Maybe there's hope for old-school reporters who still use the telephone
Adam Grant, a Wharton management professor and organizational psychologist, quoted in the WSJ:
Pre-AI, what was rewarded and valued and promoted was how much information you had in your head; we’re now in an environment where information is a commodity. So the differentiating skill set or capability is: Can you recognize patterns? Can you synthesize lots of disparate pieces of information? Can you figure out what perspectives are credible and which ones aren’t?
What I don’t think AI will be able to crack anytime soon is the hard work of synthesizing (information) into a compelling framework that is memorable, that rings true with human experience, that resonates emotionally, that’s sticky, that is pithy. Maybe what that means is that human creativity is changing, and that it’s much less dependent on idea generation, and much more dependent on idea selection and elaboration as the unique human skills. …
I’ve got a hypothesis that people are becoming increasingly skeptical of written information. So I actually think that the phone and the voice is an underused technology. I’m going to run a little experiment, and people that I would normally shoot an email to with some ideas, I’m just going to cold call them. I’m not going to schedule a Zoom. But I’m just going to try calling people and bouncing some ideas off of them, and see both if what I learn is different, and also if the bond we form is different. Really simple could be really fruitful.
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
A friend shared this flier he received at his home last week. It links to a website, StopDSAUSA.com, offering similar deep thinking about politics today. For whatever reason, the author isn’t willing to put their name behind their ideas.
It’s good to know there are only two sides to choose from.
So...
I didn’t expect my mother’s death to immediately follow my retirement, but it did.
I am the executor of her estate, so her death will delay my plans to jump into writing again.
Retired
Today is my last day with the U.S. State Department.
I turned 65 this month. That’s the mandatory retirement age for foreign service officers.
I haven’t written much publicly since 2014, when I left the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and moved from Louisville, Kentucky to Washington to become a diplomat.
Now that I’m retired, I’m going to do some writing here. About what, I’m not entirely sure, although it will certainly include journalism and diplomacy.