The Strategy of No Strategy

February 23, 2017 By

Strategy is everywhere in our society. But strategy in practice seems to be a cruel and even silly joke. I learned that the hard way when I went to college long before I ever studied strategy formally. My own “strategy” about how to get through college collapsed virtually the moment I set foot on campus. I was living on my own for the first time and had never been outside of California’s perennial summer weather environment before. I was a poor fit for an East Coast school and didn’t last a full year, getting ill from the cold temperature and transferring out to a California school. At the time, I felt like a failure.

Ensō (c. 2000) by Kanjuro Shibata XX. CC BY-SA 3.0

Like many people of my generation and my socio-economic bracket, my teenage years were eventually consumed by the looming issue of where to go to college. I tried to get the best grades, study hard for the SAT, and make whatever connections I could with alumni to get into colleges I wanted. I applied to many of them, recycling and modifying personal statement letters like the individual payloads and sub-payloads of a MIRV’d nuclear missile. Once I got to college, the clarity and structure that routine provided evaporated. I had to make my own. It was certainly very difficult.

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Prescientific Organizational Theory

February 21, 2017 By

Organizational Theory isn’t a science, though it would like to be. Unfortunately, building a scientific approach requires understanding from a number of fields that themselves are still only aspiring to be sciences. Because psychology, economics, and sociology are a mish-mash of rules of thumb and vague, non-predictive, and generally unfalsifiable “theories”, organizations are reduced to ad-hoc rules and guesswork: critical, but prescientific.

For now, to abuse the parable of the blind men and the elephant, organizational theorists are still groping at their respective elephants, unable to figure out that the trunk is next to the tusks, or even that they are part of the same animal. It’s not a science: if anything, it’s a field of engineering, albeit one without a grounding in physics or Asimovian psychohistory to draw from. Precisely because the field isn’t scientific, understanding the engineering rules of thumb that were developed over time is fantastically useful for a practitioner.

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Unbuilding the Wall

February 16, 2017 By

This is a guest post by Toby Shorin.

Although symbols are intangible, that doesn’t mean they are inaccessible. On the contrary, we routinely understand and interact with the world by interpreting and intuiting their meanings. Symbols can be created, altered, proliferated, and overthrown.

This essay will discuss one symbol and its meanings: Donald Trump’s Wall. During the ‘15-‘16 election cycle, the Wall became as much of an aspirational motif for the right as it was a corrupt one for the left. In some ways, the Wall usurped Trump himself as the central image of the election. Compared to Trump, whose innumerable controversies make him an ethically difficult figure even for many of his supporters, the Wall makes a simple proposition: in or out. This legerdemain condenses a whole lineup of wicked problems and convoluted realities into a highly condensed ideological meme, representing the entire package of Trump’s policies. Ease of compliance is visible in the rally chants of Trump followers (“build the Wall, build the Wall!”), which acknowledge and perpetuate its myth.

Of course, the Wall is not just a symbol; it is a very real political project with significant implications. But symbols are not just ideas; they are very real concentrations of meaning with political agendas and the potential for momentous adoption. For example, the key symbol of the now-dead Occupy movement, “the 99%,” has been instrumental in spreading awareness of income inequality, and nearly 10 years later remains a crucial tool of global leftist discourse. In the apparently straightforward gesture of the Wall is hidden a similarly nuanced conceptual model. The Wall defines America by drawing its boundaries, producing an exclusionary, misleading, and compelling model nation. As a symbol, it functions on three levels: the geopolitical, the psychological, and the semiotic—it fucks with meaning itself.

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Caring and Reality

February 14, 2017 By

This is a guest post by Kyle Eschenroeder.

From Tolkien’s palantír to Thiel’s Palantir, from early religions to superintelligence, the dream of omniscience is an old one.

