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Ross Dawson

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Sep 21, 2022 • 31min

Cindy Otis on the disinformation landscape, analyzing content, identifying trustworthy sources, and information communities (Ep34)

“I always think of my views like a stovetop with multiple pots and mixtures brewing. I’m constantly adding new information that I’ve learned, things that I’ve read, and observations that I’ve made into each of these pots, and they’re cooking over time. My opinion, my views, and my analysis evolve as I gain more information.” – Cindy Otis About Cindy Otis Cindy Otis is an author, disinformation expert, and former CIA officer. She is the author of books including True or False: A CIA Analyst’s Guide to Spotting Fake News. Cindy is a frequent media commentator on the Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, NPR, and CNN. Blog: Cindy Otis Twitter: Cindy Otis Instagram: Cindy Otis Book: True or False What you will learn What is the difference between misinformation and disinformation (01:41) How to pick what information is worth looking at (04:34) What are the two main starting points to assess information when it comes in (06:10) How to build a list of trustworthy sources where we are not experts (11:00) Why you don’t need to completely believe or disbelieve something (15:00) What are practices to develop your expertise in an area (16:24) How combining several schools of thought, especially contrasting ones is valuable (19:21) How to consume the news and information, and make better sense of what’s going on (23:00) How does a disinformation specialist thrive in a world of information overload (24:45) Episode resources Buzzsumo Hunchly Transcript Ross Dawson: Cindy, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Cindy Otis: Thanks for having me. Ross: You are an expert in disinformation and that’s something that we have lots about these days. Let’s start perhaps with what is disinformation. What’s the difference from misinformation? Cindy: Right. The key difference between the two terms comes down to intention. With misinformation, it’s false information that people share, not knowing that it’s false. They’re not looking to deceive, they’re not looking to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. By contrast, disinformation is false information in which the creator, the sharer knows that the information is false or misleading and is doing so deliberately. We often see it come up in the context of politics, political issues, whether a person is intentionally trying to mislead on a political topic, for example, but it spans a range of topics. Ross: Just a little update, the term fake news started to be current in 2016, started to be used a lot, and we’ve had a lot of fake news and we’ve had a lot of disinformation since then. In August 2022, where are we? Is the situation getting worse? What’s the state of play? Cindy: That’s a big question. I think that the information environment is increasingly complex, it’s increasingly busy and hard to untangle what we’re seeing, why we’re seeing it, how we’re seeing it, and who’s behind it. That is, for better or for worse, is my job to untangle that mess and try to make sense of what’s happening. But for the average information consumer, the average social media user, things are only getting more complicated. The line betweeun what is intentionally spread to deceive and manipulate is getting harder to determine whether it’s intentional, or it’s not intentional. The other big thing is that technological advances are happening on an everyday basis that make it easier to get information to people and to obscure what it is and who’s behind it. It’s getting easier to trick people because of technological advances. On the positive side, disinformation is a hot new industry so a lot of folks have joined the research community that bring really interesting expertise and backgrounds to it, to this particular problem set. We have certainly made gains in how we’re approaching the problem as well, how we’re looking at it, and the tools that we’re bringing in to be able to do that. But as somebody with a national security background, myself, what worries me the most is how advanced our adversaries are getting in creating and disseminating disinformation. Ross: You are the author of True or False: A CIA Analyst’s Guide to Spotting Fake News. Before we dig into that, I’d like to raise a bit of a philosophical point around telling the difference between true and false. Is there absolute truth? How can we unpick differences of opinion as to what is true? Cindy: It’s a great question and certainly something I struggle with daily. Despite the title of my book, I’m less interested in nitpicking over what is true and what is false, but more in helping folks understand how you make sense of the information you’re seeing, how you unpack who or what is behind it, and how it got into your feed, and then letting you determine given what you have learned through those tools and tactics, do you think the message is true or false. I tend to stick to the analysis of technology, threat actors, and how information gets to people as opposed to trying to determine what is true or false because it gets extremely complicated when you ask those questions. Ross: Yes, your response gets to my frame, which is how do we get value from information? We’ve got loads of information out there, some of it is valuable, and some of it has negative value because it misleads us or wastes our time. Starting from that idea of spotting fake news or if we could even overlay my view of does it have positive value or negative value, without running through every aspect of your book, I want to get insights. How do people start? Alright, you’re looking at the news, you’re looking at maybe news on some mobile phone, as many do, or even a supposedly reputable website, how do you start to unpick between what is worth looking at and what is not worth looking at? Cindy: The folks listening to your show are probably pretty savvy information consumers. But first, I would say that we have to account for the fact that we’re all humans at the end of the day. We are emotional creatures, we have emotional reactions to things that mean something to us. Even with all the tips and tricks and technology that you can use to sift and comb through information, organize it, sort it, read it, consume it, and all of that, we’re still emotional beings at the end of the day. As we’re living in, most people would agree, quite tumultuous times across the world, we have to check that, we have to understand that we’re going to have emotional reactions to information as we see it, we’re not machines, we weren’t built to be robots. With that framework in mind, part of it is recognizing that we’re human, we’re not able to stay on top of every issue, to follow every news event, to follow every country, every city down to the town and village, it’s not possible. We need to be selective about what we’re going to spend our time and attention on. It’s certainly been key to my professional performance and success that I have had to decide what it is that I am going to focus on in my career that’s played out in different areas of expertise. I spent 10 years at the CIA, I focused on a particular part of the world at any given time in my career. Then I focused from there on a particular domain of expertise. I was a military analyst for half of my career. I worked on security issues, threat issues, that kind of thing. Part of that is because you can’t gain expertise in the world, you can gain expertise in a particular domain so knowing the difference between what is true expertise, because you’ve focused on it, and what is global expertise. Narrowing down and determining what is it that you’re going to follow, read about, pay attention to, and gain expertise in, and being deliberate about that. That will allow folks to narrow down the sheer amount of information that they would otherwise be seeing. Second, it’s really important to understand where the information that you’re seeing is coming from. Social media platforms, for better or for worse, at least in the United States, the vast majority of Americans get their news and information from social media. It’s the reality we’re living in. Social media platforms have done different things to get different pieces of content into our feeds, regardless of whether we’re following the creator of that content. It’s important to understand what kind of content you’re looking at. Are you looking at a video? Are you looking at an article? Are you looking at a meme, a GIF, or something like that? Then dig into it a little bit. Who is it coming from? Is it an account you recognize? Is it an expert that you can actually verify their expertise? Does anyone else say that they’re an expert besides the person claiming to be the expert? What have they written? Where have they studied and that sort of thing? That’s a way of crafting a list of sources of information that are on the relatively trustworthy side, which is the next important step. That was a lot I just threw at you. Ross: Okay, so just starting to unpick that a little bit. On social media, you come across something which says, Oh, that’s interesting or startling, so two major points which I pulled out there, one is to go back and identify the source, are there appropriate expertise to analyze the article, and the other is to build a set of relatively trustworthy sources. We can dig a little bit more into those, but those are the two main starting points to assess information when it comes in. Cindy: Yes, going back to what I said about narrowing down and accepting that you’re not going to be able to follow everything with a deep level of expertise. Ross: The danger is that the disinformation is more likely to come your way, you’re not an expert, and we all have areas where we’re not an expert. If it’s in your area of expertise, you probably can filter it pretty easily. If it isn’t, then that’s where you are more likely to get caught out, unfortunately. I like your phrasing, it was relatively trustworthy sources, because there might not be any completely trustworthy sources. Let’s say you’ve got what you believe is a trustworthy source and something comes along which you think, wow, really? How do you respond to that? Cindy: One of the things that scare me the most is when I get comments from people who are like, I don’t believe anything unless you’ve posted it yourself, or you’ve verified it. I’m like, Oh, my God, I am not on social media all day, I’m not reading all of the news all of the time, I simply don’t have the time, I’m one person. That’s quite an unhealthy way or dangerous way of looking at what a source list can do for you. You’re still dealing with humans who make mistakes at the end of the day. You’re dealing with news outlets, that they have schedules, they’re dealing with breaking news that changes, they’re dealing with sources that they have to then verify themselves, there are all sorts of ways that they can get it wrong as well. That’s important to recognize when you’re building that list of somewhat trustworthy sources. But in general, I advise folks all the time that what you should be looking for is, is this a source that I can trust? If it’s a news outlet, is it a standards-based news outlet? Did they have editors? Do they have fact checkers? Do they have a review process? Do they have style guides even that influence how they end up talking about things like the trustworthiness of a source? All of that is important for journalists to ensure that the quality of the reporting is the highest that it can be. But again, these are imperfect organizations run by imperfect people. Cindy: There are different ways that you should be looking at media outlets. Media outlets who are physically closer to the news that they’re reporting, for example, there’s an attack in a certain part of the country, reporters who are on the ground are potentially going to have more accurate up-to-date information than reporters who are getting it second or third hand based in another part of the country. There are things that you want to look at like that. It’s important to look at individual sources of information that way as well. As I said, with great horror, I see those posts that say I only trust something if you, Cindy Otis, have posted about it or verified it. The reality is I’m not an expert on everything. I’m not an expert on the world. I’m a person who has personal opinions, I try to couch things that I share online with this is my opinion versus this is my area of expertise. News outlets do the same as well. Reputable news outlets have a separate category for editorials’ opinions than they do current coverage. That distinction is hugely, hugely important. With an individual source, you can dig into their background, you can look into where did they study, and where did they work. You can look at how long a person worked at a location. For me, I just came up on my fifth anniversary of leaving the intelligence community. When you come to me for information about or views on current national security events, my information is dated. I’ve been out for five years. It’s important to dig into that deep of a level when you’re building that list of potentially trusted sources of information. Ross: Another aspect is, you don’t necessarily either need to completely believe or disbelieve something, you can take it on, say, alright, possibly for later… Cindy: Right, you’re taking bits. I always think of it as my views on the range of issues are like a stovetop with multiple pots and multiple mixtures brewing, I’m constantly adding new information that I’ve learned, things that I’ve read, and observations that I’ve made into each of these pots, and they’re cooking over time. My opinion, my views, and my analysis evolve as I gain more information. When we look at our opinions and our views as one-time only, hard and fast, unchangeable, that’s where we run into a lot of issues in terms of bias in thinking, it’s important to treat your analysis as that pot that you’re constantly adding information and ideas to. Ross: Fantastic. I’d like to start to dig into how you thrive on overload as you have in your previous roles, and no doubt continue to. Coming specifically on the developing expertise, that was part of your role, your role was to be an expert in particular domains. What were your practices to develop your expertise in an area? As you said, you possibly switched from different geographies or areas of expertise, so when you’re coming to a new area of expertise, what was your process? What was the information you did? How did you build the sets of understanding which enabled you to know more than others? Cindy: When I’m delving into a new area that maybe isn’t an area of expertise, or a strong suit for me yet, but even as an expert, I’m constantly reading as much as I possibly can get my hands on. I’m reading from both news reporting, I’m reading from academia, from experts in research communities, I’m looking at government publications, I’m looking at foreign publications, I’m looking at individual experts who are considered well respected in their fields, and I’m just trying to gather as much information as possible because it’s really important to balance the various sources that you’re looking at. Tapping into the academic communities, you’re going to learn quite a different view on a topic than you’re going to learn from practitioners, for example. We have the benefit of just having so much information and thought on any topic out there; of course, it can feel overwhelming, but by just trying to get your hands on it as much as possible and again, looking at the backgrounds of the people who are in the organizations that are putting that content out there. It’s not just Googling this particular topic and reading everything that comes up in the first 50 pages, but looking at what are well-respected organizations, academic institutions, and experts in the field, are putting out there. Then as I’m reading, I’m taking notes, I’m jotting down what are the commonalities that I’m seeing in what people are saying about this topic, and what are the differences. Who are those differences between, organizations or individuals? I’m looking for what is the current school of thought. I’m also looking at how is this school of thought on this particular issue evolved, because historical context on any issue is just invaluable to have. How has thinking on this changed? What has influenced the change in thinking? Are there differences between different communities on this particular topic? It’s a process, it’s long but that’s generally how I start. Ross: I love that. That’s really insightful actually. Just to stay that back a little bit, finding and reading the different categories of experts or sources of information, reputable ones, where you can find their sources, but ones which would have different perspectives. The idea of the commonality is that differences are critical because if all the experts agree, then that’s looking pretty good. But also what specifically are the differences, I think that’s really valuable. I love that idea about how these ideas have evolved, what is the school of thought? If you can identify a school of thought, maybe say, you can identify several schools of thought, that’s picking the differences but also establishing frames on it, then that’s really valuable seeing how these schools of thought have evolved, and why they’ve evolved, and how is that thinking changed. That’s great. Do you then crystallize that yourself into some kind of a framework or thesis or structure? Or is this all in your head? Cindy: It’s just all in my head. It’s obvious when you say it out loud that that would be an organized approach that might work. But I’m continuously surprised when I get approached by tech startups, or I get approached by a policymaker or somebody in a position where they’re trying to generate ideas, and they’ve not done the first few steps of going back and seeing what has been tried before. They see a problem. They think the problem started the day they recognized it, and they try to solve it. It’s so important to know whether you’re talking about foreign policy, or you’re talking about a technological innovation, or disinformation, where have we been before? Where’s the current community going? Are there differences in those communities? Ross: Yes, fabulous. You’ve raised the question in my mind, of the current crop of disinformation startups, is there any which you think are particularly interesting? Cindy: That’s a good question. I tend to gravitate towards any approach, the problem set from trying to analyze and identify the tactics, techniques, and procedures of threat actors. I’m less interested in technological solutions that are very nascent at this point, very much dependent on improving the natural language processing capabilities, that focus on trying to determine whether an online narrative is true or false for the reasons we talked about, it just is a very incredibly difficult thing to do for humans and AI. I’m much more interested in organizations that focus more on the threat actor. Ross: Interesting. So identifying who the threat actors are, and some of the pathways by which they might be disseminating information. Cindy: Yes, exactly. Those are the ones where it’s much more clear-cut that they’re attempting to deceive so you don’t have to answer that question of why are they doing this, they’re attempting to deceive. You get to work in what is a much more fun space in looking at, how did they get that information in front of social media users? Who are they targeting specifically? How do they try to cover their tracks? Ross: Fantastic. In terms of just any daily practices, how do you consume the news, and information, and make sense of what’s going on? Is there anything we can learn from what you’re doing yourself? Cindy: I don’t know if you can learn anything from it. But here we go. I am extremely intentional about who I follow on social media across all of the platforms. If I respect somebody, but I maybe don’t think they’re providing as much value as I want to see in my feed, I might follow them but mute them. I won’t name names. I read from certain publications, but I do read widely across the spectrum when it comes to political ideology. It’s important to know what communities are saying. I do read widely, but I have a fairly short-ish list of publications that I read from. Otherwise, I would spend my entire life doing nothing but reading. I use some tools, free in some cases, open-source tools that help you sort, and help you search and discover. Tools like Buzzsumo is a favorite of mine. It’s a way of seeing headlines and topics and seeing engagement on those as well which is important in my work. I’m constantly looking at it when trying to understand the impact of a particular disinformation campaign, looking at how many eyeballs this reached, how many social media feeds did this show up in, that can be really helpful in understanding that. But it also is helpful just to know what the headlines are across a wide variety of sources. Ross: What other software tools do you use? Cindy: Buzzsumo is one of my favorites. I do a lot of network analysis so I’m looking at what accounts are linked to each other. I do network mapping. In disinformation analysis, when you’re hunting down, who’s doing what, who saw it, who’s behind it, and how did it get there, the number of tabs that I have open at any given time is just ridiculous. I have to meticulously map what points I’m going to, am I checking a Facebook page? Was there anything on the Facebook page? Am I checking a news site? And gathering data from all of those sources, so it can quickly become completely unwieldy. You don’t necessarily know what you have found until you’ve found it, you just keep digging further down into the rabbit hole. It’s really important for me in my work to be documenting every step in an investigation, so that I can retrace my steps later if I need to, or understand even where I need to go back to when I determine that maybe I’d gone off in the wrong direction, and I need to get back to where I saw the initial information, so I do a lot of documentation. That can look like anything from literally a Word document and an Excel spreadsheet where I’m dropping bits that I’ve gathered, or it can look a little more sophisticated like using a tool like Hunchly. Those are the basics. Ross: Fantastic. That’s great. There’s definitely plenty to learn from that. In terms of just rounding out, you as an analyst, as an expert, as a disinformation specialist, but in terms of just helping all of us, what’s your advice in a world of overload on how it is we can thrive? What are a few points or recommendations you can make to our audience? Cindy: I think people underestimate the emotional toll that overload can give us. I know I have at different points in my career, not realized that I was overloaded and burned out until I was well into all of it. It makes us less able actually to handle the information we’re looking at. It makes it more difficult to do critical thinking. In my career field, it made me less able to do my job because I was so overloaded. It’s important to recognize the emotional toll that different kinds of content and overload in content can wreak on our brains, and then implement things to help us overcome that. People are always surprised when I say this, but I’m a huge proponent of taking breaks of doing normal human things like putting your phone down and going for a walk. It’s incredibly important. As a former CIA military analyst, I dealt with a lot of disturbing content about conflicts that were happening in other countries. You don’t think that sitting on your computer in this safe town in the United States that it’s going to have such an impact on you, but it does because again, you’re human, you have emotions, you’re a person, and you feel. It’s important to be able to take those breaks, to have those moments of reset, to have those moments of stepping away from it all, getting fresh air, getting some vitamin D, and talking to some friends. Having a community is important as well in your particular area of expertise where you’re working, or just as an average information consumer, it’s important to have other people that you can talk to. I think people are probably surprised to know that if you visited CIA headquarters, you would see a lot of people walking together with a partner, friend, or colleague, with a coffee in their hand around the building. They’re taking breaks, they’re discussing complex ideas with a partner, they’re unloading, they’re getting some time to discuss how they’re feeling with somebody who completely understands them, at least professionally. Those moments are hugely, hugely important and will make us better able to handle the information we’re consuming daily and think about it in smart ways. Ross: Fantastic. That’s been really insightful. You are truly an expert in the field. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with our audience, Cindy. Cindy: Thanks, Ross. The post Cindy Otis on the disinformation landscape, analyzing content, identifying trustworthy sources, and information communities (Ep34) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Aug 17, 2022 • 29min

Pia Lauritzen on the possibilities of questions, collective curiosity, diverse question cultures, and making room for exploration (Ep32)

Aug 10, 2022 • 34min

Remi Kalir on social annotation, self curation, the connective tissue of ideas, annotation tools, and nuance for synthesis (Ep31)

