From The rise and fall of rationality in language 📝
All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.
While this is based on “millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data” and the reversal starts in 1980s, I bet the 2007 acceleration owes a big thanks to the iPhone and social media.
A classic from Tim Harford: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
What’s a non-obvious solution to the problem you try to solve for your customers?
Better yet, what’s the opposite of the current primary solution?
2 quotes that seem contradictory but are complimentary.
One from Tyler:
So please develop a better sense of when to keep your mouths shut and work behind the scenes.
One from Seth:
The secret way you do the thing isn’t what keeps your clients coming back. It’s the part you do in public that matters.
There is a tendency to hype the things people don’t really care about and ignore talking about the stuff we find boring that others are interested in.
Is it performative or informative?
Semiconductorctor and data center infrastructure expert Dylan Patel shared this handy heuristic on which AI models when:
- Anthropic (Claude) for one off, non-reasoning uses
- Gemini for multimodal and uses that require a long context window
- OpenAI (ChatGPT) for all other reasoning question flows
I don’t understand this one
Google is testing a feature that allows the same advertiser to appear twice on a single search results page, which seemingly breaks Google’s own existing ad policies.
I can’t imagine advertisers would want to pay twice to show in the same search. But maybe there will be a bidding option for “all ad slots” or something. Pay for saturation and blocking out competitors.
Travel booking, real estate, and law are industries that come to mind where brands would pony up for this.