credible exit.
credible exit is used to describe that data export / leaving an app provides you with smooth enough ways to do so. Usable exports, that can be updated as you keep using an app e.g. Author talks about Lindy-formats, useful term , vgl [[The Lindy Effect 20201228194100]] en [[Lindy effect buiten tijdsdimensie 20201229115037]]
If you decentralize, the system will recentralize, but one layer up. Something new will be enabled by decentralization. That sounds like evolution through layering, like upward-spiraling complexity. That sounds like progress to me.
Systems will centralise one step up from where it's decentralised. Interesting. My intuition is a bit 'softer' it's a rule of thumb for coalescence. Things might coalesce out of different needs/circumstances. The type of centralisation intended here, if it's about the silo's there's a external driver, that the easiest business models are found in centralisation as it creates asymmetric power for the centraliser. It's not a necessary outcome of the underlying distributedness, but something that others might need using that distributedness. If centrliasation isn't possible or allowed at some layer, it may well force external drivers for centralisation one layer up. Organisations as well as CoPs are mushrooms on the mycelium of human networks. Now that capital, location and finding colleagues can be done distributedly those mushrooms aren't always needed, and we see other types of mushrooms coalesce alongside classic organisations. Something like that?
Results indicate that participants were more likely to interact with their smartphone the more fatigued or bored they were, but that they did not use it for longer when more fatigued or bored. Surprisingly, participants reported increased fatigue and boredom after having used the smartphone (more). While future research is necessary, our results (i) provide real-life evidence for the notion that fatigue and boredom are temporally associated with task disengagement, and (ii) suggest that taking a short break with the smartphone may have phenomenological costs.
We grab our phones when tired or bored at work. But it seems to make us more tired and more bored. Does the same apply for internetbrowsing before mobile?
Noosphere was presented at the Render conf on tools for thought. There's overlap with Boris' work on IPFS, judging by his tweets he's involved in this effort too.
This Noosphere Explainer explains the tech used, not the 'massive-multiplayer knowledge graph' it is posited to be, how that would come about with this tech, or what that is meant to be for.
1% when it comes to time — it’s only 15 minutes out of your day
it's about 1% of a day, not a person's perceived day.
Anno, a public benefit corporation (aka “Annotation Unlimited, PBC”) that shares the Hypothesis mission as well as its team. We’ve done this so that we can take investment in a mission aligned way and scale the Hypothesis service to meet the opportunity in front of us. Anno is funded by a $14M seed round that includes a $2.5M investment from ITHAKA, the nonprofit provider of JSTOR
Anno is a public benefit corporation to house the hypothes.is mission set up to allow investment. Anno attracted 14M including 2M5 from JSTOR. JSTOR imo is of dubious moral nature wrt OA, public domain, and particularly ending the chokehold of publishers on distribution of scholalry works, inverting their centuries old mission of making distribution possible. Source of funding impacts the course of what is funded towards the character of the funders.
we launched a service that’s now used by over a million people around the world who have made nearly 40 million annotations. In higher education, more than 1,200 colleges and universities use Hypothesis. And we’ve grown from a handful of people into a team of more than 35 passionate web builders.
h. in 2022 has over 1 million users, who made nearly 40 million annotations. Early this year 2 million annotated articles/sites was reached (2175298 is the number the API rerurns today). This sounds like a lot but on its face works out to an average of 40 annotations on 2 articles per user. This suggests to me the mode is 1 annotation on 1 article per user. How many of those 1 million were active last week / month?
ust an aside about "tools for thought," a burgeoning attention-sump in some circles. I seldom notice mention of the following: A walk. A shower. A good night's sleep. Introspection and reflection. I don't know that we understand "thought" well enough to design tools to improve it. But we do love our cleverness and the artifacts thereof. We can see those, and, more importantly, show them to others! We can talk about them, criticize them, modify them, endlessly.
Dave Rogers makes the points that 1) focusing on tools is often a distraction. 2) behaviour such as walk,shower, rest are also 'tools' to aid thinking.
wie luistert, zit altijd middenin, en is nooit alleen
Miriam Rasch over waarnemen met aandacht. Vgl [[Aandacht Probes 2020112514553]] [[Je staat centraal in eigen narratief 20210428202924]] Hele tekst uit FTM opgenomen in [[Wie luistert, is nooit alleen 20220818153436]]
Reading Strategies for Coping with InformationOverload, ca.1550-1700
2003 article. The ca.1550-1700 at the end caught me off guard at first. See my 2004/2003 remark we've been offloading info to our environment since always, and similarly complaining about the amount of it. This paper case in point.
