Well. #Bridgerton has already started off on the wrong foot with the underpinnings.

stacks are eating the world

business used to be easiest to comprehend via a) market-based logic of horizontal vs. vertical STRUCTURE, b) professionalization/specialization based FUNCTION c) core competencies based BEHAVIORS

this has pretty much collapsed in the last decade

Structure = sclerosis
Functional specialization = bureaucracy
competencies = inertial habits

"Stack" thinking instead lets technology structure (rather than market structure) drive business org logic

Companies seem to do well when they identify an entire stack of technologies they are good at (not just point bits) and organize to conform to its logic. There is a "full-stack" dimension of technical specialization that is the spine of the org

It feels buzzwordy, but it really is getting to be that way. AI stack, decarbonization stack, mobility stack, electrification stack... some end-to-end pathway of turning physics into economics via layers of tech artistically baked together like a cake

Why does Your Manager’s Manager (YMM) request a deck/doc during a meeting, says it’s urgent, and then doesn’t respond for days after you create & send it?

Or, why does YMM often respond with trivial feedback (e.g. formatting) & not substantive feedback?

Answers in this thread👇🏾

Have you set an entirely new password on a site & said to yourself: “surely, I’ll remember it becos this site is so important for me”. Have you then gone on to forget that password the very next week?

Me too.

The reason for YMM’s odd behavior & my password optimism is the same.

That reason is the Focusing Illusion, first described by Daniel Kahneman.

The Focusing Illusion:
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

When YMM asked you to create that doc as one of the follow up actions during the Product Review, YMM fell prey to the Focusing Illusion.

Trust me, YMM had no intention of making you do busywork.

YMM truly believed that it was very impt & urgent to create that doc & review it.

This was YMM’s conception of how much of their future time was appropriate to spend on the item for which they requested that doc (Item A):

Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 02/11/2021

It's a slow, snowy afternoon. How about a 🧵 on "rationalists" & "rationalism"? I want to talk about what real rationalism might look like & what people devoted to rationalism might actually behave like--and how that differs from what you often see from self-styled rationalists.

Caveat up front: this is not about Slate Star Codex, which I haven't read regularly enough to have an opinion on, or about the recent controversy between SSC & the NYT. I'm more interested in the *idea* of rationalism (vs. the practice).

The core premise of rationalism, as I understand it, is simply that humans' cognitive machinery was not designed by evolution to find truth, but rather to advance the interests & welfare of the collective -- a Venn overlap, but not the same thing. Therefore ...

... reasoning well, both individually & as groups, requires special effort. It requires consciously trying to set aside the parochialism, biases, & other distortions that typically characterize our thinking -- resisting, to some extent, the dynamics of group membership/welfare.

That's all fine. I agree entirely that we should make special effort to reason well & to guard against the typical failures of reasoning to which we humans are prone. I believe it's the best (maybe only) way forward as a species. So far so good.