Here is a digest of the best links each week for anyone who might be interested.
The Pandemic: the reality we live in
A second coronavirus death surge is coming. In the meantime, US officially notified to withdraw from WHO. Though it needs to wait another year for making the move with also uncertainties depending on the outcome of election, the damage has been made. If we were so ill-prepared for this pandemic, will we ever get better for the next one?
Will the pandemic reverse the globalization? Many economists believe no, but countries will definitely try to adjust their position in the globalization forward.
Dr Robert Redfield, director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, also talked about how America can regain control of the coronavirus this week. It’s critical at this moment to deliver a coherent message across the country like wearing a mask. However, it’s going to be hard when you are changing the previous messages and a lot of political conflicts formed behind the messages. Even if an effective vaccine is available by the end of this year, there is a lot of hurdles to persuade enough population to take it. But, will the pandemic change our attitude towards death to be more traditional and accepting? No, instead it will reinforce our believe that death is a technical problems that can solved through new technologies on medicine, vaccine, etc.
Disruptions: how it might be different
Peter Turchin, an ecologist, predicted in Feb 2010 that “political instability” will undermine the optimistic scientific progress envisioned by Nature that year. “The stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt”, in combination with a “Kondratiev wave” dip in economic-growth cycles, may bring a more severe recessions than what happened in the past 50-year instability spikes (1870, 1920, 1970) at US.
One theory is to view the human history as the evolving of technology, constraint, and measurement. In the long history of Forager Age, human society was contracted by food which can be measured immediately given the lack of storage options. The invention of agriculture technologies pushed human towards the Agrarian Age, when the constraint is land and the harvest produced by land can be only measured yearly. This caused lots of society changes, that are later transitioned dramatically by industrial revolution. In the Industrial Age, the constraint for society becomes capital, which needs to be allocated more dynamically and their efficiency can only be measured in multi-year time frame. Now, the digital technology has brought us to a so-called Knowledge Age by the author. The constraint is claimed to be not capital any more, but human attentions. No one can claim the best social structure for this age yet. The challenges for human are also becoming much bigger, and can only be measured in a much longer time scale, like decades or even centuries. For example, the pandemic and climate crisis. The question is how we should measure the way we allocate our attentions as individuals and as a group.
Insights: raise the bar for ourselves
Writing and publishing are incredibly rewarding, even for software engineers. It can level up your skills, build your brand, and bring more opportunities. According to a Harvard Psychologist, the single reason why good people write bad pose is the “curse of knowledge”, which makes people hard to imagine people not knowing what they know. It really just takes a few words or examples to explain those argot.
A writer who explains technical terms can multiply her readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk.
Even if you don’t like to write about your own idea, I found it really helpful to summarize what you have read.
Just in case, you might be thinking of publishing a book already.
Leadership: the ideas for better collaboration
AVC’s Reviewing The CEO’S Performance is one of the best pieces on management I have seen recently. I’d argue it’s more effective to apply this process to executives – to mitigate the “manage up well, manage down poorly” issue – instead of CEO. Often, CEO’s performance can be better tied to the company performance, while it’s harder to evaluate individual executives. It’s also more common to see executives adopting a “managing up” strategy given it’s relatively easier to manage one person’s expectation. And, the executive’s behavior influence the culture of the organizations more directly. The recommendation of introducing an experienced third-party facilitator is genius, which brings not only a neutral voice but also aggregated experience from other companies as a benchmark for comparison.
Executive compensations, or most people in the company, should be reviewed with performance at the same time. There are lots of nuances to design a compensation structure. For executives, their compensation should be aligned with performance, that best matches the goal of the company. Here is a deep dive into Apple’s executive compensation structure.
Economy: the science hidden among fallacies
The world of democracy and free expression as we known is in crisis – with a lack of consensus around truth and growing polarization among people. Facebook sits at the heart of these interlocking crises, and it is putting together an independent oversight board to help the company rule on the content moderation. The choice comes with some hard questions, such as what the scope of the board? why stop here? why only one company? Given all the uncertainty, it is destined to be an experiment for both policy and technology. How to build a scalable and controllable recommendation algorithms that can take detailed policy guidelines while serving 2B users effectively today?
Is there a social media triangle of freedom, openness and criticism, among which you can only achieve two of three? With freedom and openness, criticism is much harder to achieve. See how images are used to spread news and rumors on WhatsApp in India. In the study, about 13% of shared images are known misinformation and fall into three classes: images taken out of context, photoshopped images, and memes.
The other reason for exasperating misinformation is the economic model that supports journalism is collapsing. It almost seems to most people that free public news is the default. Surprisingly, the digital paywall adopted by the Times ten years ago against all the odds turns out to be a huge success.