This is the first installment of an experimental storytelling and time-capsule project, as advertised.

We unpack memories from old e-mails, discuss Matt’s memory of living quarters, his first job in Mexico, the success, impact, lessons learned, and advice.

Host: Sam Panini

Guest: Matt Harbison

produced by Superversive

This is an AI-generated episode summarizing an essay on the history, principles, and value of inverting the common org chart into a network tree.

Stop ignoring broken stairs. It doesn't work.

Coined in 2012, the metaphor "broken stair" or “missing stair” is used to describe a person within a social group or organization who is known to be problematic, untrustworthy, or harmful, but whose behavior is tolerated or ignored by the group.

Instead of addressing the person's behavior directly, the group works around them, often warning newcomers discreetly about the individual rather than taking steps to remove or correct the issue.

Back in ancient times, business news media and LinkedIn melted down when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was ousted from the company the week of Thanksgiving. Supposedly, he was fired due to concerns about his lack of candor and transparency. Then, Microsoft swooped in to salvage the situation and it was all conveniently memoryholed.

The latest demo of multimodal ChatGPT featured a voice which sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. Altman has said that the movie Her, which features Johansson’a voice as a virtual assistant, is his “favorite movie”.

After the event, he seemed aware of the similarities, tweeting the word "her".

Now, ScarJo is sharing her side of the story. OpenAI dropped the sultry voice.

What it demonstrates is Altman’s lack of candor and transparency. Again.

I think Sam Altman is a broken stair, and now you do, too.

As they say, fish rot from the head.

Engaging with OpenAI, paying a subscription for ChatGPT, or using its APIs to wrap a business around demonstrates tolerance for a missing stair.

Imagine Braveheart is your favorite movie, but you don’t know what happened to William Wallace.

Imagine Good Will Hunting is your favorite movie, but you don’t know who stole who’s line.

Imagine The Usual Suspects is your favorite movie, but you don’t know who is Keyser Soze.

Imagine The Sixth Sense is your favorite movie, but you don’t know what happened to Bruce Willis’ character.

Now, imagine you’re as mendacious as Sam Altman, and didn’t watch Her all the way until the end.

If you did, you’d fix the broken stair.

Ezra Klein podcast referenced below.

Spotify:

Apple:

Superversive blog: https://www.superversive.co/blog/it-business-analyst

Last year, Noah Smith wrote:

“The combination of anonymity and virality have driven the cost of Big Lies to zero, and we’re just starting to discover what that means for human society.

“And we may just be getting started — GPTs and other LLMs have amazing conversational ability and zero understanding of the difference between truth and fiction.

“In the wrong hands — or even in the right hands! — AI thus has the potential to be a God of Lies, spamming our already hopelessly contaminated information ecosystem with plausible-sounding falsehoods.”

Whether the tools are compared to hammers, guns, or nuclear weapons, the challenge is with humans, ambition, and errors in judgement.

I think the rise of botshit will make “proof of humanity” more of a thing.

Once we drive through “uncanny valley” one too many times, we end up re-sensitizing ourselves to inauthenticity.

Noah Smith:

Superversive blog: https://www.superversive.co/blog/price-of-quality

Douglas Rushkoff: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff

Most people have been conditioned to believe they aren't that creative.

As a result, plagiarism-as-a-service has become widely accepted.

Our educational system promotes conformity, and critical-thinking is usually seen as a bug, not a feature.

This is why most people are lurking, liking, and resharing on social media platforms instead of creating “content.”

Unfortunately, the “magic” must be appropriated from others, cuz most people have internalized that they aren’t good enough to apply their own creativity or tell stories.

The large language models are pattern synthesis tools and emulate existing codes produced by humans.

I’d like to encourage originality, because the patterns on the wall are of plausibly boring copies at scale.

Zig when they think you’ll zag.

Be implausible.

Lutz Finger: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lutzfinger/2023/08/18/is-openai-going-bankrupt-no-but-ai-models-dont-create-moats/?sh=b9aecc5e223d

Active Data Product Governance: https://www.superversive.co/blog/blog-post-title-one-akk9x

Danilo Campos: https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous

Sam McAfee: https://mailchi.mp/startuppatterns.com/startup-patterns-updateinvesting-in-your-teams-during-challenging-times-13680596

Trained Synthesizers: https://www.superversive.co/blog/index-idea-for-license

Crystallized Social Relations: https://www.superversive.co/blog/crystallized-social-relations

I’ve been saying for several months that, if not broken, the Product Management function is deeply fractured.

This date point from Payscale is the first quantity evidence to validate my hypothesis.

The culture, mental models, and frameworks of modern, digital, and cloud-based product developed and matured from 2010 to 2022.

The ecosystem of VC-backed start-ups were the seedbed for so much talent, ways of working, and mindsets.

The objective of those business models was to hack growth of users, attention, and monetize via a liquidity event.

because of macroeconomic factors, optimizing for attention and not cashflow is no longer viable.

This is a structural and systemic challenge, and even CPOs are vulnerable, attached to sunk cost, with high egos, and honed motivated reasoning to deny anything is even wrong.

Product managers who can make sense of this shift feel it in their bones and that’s why they want out.

Professionals who over-index in empathy, curiosity, and systems-thinking are running head-first into authoritarian, hierarchical, and unfeeling brick-walls.

This vibe isn't just PdM, it's also endemic to Sales and Marketing.

I think it's a reflection of the last 10 years of career development which occurred during a financially aberrant period of history, optimizing culture, mental models, and frameworks for stated preference (i.e. attention) rather than revealed preference (i.e. cashflow).

Between the polycrisis, the global becoming personal, and a dearth of critical-thinking, there's a lack of sense-making and vision, which is what PdM is supposed to be tasked with.

What does this mean if you’re in product, want in, or want out?

It will get worse, before it gets better.

links:

Payscale: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/14/the-jobs-people-most-want-to-quit-one-pays-144000-dollars-a-year.html