#0051: Plus one thinking
Braingasm
A technique that I have found very useful when hiring people to work in startup and venture teams is the idea of “plus one thinking”. This is a simple idea that is really easy to spot when talking to someone in an interview context, and something that I have found to be strongly correlated with high-performing people. When discussing an idea, does the potential candidate or partner find a way to add to the idea, or do they find a way to explain how it might fail?
My anecdotal experience is that people who add with enthusiasm to ideas with phrases like “… and then you could {this}!” or “… and if you do {this}, then {that} can happen!” tend to be much better collaborators in a team environment. People who come up with a string reasons why something won’t work, or find ways to pick holes in something from the start, tend to be the same kind of people that suck all of the oxygen out of the room when a team is trying to be creative.
It’s not that there is never a time to pick holes in an idea — timing is everything. But when you are first working thru a new idea with a group of people, it’s best to build on the idea to see where it goes. Leave the pernickety failure cases until later. Much later.
Newsgasm
The only summary of 2017 news that you need to read: 52 things I learned in 2017. You might as well just go on holidays right now. #micdrop #news #roundup
What happens when a spider drinks graphene? It spins a web that can hold the weight of a human. #futuretech #spiders #web
Are you over forty and sick of giving advice to Millennials? Why not turn the table and take some instead? Life advice from teen experts. #life #advice
About 9 years ago, I had an idea for a system that I called “Socially Connected Reputation Decay” [Ed: ping me if you are interested in discussing it offline]. I thought it would be big. It wasn’t. Seems like all it was missing was the addition of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology. There are two profound realisations for me in that article: 1) there are almost never any new ideas, just re-mixed versions of old ideas, and 2) ideas themselves are worth nothing, it’s all about execution. Also, as predicted in #0050, someone did combine BTC and UBI. #transactional #ubi #btc #social
The advent of self-driving cars is going to pose some seriously confounding ethical dilemmas. Test how your morals stack up with the Moral Machine. #autonomous #selfdriving #ethics #morals
One of the most famous thought experiments about the way humans act ethically under stress is known as The Trolley Problem. Testing in real life how humans behave in this type of situation in a scientifically rigorous way is very difficult to get past a University Ethics Review Board. Ever since The Milgram Experiment in 1963, universities have taken a pretty dim view on this kind of thing. Interestingly, ethics do not appear to be a constraint for web-based reality TV. Watch what happens when this show conducts a real-life version of the Trolley Problem. It can’t be long before we see Series 7 for real. #autonomous #ethics #dilemma #thtrolleyproblem
One company that stands to benefit enormously from autonomous vehicles is Uber. That’s because they apparently only make £0.63 profit from each £10 ride. Taking humans out of the loop will fundamentally change their unit economics. #autonomous
Great quote: “Sorry humans, you had a good run” as Google’s AlphaGo Zero adds chess to the list of games that it has mastered. #ai #games #chess
I had no idea that the heads on top of screws could be so complicated. This almost certainly explains why I thread one every time I try to undo some piece of hardware. #notverygoodathardware
This smart urinal will show you ads while you pee. You really can’t make this stuff up. Which kind of explains how the bathrooms will look in the dystopia we’re building just to make people click on ads. #dystopia #ads #youaretheproduct #whatatimetobealive
Is the attention economy subverting our decision-making and democracy? Modern media is a DoS attack on your free will. Assuming we have free will. #dystopia #ads #youaretheproduct
Philosophers believe that we are living in a computer simulation. Physicists, on the other hand, find that we are not. Living in a computer simulation, that is. #youdecide #simulation
Only in (Australia) Essex
This really made me do a double-take! Farage the Emu makes an escape bid to enjoy the snow in Essex. I didn’t know that Essex had Emus, or snow. Double points for naming an Emu (a very, very dumb flightless bird native to Australia) ‘Farage’. #wellplayed #onlyinaustralia #onlyinessex
Regards,
M@
