🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 191

May 22nd, 2025

May 23, 2025

Episode 191 — May 22nd, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/191

Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Justin Quimby, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Alex Komoroske, Ben Mathes, Chris Butler, Dart Lindsley,Dimitri Glazkov, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Julka Almquist, Kamran Hakiman, Lisie Lillianfeld, Melanie Kahl, Robinson Eaton, Samuel Arbesman, Scott Schaffter, Spencer Pitman, 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.

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”
― Gary Provost

📷🪞 Learning what we haven’t lived

A lead joins a team mid-crisis. The codebase is brittle, morale is low, deadlines are close. She knows she has to learn quickly, having worked mainly on successful products. She reads retros of similar projects, talks to team members, and reads some relevant books. But when she steps into the room, it’s clear that knowing about complexity is not the same as navigating it. She can quote the right principles but can’t figure out how to apply them to this crisis.

You can’t always learn from others until you’ve had enough experience to know what you don’t know. The right ideas might be within reach, but without lived reference points, they don’t stick. Back in Episode 129, we explored the necessity of balancing learning and doing. Let’s now dive deeper into the how.

The appeal of learning through others is that it can be efficient. Books, mentors, case studies all compress years of experience into hours of consumption. But compression has a cost: it assumes a decoder. Without proper tacit knowledge, the message can lose meaning or, in some cases, be actively confused. In these cases, theory isn’t wrong, just out of phase with your current frame of reference.

By contrast, learning through lived experience provides deep, embodied understanding, often only in hindsight. You don’t always know what you’re learning while learning it. You need time, language, and contrast to metabolize it. That metabolizing is where ideas from others can become clarifying, helping process the raw material of experience into reflective insight.

The hard part isn’t knowing that you should switch between theory and experience. It’s knowing when. Sometimes the context doesn't allow it. You’re too junior to get hands-on exposure. You’re too senior and too busy to reflect. You’re stuck in high-speed doing or caught in high-minded abstraction. And sometimes, the personal stakes are too high to treat experience as an experiment.

Switching between modes isn’t intuitive. It requires metacognition: noticing when your learning has stalled, shifting gears. Aim for fluidity. Here are some ideas for how to get started.

Experience first, then frame. If something feels confusing or frustrating, resist the urge to label it immediately. Let it unfold. Return to theory with the weight of that experience. Ideas that were confusing before will often resonate differently.

Theory first, then probe. If an idea feels powerful but abstract, try breaking it down. Put it into a live situation. Ask: Where does this model hit its limits? That gap is where learning begins.

Create friction on purpose. Read outside your domain. Teach a concept you’ve experienced to someone who has never experienced it. Seek out experiences outside your comfort zone.

The most potent learning often comes not from finding the perfect mix of theory and experience, but from living in the gap between them long enough for the pieces to connect.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🧑‍🎓 Flagship US colleges are booming while regional schools are suffering

A growing number of American teenagers are “opting out” of college, and the ones that remain are primarily going to massive state flagships or prestigious private colleges (a “flight to quality”), thus reducing enrollment in regional state schools and lesser-known colleges. Enrollment at Tennessee’s state flagship grew 30% from 2015 to 2023, while enrollment at Tennessee’s regional state colleges fell 3%. Similarly, in Wisconsin, the flagship grew 16% while regional schools shrank 9%. (Another ominous sign for small schools: the number of US births peaked in 2007—exactly 18 years ago—meaning that the number of high school grads will soon start declining.)

🚏🤠 Big tech and startups are leaving Austin and moving back to the coasts

The COVID work-from-home era spurred the rise of many alternative American tech hubs, most notably Austin, Texas, which lured many California companies and tech talent with the promise of low taxes and cheaper housing. However, the RTO trend and AI boom have pushed tech firms and workers back to the traditional tech hubs. Big tech employment in Austin fell 1.6% in 2024, while startup employment fell 4.9%. In San Francisco, meanwhile, big tech employment grew 1.8% and startup employment grew 0.8%; the growth in New York was even more impressive, at 2.2% and 3.7% respectively.

