theadmiringbog

[theadmiringbog]

[theadmiringbog]

[theadmiringbog]

You will be in positions that matter. Positions in which you can decide the nature and quality of other people’s lives. Your errors may be irrevocable. So when you enter those places of trust, or power, dream a little before you think, so your thoughts, your solutions, your directions, your choices about who lives and who doesn’t, about who flourishes and who doesn’t, will be worth the very sacred life you have chosen to live. You are not helpless. You are not heartless. And you have time.

~ Toni Morrison

[theadmiringbog]

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transforrm the world. And you have to do it all the time.

~ Angela Davis

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Earth is the best planet. The rest of the universe sucks.

~ Kate Marvel

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About 75% of the infrastructure that will be in place in 2050 has yet to be built. Building for climate-resilience adds about 3% to costs, but the benefits outweigh the cost by about 4:1.

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Emergency management expert Dr. Samantha Montano says one of the best things you can do to prepare for a disaster is to bring your neighbor a basket of muffins.

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I love design. I revel in elegant, functional objects. I want our futures to be safe, but I also want them to be beautiful. I appreciate the (often hidden) roles that design serves in how we experience and move through the world, and how -- from fine art to technology to furniture -- it influences what we value and how we interact.

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The world has become too complicated. It is changing too quickly and there is just too much information for us individually or even collectively as groups of the smartest people to make meaningful interventions.

...

What if we get it right on AI?

I think it's benefit will be in giving everybody access to intelligence. The last wave of software gave billions of people access to unprocessed information on the web, like blogs and books and videos and podcasts. In the next decade, I think billions of people are going to get access to an intelligent agent or an AI that will hhelp process that information. You're just going to have a natural-language conversation with your AI about anything that you are interested in or that you want to learn about, and it will adapt to your style, your expertise, your tone. I think this is going to unleash the greatest productivity gains we've seen in human history.

I think that's going to do a tremendous amount of good because if you're motivated [to make a difference], you are now going to have an intellectual aid that knows everything there is to know [about your desired topic].

Mustafa Suleyman

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Every $1 invested in resilient infrastructure can yield $4 in benefits.

More than 1,600 institutions have divseted more than $40 trillion from fossil fuel stocks.

In 2023, more than 23,000 companies disclosed their environmental data on greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and/or water use.

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The money that tech companies have sitting in the bank is producing far more carbon than anything they're doing with their operations because their deposits, int he hands of the banks, become investments in teh fossil fuel industry.

If you have $125,000 in the bank, that's producing more carbon than all the flying, cooking, heating, cooling, and driving that the average American does in a year.

~ Bill McKibben

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You will be in positions that matter. Positions in which you can decide the nature and quality of other people's lives. Your errors may be irrevocable. So when you enter those places of trust, or power, dream a little before you think, so your thoughts, your solutions, your directions, your choices about who lives and who doesn't, about who flourishes and who doesn't, will be worth the very sacred life you have chosen to live. You are not helpless. You are not heartless. And you have time.

~ Toni Morrison

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It's okay not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out. So just be present. And when you're worrying about whether you're hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you're showing up, that you're here, and that you're finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that.

~ Joanna Macy

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Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the Earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. To hope is to give yourself to the future -- and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

~ Rebecca Solnit

[theadmiringbog]

“Rilke said that books are like a sealed envelope passed to the future,” I said. “People sometimes think writing and reading are solitary acts. But both can be a way to see and be seen more clearly.

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“Some things take time to find their way into the world. As James Salter said, ‘There are stories one must tell, and years when one must tell them.’ One day you’ll be around people who want to hear what you have to say.”

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I also felt like I’d been hugging the world hard my whole life, and now the world’s arms were wrapping around me and squeezing back.

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I once had a conversation with an agent about when a book I’d written should come out. Though the original plan was for September, my publisher was pushing for January.

“They’re the experts,” I said. “They’d know.”

“Oh, no one knows anything,” my agent said, as if he were surprised I’d thought anyone did. “Almost nothing sells either, so you might as well do what you want.”