“What is nuance? I think it’s really important, particularly in today’s information environment, whether we’re talking about the challenges of accurate information, conspiracy theory, or in general trying to find the signal through the noise.” – Remi Kalir About Remi Kalir Remi is Associate Professor of Learning Design and Technology at the University of Colorado Denver, and a leading scholar of annotation. He is co-author of the book Annotation, published by MIT Press, and many journal articles on the subject. Remi is also Scholar in Residence at Hypothesis and the co-founder of Marginal Syllabus. Website: Remi Kalir Blog: Remi Kalir Twitter: Remi Kalir Book: Annotation What you will learn What is a scholar of annotation (01:44) What is social annotation (03:52) What is the difference between highlighting and annotating (07:13) How to get started in annotating (10:03) How to build associative trails across multiple texts (12:51) Why social annotation is useful in collaborative or collective learning (21:00) What visual tools for social annotation are available (22:07) Why we should pay attention to nuance for annotation and idea synthesis (25:30) Why reading slowly, with other people, and a robust annotation practice is a great set of practices to thrive on overload (30:13) Episode resources Hypothesis app Zettelkasten Roam Research Obsidian Logseq NowComment Diigo Fabricating And Running Orchestration Graphs (FROG) Bodong Chen References from Remi The research discussed on the podcast on knowledge construction A recent and short op-ed about the opportunities and challenges of social reading, with an emphasis on annotation. Transcript Ross Dawson: Remi, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Remi: Ross, thank you for the invitation. I really appreciate it. Ross: You are a scholar of annotation. I want to know more about that. What is an annotation? Remi: Let me begin by saying Ross that you’re an annotator. You are an annotator; I know that without even knowing the nuances of your practice but I know that you read. I know that when you read, you probably make your thinking visible. I know that when you read, you take notes. It’s very likely that when you were in school, or for pleasure on a couch, reading poetry, wherever it may be, you’re probably marking up a book, or you’re probably taking notes in some kind of way. If you’re listening to this podcast, you also probably have a personal history with annotation. One of the things that I find fascinating about the practice of annotation is that people are annotators. When people read, they are writing; when they are reading, they are thinking, they are making connections. That has to be made visible in some way so that gets to that core definition of what is annotation. It’s the addition of a note to a text. It’s that simple. You add a note to a text. We might do that when we read books. Again, for so many of us, we’ve done that in formal educational settings, schools, and universities, maybe when we were very young, maybe when we were older. So many of us have personal histories of adding notes to texts, of being annotators. Of course, we also do that in much more sophisticated ways now. We do that in digital environments. We do that with all kinds of fancy online tools. But at the very core, at the basic definition of that, we’re adding notes to texts, as we engage with media, as we engage with information, as we try and navigate information overload. I know you’re an annotator Ross, I’m an annotator too, and if you’re listening to this, you’re probably also an annotator. I find that to be very fascinating. Ross: We’ll definitely want to dig into that from all sorts of angles. But one point is you also talk about social annotation, we’d love to hear about that. Remi: That’s an important distinction, and thank you for making that, which is is that for many of us, let’s say we are reading a book of poetry, or maybe we’re reading something online, we can mark that up, we can add our notes to that text in a private way. Much marginalia, if you want to use that term, a lot of book marginalia is private, it’s written only for us, it’s written for an audience of one. Yet, we can also make our annotation social, we can share it, we can use, again, either a book lent to a friend, or we can use a whole variety of digital and online tools to make our marginal notes accessible to other people. There’s a whole genre now of not only technologies but also practices that allow us to share our thinking with other people. We can do so to appreciate different perspectives, we can do so to disagree, we can do so to build consensus, but social annotation is a practice, it’s an opportunity to make those cognitive processes, to make those social processes more connected, as we read together, as we think together, as we make sense of the world together. Again, another reason why I find social annotation a very promising practice, both in and outside of schools, and in other kinds of learning institutions. Ross: One particular example of that is that you are co-author of the book “Annotation”. I believe the process of writing the book involved social annotation. Remi: It did, we had to walk the talk, so to speak. When my co-author, dear friend, and my colleague, Antero Garcia, from Stanford University, when we wrote the book, we came up with our draft… we’re not thinking alone, we’re not doing this work in isolation, so we wrote up a draft of the entire book and we used a particularly agile, intuitive platform that comes from MIT, our publisher. It’s called the PubPub platform. We put the whole book there. We said, hey, smart people, thoughtful people, people who disagree with us, hey, come read this draft of our book. This social annotation process can be very nuanced. We can find a word or a phrase or a particular argument, we can highlight it, we can add commentary, we can reply. We generated literally something like 20,000 words worth the word count volume of the annotations. It was an incredible corpus of rich feedback in commentary, shared with us, shared openly, and shared in a way that other people could reference. It left a trail of thinking on that initial draft of the book. We took all of that information back along with a more formal and more conventional, anonymous peer review. We had two processes going side by side. We took all that information, we sifted through it, we synthesized it, and we revised our writing. It was of course improved and strengthened, the crux of our book was really helpfully moved along the way, because of that social annotation process. It’s part of our work as well. It’s part of our workflow, if we’re going to talk about it, we need to do it ourselves. Ross: One distinction is between accepting text and highlighting; for example, highlighting either with a highlighter in a physical book or by copying a block of noting in a Kindle or putting a text, I think that’s akin on the large level to social bookmarking, where you might just say, here’s an article, I’ll just make a note of that whereas the annotation is when you’re actually saying something about it: I agree, I disagree or to make some more points around that? Just to dig into that for somebody who’s trying to think about how they access information and build that into knowledge, that distinction between either highlighting, we’d love to know what language you might use around that, highlighting versus active notes which add to what is there. Remi: Highlighting is a really important entry point into a richer repertoire of annotation practices. Highlighting is actually, I wouldn’t say controversial, but there’s mixed evidence; I’m a researcher, day to day, I’m a scholar, I read a lot of peer-reviewed research, and it’s actually pretty mixed evidence about the cognitive benefits of highlighting, I won’t get into all of the studies, but there are some recent ones, looking at undergraduate students, for example, who highlight course texts, then take quizzes, and their subsequent academic achievement, the evidence is rather mixed about whether just highlighting alone is a particularly effective cognitive strategy. However, in my world, it is one of a repertoire of annotation practices. Of course, we can highlight texts but then we can also take those highlights and translate them into other kinds of notes, other kinds of annotations, including those that spark dialogue, or that allow us to confirm maybe that a particular interpretation is more or less accurate, or that we might be highlighting an instance of bias or disagreement, or we have a wondering, or maybe we’re highlighting because there’s a disciplinary method, maybe in the sciences, maybe there’s a particular type of rhetorical argument in learning about how to analyze essays that we’re curious about. Whether we’re in a course, we’re a learner, and we’re interacting with our peers, or we’re reading something else, maybe with colleagues, and we’re just doing something like a book club, but it’s digital, and it can be about sharing our notes. The highlighting is a starting point but it can lead to a much richer dialogue. That’s where the knowledge construction and the deeper synthesis of ideas begin to happen. Ross: Let’s pull back to a user who’s never heard of annotation, they know what highlighting is, but framing this around, I call it knowledge development, you call it knowledge construction, the idea is we’ve got lots of information, information is just information, so this idea, how do we actively build that into our knowledge? Are there any practices or tools or starting points that you would suggest for somebody to do a more active annotation with the aim of knowledge development? Remi: In this respect, what a really good place to start is with your own self-curation, which is that we like to write a lot; I think that one of the critiques of annotation is that it’s too messy, that there’s too much of it, that it’s just scribbling or it’s defacing a book, or it’s inherently a transgressive act because we shouldn’t write on the things that we read. I understand that, I can appreciate that, but when I say self-curation, it’s important to speak back to a text, and maybe just underline a few notes here, maybe it’s important to say ha, or I disagree, or I wonder, or leave little question marks, or leave little arrows, or smiley faces, almost like emoji, those kinds of symbols have been appearing in texts for hundreds of years. Having said that, if we look back at a corpus of annotation, we’ll find that there are maybe a handful of rough draft thoughts that can become then much deeper, more developed ways of thinking about a text. This is where the meaning-making process occurs. If I spend an hour reading a text, and I’ve written all over it, many notes in many different kinds of ways, if I return to that text, at another point in time, I might find that there are just three or four that continue to speak to me, that continue to resonate with me, and I can then curate those, maybe I move them into another document, maybe they inform subsequent writing, maybe those are the types of notes that get shared socially, as opposed to that remain private. There are all kinds of ways in which as a first step, whether we’re writing by hand or writing on a computer digitally, we can return to our note-taking and annotation practices, and select those that remain resonant, select those that remain powerful to our thinking, and then inform subsequent work, inform the subsequent kind of writing, thinking, deeper production of knowledge, it is important for whatever work that we’re doing. That’s the first step: curate what you’ve annotated. Ross: One frame around this is the same, annotation happens on a particular document, be that a book or a blog post, or whatever it may be. But these may be in the context of developing knowledge in a particular domain where you might want to learn more about diabetes or around the edge of artificial intelligence, all sorts of topics, in which case, you have a whole set of different texts, which you’re annotating. How do you then pull these together to build understanding around the topic where there are multiple texts? Remi: This is a good point, Ross, because now we’re talking about annotation not just being tethered to an individual text, we’re talking about annotation being the connective tissue, or what some people refer to as the associative trails across multiple texts. Now, if we imagine a library full of books, we imagine our notes inside those books on shelves, it’s hard to imagine how those all get connected. Again, for hundreds of years thinkers and scholars have tried to imagine ways in which those notes become associated with one another and how across a domain, we can bring that thinking together in new ways. Of course, computational methods have helped with that incredibly, even in the last few decades now, we’re seeing great strides in that. There’s a tool that I happen to use, it’s called Hypothesis. It’s an open-source, web annotation technology, it’s free, anyone can use it, and it can mark up and write on the entire web. That is one technical approach to finding a way in which wherever my notes may live, across whatever kinds of documents, blog posts, primary source of literature, news articles, e-reading platforms, open textbooks, individual correspondences, the historical record, if it’s digital, it’s living online, if it’s on the web, I’m now not just annotating a single document, I’m using an annotation platform that allows me to bring all of my thinking across all those documents and all of my annotations together in one place. Again, I can choose to make those private just for me, I can choose to share those with other people. But it turns annotations from an isolated marginal comment into the connective tissue, those associative trails across all of my reading, across all of my thinking, and that allows me to then dig much deeper, as you said, particularly into domain-specific topics that require that kind of synthesis. Ross: I want to just briefly diverge and say, that sounds very much like the concept of the global brain where all of the thinking of individuals coalesces into a higher order thought structure. Remi: It does resonate. This is where again, I think that we find collaborative reading and writing technologies to provide glimpses of that. We could say that in this respect platforms even like Wikipedia, where you have multiple individuals reading together, editing together, and curating knowledge in rather sophisticated ways, although the platform is certainly not perfect, it has some documented issues. Nonetheless, it is a record, a visual record of people reading and then writing together. I think that we see other examples of that, and annotation and annotation platforms can serve as one type of that where the collective thinking of either a crowd, but also, in some cases, very highly trained expert communities can make new ways of thinking visible, accessible, and then really actionable to a much wider audience. Annotation is the key that unlocks that opportunity. Ross: In the West, we have fairly recently seen Zettelkasten become very trendy, we’ve had Roam Research become a RoamCult, Obsidian, Logseq, and other tools, these all fall into what I call connected notetaking. This is perhaps a JSON, it’s not a sort of SQL thing but these are the tools that many people are using to be able to coalesce what they find, and what connections they see between them. How do these kinds of tools relate to what you’re describing in terms of annotation and social annotation? Remi: In some cases, there’s quite a bit of overlap. I’m also quite interested in those note-taking histories because you mentioned Zettelkasten and many other methods around note-taking. In some cases, people are moving their notes off of a primary source. This is where again, it might not be appropriate or possible even to write on the text itself. They need to have a commonplace book or some other individual note-taking device, be it again, written by hand or online in some form, Roam being a great example of that, where notes can be curated, sifted through, where they can be used to be essentially remixed into other forms of writing, and they can aid in productivity workflows. I appreciate that. I understand that there is great value in that often for individuals, and often for individuals who are pursuing a particular line of inquiry. I have my own bespoke note-taking practices where I like to jot my notes. When I’m talking about annotation, both in my work as a researcher, but also in my teaching… remember, I’m a university professor, I teach classes, I have students, I know that people are reading together so there’s a little bit of a shift in purpose here, between you, Ross, picking up a book or finding even a primary source literature or even a peer-reviewed article individually, and you reading about a particular topic that you’re fascinated with, macroeconomics, developments in political theory, whatever it happens to be, and you’re then taking your notes, wherever and however you do that. The difference in purpose that I often find in my work is, let’s say, I have a group of 20 students, these are master’s or doctoral level students, and we’re going to read an article that explains a particular methodology germane to our field, we’re going to read it together and we have some shared learning objectives but we also know that our note-taking might move us in certain individual directions. But we have a common starting point and we’re also reading together, in that context, for that purpose; that’s where social annotation for me is particularly useful because I want that thinking to be made visible to the group. I want people to be reading together and then responding to one another, and I want us to be collectively making sense of that primary source. There is then again, some overlap with some of the work that people are doing around common places like Zettelkasten, individual note-taking like Roam, etc. again, often for individual productivity. Much of the work that I do, which is we’re a group, either we’re a book club, or we’re a formal course at a university, or we’re a group of educators participating in professional learning, who are collectively working to make sense of common resources, common texts, to move our thinking forward, even if some of that is individually oriented, the group activity is part of what brings us all together. Ross: And what tools do you use for that? Remi: Again, Hypothesis has become a particularly useful tool because it’s free, because it’s open, because it works across a variety of education-specific platforms, but it happens to just live online on the web. There are also several other promising social annotation platforms out there that are bringing people together. I spend a lot of time working with primary and secondary educators, and K–12 education. There is a nice annotation tool called NowComment that has become particularly useful. You’ve mentioned social bookmarking tools as well. Diigo, of course, has a long rich history. Others have been particularly generative in the formal education space. But this is where I try not to be too prescriptive about what tools people pick up because at the end of the day, it’s about social practices, how you want to be reading, thinking, writing, and collectively making sense of this stuff with other people? If you want to do it with other people, let’s figure out what those practices are, and then choose tools that meet our needs. Ross: Do you use or have any thoughts around visual tools? For example, there are various plugins for Roam and Obsidian which give network representations of connections between ideas. TheBrain arguably uses… essentially mindmap collections. There’s also a concept mapping to be able to show concepts and the relationships between them. Do you use any visual thought mapping tools? Remi: I do. I have a few of my own colleagues with several folks who have developed some of these tools as well to do this higher level thinking where you now are starting to establish associations between notes and resources, create broader categories of information, think about common themes, I think that that approach, particularly in visual ways is extremely helpful. The starting points are those initial rough draft thinking, that initial rough draft set of annotations. First of all, we need to create all this stuff. Again, this goes back to my earlier comments about curating even one’s own reading and one’s own initial annotations, it’s very important to have a corpus of rough draft thoughts, to begin with. Then whether those are mine, or yours, or a group of people’s notes, those can then all get put into other kinds of programs, other kinds of visual representational tools. There are a few that I happen to appreciate and use, where you can literally without getting too technical, essentially export digital content into other applications. Then you can begin to remix those and say, which of these notes connect to one another? Which of these notes are useful to pair in a group? How does this particular set of comments help us to think more deeply about this particular question, this particular problem? I’m a huge fan of that. I think that there are some more, in this case, visually oriented, higher order thinking tools that can be used in this way, whether individuals are doing it, or groups are doing it. Again, the question becomes, where do you start with that process? You probably start by adding notes to texts so that you can even do that work in the first place. Ross: What tools do you use or do you think are worth looking at? Remi: There’s one, in particular, that is rather more academically oriented, its acronym is FROG. It’s coming out of a group of researchers that are combining the open annotation affordances of Hypothesis with some other visual platforms. I have a colleague Bodong Chen of the University of Minnesota, he is now off to Penn, it’s his research team and colleagues who’ve put this together. It’s pretty education specific, you need to have a few technical chops, but if you’re using, in this particular case, Hypothesis, to do that openly networked social annotation, you can then move your annotations into this separate application and then really participate in some very interesting work that helps to extend that beyond a collection of texts, still working at a group level to make that higher order thinking possible as you move into other knowledge construction activities, like essay writing or textual analysis. Ross: This all goes to as I described synthesis is a human superpower, what distinguishes humans perhaps more than anything else, the idea, the ability to pull together disparate ideas into something which is cohesive, makes sense, and enables us to act effectively in a complex world. In addition to anything that we’ve already discussed, or perhaps to pull some of these things together, what are ways that you or you think that we can assist ourselves in that endeavor of being better synthesizers? Remi: I think that’s a really powerful question, Ross. First of all, thanks for asking. I think of two things when I think of the ability to be better synthesizers. What is nuance? I think it’s really important, particularly in today’s information environment, whether we’re talking about the challenges of accurate information, conspiracy theory, or in general trying to find the signal through the noise, as I’m sure you’re aware of that catchphrase. It’s really important to act with nuance, to read with nuance, and to think about details specifically. Again, this is where annotation allows us to identify particular points of a text and particular aspects of an argument, even to the level of a character, certainly a word. We can say, here’s where I see evidence of this, here’s where I understand this argument building, here’s the year, the citation, we need to cite our sources, and we need to have very careful citational practices. That level of nuance can be aided in our work of annotation. To move into synthesis, we can’t start from a level that is already too abstract. We can’t just try and synthesize big ideas and have more important insight from that if we’re not attentive to all of those small building blocks, all the little bits of nuance, all of those bytes of information that provide the strong foundation for our work. If you don’t have that strong foundation, if you don’t have that nuance, we’re not going to move to a point of synthesis. That’s the first big point I want to make. For me, again, practices of annotation allow me to be very nuanced in going back to information, finding particular aspects of a quote, or an argument of evidence. I think the second big point I want to make, though, in terms of working towards synthesis is being able to then take a step back, and have a tool and a practice that allows us to make associations. Once we have all that nuance, once we have all the evidence, once we have our corpus of information, we need a good point of connection, we need an easy way, an intuitive way, a way that we can easily say, A connects to B, and A then connects also to C, maybe there’s a tenuous connection here, we need to be able to make those networks and we need to be able to make them visible for ourselves. If we don’t have a connective practice, if we don’t habitually have some way of drawing associations, whether it’s visually, or it’s using a text-based platform, if that’s not a habit, and again, it’s going to be very hard for us to move into patterns of synthesis and to make those broader insights about the work that we do. Connection making, although people say that humans are pattern recognition machines, if we don’t practice that, it gets pretty rusty. It doesn’t allow us to then make more sophisticated connections over time. We also need to make those connections habitual. That means that we need tools and we need practices. Without getting too jargony here, this is where academic literature tells us, shows us, there’s strong evidence of this, my work speaks to this, that knowledge construction practices can be learned, they can be identified, they can be built upon whether that means identifying points of bias, working through disagreement, building consensus, or asking questions, those are connections that we can habitually learn to make. If we do that over time, we can work towards deeper levels of synthesis, we can create those deeper insights in our work. Just to quickly summarize, we need to have that nuance and we also need to have those connections. Those are both habitual practices that we can as thinkers, readers, and writers develop over time. Ross: If there are just a few of those references that you’d like to share with us, we’ll put them on the show notes because I certainly want to dig deeper, and I’m sure that some of my listeners will as well. Those are not something you can necessarily cover in a quick conversation. Remi: Sure. One can’t do it, of course. Ross: To round out, the topic is thriving on overload, which is something I think you do and you assist your students to do. Could you summarize just a few top-of-mind recommendations, to-dos, or ways in which people awash with information can pull that together to be on top of that, to feel that they are prospering in that way? Remi: Read slowly. The first thing I’ve done in my courses, particularly with my students over the past few years, is to eliminate the volume of what we read. I want us to read more deeply, I want us to read more deeply and I want us to read fewer, whether it’s books, texts, articles, whatever it is, just really winnowing down, first of all, the amount of information that we read so that we can read more slowly. Then as we read, again, it’s nice to read together. When we read alone, there is a lot to be gained and it can be very personally meaningful but the benefits of reading socially are incredible. The benefits of reading together with other people are to check bias, remind us of perspectives that we might not have considered, to think more deeply about questions that we might not have asked, which happens when we read socially. That’s the second opportunity. How do we thrive on information overload? We can read with other people because they can keep us in check and remind us of why we’re reading perhaps this in the first place. Then a third recommendation as we’ve been talking about is having robust note-taking practices. Again, if that’s going to be more individually oriented, with a commonplace book, Zettelkasten, whatever it may be, or you’re taking notes with other people as a form of discussion and conversation, having a robust annotation practice can be a really helpful way of thriving on information overload. But reduce the volume, reduce other people, and have a robust note-taking and annotation practice, that’s a nice recipe for thriving on information overload. Ross: That’s fantastic. I think that’s a very distinctive set of recommendations that are extraordinarily valuable. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Remi. It’s been a really fascinating conversation. Remi: Ross, you are so welcome. I hope that listeners find this helpful. There’s so much information out there. I’ll share some resources and people can follow my work, but I appreciate the opportunity to chat. Thank you so much. Ross: Thanks. The post Remi Kalir on social annotation, self curation, the connective tissue of ideas, annotation tools, and nuance for synthesis (Ep31) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Jul 27, 2022 • 30min

Rohit Krishnan on looking for surprise, passionate curiosity, dynamic loops, and creating your worldview (Ep30)

