strategy+business: “For as long as there have been decisions, people have used facts (lately known as data) to make them, along with reason and intuition. Nowadays, though, data often seems to be making decisions for us. Just as ‘analytics’ has changed the face of sports, business data prompts computers to order products, cut prices, or take other actions that once required human thought and intervention. But data needs people just as much as people need data. Business leaders are still the ones who have to decide whether to launch a new product line, expand into a new continent, buy or sell a business, or change a venerable logo. So how can managers use the torrent of data available to them to make the best decisions? That is the timely subject of Decisions Over Decimals, a concise guide to decision-making in the age of analytics written by Christopher Frank, Paul Magnone, and Oded Netzer, a trio of business veterans associated with Columbia University (as well as American Express, Google, and Amazon, respectively). “The challenge in today’s world is not the lack of information but the judgment to use it,” they write. Data-based decision-making is unavoidable, but it comes with risks: “Data and numbers tend to provide the comfortable feeling of accuracy and certainty, but they rarely tell us the full story. Numbers alone can never provide a perfect solution or answer, and they will never immunize decision-makers from faltering.””
James Bovard offers a critique of industrial policy: “Politicians don’t learn from mistakes committed with other people’s money. Letting politicians pick winners is the surest recipe for shafting consumers and every unsubsidized business. Unfortunately, there will always be enough pundits who failed Econ 101 to whoop up every boneheaded intervention.”
AVC: “The most important software innovation of the last decade, which started with the Bitcoin white paper fourteen years ago, is the emergence of open-source software and decentralized protocols that are the foundation of web3. These protocols have survived recent market volatility. It is the promise of software that is not controlled by a company, but instead by an open-source community with built-in safeguards and increased transparency relative to today’s tech and financial systems, that gives us so much confidence in the future of web3. These web3 protocols are in active development for mainstream adoption and some key features are still missing. For example, blockchains as they were originally architected are public by default. This is not suitable for most applications. Imagine if your email, banking, and social data were public for everyone to see on a blockchain. Also, blockchains are slow and complex networks. Improvements to performance, scalability, and privacy are happening at the infrastructure level of the web3 technology stack. Emergent technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and rollups are starting to address these issues without compromising decentralization. These breakthroughs are still in the early stages of deployment among a small subset of developers. This is the kind of important work that happens behind the scenes without any coverage. But it is these developments that are preparing web3 for the mainstream.”
FT: “While social media currently attracts more ad dollars, with a forecast annual haul of $65bn, retail media is set to grow more than five times faster in 2022. Retailers’ ad revenues are already almost twice as large as radio and print combined, and the gap with television, which is forecast to generate $68bn in ad sales this year, is also closing swiftly, according to eMarketer…The momentum behind so-called retail media is nevertheless so great that it has the potential to usher in a new era of digital advertising, says Brian Gleason, chief revenue officer at Paris-based Criteo. First came search, he says, “which changed the way we interact with consumers”. Then came social media, which brought target audiences into clearer focus. Retail media is the “third wave”, says Gleason, a former executive at advertising group WPP.”
Maryanne Wolf: “Imperceptibly we are developing a mind-set or habit of reading in a particular way that, by and large, is based on a kind of skimming reading. Again, because of all the information we have to process in any given day. So the habit or mind-set is now so largely influenced by us reading on screens that we take that mind-set, even back to print. We can build habits of mind, a kind of reading that’s after the innermost landscape of our thinking, whether we call it a sanctuary of reading, Proust always had something amazing to say about everything. He saw the heart of reading as the place where we go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own. How do we build a habit of mind, in which we decide from the start of whatever we are reading, what is the purpose? If the purpose is my shallow email, then I will skim with no guilt at all. But if my intention or my purpose is to really understand something at ever deeper levels of its complexity or to perceive the beauty of that carefully chosen word, when we are reading for that purpose — for beauty, for understanding at the deepest level — then we have to really figure out how to use, either print out and use print, or how to ensure that we can read on any medium with the deep reading processes as our goal.”
