MNTS #32
[Week 51/ Year 2023] Learning & Talent Mgmt, Collective Effervescence, Girard/Deutsch, Munger, Lightroom
Mainly, Notes To Self - my weekly attempt to compress everything noteworthy I read, watched, listened to, and discovered during the past week.
Reading
Learning and Talent Management in the Age of AI by Gianni Giacomelli
To me, the obvious choice was to orient our strategy to build an infrastructure that helped our teams express collective intelligence - whereby people could cooperate more effectively with each other, by making them “T-shaped”, and able to bring their deep expertise in one field, but understand others’ well enough. Using skills as core master data, instead of jobs, was a logical next step - and we focused on building that skills stock across the company.
Durkheim called this common passion “collective effervescence” — a special energy that can transfigure an event into something electric, transcendent, even sacred. Collective effervescence can occur at sports events, religious services, political rallies, music festivals – anywhere a group of people are engaged together in a ritual. Durkheim described the experience of collective effervescence as being “transported into a special world entirely different than the ordinary, a setting populated by especially intense forces that invade and transform.” These forces engender feelings of invincibility and the sense that anything is possible.
Rene Girard’s Science Through David Deutsch’s Theory of Knowledge by Kahlil Corazo
In The Beginning of Infinity, Deutsch explains that today's scientific community still does not have a good explanation for human creativity, but also that it is clearly the source of our maps of reality. The role of science is to prove these theories wrong. The theories with the least damage from the most criticism are our truest maps of reality—until a better one emerges from someone's creativity.
Listening
This is my favorite Charlie Munger conversation I’ve come across so far. A must listen. I was struck by how unbelievably sharp his mind was at 99 and only within a few weeks of his passing.
Here is a brief selection of my favorite Mungerisms from the discussion:
“My theory from the very beginning was I wanted to eliminate all the most conventional asininity”
“My math teacher had no idea that he’d come to a part of math that was very important in the regular world to everybody. But I saw it immediately and I just utterly mastered it and used it.”
“You got to do two things. You got to have a certain amount of competence and you have to know what you know and what you don’t know”
“Peculiarity by itself is not art”
“In this house I’ve got two busts of other people. One is a Benjamin Franklin, one is Lee Kuan Yu.”
Random
Adobe Lightroom iOS app is incredible. I’ve recently recommitted to taking more photos of my girls, friends, family, etc., and I’m super impressed with the UX and the suite of capabilities available on mobile. Below is the first photo I lightly edited and I’m surprisingly pleased with the result.
Have a Merry Christmas! And as always…
Stay spirited, stay resilient.
Andrew