🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 151

June 20th, 2024

Jun 21, 2024

Episode 151 — June 20th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/151

Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Scott Schaffter, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, Dimitri Glazkov, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, 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.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
— Philip K. Dick

🎭🔍 Valuing our multitudes

We all have behaviors or beliefs that do not serve us well… sometimes, we’re even lucky enough to recognize them. For example, a leader may express their intention to delegate tasks and avoid micromanagement but somehow still find themselves immersed in the details despite conscious effort not to. When we act in a way that contradicts our stated goals, it may feel tempting to dismiss it. Our hypothetical leader might think, “I value autonomy and know I can’t handle all the details myself, so clearly, this was just a special case.”

However, when we repeatedly act in ways that counter our professed preferences, it’s worth zooming out of the particular cases and reflecting on the pattern’s origins. Typically, both the professed and revealed preferences serve us in some way. Until we understand how they serve us, we will remain stuck, unable to find a path forward.

What does it mean to say that a belief, whether professed or revealed, serves us somehow? It means we derive some value from that belief, even if it's unacknowledged. Sometimes, this value is obvious: perhaps micromanaging makes us feel more in control, or maybe we believe it reduces risk. Maybe professing the value of autonomy helps us view ourselves as the kind of leader we admire.

The more intriguing value often comes from deeper introspection beyond the things we already know we believe. A leader might discover that they delve into details because it revives their sense of domain competence. Perhaps they find that diving in gives them that special joy they’ve been craving—and makes their day-to-day role tedious and unfulfilling.

As with all self-reflection, we must avoid fabricating answers… or only accepting the easy answers. We contain multitudes that are often in silent conflict with each other. Each part plays an important role and is an indelible and essential part of ourselves. The part of the leader that wants to delegate and the part that keeps pulling closer to genba have our best interests at heart. If we don’t learn how to value and love our parts – and truly value the beliefs that drive them – we are unlikely to find ways out of being stuck.

Identifying the ways our beliefs serve us opens the door to creative possibilities. Maybe the solution to a leader’s micromanagement issue is finding a trusted person to delegate to, or perhaps the answer is for the leader to take on a personally interesting project. Understanding these dynamics allows us to create more effective strategies that align with our genuine needs and aspirations, even the ones we are unaware of.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🦺 The US is launching a “climate corps” of 9000 young green energy workers

The American Climate Corps, initially announced in 2020, is now hiring young Americans to work on sustainability projects across the country, including installing solar panels, managing forests, and promoting sustainable farming practices. The program aims to help young people “jump-start green careers” while paying them around $11 to $28 an hour. Nine thousand people will be deployed in the coming weeks, and the government expects upwards of 20,000 to join in the next year.

🚏🥩 Huawei is selling beef online, perhaps because of Western sanctions

Chinese electronics company Huawei was spotted selling beef in its online store. This seems like a strange choice for a telecommunications firm, but commentators came up with a plausible explanation: since Western sanctions make it hard for Huawei to sell goods for money, Argentinian firms could be paying Huawei in some of Argentina’s famous beef instead. (This theory hasn’t been officially confirmed, though.)

🚏🗳️ An AI is “running” for mayor in Wyoming

A resident of Cheyenne, Wyoming trained GPT-4 on “thousands of documents gleaned from Cheyenne council meetings” and announced that the resulting bot, named VIC (the “Virtually Integrated Citizen”) will be running for mayor. The bot’s creator said he’d be the “meat puppet” who would operate the AI and act on its behalf, but the bot would be the brains of the operation, deciding on votes and how to run the city. However, Wyoming’s Secretary of State contends that non-humans like VIC can’t run for office.

🚏🥛 Biotech companies are getting plants to create key components of cow’s milk

Some food science startups have been getting plants and bacteria to produce some signature proteins from cow’s milk: one company has engineered soybeans to produce casein, the polymer that gives cheese its “floppy” and stretchy texture, while another company has gotten yeast to produce a key protein in whey, which is popular for protein supplements. Food scientists hope that this ‘synthetic’ cow’s milk could avoid the methane emissions (and, potentially, diseases!) that come with raising cows, while also helping create more sustainable dairy products like cheese and ice cream.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

Simple Sabotage for Software (Erik Bernhardsson) — Inspired by the CIA’s famous Cold War handbook on sabotaging companies from within, shares some common anti-patterns that CTOs, product managers, and hiring managers succumb to that wreck productivity and sap momentum.
Only a Fool Gets Rich Twice (Allocator Mindset) — Investigates what to do if you have a hugely profitable investment: do you sell now and potentially lose greater gains in the future, or do you hold on at the risk of losing your gains? You must realize the decreasing marginal value of money and hold an “attitude of epistemic humility” by admitting that you don’t know what the future will hold. Practically, your best bet is to sell a moderate amount with a predefined selling plan.
Fast Crimes at Lambda School (Benjamin Sandofsky) — A longread on the rise and fall of Lambda School, the once-buzzy coding bootcamp. To the author, it’s a good example of a company with poor fundamentals buoyed by the tailwinds of the late 2010s tech boom: easy money, a burgeoning tech hiring market that hadn’t hit saturation yet, and credulous media coverage. But it’s a more classical reason — the hubris of Lambda’s founder — that ultimately did it in.
Everything We Can’t Describe in Music (Hazlitt) — An inquiry into musical timbre; is it perhaps a bucket for everything we can’t describe in words? Just like wine-tasting notes, our musical notes require inventive evocativeness, like the sound of “someone slapping a steak on a corrugated tin roof.”

🔍🎛️ Lens of the week

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

This week’s lens: API-defining assumptions.

An API provides a well-defined, stable interface for interacting with software. It encapsulates and enshrines fundamental API-defining assumptions about how a system operates, and changing them is not trivial.

We at the FLUX Collective spend a lot of time in Discord, and we find its API a fun example of this. Discord began as a tool for gamers, and its API still uses Guilds, a gaming term, to refer to servers. This naming has persisted even as Discord has expanded beyond the gaming community.

Humans and organizations are similar. Our fundamental assumptions, once established, are like the names in the early versions of an API. Changing a name might seem straightforward, but it requires careful consideration of the broader implications and dependencies.

Despite the difficulty, it is sometimes necessary to make such changes. Rearchitecting an API or changing your assumptions can fundamentally open up new possibilities. It can help spark new ideas or abandon prior views that no longer hold true.

When it is time to engage in change, we must recognize the paradigm we are moving toward. Shifting to a new paradigm means re-evaluating and reconfiguring foundational assumptions. If we don’t know where we’re going, we’ll find ourselves with a confused mishmash of assumptions and values. If we know where we’re going, many decisions become easier and require less energy.

Understanding and articulating these fundamental assumptions—our stable API—is vital in both software development and personal growth. They identify the core elements that shape our interactions and provide a roadmap for meaningful change. By acknowledging the difficulty of these changes and approaching them with a clear vision, we can more effectively navigate the complexities of transformation.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review