🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 134
February 22nd, 2024
Episode 134 — February 22nd, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/134
Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Scott Schaffter, Jon Lebensold, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, MK, Dimitri Glazkov
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Dart Lindsley, 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.
“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”
― Warsan Shire
❤️🩹✅ Resilient expectations
A colleague asked you to look at an issue in a bug tracker, and you said you were on it. They check back a week later and… no progress. This is a real problem. You know that you should have made progress, but then you start contemplating how they should have done better. They should have clarified the deadline. They should have checked in. They should have clarified an uncertain prioritization.
While it’s good to share productive feedback, it’s important not to let the ways others could have done better excuse our shortcomings: it’s not their job to make up for our falling short of reasonable expectations.
Instead of pitting our flaws against each other, we can approach each failed safeguard on its own merits. When assigning someone an urgent task, it is reasonable for the assigner to emphasize the urgency of that task and check in. It’s also reasonable to expect that the assignee will read the task description and understand the urgency before committing — and follow up if they can’t follow through. This is the human-complexity version of various computer science principles like encapsulation: ideally, people would contain their inner complexities and we would only have to interface with their exposed endpoints like “I commit to doing this.” Of course, all abstractions do leak… and we must build resilient responses to those leaky abstractions.
This switch from either/or thinking — either you were the problem or they were — to both/and thinking — how we contributed to this failure — is key to increasing resilience. Resilient processes have many safeguards that reinforce each other. We can ask ourselves, “What if everybody did everything right?” and figure out how to make things better even so. Having multiple layers of trust saves us from walking on the tightrope of constant perfection, where any mistake is an irrecoverable failure.
Adding resilience to our expectations does not mean excusing failure or always allocating blame equally. Rather, it enables us to shift our view from backward-looking to forward-looking. It also allows us to see each other as much more complex individuals than faceless workers who failed to perform the assigned task. Resilient expectations allow us to build trustworthiness within our team, providing a scaffolding — and a safety cord! — to enjoy the work we do and to thrive together.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🍁 A judge ruled that Air Canada had to honor a refund policy invented by its chatbot
When Air Canada’s AI chatbot told a customer that he could request a refund for a particular flight, he tried to do so, only to find that the system rejected his request because the bot had hallucinated that rule. So, he sued. Air Canada claimed it “[could not] be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives — including a chatbot” and said the man should have checked another page on the website to see the real policy. But the judge rejected the argument and made Air Canada provide the refund, saying that Air Canada was responsible for all information on its website — even info that came from a chatbot — and that they couldn’t expect customers to know that one part of the site was correct and another part was incorrect.
🚏♻️ A new AI tool can auto-sort trash in recycling plants
An AI startup has unveiled a camera that can be installed at recycling plants and will automatically scan items moving down a conveyor belt, assigning them to one of 70 categories, from books to soda cans. The technology can be connected to auto-sorting robots that can separate garbage from truly recyclable items. This may help reduce the 30% of recyclable materials that plants accidentally send to the landfill. Moreover, proving that recyclables aren’t contaminated by trash can help them fetch a higher price.
🚏👾 Reddit will sell IPO shares at the original price to 75,000 users
Companies that IPO typically don’t let retail investors buy at the original issuing price. However, Reddit has announced it’ll buck that trend by letting 75,000 of its biggest users buy IPO shares at the issue price when the company goes public next month. This could get Reddit power users bought in (literally) to the company’s success. Still, analysts warn that if the stock falls after the IPO, retail investors could sell en masse, driving the price down further (this is why companies usually only let institutional investors buy at the IPO price).
🚏🛰️ Japan is launching the world’s first wooden satellite
Aiming to combat the scourge of space junk, scientists in Japan have created a small satellite made of magnolia wood. The satellite is sturdier than you might think: in a test, wood samples survived a year of exposure to space with almost no damage, with no risk of burning or rotting thanks to the lack of oxygen and microbes, respectively. And, of course, it’s biodegradable, unlike metal satellites, which shred into tiny pieces that hang in the air when they fall to earth. The new wooden probe is slated to be launched into space later this year.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Diseconomies of Scale in Fraud, Spam, Support, and Moderation (Dan Luu) — Argues that, contrary to popular belief, you’re likely to have a more trustworthy and reliable experience on smaller digital platforms than larger ones. A few major reasons: bigger platforms are juicier targets for spammers and scammers; large platforms have more automated, impersonal support and thus are more frustrating for users; and platforms with bigger, more heterogeneous user bases have a harder time agreeing on what should be allowed in the first place.
How Taco Bell Crippled KFC & Pizza Hut (Modern MBA) — Investigates the portfolio dynamics of the company that owns Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut. There’s been an interesting interplay between the fast food chains’ fates: Taco Bell’s steady domestic success has softened the blow of the other two chains’ decline in the US and given them air cover to expand abroad. But Taco Bell has become too much of a crutch for the parent company, squeezing the brand for profit, to customers’ detriment.
The Kitchen Sink Conundrum and Simulation’s Balancing Act (Sam Arbesman) — FLUX’s own Sam Arbesman observes that adding more details to a simulation does not necessarily make it more useful or accurate. It’s better to err on the side of simplicity and articulate the goal of the simulation clearly.
If the Moon Were Only One Pixel (Josh Worth) — A “tediously accurate scale model of the solar system” that illustrates how empty our planetary neighborhood is. It’s a delightfully interactive side-scrolling visualization; check out the ‘speed of light’ mode in the bottom right corner.
🔍📆 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: coming home
We’re home from a long trip. We can smell what it's like to be home again. We can see it, hear it, taste it, touch it. We take a moment to enjoy the small things: knowing where to put our keys and sitting in our favorite chair. Then we move on to the larger things: hugging our loved ones and picking up our ongoing project.
And so begins the ritual of coming home. Coming home involves restoring existing practices that bind us to a location, our routine, and one another. This pattern emerges when we exercise, rehearse, and make art. The ritual of coming home refreshes us and increases our tolerance for doing hard things.
Coming home can create a rare time when absence brings a fresh perspective. This is where we can re-assess and review what drives us, what we do, and why we do it. In the day-to-day bustle, it can be hard to pick up on the themes or trends that underlie our daily lives. Being so close to our own life can hinder our ability to see the larger story and the path we’re taking.
Coming home isn’t always spurred by a positive experience. Many folks have found that tragedy and hardship bring clarity and challenges. Someone who was laid off may connect with a passion they’d neglected. The death of a loved one may spur us to connect with others dear to us. Home, in this metaphorical sense, is the center that brings a sense of connection to something deep inside us.
Change is hard. One of the hardest things is finding the energy to get started or even to begin thinking about change. The time of homecoming can create a space to overcome that initial “activation” energy and think more broadly about what is happening around us.
The next time you take a trip or have a forced change in your life, think about using that catalytic energy to spark broader shifts… or at least allow you to open the aperture for change.
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