By this logic, we wouldn't have some of the breakthroughs made throughout history. Outsiders have made some pretty interesting leaps (later honed by experts). Expertise is great, but it can exist outside of formal education, and it isn't the only metric.
Totally agree, it can be a bit of an echo chamber. I had an infection post-dental-work. Bing Chat insisted I had swollen lymph nodes from a cold that would resolve on their own, then decided I had a salivary gland infection. After a follow-up with a real-world ENT, it was (probably accurately) diagnosed as a soft-tissue infection that had completely resolved on two rounds of antibiotics. The AI never raised that possibility, whereas the ENT and dentist examined me and reached that conclusion immediately.
I do think AI is great for discussing some health things (like "how should I interpret this report or test result?"), but it's too echo chamber-y and suggestion-prone for accurate diagnosis right now.
Why wouldn't it work with 2 or 3 unified days onsite and 2 or 3 days wfh, with a no-meetings, minimal-interruptions directive on wfh days? I think this structure, if well managed, would work even better than the old 5-days-in-office.
This will be counterbalanced by the fact that WFH is better for many employees from a work-life balance perspective, so higher-performing employees who have more choices will tend to gravitate toward companies that allow WFH.
I expect many companies will arrive at an equilibrium with at least 2 days WFH for focused work and 3 days in-office for collaboration. This seems to already be happening since the % of companies offering hybrid is up this year. The question is how many great employees laggard companies will lose before accepting that.
(Caveat: this does not apply to companies doing mostly ground-breaking work that have more mission-focused, highly qualified applicants than they can handle. Some companies may be surprised to find they are no longer in this bucket.)
I read this as more of a "both, and" situation. Lots of other industries have ISACs (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers), mostly focused on information security, and they can work quite well. The FS-ISAC, for example, is quite active in the financial services sector and (IMHO) reasonably effective.
So, I think this is a good step for the AI industry. Of course regulation is still a necessary component, but an industry consortium focused on sharing lessons learned and good practices is a good step, in my view.
"I do not live in a state with a Right to Try law. Can I still use Right to Try?
"Yes. S.204 makes Right to Try the law of the land. So long as a patient and treatment meet the qualifications of the federal law, Right to Try applies, regardless of whether the patient’s state adopted Right to Try."
Essay author here. Success-to-the-successful is a real feature of our current economic landscape, more than in the semi-recent past (yes, ancient feudal societies were way worse). Here’s Harvard Business Review:
Disruptive shocks (like when Google created a truly better search technology and dethroned AltaVista in the late ‘90s, or when the US gov broke up AT&T in 1984) can change those dynamics. That’s how Kodak, despite having lots of resources, lost dominance and eventually failed: they didn’t have the right non-monetary resources (innovative culture and support for change) at a critical time, so disruptive shock toppled them.
Some banks offer sweep accounts that automatically move funds over the 250k limit into accounts at other banks (again, up to the 250k limit) or into money-market funds (which have their own risks).
I believe there is no way to eliminate credit, default, and/or liquidity risk entirely in banking (when cracks in the system appear and start spreading, you may have exposure no matter what you did), but it's possible to mitigate it in ways that don't seem to have happened here.
Agree that great managers are sometimes individual contributors who take on the job because they believe doing so is the only way to ensure effectiveness. But it's important to filter for ego-as-motivation, which can make for a terrible manager....
There's another type of great manager, too, whose best quality is their ability to defend the team from b.s. and politics originating elsewhere in the organization. This is especially valuable in large, established companies.
It would be interesting to see long-term results of off-sites in which a company's executives and an equal number of long-tenured average-performing and high-performing employees gather to share and learn from each other, with follow-up on-site meetings to experiment and execute afterward.
I have never encountered an off-site like this, but if you have, how did it go?
Is this because it increases risk-taking behavior? Who knows, but it's interesting that something with potentially significant health drawbacks may have enough benefits that it's evolved to coexist with us (up to 50% of people carry it).
Is this because it increases risk-taking behavior? Who knows, but it's interesting that something with potentially significant health drawbacks may have enough benefits that it's evolved to coexist with us (up to 50% of people carry it).
Completely agree with this; it should not be experienced as a videogame, it should be experienced as a real responsibility as in, "This is what I'm 100% focused on because it's the most important thing I'm doing right now."
Funny enough VCRs had this decades ago, the double-fast-forward skipped forward a few minutes. Why e-readers can't do this with a similar symbol to skip forward 25 pages is a mystery to me.
Once, when facing a great personal crisis, I found some wisdom that helped me reframe my worries and fears: "Why do you spend all your time worrying about the blizzard on top of the mountain? Go around the mountain."
Secondly, in grad school I was upset that other students appeared to be cheating during exams, to the point that I could hear messages pinging in the classroom. A friend told me, paraphrased: "You can't control what other people do. You'll just have to do well enough that it doesn't matter." I didn't want to hear it, but once it sunk in, he was right and accepting his advice was the best path forward.