Patterns of Refactored Agency

November 27, 2012 By

This is a guest post by Mike Travers, who develops software at Collaborative Drug Discovery, blogs on diverse topics at Omniorthogonal, collects his random hacks at Hyperphor, and has a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences.

The scientific picture of the world has some disturbing implications when its assumptions are worked out to their ultimate conclusions. Brains and bodies are pieces of machinery subject to the laws of physics, and If we are simply mechanisms, then our ability to be free seems to disappear, along many of the basic foundations of everyday cognition and action (choices, selves, values, morality, consciousness, etc). The scientific worldview has proven both extraordinarily powerful and immensely unsatisfactory, given how at odds it is with our everyday experience. The disjunction between scientific thought and traditional humanistic thought was captured by CP Snow’s Two Cultures in 1959 but has only gotten worse since then. As a scientifically trained person who has worked on the margins of artificial intelligence, I’ve always struggled for ways to reconcile these two worldviews.

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Talk on Kool Aid, VUCA Discussion, Tuesday Nov 27 at USC (Los Angeles)

November 23, 2012 By

A quick announcement. I’ll be in Los Angeles on Tuesday the 27th to do a talk at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab titled Should You Drink the Kool-Aid?

The talk is at 12:30 PM at Annenberg (which appears to be in the heart of downtown). Details at the link above.  Hope to see some of you there. Middle of a weekday I know, but if you are are in the neighborhood and in the mood to sneak away from work, this should be fun.

It will be loosely based on interesting discussions I’ve had with various people since I wrote my somewhat controversial trilogy on Forbes, Entrepreneurs are the New Labor, mashed up with ideas from Tempo and posts like The Calculus of Grit and The Crucible Effect.

There is also another event later in the day at 3:30 PM (also at Annenberg) with the folks from the USC Scenario Lab, to talk about VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity).

I am also open on the evening of Monday the 26th, in case anyone wants to meet up for dinner.  I get in around 6:30 at LAX, and will be looking to grab a bite somewhere convenient around 7:30ish before heading to my hotel. Email me if you’d like to meet up.

Thanks to reader and unofficial P. T. Barnum of Ribbonfarm, Zhan Li, for arranging both events.

Notes on Spatial Metaphors for Social Systems

November 19, 2012 By

Distance metaphors are natural in any conversation about social phenomena. We talk of the distance between governance systems and the governed, guerrilla movements and host populations,  rich and poor, Chinese and American, Red and Blue.

Kevin Simler’s recent guest post made use of the standard geometric-metaphoric scheme, the Hofstede cultural dimensions model, to talk about startup cultures. The model also forms the basis for the analysis of globalization in Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0, which I reviewed last year. So distance metaphors are very robust across a wide range of social phenomena, from small startups to the entire planet.

Topology — the study of the pre-geometric structure of a space, such as whether it is orientable or not, doughnut shaped or spherical, and so forth — is not as natural or easy to apply, but is also useful if you can pull it off, as Drew Austin’s recent post on the Holey Plane demonstrated.

When you do topology and geometry for social systems incoherently, you get frustrating books like Friedman’s World is Flat.

But more careful approaches aren’t safe either.  In particular, the more I think about Hofstede’s model, the more dissatisfied I get. Is there a better way? I’ve been playing around with a few very preliminary ideas that I thought I’d share, prematurely.

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Jason Ho on Cultivating a Jiu-Jitsu Mindset

November 14, 2012 By

Jason Ho has a very practical, yet philosophical post up on his blog, qaboom.com on themes very relevant for students of decision-making. Well worth a careful read (the whole blog, not just this post). There’s more between the lines than just the personal examples he describes.

Cultivating a Jiu-Jitsu Mindset

Every once in a while, when a hobby like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu captures my fascination, it takes me by surprise. Since I’m usually interested in more things than I have time for, I tend to be very selective of the hobbies I take up. When I find myself falling in love, I take a cautious step back and start asking questions.

Why have hobbies like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, programming, and bodybuilding captured my fascination, when others have lost their appeal? What do they have in common, if anything? Why BJJ but not Muay Thai? Why computer science but not engineering?

In a world full of options and not enough time, often the hardest decisions are not what to do, but what not to do.

It occurred to me that my love-at-first-sight attraction to BJJ was more than just serendipity. BJJ, and its underlying principles, are a perfect representation of the kind of philosophy I’ve internalized. If I could compress all its wisdom into one motto, it’d be this: Spend your time and effort on where it will make the most impact.

He cites an old post on this blog that I’d forgotten about and just re-read. I didn’t really understand what the heck I was thinking back then. This often happens to me these days. I must be headed downhill.

