‘the world is a very malleable place. if you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.’ — andreessen
'we could heal the planet with an organized effort the jews and the christians and the muslims and the buddhists and the sikhs and scientologists is all of my brethren. play this on the radio you never heard another nigga say this on the radio we made it out the ghetti-o' — timothy thedford
‘we don't know how to design systems yet. so let’s not make what we don’t know into a religion for god’s sake. what we need to do is constantly think and think and think about what is important. and we have to have our systems let us get to the next level of abstraction as we come to them.’ — alan kay, the computer revolution hasn’t started yet
‘you and i have a rendezvous with destiny. we will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. if we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. we did all that could be done.’ — ronald reagan, a time for choosing
i once read words by a gentleman whose name was lenin. a man who resided in a country called the ussr or something. a man who wrote an essay that asked what is to be done. because why stand there, and do nothing, when one could stand there and do something.
this ‘what is to be done?’ essay went something along the lines of the people with less aren’t going to do the more that is needed. and that’s a problem. so we have to get organized brethren — we need professional revolutionaries to charge—charge—charge. lenin was a man who gave his life to the cause and that’s to be respected but as i wrote in the devil’s ontology the general lesson to not be forgotten is that of complexity. that it’s real and a big deal.
and so in our complexity first model of things nailing what the ‘cause’ is really a hard task. most causes i support, most movements i don’t. if your cause has the total contextual scale of everything like lenins did, then you better nail the cause. the spirit has to match the letter. lenin got the former right the latter wrong. clean water with a little bit of poop in it, is not clean water with a little bit of poop, its poop water. ‘if we cannot, as advocates of individual liberty, paint a coherent vision of what it means for man to be free, then how can we expect the rest of humanity to bother with our ideas?’ jigga man asked what is to be done and jigga man larped. no different than lee-kuan yuan larped (have you seen the spirit of singapore?) which is to say mandela and your favorite activists. pounds of respect for these men.
lenin larped. he also raised funds by prostitution and counterfeiting money which means (a) he probably owned socks scarier than our bravest content creators and (b) he was committed to a degree unrecognizable today. but never the less he larped because communism is a larp. and communism is a larp because it had no model of complexity. a house built on top of a frozen winter lake isn’t a house. marx had no model of complexity. lenin had no model of complexity. you have no model of complexity. i have a model of complexity. the model of complexity is as follows: a single word and it’s conceptual space, whether or not known to be directly associated with the system, is capable of disorienting systems of all sizes.
‘in 1999 an interplanetary mission to mars failed because one engineering team used metric units and another one didn’t.’ — robert gushko, tim mcgrath, document engineering
‘q. what is talent management? a. 75% of organizations don’t have an agreed-upon definition.’ source: institute for corporate productivity survey as cited by paula ketter, “so, what is talent management, really?” — training & development, may 2008.
‘whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all. a further difficulty, just as insidious, is that people can lull themselves into skipping steps even when they remember them.’ — the checklist manifesto by atul gawande
the hard thing about hard things is that they are hard and that’s really hard. and now you have a model of complexity. and now maybe one day someone will do something other than giggle watching a blacked out garfields singing off-tune in the strip mall level of respectability that is an attempt at that thing called altruism in this thing called modernity. that would be cool.
vladimir’s mistake was that he stood there and did something when he should have stood there and did nothing. chaos theory wasn’t out and he did not produce the general idea of sensitivity to initial conditions but that does not excuse. lenin had the space-time to curate the information. chaos theory is nothing more than a scientific regurgitation of ideas repeated across the aeon. whatever. i’m standing here doing nothing. are you standing here doing nothing. or are you doing something. the french say 'reculer pour mieux sauter’ step back, retreat a little, if you're going to successfully jump over something. i ain’t do nothing but pumpin n bump or something muffin.
‘that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.’ – aldous huxley
in the general spirit of the man who we both greatly respect but who also launched his rocket too fast, i'm going to talk a bit about what is not to be done — other than standing there and doing something, of course.
what is not to be done is to do anything other than keep the main thing the main thing. because the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. the main thing is to do the best we can with what we know knowing that (a) we do not know what we know because we do not have the knowledge logistics tools to organize information1,
‘nothing much has changed other than the speed and volume of information we are dealing with. information is still, often artificially, siloed. instead of using digital technology to create systems of knowledge that are associative and re-combinatorial, we have used it to create new and better walls. instead of organizing knowledge and creating new pathways to solving our ongoing and persistent open-ended problems, we have created a bewildering array of seemingly disconnected data that is easily challenged and undermined. in short, we have created highways when we should have been creating webs.’
