Recent quotes:
Companies That Read More Perform Better Financially - ScienceBlog.com
Size Matters in Information Consumption “The way companies consume information is reminiscent of biological organisms,” says co-author Eddie Lee. “As with organisms, there are important size differences. Larger firms tend to consume information more efficiently but face significant challenges in coordination.” The study reveals that larger companies tend to read more broadly rather than specialize, challenging traditional ideas about labor specialization. However, this broader reading often comes with increased redundancy, as larger organizations face greater coordination challenges. Reading and Financial Success Perhaps most significantly, the research found that companies consuming more information than typical for their size tend to show better financial performance. These information-hungry firms demonstrated higher future returns and valuations compared to their peers. The study also uncovered links between reading patterns and company innovation, suggesting that how organizations manage information could provide valuable insights into their operational dynamics and financial health.Opinion | Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind - The New York Times
Jonathan Frankle, the chief scientist at MosaicML and a computer scientist at Harvard, described this to me as the “boring apocalypse” scenario for A.I., in which “we use ChatGPT to generate long emails and documents, and then the person who received it uses ChatGPT to summarize it back down to a few bullet points, and there is tons of information changing hands, but all of it is just fluff. We’re just inflating and compressing content generated by A.I.”Top performers don’t always provide the best advice – Research Digest
The analysis showed that the best performers believed that they had given the best advice. However, when pieces of advice were then given to a fresh group of players, this turned out not to be the case: players who were given advice from the best performers didn’t improve at the game any more than players given advice from from other performers. The researchers also report a fascinating extra finding from this study: the second group of players rated advice that had come from the top performers as being the best — even though they had no knowledge of these people’s performance. In a fresh study, the team considered some possible explanations for this. Perhaps the top performers gave more articulate or more authoritative advice, for example. In fact, they found that it was the number of independent suggestions that mattered — and top performers offered more. “In short, advice from the best performers was not better. It just sounded better because there was more of it.”Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future? - The Atlantic
The experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire. As the Danish proverb warns, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”How Did James Holzhauer Turn ‘Jeopardy!’ Into His Own A.T.M.? We Asked Him - The New York Times
I went to Illinois. Most people think I went to Princeton or something. But I was never a diligent student. I have a strategy of reading children’s books to gain knowledge. I’ve found that in an adult reference book, if it’s not a subject I’m interested in, I just can’t get into it. I was thinking, what is the place in the library I can go to to get books tailored to make things interesting for uninterested readers? Boom. The children’s section.Successful research papers cite young references: Analysis of scientific citations reveals previously unknown patterns -- ScienceDaily
While most researchers cite older, well-established papers in their field, highly cited papers -- papers that other published papers cite the most often and therefore are considered successful -- also cite more work that has been published relatively recently. In fact, that cited work goes on to become highly cited itself, showing that top scientists and engineers are adept at betting on good prospects. "You could say the best researchers also have the best scientific taste," said Luís Amaral, Erastus Otis Haven Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and lead author of the research.Zero sum work
Too many service jobs are meant to cancel out the efforts of other service jobs, for example in litigation, where a plaintiff’s lawyer creates a job for the defendant’s lawyer. And often the zero-sumness is asymmetric: a dozen hackers make a theft, and companies everywhere subsequently need to spend collective billions on staff or contractors to protect themselves; a few criminal plague a state, and the government subsequently needs to hire hundreds of officers to make people feel safe; a few people commit accounting fraud, and the ensuing uproar forces companies and banks to ramp up the size of their compliance departments by tens of thousands in the aggregate.rebuilding the shrine
Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine is an extraordinary example in that genre. Every 20 years, caretakers completely tear down the shrine and build it anew. The wooden shrine has been rebuilt again and again for 1,200 years. Locals want to make sure that they don’t ever forget the production knowledge that goes into constructing the shrine. There’s a very clear sense that the older generation wants to teach the building techniques to the younger generation: “I will leave these duties to you next time.”The importance of process knowledge (narratives?)
The process knowledge can also be referred to as technical and industrial expertise, which includes knowledge of how to store wafers, how to enter a clean room, how much electric current should be used at different stages of the fab process, and countless other things. This is the kind of knowledge that’s won by experience. Anyone with detailed instructions but no experience actually making chips is likely to make a mess.Why Do Rich People Love Endurance Sports?
One hypothesis is that endurance sports offer something that most modern-day knowledge economy jobs do not: the chance to pursue a clear and measurable goal with a direct line back to the work they have put in. In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, philosopher Matthew Crawford writes that “despite the proliferation of contrived metrics,” most knowledge economy jobs suffer from “a lack of objective standards.”
In 1880, the top verbs associated with jobs in metro areas include “thread,” “stretch,” “sew,” and “braid” (perhaps a tribute to clothes, shoe, and rope manufacturing). Among the least-used verbs are “teach,” “conduct,” and “rule.” In this early period, cities were centers of specialized manufacturing processes, while more dynamic jobs were often centered in rural areas. By 2000, the pattern is reversed. The most common verbs (“develop,” “determine,” “analyze”) are strongly suggestive of knowledge-driven management. The least-used verbs (“restrain,” “cut,” “power”) are strongly suggestive of work on a factory floor — which there is less and less of in most cities. Now, cities are centers for interactive economic activities, while more specialized activities have shifted to outlying areas.