“You should read things that actually make you excited and make you want to engage with the world. For that, what you choose almost doesn’t matter, but you should choose something that allows you to create your own worldview.” – Rohit Krishnan About Rohit Krishnan Rohit is Investment Director at leading global venture capital firm Unbound, focusing on software and fintech. He was previously VP at Eight Roads Ventures and leader of McKinsey’s growth tech practice. He is author of the Strange Loop Canon on Substack. Substack: Strange Loop Cannon LinkedIn: Rohit Krishan Twitter: Rohit Krishnan What you will learn How to keep across useful information as a venture capitalist or investor (01:33) What are the best practices to start your information day (03:49) How to deal with disconfirming evidence and avoiding confirmation bias (08:33) Are routine and structure important to thriving on overload? (10:54) Why we should use explicit structure mental models more frequently (17:22) Why searching for dynamic loops is crucial to business (21:28) What are some information tracks that aspiring venture capitalists should follow? (24:26) Why having a worldview is the first step to thriving on overload (25:53) Episode resources Shannon Entropy Model Thomson Financial Kindle Pocket Strange Loop Cannon Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter Charlie Munger Jim Collins Flywheel Kees van der Heijden TechCrunch Crunchbase Substack Bakkie The Generalist Transcript Ross Dawson: Rohit, it’s fabulous to have you on the show. Rohit Krishnan: Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me, Ross. Ross: You are an investor, I think it’s fair to call the thinker as well. But as an investor, you have so many opportunities in such a fast-changing world. How is it that you keep across all of the change and all the things you need to be aware of? Rohit: It’s a great question. I would say that the type of investor that I am, I work in Venture Capital, which means primarily, I work with companies that are at rather early in the stage of development, Series-A, Series-B sort of companies. In many cases, what you’re trying to buy into is a little bit of what the vision of the future is likely to be for those companies. Two things are important that they’re slightly contradictory or orthogonal, I would say, thing number one is that you need to have a pretty open mind to see all of the things that are going on in the world around you, technological development, social development, consumer developments, business developments, etc. so that you can look at them and see where the puck is going to as the phrase goes. The second is that you need to try and dive usually rather deep into individual niches so you can use those macro themes and understand how those impact specific points like open source software, banking infrastructure, or what have you. The way that I’ve at least approached some of these conversations is to mainly focus on things that I’m most interested in, which perhaps is the only enduring way to do this, quite frankly. Because initially, at least I had a very focused or frameworked point of view, where you would start from, this is what the world is going to look like, therefore, these are the sectors that are going to grow, therefore, these are the technologies, etc. But what I realized is that that form of thinking is like you trying to analyze and come up with every startup’s mission statement from the top down, which is an incredibly hard job. It’s much easier to focus on things that you’re most curious and passionate about, things where you spend your time regardless because that’s the only thing that can give you a little bit of an edge. Ross: Why don’t we go down into the weeds now and maybe we can come back to some of those themes? What are your information habits? What’s the first information you touch on in the morning? How do you touch it? How do you start your information day? Where do you go? How do you do that? Rohit: It’s a good question. It keeps changing because I feel the information habits that I have are rarely the same information habits that stay over a period of time. If we were having this conversation last year, I would probably have said, books that I’m reading, articles that I have bookmarked that I’m going back to, maybe some podcasts that I’m listening to. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot more of that through Twitter. I find it both delightfully serendipitous, and a wonderfully random collection of things that comes across which is great because I need a little bit of randomness in my feed. Currently, I think a large portion of my information diet is self-selected books that I’m reading. At any point, there are several books on Kindle, that I’m at least reading, going back and forth, some fiction, some nonfiction that I like. Any article that I like, I bookmark on to Pocket because that just helps me go back to it when I get the time. Those come from a variety of normal websites and things that I track. I have a bookmarks folder that I go through or have built over several years at this point, from aggregators like arts and literature daily to anything else occasionally, the usual New Yorker-type stuff or other long forms. Changes over the last year, a large number of sub stacks have been added to it, as you would imagine which feed into the information diet. I used to read a lot more news, now I read it very less. It’s only for the main headline, so to speak, occasional scanning, but I do read a lot more in-depth pieces, essay-type pieces, and opinion pieces to get to it. Occasionally I listen to podcasts, not too many, just because I just don’t have enough time to listen to that many podcasts. I read the transcripts of several podcasts where the ones that come out because it’s just much faster and easier, depending on which ones are most interesting to me. It’s a little bit of a combination, and which part of this I spend more time on depends at any point in where I want to focus. If at times, I feel like I have been over-indexing on reading about tech news, for example, then I just reduce that for some time and over-index on something else that is valuable. Some of these things are easier because I have to keep up with tech stuff for work anyway which means even if I reduce it, I will have enough of a buffer that I know what’s going on. Whereas some of the other ones like which books that I’m reading are what are the items or ideas or sectors that I’m most interested in, or segments of the world that I want to learn more about or history that I’m looking at reading. Those are usually a function of what I’m most interested in at any given point in time. That was a bit of a rambling answer but hopefully, it gives you the main components in there. Ross: Yes, the thing is we have lots of information sources. You in your role need lots of information sources. Listeners are interested on what is the scope of that. Rohit: Yes, I was just going to say about the variety of information sources, at least one of the things I found is that I try and look at it a little bit like applying the Shannon entropy model. I want the next piece of information that I’m reading to surprise me as much as possible. Because otherwise, there are 100,000 articles say roughly similar stuff and have slight variants of the same-ish pieces of information, which don’t help me that much, neither for the job nor personal satisfaction. If I’m reading, here are the five trends that are going to change the future, and the first trend is AI, I know what the rest of it is going to be like, there’s no point in me reading that. If I’m reading something highly specific about the nitty gritty weeds or a scientific paper about how transformer models are changing, that could be helpful but there’s a point at which there are diminishing returns to me learning more about it. You gotta ride that curiosity wave so your information density is high enough and ideally, you want to keep getting surprised by any new piece of information that you’re bumping up against. If it’s not surprising, it better at least be entertaining, because if it’s neither of those things, you should probably put it aside and move on. Ross: Yes, looking for surprises is critical. The more we can sensitize ourselves to things that are surprising, one of the other advantages as well is that it helps us to be more familiar with our potential confirmation biases. If we say oh, that’s surprising because it’s disconfirming evidence, that really should be paid more attention to. Rohit: No, I completely agree. One of the things that I’ve been thinking more about recently, at least is that it’s very common, I would say, to think about pieces of information that come at you, you analyze it, and then you fight against the confirmation bias things, and especially to then judge the article that you read, or the book that you read, or the blog that you read, and say oh, yes, that was pointless. We do this on an ongoing basis so that we can curate information sources. Something that I force myself to do is that, if it is surprising to me, or if it provides a new and interesting lens to view the world with, I think of that as time well spent, regardless of whether or not I believe in its conclusion, which I find to be reasonably helpful as a habit. It happens all the time, when you’re reading about tech, it happens a lot, if you’re reading about anything in social sciences, it happens a hell of a lot, where you might accept some of the premises you like the argumentation that they have taken or the syllogisms that they put in or the rhetoric, but you might not agree with the conclusion for a variety of reasons. It’s a change that I’ve been trying to do over for a few years. I think I’m getting better at it. It helps make me far less annoyed at the stuff that I read on the internet, which is one of the main goals, isn’t it? Ross: One of the formative experiences of my life, I was Global Director of Capital Markets at Thomson Financial, very long time ago, and one of the favorite analysts, the salespeople go out, the client says, I love this particular analyst, I disagree with everything he says but he makes me think. That’s valuable. Rohit: That’s the best thing that you want in an information source or in any person, in most conversations for that matter. It has to be either surprising and informative, or entertaining; ideally, both. Ross: Yes. Do you have any schedules for your scanning or spending deeper time simulating information? Or is there a lack of structure to that? Rohit: No, is the answer. Most of it is because I’ve worked very badly in putting schedules on myself unless it’s superimposed by someone else. I’m very good at doing what I want to do because whatever is at the top of the priority list gets done if it’s stuff that I like whether it’s reading a book, writing an essay, or whatever. I’m very bad at saying things like 9:30 to 10:30 is the time for me to listen to X, or do X because I just find it hard to switch my brain into that rhythm. I treat my information diet roughly the same way that I treat my normal diet, where if I don’t want to eat cakes, pastries, and chips all the time, the only way that I can solve that, or the best way that I’ve found to solve that is just to not have it around me, and just make me interested in eating something else, which is what I focus on, on the information stuff as well. Try not to go into silly rabbit holes, and focus on the stuff that is interesting to you at any given point in time. I will say something that has significantly changed that is I have two young kids, and especially after my second son was born, the number of hours I have as free time drops off precipitously as one would imagine, as a consequence, you’re forced to become far more productive in the hours that you have left, which means that there is an automatic forcing function at any given point to say, Hey, do you want to watch that Netflix show? Or read this book? Or do you want to be doing something else? It’s an implicit calculation that goes on, which is far more pleasing to me than a schedule. Ross: We all have to find what works for us. Certainly, it sounds like it works for you. Rohit: Yes, I’ve tried to make chaos my friend, I find it to be the one thing that works reasonably well for me. Ross: Probably the first thing that made me interested in your work was you do have a channel, Strange Loop Canon. Rohit: Indeed. Ross: I’m a lifelong fan of Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Douglas Hofstadter’s work and the concept of strange loops and their implications. There’s a bit of a broader piece around mental models. Perhaps in whatever way you’d like, I like to say, what is it that draws you to this concept of strange loops? What relevance does it have to how you build your mental models? Rohit: I first read Gödel, Escher, Bach when I was very early in college. It’s one of those books that just blows you out of the water in the sense that it fits together so many disparate streams of human knowledge and tries to link them together in a pleasing narrative. It’s phenomenal. It’s one of the few books that at least during that time, I read and reread, and I just loved, and it stayed with me for a long period of time, which is why several years later when I wanted to write about at least a broad swath of topics around tech, culture, economics, industry, I wanted to use something that at least was very helpful to me. You asked about mental models, two of the things that attract me to the idea of strange loops in the first place is that strange loops are self-referential, which I think we all are. That’s one of the core properties of consciousness, it was what Hofstadter wrote about. I find that idea to be interesting, and fascinating, because if you think about the economy overall, as a complex adaptive system, then strange loops effectively are all around us, things that we do impact the output that we want, which impacts the next input that we want to give to a particular system, and this goes on and on forever. That, to me is incredibly interesting and a useful way at least to look at the world and the different ways in which causal arrows intersect. That’s one part of the answer. The second part on mental models, I would say, I’m a little bit more like” Mungerian” (refering to Charlie Munger-ed.) in my thoughts. We talked earlier about if you’re reading an article or a book, and it helps you think in a particular fashion, that’s its true gift as opposed to its conclusion, or, as opposed to its facts. Mental models are basically just that, it is a way for you to think ideally relatively quickly, but even otherwise, about topics that you don’t usually have huge amounts of domain expertise in, or huge amounts of knowledge in that you haven’t spent 30 years owning, you can use your mental models to use a series of them, ideally, to figure out does this thing even make sense, which is what its primary use is. I think of the combination of these two as trying to create a little bit like an incredulity filter, most things we see, and we are like, Oh, my God, how can the world work like that? Or how can this particular thing work like that? The mental models have been at least putting several pieces of thought pathways that at least you can look at and say, Ah, I see there is one pathway by which this particular line of argumentation makes a lot of sense, or there is one pathway by which this decision makes a little bit of sense. That’s at least to me, a bigger point about mental models. It’s not about learning frameworks, it’s about developing frameworks repeatedly so that you have a shorthand and still remember what you thought about before? Because you don’t want to start thinking everything from the first principal onwards every single time, that’d be quite inefficient, I would imagine. Ross: Part of the base of my question is using the concept of reflexivity in mental models of thinking about the world, so part of that can be expressed in systems dynamics, systems modeling, and so on. Do you use systems modeling or systems thinking tools explicitly? Rohit: For work, explicitly, almost never, but implicitly, quite a lot. Let me rephrase that. Explicitly, I do do it when I want to try to understand something better. If you want to understand a little bit more about the economy, inflation is a big topic, you want to understand more about inflation, it’s helpful, at least it was for me when I was learning about it to draw different boxes about whether it’s consumer demand, consumer demand for multiple types of topics, these come from individual firms, the firms make products, to do that, you have to make an investment, to make the investment, you have to get financing, to get the financing, you have to get a particular rate, there’s a demand for money, you draw this out, and you link the arrows between these pieces, it helps you create a better model of what exactly is going on in the world, which is really helpful. That’s one way this explicit part of it is helpful. I feel people underuse it a lot. I genuinely don’t find enough people using it in their life, they want to find out how something works. But then, once you have a few pieces, once you’ve done this a little bit in some areas, at least, if you want to employ it in your work, it is much harder to do that explicitly. Just because these are about you learning to ask the right questions as opposed to trying to get a quantitative answer at the end of it. When I was trying to learn how to do investing in startups, you could do all of this frameworky analysis, but that’s not going to help you. I’ll give you an example. When I first started, I had a spreadsheet, I still do, of 20 different metrics that I thought were most important. Some were qualitative, like how good is the management team, and some were quantitative, like how fast they’re growing, because I was like, I’m just going to pop it there, I have some sense of which ones I think are important but if I look back a couple of years, a few years, I will at least know the companies that I thought were going to succeed, did they succeed or did they fail? And use that as an answer. A few years in, a lot of the things that I thought were important were just like, it didn’t matter. A lot of the things I didn’t think were important, did matter. But the process of actually doing this explicitly helps hone that. When somebody is new in the industry, you can have these conversations like, oh, yes, I want to look at that company and I think they are interesting because their product is interesting. However, they’re not growing fast enough. At the same time, their competitors are producing these different things that could create a compliment, and they’re burning too much. But at the same time, you might look at a different company that is growing slower but has a higher burn but might be more interesting, there is no if loop that allows you to solve this, because your mental models then come in and say that in this particular situation, you should overweight product, or in this particular situation, you should overweight go-to-market or you should overweight what the broader market is going to do to you. That’s the learning that you need to get to, and that’s the ideal state you get to, or rather, you continue to try to improve on as you want to get to a decision-making process. Explicit structuring is highly useful and dramatically underused in learning how to think about new pieces of topics. Part of the reason is that doing it just feels like a little bit of a waste when you’re doing it just because there’s no reason for you to be doing it. Do you know what I mean? Nobody’s asking you for it. It’s not a deliverable. It doesn’t help you say things to someone else very easily so you got to do it for yourself a little bit, at least in large parts of our economy anyway. Ross: I do think it would be valuable for people to be thinking more systemically. One example is that you’ve got your business model canvas and a whole bunch of other similar tools, none of which have any reference to any self-reinforcing loops in them. We do have Jim Collins’ Flywheel and Kees van der Heijden business idea from wayback, which were implicitly looking at what are the self-reinforcing loops that underlie our business model? But I think that’s a massive gap in how most people are explicitly thinking about business models that they just don’t look at what are the self-reinforcing loops in there. Rohit: Yes, I’d like to pick on something you said. A large part of the conversation is about business models, and how to understand them at least from an education point of view is highly static stuff. You write down a comprehensive list of things that you can think about in all different boxes, it becomes a box-filling exercise very quickly. But which boxes are important is far more interesting than did you fill the box in the first place? That is a much harder thing to make people understand. This is one of those areas where if you’ve done it a lot, there is tacit learning that you get in identifying which parts of it are most interesting, or most important, which is what the training process is for. Part of that is identifying the actual dynamic loops that you talked about. Yes, the product is not great today, but look at the velocity by which they’re improving so if we wait a couple of years, they are going to be good, and if they managed to do this much with the okay product, think what they can do with something great, which is an example of a line of thought, that is very hard to just make someone drawing a diagram, but you see it a few times, suddenly, the pattern recognition helps. To your point, the dynamic loops are super important and it’s also important to use… I was going to say stories or narratives, but that’s perhaps not the right word, but to really try to verbalize what that future state is likely to be and how you’re going to get from here to there. Because in describing that or in drawing that out, you’re forced to define some of those loops in the first place. Because it is very difficult for you to describe a situation a year or two years down the line when companies are doing X without having some sense of how they get to that X from where they are today. Ross: Yes. There are many investors and people that stopped seeing that would be well served by a little bit more exposure to some of these ideas of dynamic loops and their impact and thinking through those, bringing those into the explicit and implicit models of startups. Rohit: I fully agree with that. Ross: To round out, I’m sure many people look to you for advice on all sorts of issues, based on your success and your experience, but to just tap your quick advice, somebody who’s an aspiring VC, and tech VC in particular, you’ve got to follow all of these emerging trends and technology, there are all of the overlays in the economy, as well as look at all of the emerging sectors, markets, competitions, there’s a lot, so what’s your advice on how someone should keep on top of that, and thrive? Rohit: I’m going to make a meta point first, which is that my biggest piece of advice, when people ask me this question, is to ask the question back about do you want to be a VC? I’m not sure that enough people understand what the job is, or understand why they want to do it beyond a general feeling that it is an interesting job that they would like. It’s okay, but I just want to make that meta point. Because it’s linked to my core piece of advice on getting the right amounts of information in doing it, which is that coming back to the original point, focus on what you’re most interested in, what you’re most curious about, and lean into that. The big difference that I find in good VCs, or good investors, good anything, is that they like what they do. I don’t mean this in jobs, your passion kind of sense, I mean it in the sense that they would be people who would be reading up about fintech anyway, as opposed to having to read about fintech for the job. That distinction is crucial. Because ultimately, a large part of at least my job is about reading all of these, a bunch of different sources, and trying to know what’s going on in the world and talking to a large number of entrepreneurs and other VCs to figure out what they think is going on in the world and how their company is doing. You’re constantly synthesizing information that is coming your way because you have a worldview. I’ll give you an example. I ask this in interviews and stuff, a sector thesis, what do you think is interesting? What do you think is likely to happen? It doesn’t matter what the answer is, but they need to have a point of view. That point of view will evolve. You talk to 200 companies and people, it will change and evolve, but you’re only really going to evolve it if you have a worldview first, which only comes if you’re interested in it first. Beyond that, in terms of information intake, there are the normal sources, the TechCrunch, Crunchbase type of stuff, where you get the immediate information about fundraisings and stuff like that’s going on in the world, broader world stuff about trends, etc., it’s probably extraordinarily well covered, but I would say there’s a vast variety of Substacks that you can read, that actually helps in that, whether it’s broad stuff like bakkies are boring, or The Generalist, or any number of these. In your information curiosity diet, you should have at least some of this how do you think about the world kind of stuff in there. That is very much idiosyncratic. You should read things that actually make you excited about the world and think about the world and make you want to engage with the world. For that, what you choose almost doesn’t matter, but you should choose something that allows you to create your own worldview. Ross: That’s fantastic. Hopefully, we’ll get more VCs that follow your advice. Thank you so much for your time Rohit. Fabulous conversation Rohit: Indeed. This was wonderful. Thanks for having me on, Ross, and congratulations on the book. Ross: Thank you. Take care, bye. The post Rohit Krishnan on looking for surprise, passionate curiosity, dynamic loops, and creating your worldview (Ep30) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Jul 21, 2022 • 29min

Sam McRoberts on connecting the dots, being humbly curious, introducing randomness, and thought experiments (Ep29)

