Ecology, complexity, and other interdisciplinary fields can easily slip into woo. Initially I expected this book to suffer from this problem, but luckily there were no dizzying invocations of Deepak Chiopra™ style quantum physics. Instead, Greer presents a grounded worldview, rejecting spiritual stereotypes and "half truths that you create your own reality".
The bulk of Greer's book features seven laws, which may be better described as perspectives or lenses. The first three are foundational, the fourth is a bridge, and the last three are somewhat derived from the first. Many of these so-called laws overlap with one another. Law of Planes and Law of Evolution are highly interrelated. Why are there seven laws? For relatively unconvincing reasons resembling gematria. I found these "laws" unevenly resonant, with the Law of Cause and Effect quite uninspiring, but others much more evocative.
(The Seven Fundamental Laws of Spiritual Ecology are well documented, so rather than enumerating them I'll just focus on the ideas across the laws that I found compelling.)
An alternative entry point to complex systems Greer's first three laws can be cleanly mapped to the the canon of complexity science. Wholeness is all about the world consisting of complex adaptive systems. Flow is about stocks and flows. Finally, balance is about balancing feedback loops.
Everything flows at different rates. Flow rates vary, often moving at a pace far slower or faster than humans are capable of perceiving:
the boulder left by a glacier on one corner of the meadow during the last ice age fifteen thousand years ago is slowly being weathered away by rain, wind, and the slow action of lichens, and fifteen thousand years from now, it will be a fraction of its present size. Solid as it seems, the stone is also flowing.
Perhaps there is a general scaling law that the smaller the faster, and the higher the frequency? (Also see Small animals perceive time more quickly and Smaller objects move faster)
Accumulation is poison because it effectively stop the natural flow of things. My initial reaction to this was one of skepticism: some accumulations seem alright. Organisms need a store of energy to survive. Accumulation also afford freedom. Freedom to consider something other than just constant toil for the purpose of survival.
Greer seems less judgmental about accumulation in the human realm, especially when this is for the future of one’s own life. He explicitly rejects that material wealth is an evil thing and the only right path is one of abject poverty. Instead, in the spirit of seeking a middle way (see Middle way in Buddhism), Greer suggests something that resonates with me:
If material wealth is flowing into your life, material wealth in some form should be flowing out of it at an equal rate.
Goldilocks zones and balance: The opposite of thirst is not too much water, it’s just enough water. By default, people seek extremes and this intuition is often wrong. This section evoked a lot of related ideas for me:
Principle of rebound: Intriguingly, Greer writes about a practical application of his Law of Balance. Deliberately push a balanced system one way, and you will make it swing back the other way with redoubled force. Fast so that you enjoy food more during the next days. This is a sort of synthesized delayed gratification. Related to Manufactured suffering for resilience, antifragility and happiness.
Constraints are a source of power and elegance: Like the flow of water through a thinning tube, as the tube thins, the flow will become more and more powerful.
Power is born when a flow of energy encounters firm limits, and the more narrow the outlet left open by those limits, the greater the power will be.
This resonated with me, and reminded me of the benefit of constraints:
I found that reframing beauty as "elegance" is generative, and fits well with Greer's example of bird flight, in which nature "engineered" or "designed" an elegant system:
To achieve the power of flight, sparrows and most other birds accept strict and inflexible limits that prevent them from engaging in many activities that other living things can do. These limits are anything but arbitrary; rather, they are the other side of the power of flight itself.
Every manifestation in the real world is limited. If you break through these limits, you don't thrive, you die.
When a cell ignores the limits placed on it by the body as a whole system and instead grows in an unlimited way, doctors call that condition "cancer." Freed from all limits, the human body would not become something superhuman; it would simply turn into a puddle of red slush, powerless, ugly, and dead.
Overlapping planes of mind and body: Greer's notion of planes is very abstract: "Everything exists and functions on one of several planes of being." The most concrete and interesting planes are the mind and the body plane. These planes interact, but only in very specific ways.
Ecosystem lifecycles: One intriguing idea in this chapter and the next was about the lifecycle of ecosystems:
Just as every creature begins with a single cell and passes through its life cycle, every ecosystem begins with bare, nonliving elements and passes through stages, called "sers." Those stages reach from the first or pioneer sere that forms on bare ground right up to the final relatively stable sere, which ecologists call "the climax community."
