about Guam, a piece of America that both is and isn’t part of the USA:

  “Guam, with its strategic location, quickly became home to Andersen Air Force Base, where B-52 bombers deploy on a rotational basis, and Naval Base Guam was expanded. The Guam tourism board’s slogan, Where America’s day begins!, was everywhere. The Guam Chamber of Commerce proudly proclaimed the island America in Asia! while Guam’s license plates read Guam, U.S.A.; but underneath that they also said Tano Y Chamorro — ‘the land of the CHamoru.’”

  As tensions between China and the USA ratchet up, Guam is uniquely and unfortunately placed:

  “In every iteration of war games between the United States and China run by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (C.S.I.S.), Beijing’s first strike on U.S. soil has been to bomb Guam.

  “Yet the island is largely forgotten by most Americans. Guam plays a central role in ‘homeland defense,’ though it rarely shows up on maps or in textbooks about the homeland — no place tries harder to show its patriotism and gets so little recognition in return.

  #

• 9 July 2023

  Filed under: politics

  The broker of Belarus

  An interesting profile in the New Statesman by Katie Stallard of Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s dictator and the recent mediator of the Wagner mutiny. It charts his rise from humble beginnings to absolute power in Belarus:

  “Born in 1954 in a poor village in eastern Belarus, Lukashenko was raised by a single mother who worked as a milkmaid, and he was bullied at school by other boys because he didn’t have a father. He served in the Soviet army and worked his way up through the Communist Party ranks to become the director of a collective pig farm in 1985, where he was once accused of beating a tractor driver with a shovel for coming to work drunk.”

  #

• 9 July 2023

  Filed under: philosophy

  Die With Zero: The Case for Not Leaving an Inheritance

  Paul Millerd reviews Bill Perkins’s fascinating book Die With Zero. Most people plan their lives on autopilot, working hard and saving as much as possible for retirement, but that’s a mistake:

  “This is a push against the default or what he calls ‘autopilot.’ Most people look at life and retirement as a money problem because, well, that is what everyone else is doing. By looking at life as a life energy allocation problem you might make different choices like giving money to your children while they are still alive, deprioritizing work and buying back time before you are ‘supposed’ to retire, and spending lavishly on experiences that might pay ‘memory dividends’ to you and people in your life.”

  Perkins emphasises the importance of making memories while you can:

  “As we get older, we spend more time reflecting on our lives. This is why Perkins argues that more people should think about old age as a combination of savings AND memories. Through this lens, having memorable experiences earlier in life, especially before retirement, can be valuable because they will pay memory dividends. And there’s good evidence that this is what makes people happy.”

  #

• 

  25 June 2023

  Filed under: sense-making

  Cynefin for the rest of us

  Explaining the popular sense-making framework Cynefin in the simplest terms I can.

• 25 June 2023

  Filed under: sense-making

  An unsuccessful coup

  Related to this week’s blog post about Cynefin, I wrote this early last year: an example from history, in this case the collapse of the Soviet Union, as seen through the eyes of Cynefin. #

• 25 June 2023

  Filed under: data

  Understanding variation – Orso

  From my blog over at Orso, a post on understanding the natural variation inherent in data. How do you know if a change in a metric is a cause for alarm, or just business as usual? #

• 25 June 2023

  Filed under: science

  Long Science

  Tim Hwang with a great post on long-term scientific experiments:

  “If you’re not already familiar… I highly recommend that you immediately stop what you’re doing and visit the Wikipedia page for ‘long-term experiment’. Then, check out Sam Arbesman’s collection of Long Data. Then, Michael Nielsen’s list of long projects.

  “If you’re anything like me, the scientific efforts that appear on these lists are deeply compelling. That’s due in part to their relative rarity. It’s hard to find cases of an experiment or a data collection effort that grinds away on the scale of decades, and easy to appreciate the uncommon dedication and focus they represent.

  “These efforts are also compelling on an epistemological level. They suggest that there is a wealth of valuable knowledge to be gleaned from even fairly humble explorations that operate over a long, long period of time.”

  Tim reckons that such experiments are under-performed, especially given how simple and cheap they can be relative to the insights they can deliver. He suggests a new way of funding them:

  “One approach could be to popularize a style of grant that I call TILT – tiny investment, long term. Under a TILT grant, a foundation or government agency would award grantees a relatively small stream of money spread out over an extremely long period of time, say twenty or thirty years.”

