🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 159

August 22nd, 2024

Aug 23, 2024

Episode 159 — August 22nd, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/159

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK, Dimitri Glazkov, Ade Oshineye, Erika Rice Scherpel

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.

“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

🍄🪵 Composting consciousness

Mental reality is more complex than the thinking visible to our awareness. We are not one. We are a thousand brains working in vague concert to produce the construct we perceive as the Self. Out of this vast collection, only a thin veneer conspires to be our “consciousness.” The rest is submerged, acting without our conscious input and making decisions more or less autonomously.

To use an agricultural metaphor, this submerged mass of our mind is a compost heap: a mishmash of thoughts, beliefs, memories of emotional responses, and the dense mycelium of associations linking them. The contents are constantly in motion, incorporating new experiences, reinforcing or withering the old.

With repetition, habits begin to grow—reactions to our environment that we manifest seemingly automatically. Our cravings, our aversions, and those inexplicable forces that often drive us are the networks of habits with which our mental compost is laced.

Our compost pile also grows blind spots. It creates invisible refractions of reality that only become visible in retrospect, if at all. Despite our desire to be rational, we are driven mainly by the invisible parts of our mental compost. Our “conscious Self” is an illusory construct on top of the thousand brains that control the show.

Our mental compost can also grow new insights and creativity. Yet, how can we access, examine, change, or encourage this? With courage. Knowing oneself requires staring at the abyss of one’s own flawed Self with an unflinching eye. Without the habits of mind to enable this challenging act, we will see fiction—no matter how hard we try.

Metaphorical or literal, healthy compost requires time and intentional care to nurture the biome. We must first spend years fruitlessly trying to see even glimpses of our vast mental compost. However, once we do, we begin reaping durable benefits, like a rich wealth of nutrients to sustain something new. The hysteresis of composting is high: it’s hard to change but also hard to unchange.

Good mental habits, rooted in healthy compost, will tide us over in rough times and give us something to hang on to during the storms. To get there, at least at first, this self-work will feel useless and somewhat woo. Journaling at the end of the day, daily meditation, and other rituals that stimulate self-reflection may seem like a waste of time. They are anything but. They are the way we slowly shift the state of our mental compost toward clarity and self-consistency.

As we learn to nurture our own mental compost, we may find ourselves more capable of nurturing the compost of the ecosystems we are a part of. Our self-work can create the potential that goes beyond the indiscernible heap it started as.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🇲🇱 Mali is using AI to create educational materials in local languages

Last year, the Malian government removed French as the country’s official language, replacing it with 13 local languages. However, there was a shortage of educational materials for kids in those languages. So, the government turned to a team called RobotsMali, which started using ChatGPT to generate stories for kids’ picture books, asking Google Translate to translate them into local languages, and using a free AI image generator to create appropriate illustrations for the books. (A local team had to manually review the AI-generated text to remove stereotypical stories and non-African settings, and they had to tweak the image prompts to avoid the “hypersexualized” African people that the AI would often put out.) So far, the project has created over a hundred books in Bambara, Mali’s most widely-spoken language, and the Malian education ministry is now officially partnering with the RobotsMali team.

🚏🔌 Australia will build the world’s largest solar project & send the power to Singapore

The Aussie government has approved a US$19 billion project that’ll build a gigantic 12,400 hectare (48 square mile) solar farm in the sun-drenched Northern Territory, then use a 4300-kilometer (2700-mile) undersea cable to send some of that power to industrial customers in Singapore. Australia’s Environment Minister said the project, when completed in the 2030s, “will be the largest solar precinct in the world.”

🚏👔 CEOs have become more execution-oriented but “less charismatic” since 2008

A recent study used 4900 data points to evaluate CEOs' “characteristics and objectives” before and after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–08. Since the GFC, they found that the average CEO interview candidate has become more execution-oriented but “less interpersonal, less charismatic and less creative/strategic.” The trend of decreasing charisma and creativity also applies when looking at hired CEOs.

🚏🍬 Nanoparticle tech could turn sugar into fiber after you eat it

Food scientists have devised a clever way to let people keep eating sugar while avoiding some of its health impacts: they take an enzyme plants use to turn sugar into fibrous stalks and trap it inside spherical nanoparticles. The nanoparticles are added to sugary food, and when the food hits the stomach, acid opens up holes in the shells, allowing the enzyme to come out and convert sugar into fiber. This experimental tech could reduce the amount of sugar absorbed from food by 30% or more, and it could help fiber-starved Americans get more of the valuable nutrient.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

On the Competitiveness of UGC Games Platforms (Seeing the Chessboard) — Uses economic development as an analogy to explain the challenges facing Roblox and Epic Games, which derive a lot of value from user-created video games. These gaming platforms are the equivalent of poor countries, only featuring low-quality games from inexperienced devs. To grow, they need to do the equivalent of what helped South Korea go from a poor country to an export-heavy economic powerhouse: encourage devs to create products that can compete on the world stage and force them to reinvest their earnings on the platform. (The famous “resource curse” has an equivalent in gaming platforms, too!)
Simplicity (Rob Pike) — A lucid argument from a legendary programmer: simplicity is highly underrated at many huge tech companies, where performance, readability, and testability are lionized, but simplicity is disincentivized by the performance review process.
How Everything Became National Security (Foreign Affairs) — Uses the history of US policy to illustrate the concept that, if everything is marked as critically important, nothing is. In America’s case, “national security” — a term that’s supposed to be exclusively applied to things that threaten the republic’s sovereignty — has become a label that leaders slap on anything they deem important: global food insecurity, mineral supply chains, drug trafficking abroad, and more. This ‘scope creep’ has made it hard to identify actual threats and led policymakers to spread resources too thin.
Why Is Writing Hard? (E.W. Niedermeyer) — Argues that computers offer a dangerous sense of comforting philosophical certainty, making it seem like “there is no mystery that can’t be solved with computers, eventually… everything will someday be quantifiable and calculable.” But the act of writing turns the mirror inward, forcing us to realize that there’s so much we don’t understand about ourselves and each other. Good writing comes out of grappling with this messiness, rather than trusting rationality to lead to the guaranteed ‘correct’ answers.

🔍🤝 Lens of the week

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

This week’s lens: commitment device.

You want to write more publicly, so you commit to sharing a weekly newsletter. If you miss a deadline, you promise to sincerely and positively highlight an article from an author you typically disagree with. This consequence sharpens your focus, turning an abstract goal into a concrete, time-bound priority you’re motivated to hit.

Commitment devices align actions with intentions by linking them to meaningful stakes. They work best when there’s a linear, predictable relationship: “If I fail at X, then Y happens.” When the consequence is undesirable enough, we’ll be more incentivized to take action.

Commitment devices can effectively keep us on track, but relying too heavily on external pressure can create rigidity and stifle growth. A more flexible, adaptive approach is to view commitment devices as temporary scaffolding — supporting consistent action while intrinsic motivation is nurtured and internalized. The key is to design incentives that evolve with your goals and reveal insights about your actual drivers.

Ultimately, the most effective commitment devices aren’t just about enforcing discipline but about fostering deeper self-alignment. By using them to explore what truly drives you, you can design systems that gradually reduce the need for external enforcement. With this reflective approach, commitment devices become not just mechanisms for meeting goals, but instruments for cultivating long-term resilience and growth.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review