(Also see the excellent Wikipedia article on this topic. Climax community and Seral community).
A seral community is an intermediate stage found in ecological succession in an ecosystem advancing towards its climax community
Placeholders in ecosystems: I found powerful the idea that individuals in an ecosystem can be seen as placeholders. The organism may die, but its immediate life wasn't that important for the whole system. The individual was playing a role that many had played in the past, and many will play in the future.
The meadow in which the mouse and the grass thrive, in other words, is simply one phase of a greater process of change that began long before either one was born, and that meadow will continue long after both have died.
Furthermore, this role can be played by a variety of creatures that evolve, but are still fundamentally of the same lineage.
Ten million years ago, some other species of small rodent filled the same role in meadow ecologies in the same region that the field house fills today, and ten million years from now, todays field mouse will likely be replaced by another species of rodent or some other creature not too different.
Magic is about the mind: Greer has a very hard boiled, realist take on magic. It mainly operates on the “plane of the mind”, and affects other planes only insofar as they overlap to the mind one. He talks lucidly of real limits when it comes to what you can expect magic to be able to achieve.
Societal lifecycles: Greer compares societies to ecosystems and suggests that they too have lifecycle. But what are the seres, and what is the climax community for societies? Perhaps the notion of progress is less clear.
Each human society arises out of the chaos left behind by some previous society and it takes shape in response to whatever challenge the old society couldn’t meet.
This reminds me of Turchin (Fathers-and-sons cycles) as well as Tainter (Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter). But there is less of a clear sense of progress from one society to the next. This rhymes with the nonlinearity of moral progress (see Moral progress is a cycle, technological progress is an arrow).
It is unfortunately common for the people of one society to ignore the hard won wisdom of older societies and suffer as a result.
Technological lifecycles? Greer goes further. He wouldn’t be surprised if at the end of our industrial society in several decades, many of today’s tech will become the stuff of legend. Atlantis, an advanced but lost civilization is a common trope in mystery schools. All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
The people of Atlantis ignored the laws of spiritual ecology and by the time those laws finished with them, nothing remained of Atlantis but gray waves rolling across empty ocean.
Dealing with higher ideals vs. disappointing realities: paraphrasing Greer, there are a few options:
Yet there is also another way: the way of the mysteries. This way starts by realizing that our everyday life in the world of manifestation, here and now, exactly as it is, is a lesson to be studied and understood, rather than a trap to be escaped or an illusion to be ignored. It goes on to recognize that the same laws that shape our ecological relationships with the world around us also define our existence in the subtler realms of mind and spirit and that learning to live and act in harmony.
I like Greer's call to curiosity, but it seems to me that the mystery schools are just one of many different ways to study and understand the lessons from daily life. Still, I'm pleasantly surprised how neatly Greer's ideas map onto my existing canon of Complexity-related notes. Also, it's useful to find giant gaps in my understanding of ecology (e.g. sers, climax communities, etc) will surely make for an illuminating follow-up.
]]>Varoufakis' book is written as a missive to his late socialist father, as an attempt to answer his question “Now that computers speak to each other, will capitalism self-destruct or become unassailable?”. His answer is confidently that capitalism has already metastasized into something much worse, characterized by a highly centralized Big Tech sector which engages in rent seeking behavior. He sensationally calls this diagnosis Technofeudalism, and his remedies are unconvincing.
Manufacturing demand post-WW2: Going beyond Zeihan (see The End of the World Is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan), Varoufakis elaborates on how the WW2-era war machine was turned into a consumer-facing economy. He describes the period between WW2 and now as one in which the US established global hegemony. This soviet-esque centrally planned war economy was a great success. During the war, America's manufacturing machine grew so large that once the war was over and it switched to consumer goods, it would overflow the US market. As a result, there was a need to manufacture more demand domestically, and to create international demand for American goods. Thus in addition to robust advertisement at home, we needed America's exported global culture. (Lots of overlap with Adam Curtis' Century of the Self, and a reference to Mad Men)
Sacking the commons: Varoufakis claims that large paradigm shifts aren’t just technological but first social. For the internet age, he describes a politically sanctioned plunder of the internet commons. This was followed by the invention of page rank and other tech.
Provocative analogy of common protocols of internet 1.0 (IMAP, SMTP, HTTP) to the British forests. Both used to be public, but became increasingly privatized and exploited for its resources for personal and corporate gain.
