🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 169
November 7th, 2024
Episode 169 — November 7th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/169
Contributors to this issue: Dimitri Glazkov, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, 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.
“There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.”
— Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
🌪️⛰️ Grounding moments
Sometimes, we wake up to a shocking new reality, a turn of events that makes everything feel surreal.
Sometimes positive, often negative, grounding moments are situations where we encounter irrefutable evidence that our beliefs and assumptions need an update. The concept of constructed reality – featured as a lens in this issue – offers a useful way of exploring the experience of grounding moments.
It is easy to lose sight of the notion that what we perceive as “real” is a tangled mess of mental models, the natural product of a lifetime of meaning-making. These models are sufficiently good for predicting some outcomes – and not great for others.
When we’re very young, prediction errors come at a low cost. Our mental models are simple and malleable. As we grow, our mental models sprawl and engulf us. As our mental models become less malleable, grounding moments create discomfort: the dread that precedes the necessary process of updating them. We must lose ourselves and find ourselves again in the newly terraformed mental model space.
Avoiding this pain can become a goal of its own. We might build a bubble around ourselves, moving into a world of constructed reality where we never have to face grounding moments. Wealth and power have been traditional tools for building such bubbles.
Technology is another way to build bubbles. With the introduction of the Internet, the cost of custom reality construction has plummeted and is now more accessible than ever. All we need to do is choose the sources that align with us and filter out everything else.
Under normal conditions, this cannot last. Alas, sooner or later, reality sneaks past our defenses and ambushes us with uncomfortable insights—insights that we experience as pain.
But sometimes, bubbles can become the force that changes reality. Whether created by wealth and power, through technology, or with other means, bubbles tend to become invisible. We don't remember we are living in them, yet we still take actions that affect others. Individually, these actions don't seem too disconnected from reality. However, when viewed as a system, actions from inside bubbles can—and do—have profound externalities.
At the extreme, constructed realities produce emergent power that changes actual reality. The next grounding moment might be when reality—the ground itself—shifts in response to someone else's constructed reality. It’s a world they've willed into existence through their power or a collective delusion.
It’s a brave new world. When it’s cheap to avoid grounding moments while the externalities of our actions remain real, the tail of constructed realities can start to wag the dog of our lives.
Yet there's hope. Grounding moments still offer a doorway back to a shared reality. They remind us that, despite our individual bubbles, we are part of an interconnected system. We hold the power to shape and nurture a common ground. Instead of shying away from grounding moments, maybe we can use them as invitations to engage more intentionally with the world and each other.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🧂 A new powder can absorb CO2 ten times faster than conventional materials
Materials scientists at UC Berkeley have developed a yellow powder that traps carbon dioxide in its microscopic pores, and half a pound of the stuff can suck up 40 kilograms of CO2 from the atmosphere — about as much as a large tree absorbs in a year. The powder releases the CO2 when heated, leaving it ready for reuse; it survived 100 such cycles unscathed. The powder absorbs CO2 “at least 10 times faster” than normal ‘direct air capture’ materials, potentially making it very useful for carbon sequestration projects.
🚏🐝 The number of bee colonies in the US has hit a record high
Colony collapse disorder and invasive pests have devastated bees in the US over the last 20 years, but new data from the USDA shows that the trend has been reversed, and the number of colonies nationwide has surged to a record 3.8 million. A significant contributor has been the rise of hobbyist beekeepers, incentivized by tax breaks from multiple states. (This is generally good news, but experts warn that we shouldn’t let domesticated bees drive native pollinators to extinction.)
🚏🗳️ Incumbent parties around the world have lost power in the last few years
Political scientists have observed that a combination of COVID-driven inflation and worries about immigration have spelled electoral trouble for incumbent parties across the developed world and the political spectrum. Since 2022, this wave has hit everywhere, from New Zealand to Austria to South Korea, and even popular parties like Japan’s LDP and India’s BJP have suffered.
🚏🌳 An area the size of Mexico could be reforested if we just left it alone
A new research study found that 215 million hectares of forest worldwide (about the size of Mexico) could grow back by itself, with minimal human intervention outside of just not touching it. This natural regeneration method would be almost an order of magnitude cheaper than manually replanting trees, and the resulting forests would be up to 56% more biodiverse. This could offset 23.4 gigatons of global carbon emissions — “about 50 years worth of Australia’s carbon emissions.”
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
On Agency and Economic Perception (Matthew Downhour) — Argues that voters tend to attribute unemployment levels and wages to individual agency (“if I got that job or that raise, I deserved it, rather than anything the government did”) but inflation and the stock market to government action. Thus, a policy of lower unemployment and higher inflation will likely be politically unpopular since voters won’t give the government credit for any new jobs they get but will blame the government for price increases.
Entropy: The Hidden Force That Complicates Life (Farnam Street) — A well-designed ship should be able to sail through a storm without intervention, epitomizing passive equilibrium. A fighter plane, by contrast, requires active stabilization to deal with the fast-changing turbulence it flies through. Complex systems, from marriages to whole societies, are actively stable, requiring a steady influx of energy to maintain the status quo.
The Low-Trust Election (Cooper Lund) — Argues that, in American politics, the parties have realigned themselves around trust in institutions, information, and other people. This pits institutionalists (whether conservative or liberal) against low-trust voters, who are skeptical that governments and communities can do anything to help them. When Americans are bombarded with spam, scams, and misinformation, and when they’re buried in hyper-isolating social media algorithms, it’s not hard to see how they’d lose trust in the fabric of society.
Be a Thermostat, Not a Thermometer (Lara Hogan) — Observes that we humans are subconsciously influenced by the mood of those around us in a reinforcing feedback loop, which can lead to a downward spiral if someone is amygdala-hijacked. In the thermometer metaphor, they’re running a fever, and you’re picking up on it. Rather than being a thermometer, be a thermostat with a balancing feedback loop of your own through subtle changes to body language and offers to pause, let the temperature cool, and resume at another date.
🔍📆 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: constructed reality.
A ball flies through the air. Our hand stretches outward, and somehow, our fingers close on it as if on its own accord. We catch it in mid-air, almost without looking. How does that happen? Do we have some extra senses that track objects?
We enter a meeting room. There’s palpable tension in the room. Two of the participants show signs of a heated argument. How do we know this? Can we somehow go back into the past and witness the conversation?
The commonality between these situations is constructed reality. In both situations, we rely on a simulated world model to play it back and forward. This simulation makes reasonably good predictions about the state of the world. This model, which resides in our minds, is a constructed reality.
Unlike the “real” reality—the actual environment around us—constructed reality is something that we build (construct!) over time by observing the environment and creating an ever-more-complex representation of it.
While our sensory organs are nothing short of amazing, the environment around us is far too complex to be perceived immediately. We must supplement our senses with an ever-growing, ever-refined mental model of the world.
We consult this model when making predictions, whether trivial and instantaneous as trying to catch a ball or complex as leading organizations. In either case, our success depends on how accurately our model represents the environment.
The ability to play the model backward and forward comes naturally to us. This can lead us to confuse our constructed reality with the actual environment. It is only when a grounding moment occurs that we realize our mistake – and are invited to update our constructed reality.
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Elegantly put, indeed :)