If tell an AI tool like ChatGPT what you want, it’s going to try to get you what you asked for — even if what you asked for doesn’t exist. This is confirmation bias, and it’s a big problem for one of the best uses for LLMs: research. Tools like ChatGPT enormously speed up research…
According to the Boston Globe, the owners of the Connecticut Sun WNBA team are exploring options for selling the team. I’m not that surprised; Uncasville in southern Connecticut is an out-of-the-way place to put a team, and their facility is not quite up to the level of the growing professionalism and booming audiences of today’s…
How do people find answers to questions? For decades, the standard paradigm for decision-making revolved around web sites, links, search (and SEO), content marketing, and social sharing. Whether the question was “How can prepare for a job interview” or “What’s the right organizational strategy for a transnational company?” the answer started with a web search….
Today, a little sports math. The current reigning NBA champion Boston Celtics, owner of a dominant 61-21 record in the regular season, are in a second-round playoff series against the 51-31 New York Knicks. The Celtics were heavily favored to win this series, in part because they won four decisive games against the Knicks during…
A LinkedIn connection of mine recently reposted a story about Sonya Curry, the mother of the extremely talented NBA player Steph Curry. I clicked through to the original post, which had been posted by a lawyer who runs a foundation and is a visiting fellow at a major university — let’s call her “Mary” (not…
I strongly recommend that you take a look at Eric Schwartzman’s new article in Fast Company, “Bot farms invade social media to hijack popular sentiment.” Schwartzman’s deeply researched piece explains how malign actors are using banks of actual mobile phones, spoofed to appear as actual independent people, to manipulate sentiment about everything from actions in…
I was startled to read this quote in The Athletic (part of the New York Times) from a federal judge overseeing an antitrust case regarding the NCAA and college sports conferences: [U.S. District Court Judge Claudia] Wilken raised several questions related to the objections, but she also expressed optimism for eventual approval if those questions…
Newsletter 86: Insisting on crediting idea creators, AI can’t cite articles properly, a new business hybrid publisher, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Fight the rip-off culture I recently accepted a job to write a book chapter. The clients were expert business thinkers. The topic was a business discipline that should…
Bear with me for a little thought experiment. When a script in Hollywood appears to be lacking something crucial and the existing writers have exhausted all their creative solutions, the producer or director will sometimes bring in a “script doctor.” The script doctor is a writer who parachutes in and, based on their expert knowledge…