🚏🗞️ The top Facebook news pages are from China, even though the app is banned there

Chinese state-owned media outlets have been publishing and advertising aggressively on Facebook, often to promote viewpoints that the Chinese government likes. So even though Facebook is banned in China, the top five most-followed news pages on Facebook are now English-language pages from Chinese media. It’s part of a broader effort by China and Russia to invest in media worldwide as Western news outlets cut budget and staff. China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency now runs 37 Africa bureaus and flies African reporters to China for training; Russia’s state-owned RT and Sputnik are expanding operations in Latin America and Africa and training journalists in Southeast Asia and China.

🚏🔬 Signal is using Microsoft’s DRM feature to block Windows’ infamous Recall

Recall—a new AI feature for Windows that records everything you’re doing so you can search over it later—was widely panned upon its introduction last year. While Microsoft has introduced an “overhauled” version, developers still can’t stop Recall from recording their apps. This was a problem for the makers of the encrypted messaging app Signal, since Recall was recording messages from anyone talking to the user “without their knowledge or consent.” So, the devs turned on a Windows DRM feature that blocks all screenshotting, including from Recall. It’s a creative repurposing of a feature typically used to protect copyrighted video content or sensitive financial apps, and a way to use Windows’ controversial DRM feature against the OS.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

The Everything App Is a Symptom of Nothing Management (Pavel Samsonov) — Argues that trying to build “the everything app” is a symptom of leaders who lack a clear vision or strategy—so they fall back on the easy pitch of “just build everything,” which gets everyone from engineers to investors excited without having to make any tough choices. Leaders must develop opinions and “disconfirm their beliefs” instead of following the latest buzzwords or blindly doing whatever the data says.
A Tool to Supercharge Your Imagination (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) — In an uncharacteristically optimistic article, Bogost lauds modern image generation models for their ability to quickly “shape unfiltered thoughts” and give them “shape outside your mind,” but he ignores the downsides. It’s a bit like reading a book and then watching the movie: all of the fuzzy but vivid mental imagery in your mind’s eye collapses into the images on the screen. Gandalf will never again be an abstract wizard, only the one Ian McKellen depicts.
The Red Sky Paradox Will Make You Question Our Very Place in The Universe (Science Alert) — Observes that the Copernican principle (that Earth isn’t in a “privileged position” in the universe, and that humanity’s situation should be considered the average for intelligent life) is seemingly contradicted by the fact that we orbit a yellow dwarf star, when red dwarf stars are much more common. Either we truly are outliers (which would go against the Copernican principle), or red dwarf stars have some attributes (e.g., intense solar flares) that make them inhospitable to intelligent life, at least at this point in the universe’s life.
A Decimal Point Decided the Fate of These Passengers (Mentour Pilot) — A harrowing tale of a plane that got lost in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and a study of how confirmation bias can override all common sense and blind you to obvious signs that your mental model is wrong. The high power distance between the captain and his more junior copilot (who thought something was wrong but couldn’t openly critique the captain) was a significant factor, showing the importance of crew resource management (CRM).

🔍📆 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 robustness principle.

A colleague sends you a messy, typo-ridden email. You could reply in kind, but you take an extra beat to make your message concise and easy to understand. This small act of asymmetry makes the whole system work better.

It’s a human translation of the robustness principle (aka Postel’s Law), a design pattern from internet engineering: Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept. In software, this makes the system robust against errors. In social systems, it becomes a guide for navigating everyday messiness—doing your best to be clear and fair in how you show up, while interpreting others with patience and generosity.

Generosity doesn’t mean low standards or tolerating dysfunction. Persistent sloppiness, disregard, or manipulation are legitimate concerns. Instead, it’s about not overreacting to isolated friction. It means not generalizing from a messy interaction or assuming intent from a bad day. After all, none of us is at our best all the time.

Asymmetry is a powerful design choice. It creates robustness through absorbing ambiguity and turning it into something clear and crisp (but not to the point of excessive perfectionism). It’s about creating space for misunderstanding without making it the norm. Instead of demanding flawlessness from others, build “parsers” that expect variation and occasional noise. And when it’s your turn to contribute, aim to increase the signal.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review