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Macbook Air's avatar

Right on time and on the nail. Excellent post. Thank you.

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James C's avatar

Very interesting entry. One of those that will stay with me. Two thoughts:

1. The rise of "lines to take" for all manner of public facing entities (e.g. politicians) is surely in part a manifestation of the rise of data-driven/modelled decision making - to the extent the lines are formulated based on models of how messaging will be received. Maybe this leads to a similar effect as with Marvel films (i.e. perfectly satisfactory, but intentionally not introducing new or risky ideas), but in more obviously consequential terrain for wider society.

2. There are likely to be interesting second-order problems of relying on models to do our thinking for us e.g. a) we may become worse at making decisions where we can't form a useful model (because e.g. the situation is in some way unique or contains too many unknown or unidentified variables to be sufficiently tractable for formal modelling), or b) recognising when the model we're relying on is either simply wrong or being used wrongly (especially if we are partly using a model-driven approach to a skip debating what assumptions should go into it).

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