Newsletter 39: Ignorance is a curse and a cult, Google and Meta rationalize AI ripoffs, the reality behind “birds aren’t real,” plus three people to follow and three books to read. Can we please stop idolizing ignorance? Twenty years ago, the Boston Red Sox did something that seemed impossible: after a supposedly cursed championship drought…
Newsletter 37: Ignorance amid abundant knowledge, traumatic writer’s block, burgeoning book bans, plus three people to follow and three books to read. The problem with ignorance Ignorance bugs the hell out of me. The urge to eliminate ignorance is the driving force in my career and much of my life. This is a good thing….
What comes before learning? In 1995, I was out of work and interviewing for a job as an analyst at a research company. As they described the job to me, I became very excited. My job was going to be to identify important questions for business clients where the answer was not yet known. Like…
A little knowledge is dangerously misleading. That’s the message of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which ignorant people think they’re smart. It’s the message of the Gartner Hype Cycle, in which people get overenthusiastic about new technologies. And it’s the reason that analysts, over and over again, get overenthusiastic about whatever’s new. In 1999, the psychologists…