New Phaistos

What Evolution Can Teach Us About Civilizational Strength Diversity has always been a survival strategy. Farmers know that planting a variety of crops helps protect against total failure—if one fails, others might thrive. Human cultures work the same way, acting as "experiments" in how to live and adapt to different environments. When a culture’s practices succeed, they persist; when they fail, they fade. This diversity has historically helped humanity stay resilient in the face of challenges. However, the past two centuries have seen a shift. With globalization, mass communication, and rapid travel, cultures have begun to converge. We eat similar foods, follow similar routines, and even teach similar ideas at universities worldwide. Of course still some differences such as disposition towards time and family remain and will not change but the edges of our cultures have been smoothed out. This shared culture has benefits: for starters, if you fly to a city in a new country yo...

Specialization vs Generalization If you glance through tech job vacancies today, one trend quickly stands out: a demand for multi-disciplinary thinkers. From internships to research and project management, job ads constantly request applicants that have dipped in more than one field. How can this skill be in demand in a world of niches and hyper-specialization? An easy answer would be the very nature of the knowledge economy. People working on technology need to be able to at least communicate on a technical level with their peers. A team designing a new smartphone for example would need to bring in battery experts, User Interface designers, a team for antenna design and so on. Of course these experts would benefit from a working knowledge in all fields. Furthermore, employees with multiple skills are more flexible with regards to deployment. In case a project loses some steam, it is always possible to reassign them somewhere else and still expect efficiency. Even if such workers do no...

What is information? As a child of the 90's, my fascination with technology and science started from a very young age. We were told we were entering the information age, and all of its aspects, including the free flow of information, the aesthetic (including the matrix movies) and the video games of course was appealing to me. The thing however that made me follow this path professionally is finding out what information *really* is. The engineer that shone the light of progress towards this path was none other than Claude Shannon. Shannon, among other things, set out to put a number on how much "information" is contained in a message and how efficiently we could transmit it without losing meaning. In simple terms, for Shannon information is the amount of “surprise” or unpredictability contained in a message; the more surprising or random the message, the more information it contains. The simplest case is flipping a coin: there’s a 50% chance it’ll land on heads or tails, ...

Evaluation systems It's often being said that people do not leave bad jobs, but bad managers. But this is only partly true: people also leave jobs with poor future prospects. Consequently a company that wants to retain its talent has to have an effective way to reward high performers and evaluate its staff, something even more important to tech companies where everything is constantly shifting and progressing. But evaluations always rely on the evaluators; the managers. Where people come, results tend always to include biases and noise. The manager might be playing favourites, not be fully aware of the specific field of each employee, have different notions of performance or objective or could also be prone to having a bad (or good) day. Exactly because this tendency to bias and noise is a well known problem, companies have enlisted the help of, well, more noise and bias in the form of more than one evaluators. Most companies' performance evaluation policy includes multiple eva...