Short Takes #35: What We Didn't Know How To Ask
Anne-Laure Le Cunff | We Need Abduction for New Ideas | Open Tabs | Elsewhen
The most important discoveries are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that delivers only what is asked for, we will lose the capacity to discover what we didn’t know to ask.
| Anne-Laure Le Cunff
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We Need Abduction For New Ideas
One of the dead-end rabbit holes implicit in the growing sanewashing of the enormous push into large-language-model AI is that all you can get are answers to the questions you ask.
Roger Martin approached this from the perspective of strategic thought [emphasis mine]:
In business (and the rest of the modern world) students are taught only two forms of logic and then further socialized to rely on only these two forms when making decisions. They are taught and socialized to use deductive logic—reasoning from general principles to a specific conclusion—and inductive logic—reasoning from specific data to a general principle. Those are the only two forms of logic considered admissible in making decisions.
A strategic thinker needs to utilize the third and untaught form of reasoning: abductive logic, or inference to the best explanation, as conceptualized and named by the great American pragmatist philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. To create a future that doesn’t exist today, strategists need to pay attention to his assertion that you can’t use inductive and/or deductive logic to come up with any new idea.
The current understanding in the field of AI (and philosophy) is that current LLM systems can not reason abductively:
Current gen AI/ML doesn’t do abduction, and there’s some reason to believe it will not be general artificial intelligence without such capabilities.
It may be totally reasonable to use AI to figure out your taxes, or analyze aerial video streams to check an oil pipeline for methane leaks, but as Le Cunff says poetically, and Martin says prosaically, discovery requires coming up with possible answers to questions formerly unasked.
We need to dream up solutions and the unasked questions, at the same time.
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Open Tabs
Millennials bailing out.
Caroline Warnes, Why Everyone Wants Out of Corporate
Over the past few months, you might have noticed a particular type of content appearing everywhere on social media: the great Millennial career crisis.
The name changes, but the themes are the same. Millennials are burned out and want out of corporate. Everyone is having a midlife career crisis. At the extreme end, some Millennials think they’ve been sold a lie.
Clearly, something is striking a nerve.
Warnes goes into this trend at some length, which is why it is still an ‘open tab’ (meaning in my case I haven’t done my usual deep read, yet).
There’s a short video summarizing her points, a page in.
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The enshittification of work.
Anne Helen Petersen (or the editors at Buzzfeed) excerpted1 her book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, back in 2020.
In contrast to Warnes, Petersen’s focus probably goes back 10 years, pre-pandemic. And her focus is more on the hollowing out of stable, full-time work, and the rise of the freelance economy. A few quotes:
‘Uber merely took a trend among corporations — employing as few people as possible — and adapted it for the smartphone era.’ | Sarah Kessler
Uber solved the problem [of employment] by calling their employees “customers” and by officially designating them as “independent contractors.”
The gig economy isn’t replacing the traditional economy. It’s propping it up in a way that convinces people it’s not broken.
Freelance and gigging don’t make drudgery or anxiety disappear. Instead, they exacerbate them.
I love this framing:
Masking exploitation in the rhetoric of freelancing and independent contractors’ “flexibility” avoids talking about why that flexibility is coveted: because the supposedly “thriving economy” is built on millions of people being treated as robots.
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The Mar-a-Lago Accord
Adam Tooze summarizes the so-called ‘Mar-a-Lago Accord’ that has earwormed the international economics community. Basically, human beings searching for a grand vision behind the chaos of Trump’s policies. Or as he puts it,
Chartbook 363 Stockholm syndrome in Mar-a-Lago: The belief that “something must be done” and the sanewashing of economic policy in the age of Trump
Elsewhen
A Paradox of Leadership | Stowe Boyd (from 2024)
Sam Walker, Ursula Le Guin | Boreout | Factoids | Elsewhere, Elsewhen
One of the paradoxes of leadership is that the better you are at it, the less people tend to notice you. When leaders remain calm and consistent, and unite people over a sensible course of action, observers may be less likely to recognize their influence or give them proper credit.
| Sam Walker, What Football Can Teach Politics
We don’t have that in the US federal government, at present.
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On Serendipity in Reading | Stowe Boyd (July 2026)
A medievalist offers wise counsel for broad reading as a means to revelation.
