The study does not appear to be longitudinal, so what it is showing is association, not causality. It could actually be foreboding a kind of "rich get richer, poor get poorer" spiral as the "cognitively advantaged" offload less, dampening the (undemonstrated) impact on their critical thinking skills.
Beautiful post, which I had not seen. Many thanks for (re-)posting. I often use the "seems critical now" vs "will be important in the future" test and marvel at how crazy different these are. As I get older, I seem to be getting better at telling the difference. The consequence of this attitude is that you have to get used to taking a lot of immediate flack for ignoring transitory bullshit.
I love the reference to children and their helpfulness in bullshit-shedding. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes, from a somewhat sick bird who nonetheless really got the value of both time with children and avoiding bullshit:
"A man's maturity consists in his finding, once again, the seriousness that he had as a child at play" -Friedrich Nietzsche
+1
And even today, regardless of software stack, tooling, etc the problem of silo-ed development and limited understanding of the big picture in large systems is still very much alive. Getting shared understanding of the ideas embodied in complex systems with lots of little teams is still a challenge and always will be.
I agree with the main point here, but one thing that has always puzzled me is how to think about what might be called deep collaborative work. Most meetings, especially the status-y kind, are manifestly not "deep" but some of the most intense work that I have ever done has been with one or a small handful of collaborators.
I personally have never found collaborative work all that deep. At least not the kind that necessitates constant communications. The interruptions are simply too much for me. I can never achieve the flow state I like. It also makes me try and come up with solutions during the communications. Most of the time I have to step away and do something else with difficult problems - let the background processor work. That is just likely my style - not for everybody.
I wonder if this relates to how comfortable people are with silence? Sometimes one or the other person can feel anxious in the presence of silence because it does not fit the profile of "work being done".
People often dismiss pure thought as effort. But when you think about it that is all programming really is. I worked with a person that started his programming career using cards. Even though his current job provided him a nice editor and build system he would write his program and simply execute in his head for the longest time before even attempting to compile it. He would then make a couple of changes and he was done.
Collaboration is definitely deep work. I think the key is whether the meeting is focused on the work or accessory to it. Keeping a manager updated is annoying because its not real work, its just someone checking up on you.
This is a hard. Books that made me a better thinker have to be the hard ones / ones that made me change. Top two would be
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant.
Supposedly more accessible version of Critique of Pure Reason but still very hard and mind-bending for me at least. Not just philosophy was easier after wrestling with this content.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Tomas Kuhn.
Made me self-aware about what scientific thinking actually is.
If you already know all of the math in Part I, great, but if you don't you need to study it carefully if you want to understand what is going on. If you just want to code, there are shorter paths, but if you really want to understand the theory, you need to master the Linear Algebra and Probability material in the first part of that book. Parts II and III give a solid foundation in DL itself.
I think you're kind of missing the point. The author was just pointing out that lots of personal health-related info was being recorded in the calls. When you know a call is being recorded it is kind to steer the conversation away from content that the person you are talking to may not want broadly shared. Prospects may be told that the calls are being recorded but they may not realize the implications of that.
Note the author updated his post in response to my comment. It originally said "protected health information", which is what I was reacting to. PHI is a very specific thing in US law, and increased legal exposure when handling PHI only applies to very specific entities.
The reason I commented is because there is a ton of misunderstanding in the real world that confuses "Joe isn't on the call today because he's got COVID" with the legal responsibilities that, say, your doctor has when sending you your COVID results.
To be honest, I think there is a lot of unnecessary concern over health information due to this misunderstanding. Obviously there is a ton of information that people prefer to keep private, but in those cases, they keep it private, or would at least tell you not to tell anyone. Due to the misunderstanding about PHI, I think people mistakenly confuse any banal health information as inherently requiring a higher level of protection/discretion, and this isn't really true. Frankly, there is a ton of other info that people probably want to keep more private than whether or not they had COVID (these days, who hasn't?) or whether someone is pregnant (usually makes itself self-evident in any case).
