FT: “Steve Brierley did not have to negotiate intellectual property rights when he quit his academic position at Cambridge university to create a start-up. But he was still glad he founded his tech company there — and could take advantage of the institution’s broader benefits. A former senior research fellow in computational mathematics, he launched Riverlane in 2016 to help correct the high level of errors made by quantum computers. Today, with 100 staff spread between Cambridge, Boston and San Francisco, he is in a good position to assess and compare the value of university links to entrepreneurs. His experience points to why a significant number of European start-up hubs are based in — or are connected to — academic centres across the continent. “The challenges are to do with scaling, engineering and implementation: how to turn ideas into technology,” explains Brierley. “I realised I would never solve this problem in academia; we needed expertise including chip designers and engineers. Being at the heart of a field where Cambridge is really one of the leading research organisations means you are exposed to so many of the top ideas.””
NYTimes: “Fareed Zakaria notes in his brilliant new book, “Age of Revolutions,” that a backlash to globalization after the 2008-09 financial crisis fed political uprisings in many Western countries, parallel to the rise of the Tea Party and the ethnonationalist takeover of the Republican Party that was happening in the United States. “These anti-globalization parties have successfully tapped into the social and economic anxiety of millions,” Zakaria writes. These narratives may be untrue or simplistic, but they are reshaping the West.” More: “You can’t reduce human well-being to a chart of G.D.P., of course, and in absolute terms, the world as a whole is still a whole lot more prosperous than it was 50 or 30 or even 10 years ago — that is what happens when you stack even shrinking incremental gains over decades. But the relative gains have indeed shrunk, particularly in the richest parts of the world, which means what might once have looked like an exhilarating, onrushing future has begun to arrive instead at decelerating speed. This isn’t a fantasy, or a nostalgic delusion; it’s just a basic description of recent economic history. And it suggests that, rather than pessimism causing slowdown, pessimism follows from slowdown. In theory, at least, the pattern may reverse, and the past few years of world-best performance in the United States do offer reasons to hope that, here at least, it may be reversing already. In the meantime, it shouldn’t be too surprising that anyone’s faith in the future has shrunk, too — and with it, the horizon of possibilities held aloft by that increasingly fragile faith.”
Arnold Kling: “The skill that you need most is skimming. The trick is that you have to do a lot of reading in order to acquire the skill of skimming. If you are reading whole books, rather than skimming them, chances are you are wasting a lot of time.”
FT: “We should therefore regard AI as an opportunity, rather than an emergency. It offers the chance to extend the “relevance, reach and value” of human expertise to more workers and rebuild the middle class. We can use AI to boost life-long learning and supplement a diminishing workforce. We can upskill and revalorise the professions that are still best performed by humans, such as nursing and teaching. And we have to find better ways to redistribute the financial gains of the AI revolution from the winners to the losers. Failure to do so will probably lead to another revolt of the “superfluous people”, only this time against the robots, rather than the Romanovs.”
WSJ: “Mary C. Murphy’s “Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations”…draws heavily on her research and experience to understand the ways in which mindsets manifest in group settings. Her book has two overarching goals: first, to highlight the potential benefits of a growth mindset for individuals and organizations; second, to explore the situations that trigger mindset shifts, with an eye toward identifying strategies that would enable us to spend more time in a growth mindset. Ms. Murphy’s premise is that teams and companies can take on mindsets of their own—“shared beliefs about intelligence, talent, and ability” that are held by members of the organization….Cultures of growth [are] marked by a growth mindset, which holds “that talent and ability can be developed with effort, persistence, good strategies, help-seeking, and support” and that “prosperity and success stem from people learning, growing, and developing in ways that move them and the company forward.””
