McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 20th 2018

• “Sponsored” by my husband: Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from. Not just writers.
• Institutional memory and reverse smuggling. Tales about how companies (fail to) capture knowledge.
• See No Evil. How do we make supply chains more transparent when they're deliberately making their constituent parts into black boxes? Slowly and deliberately.
• The bluffocracy: how Britain ended up being run by eloquent chancers. We need to start holding people to account, and to judge people on what they do rather than what they say. It's hard, but something I've been trying to do for a decade now. As the saying goes round here, "we're called do epic shit, not talk about epic shit".
• My Favorite Sayings. Programmer-focused, but good. "Sooner or later people learn the truth and figure out that the person never admits when they don't know. When this happens the person loses all credibility: no-one can tell whether the person is speaking from authority or making something up, so it isn't safe to trust anything they say. " And we should heed the "Coherent systems are inherently unstable" when we try to build governance systems that span the globe. Space for experiments and new-ways-of-doing-things to bubble up are vital.