“It’s interesting how things that seem unconnected at first glance may actually be connected. You may be looking in finance, and you find something related to psychology, where you may be looking in psychology, and you come across something that’s related to physics. Everything is connected, it just depends on the path that you get there and the weighting.” – Sam McRoberts About Sam McRoberts Sam is the CEO of global SEO agency VUDU Marketing and the bestselling author of Screw the Zoo. He is the co-host of The Entrepreneur Cast podcast and frequently appears in media such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider and many others. He has been travelling around the world with his wife and son as a digital nomad and been to 20 countries and counting. Blog: Sam McRoberts Podcast: The Entrepreneurcast LinkedIn: Sam McRoberts Twitter: Sam McRoberts Facebook: Sam McRoberts Book: Screw The Zoo What you will learn How to find the good things you need in the ocean of information (01:38) The advantage of Twitter in finding information (04:20) From an information perspective, should we be more or less predictable? (08:40) How can you pull a useful mental model from so much information diversity? (11:42) Why being and staying curious is an advantage (15:13) Why the concept of building a second brain is promising (16:50) What are some ways that we can start to correlate the different slivers or frames that we have on reality? (20:52) Going out of your comfort zone to separate the valuable from the not-so-valuable (24:53) Episode resources VUDU Marketing Allen Neuringer B.F. Skinner Randonautica The Dice Man by Luke Reinhart Kindle Notepad for IOS Roam Research app Tiago Forte Obsidian LogSeq Transcript Ross Dawson: Sam, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Sam McRoberts: Hey Ross, thanks for having me. Ross: It’s fair to say you live your life in an ocean of information. Sam: That’s a gentle way to put it. All of us, we’re surrounded by massive amounts of information. We only get the tiniest sliver of it. We’re each trying to make sense of that in our minds. We never get the exact same sliver. Everybody’s attempting to connect an overlap without knowing actually what’s in anybody else’s head. It’s quite an adventure. Ross: How do you get your particular sliver? Sam: By dipping my toes in lots of different pools. I use Twitter primarily for fishing out interesting topics and then chasing down rabbit holes, stuff that catches my interest. Ross: I was trying to get a consistent ocean metaphor, but now we’ve got rabbit holes in there as well. Sam: Sure. I guess rabbit holes could fill with rainwater. Ross: We can have mixed metaphors. Let’s start with Twitter because that’s the way we connected, reflecting back on the old days, it was one of the best possible ways to connect to interesting people, I think a little bit less these days but it is how you go about it. How do you find wonder, delight, and good things in the fairly mixed waters? That is Twitter. Sam: Trial and error; more error than trial. I look for people who are talking about things that catch my interest. I have pretty broad-ranging interests. I will start by following a handful of interesting people, I’ll keep an eye on their tweets for a while to see what they talk about and who else they connect with. Then I’ll decide whether to keep following them or keep them in my mainstream, or maybe move them to a list if they only focus on a narrow topic, or unfollow if it’s not as interesting as I hoped it would be. But so far, it works pretty well. Ross: How big is your main list and what other lists do you have? Do you have very focused topic lists as well as your main list? Sam: Because I grew up as a child of the 80s, and 90s, who was interested in hacking, I limit my followers, the number of people I follow, so 1337. That is my main pool. Then I have probably 15 or 20 other lists for different topics. It could be crypto, AI, futurism, finance, humor, whatever it is. Ross: Do you scan those lists daily, or just delve in and out? Do you have particular times a day that you play around in these spaces? Sam: I’m on Twitter probably way too much. I jump in and out of those lists, depending on my mood. I have only a couple that I check daily. Then my main feed is where I spend most of my time. Ross: What do you do with that? Are you use taking notes? Are you just building things in your mind? Is there any thesis that you’re trying to build? What are the ways in which these feed your mental models and your ideas? Sam: I mostly take notes in my mind. I operate under the assumption that if it’s important to me, it will stick, and that tends to be the case. I like to just keep my options open and be open to serendipity. I’m reading along and something catches my interest, maybe it’s about a topic I’m reading on or maybe it’s something that I just find interesting, maybe I’ll spend a few days going down that rabbit hole. What I most look for in Twitter are three things. One is other people who are curious, and who are humbly curious like they want to know what’s true, they’re willing to poke, prod, dig, and change their minds to get there. Two, technologies, new things that I’m not aware of that could be cool, maybe now, maybe down the road. Then new sources of information, whether it’s an article, a book, a podcast, a video, whatever it is, I’m looking for people to expose me to things that I’ve never been exposed to and might not have had I not encountered them. Ross: Serendipity is a topic dear to my heart. You’ve already described it in a way but are there any other things that you think facilitate you to that serendipity? Those happy accidents of finding new, relevant, or interesting things for you? Sam: I think not staying too stuck in a rut. I’m willing to go poking in random places. I even do it in real life outside of Twitter. I may take a different route one day than I would normally walk or buy something different just to try something new, or try a different show that’s completely outside of my normal sphere, whatever it is, I try and introduce randomness, because how else am I going to discover new things? Ross: Allen Neuringer was a wonderful scientist, he studied under B.F. Skinner. B.F. Skinner was the person who talked about stimulus-response, we have patterns of behavior, which are built into us because of all the responses that we have. Allen was a student of B.F. Skinner at Harvard, but he came up with this thesis, he said, if we can reinforce consistent behavior, perhaps we can reinforce inconsistent behavior, variable behavior. He came up with this phrase, variability as an operant, where he proposed and experimented with himself throughout his life, to say that he could build up to himself to have more variable responses by giving positive rewards. Sam: I like that. Ross: That’s something which we can all try to do for ourselves. Sam: Have you ever heard of Randonautica? Ross: No. Sam: Randonautica is a site and an app that uses a quantum random number generator with a geographic constraint to give you a location within your vicinity based on the radius you provide, completely random. You can use that and you can be like, pick me a random place, and it’ll put a pin on your map, and you go there and see what’s there. I’ve played around with that. Ross: That is awesome. Sam: I have played around with that. I love things like that. I love that sort of randomness and getting outside of your normal bubble. Fascinating. Ross: Allen Neuringer trained himself to be able to create random numbers, which was supposed to be impossible. He used a computer to give him feedback to be able to generate random numbers. Sam: Wild. Ross: Maybe we could do the same with our behaviors as in our paths to get to where we’re going or wherever, but I love that. This goes back to The Dice Man, have you read that? Sam: I have not. What’s The Dice Man? Ross: It’s kind of old culture. It’s the 80s book by Luke Reinhart. Anyway, it was very popular at the time. It was the story where this guy, a very normal guy, suddenly came up with this thing where he threw dice to decide what he was going to do and he just started leading this crazed life, because he just followed the dice. Sam: I like that. Ross: It set off this cultural phenomenon. Sam: That’s funny. Okay, I’m going to read that. Ross: It’s interesting just to come back to that, because our conversation unearthed that. In a way chaos is all around us. We live in a world of chaos as never before. The individuals within it are significantly unpredictable; even various politicians who seem to be unpredictable, but in fact, they are very predictable. Once you establish their patterns, you can predict what various famous politicians will do, even if they may not do what politicians of the past did. We get a lot of very consistent behaviors, which are creating more chaotic environments. I just wonder how should we behave in this chaotic environment? Should we be more predictable or less predictable? From the information perspective, the less predictable means that we have more information, more diverse information, richer mental models, and better ways of thinking. Sam: I agree with that. I think predictability is interesting. If you understand somebody’s incentives deeply enough, you can predict to a degree, but there’s also always the element of unexpected randomness, somebody who’s acting out of character, or they don’t know what came over them. There are always elements of potential randomness and you just never know when they’re going to hit, so fun. Ross: Famously, a lot of the most successful people on Wall Street are bipolar. They have a high degree of unpredictability which in some ways has served them well, or at least financially. Sam: Finance is probably a very good place to be unpredictable because really, it is unpredictable. Nobody is accurately predicting the market, you’re getting lucky in different ways at different times. If you are sufficiently luckier and consistent over time, you may have some sort of an edge. Warren Buffett’s a good example. He’s very consistent over time. It’s more the amount of time than it is his luck or anything else that’s at play. If you can just be reasonable for long enough, you’ll be fine. Ross: Yeah. You only need actually market track, to be frank. You ride the market, you hopefully have a slightly better than the average thesis, or you don’t make the mistakes, that takes you a long way. That’s one way in which consistency is good. Ross: In terms of pulling all this together, it’s wonderful to have diverse perspectives, have lots of different information, ideas and find things which you wouldn’t find, but part of the things is, okay, how do we pull all this together into some kind of a cogent and useful mental model of the world? Because that’s part of the things, the more diversity of perspectives, the harder it is to pull it together into something which has some degree of internal consistency in the way that we see the world. How do you synthesize or pull together all of your disparate sources? Sam: Honestly, it’s more random than structured. As I learned things, I see what sticks. In my mind, I think of it all, from the perspective of nodes. I know that the way we store information in our minds is in clusters across different sensory pieces. It’s interesting how things that seem unconnected at a first glance may actually be connected. You may be looking in finance, and you find something related to psychology, where you may be looking in psychology, and you come across something that’s related to physics, everything is connected, it just depends on the path that you get there and the weighting. But in terms of consistency, I’m trying to find things that fit, what I can observe, that are wherever possible, reproducible and consistent. But I also really have a bent for things that are outside of the norms. I like stuff that maybe is uncertain, or nonstandard, but still fits. What would be a good example? Nonduality, research into consciousness, nature of reality, things where we have guesses, and we have some pieces of information, but it’s still tremendously uncertain. I like those domains. Ross: I always think it’s marvelous if we look at the microscopic or the macroscopic. In physics, we have extraordinary degrees of knowledge. But we start to look inside our brains, and we’re only just scratching the surface of what it is we know. But we do have plenty of data. There are a lot of starting points for data in which we can start to use our imaginations in a way, and that’s part of extending what are the hypotheses around how our brain works, and what is the nature of the mind. That’s fun playing fields because you can’t read it all in the textbook, or at least there’s only high-level elementary views of that. But that’s something where you can start to connect dots in useful and novel ways, fairly readily, because we are just beginning to do that. Sam: I’m always amazed at how much information we’ve discovered and how much there still is that we don’t know, even as close as our brains. It was only a decade ago, not even a decade ago that we found that the brain has a lymphatic system. How wild? We’re still discovering things inside ourselves now, despite all our advances in technology, and there are probably mountains more to figure out. The microbiome is still largely not understood, protein folding, still so much more advances to make. It’s mind-blowing how much we know and yet how little that still is. Ross: Would you say that there are any practices or things that help you to be better at connecting those dots? Is it just the way you were born, or you’re educated, or the way you’ve made yourself, or is there anything which you do that helps you make some of those connections more jump out? Sam: I’m not sure if I do anything in particular. I was born, I assume very curious. I’ve heard stories from when I was two, two and a half. I was very much the same then as I am now. I questioned everything, I wanted to understand how things work, and I annoyed the shit out of my parents because I was always like why is that? No, that’s stupid, I don’t want to do that. If I do anything, it’s just deliberately reading a variety of things, exposing myself to different ideas so there’s a chance for those connections to form. If I don’t have enough variety, who knows what I’m going to miss. But it’s hard because I can only read so much. My to-be-read pile expands far faster than I can read them. Ross: What formats do you read? Sam: Mostly Kindle. Since I’m a digital nomad, I can’t haul around a bunch of books. Digital is my go-to, but I love that I can very easily highlight stuff and then export highlights. Ross: Where do you export your Kindle highlights too? Sam: Usually, I’ll pull them out into a Notepad. I like doing stuff old school in Notepad. I’ve played around a bit with Roam, but not very advanced, it hasn’t really caught me yet, it’s interesting, but I don’t love it yet. Maybe someone will convince me to dig deeper eventually. Ross: Is that just playing with the ideas? Or is this something you’re trying to build with those? Are you working on any projects where you’re driving your particular types of research, reading, or thinking? Sam: I like the thesis of building a second brain that Tiago Forte has talked about, that’s an interesting idea. Because very much our phones, have become an extension of our minds. I like the idea of building a wiki of the things that you know and how they connect together and trying to make that mirror the way those connections appear to you in your mind. But I’m vastly too lazy to build that out to the degree of fidelity that would be useful, and so I dabble. Ross: You described this as the nodes and connecting the dots, so implicitly a network structure of ideas, and then teasing out what those connections are? Sam: Yes, much like the background in your image here on the screen. I think about that, I think of my mind in terms of those nodes, and I try and get to like, what do I think the most significant nodes are? Which ones do connect the most? But getting that out into another format hasn’t been able to make me do it sufficiently. Ross: That is a project, which I’m working on, is to try and to do something, which does make that process a little bit easier. Because the Roam research, obsidians, LogSeq, and so on of this world are a little bit for the uber-geeks. Similar capabilities or these ways of being able to manifest a network thinking for a broader audience would have some potential. Sam: Agreed. I’m still holding out for the brain-computer interface feature future, where just plug me in, run me through a program that learns the language of my mind, and then download it all for me. Maybe it won’t be too far in the future. Ross: Would you be an early adopter of the invasive neural interface? Sam: I’m not going to be a beta tester, but once it’s reasonably safe, I don’t see why not. Honestly, the only feasible future for humanity long-term is probably at least some sort of human technology hybrid, if not, some sort of full digital self. I don’t see how we can not only survive long-term but spread out and explore the universe when we’re piloting these fragile meat suits. Ross: Our brains are extraordinary but the interface between our brains and the external world is… Sam: Rudimentary? Ross: Our primary interface is a language, which is good; language is a pretty decent tool but there’s a lot more that we can do. Language is linear and our brains are not. That’s one of the things which pulls me towards visual representations, is that visual start to be able to give us representations that show some of the nonlinearity of the world. Sam: I’ve written a blog post about that, it’s called the words that divide us. But that concept of language, we use a label that has a relatively simple meaning but there’s so much more attached to the label in our minds. If I say one word, if I say “apple”, you might picture a specific variety of an apple or an apple pie, or bobbing for apples at Halloween, or an apple orchard, and then you have smells, and tastes, and all these things connected to that word but all that cloud of things that are tied to the word are different for everybody. The emotions a word triggers may be different for everybody. Our language is, at best, a very lossy map but it’s so far from the territory, it’s gotten us very far but it’s still just maybe a bootloader. Ross: You started talking about the slivers of perception, the different frames that we build out of that. What are some ways that we can start to transcend that, or to marry or mesh or correlate the different slivers or frames that we have on reality? Sam: We get maybe as close as we can, in the realm of philosophy, where you have to sit down and very carefully hash out terms, frames, and meaning when you have a discussion so that you’re all on the same page. Technologically, I don’t think we’re terribly far out from being able to read emotions, imagery, and things from the brain. It may be possible in the not too distant future when you speak, to also share an emotional channel with the person you’re speaking to so they can feel more of what you’re saying, and not just hear the word and interpret it through their frame, that would get us closer. I also have high hopes for whatever the metaverse ends up being. I hope that being in an immersive, interactive visual environment where we have much more control over all of the elements will allow us to do a broader and deeper method of conveying experiences, so instead of just telling somebody about an experience, maybe you can rebuild it. What we’re seeing now in the realm of machine learning, with large language models, and image generators like Dali, are precursors to being able to maybe describe to an AI an experience we had, and then adjust it and let it generate a full sensory experience, I don’t know how close we are, I think we will probably have the ability to give a description and get a visual and auditory output within the next three to five years. But who knows, maybe within the next 10 to 20, we’ll be able to build something even more immersive. Then when we tell our story, we can show our story, feel our story, and hear our story. Ross: I think that’s very feasible. There has been some really interesting research using machine learning on fMRI scans, where you have been able to represent visually what people are thinking about in terms of essentially training them on a whole series of images so that people think of things and you can see it on the screen, which is pretty phenomenal. Given we’re already at that level, then you could imagine getting closer to where you can think things in your brain and that scene is evoked in a 3D virtual world that other people will also inhabit. Sam: As cool as fMRI is, it’s still very low fidelity. What we’re capturing is across a large neuronal space, it’s not pinpoint precision, which is why I’m so hopeful for brain-computer interfaces, or whatever we ended up using. Maybe it won’t be invasive surgery, and maybe it’ll end up being nanobots of some kind, but that ability to get very precise and then to do that training, and to be able to get down there and see ah, this part of this neuron fires when you think of this image, that’ll be amazing. Ross: Yes, we have got a bit of way to go but we are definitely on that journey. Sam: I’m hoping AI helps to speed us up. Ross: Yes, essentially, for me, this is the idea of how is it that we evolve our cognition, and part of it is being able to just be better at what humans do, lots of us can do on that front. But given we got these nice, handy, pretty nifty AI tools, we can work out how can they complement us as best possible? And that’s a big part of the next decades and beyond. Sam: Very much. Ross: Pulling back to this Thriving on Overload. I’d say that’s a pretty fair description of what you do. You’re in overload, you want it, you lap it up, you’ve probably looked for exposing yourself more than most people and you thrive on it. What are some tips? What are some recommendations? What are some things you would suggest to people that want to prosper in this world where there’s so much value, but also so much, which is not so valuable? Sam: One of the most important things you can do is to get outside of your swimlane. Everything about our education and the working system is designed to move you into a narrower and narrower lane so that your function and use to the whole is very precise. There’s a tendency to narrow your filters, instead of expanding them. The best thing you can do is deliberately go the other way. Try a lot of different things, experiment, don’t get yourself stuck in a rut, read things you wouldn’t normally read, listen to people you wouldn’t normally listen to, and maybe deliberately go after counter things that make you feel angry or frustrated. If you have a particular stance, seek out the opposite stance so that you understand more than one side of an issue. Try and put yourself in someone else’s mind. What would I need to believe for what they believe to be true? Do thought experiments, poke at things. More than anything is just to be open to whatever is true. Assume that everything you think is true is probably not, maybe it’s at one end of the truth-leaning spectrum or not. What’s the sane? All models are false, but some are useful so understanding that you don’t know anything, you just have a lot of faulty models that are more or less useful depending on what circumstance you find yourself in. Ross: That’s fantastic. It’s really sound advice. What you or I can do when we got the transcript of this is just distill out of what you’ve just said into a set of aphorisms that will give some guidance to people. I think that’s great. Sam: Awesome. Ross: Thanks so much, Sam. I really appreciate your time. It’s been a very fun conversation. Sam: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. The post Sam McRoberts on connecting the dots, being humbly curious, introducing randomness, and thought experiments (Ep29) appeared first on Humans + AI.

5 snips

Jul 14, 2022 • 39min

Derek Laney on transcending emotional overload, openness for serendipity, balancing focus and discovery, and using threads well (Ep28)

