Power Gradients and Spherical Cows

May 15, 2014 By

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had a comic recently explaining the argument against evolution based on the 2nd law of thermodynamics: “Life on Earth can’t get more complex because that would require energy, and the sun doesn’t exist.” The understanding of entropy is there, but conspicuously missing is the distinction between open and closed systems and the fact that increased entropy in the system does not preclude localized negentropic environments, such as those on Earth sustaining life.

This specific failure mode for thinking I call the Spherical Cow fallacy, after the classic physics joke. [Read more…]

Science! and Other Off-the-Wall Études

May 8, 2014 By

Last year,  around this time, I posted a selection of attempted aphorisms from my Facebook wall (you can follow my public posts if you want the live firehose). I thought I’d do another selection, this time focusing on a new length I am practicing: sub-300-word études (inspired by the corresponding form in music) written as single dense (but not aphoristic-dense) paragraphs. If you are mainly a long-form writer, I highly recommend this composition form to improve your game, and Facebook public posts as the best medium for practicing it. If I ever put together that writing-for-thinking course as I keep meaning to, études and aphorisms will be a major part of it.

Here is a selection of what I consider my better études over the past year. Use the date hyperlinks if you want to share a specific étude with someone.

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Replaceability and the Economics of Disequilibrium

April 30, 2014 By

Sam is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog at Moore’s Hand.

One characteristic of personal meaning is irreplaceability. If you’re the only one who can do what you’re doing, your actions suddenly seem a lot more important.

We’re familiar with this principle in our personal relationships — perhaps a friend needs a piece of advice, or a child needs parenting, that only we can give.

But larger systems are designed to make most people replaceable.

If you are replaceable, the system will equilibrate without you. If you aren’t replaceable, it won’t.

This is good for you but bad for the system. So your manager’s job is to make sure that the company will survive you being hit by a bus.

Replaceability is a spur to the ambitious. Every law school grad applying for a Supreme Court clerkship; every Ivy League grad interviewing at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, knows that ten other people want the job, and can do it.

But replaceability is existentially demotivating. “Just a cog in the machine” has been an epithet for employment since Charlie Chaplin filmed Modern Times.

If a system will achieve roughly the same outcome no matter who’s inside it, these people are by definition replaceable.

And so in seeking irreplaceability, we must ask: what systems are capable of achieving genuinely different equilibrium outcomes?

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Authors and Directors

March 12, 2014 By

Sam is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog at Moore’s Hand.

I grew up in Michigan, the older of two kids, but the second-oldest of all of my cousins. Every Thanksgiving we would drive to Cleveland for our family gathering, where I would hear about my older cousin Amruta’s exploits, and a couple years later, reproduce them.

She went to Penn; I went to Stanford. She spent a year living in India, I spent two. Post-graduation she started in management consulting; three years later, I followed suit.

Our paths led us both to San Francisco, but while Amruta got a J.D. and became a law associate, I quit my consulting job, taught myself to code, and became a programmer.

If you ask Amruta, she’ll say that the common thread of McKinsey and Big Law has been learning to operate in tough workplace environments. Her one-on-ones at McKinsey gave her detailed personality feedback; she was told point-blank to focus on her assertiveness.

Amruta was receiving training about how to effectively implement ideas in an organizational context — engaging with stakeholders, overcoming opposition, and so on.

My main job perk, on the other hand, is being able to sit on a couch all day and think. I give substantive status reports once or twice a week, as opposed to multiple times a day in consulting.

Amruta is a knowledge worker who primarily implements her ideas in an organizational context. I am a knowledge worker whose ideas primarily execute, and replicate, themselves in browsers and on servers.

We’ll call Amruta’s type Directors and my type Authors.

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An Information Age Glossary

February 7, 2014 By

We live in an information-rich environment, but our minds are still wired for an environment of information scarcity. It still hasn’t really hit us that in the last 20 years, we’ve experienced a transformation that is as dramatic for our brains as climbing out of the water and learning to breathe air was for our ancient fishy ancestors. 

