Antonym "Ignore This" Edition

Six minutes of critical ignoring, platitudinous cant and dogfooding

Nov 20, 2022

Image: Genuine reader reaction after reading this edition of Antonym

Dear Reader

This week Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11 years for her impression of Steve Jobs without actual technology to back it up. And for CEO-ing-while-female. I’m not the first to note that other, more male, hustle-culture icons are walking around rich and free despite illegal or illegal-adjacent activities include that fella who started Uber, and the one that Jared Leto played in Anne Hathaway’s brilliant We Crashed series.

We’ll have to see what happens to latest Wunder-kind–of–dodgy Sam Bankman Fried after he misplaced $8BN of cryptocurrency as his company FTX collapsed.

This week we have the following items for your perusal:

We need to ignore more stuff.

Ignorance might be a choice, sometimes. An intentional and smart choice, according to Sam Wiseman and his coauthors of a paper about “Critical Ignoring As A Core Competence”, which you can read and download as a PDF or EPUB document if you’re interested in the concept.

Sam Wineburg @samwineburg

In an age of information overabundance, critical ignoring is as important as critical thinking.

There’s also a short, early draft of an article about the idea on The Conversation.

In his amazing book about the history of writing, The Golden Thread, Ewan Clayton says “every generation has to rethink what it means to be literate in their own times." Learning to filter and ignore things is likely to be part of ours.

Thomas Cromwell’s advice on unwanted sales emails

One thing I really do need to learn to ignore, is nuisance sales emails. I’ve asked Antonym Agony Aunt Thomas Cromwell* for his advice:

* An AI version of TC, on Character.AI.

Cant-watch: When LinkedIn header typography goes bad

What a confusing bit of platitudinous cant we have here from a LinkedIn profile header image:

There might be genius buried in this LinkedIn profile image, because I haven’t been able to get the layers of ambiguity and contradiction out of my mind since I saw it… The curly brackets, the dual layered lines, the crossing out of words to make meaning and unmenaing that folds in on itself, the mix of sizes and colours.

Talking and writing about: uncertainty and experiments

Thank you to everyone who came along to my webinar talk about Brilliant Noise’s work around our Test–Learn–Lead™ programmes for brands like Nike, BMW and Asahi Beers.

Here’s a gif teaser of the slides. I hope a video version will be along soon, but in the meantime there’s also an article I’ve written to go with it on the Brilliant Noise blog.

Word of the week dogfooding

Two leaked memos from a senior executive in the team building the Horizon World platform (for all intents, Facebook/Meta's Metaverse) make for interesting reading.

The best thing – if by best you mean “weird language”, and I do mean that – from the memo is the idea of "dogfooding dashboards", presumably meaning representations of data showing whether anyone working on the metaverse is actually using it. The answer given by those oddly-named dashboards is "no" says The Verge:

A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

According to Techopedia, "use of the term dogfooding is often traced back to Microsoft manager Paul Maritz, who, in 1988, used it to challenge Microsoft's internal employees to use the company's products."

So now you know about that word, go and bury it forever and never use it in real life. Thank you.

Reading… The School For Good Mothers

In Jessamine Chan’s The School For Good Mothers a single-mother in a moment of sleep-deprived confusion leaves her baby alone for a couple of hours and is arrested and sentenced to a year of hard learning to earn the right back to get her child back. I found the first section of the book slow, but the character – frank, flawed and bemused – pulled me in and kept me going until the story arrives at the school of the title we’re in a strange prison/asylum/dystopian story that raises questions about power, parenthood and love. It’s dystopian near-future speculative fiction, but like Margaret Atwood, so very believable and rooted in the present.

It was a good companion read – and perhaps respite – from Ducks, Newburyport (still haven’t finished it) which is in part about how wise it is to choose to be a parent in the first place.

: : In news eerily reminiscent of the book: Mom Handcuffed, Jailed for 8-Year-Old Son Walking Half a Mile

: : And pour encourager nos autres: - How to Get Published: A Book’s Journey From ‘Very Messy’ Draft to Best Seller about how the book got written.

Almost seven years after Chan opened a blank Word document and started typing, “The School for Good Mothers” was published.

Watching…

MIKE (Disney+)

A pacy series about the life of Mike Tyson that is incredibly touching and brutally vivid about the violence — the slow-motion knockout punches are a triumph of special effects (I hope).

Not being a boxing fan, I had the received image that Tyson and his manager were intentionally cultivating – he was “a beast, a monster” – but the story of his youth and rise are touching and tragic. (Looking up the series details to write this I see that the team behind one of my all–time favourite films. I, Tonya is behind MIKE – that makes sense…) And Trevante Rhodes as adult Mike Tyson is incredible in every way.

The Peripheral (Prime Video)

The week’s wait between episodes has now become painful for me. This is the most beautifully produced sci-fi I’ve seen – the photography, effects and costumes are as carefully crafted as the story. I implore you to watch it.

I lived it: AI portrait app thinks I’m turning into John Peel

Send Vana eight pictures of you and their app will have fun remixing you into different styles. Apparently my face is converging with the late John Peel’s.

There are worse fates, I suppose…

Last links, please:

Meanwhile, Brexit turns out to have been really economical damaging, reports The Financial Times. If 52% of voters had suppressed their disdain for experts, we’d all be a bit better off today:

The Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent fiscal watchdog, on Thursday said the latest evidence showed that Brexit had had “a significant adverse effect on UK trade”, cutting trade volumes and relationships between British and EU companies

And finally, a reminder that lotteries are "a tax on stupidity”:

That’s the funny thing about lotteries. Even though the likelihood of ever winning is incredibly low — just one in 292.2 million this week — it’s fun to dream about what one might do with the money. (By comparison, National Geographic has estimated the odds of being killed by a shark at 1 in 3.7 million. You’re even more likely to be killed by a hornet, wasp or bee, according to the National Safety Council, which in the United States in 2020 put those chances at 1 in just 57,825.) (NYT)

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed, a like, a share or a comment are all very welcome.

Thank you for reading,

Antony

Antonym