🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 156

August 1st, 2024

Aug 02, 2024

Episode 156 — August 1st, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/156

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

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Jon Lebensold, 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.

“Yet knowledge and knowhow are not the same. Simply put, knowledge involves relationships or linkages between entities. These relationships are often used to predict the outcomes of events without having to act them out… Knowhow is different from knowledge because it involves the capacity to perform actions, which is tacit… Knowhow is the tacit computational capacity that allows us to perform actions, and it is accumulated at both the individual and collective levels.”
— César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows

⚓️🛳️ Extending the short pier of hope

It’s time to launch our groundbreaking app! With great enthusiasm and high expectations, we can hardly contain our excitement. Rapid adoption and financial success seem just around the corner. However, as months pass and growth plateaus, our initial hope takes a long walk off a short pier, plunging into a pervasive sense of disillusionment.

This scenario highlights a crucial idea: the timescale of our hopes plays a significant role in whether we sustain our optimism or succumb to doomerism.

Hope propels us toward ambitious goals and inspires collective action. When our expected timeframe for achieving these hopes is unrealistically short, inevitable delays and setbacks can lead to despair. This phenomenon, where initial optimism collapses into pessimism, is often exacerbated by our tendency to expect immediate results. We set ourselves up for disappointment when we forget that meaningful change is often slow and gradual.

Consider environmental activism. Many passionate advocates enter the field with the hope of witnessing rapid, significant changes in policy and public behavior. When these changes fail to materialize quickly, the initial fervor wanes, leading to disenchantment. Such a shift from hope to despair is not because the cause somehow becomes unworthy of our efforts. Rather, it’s due to a mismatch between the expected and actual timescale of progress.

Our intrinsic desire for a shorter feedback loop is a form of bias. To counteract it, we are better off adopting a longer-term perspective. It doesn’t need to be a 10,000-year perspective. Still, we must intentionally examine and stretch the timelines to meet our expectations. We must acknowledge that substantial change often unfolds over years or even decades. When we do, we give our motivation more buoyancy and find the strength to continue our efforts, even when immediate results are elusive. We can draw from historical examples and see that big change generally takes time, helping us prepare for setbacks and delays.

To maintain a sense of progress and even build energy when thinking at the time scale of years, we can set milestones and celebrate the small victories along the way. Are we getting bug reports on that new product? That means people care enough to file them! Did our proposed policy change get out of committee deliberations? Progress! We can also find a community of like-minded individuals who provide support and remind us of progress being made, no matter how insignificant.

While adjusting our timescale for expected results, we mustn’t abandon urgency – after all, many issues require immediate action. The seemingly paradoxical term “patient urgency” describes both the tension and the symbiosis of thinking in the long term and acting in the short term.

What “long term” means will vary depending on our goal. As a rule of thumb, it is almost always longer than we initially expect it to be. By embracing this, finding supportive communities, and celebrating the wins along the way, we can maintain our energy and optimism. With sustained momentum, we can reach for that elusive goal of lasting change.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🧺 Germans are installing plug-and-play solar panels on their houses

Stores in Germany are now selling plug-in solar panels for as little as 200 euros. You can install these lightweight panels yourself — no electrician or specialized tools needed — and they plug straight into a standard wall socket. (Said one retiree who installed several panels herself, “You don’t need to drill or hammer anything… you hang them from the balcony like wet laundry in Italy.”) Over 500,000 such systems have already been installed across Germany.

🚏💌 Instagram will let influencers create AI clones to answer fans’ messages

Meta has announced that Instagram users will be able to create custom AI avatars that can chat with people on their behalf. Meta’s hero use case is that creators and business owners will be able to create AI bots that can auto-respond to customers or fans (a bot can “answer questions and recommend products while you focus on the most meaningful conversations”). Creators will need to chat with the AI to teach it what topics to emphasize and what topics to avoid.

🚏🇳🇿 Air New Zealand nixed its 2030 emissions target due to lack of efficient planes or green fuels

The airline industry has set a goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, and Air New Zealand, in particular, set a target of cutting emissions by 29% by 2030. But Air New Zealand’s CEO recently announced that the company may have to postpone the timeline. The company cited supply chain issues that are making it harder to procure newer, more efficient planes, and there’s also the problem that there is currently “no realistic or scalable [renewable] alternative” to kerosene jet fuel.

🚏❤️‍🔥 Porn bots made it impossible to track a huge California wildfire on Twitter

Many Californians turned to Twitter/X last week for information about the Park Fire that was ravaging the northern part of the state, but they found the site unusable: bot accounts were flooding the site with posts that mentioned the #ParkFire hashtag but effectively only contained porn. Many posts would mention plausible-seeming updates, like “here’s a timelapse video of the fire, which has grown rapidly in the last few hours,” only to include a pornographic video with a link out to an adult site.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

High Modernism Made Our World (Programmable Mutter) — Argues that James C. Scott’s famous observation about governments trying to remake society to be legible to them can also apply to Silicon Valley: consider the tech industry’s attempts to structure the internet so it can fit neatly into ML models or to create legible walled-garden social media platforms. To recapture Scott’s much-loved tacit knowledge (metis), we may want to turn to technologies that don’t follow strict rules or formalisms: could LLMs do the trick?
How Does OpenAI Survive? (Ed Zitron) — Builds a case to argue that OpenAI will only be able to stay afloat for the next few years if it can “raise more money than any startup has ever raised in history, and continue to do so at a pace totally unseen in the history of financing.” Looking at OpenAI’s financials, Zitron argues that it needs an unforeseen breakthrough in transformer technology, extreme cost savings, and/or a sudden burst of product-market fit that can invalidate entire large industries.
Stepping Stones Not Milestones (James Cowling) — Advises that we split projects up into meaningful small and simple parts that deliver concrete value and illuminate “unknown unknowns.” Massive moonshot projects are an anti-pattern.
Systems: How the Ultra-Wealthy Think About Money (Anil Dash) — Observes that, while normal people think of money as a “stock” (a fixed amount to be spent), the super-rich think of money as a “flow” (a never-ending “hose” of cash that you can “point at anything that isn’t suiting your preferences”). This might explain why the wealthy’s preferred method of social impact is setting up institutions with recurring expenditures, rather than a single lump-sum donation.

📚🛋️ 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 Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth (2020, 352).

Anil Seth’s Being You dives into the nature of consciousness, blending cutting-edge neuroscience with deep philosophical inquiry. Seth invites us to rethink what it means to be conscious, challenging traditional boundaries between mind and body. He grounds our understanding of consciousness in neuroscience and explores the implications of these findings for our sense of self.

Central to Seth’s argument is the idea that our experiences of the world and the self are constructed by the brain as “controlled hallucinations.” According to this theory, our minds are not windows to the outside world. Rather, they are probabilistic best guesses based on a host of signals, both internally and externally generated. In this sense, everything we experience is a hallucination, a creation of our mind. However, they are deeply grounded in the signals we are getting, thus leading to their being controlled. Consciousness, the author argues, arises from the phenomenological nature of creating the mental model for both sensing and taking action.

Whether or not you agree with his claim that this approach dissolves the hard problem of consciousness, Seth’s focus on neuroscience provides new insights into this challenging philosophical issue. (We will note that the book’s section on AI near the end feels a bit lacking, given the advancements in Generative AI in the past couple of years.)

Being You reminds us of the intricate and dynamic nature of consciousness, urging us to appreciate the complexity and wonder of our own minds. It catalyzes ongoing exploration into what it means to be conscious, for humans and beyond.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review