Six Links That Make You Think #799

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Just Evil Enough, Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see.”

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

Research Integrity Is A Clown Car Which Continually Spills Forth A Truly Surprising Quantity Of Sad, Honking, Incompetent Clowns – James Heathers – James Claims. “This gets my award for the least ambiguous headline of 2025. And that’s good, because it’s about the ambiguous world of scientific research. James Heathers takes us through a year of trying to understand how a paper claiming that apple cider vinegar beat Ozempic for weight loss could ever have been published. It’s… a lot. And explains why big claims get published, and it’s too exhausting to challenge them.” (Alistair for Hugh). “What If NIH Had Been 40% Smaller?” – Stuart Buck – The Good Science Project . “It’s easy to complain about bloat, and in the face of austerity, cut deeply. It’s more worrying when we don’t know what we’re cutting. The National Institute of Health is undergoing just such an amputation – so a team of researchers decided to look at what the world would have been like if this monumental health institution had been 40% smaller all along. Spoiler: Not good. 12% of modern drugs, and that’s very likely an undercounting of the impact. I loved this piece in part because it does a great job of what so many progressives fail to accomplish: Clearly stating the benefits of something, and painting a picture of what could be, rather than complaining about the erosion of existing institutions.” (Alistair for Mitch). Day 1: The Waterloo Thesis – Jesse Rodgers – Waterloo Builders . “I remember when I was deciding what university to go to Waterloo was interesting because of its coop program: students spent about as much time working in industry as they did in class. Waterloo Grads have been incredibly successful, and what’s strange is that every university isn’t run like this.” (Hugh for Alistair). Silicon Valley’s Latest Argument Against Regulating Ai: That Would Literally Be The Antichrist – Tina Nguyen – The Verge . “Peter Thiel thinks we should worry about the antichrist, aka global coordination on regulating problems globally.” (Hugh for Mitch). The Dawn Of The Post-Literate Society – James Marriott – Culture Capital . “I wrote a rant this week about brain rot and how to push it off by reading books. On LinkedIn, Tom Asacker pushed to this article. It makes a sharp case that we’re sliding into a post-literate world… one where the long, slow work of reading is giving way to video, memes and microcontent as our default language. It’s not just that people read less, it’s that text itself is being dethroned as the scaffolding of civic life, debate and culture (yuck!). The argument is unsettling, because it forces us to ask whether we’re trading depth for spectacle, or if we’re simply evolving into a different kind of communicative species (which I hope we’re not). My take: we won’t stop reading, but it may become the privilege of a shrinking minority while the rest of culture runs on images and vibes. The challenge (and maybe the opportunity) is to figure out how to preserve substance in a world optimized for speed. This piece is worth your time.” (Mitch for Alistair). AI Minister Denies That Canada Needs To ‘Catch Up’ With Global Industry – Power & Politics – CBC News – YouTube . “I normally don’t like to share local or national stories. I much prefer to look at trends driven at a global scale. But I know how much Hugh likes thinking about the world in the context of the country we both live in. Also, we both spent quite a bit of time the other week at the All In AI conference that was held in Montreal. The energy of the 6,000+ attendees and the shift away from Canada thinking about how to benefit from AI as it grows and scales out of the United States and looks for more sovereign strategies was breathtaking. Now our newly minted Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon, who was on hand at the event, is deploying multiple strategies to ensure that Canada doesn’t simply go-along in the wake of the United States’ massive investments, but builds on its own and stands on its own. Canada’s new ‘AI sprint’ is being framed as a 30-day race to update the national strategy, but the bigger story is whether speed can make up for scale. Minister Solomon is right to point out that Canada helped invent AI, with Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Richard Sutton laying the groundwork, and he’s not wrong to highlight that we still have world-class researchers, a thriving ecosystem of 2,500+ companies, and one of the four countries with a frontier LLM player. The issue isn’t invention, it’s retention… keeping the IP, the talent and the capital here when other nations are spending billions more. The sprint is smart politics: it signals urgency, promises protections around privacy and trust, and leans into the language of ‘AI for everyone.’ But the challenge is structural. Brain drain, lack of compute power, slow commercialization and adoption rates that lag peers won’t be solved by thirty days of task-forcing. Canada doesn’t need to prove it can lead in ideas (it already has), but whether we can build the scaffolding to scale those ideas into durable industries is the real test. This conversation is worth watching closely.” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on X, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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