🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 160

August 29th, 2024

Aug 30, 2024

Episode 160 — August 29th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/160

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Ben Mathes, Erika Rice Scherpelz, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Justin Quimby, Dimitri Glazkov, 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 Law of Sub-Optimization: In a complex system, improving one part will degrade other parts of the system.”
— John Gall

📝 Editor’s note: We’ll be off next week for the US’s Labor Day holiday. We’ll see you again the week after!

🧭🧳 There and back again

Imagine a book or movie from your childhood that hasn’t aged well. Perhaps it was a beloved film that now contains jokes or stereotypes that make you cringe. Contrast this with something much older — say, Pride and Prejudice, with class and gender dynamics that are problematic by today’s standards. Despite these themes, you might not feel the same level of discomfort. It’s a classic, a product of its time, and somehow, that distance makes it easier to accept or overlook what today would be seen as flaws.

Why do works often follow a U-shaped curve in our moral judgment — starting as acceptable, becoming unacceptable as our norms evolve, and then returning to a place of cautious acceptance or even reverence after more time has passed?

This phenomenon reflects how we navigate the terrain of the moral adjacent possible — the realm of ideas, practices, and norms just outside of our current reality. The closer something is to this adjacent possible, the more challenging it becomes to judge. When we encounter something far removed from our current reality, like the social structures in Pride and Prejudice, it’s easier to contextualize without feeling personally implicated. The historical and cultural distance allows us to see its flaws without discomfort.

In contrast, the discomfort we feel revisiting a childhood favorite now laced with outdated views reflects its proximity to our present. These works belong to a world we still recognize, making their flaws harder to dismiss. They are part of our adjacent possible, and their shortcomings remind us how recently our society — and often we — tolerated those views. Wisdom grows from a seed of truth in the work and receptive soil in the listener. When something is too uncomfortably close to our adjacent possible, that seed cannot take root.

The U-shaped curve in our judgment of cultural works reflects this dynamic. As time passes, works move further from our adjacent possible, and the discomfort diminishes. Eventually, we can reevaluate them, acknowledging their flaws while understanding them as products of a different era. This pattern also applies to social norms, political ideologies, and cultural practices.

Why should we even care about the culture of the past? The present doesn’t have a monopoly on truth. Every era offers lessons (even if not every work from an era is worth salvaging). If we are willing to sift through outdated norms, we may find enduring insights that resonate today.

Engaging with the past critically and thoughtfully allows us to separate these insights from outdated trappings. It’s easy to judge what’s far away, but the real challenge lies in grappling with what’s close to home recognizing that our current values aren’t the endpoint of moral progress. The discomfort we feel when confronted with the recent past is a sign that we are still evolving.

Navigating this moral terrain requires humility and critical thinking. The U-shaped curve reminds us that what seems clear-cut today may look very different in the future. The wisdom of the past — if we are wise enough to receive it — can guide us as we continue to move forward, both as individuals and as a society.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🇵🇭 AI is boosting Filipino call center reps’ efficiency, but it could cost 300k jobs too

Business process outsourcing (BPO), such as customer support call centers, is the Philippines’ most significant source of private-sector jobs. AI is reportedly helping call centers in the country drive productivity gains, such as with LLM-powered role-playing, automatic call summaries, accent standardization, and real-time advice for agents. However, greater efficiency could also mean fewer humans are needed, and one advisory firm estimates that the Philippines could lose up to 300,000 BPO jobs due to AI in the next five years. (And if accents aren’t a problem, the Philippines’ advantage of having skilled English speakers could become less relevant, and companies could shift BPO jobs to even cheaper countries.)

🚏🛰️ Scientists are enabling GPS-free navigation with miniaturized quantum sensors

If you don’t have a GPS to track your location, you can still use a device’s accelerometers to estimate where you’ve moved. This form of inertial navigation is essential in places like war zones, where GPS radio signals can be easily spoofed or jammed. Still, the required motion sensors have long been very large and relatively imprecise. A quantum technique called atom interferometry can be up to 1000x more sensitive than classical motion sensors, but the machinery required usually fills a whole room. A team of scientists at the US’s Sandia National Labs, though, have found a way to fit such a sensor into a shoebox, and it could become mass-producible too.

