What We're Reading: Centroly Weekly Digest 2

Hope you're having a good week, and a great summer for some of you! Here are a few links our Centroly users added that got me thinking. Do any of these ideas speak to you?

Weekly Highlights

Single Decisive Reason: Decision-making for fast-scaling startups

When Reid was considering a trip to China, he could think of a few good reasons to go. But he couldn't think of 1 single great reason. Reid sensed the risk of blended reasoning — making his decision with multiple justifications. He decided against the trip to China. Why are blended reasons so dangerous? Because weak reasons rarely build on each other — but when they're numerous, they appear compelling. To put it another way: fuzzy inputs generate fuzzy outputs.

Exact Questions to Ask Your Users (and Why)

“For us in Draftsend, instead of asking, ‘What's your biggest problem with sharing and creating documents,’ we could've said, ‘What's your biggest problem when you're sharing documents and adding audio?’ It would have completely skewed the results. We would have missed the actual problem. We’d never have built FYI. So it's important to look at your survey after you've written it and make sure that you're not introducing any bias with the questions that you ask,” she said.

Generative Art 101: The Surprising Connection Between Math, Art and Nature

Generative art is performed by mathematical algorithms that were written by the artist. And the role of the artist is to create an autonomous system and define algorithms according to which, the Art is being created... In generative art — the beauty lies in building a system, a third force that dominates the Artist and the work itself. The artist is “painting” the formula according to which a detail extends to numerous details and transforms into a completed piece of work. Unique characteristics of a piece are written in an algorithm.

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales wanted to save journalism. He didn't

Some of WikiTribune’s former journalists believe that problems ran deeper than that – starting with the project’s initial proposition of repurposing the wiki model for journalism...  Wales wanted to rescue journalism, but, to his team, it was not clear whether he understood journalism in the first place. “Jimmy’s frame of reference about journalism is that it’s easy, it’s just a nice turn of phrase,” Peter Bale says. “That comes from believing that the wiki-way means you can do anything.”

System Boundaries: The Focus of Design

There are a lot of opinions about software design out there, and a lot of disagreement about which are any good. But a significant problem with a lot of this discourse is that either people ignore context (and argue fruitlessly), or they chalk all disagreement up to some undefined nebulous “context” that explains everything. This is, of course, a useless explanation... Whether we’re designing something on a system boundary, or not, is one of those things in that nebulous “context.”

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