  #

• 23 June 2023

  Filed under: creativity

  How to Differentiate Your ideas: The XY Premise Pitch

  A useful tool from Jay Acunzo, which helps to define how an idea differs from the competition that’s already out there:

  “Unfortunately, most of us get stuck playing comparison games. I think that’s because most of us are quick to spoil the possibilities for ourselves. We can’t wait to see the score. We can’t wait to look in the box at the cat. We can’t wait to figure out the best practice, or else we spend too much time consuming things inside our echo chamber. We adopt a narrow view right from the beginning instead of considering endless possibilities — which should be the hallmark of any creative person. As a result of being so anchored to our peers and competitors, when it’s time to pitch our premises, it sounds like a comparison.”

  #

• 23 June 2023

  Filed under: strategy

  Reality first, brand second

  A sobering post from Mark Hadfield, whose “Meet the 85%” agency speaks to real people up and down the UK, seeking to understand what’s going on in their lives. He’s piercing the bubble that lots of businesses and marketers live in.

  “Yet the unfortunate reality is that burying your head in the sand is not an option any more. As our good friend Richard Huntington says: ‘Hope is not a strategy.’

  “Reality is here to stay. And for the foreseeable future – whether you like it or not, regardless if it doesn’t align with your brand onion – the reality people are living now and for a while is pretty grim.”

  #

• 

  18 June 2023

  Filed under: sense-making

  For the sake of argument

  Narratives are particularly useful because they’re flexible, and can be updated when circumstances change. But how does that happen in a social setting?

• 18 June 2023

  Filed under: self-promotion

  Orso: a commercial, consumer & creative strategy consultancy

  This week I started my own strategy consultancy. It’s called Orso, and it provides commercial, consumer and creative strategy for creative agencies and consumer brands. The website explains more.

  (In case you’re wondering about the name: itsitalianforbear.com.) #

• 17 June 2023

  Filed under: sports

  The football tactics of Fluminense and Fernando Diniz

  I’m sure not everyone – not even a majority, in fact – of the people reading Roblog are into football, let alone in-depth tactical analysis of it. But this is a fascinating video even if you’re not that way inclined.

  Fernando Diniz, the coach of Brazilian team Fluminense, has developed a radically new approach to tactics. Rejecting the systematic, shape-obsessed style of successful managers such as Pep Guardiola, Diniz’s approach appears to be chaotic. But it’s actually incredibly well-drilled – and successful.

  It’s a footballing application of so many things I talk about on Roblog. Like Cynefin (the players are constantly trying to get the game out of the merely “complicated” domain and into something more complex and unpredictable for their opponents). Or the difference between competence and literacy (the players aren’t concerned with playing a role; they’re genuinely improvising). Or systems thinking vs. sensemaking (the players aren’t interested in the system and its boundaries, they’re interested in the relationships between themselves).

  The deeper-dive article that the video mentions, Jamie Hamilton’s What is Relationism?, is also great if this stuff piques your interest. #

• 8 June 2023

  Filed under: food

  The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America

  Myles Karp on why there are so many Thai restaurants in America, far more than the population of Thai-Americans would suggest:

  “Thai restaurants are everywhere in America. Mexican and Chinese restaurants might be more plentiful, but there are demographic reasons that explain the proliferation of these cuisines. With over 36 million Mexican-Americans and around five million Chinese-Americans, it’s no surprise that these populations’ cuisines have become woven into America’s cultural fabric. Comparatively, according to a representative from the Royal Thai Embassy in DC, there are just 300,000 Thai-Americans—less than 1 percent the size of the the Mexican-American population. Yet there are an estimated 5,342 Thai restaurants in the United States, compared to around 54,000 Mexican restaurants; that’s ten times the population-to-restaurant ratio. So, why are there so many Thai restaurants in the US?”

  I’ve thought the exact same thing about the UK, and had idly assumed that it was because there were lots of Thai-Americans and we were influenced by American cuisine. The actual answer is fascinating. #

• 

  4 June 2023

  Filed under: sense-making

  The importance of narrative

  The importance of storytelling within sense-making, and what makes for an effective sense-making narrative.
• 

  28 May 2023

  Filed under: sense-making

  Defining sense-making

  An attempt to define “sense-making” in a straightforward and useful way, avoiding academic or obtuse language.