Annotating this in Chrome, my firefox add-on does not load the sidebar for this paper. I hate Chrome, had to install it. Will de-install soon again. Probably better to learn to use the API properly to share annotations, or run my own instance and push from there?
he had a concept he called HLAMT: “Humans using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, and Training.” My initial interviews with Engelbart led to a long-lasting conversation with him. And from time to time, he would point out that the artifacts, as I just mentioned, are millions of times more powerful than the ones that he worked with at the Stanford Research Institute. But the language, the methodology, and the training really haven’t caught up with it.
Doug Engelbart used acronym HLAMT wrt augmenting human intelligence: Humans using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, Training. Our artifacts are much more powerful now, language, methodology and training still need to catch up. Rheingold says we're on the verge of that.
Second thought: the A and M roughly map to tech and methods in my networked agency image as design aid. Think about netag in context of Engelbart's basic vision to elicit some more thoughts.
So I don’t know the answer to this, but I’m concerned.
Rheingold in the context of this interview really doesn't say anything forward looking wrt internet in this section. The interviewer doesn't go after it, seems to hurry on. Maybe because they spent too much time on the previous sections of the interview? If Rheingold is working on something, this doesn't sound like it. He says he thinks his Net Smart solution of teaching fell flat. General literacy took generations, so 10 yrs too short? Concerned we all are.
The technology is guilty of amplifying. And after all, that’s what we’re talking about is amplifying human capabilities. Well, it turns out that there are human capabilities and human motivations that are evil or misguided. And those are amplified way beyond what they were before.
What can one do complexity-style stimulating desired capabilities, attenuating the undesirable ones? More like this, less like that stuff. At a personal level that may be clear (if one pays attention to it personally, see above), at group level, society level? Btw esp adtech platforms are not symmetrical in their amplification. They lift the mentioned pirate boats, but not the hospital boats. By design. Control over parameters for amplification in ones own info may be one.
what Brian Eno called scenius,
Eno talked about music and arts mostly. Here Rheingold connects it to tech wrt Xerox PARC in 70s. Also see Kevin Kelly in [[Scenius, or Communal Genius 20211022180225]] I see this as networkd creativity related to networked agency [[Scenius als networked creativiteit 20211023145641]] Reboot conferences fed into this [[Het Reboot gevoel vaker hebben 20161023145654]] Salons maybe proto-stages of scenius / cells in them [[Salons organiseren 20201216205547]].
Now we’re seeing people with these kind of lightweight note-taking apps
again I miss the notion of self-hosted wikis (Tiddly e.g., I used wakka/wikkawiki as pkm tool 2004-2008 as well as on my website. (I now see wikkawiki was discontinued in 2020)
The Brain
This was my main desktop interface from 1997-2004. Like my current PKM set-up is now the way I start interfacing with my laptop each day.
hypertext personal knowledge management systems — things like Roam Research and Obsidian. I heard you talk in an interview as well about DEVONthink, which I consider one of these as well.
hypertext pkm systems, and then not mentioning personal wikis?
Also Tinderbox has been around since 2002 (I first encountered it at BlogTalk 2004 where Mark Bernstein attended, used it since 2007 when I switched to Mac when I went independent and ditched corporate laptop). Tinderbox is its own PKM tool and aimed at creating hypertexts itself. Named my PKM set-up after one of the early (1987) hypertext novels published by Bernstein).
And then the last one was network awareness. We live in a networked world, and understanding how networks work enables you to have a richer relationship with what’s going on online.
Just mentioned in passing. To me this is a key one, especially as networks is where the human and digital fully overlap / become the same. Humans are intuitively good at networks of humans, digital networks present the same structures over which those people interact with their human networks. [[Menselijk en digitaal netwerk zijn gelijksoortig 20200810142551]] It's where the potential of distributedness is at, as well as the unit of agency, human digital networks. Should better detail this, as it is key in my [[Networked Agency 20160818213155]]
The networked bit can strengthen the other 4 literacies, if projected onto them. E.g. my infostrats, based on social filtering, help determine signal, show what's going on in different areas, help decide what warrants attention etc.
reserve the right of innovation to the edges of the network.
and then those same people went on to create silos and actively work to de-emancipate the edges.