CaringAndReality

Imagine having a real palantír from The Lord of the Rings, a crystal ball which gives its user a perfect view into any and every event, past and present. Such extensive knowledge tends to heighten one’s sense of power and control–which in turn lead to arrogance and over-confidence.

This over-confidence creates blind spots. The White Wizard Saruman’s discovery of the palantír precipitated his downfall. The arrogance that came with his newfound power created an opening for Sauron to take advantage of him. Our own palantírs gave Hillary a  71.4%–98% chance of beating Trump. At one point, they gave the Patriots a 0.3% chance of winning Superbowl 51.

The confidence created by our palantír-ish technologies is a confidence in our measurements, not in ourselves. The more minutiae we measure, the less respect we have for taste or experience. Designers are being split-tested into insanity as mob rule decides which color they should use for the buy button. Decision makers are being confused by confident measurements of the wrong metrics.

This is an ongoing larger struggle in the world today between taste and data. Between what’s measurable and what matters. The promise is: here are numbers, let them make decisions for you. Algorithms we don’t understand interacting with, and reporting on, something we hope is reality.

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One Sacred Trick for Moral Regeneration

February 9, 2017 By

This is a guest post by Harry Pottash.

Post-enlightenment culture has almost completely conquered Western cities, leaving them swimming in a rich and diverse memetic soup. From within this soup a new society is emerging, its members pejoratively called “Social Justice Warriors”. To avoid falling into the trap of pre-existing connotations we can refer to this emerging society as the “Identity-affirming society.” Identity-affirming society shows a striking resemblance to more traditional religions and societies, with specific adaptations, particularly around the concept of cultural appropriation, that make it more resilient to the dissolving forces of post enlightenment culture from which it is emerging. How do unique cultures — the Amish, for instance — protect themselves from being subsumed by the surrounding culture? A clearer view of how the ideas of cultural appropriation are used can be reached by comparing it with the more rigorously mapped views regarding intellectual property, as both cover similar territory.

Societies are finite games, games that introduce goals, rules, constraints on behavior and provide a scoring system. They are among the games we engage in so completely that we forget participation is optional, and the rules arbitrary. Most fully formed societies attach their rules to six instinctively used pillars of ethical behavior, each a thematic set of constraints that participants in the society must follow (or flaunt). Durable societies use these constraints to reinforce boundaries between societal insiders and outsiders.

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Shift Register Code Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber

February 7, 2017 By

This is a ghost post by Nolan Gray

“Fuck You I won’t post what you tell me” – Rage Against Deus Ex Machina

Be aware that when accessing the internet, the panopticon of the online world sees you slogging your Smartless™ baggage through the Terminal. Your online personality is like a suitcase without wheels dragging behind you, scraping and scratching through the veil of security. We all sit at the bar watching your avatar self wander by with your assumptions bag over packed for a two day trip that turns into a lifetime. Taunted by the gatekeepers of the ungrounded world their signs designate that you are only allowed to bring the approved personality items in specified sizes. 3oz of snark, No liquid optimism, a single liter of judging disapproval and nothing that looks like humility through the machine. It’s for your own safety and those of others sharing the flight from AAS* to ACD*. These traits are tightly regulated. In the security line we see the humiliating items hidden in your baggage on our monitors. You too, while waiting for coffee or bored in the yoga lounge can see our embarrassing items on your personal screen every time we log on to the social media wing of the Terminal.

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After Temporality

February 2, 2017 By

Time is weird. The alleged dimension of time has been under investigation by the physics police on charges of relativity weirdness and quantum weirdness. The math is hard, but you can see it in the ominous glint in the eyes of physicists who have had a couple of drinks.

But subjective time is even more suspicious. Each observer possesses detailed and privileged access to a single entity’s experience of time (his own); however, this does not guarantee the ability to perceive one’s perceptions of time accurately, so as to report about it to the self or others. Access to the time perception of others is mediated by language and clever experimental designs. Unfortunately, the language of time is a zone of overload and squirrelly equivocation. Vyvyan Evans (2004) counts eight distinct meanings of the English noun “time,” each with different grammatical properties. Time can be a countable noun (“it happened three times”) or a mass noun (“some time ago”); agentic time (“time heals all wounds”) behaves like a proper noun, refusing definite and indefinite articles.

