Michael McCliment

highly recommend @ruthmalan.bsky.social's Papers in Systems. We haven't updated the website in a minute, but our monthly virtual meetups have restarted after the summer break:

papersin.systems/about

Suspect many will get a hands-on experience of what the ironies of automation is all about with all this LLM assisted coding.

This was fun today, thanks!

Missing data is a fucking tragedy. It’s so easy to write a bad survey and get bad data back.

Two paragraphs from The Extended Mind discussing the effects of neo-Taylorism on cognitive performance.

My current reading dips back towards the cognitive science part of my interests. I did not expect to get ambushed by Taylorism in this context, but here I am.

- a question I like to ask is "what are the common ways this goes wrong" or "what are the common misconceptions people have here." Good teachers become experts in the *misconceptions* not just the "right answers". See if you can identify just one for everything you're writing about!

Surprise is so key. Why I share process, I have ideas but it’s only in the dance of sketches, words, and constraints of the form that I see where I’m going. I often experience - I didn’t know that was going to happen! And that should be all our creative work and our learning. No replacement for that

Notably, neither of these results in your colleagues seeing you looking out of the screen at them. That would take looking at the camera.

If you told me the most stacked sports team, with billions in funding, found a solution to dramatically improve performance? I’d be sus

If you said the solution was a mic yelling random instructions, I’d call you delusional

If you said the training data was mostly middle school pickup games? Bruh

More generally: beware of approaches that make easy incidents easier but hard incidents harder. The trade-off might still be worth it, but acknowledge the downside risk!

💯 This fallacy deserves a name.

E.g., you can't just deliver an API and then rapidly iterate on it when 10 teams are coupled to the schema.

this is my experience of tech management, btw

Reading about both change management and complex systems in the same month has me thinking we need a book with the title Seeing Like a Corporation: How Certain Schemes to Improve Profitability Have Failed.

Try www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Let...?

That link doesn't want to open for me. From the URL, though, I'm guessing that's "The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster" ?

Much of the past two years was spent in load-shedding mode to avoid burnout. Finally clawing back from that precipice, got back to reading regularly again about 4 months ago.

Time to try this out, and do a "build up contacts" thing *again*. So, yeah... hello!