Author: Jeremie Averous

How We Should Commit to Liking What We Do

Seth Godin in this blog post – that is straight to the point – ‘We like what we choose’ explains how most of us and most personal development gurus have it backwards. We don’t choose what we like, we like what we choose.

The post refers to scientific research on toddlers quoted in Science daily ‘Babies’ random choices become their preferences‘: “People assume they choose things that they like. But research suggests that’s sometimes backwards: We like things because we choose them. And, we dislike things that we don’t choose.”

In general, we may or may not have much choice in where we grow up, live or what we do. The thing is, it may not be worthwhile exhausting ourselves to find what we’d like to do. It is much better and apparently much more satisfying to just make sure we like what we do.

And anyway, at some stage, even if that was between two sub-optimal alternatives, we have made choices and this should make us prefer what we have chosen.

So, let’s focus on liking, developing and making the best of what we do, because at some stage we have chosen to do it.

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How is USA Is Growing Different From the Rest of the Western World

The infographics of this excellent New York Times opinion ‘The U.S. Is Lagging Behind Many Rich Countries. These Charts Show Why.‘ are quite enlightening about some trends that make the USA stand apart from the rest of the developed world.

The US appear to be very specific on such aspects as life expectancy, ratio of added value going to workers vs CEOs, healthcare expenditure (the double in terms of share of GDP!), incarceration rate (more than double again, even 3x or 4x!), or income inequality.

It seems quite clear that there is apparently something broken in the way the US socio-economics work. The question is out whether this situation is actually sustainable even if the US economy is quite self-sustaining. I am convinced however that despite the powerful US softpower, we need to be careful when we are importing in our societies typical US issues, which are not necessarily valid in our societies.

The USA is clearly an outlier in may socio-economic aspects. It is a very large outlier of course, but let’s not necessarily make it a model or try to adopt its solutions, which may not be adequate for the rest of the world.

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How Most Internet Services Are Poor at Helping You Discover New Things

This thoughtful blog by Seth Godin ‘Who is good at discovery?‘ remind us that most internet services are poor to help us discover new things. Some are better like Netflix, but many are really poor.

“Google built its entire business on the mythology of discovery, persuading millions of entrepreneurs and creators that somehow, SEO would help them get found, at the very same time they’ve dramatically decreased organic search results to maximize revenue.”

Intrinsically, and increasingly, internet services tend to propose new things that fit our preferences in order to keep us hooked. I find that it is increasingly difficult to get a connection to something new. And it is not the case for traditional press and magazines, my personal network of peers and connections, references in the books I read which continue to allow me to discover new things much more than all internet united.

When you search on internet you’d better know what you’d like to find, because serendipity is not going to happen by itself. Worse, on “YouTube–if you follow the ‘recommended’ path for just a handful or two of clicks, you’ll end up with something banal or violent.“

Don’t rely on the internet to find new things to discover. Rather rely on your network and traditional sources!

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How a Stock Echange Could Effectively Be Fostering Long Term Strategies

An attempt has been made recently – and quite widely publicized – to launch a Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) to foster long-term value creation by companies. The principles are accessible at this page: ‘A principles-based approach‘. It basically requires companies listing there to adhere to principles protecting stakeholders and the environment, and developing long term growth strategies.

While the principle is absolutely commendable, I see a contradiction between the concept of stock exchange and the concept of long term growth and capital stability. In all times, markets to be liquid require a high amount of transactions which then expose to all sorts of psychological effects from traders. On the other hand, it allows quicker reallocation of capital when the economic fundamentals change.

Some companies effectively deploy long term strategies only when a substantial percentage of their capital is held by shareholders that have the same intent, such as family-owned businesses. They may struggle more to adapt to an evolving environment in that case (sometimes family-owned business get stuck in old-fashioned approaches), but this provides stability that can also be beneficial.

At this stage I fail to see how the LTSE can be more than an exchange of stocks specifically picked for some strategic qualities, and effectively foster a longer-term intent from traders and clients. We’ll see!

