🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 172
January 2nd, 2025
Episode 172 — January 2nd, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/172
Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Alex Komoroske, John Cutler, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, Dimitri Glazkov, 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.
“For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
👍💭 Thinking with your thumbs
Much of our day-to-day life is guided by rules of thumb. Sometimes, these rules have a peculiar duality: they are both stable and creative. The "rice-knuckle rule," which posits that the water level for cooking rice should align with the knuckle's first joint, illustrates this dynamic. Although the rule is not particularly accurate—it varies with rice type, cookware, and personal preference—it offers an accessible starting point. Such rules are valuable precisely because they provide an entryway into exploration, even when obviously imperfect.
At their core, rules like the knuckle measure simplify complexity. Cooking rice, a seemingly mundane task, is a multivariate problem: grain density, pot size, cooking quantity, and even regional culinary preferences factor in. A rule reduces this complexity into an actionable heuristic. This allows individuals to begin experimenting without being paralyzed by choice.
We can compare this simple heuristic with other rice-making rules and see how they compare. If we need consistency more than we need to adapt to our own taste—such as at a restaurant—we can apply the measuring cup rule, where we follow a fixed formula. If we’re looking for perfection, we might use the analyzing chef rule and analyze every variable—pot size, rice type, water content, stove settings until we hit perfection…until one of the variables changes). If we just want to wing it, we can be the knuckle rule rebel and reject any heuristics… although we’ll probably just end up with a longer path to a similar place as if we started with the knuckle rule.
Sometimes, analysis, exact steps, or pure intuition can be appropriate. However, starting from heuristics builds on and builds up valuable tacit knowledge. The knuckle rule, and others like it, serve as scaffolds for learning rather than definitive answers. Their utility lies not in their correctness but in their ability to prompt engagement. A rule’s wrongness is an invitation to iterate, recalibrate, and ultimately refine personal judgment.
Some other examples of "wrong" but useful rules include:
The “2-Minute Rule”: If a task takes less than 2 minutes, do it immediately.
The “Half-Plate Rule”: Fill half your plate with fruits and vegetables to encourage balanced eating.
The “Schedule 20% More Rule”: Always leave some buffer in your plans.
The knuckle rule and other rules of thumb embody the paradox of rules: their value lies in being “right enough” to provide a foothold and yet “wrong enough” to provoke inquiry. When we move away from the idea that rules dictate outcomes—even ones that seem more fixed than rules of thumb—we may find that they can catalyze exploration instead.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🇫🇷 Central Paris has launched partially car-free zones
In November, Paris instituted new limits on cars in four of its central arrondissements, which include such landmarks as the Louvre and the Bourse. Private cars are no longer allowed to drive through the area, although journeys that start and end in the zone, as well as trips by local residents and people with reduced mobility, are still allowed. The plan is projected to cut traffic on the major Avenue de l'Opéra by up to 30% and reduce overall noise and air pollution.
🚏🍿 The 10 top-grossing movies of 2024 were all sequels, prequels, or remakes
The Hollywood Reporter pointed out that “every single one of the top ten box office hits of 2024 was a sequel, a remake… or a prequel.” The list of top-grossing films for the year included Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, Moana 2, Dune Part Two, and Deadpool & Wolverine. Total box-office revenue was a healthy $8 billion, only down a tick from 2023’s $9 billion.
🚏⛈️ Zillow is now putting climate risk scores on home listings
The home-listing website Zillow shows all kinds of data about a house, from public school ratings to estimated property taxes. One user noticed that Zillow has started showing climate risk scores, including the risks of flooding, wildfires, and extreme heat; detailed maps are shown on click-through.
🚏🌠 Scammers are buying millions of fake “stars” on GitHub
Users on GitHub can “star” their favorite code repositories, which makes star count a usually reliable signal of a repo’s popularity and legitimacy. But a team of researchers uncovered companies that use networks of bot accounts to give fake stars to repos for as little as 10¢ a pop. They found 3.1 million inauthentic stars by using graph clustering algorithms. The repos that bought these services tended to be scams or malware related to Telegram bots, crypto, and “snipers” (bots that auto-claim gifts offered on Discord channels).
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
2024: The Year in Weird and Stupid Futures (Max Read) — A massive roundup of FLUX-like signposts from last year, featuring bizarre yet striking stories that remind us how weird and ‘cyberpunk’ our current moment is. Some favorites: “The delivery-robot company Starship offered promo codes to an Arizona State University employee knocked over by one of the company’s robots”; “Banking app Revolut asked users it suspected of being scammed to take selfies with signs that said ‘Revolut warned me this is likely a scam.’”
Burn the Playbooks (Not Boring) — Packy McCormick argues that people spend far too much energy following known playbooks to reach success, whether it’s studying for math and coding competitions or climbing career ladders. Even launching startups—a supposed bastion of creativity—has become formulaic. McCormick encourages us to seek our own unique and circuitous paths rather than cargo-culting others’ journeys.
The Best Facts I Heard This Year (Zhengdong Wang) — A collection of interesting, strange, and funny facts. Standouts: “French unions have special barbecues that fit on tram tracks so they can grill sausages while they march”; “Whales don’t get cancer because they’re so big that their cancers get cancer first”; “The Allies wanted to drop bandit problems [i.e. probability puzzles] on German scientists to distract them during the war.”
Even More Impossible to Reach Places on Google Earth (The POV Channel / YouTube) — A virtual tour of some fascinating geological formations that very few humans have ever visited, from seemingly bottomless pits in Yemen’s deserts, to “horizontal waterfalls” on the remote Australian coast, to the massive but obscure Owyhee canyon system in remote Oregon and Idaho.
📚🛋️ Book for your shelf
A book that will help you dip your toes into systems thinking or explore its broader applications.
This week, we recommend Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin (2013, 272 pages).
With relatable non-tech examples—like diapers!—Playing to Win translates the sometimes-overwhelming idea of strategy into actionable steps. The book distills strategic planning into five essential questions. By providing a simple but flexible framework, the authors offer a way to navigate complexity with just enough structure to stay on track.
The first three questions cover fairly standard strategic choices: deciding what winning looks like, where to play, and how to win in that domain. Martin and Lafley then go beyond that by asking the reader to think about what capabilities an organization must have to execute on that strategy and what management systems are required to enable these capabilities. The focus on capabilities provides the critical—and often missing—link in strategy planning: how to move from an idea in a presentation to a living, actionable strategy.
Playing to Win is valuable because it doesn’t see strategy as a one shot exercise. It focuses on adaptability, implementation, and iterative problem-solving. While not a one-size-fits-all solution, its principles are a powerful starting point for organizations seeking to create clarity, focus, and impact.
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