Incentivizing over-complication: Bankers are incentivized to make complex instruments that are not well understood by the public. Big tech employees are similarly incentivized to do the same, creating complex systems to dazzle promotion committees with their sheer ambition and scalability and level of abstraction. Simplicity is underrated at Big Tech
Rents vs. profits: Varoufakis rails against rent seeking as something that is actively destructive in the tradition of Adam Smith. His argument is that when rental income dominates corporate profits, you end up with a sort of degenerative capitalism that he calls feudalism. But how is rent different than profit fundamentally?
Capitalism ➡ Technofeudalism: Varoufakis' main argument is that modern capitalism has changed over the last decades, and no longer resembles the capitalism of the early 20th century. In particular, he blames big tech's cloud computing sector for rent seeking behavior. He calls this shift "technofeudalism" but acknowledges that this is spin — a marketing term designed to evoke the gravity of the situation. He lists many examples of cloud rent:
Related: Building on a platform is providing free R&D
The remedy: Varoufakis notes that historically, the economic left struggles with offering a socialist vision for what the future ought to be, and attempts to remedy it by providing one. His vision is extremely multifaceted and includes many huge ideas, many of which he devotes fewer than a paragraph to. They include:
Like many radicals, Varoufakis suffers from the pathology of being unable to even propose a coherent desired state, let alone a path to getting there (see Strategy != Goals != Ambitions). He describes a very elaborate, broad ranging vision, and then posits that the many modifications he proposes will get us there. I'm highly skeptical that this would work, since each one of the bullet points above are big ideas on their own and would introduce dozens of second order effects. In tandem, these second order effects would only multiply, leading to some unfathomable future even a very small number of time-steps away.
Perhaps Varoufakis is well grounded on many of these interventions. He worked at Valve previously, which I think is the source of some of the ideas behind "democratic corporations", but the book ends abruptly without much detail into these actual policies. But it feels to me that going into actual policy was never his goal. "Technofeudalism" is a manifesto that describes meaty problems without seriously proposing adequate solutions.
Random:
I read this book as respite from Samuel I and before tackling Samuel II. Wolpe's retelling of David's stories is lively, easy to read, and insightful. Most of this book summarizes David's story from various perspectives: as a young man, on the run from Saul, as a king, as a father, at the end of his journey, and as the progenitor of the Messiah. I found Wolpe's negative insights to be the most incisive.
Wolpe observes that
Conventional religion has a regrettable tendency to do surgery on the human soul, leaving only the exalted parts.
Not so with David. In the words of Baruch Halpern, "David is the first human being in world literature". Wolpe's overall portrait of David is not super sympathetic. David's flaws, sins, and moral failings are so great that this sentiment from former Israeli president Shimon Peres seems like an understatement:
Not everything David did on land, or on roofs, appears to me to be Judaism.
The author of this book is my radar from a number of different directions, most surprisingly via his interview with Sadhguru.
The supernatural and the feminine: With the exception of Saul raising Samuel from the dead, there is not a single supernatural miracle in the entire story of David. Wolpe observes that when David needs a miracle, God finds a woman to enact it in an earthly manner. Is this like real life?
Family strife: Wolpe writes resonantly that “for king or commoner, the pain in families dwarfs even the final, eschatological battle”. David's family is rather extreme, a wild caricature of the sorts of pedestrian problems most people experience in their life. In a modern reading, does one soften and interpret them as allegory?
I must say, recalling David's story in detail really enhances my appreciation the much loved "Hallelujah":
But all I ever learned from love, Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.
Wolpe argues that David is the chosen of God exactly because of his complexity, which strikes me as a very modern take. Would the authors of the Bible considered complexity a desirable quality? I suspect they would laud David for being a great warrior king. A gentler modern reading is far more damning. David was "a man after God’s own heart", at the cost of sordid and tragic personal and family affairs. A broken hallelujah.
]]>I came across this peculiar book in a circuitous way. I listened to part of an interview in which a certain Beff Jesos spent an inordinate amount of time speculating about non-equilibrium systems and how they might relate to the genesis of life. He also casually name-dropped Jeremy England. On his lead, I read an article about some of recent research on life-like simulations that seem to spontaneously reach orderly states, and came across this book. Turns out England is not just a statistical physicist, but also an ordained rabbi, and that "Every Life is On Fire" is a strange amalgam of condensed matter theory and The Torah, which sounded right up my alley.
