Saturday 11th May 2024

Solve Problems Before They Happen by Developing an “Inner Sense of Captaincy”

We can start by looking at ourselves and how we consider the voyage that is our work. When do we feel fulfillment? Is it when we swoop in to save the day and everyone congratulates us? It’s worth asking why, if we think something is worth saving, we don’t put more effort into protecting it ahead of time.

Like a long sea voyage, the nature of our work is always changing. There are stormy days and sunny ones. There are days involving highs of delight and lows of disaster. All of this happens against the backdrop of events in our personal lives and the wider world with varying levels of influence.

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3 Management Myths That Derail Startups - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

In their work with more than 10,000 startup leaders across 70 countries, the authors identify three common management myths among startup leaders looking to grow their companies: the myth of scaling without hierarchy, the myth of structural harmony, and the myth of sustained heroics. By understanding why entrepreneurs fall for these myths, founders can better calibrate their own maverick impulses and instead rely on rigorous evidence about what actually leads to success.

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The Myths and Realities of Being a Product Manager - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

Product management has become an aspirational career. A group of popular social media influencers regularly offers advice on what it takes to attain a job and succeed in this field. But their content tends to glamorize the profession, gloss over the day-to-day-realities, and dispense wisdom that isn’t always on point.

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Ask Ethan: Can you explain wide binaries and modified gravity?

For more than 50 years, there’s been a mystery about the Universe that the greatest minds in physics and astronomy have been unable to solve: the fact that, when we map out all of the known matter that we can see and apply the known laws of gravity, it doesn’t add up to match the Universe we observe. Somehow, there are additional gravitational effects that appear, and on a wide variety of scales.

If we seek to add just one new ingredient, cold dark matter can take care of the present mismatch on all scales. If we seek a modification to gravity, the most common one considered is MOND, or MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, which can explain the first two but requires some sort of additional ingredient or extra modification for the last two. But that’s not the only way to try and modify gravity. Another is brought to our attention by reader George Hampton, who was curious about something he came across:

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The panopticon effect: How best to handle surveillance

Will is driving along, and he sees a police car up ahead. He puts down his coffee, tenses up, and drives exactly at the speed limit. He puts on the most law-abiding face possible.

Mia is at work behind a computer when her boss walks in. She shifts tabs, frantically types, and huffs as if overworked. She smiles as if to say, “I love my job, but I’m also hard at work.”

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Everyday Philosophy: The quickest way to test your moral character

“Is the popular “Shopping Cart Litmus Test” a measure of a person’s worth?”– Greg, US

This question made me feel like a bad philosopher. I had to Google the shopping cart litmus test, and when I did so, I discovered it’s all over the philosophy-leaning internet. It’s a modern morality meme. The test is about whether a person returns the shopping cart to its stack after a customer is finished with it. As the original, anonymous poster put it, “Returning the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do… It is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart; no one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.”

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Dragonfly: The billion-mile mission to explore Saturn's biggest moon

There are many reasons to attend a scientific conference. You get to see collaborators and friends who are pushing new projects forward. You get to watch lots of cool talks updating you on the latest cool results in your research domain. And then it happens, every now and then, that you attend some big talk on a subject you know nothing about and come out staggered. That’s what happened to me this week at the 2024 Astrobiology Conference (or AbSciCon) where I learned about NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s giant moon Titan.

AbSciCon is a big conference. It happens once every two years with multiple concurrent sessions running on all kinds of topics — everything from the origin of life to the nature of evolution to the physics of exoplanets. My colleagues and I had fun presenting a bunch of new research results. But what I love about this conference is the opportunity to learn so much about so many different fields. Most of the talks are short, 15-minute affairs that give you just a taste of a scientist’s work. It’s the hour-long plenary talks in the morning, however, that really give you a deep dive into a topic. That’s when my mind was blown by Dragonfly.

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Why do some people always get lost?

ike many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around.

The world is full of people like Uttal — and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location — or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location — and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others.

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1 in 3 Top Execs Plan to Quit Over Return-to-Office Mandates

One in three executives who received a return-to-office mandate from their employer said they would leave because of it, according to a Gartner survey of more than 3,500 employees in November. Among non-executive employees, nearly one in five said they would leave their employer because of an RTO mandate.

The consequences are critical. "Organizations that force workers to come into the office are likely to weaken their leadership bench and complicate succession planning," says Caitlin Duffy, senior director in Gartner's HR practice. Many executives -- 64 percent -- are already worried about losing people because of their return-to-office policies, according to an April survey of HR leaders by Gartner.


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Energy CEO said he canceled a $100M contract with Neom when he realized the Saudis were bulldozing villages to make space - Business Insider (No paywall)

Malcolm Aw, the CEO and founder of Solar Water, told Business Insider that he became disillusioned with the project.

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