Well done. This is precisely what the future will look like. I’ve hacked together my own version of this using N8N whereby I feed in tasks via text or photo through telegram and it outputs a to do list. At some point I’ll link it to my personal wiki and then have it action tasks. This was just a fun project, but one design decision is to keep third party services away from commercially sensitive emails.
Nice. I can see a version of this working for ever more niche areas. Curated reading lists for areas of interest. At which point a curated list of curated lists becomes viable!
Not enough is understood about the replication crisis in the social sciences. Or indeed in the hard sciences. I do wonder whether this is something that AI will rectify.
Thank you. This was well-written and made a point I think I needed to see set out in this form.
> We cannot go through our days questioning everything all the time if we want to remain functional, some things we will have to take for granted.
On reading this, it struck me how much of the world we engage with on these terms. And how much of the information soup we live in seems designed to persuade us of things being just so.
There’s an alternative theory that cities need to be bit chaotic:
“The Uses of Disorder analyzes human development at the personal and collective level in wealthy cities, presenting the thesis that such cities are excessively ordered and thereby enable residents to avoid personal growth or change. Instead of relying on prescriptive plans and rigid self-conceptions, Sennett argues, people should remain open to difference and disorder while city life ought to be more disorderly and decentralized.”
Some brand name not-for-profits pay surprisingly high salaries to their senior executives, some in the range of USD1M/year. It’s led me to believe that whilst not-for-“profit” in the technical definition of the meaning, they are certainly run as “for-the-benefit” of their management.
There are many which do not play this game - apparently not Kiva - and seem truer to their charitable purposes. Some will say: does it logically matter - if higher salaries win improved achievement of charitable purpose? The answer then is why not structure as a business rather than not-for-profit?
Edit [additional point]: microfinance is a high cost, high risk business. Organisations at the sharp end of loan management need to charge interest rates which cover costs, including defaults, currency hedging etc. I find that fair enough.
What irks me is a management hiding behind a not-for-profit status to enrich themselves without taking risk.
My experience is that I sort of ran out of energy for the true start-up experience once the children arrived. My priorities also shifted: I wanted to spend time with my family not wrestle some alligator that had small chances of success. The upside though is that I didn’t take investor money and I’ve ended up with a small bootstrapped business that actually serves my objectives quite well.