‘when the bidding started for the empire state building project, all the contractors stated they would use the standard tools they already had. when they asked the head of the starrett brothers firm, “mr. starrett, what tools do you have for this job?”, paul starrett replied: “not a blankety blank thing! not even a pick and shovel! gentlemen, this building of yours is going to present unusual problems. ordinary building equipment won’t be worth a damn on it. we’ll buy and make new stuff fitted for the job . . . that’s what we do on every big job. it costs less than renting second-hand stuff and it’s more efficient.’ — alan kay
'what we need, as sarah perry writes in her essay series for carcinisation, is “more stamp collecting, less darwin”—more local, particular, detailed accounts and descriptions, theories specific and developed enough to really be stress-tested by prediction. we cannot get ahead of ourselves in the rigorizing pipeline, which is also a pipeline from the local, descriptive, and specific to the global, the general, the abstract.' — suspended reason on knowledge logistics
(b) we are generally subject to the tyranny of a single implementation (c) we are consistently under estimating modeling complexity due to our general limitations to process scale.
mainstream science says the electromagnetic spectrum or human experienced reality is only 0.005 percent of what exists in the universe. it is infinitesimal. more than that, we can ‘see’ only a tiny fraction of th 0.005 percent known as visible light. ‘the blind leading the blind’ was never more appropriate. yet ‘the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible’ — einstein. mountains are moved when either/or is demoted under yes/and.
we can’t defend all complexity. life is performance art — and how is one supposed to be optimal about art. it’s art for god damn sakes. alan kay said we don’t know how to build systems for god damn sakes. performance art is ephemeral — it’s here today gone tomorrow (within a certain context window, as always). but just because things are complex does not mean you throw in the towel and do a half job. you do the best you can. why? because. respect as the highest currency.
what is not to be done is to ignore the fact the history of political thought is predicated on an invisible language hierarchy in which the ‘what’ (e.g. ‘what should we do about foreign policy’) dominates the ‘why’ (e.g. ‘what is the purpose of government?’) dominates the ‘how’ (e.g. implementation ‘how do we actually get things done on the micro level’). we’re cosmically blind due to the laws of physics and socially blind due to complexity caused blunders.
‘the term systems engineering dates back to bell telephone laboratories in the 1940s [schlager, 1956; hall, 1962; fagen, 1978]. fagen [1978] traces the concepts of systems engineering within bell labs back to the early 1900s and describes major applications of systems engineering during world war ii.’
'we might also suggest the extension of our psychopathological analogy to the point where an organization is described as suffering from neurosis. to justify this extension, it will be necessary to examine briefly the conditions under which individuals do in fact become neurotic. the individual lives in a world in which he has defined himself as existing. he inherently belongs to the environment in which he partakes; his behaviour cannot be considered independently from that environment. the man is not confronted with an external situation from which he is at liberty to divorce himself; he interprets his environment through his own reaction to it. for the individual, psychotherapy prescribes a 'proportioning treatment'. there must be a redefinition of the symbols and meanings that make up the environment, in which the manias and phobias which confirm and ingrain the neurosis are eliminated. in other words, we should seek to cut away the vicious reverberatory feedback circuits. organizationally, an analogous process would have to be attempted. it would probably amount to a re-disposition of individuals, and a redefinition of functions and responsibilities.’
‘the challenge in understanding and improving institutions lies in the cultural reluctance to acknowledge that general scientific principles can apply to them. unlike physics, where theories are openly discussed and debated, organizational science is often dismissed, with institutions insisting on their uniqueness and rejecting generalized theories. this resistance to recognizing universal principles leads to difficulties in organizational learning and evolution, as many organizations fail to adapt and often "die" before reaching forty. ‘our institutions are failing because they are disobeying laws of effective organization which their administrators do not know about, to which indeed their cultural mind is closed, because they contend that there exists and can exist no science competent to discover those laws. therefore they remain satisfied with a bunch of organizational precepts which are equivalent to the precept in physics that base metal can be transmuted into gold by incantation—and with much the same effect. therefore they also look at the tools which might well be used to make the institutions work properly in a completely wrong light.’ — stafford beer
what is not to be done is to not appreciate the what>why>how functional retardation this has caused. the conceptual systems held in the discourse are galaxies from sufficiently being useful for working with the world and achieving the results that are most useful, effective, or desirable. runnin like a video game character stuck in the corner that is the local minimum of ‘how,’ creates the unable to imagine 'what' and ‘why.’ the ‘how’ has gotten so messed up that we no longer associate innovation with anything related to bring humans together in anyway. innovation = exclusively tech. the idea that elon would use human excellence to do anything other then create software features for x was not an idea considered. we no longer speak in human, so we no longer think in how.
what is not to be done is to try to stop a 10,000 pound boulder from crashing down a hill with a toothpick. i think we are trying to do something about the situation the way the coffee shop near me has the sign saying worlds best cup of coffee. is the coffee impressive yes. is the attempt there. no. are there people trained the way professional sports players or astronauts trained for the challenge. no. do we think that quantifying this to be possible no. are we focused on investigating that question no. do we know what the worlds best cup of coffee is. not quite.
rapper/mogul p diddy got arrested in his home. p diddy was a guy with a security guard. he got raided. he was up against like 50 fbi agents those agents were really well trained. it was not a competition. it was complete overkill. resource mismatch. this is not intelligence but this is how failure is avoided. we think that this analogy does not apply for all topics but it does. do you have the necessary force to deal with the inertia. said differently failure is safety minus risk. what is not to be done is to get that ratio wrong.
