How to Build a System Doesn't Have to Be Slack

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I think that this is certainly striking when we look at, I mean, the move to remote work and the heavy usage of Slack. The workplace just is kind of an example here to observe that difference between the atomized interactions. How can you build a system doesn't have to look like a chat app, but something maybe, maybe it does kind of take on the broad strokes of a chat app? And how can you allow them to do that?

In episode 63 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joe Edelman.

Joe developed the meaning-based organizational metrics at Couchsurfing.com, then co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, and coined the term “Time Well Spent” for a family of metrics adopted by teams at Facebook, Google, and Apple. Since then, he's worked on the philosophical underpinnings for new business metrics, design methods, and political movements. The central idea is to make people's sources of meaning explicit, so that how meaningful or meaningless things are can be rigorously accounted for. His previous career was in HCI and programming language design.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro (yes Daniel is trying a new intro format)

* (01:30) Joe’s origin story

* (07:15) Revealed preferences and personal meaning, recommender systems

* (12:30) Is using revealed preferences necessary?

* (17:00) What are values and how do you detect them?

* (24:00) Figuring out what’s meaningful to us

* (28:45) The decline of spaces and togetherness

* (35:00) Individualism and economic/political theory, tensions between collectivism/individualism

* (41:00) What it looks like to build spaces, Habitat