Overall, I found the book thought-provoking and worthwhile despite its unevenness, abrupt end, and overreliance on scripture. One obscure episode from Exodus in which God teaches Moses to turn his hand sickly white and revert it back to normal was given far too much weight, resulting in a contorted and unconvincing analogy. On the other hand, some Torah references illuminated the author's thought process, and at a meta-level, reminded me about the flexibility of human minds to synthesize across such seemingly disparate fields. Anyway here are some ideas that stood out to me:
Escape velocity and state changes: An intuitive and new-to-me way of looking at changes in state. Consider a particle in its transition from liquid to gas (e.g. boiling water), we can apply the concept of escape velocity. This particle is like a rocket trying to escape the gravitational field of earth. In this analogy, the earth is made out of these rocket-particles, so as more of them leave, the earth's mass decreases, effectively reducing escape velocity. This bandwagon effect applies generally to state changes, explaining why we observe quick transitions rather than gradual ones.
Limitations of "first principles thinking": Reductionism holds that you can understand system by just understanding its constituent parts. But a complex system is often greater than the sum of its parts, exhibiting emergent behavior, so reductive thinking is inherently limited. Emergence is the opposite of reductionism. Multiple different fields have evolved to study phenomena from different perspectives. Each field has their scope and level of abstraction, suited to best study the phenomenons in their scope.
Life and life-likeness: Physics doesn't concern itself with defining life, but some life-like properties can be described in physical terms. For example, life tends to replicate itself, tends to require external energy and use it to repair itself. Considering some edge cases reveals how complex the barrier between life and not-life is:
Active and passive stability: Consider the self repair of an ice sheet crushed by a stick and the self repair that happens when skin repairs a cut. These are very different processes; skin is capable of dynamic self-repair, but ice is passively self-repaired.
Life has a tendency to exist in states that require constant energy input just to remain alive; repair happens continuously in response to ongoing wear and tear. In the event of a cut, the same regular maintenance occurs but perhaps at an accelerated rate.
A frozen pond, in contrast, requires no continuous energy to remain frozen. The crystal structure of the ice is sufficiently stable that it can just continue to exist as long as the temperature doesn't increase. If the structure is disrupted, water under the ice will naturally return to the surface and spontaneously freeze because of the temperature of the surroundings, self-repairing spontaneously.
The downside of the frozen pond strategy is that ice's crystal structure is highly vulnerable to changes in the environment. When it gets warm, the crystal will reliably melt and turn into water. This is static stability.
A biological system, in contrast, typically has a broader operating range, and is more resilient to environmental variation. Life is complex and constantly requires external energy to survive, but it is far more resilient.
Everything interesting flows: is it true that all interesting systems require a constant flow of inbound energy? Equilibrium is death. There is a cascade of systems in which energy flows from one system to the next, with each of the energy flows cyclical in nature. These sub-systems are not in equilibrium, but they are still in predictable flow states. (There's an amazing visualization to be made on this theme, along the lines of Powers of Ten)
Resonance and adaptation: Energy does not just come into a system in some random way. Instead, its flow and properties have a certain structure. For example, a singer can break a glass with her voice if her pitch matches the resonance frequency of the glass. The singer's voice can be represented as a spectrum of frequencies and powers. In this case, the singer modulates the frequency of the sound wave she emits until it matches that of the glass, and then cranks up the amplitude.
The singer's pitch is the source of energy for the singer-glass system. Unlike the singer-glass, most systems have a fixed source of energy, and entities in the system can adapt to it. In the singer-glass system, imagine an imaginary glass that changes size to match the resonance frequency of the singer's voice. Like the singer's voice, the sun's rays transmit electromagnetic energy in a particular spectrum of frequencies and powers. And like the glass, every living creature adapts to this structured energy to survive.
Energy in the Goldilocks zone: If energy is not structured correctly or is overpowering, it can be destructive to a system. England makes an interesting Goldilocks zone argument (see Goldilocks principle) inspired by the paradoxical story of Moses and the burning bush.
This is what inspired the name of the book. Every life is a bit on fire.