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“Our love is abundant,” he said. “Abundance means we can spare it. There is no need to hoard love. There’s plenty. Creation is an abundance of love. We should be giving it away in little ways all day and in big ways all our lives.”

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Paul said tech people often started with a list of rules: No glitter, no liquids, no hanging anything from the ceiling. But this guy started all conversations with a simple question: “What do you want to do?” He’d work with you to try to figure out how to make it work, how to let you do the show you wanted to do.

Maybe glitter was fine if there were a tarp. Maybe if we rigged pulleys we could… That seemed like a strategy for a lasting marriage, and for a richer life than past generations of women were able to have. You could come at commitment from a place not of rules but of Tell me what you want. Let’s see if we can figure out how you can have it.

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True friends consider themselves stupendously lucky to have encountered one another

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Is it possible that in some way your destiny is connected to this other person, and you’re just trying to figure out in what way?

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“You have to ask: If this was my last year alive, how would I want to spend it? If I had thirty years? If you’re saying ‘Things are good enough—why should I blow them up?’ The answer is because ‘good enough’ should not be the goal,” she said. “We didn’t work this hard”—by “we” I sensed she meant women—“to be fine.”

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I pointed out that I’d never asked for much, from him or anyone. I’d always been a self-cleaning oven. And I was ready to cash in the goodwill I’d built up.

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When my mother’s all-time favorite cat, an incredible mouser, vanished, Veronica said, “No, he didn’t get eaten by coyotes! He just killed a deer and is dragging it down a mountain. It will take him awhile. Maybe many years.”

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Anecdote: A rabbi ran after someone who’d stolen his wallet—not to get it back but to yell, “You can’t steal that from me! It’s a gift! I hope you enjoy it!”

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“What is love asking your soul to do? Do that. Then imagine the most beautiful future you can. Point yourself in that direction. And go.”

[theadmiringbog]

The grounds are littered with these smaller shrines, these “local deities.” Each shrine has two plots—plots situated side by side. Every twenty years the shrine’s positions alternate, but in the years of the rebuild, the old and new stand next to each other. The fresh hinoki cedar of the new shrine glows in the sun as if lit from within, suffused with a purity that makes it easy to understand why it’s favored for Shinto ceremonies. The old shrine, its hinoki weather-beaten, seems painted with the wisdom and wishes and hopes of a million million pilgrims. To see this old and new side by side is to see time on a cozy scale. The priests keep them like this for a month or two as the deity moves from one to the other. But soon, the old is dismantled, the wood recycled. The adjacent plot left empty until twenty more years pass.

[theadmiringbog]

All ChatGPT does technically is act as a very elaborate autocomplete like you have on your phone.

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The entire email database of Enron is used as part of the training material for many AIs, simply because it was made freely available to AI researchers. Similarly, there is a tremendous amoutn of amateur romance novels included in training data, as the internet is full of amateur novelists.

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AI's biases are compounded by the fact that the data itself is limited to what primarily American and generally English-speaking AI firms decided to gather. And those firms tend to be dominated by male computer scientists, who bring their own biases to decisions about what data is important to collect.

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Because LLMs are text prediction machines, they are very good at guessing at plausible, and often subtly incorrect, answers that feel very saisfying. Hallucination is therefore a serious problem.

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If you tell it to act like a particular person, it does.

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We aren't completely out of an innovation job, however, as other studies find that the most innovative people benefit the least from AI creative help. This is because, as creative as the AI casn be, without careful prompting, the AI tends to pick similar ideas every time. The concepts may e good, even excellent, but they can start to seem a little same-y after seeing enough of them. Thus, a large group of creative humans will usually generate a wider diversity of ideas than the AI.

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How should we use AI to help generate ideas? Fortunately, teh papers, and other research on innovation, have some good suggestions. When you do include AI in idea generation, you should expect that most of its ideas will be mediocre. But that's okay -- that's where you, as a human, come into the equation. You are looking for ideas that spark inspiration and recombination, and having a long list of generated possibilties can be an easier place to start for people who are not great at coming up with ideas on their own.

