I think you can learn a lot about a person by examining what they read.

I don’t know if you’ve ever opened a book someone recommended to you and been like, “oh, of course this person would like this,” but it can explain a lot.

I think I can break down most white collar jobs into the following categories:

1. People who produce relationships (for example, sales or recruiting)
2. People who produce things (usually products)
3. People who produce infrastructure (usually involving technology)
4. People who produce processes
5. People who produce information
6. People who produce decisions

These 6 categories are what I suspect “value” in business terms can be broken down into, and of course, we spend a lot of time trying to quantify that value using dollar amounts. How much you get paid is a function of how much value you’re perceived to produce. For example, it seems like society has decided that producing decisions is a high value activity.

Everyone and their mom is on Substack now and I really don’t know how I feel about it.

Substacks aren’t really blogs; they’re part of an ecosystem that feels a little bit like the social mediaification of blogging.

Blogging is supposed to be one of the last defences against the shackles of social media expectations, but I feel like Substack centralizing so much of the long form discourse on the internet can’t be good. Every once in a while I consider getting on Substack, but it just feels wrong for some reason. I believe in people having their own space on the internet.

Here’s a thought: The set of “public knowledge” and the set of “human knowledge” are very different things: the first is a strict subset of the latter.

Researchers get paid to advance human knowledge. They do NOT paid to advance public knowledge.

So who advances “public knowledge”? Is it journalists? Educators? Should it be the burden of researchers?

Here’s another question: should all human knowledge be packaged in such a way that the public understands it? Is that a good use of time and resources? Does the average person actually need to be able to understand the newest developments in esoteric fields?

In this day and age, we need more cross-disciplinary interaction than ever, because technology has rapidly become everyone’s problem in a way it wasn’t before, and we all need to have common language to discuss what is happening.

I was listening to an English grad student talk about the environmental impact of “algorithms” during an academic panel today, and while I know that what he was talking about was really generative AI, technical people aren’t going to take you seriously if while critiquing them, you start conflating generative AI with algorithms in general.