🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 142

April 18th, 2024

Apr 19, 2024

Episode 142 — April 18th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/142

Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Dart Lindsley, Spencer Pitman, Justin Quimby, Chris Butler, Neel Mehta, Dimitri Glazkov, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Boris Smus, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Jon Lebensold, MK, Melanie Kahl, Kamran Hakiman

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.

“If a caterpillar doesn’t know its future has wings, it hardly experiences itself as land-bound.”
— Robert Kegan

🍃🦋 Becoming a butterfly sucks

The metamorphosis that a caterpillar undergoes to become a butterfly is one of the most used metaphors for personal transformation. We transform into something completely different, and the promise of that destination is often seen as inspiring and beautiful. But today our fancy has us wondering: does the caterpillar feel the same way?

From the point of view of a caterpillar, life is great! We get to eat a bunch of leaves, look cool, and hang out with our caterpillar friends. What’s not to like?

But there’s one problem. We also have this irresistible impetus to become a butterfly. And that’s going to suck. We have to wrap ourselves up in a dark, cramped cocoon. Our body and brain turn to mush, being refactored beyond recognition in a process that feels entirely out of our control. The change is so dramatic that it is frankly amazing that butterflies seem to retain some memory of being a caterpillar.

We tend to imagine becoming a butterfly as a beautiful, positive transformation. However, there’s value in sitting with the idea that this drastic change is a profoundly uncomfortable experience that any caterpillar may well want to avoid… but can’t.

Life is often like this. When we see others who we perceive as successful, we see a snapshot of the present, and quite naturally, we may think that we want that too.

However, this desire emerges before the understanding of what it will take to get there. Like the caterpillar, we undergo periods of significant discomfort and uncertainty in our metamorphoses.

We must leave our comfort zones. It will no doubt be daunting, dangerous, and exhausting. But if we survive, we may be rewarded with wings. (Although there’s a good chance we won’t survive.) After being a soft, squishy caterpillar for so long, we may be surprised at the resilience we must show along the way.

Even more surprising, once we take our first flight, we will realize that our new state is nothing like we’d envisioned. As caterpillars, we simply lack the necessary experience to imagine dancing with grace in the sky.

Getting somewhere, especially if it requires a transformation, takes sacrifice. That sacrifice may – will! – leave us unable to recognize ourselves relative to what we were before. We may wonder if we even are the same person. However, like those caterpillar memories, transformational changes include and transcend – we are still who we were before, just no longer land-bound. And our core values and relationships are tested with our transformation, evolving along with us.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🧫 4.5 million gamers made breakthroughs in bacteria DNA analysis through a science minigame

The popular video game Borderlands 3 features a mini-game called Borderlands Science, where players line up blocks corresponding to different nucleotides in a Tetris-style interface; if they line up the DNA components correctly, players can earn in-game rewards. By doing this, humans can “identify errors in real-world computer analyses” of microbe DNA. This crowdsourcing of scientific work has paid off: a press release from McGill University, which has led the project, said that 4.5 million gamers have driven an “exponential increase” in how much we know about the evolutionary relationships of bacteria that live in the human gut. Plus, these data points will help train AI algorithms that can do DNA analysis work in the future.

🚏🌅 The solar eclipse blocked 30 nuclear reactors’ worth of solar power

According to one estimate, last week’s North American total solar eclipse cost the US 30 gigawatts of solar power generation—roughly equal to the output of 30 nuclear reactors. Energy utility companies weren’t fazed since they had ample time to prepare, but this tidbit goes to show just how much solar capacity the US has built out: to think that solar can generate so much power over a narrow slice of the country in just a few hours!

🚏🌍 Climate change will reduce global income by a fifth, hitting the developing world hardest

A new study has found that the climate crisis will cause a worldwide “permanent” loss in income of 19% by 2049, due to higher temperatures, frequent flooding, and more frequent extreme weather. The developing world will be harder hit, according to the study: the US and Europe stand to lose 11% of income, while Africa and South Asia will lose 22%. Furthermore, it projects that in a “business as usual” scenario, incomes will drop 60% by 2100, but if we achieve net zero emissions by 2050, the loss will be limited to 20%.