]]>Telejam is a web application for musicians to collaborate online in almost real time. Existing solutions like Sonulus, JamKazam and others attempt to provide live, in-sync musical collaboration over the internet. This sometimes works, especially if specialized network hardware is involved and if your collaborators are nearby. The just noticeable delay for music performance is about 30 milliseconds, and players positioned at opposite ends of the Earth will experience at least a 70-millisecond delay.
This theoretical bound is dictated by a fundamental speed limit of the universe: the speed of light. Jamming with a moon dweller would bring that theoretical minimum latency up to 1.3 seconds and you can forget about jamming with your Martian friends, where the delay is hundreds of seconds depending on orbital alignments. And remember that are just idealized thresholds; additional delays from network protocols are inevitable.
Rather than trying to beat the speed of light, we embrace the space-time continuum and other fundamental laws of the universe. Telejam lets musicians layer recordings into an instantly produced final mix regardless of the physical distance (and therefore time) between musicians. Musicians are arranged in a sequential chain where each participant contributes their "track" to the final mix:
The leader is the participant who determines the order of players, balances their respective gain, starts and stops the recording, switches between sequential and synchronized modes.
The great thing about Telejam is that musicians experience ZERO latency. Because of the unidirectional chain, however, they only hear musicians to their left in the chain. They do not hear music from musicians chained on their right. It's lonely being first in the chain, and it's helpful to have a backing track or a drummer in the first slot. Conversely, the last musician hears all the others. The final mix is available on demand as soon as the performance ends, and is a good opportunity for those early in the chain to hear the whole ensemble. At this point, the leader can reorder the chain to give others a turn on the coveted last position.
Telejam is not going to replace in-person jam sessions, but it's the closest we're going to get to jamming with a man on the moon.
My contribution to this prototype was most of the implementation including the WebRTC + Web Audio + Firebase implementation of the daisy chain as well as the rudimentary UI. It's been a pleasure to see Mark use Telejam in practice with his many musical collaborators. To hear some of those recordings and for more information about the project, check out https://telejam.net.
]]>Zeihan's book is an interesting exercise in scenario planning: what if America decides to step back from its role as policeman of the world? But this is not the framing that the author uses. Instead, the book is a high-confidence prediction about the future based on geopolitical and demographic trends. In short, America will step down as global hegemon, global trade will end, supply chains will be irreparably damaged, the world will turn multipolar, and everyone will starve to death, except the Americans who will be a-OK!
Zeihan is a consultant to large companies making important strategic decisions, so I guess high confidence comes with the territory. I would be surprised if Zeihan's world transpires fully, but he makes good "big history" points and the book was worthwhile if you can get past the bombastic vibes.
In general, Zeihan does a good job of going pretty deep into how the world works, and explaining things like I'm five. This is inevitably simplifying, as in his explanation of mediums of exchange, which ignore ledgers as an important part of the history (see Debt by David Graeber). Nits aside, I really liked his concise chronicle of global mediums of exchange, all historically gold-backed currencies, all the way to the end of Bretton Woods, where the USD now floats freely, untethered to gold. There is a certain unevenness in the presentation however, for example I really disliked his convoluted explanation of inflation, disinflation, and deflation.
The book delves surprisingly deeply into many nitty-gritty side-spurs most of which I think serve to explain the complexity of the modern manufacturing.
Geographies of Success. At different stages of human civilization, different geographic features were desirable. For example:
Selon Zeihan, during the globalized American Order, these geographies ceased to matter, since you could get anything shipped to you. But once The Order collapses, they will begin to matter again.
The Order and globalization: After World War II, America was in a position to try to establish a Rome-like global empire. America weighed her options and decided that direct rule would be unsustainable. Instead, America wisely bought a period of peace by offering a militarily brokered economic order with prosperity for all. This meant an essentially global free trade network without any of the historical challenges and high costs. Previous trade networks had way more middle-men charging exuberant prices at every step of the way and way smaller shipping volumes. This ushered in an unprecedented peace dividend (see The peace dividend is over).
Collapse of The Order: When the Soviets emerged as a countervailing pole shortly after WW2, America's need to create a strong western alliance became even stronger. When the Soviet empire collapsed, and America "won" the Cold War, it lost its sense of urgency and direction. Zeihan claims that the order is over without much justification. It seems to be more of a mood affiliation (see The fallacy of mood affiliation)
The uneven spread of tech revolutions: the industrial revolution began in Britain, where it took decades to refine the key inventions: steam engines, looms, factories. Subsequent adoption in other countries like Germany proceeded much faster. Later entrants like China industrialized even faster.
