2026-02-24

Nobody's ever ready

The Imperfectionist: Nobody's ever ready #anxiety #ai

Nothing better than a fresh newsletter edition from Oliver Burkeman to restart logging after a few weeks of intermittent logging due to work travel and Berlinale binge movie watching.

And even he has decided to address AI in his latest.

I’m not going to link to any of these contagious anxiety-spreading pieces, for the same reason I don’t go around actively sneezing in people’s faces when I catch a cold. But it’s fair to say I find the topic a little triggering. Because this basic stance toward life – the anxious attempt to scramble to a place of psychological safety, to avoid being condemned to disaster and cast into the void – goes back a long way with me. So it all feels rather personal, and important for me to say that you don’t, actually, have to live like this. It won’t make you happier. It probably won’t even aid your career. You have the option of living with vastly more creativity and calm than the anxiety-merchants would have you believe – provided you can summon the strength of mind to screen them out.

The stomach-clench of anxiety isn’t anything like that. Rather, it emerges from the feeling that reality poses a fundamental threat to your security, so that hypervigilance and constant effort will be required to forestall annihilation. It implies that it’ll be very difficult indeed to make it to safety (with the corollary that if you fail, it’ll be because you didn’t try hard enough).

The reason “you’re not ready for what’s coming next”, in other words, is that we’re never ready for what’s coming next. To quote the splendid title of a book on Jewish spirituality by Alan Lew, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. “This” being, of course, the human condition – not the latest subscription product with which OpenAI or Anthropic hope to justify their wild valuations.

Deming vs Drucker

Objectives and constraints – Surfing Complexity #management #organizations

I am also wholeheartedly in the Deming camp

Deming was vehemently opposed to management by objective. Rather, he saw an organization as a system. If you wanted to improve the output of a system, you had to study it to figure out what the limiting factor was. Only once you understood the constraints that limited your system, could you address them by changing the system.

…

I’m in Deming’s camp, but I can understand why Drucker won. Drucker’s approach is much easier to put into practice than Deming’s. Specifically, Drucker gave managers an explicit process they could follow. On the other hand, Deming…, well, here’s a quote from Deming’s book Out of the Crisis:

Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

I can see why a manager reading this might be frustrated with his exhortation to replace a specific process with “leadership”. But understanding a complex system is hard work, and there’s no process that can substitute for that. If you don’t understand the constraints that limit your system, how will you ever address them?

Ironically, I found this via a followup blog entry by the same author where he admits defeat 🙃: Poor Deming never stood a chance – Surfing Complexity

The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films

The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films - The Atlantic #attention #crisis

This article struck me especially because I am just coming off a ~25-movie binge at Berlinale. It helped that I was watching it in a movie theater, but I am still glad I retain the attention span to got me through most movies. If anything, the reason I found it hard and occasionally snoozed off in a movie was more due to fatigue than due to inattention.

Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”

I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.

The professors I spoke with didn’t blame students for their shortcomings; they focused instead on how media diets have changed. From 1997 to 2014, screen time for children under age 2 doubled. And the screen in question, once a television, is now more likely to be a tablet or a smartphone. Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. An analysis of people’s attention while working on a computer found that they now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004. “I can imagine that if your body and your psychology are not trained for the duration of a feature-length film, it will just feel excruciatingly long,” USC’s Lippit said. (He also hypothesized that, because every movie is available on demand, students feel that they can always rewatch should they miss something—even if they rarely take advantage of that option.)