So there are a number of techniques. It’s really not difficult to just take the basic step of being slightly skeptical. Think of yourself as a detective or a journalist, and you’re trying to find out whether this is really true. The jump from “oh, it’s on the web. I will accept it” to “is this really true?” is a very important jump.
Howard et al keep a running list of 'crap detection tools' at https://docs.google.com/document/d/163G79vq-mFWjIqMb9AzYGbr5Y8YMGcpbSzJRutO8tpw/edit ref'd in [[Crap detection is civic duty 2018010073052]]
good work being done by people like Sam Wineburg at Stanford University and others on how, in fact, do young people evaluate information and what is it that you do
Wineburg Standford University, educational and cognitive psychologist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Wineburg https://twitter.com/samwineburg https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Sam-Wineburg-72892550
And the good news about it is that you can actually train your attention, and it’s not that difficult. In fact, almost every contemplative meditation discipline has to do with just sitting down and paying attention to your breath and noticing how your attention changes. There is a saying that comes from the neuroscientists that neurons that fire together are wired together. When you begin paying attention to your attention, you are developing a capability that enables you to have more control over what’s occupying your mind space.
attention as mindfulness, and as a muscle to train.
You know, it’s not really that difficult, but it’s not being taught at all.
Reminds me of my 2008/2010 projects in primary schools on this. I find myself explaining marketing ploys to our 6yo in response to material she sees in print, on billboards, and online. Perhaps I should be doing that more consistently
training on how to understand how you’re deploying your attention.
There's little training on reflecting and shaping how you wield your attention. Are there resources to be found, wrt workflows / choices / being mindfull of one's attention? Beyond the 'indistractable' material of Nir?
The exclusionary aspect of attention makes it a scarce resource [[Aandacht is het schaarst 20201013163120]] implying the need to wield it with intent [[Stuur aandacht met intentie 20220213080032]] or it becomes distraction again. It's a moral choice [[Aandacht is een morele keuze 20201217074345]] even. Making such training/understanding important.
And when we now live in an era where you can stand on a street corner in any city of the world, waiting for the light to change, and notice that everyone else — everyone else — standing around you is looking at their phone. There’s a lot of money in capturing people’s attention, and there are a lot of apps that are designed to capture and maintain our attention
This is, like some of his Stanford in-class attention experiments, a bit geared towards switching on/offline it seems. There's much to be said also about wielding attention within the digital space (see Pegrum/Palalas digital disarray above), and attention as it plays out in the interweaving of the digital and physical (like having information resources available within a conversation).
But attention is really the foundation of thought and communication.
Aandacht als fundament onder zowel denken als communiceren.
Pegrum/Palalas 2021 talk about attention literacy as needed to counteract 'digital disarray'. They also call it a macro-literacy, encompassing a long list of 'digital literacies' which are more skills than literacy in the Rheingoldia sense. Bit of term inflation? Does put attention at the top of the heap of digital 'literacies' though. They also do incorporate relationships to others and the informational environment within scope of it a la Rheingold.
basic literacies that users of the web and social media ought to have
Rheingold perceives literacy as skill within community. A skill that comes into its own if there's a community of skilled people, a social practice. He may have adopted it from Paulo Freire who put reading/writing skills interwoven with reading/writing the world (mentioned in Kalir/Garcia's Annotation too). Do I see that community aspect, the social practice aspects in the 5 literacies he lists from Net Smart?
increase their ability to excel, but also it would increase the quality of the commons
skill vs social practice leading to increase of the quality of the commons. Personal relative advancement in current sitrep and/or lifting the entire floor.
And there’s beginning to be more and more of an understanding on the scientific side and more and more interest on the side of people who are interested in developing tools for thought for understanding. How does the workflow of thinking happen when you have these tools that magnify your capabilities? There really hasn’t been a fraction of the amount of research on that as there has been on the development of the tangible tools themselves.
Bias towards researching tangible things needs time to be overcome, it's also a gear shift to higher level of complexity in viewpoint. Compare to my searches in my fav topics list, where does this apply / potential hardening of focus?
The template for what personal computing could become was really obvious by the end of the 1970s. If you look at Engelbart, it was obvious in 1968. But it did take quite a while for the computer chips to be powerful enough and inexpensive enough to make the kinds of things that billions of people use today.
Ideas ahead of their time in the mainstream (not in the niches). Compare to Lernout and Hauspie wrt early natural language processing 1987-1998 and GPT-3 now.
