Join 📚 Quinn's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .
Social Search Engines: Asking "I do X. Who do you think I should meet?" at Conferences
Summary:
Read the bios, not the session titles. Look for interesting people, not just panelists. Approach the moderators after panels and ask for recommendations.
Repeat this process to meet important people.
Don't oversell yourself when approaching referred individuals.
Offer to buy them a drink. This methodical approach helps navigate the overwhelming number of sessions.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So how do you choose among all the sessions? You probly have some big, fat book that youre like, my god. How am i possibly gong to tackle any of this? Number one, read the bios, not the sessions. The session titles may not tell you the whole story. For interesting people, not titles of sessions. And secondly, don't just look at the people on the panel. Look at the moderators. And so what i did my first time to south by southwest is i would go to a panel, i would listen to these amazing people on the on a given panel, and then i would go up, not to the alisters on the Panel, afterwards, i would go to the moderator, many of whom are equally impressive, in their own right. And i would go to the moderator, whois usually not nearly as mobbed, and i would give them a quick explanation at sahe thisis my first time at southby. I don't know anyone. Connel lost. Just finish my first book. It's about a, b and c. Personally, i'm interested n at the time, say, brazilian jujito, this, this and this. Is there anyone here you think i might really hit it off with? Anyone you think i should talk to? I'm pretty good at this and this? And they be as sure, yes, i thinkshul o, this person and this person. And i just repeated that line of questioning over and over and over again. And that's how i met many of the people who led to the tipping point for the book. And when i went up to those people who were referred, by the way, don't say so and so, said, we should really meet. Don't, don't oversell it. Just say i went up to them, i asked them this. They said this. I figured, what the hell, maybe we'd hit it off. Can i buy you drink? It's a very methodical way to go about tackling deluge of sessions.
#99 — How to Build a World-Class Network in Record Time
The Tim Ferriss Show
Risk tolerance in org change: When 1 bad thing happens, don't pave over it with rules
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Two is, and Sam, like you and I have talked about this a million times, like there is such a bias around risk where it's like this thing happened once. Now we make a rule for it. Now we have to uphold that rule in perpetuity. And that is what we call work debt. We don't even know if that one thing would ever happen again. But now we have hours and time and money and cycles and cycles and cycles probably forever because let's be honest, we're never going to unwrite that rule for what might have been a one Off. And so on the one hand, I think like that person's perspective is really valid. On the other hand, I'm like, if you want to be strategic, you have to learn to look at risk a little bit differently, which is that you can never eliminate it. You are always doing stuff with the issue in the rear view.
The Future of HR — Building Your Capabilities, Pt. 1 - Getting to Level 3
At Work with The Ready
Have we overshot the scale at which humans can effectively coordinate?
Summary:
We need Jim Rutt to join the conversation to discuss whether we have exceeded our ability to coordinate effectively.
The slow progress of science and the population growth curve are related to this question. Sam Bowles and his work on behavioral engineering and the return of civil society are also important in this discussion.
We are currently witnessing a clash between institutions and individuals, and something has to give.
Transcript:
Speaker 3
We need Jim Rutt on this conversation right because ultimately this is about have we actually overshot the scale at which we can effectively coordinate and all these studies like you Know this I know it's controversial but like the slowed canonical progress of science these kinds of questions they seem related in a way to the sigmoidal curve of population growth. Have we risen above a level at which intelligibility can actually happen and if so where was that level. I mean I remember you know Sam Bowles is another person who has been looming large for me over this whole conversation not only for his work on the problems of viewing humans as agents That can be governed through behavioral engineering via incentive but also because of the paper that he wrote with Wendy Carlin the article he wrote in Vox EU in 2020 on the battle for The COVID-19 narrative which talked about the return of the civil society you know meaning that the Mesoscopic world of guilds and church groups and sports clubs and pubs and neighborhood Organizations mutual aid networks and all of these other human scale sub-done bar number structures that we found ourselves suddenly very much in need of and yet were eroded by the Radical success of both state power and market power in every way it feels like we are in a kind of clash of the titans right now we're like you know we watch institutions going up against Large institutions and people are struggling to remain unpolverized underfoot. At some point something has to give right.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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