Slow Like Whisky

Tag: Society

  • Booksmaxxing: how reading became sexy | Books | The Guardian

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    robert.adlington
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    This is beginning to sound a trifle insane. That’s booksmaxxing! Isn’t this all coming at a time when book reading is actually in decline? Overall, yes. Since 2003 the number of Americans reading for pleasure has dropped by 40%. So booksmaxxing is a niche trend cocooned within a much larger trend that’s heading in the…

  • Why drugs are here to stay – Marginal REVOLUTION

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    robert.adlington
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    This confluence of pressures (human desire for rest and relaxation, declining access to traditional means of meaning making — through work, through children — and the powerful economic pressures to replace human labor with AI and robotics) and the rapid evolution of much much better drugs means that drug use will continue to rise, continue…

  • ‘You can be made a laughing stock to millions’: can gen Z escape the fear of being cringe? | Young people | The Guardian

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    robert.adlington
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    Humans aren’t psychologically evolved to be subject to the judgment of so many others. “Biologically or culturally, we’re adapted to relatively small group living,” says Giner-Sorolla. “We’re not adapted to live where millions of eyes are on us.” When we lived in smaller, entirely offline communities, we could adapt to fit in with those around…

  • We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World – On my Om

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    robert.adlington
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    The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury…

  • AI vs Middle Management

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    robert.adlington
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    AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees. For Cloudflare, internal audit previously picked a handful of business risk areas to…

  • Being Fed Content

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    robert.adlington
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    The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm…

  • Do I belong in tech anymore? · Ky Decker

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    robert.adlington
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    I am coalescing around some core beliefs: Things that are worth doing are worth doing well. Things that are done well require time and effort. You make meaning through the doing. Ideas are common; effort is not. There are no shortcuts. — Read on ky.fyi/posts/ai-burnout

  • BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN | The Verge

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    robert.adlington
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    But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them. Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. The people do not yearn for…

  • “Even the Weather Felt Expensive”

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    robert.adlington
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    Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite…

  • How to Guess If Your Job Will Exist in Five Years – The Atlantic

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    robert.adlington
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    To Dorsey, people are horses. Innovation is driving them out of existence. But people are coal—or, to be more precise, coders seem to be coal at the moment. Businesses employ 6 percent more software engineers now than they did a year ago, in part because corporate executives are desperate for workers to figure out how…