Alan Kay used to say, “we know where the silicon is going.” So, the people who created the graphic user interface and Engelbart’s group that created that kind of augmentation, they knew that the power of the hardware itself was going to become much more powerful.
The hardware development path was visible, but at the time still limiting potential spread/adoption.
I thought that electronics was a much finer tool than chemicals for altering consciousness
1968 calling. Chemicals as blunt tool, electronics as potential finer tool. Reminds me of a dinnerconversation with Howard and Judy where someone else, much younger, praised LSD as potential mind expanding tool. J said "You wouldn't say that if like me you'd had spent the late 60s puking your guts out in the bathroom all the time". Bluntness of the chemical tool explained :D
Howard Rheingold on Tools for Thought
Not just a category these days, also a 1985 book title by Howard. (html version of that book http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/ )
Web archive url https://web.archive.org/web/20220815051435/https://theinformed.life/2022/08/14/episode-94-howard-rheingold/
First, it taught me that there was a history to this stuff, and it also expanded the frontiers of what I understood I was doing
'History of stuff' not being seen is a recurring pattern. e.g. wrt Luhmann vs commonplacing, in the Roam/Obsidian wave e.g. wrt open data around 2010 when there was little realisation of efforts by re-users to get to the PSI Directive, only the new wave of coders using the fact it existed.
It's also a repeating pattern in generations. Open Space and unconferencing e.g. needs to be retaught with every new wave of people. The open web of two decades ago needs to be explained to those now starting their professional work using online tools.
Spaced repetition for groups/society?
In order to expand understanding what one is actually doing / building on.
Doet me denken aan die '90s exchange student die me ooit vroeg of ik geschiedenis studeerde ipv elektro: ik legde bij alles ook het ontwikkelingspad uit.
mutational meltdown
Mutational meltdown happens in a population of animals if their number is so low that negative mutations and deletions in their DNA accumulate.
Minimum viable population is about 500 individuals, with 1000 to prevent negative genetic drift
Rule of thumb: 500 minimum viable population, 1k minimum to prevent negative genetic trends (inbreeding).
Is a similar rule of thumb thinkable for communities of practice in terms of maintaining the community itself, and in terms of keeping it varied / valuable enough on all [[Community building 20100210214508]] aspects Wenger et al list?
‘The Brain Has a Body’ (the title of a 1997 article) and the body has an environment – “but neither the body nor the environment feature in modelling approaches that seek to understand the brain.” The input from the world is part of the system in which brains operate.
Body and environment are commonly ignored in modeling of the brain to understand its working. Example of sub-system / system / supra-system perception levels not being taken into account simultaneously, compare [[Triz denken in systeemniveaus 20200826114731]], and the corresponding switches wrt where the complexity is [[De locus van Complexiteit 20040513173600]]. Similar to [[Disruption Theory is Real, but Wrong 20191014111801]] where the disruption can manifest on a different level than the players in the scene being disrupted and causing the disruption.
There’s an interesting but brief discussion of the contrast between reductionist approaches to understanding the brain (which seems dominant) and others pointing to the emergence of complex phenomena from a few simple neural networks. I don’t know what to think of it in this context, but the path of reductionism hasn’t served economics all that well.
Greedy reductionism, beyond the point where it still provides new agency or insight, is a consistent risk. Consciousness, economics. Perhpas make a list of examples where this happened in different fields and the impact of it? Should be a bunch in my notes.
Should Every Update Be a Post?
I am moving away from content types altogether, making them all just regular posts. I style them all the same anyway. Their type is apparent from their content and the microformats in them. Author had content categories to represent content types, which produces no navigational or discovery value imo.
Checkins and ItinerariesBoth of this represent similar things: I was in a place, or I moved from a place to another. I like the flexibility of having both types of contents and in the future I would love to have an interactive map
Itineraries as content type. I have some check-ins on my site (dubbed Plazes after that early app), and deeply miss Dopplr (even as travel stalled early 2020 due to the pandemic, and I don't know if travel will return in the same way to my life, given climate impact and surge in online collab). Can I envision Itineraries on my site as content type? Dopplr kept that within a trusted network, how do I do that on my site? Where would the type of coincidental meet-ups come from that made Dopplr so immensely valuable.
a large neural network that has been trained by reading the internet, trying to predict what the next word will be. This might not sound particularly useful. But it turns out the class of problems that can be reformulated as text predictions is vast.
not the entire internet I think? The playground provides only English answers, the examples I've asked the script of certain things had a singular focus on US examples. And when discussing a popular book that is only available in Dutch it clearly has no actual information to work with, despite the script first boasting that it studied Dutch literature in Amsterdam in the 2000's :D GPT-3's Playground is anglo-centric at least.
