"mind" entries

Four short links: 26 January 2016

Four short links: 26 January 2016

Inequality, Conversational Commerce, Minsky Lectures, and Trust vs Transparency

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 26, 2016
  1. What Paul Graham is Missing About Inequality (Tim O’Reilly) — When a startup doesn’t have an underlying business model that will eventually produce real revenues and profits, and the only way for its founders to get rich is to sell to another company or to investors, you have to ask yourself whether that startup is really just a financial instrument, not that dissimilar to the CDOs of the 2008 financial crisis — a way of extracting value from the economy without actually creating it.
  2. 2016 The Year of Conversational Commerce (Chris Messina) — I really hope that these conversations with companies are better than the state-of-the-art delights of “press 5 to replay” phone hell.
  3. Society of Mind (MIT) — Marvin Minsky’s course, with lectures.
  4. Trust vs Transparency (PDF) — explanation facilities
    can potentially drop both a user’s confidence and make the process of search more stressful.     Aka “few takers for sausage factory tours.” (via ACM Queue)