“Not only is that overload factual, in terms of data and trying to figure out what’s true, but also it’s an emotional overload. How do you be intentional about your feelings and emotions as well so that you can pay attention to what matters for you right now, rather than all of the stuff that’s being served up, as all of the emotions of the world are available for you on the internet to consume?“ – Derek Laney About Derek Laney Derek Laney is Technology Evangelist for the Future of Work at collaboration platform Slack, having previously held a range of senior roles at Slack’s parent company Salesforce. Blog: Derek Laney LinkedIn: Derek Laney Twitter: Derek Laney Facebook: Derek Laney Instagram: Derek Laney What you will learn How to deal with information overload in the workplace (01:29) Aside from information, why emotional overload has to be dealt with (04:07) How to give autonomy back to the individual effectively (06:20) How can individuals use an interface like Slack without being overwhelmed (09:43) Three tips on how to use Slack to manage information overload (18:07) How to make serendipity more possible in organizational information interactions (15:45) How to balance focus time and discovery time (26:37) What is the value in regenerating attention (31:01) Why having a document hierarchy for note-taking helps in idea creation (34:12) What is rubber duck debugging and its value in getting unstuck (36:20) Episode resources Slack Salesforce Alastair Simpson, VP of design, Dropbox Dropbox Harvard Business Review article on meetings Hubert Joly, former CEO BestBuy interview with Adam Grant Stewart Butterfield, CEO Slack Speaker’s Corner Rubber duck debugging Transcript Ross Dawson: Derek, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Derek Laney: Hello, Ross, it’s great to see you again. Ross: You are now a technology evangelist at Slack having come from a good chunk of your working career at Salesforce. Slack is helping us deal with lots of information at work. The last couple of years have been pretty interesting. I’d love to pull back a little context to get a sense of where is the workplace at in terms of overload amongst other things? Derek: Yes, it’s a really interesting topic, Ross. When you reached out to me, and let me know what you were doing, I thought of it and went, wow, this is the most important thing I never knew I needed to know. Suddenly after unpacking this, I’m like, wow, how did I not spend time focused on this as a topic for myself? It’s hugely important. Congratulations on the work that you’re doing. The podcast and the book, I think it’s really valuable, and plays well into our focus as well in terms of helping organizations build this thing called the Digital HQ, which is, how they connect all of their employees at work in this digital context. You mentioned my career, my summary is it’s been 25 years or so in software development, leading teams, outsourcing, consulting, and talking with lots of businesses that led me to Salesforce, and then most recently, to Slack. I feel very, very tied in with some of the topics that you’re exploring as well. Thank you for having us. Thank you for making the time on your podcast. I heard this quote from Alastair Simpson, who’s the VP of design at Dropbox, he said, if we’re honest with ourselves, work was pretty broken before the pandemic, it’s just that we didn’t do anything about it, and then suddenly, we turned on all our cameras, we pointed them at our staff, we recorded everything, and now, everything is visible two-dimensionally, and all this stuff that was broken, is now very much on display, and we’re like, how on earth, did we not solve these problems? Just what you’re talking about, a lot of this stuff has been around for a long time. Harvard Business Review in 2017 had this really interesting piece of research that said, 71% of managers agree that meetings are a complete waste of time, they’re ineffective, and unproductive. Yet, it’s the primary mechanism that we try to make sense. We get together in a room in a 30-minute block, maybe a 60-minute block, a little bit more if you’re lucky, and then we have this really weird ceremony where we go through the process of trying to work together, and it’s really not effective. Last year, people were really struggling. You talk about the great resignation that’s happening at the moment and that sort of thing, this is symptomatic of what you’re talking about. There’s this information overload, things happening in the macro environment, things happening in our world, not only is that overload factual, in terms of data and trying to figure out what’s true, but also it’s an emotional overload. If you just look at the last week, or whenever you’re viewing this podcast, think about what’s happening in your current week, there’s a lot going on you could care about. How do you be intentional about your feelings and emotions as well so that you can pay attention to what matters for you right now, rather than all of the stuff that’s being served up, as all of the emotions of the world are available for you on the internet to consume? How do you make sense of that? This created this period, that leads us to where we are now where workers, in general, are questioning, why am I here, there’s so much going on in my world, my work now seems less important than it did before because that was everything I experienced, and this nice little control box that I went in from nine to five, it was pretty controlled of the information I was exposed to, whereas now I’m exposed to everything, and now my work in that context starts to make less sense. I feel that’s where workers are in a lot of places. Most people are focused on, how do I change this? How do I make work more flexible? How do I give back control to our individual people to do their best? How do I enable them to work more together? That’s very related to the topic that you’re talking about in terms of thriving on overload. One of the keys that we’re finding is flexibility, control, and autonomy. These are the things that individual workers are craving to try and draw back. They feel out of control. They feel overwhelmed as you just talked about. One of the best things you can do is give them back some of that control. It could be things like controlling where they work, but actually, that’s not important as when they work. That’s a lot of what we’re trying to do, as we set up these new types of tools with technology. Ross: I’d like to look back on the emotional piece a little bit, because that emotional overload is a critical part of this. If you think about being effective, there are two levels, individual and organization. In this complex world where organizations are never quite on top of where they’re at, individuals and organizations can make a difference, part of this idea is pushing back the autonomy or control to the individual, how do you frame that in a way that those individuals use that well? Because you can give the control, autonomy, and flexibility to the individual, but if they are still overwhelmed emotionally or by information, or are not knowing what to do, how can you foster the ability to use that autonomy well in them? Derek: It’s a great question. My own reflection is that I was really good at developing and building out my IQ. It wasn’t until I came to Salesforce 15 years ago, I didn’t even know that I needed to have emotional intelligence and that was something that I needed to use at work. I’ve been on a journey over that time to figure out what’s right for me or how I make sense of it whether that’s managing teams, all of the different emotions and relationships that are part of teams, or whether it’s my family and thinking about their emotional health, through the day, and through the week. We’re just a lot more aware than we were in the past. I’m hopeful that this is not just my experience in high tech, but it’s happening across our communities. It used to be like you’d leave work, you’d have some break, and then you’d go back to your life, we talked about this work-life balance, or whatever. But if you’re coming away from work, and you’re an emotional wreck, and you have nothing left to give to your family, which should be probably your number one concern of where that emotional energy goes, then we’re probably not doing our job as caretakers, or as a worker. We need to be careful in developing the intellectual capacity of our workers. We have to develop the emotional capacity. That’s the organizational responsibility, your question was more about the individual. In my business, it’s more about thinking about leaders, managers, and how they help. In the past it was shit flows downhill, or whatever it was, the bad stuff happens to the people on the bottom, because the emotional pressure is put down, I think the days of that have gone, we can’t do that anymore. We have to be listening, and empathetic, and thinking about how those that work with us and for us are going to emotionally process. That means good change programs, listening, coaching rather than telling, and the days of using emotional pressure to produce productivity. That’s what we’re seeing with the great resignation, that workers are rejecting that and saying, look, it’s just not worth it. I’d rather go and do something else with my time. Ross: I do want to keep on that theme and dig into how that can be expressed, maybe diving straight to the coalface as it were, our interface to work. Slack is an interface for a lot of people to work and their colleagues. This is an environment which can be perceived as overloaded. There are a lot of channels, a lot of threads, and a lot of things going on. Some people find Slack as distracting as Twitter for its randomness of conversations. With Slack or other similar interfaces to work out there, how do individuals use an interface like that without being overwhelmed? How is it that they use Slack or something like Slack well? Derek: That’s a good question. There are a couple of parts to your question. First is this idea of noise and control, and how do you balance those things. The second is a humanistic approach to system design, and how do you think about nonrational responses and emotional responses, and what are we learning about systems that we can create to be less inhuman and less depressing, to be honest. Let’s get back to the first one. I hear this a lot from people where they’re like, I feel Slack is noisy. My response is, do you remember the first time you use the internet? You were like wow, so much on here, like I Google things, and there are millions of results, how am I going to read all these, and like, that’s not really how the internet works, it’s a catalog, it’s a searchable log of all of the information on the web. Slack stands for searchable log of all communication and knowledge, that’s the acronym. It’s about being how to discover, it’s about not only can you create conversations that you can discover, serendipitously, things that might be happening out in the space. Now that requires some development in the way of working. It’s very important not to just throw a tool like Slack or anything else in there and expect employees to suddenly know how to use it because they’ve lived with email for 20 years, or whatever it was, and before that, other tools, letter writing, etc. and it’s a different way of working. One of the things that I love personally, is the fact that every time I look at anybody’s Slack instance, it looks different because they’ve tailored it just to them. If you’re using it well, you’re using it intentionally. For example, I use the groupings on the left-hand side, and I have one that says read first, and I have one that says above the fold, and above the fold just means it’s not urgent but I’d like it to stay above the fold, not disappearing off. Then most of my other 10,000 odd channels or whatever that I might be interested in, they’re only there contextually when I need them. I direct what I work on. I use Slack to move the things that are interesting to me right now, to my focus, and everything else, I mute and turn off. Most of the stuff I have muted. I’m not interested in the notification so much. In systems design, we used to think that we were going to be smart as system designers, myself included, we would work out the best thing that you could pay attention to. We would surface that up to the top of your feed. We would say to you in a call center or if you’re a knowledge worker, we’d say this is what you need to pay attention to, maybe even we would use these amazing things called algorithms that would be able to figure that out. They would surface that to you and say, here is what you should pay attention to and work would be fantastic because you’ll just be able to go through this prioritized list. What we’re finding is that’s not really how it works and there are nonrational elements, and the way the brain works, that it’s not that interesting. If you work in any of these systems, where you have prioritized queues, a lot of the autonomy and joy that’s taken out of the self-direction, is taken away and productivity starts to slow down, and attrition starts to go up because I don’t want to work in a world where someone tells me what to do every step of the day and says what I should pay attention to, I want to explore what my brain is telling me is interesting, because it still has this amazing, humanistic capability to uncover information in ways that we don’t really understand and can’t replicate now. In my Slack, it’s changes based on what I want to pay attention to right now. Then I love typing a search and then go wow, suddenly, I’m in this space where I’m learning about something, and I have access to all the people and all of the information about the topic that I need right now. That’s where organizations are moving to. We talk about the culture of learning and the new ways… My daughter is just about to enter the workforce and thinking about her skills, she needs to know so much just in time. She needs to be able to develop things as she becomes aware of a need, rather than potentially knowing 10 years in advance, doing university degree, knowing all the things and then going off competent into the world. I’m not sure that was ever the case but it’s certainly not the case now. Being able to do that, in an environment where work can be tailored by the individual, they can discover the people that they need, the information that they need, make progress quickly, and then go back to whatever it is that they were doing next. That’s the noise and control thing and it comes back to autonomy. What’s interesting is that people love it, they really love working this way once they learn how to do it, and then you’ll take it out of their dying hands. They’ll be grasping onto this thing because they really see the benefit and huge productivity increases. Coming back to the second part of your point. One of the things with this new style of systems that’s not immediately obvious is that the humanistic design that was used to create them does some really interesting things. For example, Slack has an unlimited ability for you to tailor and create reactions. I remember saying this five years ago and thinking, let’s try it, that’s just a gimmick that’ll go away but it turns out when you let people express themselves in an infinite number of ways, using moving visual names, suddenly, all sorts of interesting possibilities pop up. The way that I react is not with thumbs up, thumbs down, happy face, whatever, the five different ways you can react on LinkedIn or whatever, it’s an unlimited number of ways, and in fact, mine are tailored to me. I have an emoji that was created for me on day one called Derek Laney Wow. If ever I do something cool, someone starts typing my name in the emotional reactions, they can choose my custom Wow emoji, it’s me with stardust happening behind my head. Someone does that and that is super cool, I just feel joy and feel that they care about me. They don’t have to do anything, they just type my name and hit go. I’m triggered, all this wonderful brain chemistry is then just triggered in me to go, oh, wow, not only are you thankful, but you’re thankful in an incredibly personal and unique way. It’s very similar in the way that you see people use gifs as a way to communicate. Gifs are important in channels like Slack as well because they allow you to express something in a humanistic way that you almost can’t even define; you know what the gif means, but also you can’t describe it. Then you do that in a work context where you’re trying to get work done. It’s bizarre, it makes work more fun. The surprising thing is, that also makes it more productive because you have fewer misunderstandings due to the limited emotional range of reactions like the thumb, it’s the worst possible thing that was ever invented, and instead, you’re communicating more like what you do in life like what we’re doing now with our faces and our hands, there’s all this nonverbal communication, which is completely lost in digital media. As soon as you start to bring that back, we’re early in this, but we’re doing that through things like gifs and reactions, and all that sort of stuff, you make digital communication more expressive, and more of the subtlety, and nuance, and humanistic stuff that’s hard to understand comes into it, and people absolutely love it, they’re more productive, and they enjoy it more. Ross: Let’s say you’ve got a senior executive. He is dumped into a new extremely demanding role, he’s got an organization to run, Slack is the interface, he has never used it before, he has been told how to use it, and he knows how to use it, what are your three tips for how to use Slack well to manage his overload in the information? What’s the approach? What are the tips? Derek: Yes, good scenario. I listened to something last night, I can’t remember which podcast it was but it was a new CEO of Best Buy. The new CEO had come in, and he was talking about some of the methods that he used when starting. I take inspiration from him, I take inspiration from our own CEOs. We have few CEOs and they’re all excellent. They collectively do many great jobs for us. Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, I think about the way that he would respond to that, and the way that this individual responded on this podcast. The first thing I would say to them is to be curious and open, pause the telling for as long as possible, and hold off. If you can be curious longer and have a coaching mindset, then you will be much more successful with Slack. If you start to build a strategy, start to build out a hierarchy of how you’re going to control the organization, and start to figure out how you’re going to flow information down, you’re missing the point. Most CEOs now know that. Very few CEOs think about command and control as the way to run an organization. They think about a coaching mindset and think about how to discover. CEOs are the ones who love this thing because they can search and find out what the frontline is actually talking about. They can dive into these conversations, learn, and then be much more empathetic with what’s happening in their organization. Of course, they can’t consume every conversation, why would they? They need to be intentional about their time, but in the same way that the undercover boss, which is the best by example, goes into the frontline store of Best Buy and starts asking people a few simple questions like hey, what’s working? What’s not working? How can we help you? Those three questions were the ones that he talked about. He just went to every store and asked them those three questions for months. That’s the way that every CEO should start in a new business. Slack is just allowing you to do that digitally. Dive into a channel and say, hey, great to meet you all, what’s working, what’s not working? How can I help? That’s very much Stewart, our CEO’s style as well. He’s renowned for popping into new hire meetings and just asking questions of the new hires, trying to figure out what he can do for them and what their impressions are. I think that’s the new style of CEO. This idea that we’re running an army and it’s a top-down chain of command, and we need to flow down the orders, and then the troops will carry them out, and the more we can be agile so we can move fast, our orders need to be carried out super quick, that’s not the reality of how organizations work now. In that Best Buy example, the value that he found was that the best practices were already existing, he didn’t have to come up with them, it wasn’t his job. His job was to have the empathy to be there, to point out what was working, and then to lift those things up and say, Wow, if you guys looked over here, this store has developed a custom responsive training module, where they conduct individualized training for every frontline store employee based on that employee’s strengths, weaknesses, and needs, to coach them to be the best that they can be every day. There’s one store that created this thing. They were like wow, this is awesome, we should roll this out to everyone, that’s what they did, and that’s part of how they did the turnaround. I think it was on Adam Grant’s podcast. Ross: You mentioned earlier on serendipitous discovery in Slack. I always point back to the origin, the word serendipity, which suggests that it’s not just pure accidents, it’s things that you can engineer, you can help create, how is it that you can make serendipity more possible, more broadly around in organizational information interactions? How do you make those happy accidents more likely to happen? Derek: I’ll tell you the number one way that you make serendipity, you need to get your pen ready, you’re going to write this down, that is, you do things in public, you do things in an open way. If you create private borders around things, the smaller the borders are, of where you communicate, it’s pretty obvious, if you were to walk out into a public square and stand on a box, I’m pretty sure that people did this, at some point, stand on a box and start to have an intellectual debate in open, other people would notice. Then they might be walking by and they might go, that’s an interesting idea, but what I do is different; they might chime in and say something different. Speakers’ Corner is a good example of that, and it’s no different in the organization. Unfortunately, this is a lot of work, especially the bigger your organization gets, the harder it is to be open by default. If you’re a financially regulated organization, if you’re in government, for very good reasons, we have minimum disclosure, or this idea of minimum control, I might get that wrong but anyway, it’s the idea that as few people as possible should have access to information to keep it secure. That’s a very useful tool for customer data privacy and other types of data privacy. But in terms of serendipitous discovery, it’s very unhelpful. In fact, it’s destructive because what happens is that the executive team has a private channel, whether they’re using Slack or not, and they only talk in that channel, and unless you’re in that conversation, then you never have been exposed to those ideas. Also, they become an echo chamber very quickly, the whole idea of an echo chamber is walls around a conversation where it goes around. Anytime you do that in email, in Slack, in whatever tool it is, you’re going to create echo chambers, and people are not going to be able to discover what it is that you’re talking about. You can do simple stuff, like have all-hands calls, where you share things with everybody, you can do some of the things that you think are private conversations, do them in public, are they really private? Are you discussing information that isn’t just conflict, I’m not talking about, trade secrets, I’m talking about stuff that’s company confidential, so people within the company need to keep it to the company, but that company might be 70,000 people. There are levels of data management and control. You need to be much more intentional about what really does need to be controlled. There are definitely things that are like M&A and many different things need to be controlled, so you need to have good controls for that but you need to work with your risk and compliance folks to do that intentionally and say we’re going to put controls in where we need them; Where we don’t need them, we’re going to be open by default. If we’re in a regulated organization, we’ll use the discovery tools to figure out if we’ve gone wrong, and then we’ll do post-mortems to figure out what controls can be improved but we won’t just try and get keep everything secret, if it’s like what we’re having for lunch, or whatever. Ross: The thing is, be open by default rather than closed by default. Derek: It’s easy for a high-tech organization to say that but we also manage customer data, we manage trade secrets, we manage all sorts of very sensitive data, we’ve worked out processes where we can keep those things safe. Ross: The whole thing is, there’s a mentality of saying, rather than keeping it closed and only open it if there’s a good reason to, you keep it open unless there’s extremely good reason not to. Derek: Yes, right. Then, of course, it has to be searchable. If people can’t find it, if it’s locked in an email inbox, even if that email inbox is on the internet, we’ve got to figure out how to find it. Ross: That makes all the sense in the world. Just going back to an individual, you mentioned a 10,000 channel Slack a while ago. You’ve got some things you got to focus on, you’ve got your day job, you’ve got some things you have to look at, you’ve got an open mind, you’ve got to look around, how do you maximize the chances of serendipity across 10,000 channels, when you’ve still got lots of things to get on with by the end of the day? Derek: It’s a good point. In my world. I try and balance focus time and discovery time. This is different for everyone. What we’ve discovered at Slack through research into this, or research about 10,000 individuals, every quarter, you have a group called a Future Forum that publishes that study, what we’re finding is that everyone is different and that they need to create their own style of work. That’s the key to unlocking productivity. I’m going to tell you what mine is but I don’t know if this is correct for everyone. I tend to be open and curious at the start of the day. As the day progresses, I become more and more focused on the top list of things that I wrote down at the beginning of the day that I need to get done. I start to close off things, I close down windows, I close off channels, heaven forbid, I may even close Slack at some point, because I might be writing something, and I need to be focused on completing that task. There are times in my day when I’m closing, I’m completing, I’m getting prepared for Ross’s podcast for the next day or whatever, I need to be focused. But even in those times, I find I’m more productive when I can reserve some time for myself. I would think of this as selfish time. I might just pop out and slot in 15 minutes where I can just listen to something on a podcast just to refresh myself. I need that for my energy. If I’m not doing that, if I’m not allowing my brain to follow some tangents, I become very recalcitrant and unproductive. I am the world’s best person at completing my second priority. I just write my priorities one to five, and normally I’ll get two in five done. Ross: You’ve got a lot of competition. Derek: Yes, I’ll normally get two in five done. Number one never gets done. I’m the worst at procrastinating the number one priority. Hopefully next day, something else more important will come up, and then it’ll move to number two, and then I’ll probably get it done. I wouldn’t say I’m the best at getting things done in the order, my brain seems to enjoy doing the thing that isn’t a priority. Ross: You’re not the only one of the world, Derek. Derek: Now I just give into it. I just try to come up with something else that’s more important. Then I put that further. Then suddenly, I can do the thing, that’s number two because my brain has some pressure taken off, or whatever it is. I feel that’s a little bit of it for me. The other thing is because you’re working as much as possible in threads, there are other people who can provide stimulus. If I’m working on a piece of work and even though I’m focused, I’m working in a way that’s more public, I’m using collaborative documents, I’m posting updates, I’m posting little clips to try and put it out there and get some feedback as I go rather than maybe in the past, I waited till I was finished and I had this beautiful wrapped up never to be changed piece that I would release onto the internet; you might call it a published book, I imagine it’s somewhat like that, but before you can have the published book, you’ve got to test it, you’ve got to riff it on podcasts, you’ve got to do all this experimentation and reflection, and I think that’s where a lot of the serendipity comes from. It’s like you expose some of these ideas to stimulus and things come back. I find I need to follow the tangents. I need to play out what that means. Sometimes there are dead ends, and sometimes there are absolute gems. In my most stressful moments, just before I have a deadline, a little tangent pops up and I’m like, I really shouldn’t pay attention to that but it just keeps on coming into my view and then I go look at it, I’m like whoa, this is cool, and then suddenly, I’ve got some cool, interesting story to put into whatever I’m doing. Ross: Yes, that’s the balance. One of the wonderful balances we need to tread is between the focus and the breadth, and finding, as you say, in terms of how you do that in your schedules or how you essentially have a higher view on your consciousness, so that you can push it out or pull it in, as is appropriate, and sometimes it’s not obvious. Derek: The other weird thing with me, it must be with people as well but I’ll share with you because you know, you’re an expert, you might be able to tell me if this is just me, the busier I get, the more I find I need to take up new hobbies. This has always been true for me. I learned this very early in my career. I had a super stressful, the biggest software implementation of my career, it was at Coca-Cola, it was implementing a massive system for Coca-Cola, it was a deathmatch, it was like back in the old days, before agile, six months deathmatch, we had to build this system. I was so stressed. It was at that time that I took up cycling and juggling because I was like I am so stressed, I need something, I need an outlet, and I felt guilty at the time for spending time in these selfish pursuits when I had deadlines, I always felt guilt on all these things that I was doing, that were maybe taking away from what I was doing but I’ve since learned that the more stressful I get, the more important the thing is that I need to do, that’s the time when I need to pick up something new that’s completely unrelated, and that keeps me fresh. It actually makes me better at whatever I’m doing. Ross: Yes. The way I frame it in the book is regenerating. We have different attention modes, regenerating is one of the most critical. Without regenerating, we can’t have attention. Whatever that may be, whether it’s going for walks, being in the ocean, hanging out with a partner, juggling, or whatever it may be, that is regenerating attention. If you don’t regenerate your attention, it’s going to run out. Derek: Yes, right. It’s counterintuitive that that would be a learning thing. I’m overwhelmed having to learn something, I’m going to go learn something else to free up, regenerate. It’s counterintuitive that that’s the thing that regenerates for me. Ross: Particularly the case of juggling, for example, using different parts of the brain, crudely, a lot more right-brained and left-brained. I think juggling is a fantastic example of something that really would rewire your brain and this expansive awareness. You need expansive awareness for juggling, as you do for appreciating an extraordinary natural vista. That breadth is part of what enables you to then focus the narrow, which is then running the software project, for example. Derek: Yes, very good. Thank you for that. Thank you for the insight. Ross: Just to round out, any tips or recommendations for anyone who is sitting in an office job overwhelmed with information and too much going on, any other thing, a couple of what we’ve already discussed, to suggest they do? Derek: I can talk about this all day, I’ll give you a couple. Let me just give you my quick few things that I do. I use a document hierarchy for my notes taking. I have done it since university. I create a document for anything that I’m working on. I’m not planning to share it with anyone, it’s just my ideas. For me, the thing that makes sense to me is indenting, I have these crazy indentations, which are essentially just a big hierarchy of text that I use to formulate my ideas, and I push things up and down around the document as I’m learning things to organize it. Strangely, I very rarely go back and read them. It’s mostly the creation of them that helps me make sense. Also at Salesforce, we have this bizarre culture with 30% of the employees in any point in time are building slides. I used to think this was unproductive and at some point, we tried to get away from it. We were like, let’s stop building slides, we are wasting a lot of time. What we’re doing is trying to tell the idea to somebody else in a visual form. That leads to a new level of understanding because it’s easy to write paragraphs on something, but to try and put it on a simple visual that you can express is a good way of clarifying. We use that a lot. We also use threads. When I’m working with someone, I’m normally not working with them on one idea, we’re usually working on five ideas. Even if I’m an indirect messaging channel, I might have five active threads with five different conversations that are threaded, so that when we’re talking, we’re not in conversation, it’s actually better than conversation, I can simultaneously talk with you in an asynchronous way on multiple different topics and progress those different topics, and that doesn’t need to happen at the same time, they can happen at different times. It’s okay, you don’t have to stay on one topic at one time, you can talk on multiple things, you just have to use threads. Whether that’s LinkedIn, whether it’s Slack, or whatever else you’re using, using threads in a very intentional way is a big productivity unlock. Then, of course, you have different people with access to those threads. Now, the other thing that I do, I do a lot of rubber duck debugging, which is an old software development tool, which is software developers used to have a rubber duck on their computer, then if they were stuck, they would try and explain to the duck what the problem was, and the solution would emerge because the process of teaching and telling helps you understand and your brain use a different way to tell than it does to listen so if you can start teaching as soon as possible, whatever it is, you’re trying to learn to anybody who listens, if no one will listen, just tell it to a rubber duck, then that’s hugely important. I use that a lot. These are a couple of little tips for you. Ross: It’s fantastic. I very much believe in learning by teaching and that’s in the book as well but I wasn’t aware of it and I will now take up the practice of teaching rubber ducks. Derek: Only if humans won’t listen, which in my family, at some point, they’re like, okay, I’ve had enough of your presentations, I can’t listen to another one of your presentations. Ross: Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Derek. It has been a fantastic conversation. Derek: Thank you, Ross. Wonderful to talk to you again. The post Derek Laney on transcending emotional overload, openness for serendipity, balancing focus and discovery, and using threads well (Ep28) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Jul 5, 2022 • 34min

Berit Anderson on mapping influencers, noticing breaks in patterns, ignoring headlines, and information warfare (Ep27)

