Nathanael Yellis

We've had a topsy-turvy winter, which has meant both great snow for skiing along with some rain events and a surprising number of days too windy for the chairlifts to run. March 1st was such a day: from the overnight hours through until about noon, the gusts were over 50 mph and the chairlifts were off. Not great for a Saturday at the ski hill. Some people took to the internet to complain; some played board games; a merry band of us decided this was an opportunity to stick on our climbing skins and see what the side country held.

Happy Friday! I have three good reads for you: a conservative's reading of Taylor Sheridan discovers his work to be right-coded; an NYT writer finds problematic rehab profits in Kentucky; a massive fan of Cormac McCarthy discovers the scoop of a lifetime: McCarthy's secret mistress. Each piece was well-written and held my attention. On the surface, they have nothing in common. Upon reflection, I think a close reading reveals a common and instructive theme.

I don't really trust social science, what with their almost complete inability to replicate any results and endless stories about cooked data, but I always get a kick of out it producing a result I like. The science is this recent study, really a survey analysis, of knowledge workers self-reported experiences using AI for work. The title gives us a nice hint, with its 'reductions in cognitive effort', but the abstract has a quote that had me grinning like a madman:

Quantitatively ... higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship.

In 1965's "A Charlie Brown Christmas", Sally asks Charlie to take dictation for her letter to Santa. After some opening flattery, she asks Santa to please note the size and quantity of each item on her list or, if that's too hard, to please send cash, "tens and twenties." Charlie explodes and throws down the pencil. Sally says, "all I want is what I have coming to me; all I want is my fair share."

A few weeks ago, a post popped into my LinkedIn feed feature what's become conventional wisdom: kids shouldn't have smartphones in school. While I like a good ban as much as anyone, I think it's funny that we want to keep phones out of schools, but adults will say that while surreptitiously using our phones during the workday, while driving, and while parenting (if possible). In reply to the LinkedIn post, I suggested we extend the phone ban to such places as work, home, and hand. Worth a chuckle, but I think I meant it. Ever since smart phones appeared, we've been unable to handle them.

For years, I've consulted on go-to-market optimization. The ingredients of these projects are often pretty similar: business process mapping, identifying automation potential, and finagling precision from more-or-less integrated parts of a technology stack. This similarity of ingredients has not been predictive of results: some of these projects work really well, others founder, in states of barely launched, never coming close to completion. Whether the projects succeed is often a completely separation question from whether the business result gets achieved. Seeing an excellent system launch and then diminishing results is the worst outcome. It happens, by I get mystified as to why.

This email has been a little too much like This American Life recently: a theme chosen and stories brought to you on that theme. This week, we're going back to the original style—things that were a delight to read.

For the first ten years of the millennium, it seemed like once or twice a year some new piece of tech came out and immediately found a central role in the universe. You could almost immediately spot what would trend: the move from search results in a series of animated folders to a simple, endless list gave the world “Google” as a verb. Want to post and watch videos online? Youtube. Want to run a simple website? Wordpress. People were dying to get into Facebook, going so far as to spoof .edu email addresses to get around their early “college-only” rule. There were a ton of first-mover advantages and thus fortunes were made.

I came across this line in the Wlal Street Journal's review section about a month ago. It's from Sam Sacks, their fiction critic:

The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization.

Having read just about my fair share of novels, I think he's right. The more experimental the form has gotten, the less novels are being read. Even the best ones tend to be thinly veiled auto-fiction or else routine fan service, where the book is about books and book people being heroes against the unwashed, non-reading masses. As much as I enjoy Kingsley and Martin Amis, their brilliant novels helped ensure the marginalization of all the rest.