Kind: Notes

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Hang on, so Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine is definitely an invasion but Israel’s “limited, localised and targeted ground raids” in Lebanon are… not?

Did this “common sense” survey.

With hindsight, I feel like there is a critical distinction between common sense and common knowledge. Most of these questions were related to common knowledge, so a statement of fact, which you may or may not know, or might disagree with.

To me, common sense is the ability to predict an outcome based on a broad awareness of previous outcomes. For example, if I am careless with a knife, the knife could cut me. Or, you can’t carry water (very far) in a sieve.

Common knowledge is something else altogether. For example, “the sky is usually blue during the day”, I would say is common knowledge. An example from the survey, “a grizzly bear is larger than a dog”, I would say is neither common sense or common knowledge. You may not know what a a grizzly bear is. “Water is a liquid” is probably common knowledge but, still, don’t you have to know what liquid means?

Either way, I don’t think you can apply any previous experience to these questions and predict the answer, so I don’t see how they could be described as common sense.

My co-workers want my collaboration on “a thing”, with no notice, today. They don’t like it if they don’t get it.

I want a yes/no answer from my co-workers on a simple question, that I have to ask them every month. Do you think I can ever get that one word answer?

My pitch for a new social media platform:

Our app will allow children of any age (but we’ll put 13 in the T&Cs), to engage in completely unmoderated chat with total strangers of all ages from all over the world! They’ll be able to freely exchanged photos, videos and any kind of file without restriction!

Can you imagine pitching that and getting investment? The current situation with kids and social media is ludicrous.

The rules for “branded content” on Instagram are very clear but there is no way to report Posts that don’t meet the requirements. Funny that.

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I “do” data stuff for work. We look at patient experience in health and social care services. When I first joined, I (and colleagues) genuinely believed there was some revelatory nugget of insight (or even scandal) hidden away in the data. Now I’m just happy when our results affirm things everyone already assumes to be true, like working people would like increased access to evening and weekend appointments. Findings like people in poorer areas rely more on public transport, validates our research approach and methods. So, when we do find something slightly unexpected, it has a lot more credibility.

There’s lots of examples going around of generative AI giving bad results but here’s a fun thing you can try at home. Works best if you’re a nobody. Ask ChatGPT (or any similar technology) what it knows about you (based on your first name, last name). In my case ChatGPT decided that my name was just a pseudonym for a famous person with the same last name and asserted that we were the same people.

See how it works for you. Based on the results, you might consider this tech a viable platform for factual information or you might not.

It’s polling day in the UK, which means we’ll have seamless, live coverage of absolutely nothing until 10pm when the polls close. Then we’ll have an exit poll and live coverage of nothing happening for several more hours, until the first counts come in. In fact, the next 18 hours of news in the UK will contain very little actual news.

I was thinking about Trump’s conviction this morning and it occured to me that, if he had repaid Michael Cohen the hush money from the campaign fund AND written “Hush money for porn star” in the accounts – neither he nor Cohen would have done anything illegal