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I am Avy Leghziel, an organizational consultant and trainer with a knack for unorthodox ideas. This is Masters of Babel: I share here insights on how we work, learn and manage.

Three ideas worth exploring

01 • What they tell us about our attention span is wrong

We watch Reels for a few seconds and scroll down quickly, and we often lose patience if we are listening to a speaker who is not charismatic enough.

We got to the conclusion that we can’t focus on content for more than a few seconds, and that our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. And yet:

• We learned to binge Netflix shows for eight hours straight

• We can spend hours chatting with a good friend

• Younger generations are reading more books than older generations

Our problem is not the attention span, but the fact that in the ocean of content being spewed at us we have a hard time finding great ideas and stories. When we do find them, we have no problem immersing ourselves in them for eight hours at a time.

We are also more picky than what we used to be. We know that if we properly screen all the shallow and useless content, we can find golden videos and articles. So we have much less patience for anything that is below the golden standard: lecturers or trainers talking to themselves in front of an audience, instead of trying to be excellent educators; books that assume that we will keep on reading 300+ pages of clichés; and, unfortunately, business meetings that revolve around nothing.

Our attention is not deteriorating - it’s maturing.

02 • Do you know what a Geoship is?

It's pretty much what would happen if a hobbit had their home designed by Tesla. They call them "bioceramic geodesic domes" and they look like this:

This company thinks that they are the future, and they offer a sustainable and apparently cost-effective alternative to mainstream housing: a "med-double dom" costs $222,000. They also want to build them in small villages, which is a tempting opportunity to overkill the Hobbit joke, but I won't fall into that trap.

The spherical shape is probably a gimmick, but the idea of offering a futuristic product as a better and cheaper alternative is an interesting phenomenon.

"Futuristic" used to be something that costs a lot, belongs to the rich, and conveys signals of luxury and superfluity. I think that we are reversing that trend:

• Tesla cars were, until a few years ago, a rarity reserved for the elite. Today the Tesla Model Y is the most popular model in many Western countries.

• The most talked-about scientific event in recent months has been the recycling of a spacecraft propulsion rocket - which routinely costs millions of dollars per launch.

We are slowly breaking the dichotomy that presents us with the modern as elitist and expensive, versus the mainstream as cheap and simple. The new paradigm includes avant-garde solutions available to the masses.

03 • Prompts are more useful to humans than to AI

Most of us have used ChatGPT, Claude or similar agents, and have realized that the secret for an effective use of any generative AI lies in knowing how to write a good prompt. The best prompts are the articulate ones with a clear breakdown of our needs. The most famous trick is to ask ChatGPT "Ask me clarifying questions," so as to help it understand exactly how we want it to help us.

The ability to write better prompts is not only helping us to use artificial intelligence better; it’s also teaching us to think and articulate better. Paradoxically, it could restore the damage SMS and social media have been inflicting on us for the past 30 years: forcing us to write in a cryptic and edgy way.

Paul Graham recently wrote in one of his articles that "Writing converts your ideas from vague to bad. But that's a step forward, because once you can see the brokenness, you can fix it." Learning to write prompts for ChatGPT teaches us to communicate more clearly also with our colleagues and loved ones. If a technology that represents the highest form of rationality does not understand us when we explain something to it, how can we expect our teams to understand what we expect of them?

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Unrelated

I assume that about 50% of the readers of this newsletter may be disappointed with the outcome of the U.S. elections. It could have been worse, like when they elected a cat in Alaska, or a rhinoceros in Sao Paulo.

One more thing

There are hundreds of influencers trying to convince us that we can use AI to do everything, from creating apps to doing therapy. I have found only one that manages to discuss AI in a deeper way, without being too technical or boring: CatGPT. No, it’s not an AI avatar.