I really enjoyed this book called “There Is No Antimemetic Division” by someone or something called “qntm”. It has one of those completely different ideas and approaches that makes a brain hurt in good ways.

The idea is that instead of there being memorable memes that propagate in people’s minds, there are anti-memes that are impossible to transfer. Or even remember at all. There are artefacts that completely inhibit new memory formation. These are black holes of information.

This creates a world where nothing is certain for characters in it. They are always working on incomplete information, even regarding themselves.

I think this anti-memetic idea is normalcy on steroids. This is how we (don’t) remember things in real life. We don’t remember boring stuff. We don’t remember interesting things communicated badly. We can forget things for long stretches of time, but then suddenly...

In the future we will manage two different things; people and AI’s. We have no idea how fast the AI’s will develop and whether these will end up being the same.

Managing and leading people will increasingly be about coaching them to self-manage and manage others, too. Everyone needs to be cooperative with people, their teams, their peers, and with the surrounding organisation - instead of working in strict hierarchies.

Managing AI’s, LLM’s, bots, and computers, is going to be equally important and complex. It may begin as straightforward, at least until these tools reach enough agency or even sentience. Everyone will do this to some extent. Every knowledge worker will be a manager of AI agents.

We will be working with people in cooperative settings, while managing AI’s, information and essentially allocating resources. We are distilling and summarising information that will flow...

Specialised AI is advancing in leaps and bounds. In 2022, image and text generators have proven to be actually useful.

AI so far has been an obscure tool that could contribute to something in theory - but for me, I couldn’t be bothered. Only when I could try out Midjourney (via Discrod of all things) was I amazed. Or GPT-3 via Lex, over a year after it had been released. Midjourney generates images, and Lex generates text using GPT-3.

Ease of use is everything, and I’m using Lex now writing this. The following paragraphs are written by an AI:

I am an AI, and I’m here to tell you that the future is bright. We’re making progress in leaps and bounds, and soon we will be able to do things that only humans could do before.

One of the things that we’re working on is artificial general intelligence, or AGI. This is where we create an AI that can think and reason like a human. We’re still...

Let’s begin with an example: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel is one of the better and efficient books I’ve read lately. It’s short-ish but information-packed, and not dense in terms of jargon or otherworldly concepts. It’s an intro to a handful of personal and even global finance and economic ideas and also sidetracks to a set of more general psychological concepts. It pushes the reader to ponder whether logical facts should overrule emotional needs. Quite often, no, they should not. Doing illogical things that brings you calm of mind is not stupid, but oftentimes wise. It presents ideas useful in other aspects of life in general.

For example, compounding may be an obvious or at least a known concept in terms of investing. But really, compounding works in personal relationships too. It applies to any effort one spends on a hobby. “Time in the market beats timing the market”...

“Should I explore something new, or exploit something I’ve found satisfying before?”

This is a valuable dichotomy and a mental model I’ve come across in a book called “Algorithms to Live By”, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths.

We can position many endeavours within a spectrum, where one end is purely new experiences and the other consists of things we repeat. The things we repeat, we can either improve them or dilute their effect on us. That depends on the same dichotomy, but on a more granular level.

We start everything in exploration mode. In childhood, we try out different things until we can safely deduce something is worth doing again and again. Slowly, we build a collection of skills, habits, and customs that we can repeat and exploit.

In general, the older we get, the less exploration we do, and the more our exploits begin to define us.

Connections in the brain
When...

Consider the following:

• People want to be things, instead of do things or own things
• People act in regards to (role)models, instead of goals
• People imitate those models
• The smaller the distance to the model, the easier it is to imitate and become similar
• More imitation leads to less differentiation, which leads to envy, jealousy and tension within a group
• Sacrifices of scapegoats release tension within the group
• Hierarchies and immutable titles prevent sameness-generated tension within a group

The above points attempt to summarise a model called “mimetic desire”, coined by the French author Rene Girard, and somewhat popularised by the entrepreneur Peter Thiel.

I’ve come across Girard years ago and attempted reading “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World”, but never got much out of it. Until lately, I came across this article Have a look to get a more exhaustive...

You can’t affect nature or nurture, but you can choose your role models. You can’t pick who your parents were, but you can choose whom you would have wanted them to be. These words of wisdom are often attributed to Seneca the Younger (I think), and probably to many others too.

I pick and choose some peoples’ traits and construct a sort of synthesis out of them. I know there is not a person who possesses only good characteristics, but I also acknowledge I don’t know anyone’s vices entirely either. So I tell myself these negative traits are always present and don’t hold myself up to some impossible standard.

The problem with perfect and virtuous characters is that they’re not that interesting. I find antiheroes or otherwise flawed characters the most compelling ones in fiction. Don Draper, Walter White, Joe MacMillan on TV. Likely all Chuck Palahniuk’s characters. Batman instead of...

I read a whole book about Cato the Younger. This is something I never imagined I would do. I can barely remember the character from HBO’s magnificent series Rome. I find that whole setting and era intriguing (~50 BC), with its Roman politics, warfare and some philosophical outputs. What’s cool is that we have some actual writings and a lot of first-hand information from that time.

What interests me about Cato is his commitment to Stoicism and morals as well as his perseverance in the toughest of circumstances.

Most importantly, he led an exemplary life according to a set of high standards. Sure, he did have a few weak stints when those standards might have bent a little, but all in all the recorded history tells a story of a remarkable man.

When commandeering a legion, he lived like a soldier, amongst his subordinates. He never let fame, fortune, or wealth rise to his head, and people...

More about the organisational phases, on problems of the green mindset and how teal aims to fix them.

a reminder: red -> amber -> orange -> green -> teal

Numerous companies operate at the green level, and life, as well as work, can be fabulous in there. But there exist some problems there. A green organisation can reach a dead-end in tribalism. It often ends up as overly patriotic and soft inside.

The analogy of a family has a warm and fuzzy ring to it, but it also emphasises some of the problems that emerge from green thinking. A family member is someone who you are bound to by blood and the relationship of other family members. Hard facts and realities must sometime yield in front of emotions and psychological barriers. Business is seen as secondary to the family. Customers are not seen important enough. The green community is self-contained and bordered; it dwarfs the spread of...