“The most important thing, regardless of how you collect information, is learning how to notice what’s important, like learning how to notice the systems that are underlying a specific story or a specific information source, the motivations, keeping tabs on those, and identifying the context behind the information.“ – Berit Anderson About Berit Anderson Berit is COO of Strategic News Service and director of programs for the Future in Review conferences. She co-founded and was CEO of Scout.ai, a media company exploring the future of technology. Her work on information warfare has been widely featured in major media such as New Yorker and TechCrunch and she is a frequent international keynote speaker. LinkedIn: Berit Anderson Twitter: Berit Anderson Instagram: Berit Anderson What you will learn What mindset is needed to see patterns in information (01:43) How and why look for what people do versus what they say (03:00) What are good tools for building mental frameworks (06:14) Why you must find your own way of building relationships in your information (08:54) How to notice what matters especially the hidden ones (11:24) How not to fall into the rabbit hole and balance your pattern searching (15:45) How to survive the information warfare that is all around us (26:18) Why your strong emotions are your signals to think (29:20) Episode resources Strategic News Service Obsidian Roam Research Roamcult Do Your Own Research scout.ai Transcript Ross Dawson: Welcome to the show, Berit. Berit Anderson: Thank you, Ross, it’s a pleasure to be here, I’m really looking forward to the conversation. Ross: You’ve lived your life immersed in all sorts of information and picking out wonderful things from it. Part of your role is seeing patterns. How do you do that? What’s the underpinning of your practices or mindset that enables you to do that so well? Berit: I think it’s a combination for me of two things, one, reading as much as possible from sources that I trust and sources that focus on data, as opposed to what people say, I look a lot at people’s actions as opposed to their words. That comes into play a lot in the technology space and the business space where people often, majority of the time, say one thing and do another. Then the other is just talking to people. I try to talk to people who have different opinions than I do, who know more than I do about a subject. I try to bring in experts in particular spaces where I have intellectual weaknesses and use their knowledge and what they’re willing to share, to help build out my mental model of a challenge, an industry, or a space. Ross: I’d like to get to each of those points. You see what people do rather than they say, and I presume this is the public figures or entrepreneurs? Can you give examples of this idea of seeing people what they do rather than what they say? Berit: Yes, there are so many there. I live in the US. I’m a journalist, so I feel comfortable saying this, but the entire reporting ecosystem in the United States is based around sensationalism by design because the business model of journalism in the United States is primarily driven by ads. So they will publish, not all media companies, but a vast majority of mainstream media companies will publish, and reward people who can get the most clicks for their articles. Headlines are key to that. The result of that is that you’ll often see headlines about Elon Musk tweeting something, Donald Trump tweeting something, or the CEO of Google saying something, and the key to those, in my experience, is to ignore them completely. I’m not interested in what Donald Trump is tweeting, except in the context of seeing what his strategy is, in communicating with the public. I don’t take anything that most people say publicly at face value but I do look at okay, where’s the money coming from to fund that person’s initiatives? Who are the investors in their company? What are their biggest challenges from a personal and business perspective? How did they grow up? I will often look into people’s childhoods and their evolution as an intellectual as a key to understanding their intellectual framework and underpinning, and then I apply that to what are they actually doing with their businesses or with their life. What have they created? What decisions have they made? Where are they spending the money of their company? And that, to me, tells me a whole lot more than any article about Elon Musk’s most recent tweet, or Trump’s most recent tweet. Because so much of what’s happening in those spaces, especially political spaces, but business and tech are the same, is really happening behind the scenes. From that perspective, investigative journalism is very interesting to me, because people spend a lot of time and energy looking into what’s happening. Media outlets that focus on context and understanding why specific information comes out is very interesting to me. But the blah blah blah says blank headlines, I just totally turn them out. Ross: Yes, journalism has gone a lot easier when all you need to do is quote somebody’s tweet. Berit: Screenshot one paragraph, and you’re done. Ross: You also mentioned building the mental models to understand what’s going on and that’s in a way the nub of the challenge and the opportunity today. Are there any tools you use? Are there any mental frameworks that you use to build this, for example, being able to pull back these money trails to build a concept of how the world is structured? And what might happen next? Berit: Yes, from a tool perspective, I’m old-fashioned, I like Post-it notes. I have them on the walls of my office. I like to map out people who are influencers in a specific space, understand their motivations, use those to move different ideas around, identify connections between companies and individuals, and other groups, it’s pretty basic. I also do a lot of bookmarking of tabs. When I start to notice a pattern happening in a specific industry or a specific space, I’ll create a bookmark folder for that specific pattern. Then as I come across media that relates to that, sometimes it’s just one headline that’s just a tiny part of the story, I can start to collate all of those different information sources to tell a bigger picture and a bigger story. That’s often how I develop. I’m the Chief Operating Officer of Strategic News Service, and the Future and Review, which is a conference and action tank focused on using technology to solve global problems. Now, at the Strategic News Service, I author, about once a month, it’s a newsletter focused on the future of technology and the global economy. It’s extremely accurate. Mark Anderson, who’s also my father, it’s a family company, started in 1995, he has had a 95.2% accuracy rating in his publicly graded predictions since that time. A lot of our work relies on tracking things, noticing things that don’t fit into what you would expect, and then keeping those in the back of your mind. But really, it’s pretty simple, like Google Docs, bookmarks, Post-it, that’s my jam. Ross: These tools are to just assist visualization but it is your cognition and the truth, they truly are mental models, as opposed to an external construct. Berit: Yes. I’m open to change. You’ve talked to a lot of people so maybe you can share some of their other experiences or opinions. Ross: The one thing, which I think is really interesting is the rise of connected note-taking tools such as Obsidian and Roam Research. There are a lot of other similar things. I think information is not separate, but the relationships between them as you’ve been expressing. I think that there are more and more useful tools to facilitate your mental connections by doing that in software and potentially mapping them visually in 2D or 3D maps. There are some interesting tools. The Roamcult and other words describe the phenomenon that is the rapid rise of these tools I think is expressive that they’re entering the zeitgeist. I think there are a lot more opportunities. Everyone needs to hack their own… Berit: Right. Eat their own thing. Ross: Useful usage of these tools. But essentially, it is ultimately around what’s in our heads but I think these kinds of tools can be very helpful in building those relationships. A lot of people in the world of online software are using Miro, Mural and other whiteboards. Some people are similarly using them just as a bunch of Post-it notes and seeing relationships and finding that very useful as well. There are more tools, people are finding good ways to use them to stimulate their thinking. Berit: Yeah, and it totally depends on how everyone’s brain works differently. For me, I like physical objects. I buy physical copies of books, and I write in them, and I take notes as I read, and I underline things that I think are important, and then I pull those things out but that model isn’t going to work for you or someone else necessarily. The most important thing, regardless of how you collect information, is learning how to notice what’s important, like learning how to notice the systems that are underlying a specific story or a specific information source, and the motivations that are underlying a specific story or a specific information source, and keeping tabs on those, and identifying the context behind the information is the most important thing, I think you can learn to help get better at understanding the world and what’s really happening out there. Ross: That’s something you’ve learned through perhaps growing up in your family, or education, teaching yourself but what would you suggest for other people that want to learn that facility to notice what matters or notice what’s underlying? What is the process? What are the ways in which we can get better at that? Berit: I would be remiss if I didn’t say you should become a member of Strategic News Service, because that’s where I publish my thinking, and Mark publishes his thinking, and my brother, Evan, also, he’s a world expert on China’s national business model. All of the work that we do, which is focused on technology and the global economy, understanding the systems underlying the world and what’s driving those things, the most important thing to start is questioning what you see, and understanding why people are doing things. For example, I notice how specific countries or governments think and frame things. Then when you see a break in that pattern, like if China, for example, is saying the same thing every day, for 10 years, and then you see them do something that’s out of character, that’s a good place to start looking. Noticing breaks in existing patterns is a really good place to start thinking about, Um, why is that? Here’s one example. A few years ago, I was tracking Russian misinformation. We started noticing that three times in the last three months, giant US military ships have accidentally run into Chinese ships. By the way, that also happened off the coast of Russia to some random fishing vessels. The first time, I was like, that’s interesting, what really happened there? The first time that happened, I was like, um, that doesn’t happen. As the captain of a US naval vessel, you don’t accidentally run into another giant ship. That means either there was some technological malfunction with their equipment, or it was a very deliberate effort by the other side to cause some kind of crash. When I started paying attention to that, then I saw the example pop up in Russia, of this happening with an unrelated type of vessel. Then I found out that within the city of Moscow, Ubers were being redirected to the Kremlin by accident somehow. That led me down this whole rabbit hole of okay, what’s happening here, there was a deliberate effort to use GPS spoofing to cause interference with navigation because global navigation systems were all set to GPS. Now since that happened, they’ve had to go back. GPS spoofing is when the coordinates are told that they’re somewhere that they aren’t Since that happened, the US military had gone back and had to reteach all of their naval operators how to prioritize non-GPS-based navigation. But that’s the kind of thing where one ship is crashing into another one, and you’re like hmm, that’s very unusual, why did that happen? And when you start to ask questions and notice things that are out of the ordinary, then you can follow those threads and find patterns of that sort. Ross: As a very crude, high-level summary, you’re observing patterns, noticing exceptions and patterns, asking why that might be, and being able to sensitize yourself more to other pattern exceptions that relate to that first one to build this new pattern of possibilities. Is that reasonable? Berit: Yes, that’s pretty much it. Then I try to read philosophy and poetry in between to help my brain create mental connections that are not related to the news. Ross: Yes, it’s interesting. There’s a recent article in New York Times about DYOR, do your own research. It’s an interesting point where, yes, you need to do your research and perceive your things but there’s also a point where that can be taken too far in apophenia, and to be able to see patterns that aren’t necessarily there. Berit: I think that hunger for the DYOR movement is why QAnon was so successful. It encouraged people to find connections and do research and become a part of this global network of truth, essentially, it’s how they framed it. At a time when they had no social connection, it was during the pandemic, so everyone was holed up at home, they needed that, it’s like a serotonin bump when you find a new thing. You do need to balance that realism and that conversation with others outside of your sphere to help process like, does this mean something? Or is it just a coincidence? One coincidence is okay. Usually, I find when they’re like two or three coincidences, that’s when I start noticing a pattern. Ross: One of the things which you saw patterns early was around disinformation, and information warfare, I’d love to hear where that started and how your engagement with information warfare has progressed? Berit: Prior to my work at SNS and Future in Review, I was the co-founder of a company called Scout that combined near-term science fiction and investigative reporting. In that space, we use scenario planning, and science fiction as a tool to think through, what could the future implications of these emerging technologies be? What are patterns that we’re observing now that when combined with this next iteration of genetic mutation or experimentation, or this next iteration of widespread information could like – when you start to think about how could this develop, given what we know about the way that the world functions now, you can see problems before they happen, and this is, I’m sure, something that many of your, guests have talked about. But I find it a really useful tool to think through, how would something work? Because the person who’s creating that technology is going to go through that same process at some point in the future; and there are certain things that you can pick up based on that. Because we were doing that work already, we wrote a piece of fiction that we published in the summer of 2015 about the Facebook newsfeed and how in this piece of fiction, Facebook had used its newsfeed to influence the election. Because we imagined that the majority of Facebook engineers would be more Democratic-leaning, in our mind, in this fiction, they had developed a way, at that point, within Facebook, you only needed the approval of one other engineer to push a change to the newsfeed. It’s like a double point of failure thing. This is something that Mark Zuckerberg was famous for, it is making it easy for engineers to develop and push new updates. The problem is that it also makes it easy to make a change that might have a negative impact on its users. In this piece of fiction, we imagined that the two engineers had teamed up and because the change didn’t negatively impact engagement, which was their only metric at that point for which a change to the news feed would have been reviewed, they would use that to sway, to get out the vote efforts, essentially, to increase Democratic voter turnout to impact the outcome of an election, which is something that they had done a study on internally. It’s proved already that if you put an I Voted sticker at the top of the newsfeed at that time that they could influence voter turnout by a pretty big percentage point, I can’t remember what it is now but there was a significant impact on social contagion of voting. We’d already done that going into the election. In the US, when Trump was elected, on election night, I was struck by a couple of things. One, there was a huge difference between the polls and the actual outcome of the election. I was like, hmm, that’s interesting. Why was that? And then number two, which I thought was even more unusual is that there was a huge difference in the exit polls from the election and the actual outcome of the election. None of that was capturing the way that people voted in that election, and I started looking into it, I was like, why is that? What’s going on here? What’s taking place? And clearly, polling has been outdated for a while, at the time, I’m not sure that they were relying on, as people switched onto mobile phones, a lot of political polling did not update to relevant new technologies. That has changed now in some ways, but not all. I just started doing more research to figure out okay, what were the actual polling outcomes in specific key swing states? Why did certain states swing differently than what we thought? And the more that I looked into that, the more I found this work that had been done by an incredible… I forgot his name, I apologize, he created a map of the internet during this time, and he found that in addition to all of the normal major news sites that you normally see, publishing and connections between those, normally what you see is a map where there are lots of nodes into major news sites but there was also in his map this circumference of fake news sites or like far-right news sites that were all linking to each other at the same time. I was like, Okay, that’s interesting. Something is going on there. Then from there, progressed and did more research, talked to more experts, talked to Samuel Woolley at Oxford, who was studying information warfare and bots on Twitter, learned about that, and started putting all these different pieces together to eventually publish the first article that explained how Trump, Cambridge Analytica, and Russia had used information warfare to gain the outcome of the US election and how Cambridge Analytica was working around the world with other governments to gain the outcomes of other elections as well. It started from a science fiction piece, it’s one thing, and then because I was in my head already, or that was in our heads already, we’re thinking about that. it became this eerie piece of premonition in a weird way, reverse premonition. Ross: That’s part of the frame of exploring what is plausible. It’s not hard to put together some pieces that seem as plausible, and sometimes the plausible uncovers some truths. Berit: The more time I spend on Earth, the more I realize that things that most people assume are not plausible, usually are. Oftentimes, I interact with people and they’re like, well that couldn’t be, no one’s really that evil, or no one’s really that manipulative, and no one’s that coordinated, and it turns out that they actually are. The more you learn about the world and the way things work, there’s a lot that people assume could never happen or would never happen, but that does happen. Ross: You are essentially a futurist, or that’s part of your role. I think part of that role as well is that we have this cone of possibilities that people talk about the future, what is probable, possible in the realms of possibility. Part of it’s opening your mind, and a lot of people think in terms of what they think is most likely and part of that mindset is then being able to think across a broader spectrum of what is plausible or possible and be able to stretch, almost literally stretch your mind to encompass that. Berit: Yes, a big part of that is also seeking out. When I want to understand something better, for example, with the QAnon group, I did a piece on QAnon at the very beginning when it was just starting, and I was trying to figure out, okay, what are the motivations behind this group? Why are they doing what they’re doing? Where’s that coming from? You just dive in, there’s a reason that people pay political operatives to infiltrate other groups. It’s because when you understand another mindset and the mechanics of the inner workings of an influence effort, you can start to see that play out. That requires having conversations with people who think differently than you. It requires reaching out to and listening to, most importantly, people that you maybe don’t feel like you want to listen to. But in doing so, you can start to understand the mental models that are underlying their way of being or way of thinking and it helps to increase the sphere of your understanding. Ross: Yes. That’s getting outside the bubbles to whatever degree we tend to live in. Being very early and perceiving some of the very active information warfare that we live in today, what do you recommend to people to survive and get through the flak of the information warfare that is all around us? Berit: I think it depends on what your goals are. If your goal is I’m an average person, and I just want to figure out what is going on in the world as best as possible, there are a couple of things you can do. Look for data sources, and don’t take those data sources at face value, but look into who’s funding those data sources? Where’s the motivation for those data sources coming from? As I mentioned, I ignore most mainstream headlines about who said what, that stuff is all garbage, I look at what governments are actually doing, I look at what businesses are actually doing, I read financial filings, like, in the US, the SEC requires financial filings from companies and that’s a very good way of seeing what’s really going on, you’re not ever going to see anything, but you can start to understand a little bit more about what’s happening behind the source. I love independent investigative outlets, I read The New Yorker a lot, because I feel like they do a very good job of going beyond just headlines on individuals who are shaping public consciousness in interesting ways, in unexpected ways. I look at The Economist and the Wall Street Journal for reporting on financials and what’s really happening in financial markets, and I look for what they’re missing when I read their content. I look at what they’re not saying in their articles, things that seem out of the standard operating behavior. Politically, I lean more liberal, but I follow a lot of conservative writers, thinkers, and actors to try and understand what they’re thinking, what are they doing? What are their strategies? We’re living in this bizarre world where we’ve never been more connected and we’ve never been more the subject of influence from advertisers and political forces, so you have to disconnect from your attachment to those things and take a step back and observe them with more of a learning and critical thinking approach. Or else, you’ll just wind up hating someone because that’s what information warfare is pushing you to do. Ross: Yes, which is essentially having your own mind when people are trying to shape yours, is perhaps a summary of that. To round out, rather than asking you to recommend what people do, I think you epitomize the stance of how it is you look for, uncover, pull together, and take your stance on understanding what’s going on in the world. What I’d like to ask is, what do you recommend to people to nurture that, to learn that, to develop a similar frame of mind, or approach, or mentality that you have? Berit: The biggest and most important thing that you can do is to notice when you are consuming information that makes you feel strong emotions. If you read something, and you’re like, I am really angry right now, because I just read this new piece of information, think about that, take a minute and say, why am I feeling angry? What part of me does the framing of this piece of news, or this article, or this piece of content adjust? Or I guess, what part of you is it touching that makes you feel that anger? Why is that happening? What is the motivation behind that? And once you take that step back, don’t also angrily engage with whoever posted that. Many people interact with news primarily through social media these days. We’ve become accustomed to, we’ve been trained really, by social media platforms to think that we need to have an opinion on every piece of content. That is the currency of social media, it’s like who has the quippiest comment or the smartest retort, or like, calls out, blah, blah, blah, who has the best roast of the politician or the movie star, whatever it is, but if you sit back, take a minute and sit with that, you don’t need to say anything back, it’s okay. That anger that you’re feeling, in some cases it’s justified, but in many cases, it’s a manipulative tactic that is being deployed across social media platforms by bots, trolls, and people who pose as specific individuals in a specific group. I’ve seen this a lot, most recently in the Black Lives Matter group, there are a lot of fake Black Lives Matter activists. Any hot button social issue has these fake posey accounts in there that are trying to stir things up. If you can avoid those and not jump into the anger feeling, I think it would go a long way towards breaking that cycle of anger reaction, don’t become a cog in the outrage machine. Ross: I think that’s fantastic as a single point in terms of being able to engage better. I think that really hits the nail. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Berit. There’s so much more I could learn from you. We’ve had a fantastic conversation. Berit: Thank you for being the kind of person that asks these questions. It’s an important conversation to be had. Ross: Yes, let’s hope this is sparking some more people seeking to Thrive on Overload as you do. Have a great day. Berit: Thank you, Ross. The post Berit Anderson on mapping influencers, noticing breaks in patterns, ignoring headlines, and information warfare (Ep27) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Jun 21, 2022 • 34min

Brenda Ramokopelwa on using external and internal lenses, developing young futurists, connecting rural Africa to global thinking, and validating ideas (Ep26)

“There’s a lot of information right now, sometimes you feel it’s just too much. But I try to find the right sources of information to understand how the world is changing, especially now that it is rapidly changing, and what are the impacts of those changes.“ – Brenda Ramokopelwa About Brenda Ramokopelwa Brenda is a Futurist, Author, Keynote Speaker, and Award-Winning Risk and Governance professional. She is the CEO of the Transdisciplinary Agora for Future Discussion and Managing Director at D@leo Consulting Services in Johannesburg. LinkedIn: Brenda Ramokopelwa Twitter: Brenda Ramokopelwa Facebook: Brenda Ramokopelwa Instagram: Brenda Ramokopelwa What you will learn How to get a sense of what trends are important with internal and external lenses (03:25) How to sense the relationship between local and global trends (05:15) How to assist and encourage the young and upcoming futurists (11:02) What is the importance of teaching young children to use social media well (17:35) How to introduce possibility thinking and open the world to young futurists (20:32) Why validation from people outside your circle is crucial (22:56) Why it is important to listen without biases (26:43) Why you should start at your audience’s level to engage with them more effectively (28:42) Episode resources Transdisciplinary Agora for Future Discussion (TAFFD’s) The Media, Information and Communication Technologies Sector Education and Training Authority (MICT SETA) Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Transcript Ross Dawson: Brenda, it’s a true delight to have you on the show. Brenda Ramokopelwa: Thank you, Ross. I’m quite excited to be here. Ross: I’d love to hear more about your work, what is it that you do? What are you looking to achieve in your work at the moment? Brenda: I do a variety of things. By profession, I’m a risk manager. I’m a Director of Risk and Governance company. We are based in South Africa. I also work as the CEO of Transdisciplinary Agora for Future Discussions, which is a Science and Technology Institute. It’s more voluntary. What we’re trying to do there is to try and create a platform for young futurists in Africa and open that gateway for them in and out of Africa. I also sit in different boards, for example, at the MICT SETA, which is a media information technology and education authority in South Africa, I sit in the Advisory Committee for 4IR. Those are the type of things that I am currently involved in. Ross: It sounds like you have plenty on your plate. I’d love to hear how you thrive on all of that. One of the most interesting things here is in the Transdisciplinary Agora for Future Discussions. There are two parts of this. One is, of course, you need to understand some of the trends in the future, but you’re also helping, as you say, the young futurists in the youngest most dynamic continent on the world. Brenda: Yes Ross: Perhaps we can start with you in order to be able to your sensing things and then I’d love to dig into how it is that you help these young, aspiring futurists or citizens be able to think well about the future. Perhaps, we can start with how do you get the sense of what are the important trends? What is shaping your world? Brenda: How I do it in my world is engaging with people that are around me and also reading. There’s a lot of information right now, sometimes you just feel it’s just too much. But trying to find the right sources of information to understand how the world is changing, and especially now that it is rapidly changing, what are the impacts of those changes. Not just looking internally, but also looking at your external environment. TAFFD’s is a global organization with representation across many continents. It’s always important for us to understand what is happening here, at home in the African continent, and what’s happening out there in the globe; What is the impact of that on us? And what is it that we are doing or what’s happening here, that might have an impact out there? Having that external and internal lens does help me to sift through the information in the sense that one, looking at different lenses because the biases tend to sometimes cloud how we look at things, and also getting views from other people that are going through all of these changes to see how they are experiencing that, and just keeping myself abreast of things as they happen. Ross: One of the things you pointed to there is there are global trends and seeing what is happening with various technological, scientific, geopolitical developments and so on, but there’s also the African or Southern African perspective, something you’re able to experience more directly and have the people around that to do that. I think that it is a very distinctive environment globally. I’d love to just hear a little bit more about how do you sense how these factors are playing out more locally in Southern Africa, how you are sensing what it is more locally, that is happening? Brenda: If I look at the South African context, South Africa is one of the fastest developing countries in the African continent. Just like most the African countries, we’ve got a lot of youth in our country. These are young people that are technologically savvy, the type of people that are interested in what’s happening outside and have got opinions or views in terms of how these things should be approached and how they want to impact them. They respond to these things in different ways. I’m not saying the other African countries aren’t, but in South Africa, we’ve got a lot more of young people that are, in a way forcing us to think differently. By us, I’m talking about the public sector, the government, how they change their policy. If you look at the type of debates that happens in Parliament, it’s totally different to how it used to happen. There are more voices that are coming through from the young people, more voices that are forward-thinking. When you look at it from a corporate environment point of view, you’ve got a lot of these young and ambitious people, that are trying to change the status quo, in terms of labor laws, in terms of innovation, in terms of just socioeconomic factors affecting their lives. I think we’ve got more people getting engaged, and more of those people are young people, and that is why the insist in ensuring that there’s more training, there’s more imparting of knowledge, there’s more engagement with them to be able to say, how do you see the future? How do you think you can change the future? Because when you think about it, these young people are the future, but at the same time, also, not forgetting the wisdom that comes from people that have been there before, that have got more experience as well. For example, I mentioned the fact that I’m a risk manager by profession so I’ve spent a lot of time in the corporate world, doing this risk analysis, scenario planning, and such things. Before, there was a reluctance to think about what might happen, those knowns and unknowns when starting to plan for the future; there’s a change that I’m seeing in terms of how government prepares for possible disasters, how they put those action plans in place, how they start to think about if this technological change comes, what are the type of policies that we need to have, the type of processes that need to be in place to ensure that we can execute on those policies, the type of infrastructure we need to have in place? It might be very slow at that but there’s a change in thinking, and there’s a change in how things are being done. I think there might be a gap, from my view, in the sense that there’s a lot more adoption of what has been done outside to fit what needs to happen here at home, which doesn’t necessarily work sometimes. We need to look at our environment and look at the things that are required for our environment specifically, and then be able to implement solutions that are fit for purpose, not do it because somebody else has done it. There’s a tendency when you think about technology, to let technology drive process, not the other way around, nothing to think about this is what we need, this is where we are at in terms of maturity, this is why we need what we need, and therefore, what is the best solution to be to enable us to get to that point. We seem to just start with this new technology, this innovation, and we run for that, without doing a proper assessment of if it’s really fit for people. Ross: I’d love to dig a little bit more into that later, but first let’s about this idea of nurturing, or educating, or engaging the young futurists or young people of the nation. Part of this, of course, has been able to sense, give them the tools to look, to find, and to make sense of things themselves. Can you tell me how you are assisting these young futures to thrive and to make sense of the world of so much information? Brenda: At this point in time, the biggest drive is around education and awareness; realize that it is happening, realize that it is happening around you, it is happening to you, and you need to do something about it, you can influence it, you are not necessarily at the mercy of this technology change, it is something that if you know what it is, you are better prepared to deal with it, and you are not surprised, and even if you are surprised, you can recover quickly and start to respond to these things. This is by visiting various schools, especially that are in rural areas, and engaging with the teachers. When there is no technology subject in curriculums, we start at the very basic, by introducing them to the basics of technology, first of all, what it is, how do you get in? What are the different things you get face to face with? If I give an example, when I get to school and ask what do you know about technology, they will tell me about social media. That’s the first thing, that they’ve got phones so it’s looking at how can you best use them to your advantage in a schooling environment, how do you use the information that you’ve got in abundance through the internet to benefit you in the journey that you are in. The biggest challenge that we have is access to technology. Access is a big thing in South Africa, especially in rural areas and in Africa as a whole. For example, I am based in Johannesburg, I can drive to a village that is maybe 70 kilometers from where I am to find that just Wi-Fi access is an issue. Therefore, you can have a phone, you can have a laptop, but you will not be able to get the information that you want to get. Sometimes you do have the two, a phone and laptop but they’ve just been dumped, you don’t know how to do it, because nobody ever bothered to teach them to do it. If I give an example of myself, I was saying to somebody that when I did my first-year at university, the first thing that I had to figure out was where do you start this computer. I knew there was this box, but I didn’t even know what to press, and they say press ALT+DELETE, I still had to get my fingers to do it at the same time. We’ve got kids that are in the cities, have gone to school with better quality of education, they are like 20 steps ahead. While you’re still struggling with the basics, people are already running ahead. That is where we are at, to try and at least ensure that we get them to a step better than where they’re at and teach them the basics. When they’ve got the basics in place, we start introducing them. Now that you’ve got the basics in place, what can you do with this thing? What is the importance of having this tool? How can you leverage the strength that you have? Because in a way it is a strength. It is outreach programs to rural areas and farm schools. It is having the master classes, competitions with them. It is having conferences where we invite them and give them a platform to showcase their innovation. It is also running programs where there’s a bit of technology and bringing in experts; for example, in one school that we are working with, we are introducing vertical farming, where we’ve got expertise in vertical farming coming in and showing them, you don’t need a huge piece of land, because the land is an issue in South Africa, to be able to produce food because food scarcity is a real issue. How can you do this when you are limited in terms of resources and be successful? It is looking at different areas where young people can be able to participate, and also stimulating their thinking in their brains. Once you’ve given them the tools, they are now able to run with it, they are able to transfer their skills, they’re able to come up with their own solutions, so education in everything for us at this point in time. Me in particular, it is the key, then the tools will come, then the building blocks will start to come together as we move forward. Ross: Of course, part of it is learning how to learn. Once you’ve learned how to learn, and you have access to the information, then you can teach yourself more and more. We do need the technology foundations, part of that then is giving them the skills to when they do have access to be able to use that well. I was very interested when you were saying how many students first pointed to social media as their idea of technology. You were saying, the next step is to teach them to use that well. How is it that you teach young children where their only use of technology is social media, to use social media well? Brenda: The first thing will be as the risk manager, I always tend to go into security phase. Can I make them aware of the pitfalls of using social media? Going through how do you prevent this? You can’t exactly prevent it, because criminals are always a step ahead. But how do you manage that going forward? Two, if you are using social media, for example, for business, or you are using it to drive opinions or share knowledge, who are the people that you should be engaging with? How do you create your profile in such a way that you are able to send the right message or the message that you intend to serve? And how do you deal with feedback that you get? Because I think from what I hear them say, is that the biggest thing for them, as they put it, one to be popular on social media is negative feedback, how do you deal with it? Security is also an issue for them, how do you deal with it? And also what are the other benefits of social media? They talk about wanting to use it for their education, wanting career guidance, what are the careers that are out there, wanting to know the career types that they have. When you speak to a child that comes from most rural areas, their careers are limited to wanting to be a doctor, wanting to be a lawyer, and like your traditional careers. They don’t know that there’s more that is out there. Being able to point them to the right institutions, or the right people that they can then start following for example, or start engaging with and getting more information, then it opens up their world in terms of knowing that you can be in a rural area, but from an information point of view, you can be a global citizen and engage with people while you are still sitting where you are. Ross: That’s fantastic and particularly important. In an information world, we are connected, we can be anywhere and be anyone. But first, you need to learn that that’s true. This is around possibility thinking. There are two parts. One is, how do we get them into thinking in terms of possibilities, and even just tell them what some of those possibilities are? Is that part of your mission and what you’re doing? Brenda: Exactly that. Our objective at TAFFD’s, as I mentioned, is to open the gateway in and out of Africa for young futurists. Part of that is creating that platform for them. You’ve got kids with massive talent across the African continent, and most of the time it is not seen, because one, they are not known, two, they do not have access, they do not have the right exposure so nobody can see what they’ve got, and probably be able to invest in it, or be able to help guide them to make it bigger than what it is. Sometimes, it’s validation, for somebody to say to you, what you are doing is actually great. Because all you have is people around you that only know most of the time what you know so you do not get external voices that validate. When you start a business, for example, you will find that in your family or where you stay, people will be like, yeah, Brenda; but when you go outside, people start recognizing you, people start seeing. When you come back, then they see the shiny diamond that you are. I find that seems to be the case with a lot of these kids where they need to just get out there and just show what they’ve got. The platform that we are creating is to do that through our town hall meetings where we’ve got different representatives from different parts of Africa, we’ve got 54 countries in the African continent. If we’ve got from East, West Africa, and South Africa, and we’ve got this young child who is very talented, talking about their innovation, some of those people might think, maybe this is something that is worth exploring, that is worth supporting and they might encourage them, then you get mentors, you get mentees across the continent. Because of the interconnectedness of the world right now, you are able to get somebody sitting in Australia, somebody sitting in Europe, who can say maybe there’s something that I’ve done, share their experience with them; oh, this is something new, actually is an idea that can be used here, so creating that platform for them to get the exposure, for them to get the confidence that comes with validation, that what they are doing is right, or the support to guide them in terms of the steps that need to be taken to get to that successive level, or in other instances, just to be heard, and to be seen, that can boost a lot of confidence, and that’s the platform that we are creating for them. I’m hoping that with this outreach program that we’re doing at the schools, in my visit, I will involve different stakeholders that will teach them about different subjects. We’ve got experts around so many areas. If it means to bring some stakeholder from governance like I said, I sit at the media and information technology, sector education, what they call SETA in South Africa, is that if I can bring them to come and bring their expertise and share with these kids, people that can come teach them about financial management as young entrepreneurs, it helps, all of that together seems to build this confident young person who becomes one of the people that can successfully contribute to the economy of the country, and the continent, and a global citizen that participates in the global economy as well. Ross: That’s fantastic, and very inspiring. That idea of validation is actually very powerful. If you’re sitting in Silicon Valley or Beijing or something, you’re living in the world of information, you have the validation around you but if you’re not in that context, you may have the idea just as good or even better, but you can’t know that unless you have some kind of reference point. To be able to live in a world of ideas, you do need to have the connectedness in the context which you are creating, that’s quite a powerful insight. Brenda: Just to add to that, sometimes it’s not validation but more a sounding board. Sometimes you’ve got it wrong, somebody is to say have you thought, have you considered, just to check your thinking as well and give you the confidence to go back to the drawing board not with the, Oh my God, I can’t do this anymore but going back to the drawing board with the confidence that when I come back, I’m going to come back bigger, I’m going to come back greater, and I’m going to do something better. That’s what I also have found because sometimes the idea will be based on just what they know but as soon as they get more information and see what other people are doing, they go, Wow, so they have that aha moment, and then when they come back, you can hardly recognize this person that’s talking to you, and you’re like, just blown away. It is quite amazing. Ross: That’s fantastic. To round out, given your experience and being able to give a spark to these young people and young futurists, what are a few lessons that you would offer to others who are also looking to inspire that ability to make their ideas matter in a connected world? Brenda: My advice would be to keep your biases in check because it has a tendency of clouding the way things are; because we see the things the way we are. Keep that in check. Also, when dealing with young people, what I have found very useful, is just listening to them, they’ve got so much to say, so much to share, so much creativity, listen to them and from what they are saying, if you say back to them, I promise you the type of solutions that they have for their own challenges, it is quite amazing. Because the first question they would say is that I’ve got a problem, how do I solve it? They’re looking for answers. But then what they do not realize is that they actually do have those answers. How it helps me is that I’m able to learn as well. It changes how I see things. Our biases will always be there, you will always come back. You will always have the thinking that you know but when you engage with different stakeholders, when you look at a situation, not the way you understand it, but by listening to the external views, it has a way of just making something good to be better. That will be my advice. Then the second thing is that when you are dealing with people, especially in the type of setting that I’m in, in the African continent, understand that it is not a one size fit all. We need to do an assessment, how is this change that we’re talking about going to impact these people? How is this knowledge going to be received? And based on that tailor-make whatever it is that you’re taking to them or want to propose to them; take all of that into consideration because our maturity level as far as access to information, as far as being able to analyze information, assessing that information is quite different. You need to understand where they are at and start at that level. Also, as they mature in some cases they will need hand-holding, in some cases, they can just run from the word go, in some cases, they will be flying when it starts and get stuck, and understand that this is where your guidance comes in, and that’s where the support, it might come in different ways, might be needed. It is not always easy, but it is the most fulfilling. Moving around these areas has helped me in particular, to understand my environment better, when I do the forecasting, when I do my scenario planning, to be able to do it better because I’m considering the different scenarios that exist. That will be the bit of advice that I can give. Ross: That’s fantastic. Of course, in terms of your own information, or input, or insight you gather, a lot of it is from the people you are helping and teaching. Brenda: Yes, and also the people that I’m learning from. I’ve got the privilege of sitting with people like yourself. I’m able to read some of the books that are out there. Also through TAFFD’s and the experts that are available to us across the world, be able to engage; they help challenge my thinking as well. When we bring all of these people together, for me, it’s a learning platform. Also, I’m hoping that I can impart something that can help them. Also, the fact that together through collaboration, be it private sector, academia, and the public sector, we can create a platform where these young people can thrive, we can create a platform where these people can see a better future for themselves, and at some point, be leaders that are better than the leaders that we have today, or the leaders that we are. That is why in August, we are hosting the first global conference in South Africa, for technology and science. It is all centered around the development of young futurists. We hope to see a lot of expertise from across the world coming to visit South Africa, and hopefully, helping us to support these young ones going forward in terms of future studies, in terms of supporting the different programs that they have in schools or as young entrepreneurs. Ross: That’s fantastic. It’s very inspiring. Thank you so much for your time, and it’s great to hear about all the wonderful work you’re doing, Brenda. Brenda: Thank you so much, Ross. Thank you for the opportunity to sit on this platform and share what we’re doing here. The post Brenda Ramokopelwa on using external and internal lenses, developing young futurists, connecting rural Africa to global thinking, and validating ideas (Ep26) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Jun 15, 2022 • 34min

