Episode 157 — August 8th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/157
Contributors to this issue: Dimitri Glazkov, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, 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, 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.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw
🔮🧠 An inexact theory of mind
Mentalization, or the theory of mind, is our capacity to see that other people have beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and desires. It’s an essential part of being human, allowing us to navigate social landscapes by imagining the mental states of others.
We instinctively create mental models of others and use them to predict their behavior. The maturity of a model dictates our success or failure in social interactions, our applied theory of mind. If these models are like simple stick figures, our predictions will be mostly wrong, leading to constant faux pas.
The more complex our models, the more successful we become. Complex models allow us to make accurate predictions and act on them, which helps us establish and develop relationships and generally thrive in society.
So here it is, the secret to our success. We would simply build perfect models of all humans around us — and, thus, the world becomes our oyster.
There’s just one problem. We humans are very complex. Really, really complex. Creating a perfect mental model of even a single human is impossible. Per Ashby’s law of requisite variety, we can’t build a model of a system inside of a system of equal (or lesser) complexity.
Instead, we rely on templates: simplified mental models we can hold in our minds. When encountering other individuals, we assign templates to them, often without realizing it. One template is ourselves. Depending on our stage of adult development, this might be the most complex template we have. Others include people who have influenced us greatly. It could be our parents, siblings, coaches, and teachers — or our bullies and tormentors. We also develop models from characters we find in fiction. (And as the world of fanfic shows, these models can have surprising depth.)
These models more or less define how well we will be able to function in society. Growing up among well-rounded individuals equips us with various templates for modern society. Translate to a society of vicious canines (literal or metaphorical), and we would have been better prepared if we had been raised by wolves.
Understanding oneself is crucial for effectively applying the golden rule—or its sibling, the platinum rule. If we cannot even understand ourselves, we will struggle to understand the desires of others. Knowing oneself is a power-up for our theory of mind.
Yet even the best templates are just that: templates. They don't allow us to know exactly what another individual is thinking. At best, they act as weathervanes, providing a general sense of another’s mind. The journey toward understanding them must be walked through mutual communication.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🎮 An EU petition could stop publishers from shutting down online games
The European Union has a process known as the European Citizens’ Initiative, where a petition signed by one million citizens can get in front of the European Parliament. One ongoing petition aims to combat online video games shutting down when the publisher turns off the servers, even though players have already paid for the game. It would require publishers that sell in the EU to keep games playable (without any connection to the publisher’s servers) even when the servers shut down or the game studio goes out of business. For instance, they’d have to let players self-host servers and modify the game so it could connect peer-to-peer instead of having to connect to the central servers.
🚏🥇 The Royal Mint is starting to recover gold from e-waste
The UK’s Royal Mint, which produces the country’s coins, has set up an industrial plant that will eventually process 4,000 tons of discarded electronic gadgets per year, aiming to salvage trace amounts of gold from the components. This recycling process is quick, can operate at low temperatures, and avoids the toxic chemicals usually used in gold recovery. And it turns e-waste — which Britain usually ships overseas — into an asset: 4,000 tons of e-waste can yield 450 kg of gold, which currently sells for £27M ($34M).
🚏🦀 DARPA wants to use AI to turn C code into Rust
The White House has been encouraging programmers to avoid memory-unsafe languages like C and C++, so it’s not too surprising that DARPA (an R&D outfit of the US military) has started a project that can programmatically convert C code into the popular Rust language using LLMs. But as the project lead explained, it’s not as easy as asking GPT to transliterate the code. If you want highly accurate and automated conversion, you have to find a way to avoid LLM hallucinations and handle situations where C lets you do dangerous things that Rust forbids (like certain pointer math).
🚏🇨🇳 Wind and solar power have overtaken coal in China
China has historically been heavily reliant on coal, but that has been shifting rapidly in the last few years. As of June this year, wind and solar combined now generate more energy in China than coal does. Solar, in particular, has seen a huge buildout in the last two years, and one analysis forecasts that, by 2026, solar alone will generate more power than coal in China, thus becoming the country’s dominant energy source.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
The Perils of Presidentialism (Juan Linz) — Argues that presidential political systems tend to be less stable than parliamentary ones (“the only presidential democracy with a long history of constitutional continuity is the United States”). One major reason is that presidents and legislatures have independent claims to popular legitimacy, and constitutions rarely offer a way to settle conflicts between them. Plus, the fixed terms of presidential systems are more rigid and brittle: governments can’t quickly adapt to shifting situations, and the people instead need to sit around until the next election happens.
Speak in Stories (Andrew “Boz” Bosworth) — Meta’s CTO observes that influence is all about information flow. To grow your scope of influence, you must either mediate the channels through which information flows (which, realistically, means sitting in meetings and working through bureaucracy) or create stories that go viral and flood through information channels.
The Emotional Arcs of Stories Are Dominated by Six Basic Shapes (EPJ Data Science) — A surprising paper that uses statistics and machine learning to trace the structure of popular books on Project Gutenberg. The most popular stories follow one of six arcs: “rags to riches” (rise), “tragedy” (fall), “man in a hole” (fall-rise), “Icarus” (rise-fall), “Cinderella” (rise-fall-rise), or “Oedipus” (fall-rise-fall).
This Is What a “Second-Person” Video Game Would Look Like (Nick Robinson) — Observes that, just as second-person narration styles in storytelling are uncommon, second-person perspectives in video games are exceptionally rare. Shows one mind-bending example of a second-person gaming scene: in a car chase, you’re looking over the shoulder of the bad guy who’s chasing your character — and you’re controlling that car in front and trying to escape. In a way, you’re chasing yourself!
🔍🧪 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: dissolving the problem.
Too much email! Too many chats! What can you do? Maybe set up filters or schedule calendar blocks for communications? These tricks can be effective, but they often do not provide long-term solutions to communication overload.
Often, when faced with a problem, our instinct is to solve the problem. This approach can be effective in some cases, but for more complex problems, it can leave the underlying causes unchanged, allowing the problem to reemerge in the future.
Sometimes, the best approach is to dissolve the problem. We can reframe the problem to eliminate it entirely instead of just fixing it. Through this lens, we shift our focus from symptomatic relief to systemic change. For our email example, we might look for ways to eliminate whole classes of implementing emails, e.g., by moving ad hoc requests for product updates into a tool with a defined update cadence.
Another relevant example to almost everyone is decluttering your house or room. You may develop organizational systems and containers and sorting mechanisms, but those containers are just more things to organize. Though often oversimplified, Marie Kondo’s book on tidying up is fundamentally about dealing with your psychological attachments, the ones that lead to your desire to have all that stuff. Dissolve the psychological attachments, and you won’t have the things to sort out in the first place.
Dissolving problems encourages a deeper analysis and a more proactive approach. We not only address the symptoms but also focus on creating an environment where the problem is far less likely to arise. This might involve rethinking workflows, redesigning systems, cultivating new habits and mindsets, or modifying incentives.
As we like to say, work smarter, not harder. By focusing on creatively dissolving problems rather than struggling through hand-to-hand combat with the symptoms, we can create lasting solutions that lead to more sustainable and meaningful improvements. Ultimately, we can make our lives calmer and more focused.
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the six emotional arcs paper is fascinating.. I wonder what other independent axis beyond ‘fortune - misfortune’ could the stories be plotted against?