Perhaps we will get some purchase with chronesthesia, since Greek classical compounds are well-known for injecting rigor into the wayward vernacular. Chronesthesia is the sense of time – specifically, the ability to mentally project oneself into the future and the past, as in memory, planning, and fantasy (Tulving, 2002). It is sometimes called mental time travel. But already there is weirdness: why should the “time sense” be concerned with the imaginary, rather than the perception of time as it is actually experienced (duration, sequentiality, causality)? [Read more…]

The Throughput of Learning

January 31, 2017 By

Learning in the 21st century is not about acquiring more information, knowledge, or even insights. The goal is to maximize the throughput of invalidated assumptions. But you have to get there one step at a time.

When you first start learning, early in life, there is a bottleneck in the amount of information you have access to. You soak up everything like a sponge, because you are open and there is relatively little to absorb.

But very quickly, in elementary school, your access to information stops being the limiting factor. You take home a few giant textbooks, and suddenly the bottleneck moves to ways of structuring and contextualizing the information.

In high school, you learn a variety of methods to structure information — outlines, diagrams, underlining and highlighting, reports, essays, notebooks and binders. The bottleneck moves to your ability to synthesize this information, to turn it into new ideas.

In college, if you make it that far, the bottleneck moves to insight generation. You start questioning the world as given, and find that the juiciest intellectual rewards are ideas that shift how you view it. You start hunting for the revolutionary, the controversial, steering your learning toward the red pills of paradoxes and contradictions.

rf5.001

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Games, Videogames, and the Dionysian Society

January 26, 2017 By

This is a guest post by Chris Reid.

The destinies of cultures can be read in games.

–Roger Callois, Man, Play, and Games

Before it was stolen, patented, and sold to the Parker Brothers, Monopoly was “The Landowner’s Game,” a Georgist propaganda piece meant to illustrate the unfair behavior of the landowning class. The game accomplished this by setting up rules and fictions (game mechanics) that generate a reliable system behavior (game dynamic) which produced the intended experience (aesthetic): That aesthetic, frustration, has disrupted family game nights for decades. The dynamic is familiar to nearly anyone who has played it: those who manage to own more property have the money and power to be better insulated against chance, and those who don’t are likely to lose even more. The game spirals out as losers are burnt down to nothing and winners become even more powerful. Winners might find the game fun. Losers are deliberately irritated by a slow, nearly unavoidable death. In theory, the game mechanics could be adjusted to produce a ‘smoother’ outcome for more players, but it was never the point. It wouldn’t be “Monopoly” otherwise.

Monopoly’s rude feedback loop, illustrated in Hunicke et al., MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.

Monopoly’s rude feedback loop, illustrated in Hunicke et al., MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.


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Lies, Caffeinated Lies, and Operating Systems

January 24, 2017 By

This is a guest post by Tim Herd.

Computer science is not about computers. It’s about computation, a much wider subject. Creating abstractions, essential representations of things, be they objects, processes, ideas, and manipulating those representations. Manipulating these representations and letting their movements inform and power the outside world. These representations are organized in the computer, but there’s no law saying they have to be. The organizational principles and structures are more fundamental, and can be applied to anything. A cafe, perhaps?

CaffLies

Right now you’re reading this on a computer, and that computer is running an operating system. Windows 10, macOS, one of a billion different linuxes. But what is an operating system?

Modern operating systems do a million things, but their fundamental job is to lie to programs. Each and every program running on your computer thinks it is the only program running on the computer. Programmers like me write programs assuming that no other pesky programs will get in the way. It’s the Operating System’s job to make sure the farce is believable.

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