Julie Rasmussen on her 7 S’s system, using Slack for note-taking, identifying systemic issues, and finding white spaces (Ep25)

“I find synergising to be the most rewarding part of the whole process. When that happens, you really are thriving on the information overload.“ – Julie Rasmussen About Julie Rasmussen Julie is a highly experienced corporate executive and entrepreneur, taking senior leadership and board roles in a range of industries and several countries for major organizations including Mary Kay, CVSL and EnXray. She is now the founder and CEO of She Banks, a fintech startup whose mission is to increase financial security for women. LinkedIn: Julie Rasmussen Twitter: Julie Rasmussen What you will learn Information processing via the seven S’s (03:07) How to sort efficiently using Slack (05:15) Why the sort structure for information is crucial (08:35) Why a pen and yellow legal pad can be the best mind mapping system (10:52) Why information synthesis is very active work (11:51) Why synergising is the creative process that adds value (14:39) What is the importance of scheduled downtime (18:06) Should mental mind maps be styled classically or otherwise (21:04) What is the advantage of getting further education even if you are already highly successful (27:51) How to avoid confirmation bias and loss aversion for thriving on overload (30:57) Episode resources Pepper by The Butthole Surfers Leslie Shannon Coggle Kumu Lego Schumpeter’s Process of Creative Destruction Oliver Wyman on serving women as financial services customers Harvard Business Review Myers Briggs Profile Blue Ocean Strategy Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman Transcript Ross Dawson: Wonderful to have you on the show, Julie. Julie Rasmussen: Hey, Ross. It’s great to be here. Ross: Since I reached out to you to interview you on how you thrive on overload, I gather you’ve thought a little bit more about the subject. Julie: I have indeed. It’s quite fascinating because until you sent me your list of questions, about thriving on information overload, my opinion about it really was more like barely surviving on information overload. I think sometimes it’s more like drowning in information overload, it’s like trying to drink from a firehose, or in the immortal words of the Texas punk rock bands, The Butthole Surfers, it’s like drinking from a fountain that is pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain. Ross: They do know all about it. Julie: Exactly. Then I started looking at your list of questions and listening to some of your other interviews. In particular, one of your most recent ones, with Leslie Shannon, from Nokia, who was one of my very good friends, and one of the most brilliant and interesting people you’ll ever hope to have a chance to meet, she mentions her five F’s, she has Find, Filter, File, Familiarize, and Formulate. I started thinking more consciously about the fact that, in fact, I do thrive on information overload, because this is where I get the ideas to start up new businesses or fix businesses that I’m working on. Ross: Tell us what it is. Julie: Ross, this is not that different from her process. Again, I will repeat one thing that Leslie says, it’s very important to find what works for you as an individual, and what works for one person might not work for another. What I discovered is that my process if we want to name it as a system is the seven S’s. It consists of Search, Scan, Sort, Structure, Save, Synthesize, and then Synergize. My information processing starts in the morning, I get a strong espresso, and I check out four or five different TV channels, then go to the office where I’ll spend between one and three hours looking at the various newsletters and publications that push info to me. These are news aggregators and publications that I subscribe to. Ross: So this is starting with the Search. Is this in chronological order as in, you start with the Search? Julie: I just start by scanning my inbox, what has been pushed to me, and scanning the headlines in the news aggregators, to see what the topics of the day are. Then I will delve more deeply into the topics of particular interest that I happen to be researching at that particular time. One time I was working with a cannabis company so I would focus on issues facing the cannabis industry. Or if I’m working with a security and transportation company, I’ll be scanning and searching for information relevant to that. My newest startup that I’m working on right now is a Fintech Ecosystem for women so I’m looking at everything having to do with Fintech, financial products and services, and women’s use of financial products and services. Then it just goes deeper and deeper from there. I start with my Search, and then if I see particular things as I’m scanning, a particular author, speaker, or article, I’ll quickly jump onto Amazon, I’ll order that author’s book and have it sent to me. Or if a link leads me to another publication, I’ll click, and I’ll follow the trail of information. Now, as I’m doing that, and I’m scanning, obviously, I don’t have time to read all of this while I’m doing that, so I use speed reading and headlines to scan the info, and then a various system of sorting it. This sorting is very important. I’ll use flags and emails of different colors. I’ll download things into files. I will insert names into a database, into an Excel spreadsheet so if there’s a significant person that I’d like to develop a relationship with or reach out to for their expertise, I’ll put them in my database and I’ll make notes where I ran across them, and what their area of expertise is so that later I can search for them on LinkedIn or the internet, get their publications, whatever it is that’s going to help me develop information from that person. Then I have a very interesting use of Slack. I set up Slack workspaces for whatever topic that I happen to be researching at the time. Because I do almost everything online, and even if I’m reading a book, you can get a synopsis of the book online, you can go to Amazon and click the link to the book, I’ll just set up a channel in Slack. Ross: Is this for your use only? Julie: Yes, my own use only. Ross: Nice and novel. Julie: I can’t get anyone to use my Slack channels, because I’ll have 150 channels, let’s say on Fintech, with everything I’ve ever read on Fintech that I thought was interesting, I’ll just make a channel, or I’ll add it to a channel in Slack. Ross: Fabulous Julie: Over time, I might have a Slack workspace that has 1000 or 1500 links to various topics. There are many, many tools you can use, like Endnote, and different internet searching tools, but I just found Slack was so easy to use; create a channel, post the link, and then I can make notes, right in the Slack channel under the article, or you can cut and paste certain paragraphs in the article and paste them to the channel and then you can pin the channel. I’m also a member of many collaborative Slack workspaces. That’s how I have organized my research with articles and online content into Slack. Ross: I never heard anyone doing that, but it makes a lot of sense, not least because you’re already in Slack all the time and you’ve got an instant tag by sticking it in there. Julie: Exactly. That’s just something that I just discovered, I just stumbled across as I was researching and thinking, what am I going to do with all these… Ross: Innovation? Julie: Yes, and all these different links to all these different articles, I got to store them somewhere. When I’m writing articles or emails, I will just click open my Slack workspace, quickly find the channel, copy the link and send it to somebody, or click on the article or see the parts that I’ve excerpted. It’s a fantastic archive tool I have found for storing this information. That’s my main sorting procedure, is to make an Excel spreadsheet, make a slide, but mostly store things in Slack. To properly store all this information, my fourth step is structure. Now structure here has more than one meaning. I’m talking both about the structure of the information that I’m sorting. What kind of information is it? Is it medic information? Is it statistics? Is it databases? Is it an opinion? Is it a point of view? And what is the key premise or systemic significance of the information that I’m seeking to understand and deciding where to place it and where to sort it? If I don’t really understand what kind of information it is, I’m going to put it in the wrong place. It’s not going to be very helpful to me. Or I might use the wrong information to make the wrong point. Because certainly in writing an article, or devising a business concept, I don’t want to use opinion or hearsay, to maybe create a strategy, I need to kick the tires and make sure I’m using information from an incredibly reputable source, and I need to make sure that I’m backing up with data and statistics. Ross: What tools do you use to put structure on it or to capture the structure which is apparent in your mind? Julie: Leslie uses this analogy of the Christmas tree. Areas that she has more information about, I think she used the example of Brazil, she knows a lot about that, so she hangs the information on this mental map of a Christmas tree that represents Brazil, and it glows very brightly in her mind map because it’s so rich with information. For me, it’s more like I’m looking at that green code that flows down the screens in the movie “The Matrix”, and I’m looking for the patterns and I’m looking for the underlying connections in this information, which again, I’m looking for the meta structure, and then I will use mental maps or some systems’ analysis tools, flowcharts like Coggle, or Kumu. I find one of the best technologies ever invented that will be forever is just a pen, and a yellow legal pad, or a pencil and a yellow legal pad, or sticky notes, and just drawing diagrams, jotting notes, questions, and things like that. Then I’ll keep a folder of all these paper notes. Then later at some other time, I’ll go through and I’ll think about them and think about where they go, I’ll research them, and I will figure out how they fit into my mental mind map. But I think that systems thinking and mental mind maps are really critical for organizing this information in your head. Ross: I’d love to just dig a little bit deeper into that. For example, on the legal pad, when you sketch things out, are there any particular types of relationships that you’re trying to capture in terms of dependence, causality, priority, or anything else? Julie: Yes. After we have searched, scanned, sorted the information according to what kind of structure and type of information it is, then saved it in the appropriate place, then it’s really critical to try to synthesize some of this information. Are there clashing elements? Are there contradictory statements? Are there statements that ring true? Or are there statements that cause doubt? And I’m looking for gaps, both in the information and then gaps in the real world. If there’s a root cause or a systemic element, where’s the blockage in the system? Or where does the system ignore information that if inserted into the system could cause it to change? Synthesizing is like you’ve got all these pieces like Legos or building blocks, so you’re trying to see how they fit together, and what parts don’t fit and what parts do fit, and are patterns revealed that illustrate systemic problems. Then you think about what ways could those problems be addressed. Ross: Is this something where you sit back and get into this certain state of mind to synthesize where you are pulling back to be able to ask these questions to yourselves? Julie: Yes, synthesis is a process of very active work, where I’m really consciously reading this information, trying to process it, trying to understand it, and trying to group it together in my mind, in this structured mind map that I’m building, so I think synthesis is really the hardest part because there’s so much information. When it tends to start to repeat itself, then you can say, Okay, well 70% of the data on this is all congruent so let me just now make up an object, which has certain premises, which I believe to be more or less true, that’s been now synthesized, all that information. For example, women don’t use financial products as much as men because they’re not culturized to do it. Maybe that’s false. But I’ve come across 70% of information that tends to agree that’s a fact so I’ll tentatively say, okay, that’s a truism, or that seems true. Ross: I’d later come back to that, perhaps, after finishing off your seven S’s. Julie: Yes. The last step is after that information is synthesized, and I’ve got this mind map, and I’ve got this underlying code in The Matrix where I think I know how certain systems and forces are working, the next thing is really Synergize. Now, this is where the real value add comes and two plus two is not four, two plus two starts to be five. This is the one that I don’t think you can really force, and I find that it’s obsessive deep thinking, a rumination process that runs in an infinite loop in the background while I’m brushing my teeth, taking a shower, making scrambled eggs, whatever, it’s like, you got a little bit of small piece of food stuck between your teeth and it’s there, you want to get rid of it, you don’t know what you’re going to do with it, it’s quite annoying until you can get rid of this. Going for a bike ride, just letting your mind wander through all the information, picking up things, looking at them, turning around, putting them back down, until suddenly, if the process is working, and I’m doing this right, I’ll get some kind of sudden insight or epiphany, that will bring me to a new level of understanding of both the problem, the systemic issues, and then possible solutions. I think of this as a typical creative process. This also reminds me of Leslie’s formulation step. I was very struck by something she said, that every solution has the seeds of the next problem. This reminds me of the Hegelian Dialectical Process that every new synthesis of ideas will lead to the next antithesis, and this is really a never-ending process. It also reminds me of the Austrian economist Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction. I do think that processing information and thriving on information overload is a process of creative destruction. You’re looking for what’s the value of all this information? What insights does it give us for innovation, societal change, or step-change functions and processes? I find that to be the most rewarding part of the whole process. I think, when that happens, you really then are thriving on the information overload. Ross: Absolutely. Ultimately, of course, the purpose of this is to create something wonderful, which wasn’t there before, either to solve problems or to create new opportunities. That’s where it all comes. But as you say, once you resolve the tension, the other tensions emerge from that. Julie: Exactly. I do think that it’s very important to schedule downtime but it really goes against our culture, this work-addicted, workaholic, high-pressure culture. But I find that I have to schedule and I will try to schedule two days a week, sounds like a lot, but where I just do nothing, but nothing being thinking, where you’re just going away, and you may be writing, you’re writing down your thoughts, or riding a bike, or doing something, shopping, it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing, lying in bed watching TV, I don’t know, but that’s when the real creative impulses come and your subconscious takes over, and we’ll make these connections that result in epiphanies, innovation, and synergies. Ross: Fortunately, two days a week corresponds with the weekend, so you’re lying with the rest of the society. Julie: Yes, but I try to take at least one day during the week, a Wednesday or a Friday or a Sunday. I actually rent a small studio apartment near my office. I won’t even go to the office because I have to have just no distractions, nothing on my agenda, nothing on my schedule, just force me to have that downtime. A good example for me was I used to take this 13-hour flight from London to Hong Kong back in the days before there was any Wi-Fi on the planes. I was really lucky because I was a CEO of a large organization so I used to fly business class or first class with a flatbed seat. It was such a relief and such a haven to go into this confined space where you didn’t get up really for 13 hours, they would bring you your food, bring you your water, there were no distractions, no one could call you, no one’s talking to you and all of my most productive, creative business insights almost without exception would come to me during this flight. After a few hours, I get out a pencil and a notebook, and the words, and the thoughts, everything would just flow, just flows out of your brain onto the paper without thinking about it. It’s just percolating up from the deep recesses of your brain. If you’ve done the first six steps, then it just percolates up. Ross: My experience used to always be that I’d literally get the 30,000-foot perspective of my life. Julie: That’s a great analogy. Ross: I just want to dig back into a couple of those S’s. I want to hear a little bit more. In the structure piece, you use the term mental mind maps. Are those classic mind maps with a concept in the middle and then branching forks of the hierarchical structures? Julie: Not really, I think it’s very important that your mind map is very free-flowing. I might just take one thought, or one problem, or one question, or one fact, just write it down and draw a circle on it. Then I just let my mind wander wherever it wants to go, like, what’s connected to that, or what’s not connected to that. It’s a very free-flowing thing. You just spew everything out onto the paper, then later, I will go back, and I’ll maybe impose more order on it or more structure on it or make it more formal, more like maybe a classic mind map. But I think it’s really important not to have any preconceived ideas, like, okay, it has to be organized in a certain way, no. Ross: When you jot down some concepts, what kind of relationships between them are you trying to elucidate? Julie: For example, I started researching for this latest startup. My father has a Ph.D. in economics. I’ve always been very strong in personal finance and economics, because of what he taught me. I’ve worked with tens of thousands of women entrepreneurs, and then I started to realize that women lack confidence in investing, they have lower levels of financial literacy so I draw a big circle over here that represents the finance industry, finance, financial concepts, then over here, I draw another circle, and this is women, women entrepreneurs, women’s challenges, what’s going on with women. I realized these are almost two separate universes. Then I started thinking about, well, maybe this is the problem, this disconnect. This is why women are not using financial products and services. What are the root causes of this? I’ll start to put things in the middle, like how can we bring these two circles closer together? Are there any overlapping circles like in a Venn diagram? I’ll just start drawing Venn diagrams and circles and putting things into them and then just seeing if there are connections. Then when I’m done with this map, I’ll see where there are connections, where I think there should be connections, and where there are no connections. It’s the blank spaces, often that are more important, or as important as the circles that are filled in with data. Where these big white areas are where there is no connection? That’s the opportunity. Ross: Yes, absolutely. Julie: Like in this particular example, it’s a huge opportunity. I had no idea when I started researching this. Oliver Wyman did a study that says, the difference in the use of financial products and services by men and women is a $700 billion global opportunity. That’s mind-boggling to me. That’s a huge white circle that really bears thinking about and figuring out how do you fill in the circle with basically encouraging women to use financial products and services so that they start investing more, and start to have better economic outcomes. But without drawing that mind map, I’m not able to really visualize how to do that. Ross: That’s interesting. On a related note a dozen years ago, in Harvard Business Review, there was a strategy map, where they did a semantic analysis of all of the content that companies created, including all of their filings and so on, and then looked at the relationships, created network analysis of these companies, which ones are adjacent. From that, there were white spaces, where there are basically industry sectors that barely exist at the moment, where opportunities lie rather than where there are massive clusters of everybody using exactly the same language to say what they’re doing. Julie: Exactly. I’m looking for these whitespaces. The world of finance is dominated by men. This is not a criticism. It’s just a fact. If you think about creators creating things in their own image, it’s no wonder that the financial services industry speaks the language that the creators of it understand and feel comfortable with. It’s not the same language that the universe of women who control three-fourths of domestic household spending and then on average have 13 different roles they feel at home versus three or four for men, it’s no surprise that that universe of women is speaking a different language. Neither one is good or bad, or better or worse, they’re just different. How can we translate from one of these worlds to the other in a way that they understand each other better, and when they do, then the first circle here of the financial and services industry, will then start to communicate with and include and involve this world of women who are not participating in or who may be underserved by the existing financial industry. To me, that epiphany is very exciting because it’s a huge open playground, with massive, massive amounts of room to play, and create value. People are trying to, it’s not that any of that was done on purpose, people want to bring these two worlds together. But it’s like if you speak English, and the other person speaks French, if you don’t speak each other’s language, it’s very hard to communicate, you can do it, but it’s hard. It’s a lot easier if you have a common language, and you can understand each other. Ross: You mentioned building systems diagrams using tools like Coggle and Kumu. Have you had any education in systems mapping and diagrams? Or is this something that has come to you intuitively? Julie: I always was a systems thinker. My Myers Briggs profile is an INTP, which is a researcher and a gatherer of information. However, the answer to your question is yes. I just recently went back to school and completed an MBA, which I finished in June of 2020. I’m already a very experienced, very successful business person. My friends are like why on earth are you doing that? Why are you wasting your time doing that? And I said because I’ve done many, many startups, I’ve done many turnarounds, I’ve sat on many boards but I want to know if maybe I have one last big startup in me. If I’m going to do another startup, it has to be big because startups are hard, it has to be something that is potentially massively scalable, or it’s just a lifestyle business and you can do that as a hobby in your spare time. I went back to Oxford, and this is where I started researching all of this information and finding out about all this information about just how big the gap is in women’s use of financial products and services. In fact, at Oxford, they do have a class on systems thinking, that’s how I learned about Kumu. That there’s a word for these mental diagrams that I draw in my head. Mind Maps, I never knew, I just thought it was something that you do because otherwise, it’s hard to make sense of the world around you with all this different information. My answer to my friends’ questions was, all that information may be in your brain, and it comes from your experiences but in many ways, it’s inchoate, it’s chaotic, it’s just all mushed in there until you start to really systematize it. What going to get an MBA did was give me frameworks like the Christmas tree, like the coding in The Matrix. I’m an excellent strategist, it comes to me intuitively, but now I find out there are all these strategic frameworks that you can use to hang your strategies on. Then you can use shortcuts like, this is a blue ocean strategy, or this is a red snake strategy, whatever, I don’t want to get too enthusiastic about all these crazy frameworks and their names but these tools, these frameworks really can be helpful tools in helping you think about the information you have. Now that when I see a huge open whitespace, I know what the business school term for it is. I forget what it is, I think it’s a blue ocean. That’s fine, but I know that it’s not just me, I know that someone’s thought of this before and I’m not crazy. In fact, I can go research about this if I just Google blue ocean. Ross: Yes, absolutely. You definitely need to trademark your seven S’s though. A few decades ago, McKinsey, put out their Seven S’s of strategy so you might have a bit of a tussle on your hands. Julie: Okay, I’ll have to look that one up. Maybe they beat me to the punch. Ross: No, it’s a different seven S’s. I think yours is wonderful. That’s a great insight, really valuable. Perhaps, you can write a book. In conclusion, any last recommendations for listeners on how they too can thrive on overload as you do using your seven S’s? Julie: Yes, I think one thing to do is to research frameworks because those frameworks can be very helpful, and they’re good shortcuts and good tools that people have already thought of, that you don’t have to reinvent, that you can use as your Christmas tree structure or your mind map structure or whatever. Then we also read a book for the MBA program called “Thinking Fast and Slow” by behavioral economist, Daniel Kahneman. It’s a very dense book, and there’s much repetitiveness in it. But if you will scan the chapters or read a synopsis of this book, there are some very important principles in there. I think it’s really important to be aware of confirmation bias and loss aversion. When you research, you tend to latch on to information that supports your thesis so it’s very important to force yourself to go get information that would undermine your thesis. That’s why I watch both Fox and CNN. Then you can come up with your own synthesis and decide if your thesis is correct or not, or if you’re just suffering from confirmation bias. Everything I see now looks blue because I’m thinking about the color blue or whatever it is that I’m doing. Then loss aversion, if you’ve really invested a lot of emotional thought into a certain premise or thesis, it’s very hard to let go of that thesis if you do find information that would tend to contradict it. That’s called loss aversion. You don’t want to let go because you have so much invested in it. Those are two pitfalls I would really strongly advise people to be aware of and try to avoid if they can. Ross: That’s fabulous. Thank you so much for your time and your insights today, Julie. Julie: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. The post Julie Rasmussen on her 7 S’s system, using Slack for note-taking, identifying systemic issues, and finding white spaces (Ep25) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Jun 7, 2022 • 27min