Demographic determinism: It's hard to refute demographics, which are definitely an underrated (by me) source of long-term future projection. Given a demographic pyramid of the current world, it's relatively easy to predict a future pyramid because of population dynamics. In general, the more affluent a country, the lower the birth rate. If you have few children today, you will likely have few children in twenty years, because fewer children today means fewer child-bearing adults.
One major flaw with demographic determinism is that there is more to the story than just age. For example, a large young population may be skilled or unskilled, and these scenarios will play out very differently.
Straightforward projection of demographics does not account for immigration. Countries like the US and Canada are based on an influx of people from the outside, and this remains a major advantage compared to many other countries, which have similarly low birth rates but no immigration.
De-sourcing trend: Multinational companies set up factories in other countries, hiring the local population and selling them the goods. Japan does this globally with Toyota and other car companies. China does this with their auto industry in Russia, especially after the pandemic (see Russian car industry after War on Ukraine). The US does this all over the world.
The Order is fragile. Zeihan points to a historical episode in the 1980s, where the Iraq-Iran war disrupted global trade because the insurance industry collapsed. This rhymes a lot with what's happening in the Red Sea and Yemen's Houthi trade route disruptions. Large container ships enable essentially free global shipping and a very complex supply chain for all things. Unfortunately they cannot be easily defended, and having military escorts for all of them would be very expensive. Zeihan calls them "floating buffets" for other countries to raid.
Without The Order: Zeihan's predictions without American-backed global free trade are dire.
Split by hemisphere? Zeihan predicts a multipolar world that is for some reason split by hemispheres. The American hemisphere will do super well for many reasons. First, there is so much untapped resource potential in America. Mexico has the right demographics and US has the right expertise to replace a lot of global supply chains. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will suffer because of longstanding hatreds, relative lack of resources.
Pointers:
Exupery was a voice-powered sketching robot. I named it after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry because of the conversation in his most famous book where the Little Prince asks the pilot to draw him a picture of a sheep. You, too, can now ask Exupery to sketch pictures of things, and it will try to oblige. It replicates sketches drawn by real people playing the game Quick, Draw!, and adding a bit of flourish. Try the online demo, and read on to find out more.
The hardware version of Exupery was built as a showpiece for the AIY Projects Voice Kit and presented at Maker Faire back in 2017 (see photos). To show it off at Maker Faire, we used an AxiDraw V3, a maker-friendly and surprisingly precise pen plotter. Here's an example of a sketch being produced using the hardware. Be sure to unmute this video to hear the linear actuator servomotor's song!
Today, given the slim chance that you have such a device, Exupery can also just run on the web, with a virtual pen drawing on a virtual canvas. To get Exupery sketching, say something like "draw me a sheep". If you aren't satisfied with your sheep, try "do it again". Once you're ready to move on, ask it to "draw something else" for a random sketch.
Exupery has a few fun features going above and beyond the call of duty. Great artists sign their work, so Exupery labels the thing it sketches after drawing it. Implementing this was a fun excuse to dig into vector fonts. If you don't keep it occupied with a query quickly enough, Exupery gets bored and starts drawing little doodles all over the canvas. The entire user interface for Exupery is sketched using icons from Quick, Draw!. This includes the virtual pencil it uses to draw, as well as the microphone indicating that it's time to speak.
Exupery was a fun project hearkening back to a simpler time. Today I'm pleased to revive it and release it into the world. So try it out live, grab the code on github and as always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. À bientôt!
]]>Here is a small selection of intriguing articles I read online over the last three months.
Happy New Year to you all!
]]>Thanks to AK for the suggestion, I found this to be a more historical and literary take on a concept similar to End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. It's also a short novella, which I think is part of why a lot of the details feel like they are left as an exercise to the reader.
Crowley's secret cabal of time traveling elites, takes after Asimov's Allwhen Council of Eternals. Except is founded by Cecil Rhodes and called the Otherhood. Just like Asimov's Eternals seek to intervene in time by making Minimal Necessary Changes for the Maximal Desired Response, the Otherhood seeks “the smallest possible intrusion that would have the proper effect”.
