What is the Largest Collective Action, Ever?

September 29, 2015 By

I’ve lately become interested in the question of climate change from the perspective of the scale of organizational capabilities that are emerging globally to tackle it (a question that exists and matters whether or not you believe climate change is real). I came up with this conceptual graph to think about it. I’ll explain my capability measure c in a minute.

Screenshot 2015-09-29 14.02.54

 

In some ways, “dealing with climate change” is the largest, most complex collective action ever contemplated by humans. Here I don’t mean collective action in the leftist sense of a political coalition based on egalitarianism and solidarity. I mean any kind of large-scale action involving coordination (not getting in each other’s way), cooperation (not working at cross-purposes), collaboration (combining efforts intelligently) and conflict (structured adversarial interactions encompassed by the system  to allow net action to emerge from a set of warring ideologies), in a politically neutral sense. Everything from weaponized sacredness (think the Pope’s statements on climate change) to war and unmanaged refugee crises can fit into this broad definition, but as I’ll argue, it’s not so broad as to be useless.

So the definition includes everything from the pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China to the Normandy landings in WW II, the building of Standard Oil, the modern bond market, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Historically, the “peak-load capabilities” of our biggest collective action systems have been expanding steadily, modulo some ups and downs in the interstices of imperial ages, since the Neolithic revolution and the first pot-sized granary.

The interesting question is, what are those “some ways” in which a response to climate change futures is unprecedented, and what does that imply for the likelihood of it succeeding?

A useful way to focus this question is to ask what is the largest collective action, ever, and how much of a stretch are we talking to respond to (say) a speculative 2-degree rise scenario?

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Significance Appreciation

September 22, 2015 By

There’s a phenomenon I’ve observed where ideas that seem banal when you’re young acquire increasing significance as you age. Until they become so pregnant with significance that you start experiencing a peculiar sort of loneliness because you cannot communicate them any differently than you used to. At best, you slowly acquire an ability to recognize kindred spirits who attach as much incommunicable significance to an idea as you do. If you’re lucky enough to meet any.

Take the seemingly yawn-worthy idea, you should always be learning new things.

You probably had an adult tell you something like that when you were a teenager. Probably in that slightly pompous manner adults seem to affect when telling teenagers things. A manner that makes every line sound like an unreconstructed ritual incantation uttered by a society-programmed robot, rather than a deeply felt idea being expressed by an autonomous, thinking human.

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How to be a Precious Snowflake

September 17, 2015 By

Every few months, one of my much more successful friends will get frustrated by my apparent lack of aggressive hustle in service of my own work, and declare that I could be 10x better known and make 10x as much money if only I did x. The unstated assumption is that I am perversely being a precious snowflake by not doing x.

snowflake

Every few weeks, I also have a different kind of conversation, usually sparked by a particularly poignant email from a youngish reader who has been persuaded by something I wrote to “go sociopath” (a la Butters going Professor Chaos). Typically, my new best friend will express a desire (and seek my help) to pursue some creative mission of personal, soul-enriching significance, without getting eaten alive by some species of shark in their waters. These emails often strike me as precious (as in snowflake, as well as in every other sense of the term).

We need a term for an anti-snowflake. I propose clod. 

Clod

If you view someone as a precious snowflake, they necessarily view you as a clod. This post is about the clod-snowflake dynamic.  All culture arises out of it.

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The Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region 2015

September 8, 2015 By

A special treat for you today: the 2015 Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region map.  Vastly improved since the 2012 version, much better illustrated (by Grace Witherell) and representative of an older, if not necessarily wiser blogger. Click for a bigger image. This map will now be available on the You-Are-Here page via the sidebar link.

mapfinal1

Rather serendipitously, Sarah just posted a thoughtful piece on the nature of maps like this, so I won’t bore you with meta-commentary. Since she is now a contributing editor, I figured I’d put her on the map. You can have some fun figuring out where she is on the map and why.

I won’t attempt much commentary other than to say that some things have stayed the same, some things have changed, some things have been dropped, and many more things have been added. If you’ve been reading ribbonfarm long enough, comparing the 2012 and 2015 maps side by side on two monitors might be fun. I think the evolution says quite a bit about me, but probably more about the changes in the cultural environment in which bloggers like me exist.

I plan to do a screencast narration/virtual walking tour of the map soon, so I’ll leave my detailed riffing for that. In the meantime, you can Ask Me Anything about the map in the comments.

I’m pleased enough with this thing that I might reverse my position on never doing schwag, and put this up for sale in the form of a printed poster.

Addendum: Thanks to Carlos Bueno and Anthony DiFranco for suggestions that made it into the map.

Breaking Smart Afternoon Workshop, and Evening Meetup, London, Sept 11

September 1, 2015 By

I’ll be in Europe for Sept 6-14 doing a few Breaking Smart workshops in Zurich and London. One of these  is a public (ticketed, but free) workshop on Friday, September 11, at Campus London in Shoreditch, 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM. If you are based in London, it’d be great if you can make it. Click here to register.

I’m also planning to pull together a ribbonfarm/breaking-smart drinks meetup later on the same day, at 7 PM, also in Shoreditch. If you can make it, please RSVP on Facebook. Location TBD.

workshopImage

I’ll also have some limited availability over the weekend (12th, 13th) if you want to meet. Especially if you’re willing to play tour guide briefly :)

This will actually be my first non-airport visit to the UK. Somehow I’ve never managed to manufacture an excuse to visit the UK on previous Europe trips. So I’m looking forward to meeting long-time online friends and exploring a bit. For those who missed the announcement, breaking smart is a new site+workshop+mailing list I launched last month. Go check it out.

