🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 139
March 28th, 2024
Episode 139 — March 28th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/139
Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Dimitri Glazkov, Erika Rice Scherpelz, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, 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.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor Frankl
🗝️🌈 Agency-taking or agency-giving beliefs
Suppose you want to get into better physical shape. What does that take? You might have to think about how you have to join an expensive fitness club or buy a bunch of equipment. And the time commitment! Not only do you have to spend all that time on exercise, but you also have to drive there or set things up, change clothes, and shower. Ugh, with all of this, maybe the status quo is good enough.
Be wary. An agency-taking belief just reared its head. Looking at the agency embedded in a particular belief can help us spot unproductive behaviors that may arise from our beliefs. We can make a deceptively simple distinction: given a belief we might have, is it taking agency away from us, or is it giving us agency?
An agency-taking belief usually stops us from doing what we want to accomplish, such as in the exercise example above. By focusing on the money and effort, we create a barrier between us and our goal of getting fit. Now consider an agency-giving way of thinking about getting into better shape: “Maybe all it takes is a few minutes of daily exercise. I can take a walk around the neighborhood after lunch.” By lowering our resistance to change, we suddenly gain more agency.
It is not always easy to tell whether a given belief is agency-taking or agency-giving. We are masters of twisting what we see in ourselves to fit into a nicer story. For example, we might reframe staying in a job we despise by focusing on how it supports the family we love. But if we’re not considering the other options that could meet our goal, we’ve shifted our perspective, which can be useful but is not the same as increasing our agency.
Two helpful markers can help distinguish agency-giving beliefs. First, these beliefs usually create some discomfort. Agency expands our options, which means agency-giving beliefs usually ask us to contend with some inner truths that may feel best left unquestioned. Agency means more uncertainty, and shifting toward that can often be accompanied by struggle and pain. If it’s easy, we’re probably moving the other way.
Second, agency-giving beliefs tend to lead to personally-novel outcomes. If we feel we’re trying to change our beliefs toward more agency, yet the outcomes remain the same, we are probably deluding ourselves. Intending change and yet maintaining the same outcome is a sure sign of an agency-taking belief taking hold.
Agency-giving beliefs don’t necessarily contain answers to hard questions. They don’t always lead to good ends. In themselves, they will not make us fit or find us a better job. However, they help us start thinking about new possibilities. They sharpen our sense of interesting opportunities. We still need to work – even harder than before – to properly recognize the possibilities and capitalize on those opportunities.
But at least we will have a shot at them—something that’s simply inaccessible when we stay behind the veil of agency-taking beliefs.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🌦️ Hydropower generation in the Western US fell to a 20-year low
According to data from the Energy Information Administration, hydropower generation in the western half of the US during 2022–23 fell to its lowest point since 2001. A combination of droughts and heat (which melted much of the snowpack, thus reducing water availability for the rest of the year) was to blame. And the problem looks set to continue: the EIA expects hydropower output in the western US to fall by a further 12% this year.
🚏📺 BBC ditched a plan to use AI to generate marketing materials for a TV show after “complaints”
Earlier this month, the BBC announced that it would be using generative AI to help promote its upcoming TV series “Doctor Who;” an LLM would suggest marketing copy for push notifications and emails. (Still, all generated text would be approved by a human before going out.) After receiving unspecified “complaints” about this approach, the BBC backpedaled, saying it had “no plans to do this again.”
🚏🖨️ HP will let you rent printers for a monthly subscription
A new subscription service from Hewlett Packard will let you rent a printer for between $7 and $36 a month; the plan includes between 20 and 700 monthly printed pages, ink deliveries, and support (though not repairs or part replacements). Critics have also noted that the plan requires you to keep your printer online at all times, which means the device can send metrics and personal info back to HP.
🚏📀 Vinyl records outsold CDs for the second year in a row
Americans bought 43 million vinyl records last year, compared to 37 million CDs — marking the second straight year that more vinyl was sold. (Before that, the last time vinyl outsold CDs was in 1987!) It’s not just because CDs are declining, either; vinyl sales in the US have indeed been ticking upward for 17 years.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Why Autonomous Trucking Is Harder Than Autonomous Rideshare (Kevin Chen) — Enumerates some surprising challenges facing automated highway driving: 1) heavy trucks on downhill slopes require long braking distances, and precise sensing at these ranges is currently impossible; 2) autonomous cars currently stop when encountering a risky situation as a safety measure, but stopping on a highway is not an option; and 3) training data from “interesting” events is rarer on highways.
Microsoft Is Dead (2007) (Paul Graham) — A nice time capsule from 15+ years ago attributing Microsoft’s decline and Google’s ascent to the rise of web-based software. One indication of Microsoft’s decline was that Graham’s Y Combinator “didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for the startups we funded.”
A Simple Theory of the Stock Market (Interfluidity) — A technical essay that argues, sometime around 2008, the public stopped viewing equity investing as stock-picking speculation and started seeing it as the place to put extra money, regardless of the underlying fundamentals. “Inevitably, a policy apparatus evolves to stabilize whatever conventional, smart, politically enfranchised people do,” and so both governments and managers started distorting their actions to promote stock market growth at all costs.
Life Universe (Oimo.io) — An infinitely fractal version of Conway’s Game of Life: each “cell” of the game is really a giant contraption made of many smaller Game of Life pieces, but each cell in those contraptions is itself made of smaller pieces, and so on infinitely. Scroll in and out on the web page to get a feel for it.
📚🛋️ Book for your shelf
A book that will help you dip your toes into systems thinking or explore its broader applications.
This week, we recommend The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama, (1992, 418 pages).
Despite the alarming title, this is not a doomsday-themed book. Hailing from 1990, Fukuyama comes across as optimistic and often downright ebullient about the future and the place of Western liberal democracy in the larger context of history. The term “end of history” is borrowed from Marx and Hegel before him, describing the peak of human society’s evolution, with the word “history” being used as this evolutionary process. The “last man” comes from Nietzsche – which should hint at the breadth of thinking in this tome.
This book is very dense and rich with ideas and framings. It might be tempting to substitute it with Fukuyama’s original, similarly titled essay. Although the essay is worth reading, we do not recommend considering it a replacement for the book. The book is not just a longer version of the essay. It is a well-articulated, carefully thought-out refinement and expansion of the essay.
Starting with Alexandre Kojève's ideas, the author combines a variety of philosophical and political science concepts, weaving them into a surprisingly cogent narrative of global systemic proportions. We might disagree with some of the assertions, chuckle at the bold predictions that didn’t come true, and cringe at some of the now-quaint (and sometimes, frankly offensive) language in the book. But one thing’s for sure: this classic offers a wealth of lenses and framings for an avid systems thinker.
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