For the past year or so, I seem to have been unconsciously retooling my thinking and writing to operate in an information-rich environment. A big part of such cognitive ret0oling is  learning to favor particular terms (or unusual redefinitions of existing terms), and deprecating older terms and meanings that assume information scarcity. 

I figure it is time to get more conscious and deliberate about the retooling, so I am sharing the current state of my glossary. Proposals for new terms, or refinements of definitions welcome. I’ll edit this post for a while, and if people find it useful, we can try to figure out a more permanent home for it.

Very little of this is original to me by the way. I’ve credited people where I can, but a lot of this is the outcome of conversations with people I am not at liberty to cite publicly. So you can credit me for any substance here, and blame these invisible collaborators for any bullshit.

Related: I’ve wanted a CMS dedicated to creating shared glossaries for a long time, and even took a half-hearted stab at building one with a friend. I’d enthusiastically support any such effort.

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Resident Bloggers for 2014: Sam, Jordan, Kartik, Keith

January 15, 2014 By

Another fun bit of housekeeping. I’d like to welcome Sam Bhagwat, Jordan Peacock, Kartik Agaram and Keith Adams, our resident bloggers for 2014.

I’ve known them all for a couple of years now (though I’ve only met Jordan online), and I can safely say that the sophistication of my understanding of our emerging digital civilization has been greatly enhanced by my ongoing conversations with these guys. If I’ve said anything smart in the last couple of years about the world being created by computing technologies, a lot of the credit goes to them.

This blog already has a computing subtext (the “refactoring” in the tagline is a reference to a computing concept), and my own work this year is going to be dominated by projects related to software and computing, so part of my reason for inviting these guys on board this year is a selfish one. I hope they can keep my own thinking at the bleeding edge. Nothing like immersion to get you thinking like a native in a new culture.

I suspect all of you will also enjoy learning from these guys. The more our world gets eaten by software, the more the world views of software professionals matter in shaping the future. On the flip side, non-software people have to keep evolving their appreciation of computing, or risk being left behind on the wrong side of history.

To kick things off, I asked the new residents to introduce themselves with a short riff on the idea of refactoring, as I did last year.

So let me yield the floor to them.

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Refactor Camp 2014: Computing and Culture

January 15, 2014 By

It’s Refactor Camp time again.  As with the last two years, the event will again be held in the Bay Area during the first weekend in March.

This year, that’s the weekend of March 1-2. Click here to register.

refactorcamp2014

The venue this year will be the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. For those unfamiliar with the area, this is in the Bay Area, about an hour south of San Francisco. I am hoping to see more out-of-town attendees this year. In the last couple of years, we’ve had between 4-5 out-of-towners, and they definitely helped get us out of the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

The theme of the event this year will be Computing and Culture, and the format will be a pure barcamp style. More details at the Refactor Camp website.

As before, the event is organized on a non-profit basis, and limited to about 45-50 attendees. The registration is $95 and covers both days, including lunch.

If this is beyond your means, but you really want to attend, email me, and I’ll make a few limited discounted spots available.

So looking forward to another stimulating weekend with both returning attendees and new faces. About 22 spots are already taken via early invites, so if you want one of the remaining spots go register!

Complete 2013 Roundup

December 23, 2013 By
This entry is part 7 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

It’s time again for our annual roundup.  In many ways, 2013 was a year of endings and beginnings for this blog. So, since I like marking boundaries and naming things, I am going to name the relatively self-contained 2007-2012 period The Rust Age and notionally classify it as history. Starting with 2013, we are in the as-yet-unnamed post-Gervais-Principle second age of Ribbonfarm.

New readers interested in history can dive into the past via that link, which has past annual roundups, curated selections and a map of historical interest. Those uninterested in the past can safely join the party starting with this 2013 roundup. I’ll be making a serious effort to limit my use of back-linked references to pre-2013 material, going forward. The past will of course, continue to haunt the present in unexpected ways, but I’ll try to let sleeping ghosts lie.

