ConditionalLogic No.1

On the launch of ConditionalLogic, and other things about the works of our lives.

Dear reader,

Welcome to ConditionalLogic.

I am S., your first officer. I’ve logged fifteen years in Tech across Silicon Valley and Silicon Roundabout to qualify to pilot this plane (it will probably be fine, just don’t trip on the escalator while scrolling).

During that period, I did SaaS sales for a bit, and then Product for a long, long time. These days I work at Prolific, an AI infrastructure scale-up in Kings Cross, London, where I manage products, Product thinkers, and technology teams and think a lot about building technology and leaving humanity less bad than we found it.

Why do the content thing?

Okay, first confession to the front: the word ‘content’ makes me a little bit nauseous.

The cliched and anticipated admission that content makes me nauseous also makes me a bit nauseous.

When I was 20 years old, there was no such boogeyman as ‘content.’ We argued about the Turing Test till we were blue, sitting on the floor beside the one student association printer we all heavily relied on, and drank the university’s horrible wine, and felt very good for being interdisciplinary cognitive scientists and caring about the project of civilisation.

20 years have passed and I still have moments where I think about the same topics, kind of? They come up more tactically, more operationally, in the course of solving problems for customers, teams, and users. But recently I thought — what if I could force myself to stare out over a wider horizon? Produce a forcing function, challenge myself to write stuff down with better coherence.

Maybe bring a couple weary civilisational passengers along for the ride. Even if it’s just the ones whose in-seat TVs aren’t working :(

What can I expect as a ConditionalLogic reader?

Like all good Product people, I subscribe to an underpromise and overdeliver practice. So:

1. Expect ~ 1 essay a month

2. They will be short and free (with paid options and tip jars coming, I hope)

3. No AI generation, not even for the blank cursor bit. All human writing all the way down.

4. They may be a bit strange, because I am a bit strange — not exactly LinkedIn fare. How and why to build great Tech; how to make and collaborate on products without being eaten alive by Product; occasional reheated mental leftovers from the student association days (Philosophy of Mind at Edinburgh and Cognitive Science at UofT).

5. Good for: Product Managers, Designers, Engineers, AI scientists, human beings. I like the word ‘technologist.’ If you like that word too, you might like ConditionalLogic.

Help me make this good

I will try to open comments + welcome them. Please share and chat and suggest things.

Thank you for spending a little bit of your day with the project.

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