🚏💸 A “cryptojacking” scheme stole $3.5M of cloud compute to earn $1M in crypto

US federal prosecutors alleged that a Nebraska man registered several accounts with two major cloud vendors (probably AWS and Microsoft Azure), tricked the vendors into deferring his bills, and thus was able to run up huge computing bills he never had to pay for. He allegedly used rented GPUs to mine Ether, Litecoin, and Monero (the last of which is a favorite among fraudsters for its near-untraceability). In the end, he burned almost $3.5 million in compute costs, along with huge amounts of energy, only to earn just $1 million in mined coins.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

Be Good-Argument-Driven, Not Data-Driven (Richard Marmorstein) — Argues that being data-driven can lead us astray when we “begin to favor bad arguments that involve data over good arguments that don’t.” Over-reliance on metrics leads teams to focus only on things that they think can be easily measured, and it encourages leaders to hide behind metrics (even if they’re meaningless) rather than making tough judgment calls.
Believable Space (Kiosk) — A former architectural illustrator shows how his clients’ desire for inoffensive, “middle-ground” elements in his drawings (sunny but not too sunny, generic-looking trees, few people, etc.) led him to create bland “nowhere spaces” that didn’t look believable and didn’t evoke any emotions in the viewer. More generally, trying to make art that appeals to everyone leads to a product that appeals to no one.
Share Buybacks and Uninformed Investors (Interfluidity) — Explains why share buybacks have largely superseded dividends as a way of returning money to shareholders, then argues that buybacks benefit active and buy-and-hold investors at the expense of passive investors and those who need liquidity immediately. Thus, when we say that “firms should be managed for the benefit of shareholders,” we have to ask which shareholders we mean.
Remember That Time the EPA Killed the Sedan? (The New Republic) — Shares a famous example of the law of unintended consequences. A 2012 American law started requiring automakers to reduce cars’ CO2 emissions, but the standards were more lax for larger cars. Thus, carmakers shifted toward producing more SUVs and “light trucks,” which undermined the EPA’s goal and made the 2012 law only reduce emissions by 2% rather than the projected 3.5%.

🔍🗺️ Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: thoughtfully selective truth.

We’ve written before about maps as one way of understanding unfamiliar territory. The very act of creating a map requires that the mapmaker choose certain details and leave out others. Maps require thoughtfully selective truth. Even if it were theoretically possible for a map to represent all of the details of an area, doing so would make it no longer a map. It would become a full-scale reproduction and lose the abstraction that makes maps useful.

What details should a mapmaker leave out? It depends on the map’s purpose. A map depicting population density will look different from a map showing air quality, which will look different from a navigational map. Even a map for navigation will look different depending on whether we are on foot, using public transportation, on a bike, in a car… or if we’re in a self-driving car.

Although mapmakers can and do lie with maps, most of the time, this selectivity is a benefit. It allows the viewer to focus on the data pertinent to their needs. What differentiates deceptive selectivity from useful selectivity is how clearly the omissions and inclusions align with the map’s stated intention. It probably makes sense to leave roads off an air quality map… until we start using it to look at the impact of vehicle traffic on air quality.

This idea of thoughtful selectivity can be applied beyond mapmaking. An unsurprising application is when creating a presentation: taking our target audience into account is among the most basic presentation tips. When choosing target personas in product development, we can avoid the problem of personas that feel too specific by using thoughtful selectivity—focus on goals, motivations, and the context in which a product is used in a way that is still representative of larger groups.

Whenever the whole picture is too much and we need to be selective about what data we consider when achieving our goal, we can think back to the job of a mapmaker who has to balance the detail needed to convey a message with the selectivity to not distract from that message.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review