Stellar piece on Aeon regarding bullshit:

Bullshit is much harder to detect when we want to agree with it. The first and most important step is to recognise the limits of our own cognition. We must be humble about our ability to justify our own beliefs. These are the keys to adopting a critical mindset – which is our only hope in a world so full of bullshit.

I aggressively prune my inbox, but Aeon’s mailing list is one of a handful of publications that makes the cut. You should sign-up for their mailing list.

Questions: How many of these did you hear or read? How many got in your head and made you mad or glad? How many did you assume were true or false without actually doing the work to determine if true or false? Embarrassed to say I heard many of them, raged a bit, and didn’t fact-check most.

(Via Politifact.)

The icing on the cake when I do a presentation is Q&A. Being peppered with random questions might seem problematic, but I love it. First, because it tells me what the audience heard and, second, because it allows to me fill in the gaps of the presentation.

There are a standard list of questions I get on a regular basis, and one of them is, “If you were going to found a start-up, what would it be?” My answer has been consistent for the past five years, “I don’t know how I’d do it nor how I’d make money, but I would provide a service which allows a human to determine the source of a piece of information.”

Everyone suddenly cares about this idea a lot. Facebook recently announced it’s plan to vet alleged fake news with five different independent news/fact-checking groups. These groups are:

• ABC News
• Politifact
• FactCheck
• Snopes
• The Associated Press

I remain jaw on the floor shocked how much opinion that swirls me is repackaged as facts. I’m not pointing the finger at a particular demographic; I’m talking about everyone (including myself) who says, “That insert-fact-here just feels wrong.” We are 100% entitled to our opinions. Our views are also protected. However, usage of an opinion as fact is rotting our national discourse.

Kudos to Facebook for taking action, but a better course of action is when you hear or read a fact that seems just plain off check out one of the sites above get the real facts.

p.s. There is a fact-checkers code of principles.

Solid piece from Quartz on the state of the Holacracy experiment at Zappos. I’ve never worked at Zappo’s, but it seemed to me like a healthy culture to boldly engage in different productivity and leadership experiments. However, as reported, it does not appear to be working.

Nearly a third of the company has walked to the door. I don’t know what Zappo’s annual attrition rate has been, but I guess that is higher. When you combine this with the fact that Zappos dropped off the Forbes “Best Companies to Work For” list, you have evidence of a larger systemic problem.

To me, the money quote in the piece is, “Robertson [Holacracy’s creator] says it takes five years for Holacracy to work.” There’s a short list of the larger companies using Holacracy on their wiki, but my question is two fold: what does working mean and what company has successfully done it?