🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 168
October 31st, 2024
Episode 168 — October 31st, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/168
Contributors to this issue: Ade Oshineye, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Ben Mathes, 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, Wesley Beary
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.
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
🐸🔥 Boiling over with metaphors
Ah, the classic boiling frog metaphor—a frog sits in a pot of water that gradually heats up, unaware of the rising temperature until it’s too late. It’s vivid and effective... and inaccurate. Despite this, it remains compelling for how it captures gradual, unnoticed threats. Here are some fresh alternatives that invite us to think about different aspects of patterns of escalation and inattention.
🍑 The Rotting Fruit
Picture a perfectly ripe peach on your counter. It’s beautiful, fragrant. After a few days, tiny spots start to appear. A few days later, when you finally think about enjoying that peach, it’s mushy, spotted, and crawling with fruit flies.
If you appreciate the natural progression of the boiling frog, this metaphor offers a fresh perspective by highlighting how minor issues left unchecked can quietly grow into significant problems.
❤️ The Clogged Artery
Imagine an artery gradually clogging over the years. There’s no pain, no immediate signs—everything seems fine. Then one day, without warning, a heart attack strikes.
If you’re drawn to the element of sudden catastrophe, consider this metaphor for how problems can accumulate silently until they suddenly demand our attention—often when it's too late.
🏞️ The Crumbling Dam
If there’s a tiny crack in a dam, it will seem harmless at first. But over time, that small fissure grows, largely ignored, until eventually, the dam collapses, releasing a flood that sweeps away everything in its path.
If you want to convey that the problem could have been fixed if noticed earlier, this metaphor illustrates a looming disaster on a grander scale, showing how small weaknesses left unattended can lead to catastrophic failures.
⛓️ The Rusting Chain
As a final vignette, visualize a sturdy chain holding something important. Over time, rust begins to creep in—slowly weakening the links. It seems solid, but one day, a link snaps, and everything falls apart.
We’re moving a bit further from the original metaphor. However, suppose you resonate with the gradual wear and tear aspect of the boiling frog, the multitude of reversible decisions (or indecisions) snowballing into irreversible. In that case, this metaphor captures the way everything declines over time.
Each of these metaphors reflects different aspects of the concepts from the original metaphor: gradual danger, quiet escalation, and the cost of inattention. Yet each also offers a distinct lens to reconsider the nature of slow-building crises. Whether it’s the rot of neglected fruit or the sudden shock of a heart attack, these metaphors challenge us to recognize and address creeping threats before they become irreversible. Adopting a fresh perspective makes us more attuned to the signs—and more prepared to act—before it’s too late.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🇮🇴 The .io domain ending might disappear due to geopolitical shifts
The .io domain ending (known as a TLD) has become popular for tech startups and open-source projects (not to mention the famous .io games). Officially, it’s a country-code TLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory, just as “.in” is for India. But the UK recently agreed to hand over the islands of their Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, meaning that, officially, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. By the standards organization’s rules, the .io TLD must be discontinued within three to five years, but it’s possible that they could make an exception for such a globally popular domain.
🚏📡 Archaeologists accidentally found a lost Mayan city in the jungle
An American PhD student found a random Lidar survey on “page 16 of Google search” and applied archaeological data analysis techniques; his team found a giant ancient Mayan city that could have housed up to 50,000 people at its height around 800 CE. No modern archaeologist had ever seen the city buried deep in the Yucatan jungle (although it’s just a 15-minute walk from a town on a major road). Scientists think many more cities could be hidden in the Mexican jungle, waiting to be discovered by future Lidar surveys.
🚏🧯 The Feds warned about ballot drop box bombings weeks before they happened
An October 17th piece in Wired revealed that the US’s Department of Homeland Security “warned of a ‘heightened risk’” of “extremist violence” around the 2024 election, warning about “plots to destroy bins full of paper ballots.” Two weeks later, several ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington caught fire after a suspect put an “incendiary device” on the boxes, leading to hundreds of ballots getting damaged or destroyed.
