🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 171

November 21st, 2024

Nov 22, 2024

Episode 171 — November 21st, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/171

Contributors to this issue: Spencer Pitman, MK, Wesley Beary, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Dimitri Glazkov, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, 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.

“Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell. “Why, of course!” she laughed. “Then why do you do it?”
“It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think, I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was you who actually did it.”
“Hmm,” he said.
“Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?”
“Yes,” he agreed.
The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?”
He smiled. “I suppose not.”
“You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” She looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun.”
— Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons (1990)

📝 Editor’s note: We’ll be taking the rest of 2024 off for the American holiday season. We’ll see you again in January!

🧊❤️‍🔥 From icebreakers to firestarters

You want your team to connect, so you turn to the power of video games! You gather everyone and play Overcooked. It’s hectic, a bit stressful, and highly collaborative. It works brilliantly! Encouraged, you try the same strategy with another group, but it falls flat. What made the difference? The first team already had a relational foundation; the second did not.

When bringing a team together, it is essential to distinguish between cold bonding and bond strengthening. Cold bonding is about creating connections where none exist—like the early awkwardness of a first date. Bond strengthening deepens and enhances existing relationships—like a couple finding new ways to thrive. Neglecting these dynamics can lead to efforts that fail to connect.

Cold bonding happens when a team is new, new roles are introduced, or the mission undergoes a significant change. Members need to build – or rebuild! – familiarity with each other. The goal at this stage is to spark connection by establishing psychological safety, discovering boundaries, exploring personalities, and setting a baseline for interaction. The initial stakes should be low because people don’t have the foundation to put themselves out there fully. Structured icebreakers and casual meet-and-greets are often effective.

For an established team, those types of activities can feel inane. Established teams must focus on firestarters—activities that ignite deeper collaboration and shared identity. The goal is to test and push limits together safely—maybe even induce a bit of low-stakes stress. We can do that through shared challenges or playful competition. This phase builds shared concepts, deepens trust, and strengthens team identity. Valuable activities include hackathons or games.

For new or fragmented teams, prioritize cold bonding with activities to build familiarity. For teams with cohesion, focus on bond strengthening with challenges that push their collective edges. Remember, though, that teams tend to change over time. Different people may be at different phases—some need icebreakers, and others are ready for firestarters.

In the end, team dynamics aren't discrete phases. We need to meet people where they are. Cold bonding and bond strengthening are not steps on a ladder but parts of an ongoing dance. Like in any expert craft, we must know the formal elements, but apply them dynamically, responding to the rhythm and movement in real-time.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🏡 The average age of US homebuyers keeps going up

As a sign of how expensive American housing has become, the median age of a US homebuyer is now 56, up from 49 last year and significantly up from 42 in 2012. The same pattern holds for first-time homebuyers: the median age is now 38, up from 35 last year and just 31 in 2012. Plus, the percentage of first-time homebuyers has sunk to a record low of 24%, down from the high 30s in the early 2010s.

🚏🧸 Pokémon Go data is being used to train a geographic AI model

Niantic, the company behind the popular AR game Pokémon Go, is training an AI model based on geolocation and photo data from its players. This “Large Geospatial Model” (LGM) could help robots navigate the world by predicting what’s around them but just out of sight. For instance, a robot might see the front of a church and not know what the back side looks like, but with enough data points about what churches look like in 3D, it could use AI to predict what’s behind this particular church.

🚏🛞 Researchers are making a wheel that can climb stairs

Talk about ‘reinventing the wheel’: a team of researchers from South Korea is working on a “morphing wheel” that can deform when going over obstacles while maintaining its overall stiffness. These wheels can even go upstairs! The technology could enable greater mobility for wheelchair users or delivery robots. (Interestingly, the morphing wheel was inspired by the surface tension of water droplets, which go “from solid to fluid” when they encounter obstacles.)

🚏🧵 Bluesky has surpassed Threads in active US users

Bluesky, the decentralized social network we discussed last week, has seen explosive growth this month, now drawing more daily visitors in the US than Instagram’s Threads (and it’s about equalized in the number of worldwide visitors). At the time of writing, Bluesky adds five users a second or almost half a million per day.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

How to Be More Agentic (Cate Hall) — A polymathic lawyer, poker player, and startup founder shares advice for building a more dynamic life: “court rejection” (go for things that are out of reach), “seek real feedback,” “increase your surface area for luck,” “assume everything is learnable,” embrace being low-status (to maximize your rate of learning), and don’t work too hard (“burnout is the ultimate agency-killer”).
Were the Ottomans a Roman Dynasty? (Premodernist / YouTube) — Argues that the Ottoman Empire, who took over from the Byzantines in 1453, could well be considered an extension of the Roman Empire: they ruled over people they considered Roman in a land called “Romania,” and they considered themselves rulers of Rome (“Kayser-i-Rum”). Even though the political system was different, so too was the French government after the French Revolution — and we still call that place France. It shows that the meaning we project onto historical events may be totally disconnected from how people back then interpreted things.
A Few Notes on The Culture (Iain M. Banks) — The science fiction legend discusses wide-ranging ideas behind his expansive worldbuilding: an AI-planned economy can be more productive and morally desirable than one left to market forces; an interstellar civilization would be far more heterogeneous and chaotic than what we have on Earth today; and that the only way to keep ‘The Culture’ from terminal decadence is “that its easy hedonism is not some ground-state of nature, but something desirable, assiduously worked for in the past, not necessarily easily attained, requiring appreciation and maintenance both in the present and the future.”
Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Thinking (Farnam Street) — Discusses an observation that’s been in the news lately: you shouldn’t remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place. In other words, we live in a world of social norms, institutions, and systems that were created for a reason. Sometimes these old institutions have outlived their usefulness and need to be torn down, but you can’t rightly make that decision until you’ve understood their history.

🌀🖋 More from FLUXers

Highlighting independent publications from FLUX contributors.

In his essay Employees Risk More, FLUX’s own Ben Mathes observes that VCs invest money into a portfolio of bets, while the startup employee invests all of their time into a single risky bet. Investors can always raise more money, but employees can’t raise more time, so if you're looking to join a startup, do your homework!

🔍🔮 Lens of the week

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

This week’s lens: the illusion of efficacy.

You’ve instituted weekly status update meetings to keep your team aligned. Everyone shares progress, highlights challenges, and confirms next steps. The sessions run smoothly, issues are flagged early, and you leave each meeting confident in your team’s coordination. Yet, over time, your team starts to dread the meetings, seeing them as repetitive and time-consuming. The meetings aren’t fostering alignment despite your continued confidence—they’re draining momentum.

The illusion of efficacy describes the gap between what feels effective and what drives results. We often mistake the visible success of an activity—like well-run meetings or timely updates—for meaningful impact. This mismatch often arises from a combination of emotional anchors (such as a sense of control) and feedback loops that reward visibility over effectiveness. Overconfidence in our ability to design the "right" system exacerbates the issue.

As a consequence of this illusion, you may waste time and energy on actions that create only the appearance of progress. Over time, this becomes kayfabe, where everyone knows the performance is fake, yet they can’t afford not to participate. This misalignment can breed frustration, reduce morale, and erode trust.

To counteract this illusion, we need to understand how we assess effectiveness. Replace surface-level feedback (e.g., the number of issues flagged in meetings) with metrics that track genuine alignment and collaboration outcomes. Encourage anonymous feedback. Observe behavioral shifts over time. Periodically question – and sometimes, intentionally break – your routine rituals to ensure your practices stay focused on impact rather than appearances. We can never fully remove the illusion of efficacy, but we can pull on the ground truth of results to keep the gap as small as possible.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review