Kickoff for September 23, 2024
Even with the rush and stress and general madness that comes with the process of moving between cities, I was able to pull together an edition of The Monday Kickoff. See how much I care? But what I wrote last week about publishing being a bit sporadic over the next few weeks still applies.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The truth behind all those former gifted kid memes — Wherein Constance Grady explores the challenges and pains of children labelled as gifted in school, and how that label can mess them up in their adult lives.
From the article:
The research suggests that the gifted label comes with some big downsides. The pressure can be enormous, and the skills and values you’re taught to internalize may not serve you well in the real world.
Playing With Guns (and Phones) — Wherein Nadia Asparouhova examines the good (yes, there is some) and the bad (yes, there is a lot of it) of technology, our relationships with it, and how technology is viewed by the people using it and by those creating it.
From the article:
One of the key reasons why tech people don’t talk about phone addiction in public is because they have soured on, and are sensitive to, critiques of their industry from outsiders. And they are right to be wary of opening the floodgates.
Think Better — Wherein Mike Loukides discusses why we shouldn't outsource or offload our thinking to generative AI systems, and instead use them as the tools they were intended to be and not some divine source of knowledge and insight.
From the article:
AI is good—very good—at what it does. And it does a lot of things well. But we humans can’t forget that it’s our role to think. It’s our role to want, to synthesize, to come up with new ideas. It’s up to us to learn, to become fluent in the technologies we’re working with—and we can’t delegate that fluency to generative AI if we want to generate new ideas.
Making ‘Food Out Of Thin Air’ — Wherein we learn about a startup in Finland creating a novel protein out of fermented bacteria, the potential of that to help alleviate the world's food woes, and the opposition (from both consumers and governments) it and similar startups around the world are facing.
From the article:
The product’s success will be essential to the long-term future of the business, but even if it fails, the company’s achievements to date are significant. Solar Foods has designed a new way to farm proteins that decouples food production from the need for vast areas of land.
One Man’s Quest to Restore the First-Ever Air Force One — Wherein we learn a bit about the history of the first true presidential airplane, how it came into the possession of a crop duster named Mel Christler, and the efforts that have been made over the last few decades to try to bring the plane back to its former glory.
From the article:
Columbine II was in a sorry state when he and lead mechanic Brian Miklos arrived in 2014 to look at the plane. The plane’s aluminum paneling was totally oxidized. Engine hoses and gaskets had corroded to dust. And the fuselage was infested with rodents, birds, and scorpions.
What Kant can teach us about work: on the problem with jobs — Wherein Tyler Re examines what good and bad jobs are, and how the thoughts of the 18th German philosopher can help up define what work is and what it means to us.
From the article:
Take a look at some of the more prominent theories of good jobs and you will be hard pressed to find any reference to purposiveness. That is because the modern organisation of work is so thoroughly structured by this division of labour into purposive planning by management on the one hand, and brute execution by workers on the other, that it is often taken for granted.