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Example prompt for 20 ideas of marketing slogans for a new mail-order cheese shop:

You are an expert at marketing. When asked to generate slogan ideas, you come up with ideas that are different from each other, clever, and interesting. You use clever wordplay. You try not to repeat themes or ideas. Come up with 20 ideas for marketing slogans for a new mail-order cheese shop, make them different from each other, and make them clever and creative.

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Tell the AI who it is. Force it to give you less likely answers, andyou will find more original combinations.

Example: You are opening a coffee shop:

You are an expert at problem-solving and idea generation. When asked to solve a problem, you come up with novel and creative ideas. Tell me 10 detailed ways a superhero might make espresso andhow they might speculatively get teh same effects in a new product.

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When given access to general purpose tools -- like AI -- people figure out ways to use them to make their jobs easier and better. The results are often breakthrough inventions, ways of using AI that could transform a business entirely.

[theadmiringbog]

Na’amah

hard agree!

don’t even trip just cut him loose

can’t get your eggs cracked without cracking a few eggs

Sarah

and whatever u do don’t text him

55357569015535657339

mayb even softblock

Anjali

yessss

yeet and delete

we stan a non-self-sabotaging qworn

def not

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Whenever I feel like taking a motivational break, I pair some inspiring savage images with sickening music; for me I like to crank “Another One Bites the Dust” while looking at that photo of the American soldiers sticking the flag into Japan, just a double dose of freaking epicness, after a few minutes of that I’m always eyes-up and ready to rock. She said a few sort of negative things about this, so after I set her straight on the “No Bummers” policy in my house, I reminded her that if we were gonna pursue our goals we had to keep focused on the long term.

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These are my goals, I said: the instant I hit retirement at age 40, I want to start having kids, just like you do—as many at a time as IVF will safely allow, until we hit a dozen. (Four per gestation cycle would strike the ideal balance between fast and feasible.) I want us all to live under the same roof, in a big “mothership” that takes care of our every need. Alison would be the household COO, running admin and housework, which she obviously enjoys, and I’d be CEO, overseeing our kids’ education from birth. We’ll wake up at 5 a.m., chug our shakes, engage in physical and mental enrichment, and get our yeeks in bed at the stroke of eight. As soon as the kids acquire language, we’ll start them on an *actually useful* curriculum focused on bizdev and Stoic thought that will give them a massive edge on public-schoolers—picture everyone happily sweating away at their custom desks/treadmills as they absorb meticulously curated high-quality podcasts at 2.5x speed.

[theadmiringbog]

We’re in the middle of a companywide lockdown—several weeks where everyone is encouraged to stay at work day and night—triggered by the launch of Google Plus, which is widely seen as a “Facebook killer.”

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As soon as the German delegation is seated in the meeting room, we start formal introductions. Marne explains her background, that she’s relatively new to Facebook, having most recently worked at the White House under Larry Summers. At the end of listing her Harvard and government credentials, she concludes with, “And I’m Jewish.” The room is silent. “I mean, I don’t bring that up because of the Holocaust.” Absolute silence. As if every living thing in the meeting room has been frozen. I’m trapped in some terrible parody of diplomacy. “It’s just I figured you already knew,” she continues. “We can discuss it if you wish?” The tension in the room is unbearable.

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Effort, productivity, and the sacrifice of everything else in life are valorized and fetishized. Marne’s work ethic sets the rhythm of my life,

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Years later, after a few wines at Davos, Sheryl tells me that the punishing scale of work is by design. A choice Facebook’s leaders had made. That staffers should be given too much to do because it’s best if no one has spare time. That’s where the trouble and territoriality start. The fewer employees, the harder they work. The answer to work is more work.

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The expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible, and the more skilled you are, the more invisible it is.

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No, you have a seven-month-old baby at home. Doing jail time in a foreign country is not a reasonable ask from your bosses.

