Is there one link, story or idea that stopped you this week… and made you think, “someone else needs to see this”?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Just Evil Enough, Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I made a simple pact years ago. Once a week, each of us would share one link with the others… something we genuinely believed the other two had to see. No trend-hunting… no performance. Just six ideas exchanged with intent. What started as a small ritual between curious friends became Six Links That Make You Think.

These are the six links we passed to one another this week… take your time with them…

• Demographic Profiles – VisQuill. “I love me a good visualization, and this is one of the best I’ve seen.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Too Much Efficiency Makes Everything Worse: Overfitting And The Strong Version Of Goodhart’s Law – Jascha Sohl-Dickstein. “When Hank Green put out a video on The Jevons Paradox, my partner sent me a note: ‘You’ve been saying this for years.’ She didn’t mean it as a compliment; these things have a way of slowly leaking out into the general consciousness, so that was either ‘you won’t shut up about this’ or ‘why aren’t people learning about this from you instead.’ 😉 Well, a couple of years ago I added Goodhart’s Law to my list of smug thinker pieces. It’s what happens when we optimize for a measurement instead of the thing we’re trying to improve, and AIs are nothing if not ruthless optimization machines. So watch this space.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Does America Really Have a Doctor Shortage? – Joel Selanikio – Future Health. “An old friend Joel Selanikio writes about (and practices) the future of medicine. I’m not sure how much the details of this article track to Canada, but the principles certainly do. Boston has among the highest MDs per capita in the USA, but also the highest wait times. Counterintuitive. Now, the current message from US associations is: we need more doctors. But Joel walks through a whole host of other data point, including what no one is counting: how many appointment slots are available? In any case, this is a brilliant case of lies, damn lies, and statistics, and reminding us all that it’s essential to understand the diagnosis before prescribing the cure.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Walk Through The Largest RV Salvage Yard In The World – Young Farts RV Parts – YouTube. “Watched a panel at StartupFest with Mitch moderating, about business, social media and authenticity. How do you make a dent in a world swimming in media junk (and quality for that matter?). Well, if I ever need RV parts, I know where I will be shopping. Apparently these guys just got a reality show, good on em. Give ‘er.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• 200 Economists Just Admitted They Can’t See Where AI Is Taking The Economy – Ana-Maria Stanciuc – The Next Web. “Is it just me or are the news cycles too fast or just too much that nobody takes one beat to see these bigger pictures? How often do you have an economist, let alone 200 of them… let alone 16 of them Nobel winners, admit that they cannot predict how AI will change the economy? This is fascinating. They’re warning that AI may transform jobs and living standards faster than past technologies, which will have huge implications on the economy. On top of that they’re calling for urgent action to create tools and rules to manage this uncertain future. I wrote about this, in parallel, this past week in relation to AI training in organizations. Most training doesn’t have the most important component… which is tdemonstrating to us humans what that means for our value and well-being at work.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• In Largest Study Of Its Kind, U.S. Fiction Audiobook Consumers Rate Spoken Multi-Cast Higher Than Human Narration – PodNews. “First off this link is to a press release so take everything you read in a press release with a grain of salt but I do trust the source… Edison Research. The story here is pretty wild. Everyone loves to talk about the irreplaceable power of the human voice, but this study found that listeners often couldn’t tell whether an audiobook was narrated by a person or by AI. Yikes! Even more interesting, the AI multi-cast version scored higher than human narration for character-driven fiction on favorability, quality and engagement. As a reminder, there’s a big difference between nonfiction and fiction. If a fiction-driven multi-character AI-generated audio book is scoring more favorably than a human… what does that say? The instinct is to defend the human narrator… and I get that. But the consumer behaviour may be more complicated (and what is the future for radio hosts, etc…). People can’t tell the difference… and in some cases prefer the AI version… what a time to be alive.” (Mitch for Hugh).

If one of these sticks with you, pass it on… and let us know what earned your attention this week…

Before you go… ThinkersOne  is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.