Weekly Wisdom #319 - The fix for all our problems

Transparency, Healthcare & Language Learning With AI

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Happy Monday!

I had dinner this week with a friend who was frustrated about the performance and compensation process at her current company.

There wasn't a formal process in place, and despite getting a recent raise, she knew peers who had received different amounts.

Now, inequality when it comes to salaries, especially between genders, isn't anything new.

What solved this issue at my current company was salary transparency. Everyone knows how much everyone else makes, and the salary tracks are public and based on a broad data set.

Now, there are still challenges with this: you can debate whether a particular person meets the criteria for a particular level in a salary track, or whether the data sets are already biased, or whether one role deserves more than another.

But there's far less ambiguity, and you can have far more rational discussions about how to improve.

Transparency breeds trust.

And the opposite—opacity—breeds distrust.

It's the underlying reason it's difficult to discuss almost any controversial topic today—war, immigration, the economy, government, media, healthcare (related article below)—we lack transparency, and so we lack trust.

In a world where everything happens in real-time, everyone has a smartphone, and we are the most technologically advanced society to have ever existed, it's more important than ever.

As the cliché goes, "sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Across the board, the answer starts with transparency.

Have a great week!

Graham

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Links

📖 The Fix - Scott Galloway - I've got a strong interest in health, longevity, and tech, and so solving the issues we have in North America with healthcare is a topic I'm always interested in.

There's been movement on the issue in the US, but this article points out many of the remaining problems, and how we might solve them.

Spoiler: transparency is a big part.

🔧 Language learning with AI - One of the largest benefits of AI overall is the acceleration on learning in general.

I'd be hard pressed to come up with an area where AI doesn't help, but language learning is one of the areas where I believe it delivers a huge impact.

At very minimal cost, you essentially now have a full-time tutor with infinite patience.

ChatGPT Advanced Voice mode does a decent job, but here are a few other products I'll be checking out:

​LanguaTalk​

​Little Language Lessons from Google​

​Talkio AI​

​Gliglish​