Weekend Reading
Writing worth reading - 11th/12th March 2023
Welcome to Broken Britain 2023 and a new ‘Winter of Discontent’ by Matthew Gwyther
“There is precious little ‘Dunkirk spirit’ about the place. After the knockabout comedy of Boris Johnson’s premiership, we had a brief and weird interlude of Liz Truss and her chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, which alarmed financial markets so much the pound and bond markets nosedived. The cost of that excursion has been estimated at 30 billion pounds. With Rishi Sunak now in charge, a fresh round of Conservative fumbling has begun ...”
The Difference Between Speaking and Thinking by Matteo Wong
“But then the program says something completely absurd—that there are 12 letters in nineteen or that sailfish are mammals—and the veil drops. Although ChatGPT can generate fluent and sometimes elegant prose, easily passing the Turing-test benchmark that has haunted the field of AI for more than 70 years, it can also seem incredibly dumb, even dangerous. It gets math wrong, fails to give the most basic cooking instructions, and displays shocking biases …”
McKinsey’s Missteps Point to an Industry-Wide Mess by Adrian Wooldridge
“The relationship between consultants and clients has always been open to abuse. Clients never know exactly what they want from consultants. That is inevitable when you are transferring knowledge. Success is always a matter of the client’s ability to learn as well as the consultant’s ability to teach. That creates an excuse for blame-shifting …”
Revisiting Hitler’s Final Days in the Bunker” by Alex Ross
“The most curious thing about ‘The Hitler Book’ is that it was intended for a single reader: Joseph Stalin. The Soviet leader had ordered the N.K.V.D. to gather as much information as it could about Hitler’s last days, partly in order to make sure that the Führer was actually dead, although Stalin was generally fascinated by his most powerful and ruthless rival. “The Hitler Book” allowed Stalin to enjoy his own private staging of the Untergang—a lavishly detailed chronicle of Hitler’s psychological implosion, under the pressure of the invincible Red Army …”
Upcoming meals with 9others
Thursday 23rd March — Berlin — details and signup here.
Wednesday 29th March — London — details and signup here.
Tuesday 18th April — Manchester — details and signup here.
Wednesday 26th April — London — details and signup here.
Please book in & share with good people you know in the above cities.