At Home, in a Car

November 5, 2012 By
This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Regenerations

Early tomorrow morning, I will pile stuff into my twelve-year old Corolla one more time, and make the two-day drive from Las Vegas to Seattle, via Twin Falls and Boise. My car (which I bought new in 2000) is now over 130,000 miles old and has sported license plates from five states. It has traveled with me from Austin to Ann Arbor to Ithaca to Rochester to DC to Vegas. That last trip was also a nomadic driveabout across the lower 48 that covered nearly 8000 miles over six weeks. Many of you have met my car. Some of you have ridden in it as well.

To the extent that there is any sign of external continuity to my adult life, it is tied up in this car. It has also been the only non-disposable physical part of my life for a long time. Since I arrived in America at age 22, I have not lived in a single place continuously for more than three years. In about a week, I will turn 38. I will have lived in 16 apartments/houses and half a dozen cities through my adult life. My digital life will have passed through half a dozen computers, email addresses and cell-phones.

For much of this time, my car has been the only physical anchor of my sense of place and self.

***

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Deskless in Seattle, Future of Data Survey

October 31, 2012 By

First off, thanks to my guest bloggers in the past couple of weeks, Drew Austin and Kevin Simler, for covering for me. It’s been a crazy-chaotic time for me lately, but the dust is finally settling.

Two quick updates: I am moving to Seattle, and I need help with a Survey.  Details:

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Anthropology of Mid-Sized Startups

October 29, 2012 By

Guest post by Kevin Simler, who works at Palantir, observes the startup scene, and writes at Melting Asphalt, about… well, go see for yourself.

In their natural habitats, social species organize into characteristic groups. Gazelles form herds, wolves form packs, and ants form colonies. Humans, in the same way, form tribes.

Of course, we’re pretty far removed from our natural habitat these days. But tribes are a large and fundamental part of our evolutionary heritage, and they have a corresponding influence on our mental and social lives. Organizing ourselves into tribes is one of the ways we manufacture normalcy. It helps our paleolithic minds perceive and act, more or less sensibly, in an increasingly complex modern world.

Humans also form kingdoms, nations, states, and civilizations, but those units of organizations aren’t as fundamental to our psychology. Statecraft is an esoteric enterprise; we spend most of our cycles processing social data at the tribal scale. Even Kissinger, for all his mastery of foreign relations, had to play tribe-level politics in the White House and State Department.
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The Examined Life

October 29, 2012 By

A useful idea for people interested in narrative-driven decision making is the Socrates quote: the unexamined life is not worth living.

Fair enough, but how do you actually apply this insight? Clearly you need an element of living to provide fodder for the examining. You cannot be born and raised in a dark sensory-deprivation chamber and do any useful examining (in fact, horrendous medieval experiments along these lines generally destroyed the unfortunate victims).

How do you balance examining versus living?

Here’s a quick primer. It’s more subtle than you might think.

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Navigating the Holey Plane

October 23, 2012 By

Guest post by Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus, an excellent blog about urbanism and cities.

 Although connectedness is the spirit of the city, and will probably remain so, the American version has always harbored a tendency to explode, to atomize, and to spread itself as far as possible. Today this may be exacerbated (or made more possible, if you like) by the media of virtuality.

— Lars Lerup

 “Connectedness” is one of the great buzzwords of the Internet Age. The claim that everyone is now more connected than ever before is the platitude upon which plenty of techno-optimism rests. Count the number of times Mark Zuckerberg uses the word whenever he explains Facebook’s role in the world (on his own profile, for instance). Then, count the number of times he explains what he actually means.

Within the context of Facebook, of course, Zuckerberg shouldn’t have to explain what “connected” means. Everyone knows. If more information can flow between two people via Facebook than was previously possible, those two people have become more connected—at least by the standards of the Facebook universe. Does this mean that Facebook has brought about its stated objective, a more connected world? Has the internet even accomplished that? What about the last century of technological progress in general? What does it mean to be connected, exactly, and what have we given up in order to reach that state?

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Economies of Scale, Economies of Scope

October 15, 2012 By

I’ve been trying hard over the last several weeks to wrestle a very tough idea to the ground: economies of variety. Yes, there is such a thing, and I don’t mean either the Starbucks menu of mass-customized combinatorial choices or some charming favela economy that has variety, but not economies of variety. Economies of variety are related to, but not the same thing as, the idea of superlinearity.

I’ll leave that subject for another post, when I beat the thing into some sort of submission, but the process of wrangling the idea has led me to a much deeper appreciation of the two existing economies — of scale and scope respectively — that characterized the industrial age. So this is a sort of prequel post. If a well-posed notion of “economies of variety” can be constructed, it will need to be really solidly built in order to punch in the same weight class as these two mature ideas. A business that achieves all three will be close to unbeatable by competing businesses that only manage one or two out of three.

Amazon is the first company that is getting dangerously close to 3/3. That should give you a hint about where I am going with the economies of variety idea. But let’s figure out scale and scope first.

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