gregcohn

Yeah, I think the elitist part of the book being reviewed is that it elevates books per se. I have a degree in literature and a home full of books, so I’m as sad as the next guy about no one reading anymore, but I think the argument (such as it is reconstructed by the reviewer) is better when focused on the types on things one could be doing, and the self-reflection and self-improvement that comes from doing them, rather than bemoaning the specific works not read.

“No one reads Shakespeare anymore” is probably true, but it’s just as sad that families talk at dinner less, kids spend less time outside, watercolors and paint brushes gifted by grandparents are tossed aside, and kids don’t ride bikes, go camping, explore the woods behind school, bake brownies (that aren’t viral recipes), and so on. Instead of measuring IQ in correlation to technology, you could probably measure VO2 Max.

I would be willing to bet that it turns out that the algorithmic feed, and especially TikTok, are specifically correlated to some of these deleterious things, and have outsized effects on kids, teens, and the neurodiverse. Not everyone possesses the self-control to put the phone away after a 15-minute scroll break the way grandpa would shut off the tv as soon as the 6 o’clock news was over, and the algorithm is designed to prevent that and ultimately probably wears down native willpower over time.

“Let’s ban TikTok” sounds stupid and reactionary, but what to do about it is a discussion we ought to be having.

Very cool project; thanks for making it.

Would really like Siri AI to have an MCP server

While points 1 and 2 are indeed desirable, point 3 should be moot given we have a constitutional right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizures.

The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.

So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.

I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)

Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.

As someone who runs a company, this article resonated with me. This stuff happens in every department and has a lot to do with how the company is run day to day. If you think about the major deliverables of a department - and pick any department - “manager culture” says the head of that department produces the deliverable internally, getting feedback from stakeholders outside their team perhaps, but “owning” the decision. Thus the product roadmap is “owned” by the product team, and the person the VP PM or CPO reports to is a passive recipient of it even if they have input or feedback on it. But that cascades downward: in manager culture, the mobile roadmap is owned by the mobile PM, the internal tools roadmap is owned by the internal tools PM, and so on. They all buy into manager culture, where autonomy is viewed as a defining aspect of their impact and importance, and to take away that autonomy is to undermine them and risk losing them (“micromanaging, which is bad”).

This same thing happens with marketing. Budgets get set. Agencies get hired. Branding and creative campaigns get developed and show up on the doorstep of the CEO hundreds of thousands of dollars deep. In engineering. In customer support. In finance (we have to do this, because the forecast cycle requires it; we can’t do that, because we don’t have the budget).

In founder culture, the founder gets down and dirty in the roadmapping process. They will give direct feedback on how a customer issue is routinely handled, or a design choice, or a creative campaign. Or a technical standard - Gates and Jobs both famously did this incisively and decisively. I’m no huge fan of Zuck, but it’s clear how much involvement he has with product and design for example. He famously bought Instagram because he wanted to, and understood its importance to facebook’s future, not because a strategy team identified it and a corp dev team engaged and investment banker to analyze and negotiate it. Mark Pincus was like this at Zynga too- ask anyone who was there.

Why is this important? Because people all the way down the organization don’t usually have the same nuanced understanding of the product, the market, the company strategy, the positioning, as you do. They will make decisions that optimize their subsystem but are sub optimal to the system. I had a customer support manager recently ask me if he could move a set of things that was causing a lot of load on his team to our law firm. The law firm of course charges 10-30xx per hour what a customer support agent makes. Even if you do a good job evangelizing the company mission and hiring non-mercenaries and whatnot, again and again and again you will see people wanting to “professionalize” their teams in ways that add more process, slow things down, and attenuate impact.

So If you let your company get into manager mode, you really lose control of the boat. And if you try to operate in founder mode after hiring a bunch of managers, they pissed because they don’t want to be micromanaged. But if they were crushing it, you wouldn’t need to.

I think the best founders are able to navigate this dynamic effectively, whether that’s by being able to effectively make a jump to a more delegated model, or building a team that can leverage their strengths without snuffing their hands-on involvement, or taking back the wheel at the right time.

A good counter example I can think of is Yahoo, when Jerry Yang took back over after Terry Semel retired. Manager culture had deeply set in there, and was not reversible despite Jerry’s good efforts and some great executives who were aligned to it. (And yes, the big, Steve Jobs inspired, “fix the company retreat” they did was literally “VP’s and up”.). As someone who worked there, was not a VP, but likely would have been in a “top contributing employees” cull by different measures, it was extremely painful to experience.

I would note that it takes a lot of energy to sustain this mode and be a leader through it, or to make changes in this direction to course correct.

Anyone who has kids has to answer the phone from strangers routinely. School staff and camp counselors are routinely using their own cell phones these days to communicate with parents.

Doing it the opposite way - tying all outbound school/camp calls to a single callerID - risks blending the important with the automated reminders. LAUSD abuses their automated calling system to the extent that my wife and I have both screened calls from the front office involving an injured child, more than once.

The real issue here is getting to the root cause, which is carriers and their intermediary aggregators having incentives to carry large volumes of spam.

In a number of markets, operators have increased the cost of SMS messages to deter spam, only to find a massive increase in traffic pumping fraud that mysteriously appears in the system of trusted intermediaries. Everyone's making a goddamn fortune off it, and no one actually cares to fix it.

I am partial to Notion and have been experimenting with it for one meeting. The Slack integration works well.

Do you have any top-5 templates you can describe or share?

From the team that made Burner, an iOS app that screens out all calls, allowing only a user-designated whitelist to ring through.

See you at Tacos Villa Corona!

My pleasure and definitely agree some of the things I suggested go well beyond MVP. It is the blessing and the curse of getting product feedback that the second you do something interesting, people want a million more features ;-).

Good luck with it!