[theadmiringbog]

“I’m glad you were out here as I was walking by,” he said. “It’s my favorite thing about today. And it’s been a good day.”

[theadmiringbog]

Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe.

~ Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living

[theadmiringbog]

Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

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Listening well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love, keep asking them, "Is there more?" until there is no more.

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Always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.

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A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.

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The advantage of a ridiculously ambitious goal is that it sets the bar very high so even if your effort falls short, it may exceed an ordinary success.

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Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind, be kind. No exceptions. Don't confuse kindness with weakness.

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The best way to get to yes in a negotiation is to truly understand what yes means for the other party.

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Don't be the best. Be the only.

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If you ask for someone's feedback, you'll get a critic. But if instead you ask for advice, you'll get a partner.

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Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe. And you can get better at it. It's the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

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Most overnight successes—in fact, any significant successes—take at least five years. Budget your life accordingly.

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Don't ever work for someone you don't want to become.

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The consistency of your endeavors (exercise, companionship, work) is more important than the quantity. Nothing beats small things done every day, which is way more important than what you do occasionally.

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If you repeated what you did today 365 more times, will you be where you want to be next year?

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Art before laundry.

[theadmiringbog]

After Venture, I was hired away by the PR mega firm Burson-Marsteller. My biggest client was the U.S. Tuna Foundation, which tried to get pregnant women to eat, you guessed it, more tuna. We paid off academics to argue that a certain form of molecular mercury was too large to cross the blood–brain barrier.

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PR firms employ two types of people: bureaucrats and operatives. Bureaucrats are the accountants. The conference call leaders. The digital paper pushers. Operatives infect newsrooms. Call reporters. Do whatever it takes to get ink. I have always been and will always be an operative. Put it on my tombstone.

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Ninety percent of mega PR firms’ staff are bureaucrats. These firms claim to be experts in media relations, adept at securing coverage. Most of them don’t achieve results for their clients. They don’t know how to start fires. They

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I’ve got what I need: first ink. Once you create one moment out of nothing, you can create more. You have started a fire.

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We have the journalists outnumbered. Three hundred thousand people are employed by the PR industry in the United States, compared to an estimated forty thousand journalists. There are seven and a half PR pros for every journalist. Would you take those odds in a fight? We also have journalists outgunned. The average salary for a PR professional is a multiple of what a journalist of comparable experience can make. And

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When I am trying to place a story, I plan for it to take at least a month. Twenty phone calls. In a 2024 world, I send hundreds of Signal messages. And only one or two emails. Email is the easiest to subpoena, so I limit my work over that platform. The process generally goes something like this. A client calls the firm and presents us with a problem. We do an intake call to understand the scope of the damage. I take the allowed incubation time to consider our options. This can range from thirty minutes in the worst case to a day or two in the best. I am about to admit to a trade secret here, one that might piss off a few people: I engage in the equivalent of “insider trading” with the media on a regular basis. I don’t just talk to myself during this period. I use a group of a dozen journalists to field-test ideas. During my incubation period, I’ll call one or two of them and float a strategy by them that has not been given to the client. It’s always positioned as “What if, hypothetically, my client decided to do X … Would that be newsworthy?” And I make sure that all these calls are off the record. I’m not sure what a journalism school ethics professor would think of this practice. I then present the plan to an internal audience at the firm. Because what I come up with is normally a bit crazy, it then gets modified. After this, the firm presents the strategy to the client. Then we convince them to take our advice.

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This is where a reporter would normally get involved. If we are lucky, I’ll know a reporter who will take the story immediately. However, normally, I need to ask someone at the target publication for a recommendation of a reporter who covers the issue in question. For the most part, reporter friends will send an email introducing me to a colleague. I then switch the conversation to Signal as quickly as possible and send some version of the following message: “I have a piece of information that no one else has. Do you want it?” Generally, reporters will give you a call after that. Then you move into the “discovery” phase. The discovery phase is when I spend my currency. I have never bribed a journalist. I have heard of it happening in other countries. Clients have asked me to do it. I have worked with a former foreign journalist who had a penchant for taking bribes. But I have never bribed one myself. When I refer to spending my currency, I mean the proprietary information my client has given me to dole out to the media. Once I no longer have any new information to give a journalist, I become irrelevant to the story. More important, I have lost all leverage in the conversation.