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How Internet Activity Does Not Seem to Increase Exponentially Any More

I have recently looked at those graphs produced every year about everything that happens on internet in a minute. This is the graph for 2020. What is interesting is to compare to similar graphs from previous years.

The absolute numbers are overwhelming (4.7 million videos viewed on youtube every minute, 59 million messages on messenger and whastapp), in particular when one remembers that it takes 1,440 minutes to make a day. At the same time they have evolved somewhat linearly in the past 4-5 years (doubling over the period) at least based on similar representations. There seems to be a physical limit to our online activity!

Of course, each video or message itself may have become heavier with higher definition or improved content, so that may not represent the actual growth of traffic. Still, it is interesting to observe that we don’t seem to be in the exponential growth that was observed when digital started to spread at the start of the century.

Maybe an important thought to have in terms of context for new online services that would intend to penetrate the market in particular where it seems to be quite mature (developed countries).

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How Collaboration is a Competition Against Ourselves

I like this quote I noted from Gapingvoid: “Collaboration is a competition — of us against ourselves“. Collaboration is an absolute requirement nowadays to achieve the best results, and if it works properly, it should stretch ourselves.

Here’s the full quote: “Competition, against ourselves or against others, is what gets the best results from us. But so does collaboration. How does that work? Let’s reframe the discussion. Collaboration is a competition — of us against ourselves. To get the best results, we need to push ourselves past the point of ourselves“.

In productive collaboration we have the opportunity to show the best of ourselves in the areas we are the best. Collaboration allows to complement those skills and talents with different skills and talents of others to build something unique. Positive collaboration obliges us to give our best at what we are the best at.

The caveat of course is that we are addressing here the best situation of positive collaboration in an effective team, which do not happen so often. It does not prevent us to always give out the best we can of ourselves. But it requires a good dose of personal discipline.

Effective collaboration is an opportunity to provide our best from our talents and what we know to do best. That’s how we identify positive collaboration.

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How Social Network and Facebook Backlash Should Not Have Let Down

In is quite interesting to note that the strong backlash against Facebook end 2018 / early 2019 has let down, while Facebook has not visibly changed its operating model. Articles from the time are still quite relevant such as for example: ‘Facebook must decide: Is it for the mob or for democracy?‘ or ‘Is It Wrong To Feel Bad For Facebook?‘.

It is increasingly clear that the revenue drive of social networks like Facebook is built on increasingly targeted advertising, and stickiness of the network itself to capture more attention for adds; and this, in turn, has the consequence of having the network show us what we’d like to see, creating relatively isolated communities of similar interest which sometimes lose touch with reality.

Still, it is amazing how the social network backlash has disappeared from front concern when the basics have not changed, people are still addicted to social networks, and the risk of manipulation linked for example to elections, has rather increased through AI generated content and the current possibility to target people at the individual level. Effective regulation has not really been implemented. So why don’t we hear so much about it now? Is that the result of effective lobbying? Is that because people have more pressing concerns? Is that because we resign ourselves to the situation?

I hope that the current debates about election manipulation will come up again around the US presidential elections, and that the subject will be tabled again to finally provide a strong regulation of social networks. We should not lose sight of the need to tackle this issue to protect democracy and our societies from excessive manipulation.

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How We Need to Increase Efforts to Protect Against Inadequate AI Generated Content

Following up from the previous post ‘How We Underestimate the Availability of AI Generated Content‘, this interesting post ‘AI-generated fake content could unleash a virtual arms race‘ goes one step further looking at the consequences of this technology.

“[the exercise of generated a fake AI-generated website provided] a glimpse into a potentially darker digital future in which it is impossible to distinguish reality from fiction.“

“Such a scenario threatens to topple the already precarious balance of power between creators, search engines, and users. The current flow of fake news and propaganda already fools too many people, even as digital platforms struggle to weed it all out. AI’s ability to further automate content creation could leave everyone from journalists to brands unable to connect with an audience that no longer trusts search engine results and must assume that the bulk of what they see online is fake.”