• 28 May 2023

  Filed under: politics

  Britain is Dead

  Samuel McIlhagga strikes a pessimistic note about Britain’s prospects:

  “The overall trajectory becomes obvious when you look at outcomes in productivity, investment, capacity, research and development, growth, quality of life, GDP per capita, wealth distribution, and real wage growth measured by unit labor cost. All are either falling or stagnant. Reporting from the Financial Times has claimed that at current levels, the UK will be poorer than Poland in a decade, and will have a lower median real income than Slovenia by 2024. Many provincial areas already have lower GDPs than Eastern Europe.”

  …and, most interestingly, digs into the long historical context that leads up to this point; this modern malaise has deep roots. #

• 28 May 2023

  Filed under: ai

  The Platypus in the Room

  Drew Breunig compares AI to a platypus – usefully, as it happens:

  “When trying to get your head around a new technology, it helps to focus on how it challenges existing categorizations, conventions, and rule sets. Internally, I’ve always called this exercise, ‘dealing with the platypus in the room.’ Named after the category-defying animal; the duck-billed, venomous, semi-aquatic, egg-laying mammal.

  “There’s been plenty of platypus over the years in tech. Crypto. Data Science. Social Media. But AI is the biggest platypus I’ve ever seen… Nearly every notable quality of AI and LLMs challenges our conventions, categories, and rulesets.”

  #

• 28 May 2023

  Filed under: organisations

  Normalising Feedback

  Lingjing Yin thinks about how to get better at delivering feedback within teams, something that people are generally pretty bad at:

  “How might we treat feedback as an opportunity to learn rather than to teach and go into it with a curious mindset to explore the strengths, gaps and opportunities of each other and the context we are part of?”

  #

• 

  21 May 2023

  Filed under: sense-making

  An introduction to sense-making

  The first in a series of articles about sense-making, the practice of making sense of the world and making decisions on how to act

• 8 May 2023

  Filed under: ukraine

  Time for Ukraine's Offensive?

  Clear analysis on the potential upcoming Ukrainian offensive from the peerless Lawrence Freedman:

  “Putin and his commanders cannot afford to get many more of the big strategic decisions wrong. If they do so then they will face the prospect of not only futile stalemate but of humiliating withdrawals. I am less convinced than others that they can continue to brush off one setback after another simply because that is what autocratic police states can do, pretending to their people that nothing seriously has gone wrong. Insouciance and misinformation can take you only so far.”

  #

• 7 May 2023

  Filed under: photography

  Coronation of King Charles III – Re:LDN

  I went to see the crowds at the coronation this weekend, to see if it felt like history in the making. The mood was hard to gauge; the rain really put a dampener on things. But the crowd felt so much less reverential than when the Queen died, so much less moved, so much less interested. If someone travelled back in time and told me that this was in fact the last ever British coronation, I wouldn’t be enormously surprised. #

• 2 May 2023

  Filed under: food

  William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker

  The Gentle Author went with photographer Tom Bunning to see William Oglethorpe, who makes his Kappacasein cheese under a railway arch in Bermondsey. (It’s incredible cheese, if you get the chance to try it; they do a “London Raclette” that’s every bit as good as you’d hope.)

  “‘Cheesemaking is easy, it’s life that is hard,’ Bill admitted to me with a disarming grin, when I joined the cheesemakers for their breakfast at a long table and he revealed the long journey he had travelled to arrive in Bermondsey. ‘I grew up in Zambia,’ he explained, ‘And one day a Swiss missionary came to see my father and asked if I’d like to go to agricultural school in Switzerland.’

  “‘I earned a certificate of competence,’ he added proudly, assuring me with a wink, ‘I’m a qualified peasant.’”

  #

• 29 April 2023

  Filed under: food

  The Battle Over Refrigerating Butter

  I knew that butter lasted for a while out of the fridge, but didn’t realise quite how long – to the point that many people advocate never refrigerating it in the first place:

  “In 2015, Ms. Mertzel sent samples of four brands of butter to a lab for testing. The finding: No sign of spoilage after three weeks of storage at 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit [20 to 25 degrees celsius]. She commissioned a similar analysis this year and found no spoilage after 30 days.

