Clamber inside their head
Next time you want to put yourself in someone else's shoes (and after you’ve given Watch Me Think a bell… obvs 🤪), try giving XPLANE’s Empathy Map a whirl.
It’s a discovery and alignment tool to help think like your audience does, be that internally or externally.
“Best practice wearing a strategy’s clothes”
How can we get better at seeing what’s coming and deciding what to do about it? Step forth Jasmine Bina and how to train your strategic instinct:
“teams arrive at things like “we’ll maximize the quality of our customer experience.” But who wouldn’t? That’s never a strategy, it’s a best practice wearing a strategy’s clothes [...] A real strategy has a viable opposite. That’s how you know you’ve got something specific - someone else could rationally do the reverse, and probably will. If the opposite of your strategy is unthinkable, you haven’t said anything.”
The curious case of Elias Thorne
Ask one of the LLM big-dawgs to write you a story and ‘Elias the lighthouse keeper’ will appear in nearly two-thirds of them.
Eh?! Why?! From Antonia Davison:
“The Cornell paper hypothesizes that Elias himself traces back to WildChat, a dataset of 1 million real GPT-3.5 conversations that has been recycled into AI training sets [...] Models that trained on it copied the pattern, and developers building newer datasets used those models [...] Alignment training compounded the problem: by steering models away from copyrighted characters and adult content, developers inadvertently pushed them toward Elias, a placeholder character so inoffensive he barely existed in fiction before AI made him famous.”
Data sciencing the World Cup
Paul Thibodeau applying his statistical sorcery to the World Cup is my favourite thing since Google’s ‘did you mean to attach a document to this email?’ prompt. (Yes Google, yes I did.) A recent piece looks at whether this really is a draw heavy tournament, or if it just appears that way:
“To actually rule out the null [...] we would have needed to see not 13 draws but 15 [...] So yes, 13 draws in 39 matches is high. But it is not impossibly high. Even in a completely normal World Cup you would see a start this draw-heavy, or heavier, about one time in seven. That is the lesson worth carrying out of this: unusual is not the same as proven.”
And finally…
I’d thoroughly recommend a rummage through the Manhoff Archive. It’s a long-hidden collection of photos and videos taken by an American attaché during his time in Stalin’s Russia. Properly fascinating.
The 40 most rage-inducing problems in tech. Deep breaths, people. Deep breaths.
How good are you at mowing the lawn? Fair warning that you're about to lose the next 15 minutes of your day. Sorry about that.
Bon weekend,
Fran