🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 133
February 15th, 2024
Episode 133 — February 15th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/133
Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Scott Schaffter, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dimitri Glazkov, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Dart Lindsley, Jon Lebensold, Melanie Kahl
We’re 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 we’ve noticed in recent weeks.
“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”
― Phil Jackson
🏀💡 Shaping our metagame
Much of life is practice for the future, although we may not always realize it. Bringing greater awareness to our practice can provide motivation, especially in the face of activities that don’t seem inherently worthwhile.
For example, if we are doing free throws for the sole purpose of doing free throws, it may start to feel boring after a while. But if we believe we are practicing free throws to land one in an important basketball game, that changes everything. Practice creates a kind of slack in our personal work routine. It moves us from a space focused on what we can achieve right now to a space where we connect our current activities with some desired future. It moves us from game to meta-game.
Not all forms of practice are as obvious as free throws. Practice shows up in subtle ways in a host of contexts. Process activities such as defining environment variables, building lookup files, or treating research experiments as a repeatable process may not seem strictly necessary, but they encourage a different way of thinking about the problem.
Once we’ve discovered that new way of thinking about the problem, the one that gives it meaning, we are playing the metagame. Sometimes, the metagame is externally imposed, but to really play it well, we must define our own — personally felt — reasons behind the practice. Practice works best when it’s motivated by goals that we care about, which are relevant to our life trajectory. If we never expect to play professional basketball and someone comes up to us and says, “Hey, do free throws so that you’re ready for the NBA finals,” our very natural reaction will be a blank stare.
Shaping our personal metagame has benefits beyond just making practice meaningful. It can increase our resiliency by giving us a reason to stick with what might otherwise seem like pointless drudgery. Imagine having to write mountains of SQL to move data around. We could see that as burdensome toil, or we could choose to see that moving data around is a prerequisite to our goal of doing an awesome data analysis that provides insight into an important problem.
Realizing that we have the agency to shape our own metagame through our internal narrative means we can gain a sense of agency in situations that don’t appear to give us any. Imagine a person in a windowless aluminum room for two years. If we are put there against our will, it feels like cruel punishment. However, if we know we are on a voyage to Mars, we might be willing to deal with that situation and perceive ourselves as heroes.
Not every situation can be improved by defining the metagame, but if applied intentionally, it can be a powerful tool for uncovering latent agency we might not otherwise see. Perhaps next time we’re frustrated with something in our lives, we could pause, take a deep breath, and look for a metagame that makes it a little less painful.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🪁 An undersea kite can convert tides to electricity
Tidal currents are a reliable renewable energy source, and one company has unveiled a new line of underwater “kites” that can be tethered to the seafloor and flutter around like a figure 8, harvesting energy from the flowing water. This new model, the Dragon 12 — weighing in at 28 tons and sporting a 39-foot wingspan — is rated at 1.2 megawatts of energy, a tenfold increase from the company’s previous kite model. The first Dragon 12 was deployed to the Faroe Islands, where the narrow channels between islands create strong tides.
🚏🥡 California’s plastic bag waste has increased despite the single-use bag ban
State legislators in California banned single-use plastic bags in 2014, yet the annual weight of discarded plastic bags in the Golden State rose from 4.08 tons per 1000 people in 2014 to 5.89 tons per thousand in 2022. One potential reason is that stores have shifted to offering heavier, thicker ten-cent plastic bags that technically count as “reusable” but, in reality, are quite likely to end up in the trash. (Legislators are proposing new laws that would close this loophole.) COVID also increased the usage of plastic bags for takeout and deliveries.
🚏🎖️ The US military is fielding esports teams to get teens interested in joining up
The US Navy has said that it spends about 3–5% of its marketing budget, totaling $4.3 million annually, on esports initiatives, such as having teams of enlisted personnel host streams and tournaments of popular games like Fortnite, Valorant, and other ‘shooters.’ The Navy sees this as a way for soldiers to talk to young people and get them interested in future service, which they say is important given that the US armed forces have fallen far short of recruitment goals in recent years. Some veterans, though, have said it’s unethical to “market the military with video games” — especially when the intended audience is children.
🚏🕔 Australia is poised to give workers the “right to disconnect” after hours
The Australian Senate recently approved a bill giving workers the right to “refuse ‘unreasonable’ professional communication outside of the workday;” companies that punish employees for not responding after hours could face fines. The bill is expected to pass easily in the Australian House of Representatives.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
To Get Good, Go After the Metagame (Commoncog) — Argues that learning how to master a metagame — whether that’s in board games, programming, or in business strategy — is a surprisingly transferable skill: you learn what strategies emerge from the base rules of the game, you learn how to adapt when new tools become available, and you learn that the optimal strategy depends on what strategies everyone else is using.
Five Myths About Stoicism (Washington Post) — Scholar of stoicism Nancy Sherman wants us to abandon the idea that stoicism is just about “being tough, emotionless, and indifferent to the world.” A revised reading reveals that stoic writings encourage us to cultivate positive emotions, feel deeply, and seek deep connections with others.
