vaughn tan

@vt

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just ran a board workshop for a multinational insurance co on using scenarios for strategy currently have so many thoughts on how the insurance business understands the difference between uncertainty and risk (and also on how scenarios can be used in different ways for taking concrete nearterm strategy action)

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organisation (the act of doing things together) is one of the foundational technologies we've developed as humans, and it is the basis for us developing more obvious technologies (like cooking, printing, internal combustion engines, mobile phones, machine learning etc)

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early morning test of a commute route in /singapore

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a blob of playdoh and birdseed or whatever

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i realised a few days ago that thinking of a single place as permanent home is non-viable (i want it but it isn't viable economically). instead, it is more like a location probability cloud with changing densities over different places. #amorphousness in time and space

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pizza is a thing. even bad pizza is edible, but really great pizza is Excellent. it's essential to have a clear idea of what you _personally_ like (and dislike) about pizza, so that you are not led astray by the increasingly low-signal food writing vortex. but keeping an open mind about the definition of "great" is essential too, because this allows re-baselining to happen. https://vaughntan.org/pizza-tradeoffs

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just after sunrise, destroyed by sleep debt compounded with jetlag, i went for the best bcm i've had on the island — i've been a regular whenever back home for nearly 20 years. still assiduously prepped, precisely cooked, precisely sauced, completely unpretentious, an exemplar of singapore's noodle vernacular: https://hydrationisourhighestpriority.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-noodle-vernacular.html (from 2015)

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Philosopher Alva Noe's latest essay for Aeon is on a topic I've been working on for the last few years: meaningmaking, why it is so fundamentally and uniquely human, and why it matters for how we think about AI systems. Very glad a philosopher of his standing is injecting this idea into the discourse on AI and really hope it sticks. In the essays linked in this article, I unpack what meaningmaking is, and why it is such a crucial lens for thinking about AI, the future of work, and human-ness: https://uncertaintymindset.substack.com/p/meaningmaking-nk

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inadvertently in AMS for a day, an opportunity to float about the inner canals on an electric tender. is this what it means to touch grass.

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at europe's largest office furniture and equipment fair — the future of work appears to be pastel, earth-toned, and diaphanous

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once more at catalans, the democratic beach

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nauthólsvik 4°C in the water

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i'm in reykjavik teaching a course on competitive strategy and it is frankly appalling how often strategic frameworks and strategic planning are mistaken for strategy 🫠

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licorice pieces in milk chocolate. revelatory. this may also be relevant to /candy

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it's been a long time since I've seen those old skool giant flat suitcases but here at keflavik they are abundant

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I suppose this is practical philosophy — the consequences of thinking more clearly. A very old friend from college pinged me last week. In her line of work, she helps people deal with uncertainties around what to do and what is valuable. Her question is (I’m paraphrasing): When people do cost/benefit analyses or expected value analyses to decide what to do in situations where they don’t know what will happen, they are treating the situation as formally risky when it may not be. What's your recommendation? Other than re-labeling the word "risk," what's the alternative course of action? It’s an important question, because so many real-world situations are unknown in uncertain ways, not formally risky ways. I wrote about the answer here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-do-uncertainty-thats-risk-vaughn-tan-z3mcc/

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