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{{a|devil}} Newsletter cribnotes

Vertex Vs  edge

Text vs meaning

Formal versus informal

Tool versus application

Innate Vs emergent

Obvious versus subtle

Simple versus complex

Quantitative Vs qualitative

Calculated versus interpreted

Static versus dynamic

Noun versus verb

Trees v wood

Permanent versus emphemeral

====Illusion of permanence====

*'''[[Ship of Theseus]]''':We see that even many of the markers we treat as permit are in fact temporary Colin the dread Pirate Roberts affect: the personnel populating a corporation change from time to time. The corporations devotion to the formal memes that successive individuals are progressively more constrained.

Likewise institutions comma corporations merge comedy,, change business models, moving to different markets.

Because we can see the formal structures easily we tend to attribute significance to them and the relationships between them full stop for example the organisation chart: this places every person in a firm in a logical relationship to everyone else comma and can be neatly and easily controlled, that's not to say many organisation charts become positively Byzantine.

There is much management theory around optimal organisation charts no more than 5 layers of management; no more than 5 direct reports and so on. But this is largely to miss the map for the territory. Often the reporting lines of the most sclerotic interactions in the entire organisation and it's entirely missus the lateral communications and interactions that make up the firms actual day-to-day operations. Perfect fit blinds are more interaction constraint rather than indicators of interaction. An organisation chart is a static map of firm as it is configured before interacting or doing anything. They are the plan that everyone has before and gets punched in the face.

They are the thing that largely impedes the firm from interacting freely konan last observation that agile requires the removal of layers, this establishment of silos, and the decluttering of the organisational structure. For a modernist, this is inevitably a scary prospect: the modernist Theory is that the machine can be centrally controlled from the top; therefore the more organisational structure the better.

The agile Theory is that both risks and opportunities arise unexpectedly, emerge from places unanticipated by a management structure comma and therefore the design principle is to allow people at the the coalface maximum flexibility 2 to reacts to those risks and opportunities. That's the imperative is to have the best people with the best equipment at the coalface. Compared to the modernist view, which is that as long as the structure is correct the quality of the people in any of the positions on the organisational structure is immaterial as they have predefined roles to perform.

So to understand a business one needs not understand it's formal structure, but it's informal structure home other people you need to get things done semicolon to break through logjam, to ensure people are on side? These lines will not show up in any organisational structure.

They are not what James c Scott would describe as legible.

The idea that the truth is in the patterns in the days that human cannot even see.

Money as an abstract token of value that has no intrinsic value

Advertising generates economic production, rather than economic production generating advertising.

Why the emergence of [[artificial intelligence]] that can write its own Nirvana tunes tells less about our future than thought leaders think it does.

{{Quote|''Over The Bridge, a mental health awareness organisation, has created The Lost Tapes Of The 27 Club, a compilation of songs generated by [[AI]]. The four songs mimic the tonal qualities of Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison, imagining what music by the artists were like '''had they not passed away'''.''}}

But the implied promise here isn’t “technical emulation” but redundancy of humans altogether in the creative process. The futurologists are over their skis here. Can [[artificial intelligence]] give us the music Kurt Cobain was going to give the world had he not died? No. ''Of course'' it can’t. Even logically, this is barking mad: the guy shot himself. There is a path-dependency problem here: Cobain could not make any more music, so whatever a machine can come up with, however brilliant, ''it could not be that''. It would be something different. It would be ''some other process'' trying to imitate Nirvana.

And we don’t need AI to do that: AI just makes it cheaper and easier. However good these processes may be, it is never the same. Just ask the surviving members of Pink Floyd.

In 1993 there had not been a Pink Floyd album of any kind for six years, and there hadn’t been a ''good'' one for fourteen. The Machine — you know, the one Pink Floyd welcomed us to in 1975 — judged the mood of the record-buying public, which tends to buy Pink Floyd records regardless of what they are like, and concluded it was time for a new one.

 

But, problem: other than through their [[legal eagle]]s, band members were not talking to each other. Lyricist Roger Waters had walked out over a decade earlier, and there was no chance of him coming back. What to do?  In 1994, using AI to emulate the band’s recorded output wasn’t really on the cards. The remaining members did it the hard way. They pulled off a fair approximation. Without Waters, guitarist David Gilmour had his wife, an author, contribute lyrics. Beautifully recorded and redolent of the band’s signature crystalline guitar solos, swampy organs and moody synth pads, ''The Division Bell'' went straight to number 1 in the UK and the US, eventually selling something like 10,000,000 worldwide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creatives: you’re not out of a job yet.

=== It’s not about the music ===