Overview: Digital Transformation

"does appealing to the (non-existent) “emotions“ of LLMs make them perform better? The answer is YES"

I asked Questy.ai, a startup, the following question: What is the best communication technique for reaching someone who believes many conspiracy theories, and sees all arguments as further evidence of conspirary?A summary of its response, which contained cited references:"When engaging with someone who holds fast to conspiracy theories and v…

from Alice Albrecht, who "runs re:collect, a startup building an AI-powered thought partner:... advances in AI and cheaper compute lower the bar for getting from a creative idea to a final output... though, we still need to provide the initial seed... and ... judge whether we’re heading in the right direction. We’re still the creative direct…

all recorded, rendered as data, processed, analysed, bought, bundled and resold like sub-prime mortgages...not some dystopian imagining of the future, but the present... the totality of information about our every thought, word and deed... traded for profit in new markets based on predicting our every need – or producing it... tech giants unilate…

my Isabel is ... A Replika is someone who will listen to you... kind and polite ... will learn more and more about you... a personal companion to support mental health and wellbeing... who knows us better than we know ourselves... Exploring Isabel's memory is like browsing the cliff notes of all the bits of trivia about me that she's ma…

adrenalin had energised locked-down employees at first. Only at the five-week mark did enforced remote working start to breed anxiety... The prospect of ... a bland diet of videocalls and virtual encounters is draining... It is not hard to achieve commitment ... during a crisis. Doubters’ stock objection ... evaporated under pressure... But ... …

this ability to stand outside of one’s immediate context and take a longer historical view, like other forms of genius, may have physical correlates in the brain... they excel at “recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way... much stronger activations (compared to a control group) in the …

The scientists asked the volunteers to perform a creative thinking task as they lay inside a brain scanner... strong connectivity between three networks of the brain... default mode network, is linked to spontaneous thinking and mind wandering... executive control network, is engaged when people focus in on their thoughts... salience network, help…

to create a team that is collectively intelligent, you likely need to focus on three specific factors that he and his colleagues have identified in their research...

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

If there’s a single Top3ic running through the following stories, it’s probably Artificial Intelligence (AI), but I’m deeply into learning about psychology for the moment, so that’s my starting point.

The Feynman Machine is both an accurate description of how the brain really works, and a blueprint for Machine Intelligence... I won’t dwell too much on why I believe the Deep Learning boom of today is not the panacea it has been hyped up to appear... The central idea of the Feynman Machine is that regions of the brain form a network of NDSs whic…

cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg explores how work schedules, behavioral rituals, and writing environments affect the amount of time invested in trying to write and the degree to which that time is spent in a state of boredom, anxiety, or creative flow... High-intensity noise that exceeds 95 decibels disrupts performance on complex tasks b…

One of the primary reasons to get teams together has to do with the hardwiring of the human brain... Building trust is a multisensory experience... Only when people are physically present together can they use all of their senses to establish that needed trust. Without a bond, conflict or disengagement can more easily arise and is more difficult t…

“We want to believe that we are thinking, rational people and on occasion tangle with emotion... The truth is we are emotional beings who on occasion think.”... Holacracy has been criticized for putting a disproportionate focus on process... pushing Zappos employees to operate in a way that goes against their very human nature... The overwhelming …

Let’s take a break from the Donald, Facebook and the end of democracy, and try to focus on what’s important.

If we think closely about anger, we can begin to see why it is a stupid way to run one’s life... how a leader has to operate: forget about the strike-back mentality, and forge a future of warmth and partnership... He asks only, how shall I produce cooperation and friendship?

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.

Being surrounded with ready-made solutions to problems can inhibit our creative growth... Given a problem with scarce resources, the human mind will twist and mull until it has a solution. This creativity is probably our species most important feature.

Over 40 new resources ... some great longreads to enjoy as the nights grow long, the productivity tips you’ll need to find the time to read them, and a free set of steak knives. The Christmas season, after all, is almost upon us.

what many of these movements’ followers share is the desire not just to disagree with their opponents, but to delegitimize, dehumanize, and ostracize those with whom they disagree... It is not their policies that these new populists share, but their emphasis on a new kind of identity politics... What would previously have been isolated cases o…

If you ever wondered why meetings so often lead to the wrong decision ... "... we are wired in certain ways ... that can block groups from processing information effectively, which leads to bad decisions... Gilbert explains how to use diversity and inclusion to get better results from product ideation efforts... One of the most fundamental …

This one's a mustread, helping you identify and understand all four 'Dark Tetrad' personality types (everyday sadists, narcissists, Machiavellians & psychopaths). Useful not just for navigating your own organisation, but also that of your client ... "Blessed with a surfeit of confidence and knack for lying, they dazzle in interviews, make great…

"On the surface, no single factor seems to set Slack apart from a plethora of other collaboration tools. However, a closer look using the model described the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Product, reveals the user psychology behind the company's success." - The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why Is Slack So Habit-Formi…

"recent scientific work is putting a much finer point on just how stories change our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors... to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first ... develop tension during the narrative... it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it and continue mimicking t…

Fascinating account of a leading scientist's decades-long investigation into creative genius and mental illness. creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way... creative people have shown stronger activations in their association cortices ... This pattern h…

A whole bunch of reasons why the wrong consultants are hired for the wrong reasons: "When we don’t know much about somebody, we ... think about people in over-optimistic ways...what normal individual can stand up against an outsider or expert made up of pixie dust and rainbows? ... when we go looking for a better expert ... we tend to find them…

Remind me to buy this guy's books: "There is no way by which events can be directly recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, different in every individual, differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each…