John Boyd presentation (more)

final presentation of John Boyd (more)

There are 3 Games of Product Management, and each of these has variations based on the context. (more)

old fighter pilot responsible for OODA model (more)

Taylor Pearson on The Truth about How Creativity Really Works. John Boyd was a fighter pilot.. (more)

Associated heavily with Timothy Gallwey's series of books, starting from The Inner Game of Tennis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gallwey#Inner_game (more)

Zen (Japanese pronunciation: [dzeꜜɴ, dzeɴ];[1][note 1] from Chinese: Chan; in Korean: Seon, and Vietnamese: Thiền) is a Mahayana Buddhist tradition that developed in China during the Tang dynasty by blending Indian Mahayana Buddhism , particularly Yogacara and Madhyamaka philosophies, with Chinese Taoist thought, especially Neo-Daoist.[2] Zen originated as the Chan school (禪宗, Chanzōng, 'meditation school') or the Buddha-mind school (佛心宗, fóxīnzōng),[3] and later developed into various sub-schools and branches... Chan is traditionally believed to have been brought to China by the semi-legendary figure Bodhidharma, who was an Indian (or Central Asian) monk. From China, Chan spread south to Vietnam and became Vietnamese Thiền, northeast to Korea to become Seon Buddhism, and east to Japan, becoming Japanese Zen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen

Zen Buddhism

Venkatesh Rao: The Inner Game of Exploding Minds (more)

Past and present reads. Bolded-titles were faves. See esp. Greatest Books (more)

independent AI researcher and philosopher. Previously, I was a research engineer on the AGI safety team at DeepMind and worked on the Governance team at OpenAI. https://www.richardcngo.com/

book (Design Fiction?) by Adrian Hon ASIN:B00EX8QRPM http://ahistoryofthefuture.org/ (more)

Technology that can be key Infrastructure either pre-Civilization (Africa) or post-Collapse. (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)

Cedric Chin: When Action Beats Prediction. One of the big ideas that we’ve covered in the past couple of weeks is the notion that ‘management is prediction’ — the W. Edwards Deming observation that you cannot run your business effectively if you are unable to predict the outcomes of your actions (more)

My friend David Schmaltz's new book The Blind Men And The Elephant ISBN:1576752534 is coming out. David Schmaltz brilliantly identifies the true Root Cause of the difficulties in project work: "in-Coherence" (the inability of a group of people to make common meaning (Shared Vision) from their common experience)... Schmaltz exposes such oft-cited difficulties as poor planning, weak leadership, and fickle customers as poor excuses for Project Failure, providing a set of simple, project coherence-building techniques that anyone can use to achieve success. He explains how "Wicked-ness" develops when a team over-relies on their leader for guidance rather than tapping their true source of power and authority-the individual. I'm definitely buying it. (more)

The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy's law[1]) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, the longer its remaining life expectancy. Longevity implies a resistance to change, obsolescence, or competition, and greater odds of continued existence into the future.[2] Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time. Mathematically, the Lindy effect corresponds to lifetimes following a Pareto probability distribution. The concept is named after Lindy's delicatessen in New York City, where the concept was informally theorized by comedians.[3][4] The Lindy effect has subsequently been theorized by mathematicians and statisticians.[5][6][1] Nassim Taleb has expressed the Lindy effect in terms of "distance from an absorbing barrier". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect (more)

David Manheim, Gregory Lewis: High-risk human-caused pathogen exposure events from 1975-2016. (lab leak, biowar). Biological agents and infectious pathogens have the potential to cause very significant harm, as the natural occurrence of disease and pandemics makes clear. As a way to better understand the risk of Global Catastrophic Biological Risks due to human activities, rather than natural sources, this paper reports on a dataset of 71 incidents involving either accidental or purposeful exposure to, or infection by, a highly infectious pathogenic agent.

International Control of Powerful Technology: Lessons from the Baruch Plan for Nuclear Weapons (pdf): The invention of atomic energy posed a novel global challenge: could the technology be controlled to avoid destructive uses and an existentially dangerous arms race while permitting the broad sharing of its benefits? From 1944 onwards, scientists, policymakers, and other technical specialists began to confront this challenge and explored policy options for dealing with the impact of nuclear technology. We focus on the years 1944 to 1951 and review this period for lessons for the governance of powerful technologies, and find the following: Radical schemes for international control can get broad support when confronted by existentially dangerous technologies, but this support can be tenuous and cynical. Secrecy is likely to play an important, and perhaps harmful, role. The public sphere may be an important source of influence, both in general and in particular in favor of cooperation, but also one that is manipulable and poorly informed. Technical experts may play a critical role, but need to be politically savvy. Overall, policymaking may look more like “muddling through” than clear-eyed grand strategy. Cooperation may be risky, and there may be many obstacles to success. Analogy to development/control of AI/AGI/ASI. (See AI-2027, x-risk.) (more)

aka existential risk