Shields Down (Rands in Repose) — Argues that the pivotal moment in someone leaving a company isn’t when they actually quit; it’s when they first let their mental ‘shields’ down, when they “let a glimpse of a potential different future into [their] mind.” The causes of shield drops are often subtle and hard to spot: perceived slights, boredom, mercurial leadership, etc. This complexity is a big reason why leadership is so hard.
📚🌲 Book for your shelf
An evergreen book that will help you dip your toes into systems thinking.
This week, we recommend Fluke by Brian Klaas (2024, 335 pages).
Agency, control, making a dent in the universe: such are the obsessions of our modern society. But the world is not built for such aspirations. Each of us is embedded within a complex web of interactions and timings, from the microscopic to the irrationally human, making the impact of our actions far more difficult — or even impossible — to foresee.
Fluke, by Brian Klaas, works to disabuse us of some of our more individualistic illusions. Each of our fates is far more fragile and contingent than we might realize and is intertwined with everything around us. From the small interactions that send our lives careening along different trajectories to the path dependency over millions of years ago that have led humans to be what we are today, there is a vast contingency in this view of life. Klaas draws together insights from chaos theory, evolutionary biology, complex adaptive systems, and more, all to make it abundantly clear that we have far less understanding of our individual actions — and any broader predictive shape of society — than we might realize.
But this approach needn’t result in fatalism. Using ideas from philosophy and the sciences, Klaas argues that this kind of thinking can actually provide a mechanism for each of us to recognize the deep impact of any and all actions that we might take. An impressive work of modern wisdom literature, Fluke strives to provide humility and meaning.
🔮📬 Postcard from the future
A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that could result from the systemic forces changing our world.
// What happens to car racing when human augmentation becomes common?
“Hello there, Mark Thompson here. Welcome back to our live coverage of the start of Formula One’s 2061 season. Coming to you from the Lockheed broadcast booth, we’ll be providing you live human commentary throughout the day, along with our ongoing AI analysis streams.
“While the drivers and crews make last-minute adjustments here at the Suzuka Circuit, let’s get to the topic dominating headlines, streams, and the nanosphere: the 1% rule. Over to Dr. Zhang, our cybernetics expert, to walk us through this year’s biggest rule change.”
Dr. Zhang: “Thanks, Mark. I’m Dr. Caiji Zhang, and let’s dive right in. The ‘1% rule’ limits driver cybernetic and artificial augmentation to a maximum of 1% of their body mass.
“After the first successful full spinal replacement a decade ago, the FIA faced a critical decision: what role do humans play in F1 racing? To what extent should human skill and intuition remain at the sport's core?
“Without restrictions, the drivers would be no more than drones, given how far human augmentation has come. After all, most modern militaries’ front-line troops and vehicles are drones, either piloted by remote humans or autonomous agents that abide by the 2038 Geneva AI Convention.
“Forcing drivers to be fully un-augmented is not an option either, as over 98% of the intra-asteroid belt population have implanted data ports to access the nanosphere.”
Mark: “Plus, it would remove the star appeal of the drivers and the sponsorship deals (and tabloid headlines) they create.”
Dr. Zhang: “Tabloid headlines… there you go with your metachronisms again!
“Back to the 1% rule. To ensure the sport still centers on human skill and intuition, the FIA set the limit of 1% of body mass, forcing teams to decide which elements of the driver to augment or replace entirely. A fully cybernetic conversion of the brain, eyes, spinal cord, central nervous system, heart, lungs, and hands is roughly 5 to 6 percent of the mass of the human body. Even a 50% augmentation of those core elements will violate the rule. The strategies of the teams are quite varied in response.”
Mark: “That’s so true. Mercedes primarily augmented the vascular system to enable enduring higher G-forces through turns and acceleration. Red Bull went heavy on increasing vision and neural reaction times. And then the Anduril team is doubling down on musculature and bone reinforcement for improved steering wheel control.”
Dr. Zhang: “Given the wide variety of tracks this year, we will see which strategies play out the best. Especially at the Malapert Circuit on the Lunar South Pole, for obvious reasons.”
Mark: “Right you are. The drivers and their gravitational generators are sure to get a workout there. And that is part of why Formula One has endured for 111 years. It’s a place where technology, sustainability, and innovation converge. Each team brings a unique blend of advanced technologies, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in motorsports. And it looks like we are getting ready to get started. Let’s go to our reporter trackside…”
© 2024 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.
Also the metagame article was gold - particularly love “James Stuber has this thing where he says “master boring fundamentals”, and he says it in response to beginners who desire to go after the fancy stuff. Stuber’s quip applies here. To run with his terminology: I’d say that the meta is what you get after you master boring fundamentals. But observing the state of the current meta often reveals what boring fundamentals you need to learn.”
I really enjoyed this - but an evergreen book published in the past 6 weeks? Surely evergreen requires at least a decade, ideally three?