Six Links That Make You Think #759

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see.”

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

• Wrong 1 – Part 1 Of A Sporadic Series About Wrongness – Neil Stephenson. “I love Neal Stephenson. He has, thanks to some early literary success and the fetishization of his work by well-heeled tech-bros willing to part with shares in return for his proximity, earned the ability to work on whatever he chooses. He has his detractors, and some of his writing has not aged well. Other parts of it – the real-time populist polling of Interface, the domestic terror of The Cobweb – was prescient. I find his thoughts chewy and worth the time. Here’s a post on wrongness. ‘Or, as Charles Sanders Peirce – the subject of this post – put it: ‘Every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written.’ And that last quote: Damn, could not be more relevant in the cancellation of fact-checking.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Shell Game – RadioLab. “Evan Raltiff has written a lot about tech. To better understand AI, and how it might replace his work, he decided to go all in, and created a digital clone of himself using a LLM, a voice synthesis tool, and various other parts to cobble it together. Want a peek at knowledge work in 2027? Evan’s lived there for you (this is part of a longer series, but I’m attaching the Radiolab episode that summarizes that series).” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Tyler Cowen On Everything – Yascha Mounk – The Good Fight. “Economist and smart podcaster in his own right, Tyler Cowan (known to be, maybe, the best-read human on earth) gets interviewed by Yasha Mounk, with powerful insights on AI, declining birthrates, and other things.” (Hugh for Alistair). 
• G.E. Smith On Eddie Van Halen And Eric Clapton On Saturday Night Live – Archive Of American Television – Foundation Interviews – YouTube. “G.E. Smith was bandleader for Saturday Night Live from 1985 to 1995, the period when I was watching it regularly. I didn’t appreciate G.E. Smith back then, but he is, truly, a gem. If you would like to study oral story-telling, it would be hard to beat this interview (this is a short clip about Eddie Van Halen and Eric Clapton, but you can spend a couple of hours watching the full interview, on YouTube). There is a weight, a grace, and a passion to every word Smith chooses, plus stories upon stories of true music history.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• The Anti-Social Century – Derek Thompson – The Atlantic. “I’m fairly certain that this latest cover story for The Atlantic is going to be making the rounds in the media and will, likely, lead Derek Thompson to a bestselling book on this topic. In the early 2000s I noticed a weird trend as smartphones began gaining in popularity: People in very public spaces (thinks bars and restaurants) who are surrounded by people in a social setting were off in a corner on their phones… essentially ‘at the bar’ but truly ’not present’. I wrote about it. I spoke about it. I was introduced to thinkers like Sherry Turkle and her amazing book, Alone Together (along with Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone), and realized that as amazing as digital technology is at connecting people it is equally powerful at place-shifting anyone anywhere else. Weird. So… now we’re twenty-plus years beyond that moment and what do we have? A world where we are spending way too much time alone… and I think we all know what happens when people are feeling alone…” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Meet The Coffee Obsessives Who Go To Any Length—And Pay Any Price—For A Great Cup Of Joe – Mark Ellwood – Robb Report. “Can coffee become the new wine? To what lengths would you go for a great cup of coffee? Make no doubts about, I love nothing more than my morning coffee along with some great conversation. It fills me up and gets me going way more than the caffeine in the cup. I can appreciate someone’s passion around coffee… and I marvel when those people take it to a whole other level…” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on X, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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