Byrne Hobart: Bullshit Jobs is a Terrible, Curiosity-Killing Concept. David Graeber died in 2020, but "Bullshit Jobs" still gets thrown around a lot. I was uncomfortable with the concept, but had never read the book so I didn't feel especially comfortable being dismissive. This was a mistake. If you don't own a copy, don't bother buying one. If you own a copy, consider reading it an act of meta-anthropology, exploring why a professional anthropologist could be so relentlessly, aggressively incurious about the lives and experiences of others. (more)

David Schmaltz has an interesting series of posts on Scientific Management. (more)

Cedric Chin: Product Development as Iterated Taste. Working Backwards is the first book to describe how Amazon really works, written by two insiders who were in the room when the techniques were first invented. I finished the book a few weeks ago, and I’m still chewing on many of the ideas (more)

Dino Karabeg on the past and future of Douglas Engelbart's work, provide Context for: The Club Of Zagreb is a creative redesign of The Club Of Rome where the ends are similar, but the means are entirely different. (more)

My job is extrapolating everything to its most absurd extreme. (more)

group of folks trying to grow a scene around sense-making: Ronen Tamari, Gabriel Chartier, etc. (more)

I’m a researcher and entrepreneur working on distributed collective intelligence systems to help us think better, together. I’m building Cosmik (Collective Sensemaking Networks), a new kind of social network combining AI and semantic nanopublishing, to improve how we collectively curate, evaluate, disseminate and discuss scientific research. My PhD thesis focused on cognitive-inspired computational models of natural language understanding. I’m particularly interested in embodied and stigmergic cognition, and the role of learning environments in shaping human and machine intelligence. https://ronentk.github.io/ (more)

aka Gerald M. Weinberg. http://www.geraldmweinberg.com/ Here's a longer bio. Died 2018. (more)

Adam Butler I've got bad news. The AI cycle is over for now. (more)

Book-in-progress (to-come Sept'2022?) by Brad DeLong. What I call the “long twentieth century” started with the watershed-boundary crossing events of around 1870—the triple emergence of globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation—which ushered in changes that began to pull the world out of the dire poverty that had been humanity’s lot for the previous ten thousand years. What I call the “long twentieth century” ended in 2010, with the world’s leading economic edge, the countries of the North Atlantic, still reeling from the Great Recession that had begun in 2008, and thereafter unable to resume economic growth at anything near the average pace that had been the rule since 1870. The years following 2010 were to bring large system-destabilizing waves of political and cultural anger from masses of citizens, all upset in different ways and for different reasons at the failure of the system of the twentieth century to work for them as they thought that it should. The end of American Exceptionalism (Pax Americana)—where the U.S. was near-universally regarded as an important model for at least some degree of emulation—an apparently permanent productivity growth-rate downshift; the failure of global north institutions to adequately deal with the Great Recession that started in 2008, the COVID-19 plague, or global warming; the rise across the globe of political movements that are called (politely) fascist-adjacent, neofascist, or (impolitely) fascist: all these told us that the Grand Narrative of the long 20th century could no longer be made to fit. It was a new set of stories, needing to be made comprehensible by a new Grand Narrative or Narratives. What it or they are we cannot yet know.

Brad DeLong: “Slouching” Omission: Mishandling the: Theme of the Industrial Research Laboratory: First Edition. Arthur Goldhammer has a withering critique of how the theme of the industrial research lab is developed—or, rather, left undeveloped in the book (Slouching Towards Utopia). (more)

Venkatesh Rao: Book Review: Slouching Towards Utopia. One of the things I got done was finishing Brad DeLong’s highly anticipated new book, Slouching Towards Utopia. I rarely review books on this newsletter, but this felt like a worthwhile exception. (more)

A Survey Course idea I had, in horrified reaction to Number One Son being in an AP World History course that covers everything in 1 year through an infinite number of meaningless factoids. (more)

Extending past Progress conversation with NotebookLM on potential for a NetworkEnlightenment (more)

John Boyd's Roll Call: To Be Or To Do? Do Something or Be Someone? (more)

When I don't feel like Reading an entire book, so I just read a bunch of articles/reviews about it. (more)

tag for experiments with GenAI, like (2025-06-14) Collaborative Groups Of Thinkers That Instigated Significant Technological And Political Changes

In 1995, Edwin Hutchins published Cognition in the Wild,[5] a detailed study of distributed cognitive processes in a navy ship (an Iwo Jima-class amphibious assault ship[6]); like other works related to distributed cognition, it criticizes disembodied views of cognition and proposes an alternative which looks at cognitive systems that may be composed of multiple agents and the material world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hutchins

HTML tag for creating link to another object URL (section within document, document, media object, etc.) (more)

Thomas Piketty (French: [tɔ.ma pi.kɛ.ti]; born 7 May 1971) is a French economist who is Professor of Economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (French: École des hautes études en sciences sociales: EHESS), Associate Chair at the Paris School of Economics[1] and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics. Piketty's work focuses on public economics, in particular income and wealth inequality. He is the author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013),[2] which emphasises the themes of his work on wealth concentrations (wealth inequality) and distribution over the past 250 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty