🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 136
March 7th, 2024
Episode 136 — March 7th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/136
Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Samuel Arbesman, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Ade Oshineye, Justin Quimby, MK
Additional insights from: Ben Mathes, Dimitri Glazkov, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Dart Lindsley, Jon Lebensold, Melanie Kahl
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 way, especially in Western society, we’ve been taught this concept of learning is that it’s the acquisition of knowledge. But it’s not. It’s the acquisition of experience and making sense of that experience to really re-form or add to the mental models that drive our beliefs about the world.”
— Jeff Hunter on Work for Humans (a podcast by FLUX’s own Dart Lindsley!)
❤️🔥🔗 The bonds of fate
When the going gets tough, what makes the difference between those things we’re willing to give up on and those things we cling to, even when it might not be for the best for us? There are many reasons: habit, tradition, values, principles. Among them, a key factor in group scenarios tends to be shared fate.
Shared fate is the idea that individuals within a group share a common destiny or outcome. Their successes, failures, challenges, and rewards are linked. Shared fate is foundational for aligning communities and maintaining their longevity. It ensures that everybody has a meaningful amount of skin in the game and, from a game-theoretic perspective, makes defection expensive.
For any community to be aligned for the long term, there must be an indisputable sense of shared fate and a mechanism for achieving common knowledge of this shared fate. The sense motivates us to contribute to the common goals and the common knowledge lets us know how to work toward those common goals. The prisoner’s dilemma is a well-known example of participants having a shared fate without shared knowledge.
With a positive valence, shared fate looks like finding a higher purpose with others. Teams often achieve this sense of shared fate as they advance through the stages of the Tuckman model of group development. Families achieve it through their mutual concern for the well-being of their members. Societies can achieve this through shared values, which have a visible, consequential impact on outcomes. With a negative valence, this mechanism looks like hazing or a founding atrocity, instances where the sense that we did or experienced something terrible together leads to a sense of loyalty, albeit often based on fear of repercussions.
A shared fate helps to cut through behaviors that can sabotage a group for the gain of an individual, such as in a tragedy of the commons. When the value of a given action (leaking corporate strategy, sabotaging a coworker, selling weapons plans to an enemy state, etc.) is greater for an individual than their attachment to the group, some individuals will likely take that path.
To avoid this defection, the positive benefits of putting the group first must be quite great, or the negative consequences of not doing so too awful for most individuals to stray. These benefits and consequences may be material, but just as often, they are emotional, especially when they relate to our sense of identity. Many early startups have a sense of “us against the world,” which tends to wear off as companies become larger, more successful, and more “corporate.”
Cultivating and maintaining a strong sense of shared fate for a group takes effort and energy. It also takes faith that others will share our dedication to it. Shared fate is, after all, shared. It will die quickly if people feel alone in their dedication to that fate. It’s a bad sign if we look at our peer group and ask, “Who is still putting in that effort?”
Communities that thrive in the long term need rituals to renew their sense of common knowledge of a shared fate. These rituals remind us why we bought into the shared fate in the first place and why it continues to have value. Rituals can look to the past (remembering and reenacting key events), the present (celebrating successes), and the future (imagining what can be accomplished).
When a need to energize a group toward action arises, first, find something that appeals to their values or needs. Next, think about how to create and maintain a sense of shared fate around the issue. Doing so will tap a level of investment that caring alone cannot.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🍄 All 5 members of the original Super Mario Bros team helped make the latest Mario game
The original Super Mario Bros video game, which debuted in 1983, was created by a team of five Nintendo employees. Almost forty years later, all five of those developers were still working at Nintendo and were credited in the latest installment of the franchise, Super Mario Bros Wonder. This stability is unusual even by Japanese standards, and one journalist added, “This might just be the most incredible piece of developer continuity in gaming history.”
🚏🍎 An EdTech giant will let teachers use ChatGPT to grade essays
An AI-powered tool called Writable, recently acquired by the major American education firm Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, will let teachers use ChatGPT to evaluate students’ essays. Essays are first uploaded to the chatbot, which “offers comments and observations to the teacher, who is supposed to review and tweak them before sending the feedback to the students.” (It’s an interesting parallel to the rise of students using GPT to write their essays in the first place.)
🚏🇮🇳 India will require government approval for AI model launches from big companies
Last year, the Indian government took a hands-off approach to AI, saying the space was considered “vital to India’s strategic interests.” However, the government has now changed its mind and issued an advisory letter saying that “significant” tech firms (but not startups) must get government permission before launching new AI models. Companies must also show that their models don’t allow “bias or discrimination” or “threaten the integrity of the electoral process.”
🚏 🐈⬛The ransomware group behind the Change Healthcare attack may have “exit scammed” its own partners
The American healthcare giant Change Healthcare was hit with a debilitating ransomware attack in February that disrupted prescription drug delivery for weeks. Researchers discovered that the ransomware group BlackCat was behind the attack and got a payment of $22 million in crypto. BlackCat doesn’t do cyberattacks itself, though: it leases its software to partners who use it to infect targets, and the partners get 60–90% of the ransom. However, BlackCat didn’t pay out any of the $22 million to the hackers who infected Change Healthcare, and in fact the group appears to have shut down — disappearing with this and many other ransom payments they hadn’t paid out yet. Experts believe, in short, that these crooks may have “exit scammed” the other crooks they worked with.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Helpful and Unhelpful Anthropomorphism (Apperceptive) — Argues that, because LLMs sound like humans, we tend to attribute sophisticated desires and internal mental states to them — when, in actuality, they’re responding to very simple incentives like getting humans to like their answers. For instance, it’s inaccurate to think that LLMs can ‘lie,’ because they lack the intentionality and state of mind to try to mislead someone on purpose.
Superlinear Returns (Paul Graham) — Argues that once you reach a certain threshold of success, superlinear returns for performance are an inbuilt feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we’ve invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power, military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity.
Signs That It’s Time to Leave a Company (Adrian Cockcroft) — Describes the “prune and grow back” strategy that company leaders should follow when their firms are struggling: decisively cut staff, shut down entire product lines, and shrink the business’s surface area so you can rebuild around the things that work. However, this is a good time for employees to leave the company.
Gregor Mendel’s Pea Plant Observations Were “Too Perfect” (Concordance) — Shows that the friar’s famous experiments with dominant and recessive genes in pea plant breeding resulted in suspiciously perfect ratios like 3:1 and 1:2:1; he somehow avoided both randomness and gene linkage. It may not have been fraud on Mendel’s part, though — he may have not documented some “methodological variables,” or his assistants may have skewed the data to fit Mendel’s conclusions.
📚🛋️ 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 How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball (2023, 552 pages).
Philip Ball’s How Life Works examines the wide variety of new biological insights that have been made in recent decades. These insights turn our view of cells and organisms from machinery into something different — and more interesting. Biological creatures are not just their genes: they are complex multi-level systems, robust in the face of messy disorder, and much more.
Ball takes the reader across multiple levels of biology, moving from genes to cells, tissues, and even how bodies form. He explores networks upon networks, the interactions of DNA and RNA, wiggling and floppy proteins, and more, all of which affect the numerous properties of life. Intriguingly, Ball also explores how multicellular organisms operate differently from single-celled creatures. This is biology as you probably don't remember it from school.
What does this all mean? One implication involves how we treat disease. For example, our obsession with single gene targets might be more a matter of having found “low hanging fruit” than biological systems working like that (they are far more subtle). In addition, engineering biology may need a rethink: we might need to use much more tinkering and emergence-focused approaches as we construct emergent systems rather than top-down design.
Some of the most powerful insights are about how we might rethink biological metaphors that we often use, from nature versus nurture to cells as machines. Living things are far more sophisticated — and exciting! — than these simple metaphors. Biology is messy and weird, with complications abound. It requires grasping for humility and emergence to explain the counter-intuitive robustness and multi-scale nature of biology.
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