Learning is the Opposite of Healing

August 25, 2015 By

I was trying to analyze the difference between various ways of learning-by-doing, and came up with a 2×2 that captures an idea that is in hindsight very obvious: learning is the opposite of healing. Learning is an activity with a high failure rate, and therefore high probability of damage and injury. Which means the opposite is an activity that heals. I got to the idea by taking what I consider the three basic kinds of learning (goal-directed or project-based, habit-directed or play-based, and recipe-directed or rote-based, corresponding to the three ethical orientations), classifying them by certainty in means versus certainty of ends, and realizing that you could complete a 2×2 like so.

learningHealing

Moral of the story: always complete a triad into a 2×2. You don’t know what obvious-in-hindsight idea you might be missing. By performance in the diagram, I mean an activity that is expected to result in the generation of value in the external world, through some sort of means-ends reasoning. By this definition, ritual that is informed by sincere and literal belief in religious ideas is not actually ritualistic. It belongs in one of the other three quadrants (usually recipe-directed), even though it is based on unproven or false causation models.

This 2×2 suggests that there is or ought to be a distinct ethics associated with ritual-directed behavior, similar to deontological, consequentialist and virtue ethics informing the first 3 quadrants. I think it is ironic ethics. To do something in a genuinely ritualistic way is to do it ironically. This is why the anti-performance label works.

Extraordinary Laboratories

August 18, 2015 By

Where it is actually used, a (not the) Scientific Method, which I’ll just refer to as a (big-M) Method, is used for scaling an instance of a small-s-small-m scientific method. One that achieved unreasonable traction with respect to a particular problem, suggesting hidden investigative potential: a Method-Mystery Fit (MMF), by analogy to the notion of a Product-Market Fit (PMF) in entrepreneurship. There is no canonical Scientific Method, just a plurality of scalable investigation processes that come and go with particular streams of discovery. When an investigative approach proves to be unreasonably effective, we scale it from method to Method. When we attempt scaling without MMF, we get the cargo cult process I called Science! (with exclamation point). You can tell the difference easily: true Methods are built around scientific instruments, not philosophical concepts. A class of instrument-makers emerges around a true Method. Telescopic observation is a Method. Some funding agency bureaucrat’s idea of “observation, hypothesis, experiment, theory” is not.

Science itself is a methodologically anarchic process, driven by a sensibility rather than a set of techniques. The aggregate of all currently fertile Methods constitute only a small part of all science. But the scaled Methods do share two features: a finite lifespan (there is no immortal Method that yields great discoveries for all eternity at a steady rate) and a deliberative element you could call “experiment design.”

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Executive Engagement

August 13, 2015 By

Corporations spend vast amounts of money researching “employee engagement” and worrying about how to shift the distribution in one direction or another as part of some sort of change initiative.

There are good and bad, qualitative and quantitative ways of studying employee engagement. You can study it using survey instruments (something my wife does for her clients), and you can study it using various anthropological lenses, such as metaphors of organization or my model in the Gervais Principle.

Here’s the thing though: when organizational change is possible and desirable at all: executive engagement matters a heck of a lot more, and almost nobody studies it formally. If you take care of executive engagement, employee engagement almost (but not quite) takes care of itself.

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Low Humanity Orbit

August 11, 2015 By

I acquired a new hobby last week: watching the International Space Station zip across the sky. The ISS is in low Earth orbit (LEO), with altitude varying between 200-270 miles. It moves fast enough (and is bright enough) to be mistaken for a plane. That gives you an idea of how quickly it moves along in its 93-minute orbit. Since Seattle airport flight paths also pass over where I live, the comparison is quite stark.

I harbor some ISS envy. I’d like to be in the lifestyle equivalent of a LEO orbit: moving incredibly fast, all around the world, using practically no energy, and at an altitude that offers a great view of Earth, but with none of the friction of actually living on Earth. I think of such a lifestyle as a low humanity orbit, LHO. Seeking LHO is, to be quite blunt about it, always a kind of rent-seeking. In the worst case, LHO is parasitism. But in the best case, as with satellites in LEO, you can add some value back on earth while enjoying the easy life yourself (note, here the “easy life” refers to the life of the satellites, not astronauts). A low humanity orbit is also a low-humanity orbit, hyphenated. Not only are you somewhat removed from the main action, you are also a little less human than people in the fray. You’re acting at least a little dead.

Most of us can only expect to experience brief, sub-orbital flights into societal outer space, not LHO. Calendaring friction is a clear first symptom of “getting back in the fray.” In any attempt to create a lifestyle with a high element of routine, unpredictably evolving “hard landscapes” (a GTD term) on the calendar are the main source of LHO rituals getting messed up.

It is easy to be ritual driven if you’re sufficiently above the fray in the vacuum of fully designable lifestyles. This usually means having enough money to either not deal with people at all, or deal with them only on your own terms.

The second option is to be in a tethered orbit, where  you stabilize your lifestyle by hitching it to people or organizations that are in LHO. Tethers create a lot of drag, but do have some of the advantages of being in orbit. You experience atmospheric friction, but don’t have to actively maneuver with it.

The third option of course, is acting completely dead.

The Four Forces for Sociology

August 4, 2015 By

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of the four fundamental forces in physics ever since I first learned of the idea. I used it as a metaphor for Big History in A Brief History of the Corporation a few years back. Brian Skinner’s meditation on Coulomb interactions and some conversations with my favorite crazy engineer Artem Litvinovich (blog, twitter) have gotten me thinking about the four forces again.

I made up a metaphorical mapping of the four forces to sociology. It’s not pretty, but it’s interesting.

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