  “‘This is a quality issue, not a safety issue,’ said Gina Mode, a butter researcher at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research. Butter will eventually go rancid but that won’t make people sick, she said. Ms. Mode in an informal survey of her colleagues found that 24 of 31 keep butter out, a telling data point among experts.”

  #

• 28 April 2023

  Filed under: data

  Five graphs that changed the world

  Adam Rutherford showcases five data visualisations that changed the world, for both good and ill:

  1. John Snow’s dot map of Soho, that led to an understanding of the transmission of cholera

  2. Florence Nightingale’s Coxcomb of military deaths in the Crimean War

  3. W. E. B. Du Bois’s graphs of African-American advancement in the years following slavery

  4. Henry Goddard’s Kallikak family tree, used to justify eugenics

  5. Ed Hawkins’s global warming colour stripes

  #

• 28 April 2023

  Filed under: technology

  What the UK should – and should not – do about semiconductors

  Richard Jones, whose Soft Machines blog is a great read on industrial strategy, sets out what the UK should do to build an effective semiconductor strategy – of huge importance given the emergence of compute-hungry AIs. The options aren’t amazing, mainly because we’ve been neglectful in the past:

  “The UK’s limited options in this strategically important technology should make us reflect on the decisions – implicit and explicit – that led the UK to be in such a weak position.

  “Korea & Taiwan – with less ideological aversion to industrial strategy than UK – rode the wave of the world’s fastest developing technology while the UK sat on the sidelines. Their economic performance has surpassed the UK.”

  #

• 26 April 2023

  Filed under: creativity

  Sleeping beauties: the evolutionary innovations that wait millions of years to come good

  Andreas Wagner, in an extract from his new book, details the evolutions – in both biology and human culture – that lay dormant for years before suddenly encountering the conditions in which to become successful:

  “These and many other new life forms remained dormant before succeeding explosively. They are the sleeping beauties of biological evolution. They cast doubt on many widely assumed beliefs about success and failure. And these doubts apply not just to the innovations of nature, but also to those of human culture.”

  This reminds me of the theory of the “slow hunch”, which Clive Thompson wrote about last year. #

• 

  23 April 2023

  Filed under: organisations

  AI and coal mines

  On the cusp of the widespread adoption of AI, which organisations will successfully adopt it and which will fail? As ever, there’s a lesson from history.

• 23 April 2023

  Filed under: ai

  The Internet Is Suddenly Full Of AI-Generated Hip-Hop

  A couple of months ago a video did the rounds of David Guetta, who’d used AI to conjure up a realistic-sounding sample of Eminem. It was interesting, but also pretty meh: it sounded like Eminem, sure, but the lyrics were nonsensical and it all had a slightly uncanny feel about it. It felt like the jobs of rappers were safe for now.

  Then, a couple of weeks ago, hip-hop duo Alltta released the song Savages, and everything changed. It illustrated how far things have come in just a couple of months, but also how incredible human-AI collaborations could be: it features lyrics by rapper Mr. J Medeiros, delivered in the unmistakeable flow of Jay-Z, backed by a genuinely good beat. It’s amazing and scary in equal measure.

  Over at BuzzFeed News (RIP), Chris Stokel-Walker takes a tour through some of the recent developments in AI-generated hip-hop, and delves into the legal issues that are looming:

  “While a consensus is forming that generative AI is potentially troublesome, no one really knows whether hobbyist creators are on shaky legal ground or not. pieawsome said he thinks of what he does as the equivalent of modding a game or producing fanfiction based on a popular book. ‘It’s our version of that,’ he said. ‘That may be a good thing. It may be a bad thing. I don’t know. But it’s kind of an inevitable thing that was going to happen.’”

  #

• 17 April 2023

  Filed under: social-media

  In a way, this is how it should be

  Brian Feldman on why the slow-motion shambles that is Twitter feels like a throwback to the old web:

  “My current theory of Musk is that he’s a guy who did a lot of coding many, many years ago and it made him very rich and confident, and so nobody who still works at Twitter has the energy to correct him when assumes, ‘If we go into the <img> tag and change twitterbird.png to doge.png, we’ll have ourselves an epic prank.’

  “Being able to sense someone messing with a website in real-time, moving the menu items around and forgetting to close an HTML tag here and there, is a neat feeling. It feels scrappy. I don’t mean to excuse any of this and I feel kinda bad for people who still rely on Twitter. But as someone with no skin in the game, I am enjoying the process, if not the result. I honestly prefer the dynamism of a guy who keeps changing the layout of the world’s most expensive MySpace page to sites of comparable scale promising me a new, inconsequential feature.”