To access GPT-3, you set up an account at OpenAI. Then you click on Playground, which brings you to this workspace:
did that. Playing with it is highly fascinating. Saving some conversations as examples.
I think the skill involved will be similar to being a good improv partner, that’s what it reminds me of.
that sounds like a useful analogy. Prompting like you are the algo's improv partner. The flipside seems to be the impact the author himself is after: being prompted along new lines of inquiry, making the script your improv partner in return.
GPT-3 is by no means a reliable source of knowledge. What it says is nonsense more often than not! Like the demon in The Exorcist, language models only adds enough truth to twist our minds and make us do stupid things
The need to be aware that GPT-3 is a text generation tool, not an accurate search engine. However being factually correct is not a prerequisite of experiencing surprisal. The author uses the tool to open up new lines of thought, so his prompt engineering in a way is aimed at being prompted himself. This is reminiscent of how Luhmann talks about communicating with his index cards: the need for factuality does not reside with the card, meaning is (re)constructed in the act of communication. The locus of meaning is the conversation, the impact it has on oneself, less the content, it seems.
I’ve talked to people who prompt GPT-3 to give them legal advice and diagnose their illnesses (for an example of how this looks, see this footnote1). I’ve talked to men who let their five-year-olds hang out with GPT-3, treating it as an eternally patient uncle, answering questions, while dad gets on with work.
The essay gives various examples of usage: legal advice medical diagnosis nanny to talk to your kid a research assistant, prompting it for surprisal basically to come up with lines of inquiry an questions let the algo impersonate someone and run ideas by that impersonation let the algo impersonate opposing debate partners list possible counterarguments draw analogies between knowledge domains
augment human intelligence
Doug Engelbart overtones
a new interface for the internet.
GPT-3 is a way to approach the information on the internet, an interface for the internet. This I associate with the aspects of distributedness: apps are dataviewers (like Obsidian.md is), interfaces are queries on that data.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
This phrasing imo instrumentalises those fascinating people you find. Interesting stuff is a byproduct of interacting with those fascinating people, a result from fascinating conversation, a residue of the construct you've built together in conversation.
Therefore, it is intriguing to realize what I am doing is, in fact, prompt engineering.Prompt engineering is the term AI researchers use for the art of writing prompts that make a large language model output what you want. Instead of directly formulating what you want the program to do, you input a string of words to tickle the program in such a way it outputs what you are looking for. You ask a question, or you start an essay, and then you prompt the program to react, to finish what you started.
I take to the term prompt engineering. Designing prompts is important in narrative research, just as much as in AI, and in e.g. workshop settings. It's definitely a skill. Conversational prompts describes blog posts too.
When I’m writing this, from March through August 2022
The author took time over a period of 5 months to put this essay together. That's impressive, in terms of effort put in and in terms of tenacity. How much of this time is to 'hold questions' as Johnnie Moore would say, to develop your thoughts iteratively. Could it have been done in index cards, under the radar, with the essay then a smaller effort, reduced to collating those index cards?
When I’ve been doing this with GPT-3, a 175 billion parameter language model, it has been uncanny how much it reminds me of blogging
This is intriguing, seeing a similar return on prompting GPT-3 as from blogging. After reading this essay the first time, I played with GPT-3 myself, and even from a first attempt it is clear what he means. It feels like a similar process, prompting GPT-3 and pushing a notion, bookmark or question into my blog's feed. The first reactions on both types bring similar levels of surprial. What is however missing from GPT-3 in comparison with my blog is that blog networks are more than a 1-on-1 prompt and respons. They form larger feedback loops, which in turn lifts signals above the noise.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220810205211/https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/gpt-3
Blogged a few first associations at https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/08/communicating-with-gpt-3/ . Prompt design for narrative research may be a useful experience here. 'Interviewing' GPT-3 a Luhmann-style conversation with a system? Can we ditch our notes for GPT-3? GPT-3 as interface to the internet. Fascinatiing essay, need to explore.
Like most things in life, the answer is a complicated balance. And you have to find your way and find your balance, which isn’t easy no matter who you are or what you do. After two years of trauma, I’m going to crack on loads more. Make some new memories, new good times, which in the future I’ll be able to look back on as part of my nostalgia. Just have to find that tricky balance.
Ruben is quoting Geoff Marshall in a video here. I recognise what Ruben says about his mental health, the melancholic funk, both from myself and E. Sometimes the current months are harder than when the pandemic first hit. Things seem normal, except they aren't. Geoff suggests adding new experiences now, so they become part of his future nostalgia, as a counterbalance to the past two years. Not pushing stuff away but balancing it. Reminds me a bit of what I used to say about 'hiding' unwanted Google results: publish more online so that it balances out and the unwanted things aren't the dominant search results.
any animal equivalent is going to have to need oxygen — a lot of it.
does this still hold up? the wikipedia lemma points to several more recent sources that seem to offer counter information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis#Free_oxygen_may_be_neither_rare_nor_a_prerequisite_for_multicellular_life The source of the claim seems to be the book itself, so would need to look it up in Ward Brownlee 2000, page 217
have really rapidly moving creatures and rapidly thinking creatures, which is a form of movement
Ward in the context of Rare Earth hypothesis says this. An intriguing notion seeing thinking as a form of (deliberate) movement. How is this meant / to be understood? Chemically, in terms of what it requires in an animal (ie us)? The remark is made in the context of the need for oxygen for complex life to be possible. (based on David Catling Univ of Washington) after all. Or environmentally/contextually, as both deliberate physical movement and brain activity are response to outside impulses?
This article is the first in a four-part series, where we will look deeper into the relationship between data mesh and privacy. The series will cover: How a data mesh architecture can support better data privacy controls. How to shift from a centralized governance model to a federated approach. How to focus on automation as a cornerstone of your governance strategy. How to bake privacy tech into your self-service platform approach.
when will the other parts be published?
The data mesh paradigm allows us to see data in a new way
moet het boek Data Mesh nog lezen (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/data-mesh/9781492092384/) maar lijkt goed aan te sluiten bij de gedachten achter de EU Dataspaces.
Privacy-first data via data mesh
https://web.archive.org/web/20220805183650/https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-de/insights/articles/privacy-first-data-via-data-mesh (trying to be consistent in storing the archived link here.)
I consider this a Public Domain image as the image does not pass the ‘creativity involved’ threshold which generally presupposes a human creator, for copyright to apply (meaning neither AI nor macaques).
I say this, but there's a nuance to consider. I read a post by someone creating their company logo with Dall-E by repeatedly changing and tweaking their prompt to get to a usable output. That is definitely above the creativity threshold, with the AI as a tool, not as the creator. Similarly, NLP AI tools can help authors to get to e.g. a first draft, then shaped, rewritten, changed, edited etc., which crosses the human creativity threshold for copyright to kick in. Compare with how I sometimes use machine translation of my own text and then clean it up, to be able to write faster in e.g. German of French, where the algo is a lever to turn my higher passive language skills into active language use. (Btw comment added to see if that updates my original hypothesis annotations of this article in my Obsidian notes, or if it happens only once when first annotated. The latter would mean forcing annotation and thus break my workflow)
the classic idea of blogging as thinking out loud, but here with others.
Alan pointed to the same notion elsewhere. Blogging should be more about open ended curiosity and holding questionsm than about explaining or sharing ones coherent worldview or current truth about something. This with an eye to the former being a better prompt for conversations. I agree that conversations (distributed ones, taking place over multiple blogs) are a key thing in blogging. I also believe in the 'obligation to explain' as ruk.ca says: if you have figured something out, created something, you have a civic duty to explain it so others may find their way to their solution faster. (this annotation is also meant as a test to see how it ends up in hypothes.is and gets sync'd or not to my notes locally.
Something else that came out of this research is the fact that the length of company’s lives is shrinking at almost one year per year. In 01950, the average company on the Fortune 500 had been around for 61 years. Now it’s 18 years. Companies’ lives are getting shorter.
I recognise the statistic, but the conclusion that companies lives are getting shorter doesn't follow without further evidence. There are def many more companies than before (more population plus increased digitisation and mobilithy = more companies), so the bulk of existing companies is younger than before. Some will be successful enough to be a Fortune 500 faster than before, driving down the average age of companies in that list. It doesn't mean that every company dropping out of the Fortune 500 ceases to exist. It may continue to exist in the exact same way as the longest living companies mentioned elsewhere in the article. In other words, they may be doing what the article is counseling to do, turning this factoid into the opposite of the argument it is now used as. In short: you can't say this unless you have data about the discontinued companies, both 'nowadays' and in previous 2-3 centures.