Now for the roundup, starting with the 21 resident/guest posts, followed by the 24 posts by me, and some commentary.

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Morality for Exploded Minds

December 17, 2013 By

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.

This series of posts has explored a variety of ways in which agency – the ability of something to initiate action – can be rethought, redistributed, and refactored. Agency can be assigned to things that normally don’t have it, or we can undo our everyday sense of personal agency and think of our behavior as the output of a mechanical process. My not-so-hidden agenda is to battle against the everyday notion of the self, the idea that at the core of a person is something simple and unitary. Maybe this isn’t a battle that needs to be fought – perhaps everyone, these days, is perfectly aware that they are a conflicted assemblages of drives, that personae are fictional, that autonomy is an illusion. Isn’t that conventional wisdom by now, and am I not preaching to the already converted? Hasn’t Freud been repackaged for mass consumption for decades now?

Maybe, but it seems to me that our everyday notions about agency are so baked into our culture and into the very grammar of language that the struggle against them must be ongoing. In this final post I want to explore some of the reasons why you might want to dissect your mind, and why society conspires to make that difficult. In the course of this, we’ll explore some of the moral aspects of the unity and disunity of mind. Fundamentally and perhaps obviously, morality is tied at a very basic level to the idea of a person, so that to attack the idea of personhood can seem to be be almost immoral.

I haven’t focused too much on the pragmatics of actually performing this kind of operation – such as psychological methods for refactoring yourself, or the benefits that might be obtained by doing so. A couple of interesting efforts in that line have recently come to my attention – a therapeutic technique called Internal Family Systems, and an online group trying to encourage each other to develop tulpas, “autonomous consciousness, existing within their creator’s mind…A tulpa is entirely sentient and in control of their opinions, feelings, form and movement. They are willingly created by people via a number of techniques to act as companions, muses, and advisers.” (h/t to Kevin Simler). These efforts are quite interesting, if also somewhat alarming – with this sort of stuff, if you can’t make the leap to considering the products of your imagination literally then it won’t work, but on the other hand if you do, there are very real psychological dangers. When these independent mental entities manifest on their own, we call that schizophrenia, which is no joke.

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Rough Books for Roughening School

September 25, 2013 By

After months of procrastination, I’ve finally managed to put together the promised ebooks of the Gervais Principle series ($3.99 on Kindle in the US) and the archives of the Be Slightly Evil email list ($2.99 on Kindle in the US), which I’ve officially retired as of last week.

I will also be conducting the Gervais Principle online workshop for the first time in the coming months. You have two opportunities to attend, on Tuesday Oct 22 or Tuesday Nov 5, between 7:00 – 8:30 US Pacific Time. It will be a small-group (limited to 8) workshop based on the Gervais Principle. Since I am test-driving the idea of this workshop, the price is basically beta-testing cheap: $95. If the thing is successful, I’ll figure out the actual sustainable price I’ll need to charge.

  1. The Gervais Principle ebook has a bonus essay on the movie Office Space, as well as an extended preface outlining a philosophy of organizational literacy, and a TV/movie watching guide for your continuing education.
  2. The Be Slightly Evil ebook has a bonus 5000-word essay called Inside the Tempo, which pulls together a broader philosophy of adversarial decision-making.
  3. The workshop will be a mix of presented and interactive material that I’ve been working on for quite a while now.

These ebooks (which are the first two in a series I am calling “Ribbonfarm Roughs”) and seminars are part of this idea I’ve been slowly developing for a sort of “roughening school” approach to business education, as opposed to the “finishing school” approach that most business training adopts. The general idea is that the transition from theory to practice requires adding an element of roughness and barbarian thinking to abstract ideas, rather than refinement and finishing touches. If these ebooks and trial seminars work out, I’ll develop and offer more such material.

So check out the ebooks and sign up for the workshop. If you’d like to help promote them, here are some tweetables and shareables for you to use. I hope you will add some enthusiastic and flattering superlatives.

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