  #

• 16 April 2023

  Filed under: culture

  The age of average

  Alex Murrell perfectly joins the dots on so many threads of modern culture, and why they’re all so… samey.

  “So, there you have it. The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.”

  Murrell’s argument is that, in an increasingly homogeneous world, there’s a greater opportunity than ever to do something different – greater returns to distinctiveness, if you will. But I wonder whether that’s really the case. The bland world Murrell describes is one of our own making: algorithms serve us content, and we engage with the blandest bits; market research firms ask us our opinions, and they turn out to be pretty bland too; Airbnb offers us the world and we choose to stay in identikit apartments. Does the world really cry out for distinctiveness and diversity? Or is that only the predilection of art directors and aesthetes? #

• 16 April 2023

  Filed under: ai

  Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages

  Izzy Miller trained a large language model – similar to GPT – on the entire history of his friends’ group chats, which had been running for years. He then hosted an interactive version of it for his friends, so they could all chat with the AI versions of themselves. It worked surprisingly well:

  “This has genuinely provided more hours of deep enjoyment for me and my friends than I could have imagined. Something about the training process optimized for outrageous behavior, and seeing your conversations from a third-person perspective casts into stark relief how ridiculous and hilarious they can be.”

  The post contains lots of technical details, if you have the urge to do something similar yourself. #

• 16 April 2023

  Filed under: politics

  The mystery of Morocco’s missing king

  Morocco’s king has become increasingly absent over the past few years, to the frustration of the nation’s bureaucrats. A potential cause? His friendship with three Moroccan-German kickboxing brothers. Nicolas Pelham tells the bizzare story in The Economist; it’s illustrative not just of Morocco’s fraught post-colonial history but of its place in the Arab world, too.

  “Five years ago, an unusual image appeared on Instagram. It showed Mohammed VI, the 54-year-old king of Morocco, sitting on a sofa next to a muscular man in sportswear. The two men were pressed up next to each other with matching grins like a pair of kids at summer camp. Moroccans were more accustomed to seeing their king alone on a gilded throne.

  ‘The story behind the picture was even stranger. Abu Azaitar, the 32-year-old man sitting next to the king, is a veteran of the German prison system as well as a mixed-martial-arts (MMA) champion. Since he moved to Morocco in 2018 his bling-filled Instagram feed has caused the country’s conservative elite to shudder. It’s not just the flashy cars, it’s the strikingly informal tone in which he addresses the monarch: ‘Our dear King,’ he wrote next to one photo of the two of them together. ‘I can’t thank him enough for everything he has done for us.’”

  #

• 16 April 2023

  Filed under: social-media

  The Influencer Industry

  Emily Hund’s new book examines the organic origins of influencer culture: the world of blogging that emerged in the late noughties.

  “Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves and each other.”

  #

• 

  9 April 2023

  Filed under: knowledge

  The decisions of dictators

  Autocrats, trapped by the dynamics of power, often make awful decisions. Why is that?

• 9 April 2023

  Filed under: toys

  Why Lego won (YouTube)

  Lego wasn’t the first stacking brick aimed at kids, but it became overwhelmingly dominant. Why? Phil Edwards explains. #

• 9 April 2023

  Filed under: gambling

  How to beat roulette

  A long read from Bloomberg on a Croatian gambler who seemingly cracked roulette, winning millions at casinos across the world apparently without cheating.

  “It wasn’t the amount of money at stake that made the Ritz security team anxious. Customers routinely made several million pounds in an evening and left carrying designer bags bulging with cash. It was the way these three were winning: consistently, over hundreds of rounds. ‘It is practically impossible to predict the number that will come up,’ Stephen Hawking once wrote about roulette. ‘Otherwise physicists would make a fortune at casinos.’ The game was designed to be random; chaos, elegantly rendered in circular motion.

  “When the Croatian left the casino in the early hours of March 16, he’d turned £30,000 worth of chips into a £310,000 check. His Serbian partner did even better, making £684,000 from his initial £60,000. He asked for a half-million in two checks and the rest in cash. That brought the group’s take, including from earlier sessions, to about £1.3 million. And Tosa wasn’t done. He told casino employees he planned to return the next day.”

