Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity and the Invisible Professional. Picture a meeting you’ve been in — probably more than once. The agenda is ambitious, the stakes are real, and you’ve done your homework... And somehow, again, the meeting moves around you. The person who delivered three confident-sounding sentences about “alignment” and “moving the needle” gets the nod. Your point — the careful one, the one with the nuance and the caveats and the actual evidence — gets a polite “that’s interesting” before the conversation cheerfully rolls on without it. (mediocrity) (more)

Jim Highsmith frames Practitioner Voice. I've been called a Thought Leader. I don't love the term. But I've used it, because there wasn't another one. (more)

Ian Alexander: Book Review: Donald Schon - The Reflective Practitioner. Readers of my reviews will know that I have been interested for some years in the dialogue between action (do something) and reflection, discussed admirably by John Heron and Peter Reason, and put into practice in their Co-operative Inquiry method. Donald Schön is one of the seemingly few people to have written about reflection and its role in professional life; it is a tricky subject, as it lies between the domains of academia and industry, and must be both theoretically accurate and practically useful to succeed fully. (reflective thinker) (more)

John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons;[nb 1] October 2, 1914 – June 17, 1952) was an American rocket engineer and rocket propulsion researcher, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Associated with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant,[1] and pioneered the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets... After a brief involvement with Marxism in 1939, Parsons converted to Thelema, the English occultist Aleister Crowley's new religious movement. In 1941, with his first wife Helen Northrup, Parsons joined the Agape Lodge, the Californian branch of the Thelemite Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.). At Crowley's bidding, he replaced Wilfred Talbot Smith as its leader in 1942 and ran the Lodge from his mansion on Orange Grove Avenue. Parsons was expelled from JPL and Aerojet in 1944 due to the Lodge's infamous reputation and his hazardous workplace conduct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Whiteside_Parsons (more)

Computer Mandate, supposedly from a 1979 internal IBM presentation. (more)

write of IntuitionMachine medium-newsletter, about AI. https://medium.com/intuitionmachine (more)

the Apple Macintosh Operating System built on top of FreeBSD. (more)

Pranav Dhoolia on Adding ChatGPT-Like functionality to MacOS Spotlight Search. In one of my YouTube videos, I locally hosted LLMs using Ollama, and interacted with them in a ChatGPT like interface using Ollama Web UI also hosted locally. This continues that journey. Here, I build a solution using a locally hosted LLM and LangChain (the most popular framework for building LLM solutions). (more)

Cedric Chin: Announcing Speedrunning the Idea Maze. Launching a new product? Starting a new company? You're probably quietly terrified ... and that’s ok. (more)

Cedric Chin: Improv and the Search for Product Market Fit. Here’s a funny thing that happens with frameworks. If you read a framework first, and then look for cases afterwards, you’ll inevitably start seeing cases through the lens of the framework. Worse, you’ll try to force cases into the shape of the framework. (more)

Causal reasoning is the process of identifying causality: the relationship between a cause and its effect. The study of causality extends from ancient philosophy to contemporary neuropsychology; assumptions about the nature of causality may be shown to be functions of a previous event preceding a later one. The first known protoscientific study of cause and effect occurred in Aristotle's Physics.[1] Causal inference is an example of causal reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_reasoning (aka causal thinking)

Cedric Chin: The Idea Maze is a Useless Idea. In 2022, I launched an experimental series of cases on the ‘Idea Maze’. The term ‘Idea Maze’ is a Silicon Valley (or tech industry)-ism ; it was originally coined by former Coinbase exec Balaji Srinivasan and then expanded on in a subsequent essay by venture capitalist Chris Dixon. ((2022-08-23) Chin The Idea Maze Cases) (more)

guru of effectual reasoning (more)

In finance, an inverted yield curve is a yield curve in which short-term debt instruments (typically bonds) have a greater yield (interest rate) than longer term bonds. An inverted yield curve is an unusual phenomenon; bonds with shorter maturities generally provide lower yields than longer term bonds.[2][3] To determine whether the yield curve is inverted, it is a common practice to compare the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond to either a 2-year Treasury note or a 3-month Treasury bill. If the 10-year yield is less than the 2-year or 3-month yield, the curve is inverted. (treasury market) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_yield_curve (more)

The Single Best Interview Question You Can Ask In Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future there is a great section on the single best interview question you can ask someone. When Peter Thiel interviews someone he likes to ask the following question: What important truth do very few people agree with you on? (more)

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Rationality is Systematized Winning. There is a meme which says that a certain ritual of cognition is the paragon of reasonableness and so defines what the reasonable people do. But alas, the reasonable people often get their butts handed to them by the unreasonable ones, because the universe isn't always reasonable. Reason is just a way of doing things, not necessarily the most formidable; it is how professors talk to each other in debate halls, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. If a hoard of barbarians attacks the debate hall, the truly prudent and flexible agent will abandon reasonableness. (more)

a John Boyd briefing, also published as book ISBN:978585662791

Scott Alexander SSC Journal Club: Mental Disorders As Networks. Suppose you have sniffles, fatigue, muscle aches, and headache. You go to the doctor, who diagnoses you with influenza and gives you some Tamiflu. (more)

Martin Cagan: The Era of the Product Creator. I have been emphasizing that the heart of the product manager job is product creation. (more)

A Promising Heart Drug Fails, Challenging a Long-Held Theory of Disease. The drug targeted inflammation, and its shocking failure has experts questioning whether inflammation really does cause heart disease. (more)