I was procrastinating through my LinkedIn backlog when I found this note from an old acquaintance:
Dear Seth,
I’ve written this recommendation of your work to share with other
LinkedIn users.Details of the Recommendation: “Seth is a personable and empathetic leader with a passion and a drive to see his goals through to completion. He looks at the world with great curiosity, from a logical and questioning point of view. Seth is imaginative and innovative in his thinking while also being practical and systematic. He seeks precision and notices the minute distinctions that define the essence of things, then analyzes and examines their interconnections and interrelations. Seth scrutinizes all sides of an issue, looking to solve problems in creative and unusual ways. He employs novel cognitive models as tools for discovery, using “what if” questions to explore alternatives and allowing multiple possibilities to coexist. He sets high standards for himself and others, inspiring enthusiasm, fostering collaboration, and maintaining accountability. I very much enjoyed working with him.”
We didn’t have very much contact, much less anything like professional contact. This contact was quirky, and generally suspicious, and it was such a nice-but-strangely-um-I-don’t-know gesture that I found myself cynically googling sentences from it. It turns out my cynicism was justified: the recommendation above points straight to Wikipedia’s pages on
