Episode 125 โ November 9th, 2023 โ Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/125
Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK, Dimitri Glazkov, Erika Rice Scherpelz
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Gordon Brander, Stefano Mazzocchi, Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Dart Lindsley, Jon Lebensold
Weโre a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns weโve noticed in recent weeks.
โSimplicity is the ultimate sophistication.โ
โ Clare Boothe Luce
๐๐ฆ Editorโs note: Weโll publish an issue next week, but after that, weโll be off for several weeks for the US holiday season. Weโll return in early January!
๐ช๐ชฝ Know thy hooksย
Anxiety. Everyone experiences it. In our uncertain, turbulent modern world, anxiety is everywhere. We worry about our careers. We worry about our health. We worry about the environment. We worry.
There are many practices and techniques for managing anxiety. And most of the time, we do okay. We learn to examine our thoughts and dismiss the catastrophic ones. We build habits to make reflection less effortful over time.
However, we each have particular kinds of thoughts that we tend to believe immediately. They bypass our carefully practiced pauses of self-reflection. When that happens, we tend to act in unproductive ways. We might do or say something we regret or give up our agency. Our reaction may spiral out, losing our sense of center. We lose our ability to see the anxiety itself and only see the effects of our bewilderingly strong reaction.
In their book Immunity to Change, the authors Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan call these thoughts โhooks.โ This metaphor is apt โ they hook us and unceremoniously drag us into the abyss of limited reasoning and hasty action. Everybody carries their collection of highly individualized hooks. Some may fear abandonment. For others, itโs about a pervasive sense of insufficiency. For others, it might be related to oneโs fragility in the face of the uncaring world. Oftentimes, itโs an eclectic mix of all of the above.
It takes significant effort (often accompanied by coaching and/or therapy) to spot our hooks. They tend to hide right outside of our ability to observe ourselves. They masquerade as completely rational thinking. โOf course I was angry! She was asking very picky questions about my design!โ โOf course, I had to work on that doc late into the night. What else would I do? Let everyone down?!โ
Fair warning: learning of our own hooks may be an infohazard, at least at first. Few things feel more hopeless than observing ourselves getting hooked and struggling to do anything about it. We may long for the simpler times when hooks just happened to us โ like weather or earthquakes โ and allowed us to shift the responsibility elsewhere. Developing the unconscious competence of releasing a hook is a long journey.ย
However, to โknow thyself,โ as the maxim stenciled on the ancient Greek temple of Delphi dictates, we must know our hooks. Hooks hold us back. They prevent us from becoming who we desire to be. Hooks put self-imposed limits on our agency and sabotage our aspirations. To truly fly and live fully, we must know our hooks and keep working to release them.
๐ฃ๏ธ๐ฉ Signpostsย
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
๐๐ง Over a million fan-made sped-up remixes have flooded streaming services
Homemade, sped-up remixes of songs have become all the rage on social media and music streaming platforms, partly because faster songs are more exciting and partly because sped-up songs let you fit more of a track into the time constraints of a TikTok video. Some artists are encouraging their fans to experiment with their music since it can help the original songs go viral. Still, record labels worry that fan-made remixes are diverting streaming income away from labels and toward fans. By one estimate, over a million โunlicensedโ remixes are now live on streaming services, accounting for over 1% of all songs on those platforms.
๐๐ท๏ธ Washington DC will give residents free AirTags to track stolen cars
The USA's capital city will hand out free Apple AirTags to residents of certain police districts, focusing on regions that have recently suffered large increases in car theft. The idea is for residents to attach the tracking beacons to their cars to help the police track down their vehicles if they get stolen.
๐๐ฎ Microsoft is bringing AI-powered characters, stories, and quests to Xbox
Microsoft is teaming up with an AI company to release new generative AI tools for Xbox game developers: an โAI design copilotโ will help developers write scripts and storylines, and an โAI character engineโ can be integrated into games to generate stories, quests, and dialogue dynamically. The โmultiyearโ partnership doesnโt have a clear launch date yet.