🚏🌄 TSMC’s Arizona chip fab has achieved similar yields to Taiwan’s fabs
The massive silicon chip manufacturer TSMC produces most of its products in its home country of Taiwan (where it accounts for 30% of the country’s main stock index). Still, it opened a “fab” in Arizona earlier this year. According to a new report, the Arizona factory’s yield has reached parity with the Taiwanese fabs. Good yield is essential in maintaining profit margin, so experts see this as a positive sign for TSMC’s planned future expansion out of Taiwan and across the US, Japan, and Germany.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
A Lot of State Poll Results Show Ties. So Are They Tied Because of Voters — Or Pollsters? (NBC) — Argues that polls of next week’s US presidential election are showing blatant signs of ‘herding’: pollsters tweak their numbers to align with other pollsters to avoid embarrassment if they end up being wrong. The polls’ reported margins are showing far tighter clustering than you would expect given their margins of error; in other words, you’re not seeing the bell curve that you’d expect from random sampling. Indeed, pollsters are converging on a dead heat between the two major candidates (and one uncharitable explanation is that they’re hedging their bets so nobody can say they’re wrong).
Muscular Imagination (Robin Sloan) — A science fiction writer himself, Sloan describes how difficult it is to imagine the far future and lauds Iain M. Banks’s triumphal The Culture series. This original massively scaled world does not fall into the usual tropes, nor the expected dystopian projection, presenting a positive vision worth aspiring to.
Why So Few Matt Levines? (Gwern) — Examines why there is a paucity of accessible, educational, and entertaining mass-market newsletters like Matt Levine, the famous (and excellent) financial writer. Levine helps lay people learn the core mechanics of finance through his case studies with unambiguous inputs and outcomes, first-principles explainers, and “spaced repetition enabled by fast turnover” (i.e., repeatedly returning to the same themes). The problem is that very few industries have such perfect information games and lend themselves to first-principles analysis.
How to Talk Yourself Into Defending Nonsense (Aaron Ross Powell) — Observes that being a contrarian is a sure way to attract attention, but this attention-seeking introduces a dangerous feedback loop. Succinctly, the mechanism is this: 1) argue contrarian position, 2) attract many detractors from the other side, 3) dismiss them as politically motivated, and 4) end up doubling down on the original contrarian position.
🔍✂️ Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: scissor statements.
In a team meeting, someone confidently declares, "It's impossible to improve both speed and quality. There can be only one." This forces everyone into opposing camps, ignoring potential balance or creative solutions.
This is a scissor statement: provocative messages that flatten complex situations into binary choices, often forcing a "with us or against us" choice. Scissor statements are inherently divisive and best avoided as a decision-making device. The simplicity they offer is illusory, and they tend to make it harder to reach productive, nuanced outcomes and integrative solutions.
Being inherently divisive, they are also quite effective at revealing deep-seated values within groups or societies. They expose fault lines that might remain implicit when used as a rhetorical device. As such, it might be helpful to understand their dynamics and learn from the insights they provide.
Scissor statements thrive in environments that value quick pace, like social media or fast-paced startups. They create an illusion of clarity while hiding the real complexities of an issue. Despite their divisiveness, scissor statements can clarify individual values by illuminating what people prioritize. The key is to recognize their insights while resisting their reductive nature.
To navigate scissor statements effectively, consider these approaches:
Seek intentional complexity: Accept the values in the binary as relevant, then explore what other factors might be relevant. Shift the conversation from "either/or" to "how much?" or "in what order?"
Discover underlying values: Use scissor statements to constructively uncover different stakeholders' priorities and address their concerns.
Recognize epistemic tricks: Be aware of when an issue is being simplified in a helpful way versus when it is being oversimplified to force division.
By approaching scissor statements with discernment, we can reduce their divisive impact while still gaining valuable insights into underlying values.
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