It’s been a bit quiet on the blog lately, so I thought I’d bring back the link roundup thing I used to do quite a bit. Here’s some stuff I read and enjoyed recently outside the regular product/business topics I usually write about here…

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Very good summary of The OpenAI Keynote by Ben Thompson. This bit stood out to me:

The fact of the matter is that a lot of people use ChatGPT for information despite the fact it has a well-documented flaw when it comes to the truth; that flaw is acceptable, because to the customer ease-of-use is worth the loss of accuracy.

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I’ve been following Craig Mod’s work for over a decade and know what to expect, yet his reflections on “Aloneness” took my breath away.

The real shitter is that if you’ve inured yourself to living in this state of aloneness, it can be difficult to break the habits that have led to it. Aloneness as default becomes comforting, and habits built around aloneness feel palliative because they’re known, and we tend to repeat familiar actions, even if they hurt us.

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Great essay by Anne Helen Peterson on how friendship changes over time—including a period she calls “The Friendship Dip”:

Right now, the way our society is organized, we have a prolonged stretch of adulthood that is not conducive to forging or sustaining friendship or community. In many cases, I’d say it’s actually hostile to it.

Everything about the new U2 show sounds amazing. So sad I don’t have tickets.

Zoo TV had predated reality TV, fake news, social media—all these things. Bono had heard about this new venue in Vegas with nearly 20,000 seats, custom sound and an incredible screen that was akin to the whole audience having a VR experience. In the post-Covid era, it was appealing not to have to travel every night

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Every new house in Portland uses this font for the house number, and now I can’t get this article out of my head. “The gentrification font: how a sleek typeface became a neighborhood omen”:

As Neutraface house numbers have become too commonplace to ignore, some now associate them (along with gray paint jobs) with neighborhoods overtaken by construction and renovations.

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Feels like spam is about to get a lot harder to detect… “Inside the Underground World of Black Market AI Chatbots”:

We’ve got folks who are building LLMs that are designed to write more convincing phishing email scams or allowing them to code new types of malware because they’re trained off the code from previously available malware.

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And finally, for my fellow Northerners… “How to light the dark months” has some excellent advice—not just the normal stuff we’ve all read a thousand times.

Lighting winter is an art and a daily practice, an act of survival and a gesture of love. Here are 10 ideas for fighting the gloom in the dark half of the year.

There’s a concept in UX design that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the context of interpersonal work relationships. It’s called “The 9x Effect” and I wrote about it… checks watch… 10 years ago. In short (and heavily simplified), customers value their existing solution/product 3x more than any new “innovation”, and companies overvalue their innovative new product by 3x of what’s currently in the market. So you end up with a 9x mismatch between what companies build and what people believe they need.

There’s another adage that when someone cuts you off in traffic they’re a jerk, but if you cut someone off you had a good reason. We tend to rationalize our own actions while not giving others the benefit of the doubt.

So I’ve been thinking about this in the context of competence at work. I wonder if we sometimes overvalue our own competencies by 3x, and undervalue others’ skills by 3x[1]. And I wonder how that affects the efficiency and health of organizations. We all have a tendency—especially in large organizations—to disagree with strategy, or at the more extreme end of the spectrum, view leadership as “inept” or “clueless”. And I wonder if it’s because of the 9x effect, and if we can all just divide our own opinions by 3 things would get a lot better.

What might happen if as employees we go “well maybe the way I think it should be done is only ⅓ of the answer”. And what if, in turn, leaders go “maybe the way I think things should be done is only a ⅓ of the answer.” Would we be able to come together in the middle and make better decisions together, and in doing so massively improve a company’s culture, autonomy, and efficiency? Sorry, I don’t mean to be a vague question-talker with this post, but I am genuinely curious about this.

A little more critique of ourselves, a little more grace for others… I think I’d like to try that.

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1. Yes, I’m very familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect. What I’m talking about here is a bit broader and through a different lens.  ↩

I came across a couple of really helpful articles recently about how to start a new job well. 30 Tips for New Startup Employees is a long and super useful read—and not just relevant for startups:

Align yourself with the risks of the company. If you’re an engineer but the company is not acquiring customers fast enough, spend your time in marketing. Have range, and don’t try to be too narrow in your focus in the early days. Gain knowledge in a few different areas of the business so you can reduce the overall risks of the company.

Learn How The System Breaks is more relevant to technical roles, but I think “failure streams” can be expanded to other areas of the business as well:

Failure streams are a short circuit to understanding the system, because failures are where the system is interesting and nuanced. Failures are where the heart of complexity, entropy, and flux in the system are. Everything that doesn’t fail behaves like the architecture diagram. Failures show where the architecture isn’t working as intended. By focusing on failures, engineers can onboard quickly into the most important part of the system - the part with problems.

These are all great tips. The one I would add as most important for me personally is related to the concept of Chesterton’s fence:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’

Or to put it in terms of systems thinking:

Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened. If possible, find or make a time graph of actual data from the system. Peoples’ memories are not always reliable when it comes to timing.

When you join a new organization you’re probably going to see a lot of random “fences across roads.” Instead of saying “let’s tear this thing down,” first ask “why is this fence here?” There is always a reason, and it’s very likely that there is value in the reasoning. First understand, then make change.