sari

Helpful criticism is about making the world better. Unhelpful criticism is about making yourself feel better.

There is a growing risk that you will only be presented with information that someone else thinks is what you want to see, read or hear. Accentuating your biases and prejudices. Increasing groupthink. Narrowing your frame of reference.

Take the music industry, for example. From Napster to the iTunes Music Store and now Spotify, the last two decades look a lot like an exercise in how to use internet platforms to effectively deny income to musicians while extracting maximum value in content and data.

But we are working on it. We are a long way from the world in which all knowledge is equally accessible. Hopefully someday our patchwork of intentionally-inefficient libraries will turn into a free storehouse of humanity’s recorded knowledge and creativity. In the meantime, however, we need to focus on getting good and thoughtful material in as man... See more