Hiccupps

I'm continuing to be inspired by Patrick Prill's series of posts on the way AI is impacting personal, societal, and economic systems and today that leads me to share another short analogy. See also Hedging Your Bets  and A SpotifAI Model? Into the Groove by Jonathan Scott recounts the history of recorded music. You probably already have some background awareness of a timeline something like this: wax cylinders were the early commercial format, overtaken later by 78 rpm shellac discs which in turn preceded vinyl 33s and 45s, before CDs and now streaming. What you may not be aware of is the explosion of formats, players, converters, novelty features, quality innovations, pricing strategies, lawsuits, and mergers that lead ultimately to standardisation and consolidation.  Formats: the medium is one obvious difference between formats but there are others including the needle, the type of amplification, the speed of rotation, whether the needle moves left/right or up/down in the ...

You've almost certainly heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma : two members of a crimimal gang are captured and interrogated separately. The police tell them both they are looking at a year in prison but offer a deal if they squeal: less time for incriminating their colleague. There are three scenarios: No-one talks: the default one year each One talks: the talker goes free , the other gets three years Both talk: both get two years  The dilemma is whether to remain shtum and trust the other will do the same  or  to spill the beans with the risk of an extended stay in prison but the potential reward of walking away scot free.  Given that they are sure the other would be prepared to rat them out, the rational individual's strategy, according to game theory, is to talk even though there is a better group outcome in not talking. --00--   The Prisoner's Dilemma is merely a well-known example but there are many other games with different setups and constraints. I came acros...

  Hands up if you think the world needs another format for retrospectives.  Yeah, right.  Yet here I am. Last October it was clear that we were becoming jaded. After a phase of novelty themes (at the festival, NSYNC, 8-bit video games, ...) and a long stretch of Stop Start Continue , engagement in our retros was sliding. So when it was my turn to facilitate I wanted to find a different format and I had some specific requirements in mind: a simple and intuitive structure, invitations to express feelings, and opportunities to be publicly grateful.  I didn't find an existing template that fit the bill so I made one up, just four columns in a basic table with these headers: Kudos to ... 'cos of ... I like it when ... I feel meh about ... I don't like it when ...   I expected it to be a one-off palate cleanser but it's proven popular and we've been using it for six months straight.  There's no originality in those categories, by the way: I see a strong fami...