Over the past seven weeks (good golly, where does the time go?) at Google, I’ve noticed a funny habit of mine. Whenever I overhear a conversation involving something that is related to my team’s work, I drop whatever I’m working on and wander over to listen in. Now, one might guess this is due to […]
Category: cognition
Switching Costs
Earlier this week I switched my RSS reader from Bloglines to Google Reader. I’d been meaning to check out Google Reader for months, if not years, but had never gotten around to it, as Bloglines was serving me well enough for what I needed, and I’d gotten used to its quirks. But over the past […]
Self Haxx0ring
As noted in my last post, this is my first week as an employee of Google. I’m trying to get up to speed on the types of things that I will be doing, which meant spending most of today learning about the ad system, revenue forecasting models, how the Google backend works, etc. Unsurprisingly, there’s […]
A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink
Amazon link Official book site My friend Wes recommended this book to me after my social capitalist post where I claimed that we were moving from a world defined by technology to one defined by social connections. Daniel Pink’s book describes a similar transition from an emphasis on left-brain thinking towards right-brain thinking. Pink starts […]
Intelligent organizations
Tobias Lehtipalo asked a really interesting question on the pmclinic list, which essentially was: Can we apply the principles described by Jeff Hawkins’s model of the brain in On Intelligence to organization design? To review, Hawkins suggests that the brain is composed of a set of pattern-recognition layers. Each layer is trained to look for […]
Intelligence in Google world
In a comment on my strategic intuition post, Seppo asked the interesting question, “How will Google change the way we *think*?” In particular, he notes that sheer accumulation of facts once was a metric of intelligence, but in a world where Google is accessible from our pocket phones, mere facts don’t have the value they […]
Strategic Intuition and Expertise
On Monday night, I went to a talk by William Duggan, a Columbia business school professor who studies strategy, on a concept that he calls strategic intuition. Duggan has written a book on the subject, and has set up a blog to discuss the concept. Duggan started by discussing the differences between expert intuition and […]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Nonlinearity
Over the weekend, I went for a walk and listened to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s talk at the Long Now (viewable at the Whole Earth site, and summarized here). I’ve been doing this for a few weekends now – I can never pay enough attention to listen to a talk like that if I’m at home […]
Tracing influence through the network
I spent the weekend at BarCampNYC3, an unconference in the mode of the BrainJams I once attended. It was great to meet a bunch of new people, including some nextNY folks I had never met in person, and to get the chance to talk about interesting topics for a couple days. One session I attended […]
Learning by repetition and memorization
A friend’s 7-year-old son recently challenged me to a game of chess. I’ve never played chess seriously, and had not played a single game since before he was born. I quickly found myself in a struggle – I made a mistake early and he took my queen. I eventually fought back to a mostly equal […]
