January 2016

If you do things differently only when you see an overwhelmingly good reason, you will have more than enough trouble to last you the rest of your life.
     - Eliyezer Yudkowsky

The Investors in People study on British work shows 33% of workers unhappy and 49% planning to quit in 2016. 

A new idea for presentations: 20 slides in 6 minutes and 40 seconds: Pechakucha.

The Future of Jobs - a new report by the World Economic Forum

Venture Capitalists fund entrepreneurs who think like they do - paper.

How to Pursuade People - an illustrated video by Robert Cialdini

A video series On Reality, Objectivity, Self-Deception, and Fallback Positions. 

Why the drug war is impossible to win. 

How Businesses can Benefit from Short Sprints - by Laila von Alvensleben

A new paper showing that strong agreement should weaken your assumptions, not bolster them.

Google does a three-year experiment with liquid democracy and learns a few things about group decisionmaking   - paper

Learn about iota tokens by reading their short white paper, a near frictionless token for rapid-fire, huge scale transactions, like IoT and others. Convert your cash into iota, use it, and then convert back. Smart.

From How Google Works, by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg: 
“One of the biggest reasons for our success, though, is that the plan we delivered to the board that day in 2003 wasn’t much of a plan at all. There were no financial projections or discussions of revenue streams. There was no market research on what users, advertisers, or partners wanted or how they fit into nicely defined market segments. There was no concept of market research or discussion of which advertisers we would target first. There was no channel strategy or discussion of how we would sell our ad products. There was no concept of an org chart, with sales doing this, product doing that and engineering doing some other that. There was no product roadmap detailing what we would build and when. There was no budget. There were no targets or milestones that the board and company leaders could use to monitor our progress. […] We left that out for the simple reason we didn’t know how we were going to do it. When it came to management tactics, the only thing we could say for sure back then was that much of what [we] had learned in the twentieth century was wrong, and that it was time to start over.” 

A UK study points out how the government can shift to using blockchain for many applications. 

If you don't set up a prediction/decision market, you may still find your group voting on issues. Use the RangeVote concept to do that - it was designed by an MIT/Princeton PhD and has a lot of advantages over other voting systems. If you're interested, read the paper. 

A little bit of negative information can enhance a positive image - Stanford research

Buffer changed their compensation equation - learn how.

Double-blind: Can you pick the Stradivarius? - try it! 

We think we're good at telling when someone is lying, but we're lying to ourselves - New Yorker article (Interesting, but I'm skeptical of the study methodologies mentioned)

All things being equal, good looking female students do get better grades - paper.