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…

• Agency – Quinn Norton – Medium. “Quinn Norton with a great post about grief, loss, and false immortality.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Temperature Zero For Culture: Why Everything Is Starting To Look The Same – Lauren Leek – Lauren’s Data Substack. “The mathematical reason for sameness, and why algorithmically moderated worlds lead us towards the generic norms. It’s not just a gut feel—there’s actual math, and as we abdicate decisions to AIs we will be gradually shepherded towards boring. ‘A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.’ There’s a solution, too: The exploration/exploitation balance: ‘Any system learning from feedback has to divide its effort between exploiting what already scores well and exploring options it hasn’t tried, in case they’re better.’ Now, how do we build that into culture?” (Alistair for Mitch).
• How The Phone Book Taught America To Ask For Answers – Alex Houston – JSTOR Daily. “A history of the phone book, and the fascinating evolution of the telephone, operators, companies educating people how to use it, and people educating companies on how they wanted to use it.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• The Lucrative World of Literary Scams – Snigdha Poonam – The Dial. “There’s an old saying something like: writing is easy, you just lean over a blank page until drops of blood start pooling on your forehead. And once you have suffered, my God… but do you want someone, many people to tell you how wonderful your writing is. The founder of Lulu.com once told me the average sale of a self-published book was 2. This makes authors ripe for scams, and AI sure makes scams easier.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• AI Is Hacking The Code Of Civilization – Yuval Noah Harari – YouTube. “Does our ambition to build new technology ultimately serve humanity? A worthy debate topic that feels germain to the day… but is probably one that has always been worth haviing. This feels like a ’we have to choose a side moment’… but I do not think that it is. What I mean to say is that we have really have to put our values aside and be open to being more intellectually rigorous… especially as this AI world emerges. This is a fascinating presentation by the acclaimed public intellectual, Yuval Noah Harari. Harari makes a big point that I don’t hear about in the general public discourse: AI is not a tool. And if AI truly starts taking control of some of our systems (think law, finance and government) and is able to do things that we can’t understand (some might argue that it’s already doing this), do we become cows in a world where cows are a victim of farming and food (and an entire industry that relies on them) without having an inch of understanding about what this system is? Deep thinking worhty of your time…” (Mitch for Alistair). 
• The New Age Of Reading – Nathan Heller – New Yorker. “I was in Boston this week for a speaking event and took some free time to wander the local bookstores, stationery shops, and more. As I walked by a Barnes & Noble… I had this weird remidner feeling that, prior to Amazon, this book chain was seen as the 800-pound terrible gorilla that was destroying the book industry. In a handful of years, and as this chain has gone through layers of disruption, it’s fascinating to see society cheering them on so suddenly. It’s similar up here in Canada with the Indigo chain. Forget what you think you know about reading and buying books. James Daunt believes good bookstores help people read more. He has reshaped Barnes & Noble with welcoming shops and knowledgeable booksellers… and good vibes. So much so… that B&N is having a real moment here… and he is being credited with helping to revive bookshops and bring in more readers… including young people.” (Mitch for Hugh).

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

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