I Fed the People Building the Metaverse
The future is being built by people.
I was there.
And honestly, they didn’t even wash their hands.
A.I. economics for dummies
Could be taken to exemplary for start-up culture as a whole, but somehow shoving A.I. into it makes it better really: AI Economics for Dummies.
Over vertelkunst
Twee stukken over vertelkunst: de manier waarop we verhalen vertellen. Kort, want het ligt al lang op de plank.
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Discworld (nog niet gelezen) is anders dan andere fantasy, omdat het meer ‘regels’ schendt dan meestal. De analyse vergelijkt het met In de Ban van de Ring van Tolkien, wat een heldenverhaal is (jammer dat Tom Bombadil buiten de analyse is gehouden overigens), voedsel voor authoriteitsdenken zoals helaas weer trending is. Discworld is meer gefocust op de wereld, hoe deze in feite werkt, en hoe je daarbinnen zelf doelen kun stellen en nastreven. Ik moet die boeken lezen.
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De letterlijkheid rukt op, over hoe met name in film de kijker van het zelf denken en fantaseren wordt ontheven. Ik mis hier wel het feit dat streamers die letterlijkheid en redundantie expres inbouwen om met het moderne ‘achtergrondkijken’ te dealen. Wat niet wil zeggen dat het een bedenkelijke trend is.
Deskilling
Somebody writes about how expertise cannot be fully codified, and thus never fully taught through passive learning (books). One must have some (or a lot) of experience to become “street smart”, instead of merely “book smart”.
Most interesting is the corollary, especially for organisations: if you train personell to be book smart, they’ll only be able to cope with the scenario’s codified therein, and be generally lost when it comes to creative problem solving. Brain-on-rails. This is basically the point Bert Hubert made: it takes expertise to be able to know what expertise is, and by outsourcing all expertise the expertise to succesfully outsource is lost. A problem often encountered in government. Moreover, these process-heavy environments actively repel skill and epxertise, so it is a kind of downward spiral. Arre Zuurmond’s solution is simple: liberate experts from this kind of process-bureaucracy.
European Economies Are Not Stagnating
At Jacobin an interesting exploration of how different methods can produce different GDP numbers, and how we (official statistics) might require methodological updating. The article explores a Dutch-developed method in particular: the Penn World Table. If I understand correctly, it does not use official exchanges rates to produce GDP number in a single currency (almost always, or always, USD), but purchasing power parity tables, which track real costs over time of baskets of products, which generates a price index which can be compared to different countries.
Gives you a good idea of what goes on in official statistics, and what the impact is on key figures you’ve heard about and your government uses to determine policy.