๐๐ณ๏ธ Odd-year elections cut voter turnout by up to 50% in one US state
A longstanding law in Washington State requires city and local elections to be held in odd-numbered years, placing them out of sync with the much higher-profile statewide and national elections that occur in even-numbered years. New research found that every single city in Washington suffered a turnout drop in its local elections due to this rule, with an average 36% drop-off from midterm years like 2022 and a 50% drop from presidential years like 2020. (The drop-off was uncorrelated with city size and demographics, meaning the effect was universal.) Thus, advocates argue that a simple law change to shift municipal elections to even-numbered years could (in theory) almost double turnout.
๐โณ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces weโve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Why Generative AI NPCs Are Overhyped (Game Stuff) โ Argues that LLM-powered non-player characters in video games are โeither too important or too trivial a feature for developers to rely on a third-party service.โ NPCs with dynamic but ultimately unimportant dialogue arenโt worth paying for, while game developers will want full control over NPCs that are core to the gameโs story and mechanics. Thus, โGenAI NPCs as-a-serviceโ companies arenโt going to become as popular as VCs think.
Keep Moving, Seek the High Ground, Stay in Touch (Marcus Guest) โ Discusses how dynamic environments (whether in nature or in organizations) require dynamic responses, which look more like flexible heuristics than rigid rules. The Marinesโ simple three-part approach for when battlefield plans break down is a great example: it helps soldiers stay organized in rapidly changing environments and also helps commanders โestimate frontline developments even when they canโt see whatโs going on.โ
โJust Buy Everyone a Carโ (Alex Davis) โ Critiques the urban planning trend of replacing buses with dynamic, โon-demandโ transit โ in other words, subsidized Ubers. Though the idea sounds efficient and high-tech, it suffers from high operating costs, long wait times, and unpredictable timings and routes. Subsidizing car ownership doesnโt work either because urban areas and major commuter routes simply couldnโt handle that many cars.
Heightened Dream Recall Ability Linked to Increased Creativity and Functional Brain Connectivity (PsyPost) โ Finds that strong scores on the famous alternate uses test (AUT), typically used to measure divergent thinking ability, appear to be correlated with creative thinking, high dream recall, and more activity in the part of the brain associated with daydreaming and introspection. But which way does the arrow of causality fly? And can these abilities be cultivated?
๐๐ Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This weekโs lens: stop energy.
Youโre posting about a new tech device youโre excited about on social media. You come back a few hours later expecting to see a couple of likes and some โI agree!โ comments. Instead, what you come back to is a wall of text about how that brand sucks and this other brand is so much better. You go away feeling deflated, wishing you had never shared in the first place.
This is an example of stop energy. Stop energy is not just about saying โnoโ or critiquing an idea, which is often valid. Rather, stop energy is characterized by taking our enthusiasm and sense of forward motion and quashing it. When we are at the receiving end of stop energy, criticism doesnโt come across as an attempt to work collaboratively to understand and solve a problem. It comes across as a judgment of our taste. We hear, โWhat sort of person would even think that in the first place?โ
Itโs easy to become the unconscious bearer of stop energy. If, for example, we have the experience and expertise to know that a certain idea wonโt work, it may seem so obviously wrong that our response of โthat wonโt workโ doesnโt feel like stop energy. It feels like giving helpful feedback. However, from the point of view of a recipient who doesnโt have our knowledge, it feels like their idea is being dismissed without consideration.ย
Instead, we can look for opportunities to turn our feedback into conversations. If the idea is something that truly wonโt work, turn it into a learning conversation. Figure out where the person started and their chain of reasoning. Work through it step-by-step with them and see where we can gently nudge them or, even better, redirect their enthusiasm into a more fruitful direction. If the discussion topic can go somewhere, turn it into a collaboration. Instead of pushing back on the other person, find a way to hold the problem between us and push back on it. One way of doing this is to ask questions instead of pushing back directly. โWhat about this part?โ rather than โthis doesnโt solve this problem.โ
Whatever the approach, our goal is to avoid squashing motivation. Instead, we want to approach every conversation to increase and, when appropriate, redirect enthusiasm.ย
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