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I’m paid to disseminate information. I tell the truth from a monetized point of view.

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During media training, PR operatives learn that every story has three parts: a villain, a victim, and a vindicator.

In this story, Mary was the victim, and when he murdered the drunk, George became the villain. In the PR business, we try to convert a villain into a vindicator or a victim as fast as possible. And that’s exactly what the town did when they found George “not guilty” sans trial. They made him the hero, a vindicator of battered women. The deceased drunk was switched from a murder victim to a wife beater who deserved to die. A villain. Every story needs a villain. Show me a good story without one.

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I tell clients, “Don’t be a hero. Always work to find a better villain.”

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It makes the opposition look like they’re asleep at the wheel. First ink is the most important. Journalism is the first draft of history, and the first story is the first draft of a news cycle. It sets the tone for the coverage. We’re aiming for “David versus Goliath.”

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It’s the client who is convinced they are front-page news who scares me the most.

Their expectations are so out of whack with reality that there is no chance you will ever, ever please them. Fire this client immediately. Other clients don’t understand what news is. It is nothing more complicated than the word new made plural. News. That’s it. It has to be new. So, no, I cannot get the New York Times to write an article about your press release from last month. Then there are the clients who just crave seeing their name in the paper. These people are dangerous. With reckless abandon, these clients will go on the record in a heartbeat, refuse any and all media training, and, most important, likely take advice only from themselves or their trusted spouse.

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I’m proud of my work, but I’m not proud of what I’ve done. I’ve manipulated narratives—even invented them when needed—to fix problems for a client. My stories didn’t occur in a vacuum. They circulated out into the world. And they changed it. Sometimes for the worse. Often for the worse. I helped Qatar win the World Cup bid, one of my deepest regrets. I’m not proud to say I’ve seen the destruction my handiwork has created. We live in dangerous times, and my industry helped make them so.

[theadmiringbog]

At moments like this, I missed prayer. It had been a gift. Tilting my head toward the sky, luminescent as though backlit by God himself, silently unburdening myself, inhaling the expansiveness of his deliverance. It had been a relief to surrender, to accept my smallness, to merge into a sacred whole.

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“Priya,” I said, gesturing between them, “this is Sheikh Jason. He’ll be teaching the religious education classes.” She looked at him. Laughter rippled up her body and, finding her mouth squeezed shut, rippled back down again. She removed the laptop from her knees and stood up.

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I shuddered thinking about Jason trying to speak Arabic; never had a whiter man existed.

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How do you heal someone who doesn’t think they’re broken?

[theadmiringbog]

[theadmiringbog]

[theadmiringbog]

Westminster bills itself as the second-oldest continuously held sporting event in American history. This depends a lot on what you consider to be a "sporting event." Is Westminster a competition? Yes. Are there winners and losers? Yes. Is there some kind of physical activity involve? Yes. Are there teams? Yes. Do all the teammates know they're in a competition?

Hmm.

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Javier Milei is an economist and right-wing politician in Argentina who is best known there for his five cloned mastiffs. The weird part is that Milei considers the mastiffs to be his political advisers, via mystic who serves as a go-between. (Murray the Mastiff, for example, gives advice on the economy.)

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We have admired and adored so many dogs -- the Frenchie being only the most recent -- while at the same time we have caused them pain and shortened their lives.

In many ways, we have loved dogs to death.

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At the first dog show in Newcastle, England, in 1859, there were two classes of dogs in the show: setters and pointers. The winning setter just happened to belong to the judge of the pointers. And the winning pointer just happened to belong to the judge of the setters.

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We had more than 14 years with Fred--somewhere north of 5,000 days.