Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

On the Value of Negative Knowledge

Hailed as a pioneer of artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky died at 88 (January 24.) Combining “a scientist's thirst for knowledge with a philosopher's quest for truth,”# Minsky was the co-founder of the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Project (later the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.) His contributions to the field of cognitive science are many. His ideas on human intelligence and thinking are still relevant. In a 1994 article titled Negative Expertise, Minsky puts forth a thesis on knowledge and learning: We tend to think of knowledge in positive terms -- and of experts as people who know what to do. But a 'negative'... Read more →

How Good Ideas are Born, Get Done

We all like to think our ideas are good, and many likely are. When we stay with an idea long enough, over time, we may find a way to get it done. Adoption, or success is the validation that the idea was good. Steven Johnson writes about big ideas and in Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation he tells the fascinating stories of great ideas and great thinkers across disciplines. Setting the tone with Darwin's Paradox in the introduction, Johnson traces the origins of ideas along with their development. He says, “to understand where good ideas... Read more →

The Challenges of Science Communication

In an article on Vox, Brian Resnick talks about what journalists get wrong about science. His summary of the twenty responses he received from actual scientists reveal the disconnects. For example: Journalists often want clear answers to life and social problems. Individual studies rarely deliver that Journalists are obsessed with what's new. But it's better to focus on what's old There's a difference between real-world significance and statistical significance Journalists should also be skeptical of studies based on self-reporting Always direct readers to the original research Correlation is not causation Overall, the article calls a higher degree of skepticism, for... Read more →

Saving Public (and Private) Companies

Companies are still a major economic engine in commerce. Imagine what the landscape would look like if we had only free-lancers of single proprietors looking to do business with each other -- the ultimate fragmentation. Thus what happens when a company dies makes a difference to society. But how do we know the data is accurate when we measure lifespans? “Studies on the general quantitative and statistical character of firms have produced mixed results regarding their lifespans and mortality,” say the authors of a recent study that looked at the lifespans of more than 25,000 publicly traded North American companies,... Read more →

The Universal Language of Human Relationships

Any relationship we enter into occupies our mind and uses our energy. This includes our relationship with things. The things we own require attention -- from basic maintenance like a car or a house, to needing to be put away after use or a decision of whether to keep or toss. The things we own own us as it takes energy to deal with them and unless we change our relationship with the stuff we own, it will end up owning us. In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing Japanese cleaning consultant Marie... Read more →

Right and Wrong are not Absolutes

Our world is not binary. When it comes to experience, we frequently if not most of the time have more than two choices as to how we go about making decisions, for example. Why it is good to reflect the reality that in life there are more than two doors in our stories, and to learn to think critically, or with our own head rather than accepting what others dish out as absolute truths. In an essay he titled The Relativity of Wrong, Isaac Asimov argues persuasively against the common belief that “‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are absolute; that everything that... Read more →

What Percentage of our Time Should we Spend on Shallow Work?

This is probably not a question we are used to asking -- our boss or ourselves -- and because in knowledge work, where most of us spend our time, it is harder to measure the value of what we do, we don't calculate it, or aren't aware of how much it is. Cal Newport says knowledge work is afflicted by the metrics black hole -- we measure everything, and yet we fail to measure two critical things when it comes to the majority of our work today: 1.) We don't tally the cost of using resources on one thing rather... Read more →

What is Our Job?

It might be easy to dismiss a book by its cover, especially when that book is Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. If not for the subtitle that provides a clue that the author is grounded in everyday reality -- mindfulness meditation in everyday life. The organization of the book in short chapters provides countless ways of reading it. We can go through one short story each day, or just open it and read where we land. Some chapters start with a question, others explain a statement. In “what is my job on the planet with a... Read more →

Perspective is so Hard to Capture

In Creativity, Inc. Ed Catmull describes his thoughts on Steve Jobs with whom he worked for more than a quarter-century. He says: Perspective is so hard to capture. I worked with Steve for more than a quarter-century -- longer, I believe, than anyone else -- and I saw an arc to his life that does not accord with the one-note portraits of relentless perfectionism I've read in magazines, newspapers, and even his own authorized biography. Relentless Steve -- the boorish, brilliant, but emotionally tone-deaf guy we first came to know -- changed into a different man during the last two... Read more →

How not to Kill a Conversation

“The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it” [Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton, British politician, poet, critic and prolific novelist, 1803-1873] Using a term instead of another can make a radical difference in changing a conversation. For example, in business and marketing circles we use the language of war, a metaphor that has been taken up swiftly and pervasively in management books and our thinking over the years. They are words that operate in a terribly negative space -- front lines, command and control, targeting, and so on. It's the “we” vs. “them” mindset, a... Read more →