The issue is really that machines can generate content much faster than humans, and that all social networks rely mainly on humans to weed out inadequate content. Those tools could thus be “weaponized […] to unleash a tidal wave of propaganda could make today’s infowars look primitive“.

There is thus a definite urgent need to develop “increasingly better tools to help us determine real from fake and more human gatekeepers to sift through the rising tide of content.”

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How We Underestimate the Availability of AI Generated Content

Just take 1 minute to visit ‘This Marketing Blog Does Not Exist‘. Looks like a genuine blog, just as this one, right? Wrong, it has been entirely AI generated including the head shot of the supposed writer. And the texts do seem to make sense at first glimpse.

We are coming to a situation where we not any more in a position to distinguish AI generated content from human content. Speech generators produce real-sounding audio. Soon we won’t be able to distinguish deep-fake videos from real videos (the picture represents a snapshot from a deep-fake video of Obama compared to a real video extract).

For end-users, there is a definite need to clearly identify content that is AI generated. For some people, this also creates an unprecedented opportunity to swindle or otherwise abuse the confidence of readers or viewers at an unprecedented rate.

In a year where AI-engines are now being put widely at the disposal of the public, I believe we widely underestimate the impact of those technologies in the current world and how an increasing portion of what we read, hear and watch is AI-generated fiction. A wake-up call could be needed!

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How Diversity Is Shown to Increases Academic Research Results

This Nature article ‘These labs are remarkably diverse — here’s why they’re winning at science‘ makes the point that diversity is fostering creativity and academic outcomes, based on a study of scientific papers.

Of course, this study that shows that diversity is beneficial is based on citation count of scientific papers vs the names of contributors, which may not be fully representative of the importance of the research. Still, it is interesting to see a full fledged research based on data demonstrate the benefits of diversity.

The diversity of experience, cultures and viewpoints is quite essential for creativity and the article gives quite a few examples, in particular with the input from Maori culture into research, and other multi-cultural research teams such as an Okinawa setup that requires diversity and multi-culture to be part of the team. The article also mentions challenges of working in diverse teams such as language and cultural behavior.

Another stone in the field of demonstrating how diversity is beneficial for creativity and value creation.

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How to Move in the Collaborative Age in the 2020s Decade

In this post ‘An Agenda for the 2020s: Inventing the Knowledge Age‘ by Alan Wenger (a New-York based Venture Capitalist), some key success factors for moving into the Collaborative Age are listed.

First, I note that the overall perspective of the author is quite aligned with my Fourth Revolution viewpoint: “Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies scarcity is shifting once more. We need to figure out how to live in a World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.” Attention being new the new scarcity, it is an essential skill we need to practice more.

According to the author the key success factors include:

  • Fighting the climate crisis
  • Defending democracy
  • Promoting universal basic income
  • Fostering decentralisation
  • Developing mindfulness
  • Resuming learning

I’d probably add something about inequality and inclusiveness

In any case, important transformations will have to happen in the 2020s decade to move into the Collaborative Age. They will be accelerated by the Covid crisis and possibly other upcoming world transformations as well. Be ready for change!

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How Attention Should be Consciously Exercised

I like this quote from Valeria Maltoni post ‘Clear Thinking in an Age of Confusion‘, which covers a variety of sources for clarity: “Attention is a muscle you can exercise. People so often look but don’t see“

Attention is important because otherwise we tend to close ourselves into our own thoughts and frames. It requires open mind and being free from worries to notice those things that are outside our usual frames. I am always surprise at how much we can miss if we don’t pay attention.

And it is definitely worth it. “Strategic thinking is all in the doing… if you can think clearly enough to do the right things in the right context. Notice more, and you’ll find those things, because you’ll see them. Then you’ll know“

What type of exercise is meant here? Meditation, meditative walking, and all sorts of mindfulness exercises are good. But it is certainly also staying curious and open to new things through our relationships, reads, travels and other occasions to discover.

Consciously exercise your attention and discover new facets in your everyday life!

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