  #

• 9 April 2023

  Filed under: philosophy

  The paradox of Alan Watts

  There’s a P&O advert airing at the moment with a voiceover of Alan Watts spouting platitudes about following your dreams. The choice of Watts for a luxury cruise ad was a decision I found odd, given Watts’s reputation (in my mind) as a schlocky new-age huckster. Gus Carter agrees, in some entertaining detail:

  “Watts’s philosophy is difficult to define. He spoke in aphorisms, linguistically clear but conceptually fragmented reflections on the contradictions of human experience. He rejected the idea of the individual and spoke of the ‘European dissociation’, the feeling of oneself as an outsider in a hostile world. Instead, he argued, we are all the universe and any sense of one’s own desires or exertions are merely an expression of the singular universe unfolding.

  “In one lecture, Watts explains: ‘As you cannot conceive, possibly, of the existence of a living body with no environment, that is the clue that the two are basically one… You are both what you do and what happens to you.’ It is a strange argument: you can easily imagine an environment without humans. How is it then that nature and human experience can be described as one and the same? But his pronouncements aren’t designed to be logically analysed. It’s a philosophy of vibes.”

  #

• 24 March 2023

  Filed under: sustainability

  Counterproductive Sustainable Investing

  An interesting paper by Samuel M. Hartzmark and Kelly Shue outlining a counter-intuitive aspect of ESG investing.

  The ESG consensus is that you should invest in companies that do good, and not invest in companies that do bad. If you do that, you’ll make it harder to do business for companies doing bad things (by raising the cost of capital for them). That’s then a good incentive for those companies to behave better (and therefore access more, cheaper investment).

  But Hartzmark and Shue argue that this is counterproductive. If you invest in an already-good business, there’s much less scope for them to improve in absolute terms. And if you don’t invest in bad businesses, you make it hard for them to make big investments (which means they won’t create new technologies to reduce emissions), and you put pressure on them to make money in the short term in order to survive (which means they’ll do bad things like mine more coal or produce more diesel engines).

  ESG investing effectively makes bad companies worse, without making good companies better – because it lacks a mechanism for rewarding companies for absolute reductions in impact. #

• 22 March 2023

  Filed under: finance

  Why is finance so complex?

  A superb (and apposite) essay from Steve Randy Waldman, writing in 2011, on why finance is necessarily complex and opaque, and why removing that complexity and opacity is impossible and undesirable:

  “This is the business of banking. Opacity is not something that can be reformed away, because it is essential to banks’ economic function of mobilizing the risk-bearing capacity of people who, if fully informed, wouldn’t bear the risk. Societies that lack opaque, faintly fraudulent, financial systems fail to develop and prosper. Insufficient economic risks are taken to sustain growth and development. You can have opacity and an industrial economy, or you can have transparency and herd goats.”

  The “faintly fraudulent” aspect reminds me of Dan Davies’s brilliant book Lying for Money, which I wrote about last year. A certain amount of fraud in a society is desirable; completely eliminating fraud would also completely eliminate all other forms of commerce. #

• 21 March 2023

  Filed under: architecture

  Crystal Lake Pavilion

  A beautiful building, designed by Marc Thorpe, that appears to float over the surface of Crystal Lake in New York.

  

  #

• 17 March 2023

  Filed under: ai

  Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT and AI

  The great linguist Noam Chomsky outlines his frustrations with the buzz around generative AI: principally, that it might obscure the wonder of humanity and our incredible real intelligence.

  “The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

  …

  “Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case – that’s description and prediction – but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.”

  #

• 17 March 2023

  Filed under: organisations

  On Relational Infrastructure

  Sam Rye with a fascinating comparison between the informal, emergent relationships that become established in organisations and the mycorrhizal networks that link plants within forests.

  “Much like when we began to understand the web of mycelial connections were fundamental to the health of the forest, illuminating relational infrastructure can help us see why leaving relationship building to happen in the coffee breaks is a terrible idea.”

  (Thanks Flo!) #

• 19 February 2023

  Filed under: technology

  Can We Trust Search Engines with Generative AI?

  The buzz this week has been about Microsoft’s launch of its AI interface to the Bing search engine. Simon Willison, among others, has documented the frankly insane responses that people have managed to coax out of it; it’s clear that, from a safety perspective, this AI really isn’t ready for prime time.