🚏🍿 AI made up fake quotes from movie critics for a major studio’s movie trailer

A marketing consultant for the movie studio Lionsgate used AI to generate a movie trailer for director Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming movie “Megalopolis.” The trailer included critical quotes about Coppola’s past movies, such as “The Godfather.” The problem was that the LLM fabricated these quotes and some of the movie critics who supposedly said negative things about the movies actually loved them. (When a magazine asked ChatGPT to find negative criticism about Coppola’s movies, it got similar fake quotes to what was in the trailer.) Lionsgate quickly pulled the trailer.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down (New York Times) — Tells the story of the rise and potential fall of Próspera, a company-run, built-from-scratch city that sits in a free trade zone off the coast of Honduras. It highlights a key challenge facing such “charter cities”: you’re borrowing land from (and thus reliant on the good graces of) a government that can cut you off anytime. More broadly, can any development truly be considered “greenfield” when it must rely on existing infrastructure, economies, and communities that other people have built?
The MVP Is Dead. Long Live the RAT. (HackerNoon) — Argues that Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) often become bloated because they focus on building a product rather than testing whether your idea is good. The most pressing task for a new venture is finding your most load-bearing assumption (or the one you’re least sure about) and figuring out if it’s valid. The Riskiest Assumption Test (RAT) focuses on testing your assumptions without building a product, and so it enables much quicker, more iterative learning. (This concept is closely related to our Lens of the Week below.)
Dear AWS, Please Let Me Be a Cloud Engineer Again (Luc van Donkersgoed) — A software engineer argues that the cloud provider is over-focusing on adding GenAI features rather than building out the core infrastructure to which GenAI will be applied. In short, “GenAI can only exist if there is a business to serve.”
I Feel, Therefore I Am: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on Consciousness as a Full-Body Phenomenon (The Marginalian) — Argues that feeling might have begun as a “timid conversation” between the chemistry of life and a rudimentary nervous system. It eventually flourished into an advanced proprioceptive feedback loop that is the source of all human pleasure and pain — and the basis of “our capacity for problem-solving and poetry, for beauty and transcendence.”

🆕📲🛋️ App for your drawer

An app that will help you apply your knowledge of systems thinking or enjoy the world of complexity science.

This week, we recommend iNaturalist: a “citizen science” project where amateur and professional nature-watchers alike can record pictures of the plants and animals they’ve seen. A community of fellow enthusiasts can help sharpen and verify your observations (helpful when you don’t quite know what you’ve seen). Once an observation has enough verifications, it becomes “research grade,” meaning scientists can use it to help track migration patterns, lifecycles, biodiversity, conservation status, and more.

In addition to helping you contribute to science, the iNaturalist app is a valuable compendium of all the delightful creatures you’ve seen. The “missions” feature and scoreboard of species add a touch of fun gamification that encourages you to get out in the world and keep your eyes open.

Here’s a shot of some animals one FLUXer recorded on iNaturalist during his recent trip to Kenya! (Not pictured: hippos, lions, giraffes, and elephants!)

🔍🛟 Lens of the week

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

This week’s lens: recursive de-risking.

Today’s lens builds off some insights from FLUX’s own Gordon Brander.

Suppose a startup is testing a new customer acquisition strategy. Instead of launching a full-blown marketing campaign, it starts small, running a limited ad campaign with basic content to gauge audience engagement. As it iterates, it scales up what works and swiftly pivots away from what doesn’t. This approach allows it to quickly identify what works and adjust before scaling up.

This form of recursive de-risking flips traditional planning on its head. Rather than following a linear path from problem identification to market delivery, this approach emphasizes continuous cycles of identifying and mitigating risks. By focusing on the most significant unknowns early and testing them in the cheapest way possible, you generate rapid feedback that guides the next steps, reducing the chances of costly mistakes later on.

Recursive de-risking is a type of adaptive cycle akin to an OODA loop, where every action is part of an ongoing process of learning and adaptation. When risks could be existential, focusing the loop on risk directly addresses what is most likely to require a response. Each iteration provides new information that refines the system's behavior, leading to more resilient outcomes.

To apply recursive de-risking, start by identifying a goal or project with a high likelihood of failure. Sketch out a rough plan, and immediately focus on the biggest unknown or risk. Take the smallest, most cost-effective step to test that risk. Gather feedback, learn from it, and use that insight to adjust your approach. Repeat this process until you've built confidence and reduced uncertainty. This cycle doesn’t guarantee success but enables you to adapt to the challenges most likely to stand in your way.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review