Paul X. McCarthy on networks to find experts, identifying authorities, computational social science, and latent knowledge (Ep24)

“Productivity is ultimately one of the greatest predictors of success in all fields. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an artist or a scientist, or whatever you’re doing, productivity is a key marker to long-term success.“ – Paul X. McCarthy About Paul X. McCarthy Paul is CEO of data science and research startup League of Scholars, which works with a wide range of organizations including Nature and News Corporation, and the co-founder of a number of other ventures, He is an Adjunct Professor at U of NSW and Honorary Research Fellow at Western Sydney University, and the author of Online Gravity, a successful book on how technology is rebooting economics. Website: Paul X. McCarthy LinkedIn: Paul X. McCarthy Twitter: Paul X. McCarthy Facebook: Paul X. McCarthy Instagram: Paul X. McCarthy Books Online Gravity What you will learn How to identify experts or stars in a field of study within their networks (03:34) How to ask simple questions to uncover their hidden expertise (06:24) How to find an expert in your network that you should be listening to (09:14) How to get even more granularity in finding experts (11:00) How to identify credible and authoritative sources (15:29) To what degree can we infer credibility from an expert’s network centrality (17:49) Why purpose leading to clarity and focus is key to thriving on overload (19:09) Why productivity is a key marker to long term success (21:00) Why sharing insights from information is crucial to network formation (24:20) Episode resources Albert-László Barabási Six Degrees of Separation Marshall Kirkpatrick Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Rise And Fall Of Rationality In Language Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science Evolution of diversity and dominance of companies in online activity The Science of Science Unsupervised word embeddings capture latent knowledge from materials science literature Transcript Ross Dawson: Paul, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Paul McCarthy: Thanks, Ross. Ross: Paul, I’d like you to tell us about the League of Scholars and what the underlying principles are, and how it helps you and others to thrive on overload? Paul: League of Scholars is a global startup that looks at researchers and research analytics worldwide, and the basis of League of Scholars is that individuals are the key to the success of the research. In recent years, in the last couple of decades, there’s been a global rise in the rankings of universities and other research institutions worldwide. There are now three large global ranking systems, the ShanghaiRanking, the Times Higher Ed, and the QS ranking. All people interested in the university sector are aware of these and very acutely aware of the rankings game between institutions in terms of how they’re perceived in terms of their institution’s reputations. What we’ve realized is while these rankings are useful, there are a lot of drawbacks to them. They’re not very up to date. Often, they include things like Nobel Prize winners, whose work is 20-25 years plus years ago, and often the rankings don’t change very much each year, so most rankings have hovered at the top and that hasn’t changed significantly in the last couple of decades, the elite list of organizations. What’s not so visible, I guess, is information about individuals. That granular and timely information is about what the League of Scholars is about, about uncovering the individuals in science, engineering, health, but also in other areas, in humanities, in social sciences, trying to understand who are the leaders in these individual more specific fields but also looking at tomorrow’s leaders and the emerging stars. Ross: What’s the basic principle underlying how it is you identify these stars in these fields? Paul: We use a variety of traditional bibliometric techniques. For those unfamiliar with the research world, research impact is citations; it’s the number of times that work has been cited by other scholars in peer-reviewed journals and publications. We use those traditional measures of bibliometrics but also predictive measures. We use machine learning to try and understand who is most likely to have the greatest impact in the future, especially for early career and mid-career people. As inputs, there’s a variety of measures that are known to be predictive of future impact. One of those, of course, is your peer network, that idea of who are your co-authors, what are your current co-authors, and how fast the school of fish you’re swimming with now is, is one way to think about it. Ross: Of course, you can just go on Google Scholar and see the number of citations of a particular scientist from their papers and so on but that’s a pretty crude measure, so how does the network aspect overlay that to identify who’s most well regarded in the field? Paul: What we do is we look at their co-author networks. There’s a range of network analytics approaches we use to understand the influence of their network, both their direct co-authors and also their co co-authors, so we build this analysis into the inputs to machine learning algorithms, which then go on to predict scientists’ or other academics’ likely future impact. We’re looking at other things. Citation patterns vary radically between fields and across disciplines so you can’t compare the citation impact of scholars in different fields. You need to compare like with like, so we take that into account too, and also the stage and age of people. The quality of the venues that they’re publishing is important too. Early on in one’s career, there’s not a lot of data so it’s quite difficult to see, just with the untrained eye, to distinguish between people but there are signals in the data. There is information that can be used to predict things like the quality of the venue, the co-authors, how many co-authors are outside your institution, and a bunch of social publishing metrics. Ross: This idea you’ve mentioned to me of the expert’s expert. Paul: Yes. Ross: I’d love to hear about where you’ve come across that idea and how you apply that in both League of Scholars and also more generally how you are keeping across the information. Paul: Yes. This idea was introduced to me by a colleague, Doris Field Tanner. I think you may know Doris, she’s an expert in network analytics. She explained to me that some of her previous work showed that you can discover an expert in any field by asking a series of simple questions iteratively to your peers. One can do it oneself. In a very simple sense, if you’re looking for information about a restaurant in another city that you’re not familiar with, you might ask someone who lives there. Then they might not be much of a foodie, and you might ask them to ask who would they know in their city that’s a restaurant. Obviously, it becomes a bit more complicated if you’re looking to understand quantum machine learning, for example, you might think of someone you know who’s a scientist in your field, and then ask them to ask, who do they know in their sphere, who’s the greatest authority in quantum computing and then quantum machine learning and other specialization, a really hot field that’s emerging now. They may know people in their sphere and so on. We know from the work of network scientists like Barabasi and others that the six degrees of separation storied in the Fred Schepisi’s film is very true and is shrinking, so there is a path between us and most other people on the planet, which is quite short, and there’s an easy way of identifying that through intuitive crowdsourcing approach. Ross: Marshall Kirkpatrick, who has also spoken to us on Thriving on Overload used the expert’s expert frame for his platform Little Bird to identify influences. It’s also interesting to look at your network, social network analysis, one of the classic techniques is the snowball where everybody asks who all should be included and such sort of building out the scope of the group and the interactions between them to ones that encompass as many people as possible that are relevant. Paul: Yes, absolutely, Ross. That’s a really good example. What it tells us, I guess, is that we’re all much more connected than we think. There are opportunities, I guess, that are in that. Ross: Are there any other particular aspects of the network analytics, which help to uncover those that are the most…well one of the things people talk about a lot in network analysis is centrality. Paul: Yes. Ross: So who are the people who are most central to the network, that’s one indicator, but is that the best indicator? What are the ways in which within a network of experts who respect each other, how is it you find the ones that in any particular domain are going to be the ones you should be listening to? Paul: Yes, one of the things is, it’s always about authority and expertise. Particularly in academia, there are a lot of subtleties in academia. As we know, Google search, it’s a two-dimensional thing, there’s authority and relevance. Similarly, for any topic, people’s expertise might be subtly different, so it’s quite difficult to actually put people into the same category. So often, it’s a case of finding the person who’s most relevant to your particular information needs rather than specifically saying that they’re better or worse than another person. Having said that if you’re hiring and you’re a university, you’re looking to hire an early career researcher, and you want to have a significant impact in a particular field, you are going to choose between particular candidates, yes, I mean, there are a bunch of predictive features but certainly, the quality of the venues in which they’re publishing, the influence and impact, output, the productivity of the co-authors and their co co-authors is significant. Ross: Let’s say you’ve got a specific domain, not just quantum computing, but specific aspects of that. Either currently, or can you envisage how we might be able to get some real granularity around finding the expert in a very specific area? Paul: Yes, absolutely. This is something we’ve been doing quite a bit of work in is computational linguistics, which is fascinating. Looking at using machine learning and computer science to do analysis of large-scale text databases, that can be of literature, news, for example, or of information just broadly available on the web, Wikipedia is another source. There’s a fascinating study that was done a year ago and published in the journal PNAS, which looked at the last 100 years of books, books published in English, I think they also looked at Spanish, and they looked at the language used in all the books published in the last 100 years, they found some macro trends in the use of language, across a century over time, so each year’s books were looked at separately, and were analyzed using a technique known as principal component analysis to understand what the characteristics or the features which were most distinguishing of the language, and how those features changed over time. It’s a fascinating study, it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in the last 10 years. They came to the conclusion that there was an inflection point in 1980, the post-truth era, some people call it the post-truth era where, basically for the best part of the last century, from 1900 until 1980, there’s a rise in the use of rational language and there’s a rise in the use of language that is in third person, in an objective sort of sense. Then from 1980 onwards, there’s a decline in the use of rational language and an increase in the use of first-person pronouns me, myself, I, and also words associated with conjecture, I believe, I think, my view is this, rather than we conclude, or we have observed, and so on. That’s a sort of simplistic way of characterizing, but it’s an incredible paper that makes a wide-scale macro-observation about society, for these kind of tools … Ross: Do you recall the title of the paper? Paul: It’s the Rise And Fall Of Rationality In Language. Ross: Right. Seems like a very pointed commentary on our times. I think 1980 was post-truth, and probably the last six years or so we’re in post-post-truth. Paul: That’s right. Yes, it’s fascinating. We did a review recently. I wrote an article about the top eight papers over the last decade in this field of computational social science because it’s only in the last decade. People have been using large-scale computation in the natural sciences and engineering for decades, and the big breakthroughs a decade ago in the Hadron Collider, and the discovery of these new fundamental particles in our universe, as a result of large-scale computing, largely. Similarly in astronomy, there was a paper published in 2009, in science called computational social science by Barbasi, and several other authors, Sandy Pentland from MIT. It kind of foreshadowed possibilities that large-scale computing could offer social scientists, and also scholars working in humanities, digital humanities. In the last decade, we have seen some amazing papers. This is something that I’m particularly interested in. Ross: I’d like to distill a little bit. We’re looking to thrive on overload. Paul: Yes. Ross: Both or either for academics or nonacademics, what are some of the lessons that you would derive from what we’ve just been discussing around identifying the credible or authoritative sources in a particular domain? Paul: Network centrality is certainly as you mentioned, one of the key things. It seems, in any environment, as Google has identified at the heart of their algorithm is the extent to which other people defer to individuals or sources of information. There was a piece of work we did last year, which was published in PLOS One where we looked at online diversity over the last decade through the lens of links in Twitter, and Reddit in social media. What we looked at was the diversity of links. The number of links relative to the number of domains is quite revealing because it shows that over time, the diversity of links is shrinking. In other words, more of the links across the entire web resolve to a smaller number of domains. You’re seeing, in various categories, for example, on YouTube, a decade ago, there was a variety of video platforms, but now most video on the web is hosted on YouTube, similarly, in social media. You get this kind of realms. But one of the things, I guess that it does reveal is what are the authoritative sources, as defined by the attention that people give them via these social media links. That was quite revealing, but from a practical point of view, one has a mix of using various tools but also as we’ve referred to earlier, using one’s social network as well, friends and colleagues. Ross: There is this thing, just because somebody is influential doesn’t mean that they’re right or worth listening to. Paul: Yes, absolutely. Ross: There are probably plenty of examples of people that have very big audiences or many people look to them but that doesn’t necessarily arbitrate and perhaps, that’s a difference between academic domains and nonacademic domains. I wonder even if that plays out a little bit in academics even in terms of popularity, as it were? Or do you feel that it’s interesting to look, and so to what degree can we infer credibility or authority from the network centrality? Paul: Yes, that’s a really good question, Ross. The way it works in academia is that you get a certain starting platform, by your level of authority. The trust and respect that you earn as an academic, throughout your career gets you at a baseline, but it doesn’t impact the overall success and total impact of the work. There’s a fantastic book called “The Science of Science”, which was published last year. It looks at all the evidence behind bibliometrics. One of the things they show is that the ultimate impact of scientific works is independent of the authority. But what authority does give you is it gives you a starting platform. You’re right, though, I think beyond academia authority confers a lot of influence. But yes, within academia, the peer review process still determines the ultimate impact. One can have confidence that academic work is different in its character and its nature, and that’s one of the reasons many of us have a lot of trust and faith in scientific work because I think it does have this kind of unique approach. Ross: Rounding out, I’d like to hear more about the ways in which you thrive and overload. You are obviously exposed to and digest a lot of research, you’re running a startup, your fingers are in a lot of pies, what’s the day by day or the practices or what is it that you can share that you think to be valuable to others in how you thrive on extraordinary amounts of information? Paul: your framework in the book, Ross is really good. I think it comes down to a lot of things about purpose, having purpose leading to clarity, and focus. There’s potentially an overwhelming amount of information out there and it’s growing, we need to relax about that is the key thing. Our relationship to information can be one of confidence or one of fear and it depends on how we see that in terms of our status in relation to the information. Information is only useful if it serves a purpose, which is useful to the user or the people in which you’re helping through disseminating that information, or if it’s helping you do your job better. I think that’s a really useful way to cut through things. I’d have to say that I don’t feel to be an expert myself in the mastery of my own day. Ross: Nobody thinks that they are, but there are many of us, many people I know who are extraordinary. They just don’t think it was always that way, and probably me included, or aren’t aware of their own practices that get there. Paul: Yes. Ross: I think that’s probably the thing of that sharing of what is it that you think might be useful for others as you have been? Paul: Yes, I guess, trying to be mindful of the day. I am aware of the research on this, that productivity is ultimately one of the greatest predictors of success in all fields. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an artist or a scientist, or whatever you’re doing, productivity is a key marker to long-term success. I think it’s quite simple. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an artist or a scientist or a business person, much of life is a series of experiments, whether they’re formal lab experiments, whether they’re a startup, or whether they’re experiments in relationships, we’re all experimenting and we’re all doing what we can with what information we’ve got… Ross: Absolutely. Paul: …and learning from that as we go. The thing about productivity is, that it’s just a sign that you’ve done more experiments. Ideally, we learn from others, that’s an ideal thing but often, it seems the best lessons, the hardest ones, challenges usually that we’ve faced ourselves, we seem to have the most significant lessons from those experiences. It’s worth noting that there is a relationship between productivity and success. The other thing I should say is, again, drawing on Barabasi’s work, who’s written a book about success with all sorts of amazing work that they’ve done on networks. They said that two things drive success, they divide the world into two, there are those industries in fields of endeavor that have performance measures; sports, one of those; you just have to be good at performing and you need to get better at performing and you need to practice and continually practice; whereas some fields of endeavor such as art, and to some extent business, are much more ephemeral and the measures of success are much more judged through social influence and networks where there are no clear measures of performance or success through performance, then networks’ trump performance, that’s all their science in a nutshell about performance. Ross: That’s really interesting. I think it goes to the point that part of it is in recycling the information we bring in. Part of the value, of course, or information is to help us think better and act better but it’s also the more that we then share that out hopefully, and having added value to it through our thinking, that is a fundamental part of network formation of where people can then see that what we’ve done with that information and where the network becomes, as you say, either central to performance or trumping performance. Paul: That’s a really good point, Ross, about the visibility of seeing the networks and seeing the provenance of ideas. That’s another feature of academia that is worthwhile for people to be aware of in day-to-day life, too. We’re all benefiting from others. Personally, I’ve benefited from your insights, Ross, throughout the years, and it’s been wonderful. You introduced me many years ago to the concepts of impro and the improvisational theatre, and that’s led me down to some fantastic powers and I’ve learned a lot as a result of that. We’re all in the same boat, where we, like Newton, standing on the shoulders of giants come in. We’re all indebted to others, and being able to see that is a great way of learning. Humility is a great, the best way to learn anything. The greatest barrier to learning anything is to think that you know it already. One of the things that fascinate me with this information space, possibly the most interesting question for me is this idea of latent knowledge. I just mentioned one other, I’ve mentioned lots of academic papers, there’s another paper published in Nature a couple of years ago, looking at latent knowledge in chemistry research. What they’re doing is they’re using this computational linguistics again to look at a really large database of chemistry research papers. What they found is that there’s all this information that can be inferred automatically from the papers. Firstly, things like the periodic table can be inferred, semi-automatically, out of the papers themselves using these new techniques. But not only that, there’s latent information, in other words, hidden information that was not available, or not widely known amongst chemistry researchers worldwide at the time, which is in the papers. There are new materials, for example, that can be predicted through analysis of these papers, using machine learning. It gives you a glimpse into this idea that there is all this information potentially available, which is beneath the surface. It’s like an iceberg. We see the tip of this iceberg, but underneath this is a potentially huge reservoir of information. That’s a personal interest of mine. There are a lot more interesting ideas out there that are yet to be discovered. Ross: Absolutely, it is a fantastic place to end in the potential of not just what we can create, but what’s already out there and how we can find that. Thank you so much for your time and your insight, Paul, that’s been fantastic. Paul: Thanks, Ross. The post Paul X. McCarthy on networks to find experts, identifying authorities, computational social science, and latent knowledge (Ep24) appeared first on Humans + AI.

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