  But how does it fare on accuracy? Nick Diakopoulos of Northwestern University fact-checked some of Bing’s answers – and the results aren’t pretty:

  “But, when it comes to accuracy it’s a different story. I found factual inaccuracies in 7 of the 15 responses (47%). There were also several responses that provided references for a sentence which did not include evidence of the claim in that sentence. Sometimes the claims were accurate, and other times not accurate, but either way there’s a sort of unwarranted credibility conveyed, where the citations to news outlets give a trust signal, but don’t actually support the claim made.”

  #

• 19 February 2023

  Filed under: film

  Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

  A charming new film from Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate, that’s out in cinemas now. From Mark Kermode’s review:

  ”While subjects as dark as separation and death may be faced head-on (a reading from Philip Larkin’s The Trees had me in tears), there’s a comedic quality that reminded me of Aardman’s sublime Creature Comforts animations – a joyous juxtaposition of quotidian, vérité-style dialogue and fancifully inventive visuals that hits a tragicomic sweet spot.”

  #

• 19 February 2023

  Filed under: technology

  Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing

  James Vincent on why we keep failing to understand the sentience of generative AIs – why, in effect, we keep failing the “mirror test”:

  “The mirror is the latest breed of AI chatbots, of which Microsoft’s Bing is the most prominent example. The reflection is humanity’s wealth of language and writing, which has been strained into these models and is now reflected back to us. We’re convinced these tools might be the superintelligent machines from our stories because, in part, they’re trained on those same tales. Knowing this, we should be able to recognize ourselves in our new machine mirrors, but instead, it seems like more than a few people are convinced they’ve spotted another form of life.”

  #

• 

  12 February 2023

  Filed under: organisations

  Coordination without communication

  Imagine you had to meet someone in New York City. You couldn’t communicate with them in advance; you only knew that you had to meet them somewhere in the city at some point on a particular day. Where and when would you choose to go, in order to maximise the chances of meeting them?

• 12 February 2023

  Filed under: agility

  The Perils of Prudence

  Abraham Thomas with a well-expressed solution to the apparent contradiction that startups require both stamina and speed:

  “If startups are a marathon, then staying power should count for more than speed. Conversely, if speed is the key, then why worry about stamina and resilience and the long haul?

  “One way to resolve this contradiction is to simply say, this is why startups are hard. You have to do both: go as fast as you can for as long as you can. Sprint the marathon.

  “But I think there’s a deeper resolution, and I found it in events from over a hundred years ago.”

  His examples are from the golden age of Antarctic exploration, and Scott’s and Amundsen’s competing attempts to reach the South Pole. #

• 25 January 2023

  Filed under: business

  What Companies Still Get Wrong About Layoffs

  As the tech industry in particular fires people in their tens of thousands, Sandra J. Sucher and Marilyn Morgan Westner explain something I’ve always felt intuitively about mass layoffs:

  “I’ve studied layoffs since 2009… the short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation – all of which hurt profits in the long run.”

  #

• 25 January 2023

  Filed under: weird

  I ate 40 rotisserie chickens in 40 days

  A news story that, in true Ronseal fashion, does exactly what it says on the tin:

  “It began as a way to make myself a little uncomfortable, which I think is necessary in life. I wanted to return to simplicity – eat a cooked chicken every day, with no sauces, no condiments. I never imagined it would take off in the way it did. What captured people’s imaginations? A rotisserie chicken is very evocative: with even just the word, you can smell it, taste it, feel the grease beneath your fingertips. I like that it’s a simple, mundane thing.”

  #

• 12 January 2023

  Filed under: knowledge

  The Chinese Businessman Paradox

  A great article by Cedric Chin of Commoncog about the stereotype within the Chinese diaspora of the person who just “gets business”. Chin maintains that it has nothing to do with innate talent:

  “But the perception of ‘business savvy’ or ‘not business savvy’ as an inborn trait, unchangeable by circumstance, is hardcoded into our culture; an inalienable part of the ‘traditional Chinese businessman’.

  “I reject this notion almost as strongly as I reject the notion of pre-ordained destiny.”

  …but is rather the result of a particularly earthy and practical sort of knowledge, hard-won from trial and error. There’s a series of articles that explores this education and decision-making, and there’s lots of interesting gems within them. #