what is not to be done said simply is bullshit. said differently, what should be done should be cool shit. most shit that is the shit is mostly shit. no shit would be the shit. we got a ton of shit but we some bullshit. cool shit is shit that don’t shit shit. cool shit isn’t “saving the world vibes.” saving the world vibes is driven by the spirit of pointing out evil. pointing out evil all the time isn’t cool shit. but it can be cool some of the time. cool shit is different then save the world vibes. full-scale rehabilitation of our infrastructure is different than how do we inject the world with awesome. a balance for both is the coolest. winning and not losing are not completely overlapping,
what is not to be done is this current state of political discourse. a surrender to the deep embedded psychological defense mechanisms that rationalize our decision to live in the ruins of a once great civilization like 250 ad rome2. not everything that is faced can be changed. but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
‘centuries ago it was, perhaps, possible for a single brilliant individual—an aristotle or hypatia or leonardo—to surpass all others across many areas of knowledge. today, human knowledge has expanded so that this is no longer possible. knowledge has been decentralized, and is now held across many minds. even the most brilliant people, people such as mathematicians tim gowers and terence tao and chess player garry kasparov, have an unsurpassed mastery of only a tiny fraction of our knowledge.’ — michael nielsen
what we know: the knowledge that society has collected and produced over the course of history in product manufacturing terms, organization is the constraint. today, organization, our capacity to assemble, integrate, and iterate on our knowledge is unfathomably low across all three dimensions; assemblage, integration, and iteration. if we are building the best house we can with what we know — how many dimensions could we think about constructing the best possible home? if the answer that comes into your mind, isn’t infinite — then let’s expand your imagination. let’s start with a curveball. take the philosophical question: what is the purpose of your life? does this count as a dimension for constructing the best possible home? does one spend a meaningful amount of their lives in their home? absolutely, they do. and absolutely what is the purpose of your life affects constructing the best possible home. and absolutely the dimension changes if we alter the question from what is the purpose of your life to what is the purpose of life as it does when we alter the proposition from constructing the best possible home to constructing the best possible home for an individual. how about thinking of the “vibe” in the house as a possible dimension. what type of “vibe” do i want the house to have? if vibe is an important dimension — which i can't understand how it would not be if you were aiming to design the optimal home — then vibe as a dimension to observe and orient ourselves around. i could explore the literature and read about vibes. i also could put together a pattern language for the type of vibe that i’m looking for. or i could find the most vibey person in the world — for the vibe i am looking for. [or i could pause midway through and think that well optimal isn’t optimal and the observer effect is real and therefore i should audit my approach with a more meta analysis]. these are plausibly complementary activities that require real effort, have the capacity to yield extremely meaningful outcomes, and are both able to be subsidized when recycled across a wide range of operational activities and could be produced by crowd source intelligence operations by a platform that was more effective than wikipedia. let’s stick with third activity: finding the most vibey person in the world for the type of vibe i’m looking for. the objective, presumably, is to extract the relevant knowledge and have that knowledge be transferred into the construction of my home. but slowdown cowboy. lot’s of presumptions and lots of opportunity to make small mistakes that have system-wide — or in this case home-wide — damaging effects.
it’s unsafe to assume a correlation between being able to produce a certain vibe and being able to explain a vibe. it’s a known fact that experts are not expert explainers. okay, say we know this but we are ready to meet the challenge. my capacity to retrieve information from this expert is dependent on a healthy number of variables. my incentives. her incentives. the environment we are communicating in. the quality of questions i ask. the questions i ask. researchers have studied questions. engineering studies prompt engineering. i see opportunity for a strong rise in competence in both. outside of academia, i’m sure many practitioners have useful ideas. a hostage negotiator — i'd bet — has a lot to say about the topic of questions. then a meta question comes up. can i find the hidden wisdom about questions? what person has thought about what sliver of the problem in a way that could be relevant to me that i’m not thinking about? i find the hostage negotiator. i ask him questions. i now, have an information transfer problem. this will be the same transfer problem that i will have with the vibe expert — but it will be a slightly different information transfer problem because the vibe expert was a walk and talk, the hostage negotiator was a zoom meeting. i transfer my information, i see two conflicting thoughts about asking questions. how do i settle this debate. do i look into the field of truth resolution? maybe it’s simply testing it with a quick equation. qd = quality of the debate = shared understanding of each side, incentives, participant lucidity. is this right? probably not? but then it poses the question of what is the definition of incentives and how do we ensure that we are aligned on the definition of what incentives mean. but it doesn’t end. the list of variables does not stop dancing. when i drink two cups of coffee in the morning, i am more energetic.
when i am more energetic, i produce more information in a more unorganized packet. this is a different information packet than what i produce when if we speak after i drink mint tea in the evening. a phone call produces a different information packet than zoom does. a zoom information packet is different than an in-person information packet. an in-person at a bar information packet is different then an in-person walk and talk information packet. the idea is not to run a perfect system, nor is the idea to control the individual in some meretricious tyrannical fashion, rather the goal is for the operator, the controller, to execute in the best way possible.
and then finally what is real not to be done is to think that statements like this one referencing rome are not most likely some other version of a larp.