Russell Davies

Ten years of twitter

Asterisk*

Number something in a collection

Good title

‘On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B’

Real science

Smart words from a terrible man:

"If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is – hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies and never believe what advertising companies tell you about ‘data’ unless you can independently verify it. Physics, mathematics, and computer science are domains in which there are real experts, unlike macro-economic forecasting which satisfies neither of the necessary conditions – 1) enough structure in the information to enable good predictions, 2) conditions for good fast feedback and learning. Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people."

"If you are young, smart, and interested in politics, think very hard before studying politics / ‘political science’ / PPE at university. You will be far better off if you study maths or physics. It will be easy to move into politics later if you want to and you will have more general skills with much wider application and greater market value. PPE does not give such useful skills – indeed, it actually causes huge problems as it encourages people like Cameron and Ed Balls to ‘fool themselves’ and spread bad ideas with lots of confidence and bluffing. You can always read history books later but you won’t always be able to learn maths. If you have these general skills, then you will be much more effective than the PPE-ers you will compete against. In a few years, this will be more obvious as data science will be much more visible. A new interdisciplinary degree is urgently needed to replace PPE for those who want to go into politics. It should include the basics of modelling and involve practical exposure to people who are brilliant at managing large complex organisations."

Give Jason money

This is the most important thing. Give Jason some money. You want to live in a world where people like Jason can make a living writing on the internet. The way to get that is to give him some money. Do that first.

Then you can come back here for some views. Which is that I disagree with this:

"There are undoubtedly new blogs starting, and many more happily spinning along in various niches, but they’re not really part of the cultural conversation anymore."

It's more that they're not part of a particular cultural conversation, a particular cultural conversation which lasted a few years and was mostly people blogging about blogging. That was great, it was enormously fun and invigorating and it has mostly gone. It's been replaced by people tweeting about tweeting.

But other cultural conversations are doing just dandy. Just today I found a brilliant bit of writing on a blog I'd never seen before. A tremendous pile of inside-comedy-writing jargon. That cultural conversation seems fine.

Prototypin'

A tweet from Sam brought me to the Nine Dots Prize. It looks interesting. It asks the question; "Are digital technologies making politics impossible?"

The answer, of course, is to be provided as a 3,000 word essay and then a 'short book'. Which answers its own question. Politics are becoming impossible because huge buckets of words are deemed to be the only way to understand them.

Related: the IFG published a report yesterday (pdf, obvs) that included the words "Ministers need to embrace a new kind of conversation about policy, based on prototypes as well as submissions." *

This is good and true! (Though I'd quibble with the inclusion of "as well as submissions") but it rather begs the question; who will prototype these prototypes? They're not in the skill-set of those who normally suggest or draft policy.

Good news! Doteveryone does prototypes. We'll be pointing at a bunch of them soon. Ooh, and, look, here are some from If.

 

*Incidentally, you could probably track the increasing digital maturity of a sector by charting the decline of the phrase "not just for geeks anymore" in their press releases.

October 2016

October 2016 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

Conflict is attention

Trolls for trump

Mags at Interesting

I asked Mags to talk at Interesting but she wasn't sure we wanted to go on stage. So, Mark very kindly made this video and we showed it on the evening. Excellent stuff about creativity and failure. Thanks Mark. Thanks Mags!

Wired archive

Every now and then some event occurs and I become convinced that I once predicted that event with astonishing perspicacity. Which takes me to the Campaign or Wired archives so I can boast of my foresight. Typically I'm disappointed because the archive proves that I've misremembered something. The last time this happened though (and I can't remember what the triggering event was) I was disappointed because the archive had disappeared. Wired's had a bit of a tidy up and most of my stuff has been 'wiped'. 

For reasons of ego (and future-proofing my future prescience-proving) I've picked through the Wayback Machine, found most of them and for your convenience (who am I kidding? for my convenience) they are now presented here. Enjoy. (Enjoy?)