🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 149
Episode 149 — June 6th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/149
Contributors to this issue: Dimitri Glazkov, Ade Oshineye, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Dart Lindsley, Jon Lebensold, Melanie Kahl, Kamran Hakiman, Chris Butler
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.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
— Brian Eno
🧱⚙️ Structures of success
All organizations have processes, the officially codified ways of doing things, alongside shadow processes — the real way to get things done even if it goes outside of (or even against) the official process. The best processes streamline work, increase efficiency, and encourage consistency. However, processes often become tedious overhead. People go through the motions to get the end they want, yet it would be more efficient for everyone involved just to skip the unnecessary steps.
Useful processes increase efficiency or motivation. They are often designed for the person who is enacting them. When we design our own processes, we often call these routines or habits. Good processes reduce the overhead of getting things done, whether self-designed or designed by others.
Overhead-increasing processes, the kind that induces frustration, often arise when the process is designed for someone else. For example, processes that exist primarily to benefit others — the boss, the auditor, the committee — tend to become overhead. Some overhead may be necessary. For example, when handling sensitive data, the net benefits of auditing outweigh the overhead of accessing the data in an auditable way. Processes designed to make observers happy rarely bring joy to the person wading through them.
However, the most effective process is not really a process at all. Structures can replace explicit processes in a way that makes them almost unnoticeable. Structures are different from processes in that we encourage desired behaviors by shaping the environment around ourselves or our collaborators so that this environment naturally leads to effective work.
For example, the culinary practice of mise en place involves intentionally creating structure in a kitchen to support high-quality, efficient work. When designed with the work in mind, structure supports and enables the worker.
Standardizing structure, so that it’s shared by many people, can go even further. It can replace extra work or communication overhead with a self-service model. If everyone tracks their work in a well-defined place with common standards and updates it on a shared cadence, then people who want to know what’s going on can simply reference the tracking artifacts. This won’t always work, though. Standardized issue tracking might enable teams to collaborate more effectively on shared work, but the CEO may need distilled summaries to grasp what's happening. Still, they can replace mind-numbing status meetings that just rehash the available data elsewhere… if only anyone knew where.
Structure can support automation: when data is produced in the same format and known locations, people can start building views or automated processes on top of them. This can be a powerful way to reduce toil.
As with any other process, too much structure can become a trap. Yet, as long as it stays anchored in the work, structure can increase effectiveness without feeling like a process.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🎥 A streaming service will let you create TV shows with AI
An Emmy-award-winner startup is launching a site called Showrunner, where users can turn text prompts into AI-generated animated TV series; you’ll even be able to “control dialogue, characters, and shot types.” Users could earn royalties if other streaming services pick up their show, and Showrunner may pay users to feature their shows in a public catalog. Some shows the company is currently advertising include a satire of Silicon Valley in the style of South Park and a post-apocalyptic “dark horror anime.”
🚏🛢️ Vermont will make oil and gas companies pay for climate damage
A new bill passed in the Vermont legislature will establish a “climate superfund,” which (when implemented in a few years) will make fossil fuel companies pay for the damages caused by climate change. The state doesn’t yet have a mechanism for figuring out how much to charge, and the legislature only allocated $600,000 to figure out that methodology. Still, observers estimate the strategy could raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
🚏🕹️ Dave and Buster’s wants to let people bet on its arcade games
Dave and Buster’s, the popular entertainment chain where you can grab some food and play arcade games, is partnering with a “gamification technology company” to launch a product that would let people make small bets (reportedly between $5 and $10) on the outcomes of those arcade games. The partner company was quick to state that this wasn’t gambling, but rather a way to “gamify” and “digitize” the “friendly competition” that already goes on between friends and family at the arcade.
🚏🍬 Ozempic could cut US calorie consumption by 1.5–2.5%
According to one forecast, about 10% of Americans will be on GLP-1 drugs (a class that includes the popular weight-loss drug Ozempic) by 2035. Overall, the rise of GLP-1 meds is expected to reduce calorie consumption in the US by 1.5% to 2.5% by 2035, with a drop of up to 5% for baked goods, soda, and candy. This caused consternation at one recent summit full of sugar traders, with one researcher advising American snack companies to diversify their product lineups and investigate smaller serving sizes.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does (Anil Dash) — The CEO of Glitch examines the corollaries of this key concept from cybernetics. “The machine is never broken” — its outputs, no matter how flawed, are exactly what it was programmed to do — so the clearest way to drive change is to make the machine want something else. This also highlights a flaw with “mindless optimism”: it leads you to keep investing in a system that gets you a bad outcome when you often need to dismantle and rebuild it instead.
AI Is Like a Very Tiny Hamburger (Akhil Rao) — Examines the math of computing the water and electricity costs of artificial intelligence models, observing that it’s hard to get a net resource cost figure that everyone can agree on (especially when you look at indirect costs). How much of the production of chips and data centers would have happened anyway, even without AI? How much of the water being used to cool data centers can be reused? If the greater demand for chips leads manufacturers to improve energy efficiency, does that count as energy savings thanks to AI?
Research Brief: Hierarchy in Dynamic Environments (Santa Fe Institute) — Summarizes a new agent-based modeling study comparing hierarchical and non-hierarchical organizations performed in fast-changing environments. They found that “teams with a hierarchical structure performed better than those without, with one crucial caveat: workers must have the autonomy to judge the manager’s input when deciding what to do.”
Disclosure, Dasein, and the Divine in Terrence Malick’s ‘The Tree of Life’ (Ryan Poll) — A deep look at Malick’s epic film from multiple lenses. Can a film be a prayer? Can a film break away from the narrative expectations of its audience and into philosophical musings?
🔍📆 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: reasoning by analogy.
We’ve discussed different types of formal reasoning before: inductive, abductive, and deductive. There’s a type of informal reasoning that’s just as common in most people’s toolboxes (if not more so) but comes with its own set of tradeoffs: reasoning by analogy. We reason by analogy when we take two separate things and reason about their similarities.
Reasoning by analogy can be extremely helpful. When our reasoning is blocked, analogy can help open up new possibilities. Thinking about the parallels between debugging a program and fixing a machine may lead us to think about how to break the system down into components and test those independently. It can also be valuable when explaining a new idea to someone. If we can find an analogy that connects the unfamiliar with the familiar, it can help them to grasp the unfamiliar more quickly. For all but the true quantum physicists, anything we think we know about quantum mechanics falls under reasoning by analogy.
However, reasoning by analogy is also likely to mislead us. If life is like a box of chocolates, that doesn’t mean life is high in sugar and comes in a box. Or that life is full of random events that just happen to us. Taking quantum mechanical metaphors too literally is a source of many outlandish claims. And if we forget that computer programs are not mechanical machines, we may be surprised at the spooky action at a distance that occurs in programs.
If we’re careful not to abuse it, if we can make sure we understand what elements of similarity are helpful and which are incidental, then reasoning by analogy can be a great tool for expanding our reasoning repertoire from the formal to the creative.
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