But unlike the Allwhen Council interested in preventing societal collapse, the Otherhood are Tories whose main goal is to keep the British empire going for as long as possible. In one future explored by Crowley, the Otherhood succeeds in this, preventing the calamities of the 20th century. A glimpse into the far future, however, reveals a dark and bizarre world with Hominids, Angels, and "Draconics". (Connecting the dots, this is supposed to be a terrible turn of events, but its apparent awfulness doesn’t really come through in the prose. What’s bad about it?)
Crowley goes beyond Asimov in describing the geometry of the multiverse which time travelers ("orthogonists") can traverse. Time marches on inexorably:
The universe proceeds out of what has been and into what it will be, inexorably, unstoppably, at the rate of one second per second, one year per year, forever.
But as I understand it, any forward progress breeds a new universe that is literally orthogonal to the arrow of time:
At right angles to its forward progress lie the past and the future. The future, that is to say, does not lie "ahead" of the present in the stream of time, but at a right angle to it
You can never enter the same present twice.
The past he had passed through on his way back was not 'behind' his present at all, but at a right angle to it; the future of that past, which he had to traverse in order to get back again, was not the same road, and 'back' was not where he got.
(I think this is similar to the many-worlds interpretation that quantum mechanics applies everywhere and at all times and so describes the whole universe. In particular, there is no wave function collapse. Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead, even before the box is opened, but the "alive" and "dead" cats are in different branches of the multiverse, both of which are equally real, but which do not interact with each other.)
But how does time travel work in such a world? Well, I guess one possibility is that in the next time step, you move into a world that is a lot like the one before. With the many-worlds interpretation, it's possible that anything happens. So there's a non-zero probability of having a time machine and using it to time travel to a world that looks just like 1893. There is also a non-zero probability that you will use a chicken to time travel to a magical rainbow under the surface of Jupiter's smallest monkey. The only difference between these two scenarios is their respective probabilities.
]]>I discovered Yossi Klein Halevi following Hamas' massacre on Oct 7 on a podcast. Halevi's ability to combine a firmly pro-Israeli position with a gentle touch impressed me. This comes through in his book too, which I liked overall. I'll recommend it to left-leaning friends struggling to understand the situation.
Half of Israeli Jews descend from the Arab diaspora. (I did some additional research at Waves of Jewish immigration (aliyah) into Israel). This is a pretty solid counter to the idea that Zionism is a European colonial project.
Hertzl's Uganda Scheme was new to me, or I'd forgotten the idea completely. Was this omitted from the brave and valiant history of Israel in my Hebrew school?
The 1975 UN resolution that "Zionism is a form of racism" caused the hard Israeli right to harden. This "Zionism = racism" act was reverted in 1990 which increased Jewish and Israeli inclination to peace.
Genocidal neighbors: On one hand, you want to befriend your neighbors and let them into your house. On the other, when a genocidal enemy says that they want to destroy you, you should believe them. This is the dilemma that Israel faces with many Palestinians in Gaza. They are both neighbors and committed to the destruction of Israel.
Arafat’s Johannesburg Speech: In 1994, Yasser Arafat gave a speech in which he admitted that he wasn't actually looking for peace with Israel at all just a temporary seize fire.
What they are saying is that [Jerusalem] is their capital. No, it is not their capital. It is our capital. It is the first shrine of the Islam and the Moslems
Palestinian voice for peace?: It's completely unclear where the serious voices advocating for a two state solution are in the Palestinian media. Where are they in the Arab world? Where are they in the broader Muslim world? (They seem to exist, but they are quiet.)
No national movement has rejected as many offers to create a nation as the Palestinian national movement.
Distinguish between country & land Both the Israelis and the Palestinians make claims to the same land. But neither side can have full control over that land, so the only way the conflict can resolve peacefully is if there's some equilibrium in which the country of Israel is not the same as the land of Israel and the country of Palestine is not the same as the land of Palestine.
Understand the imperfection: Both sides must understand the imperfection of this equilibrium. This is just a compromise that needs to be reached while also acknowledging that both sides have a maximalist tendency to acquire all the land. This must be resisted in a credible way.
Mutual contraction: There is a mirroring here between the Palestinian right of return and the Israeli settlement movement:
These maximalist claims need to be reneged in a mutual contraction. Israel contracts its settlements and Palestine contracts its refugee return demands.
Cherry-pick the holy books: There is so much in the scriptures, it’s a matter of picking the right narrative for the right time.
For example, from a religious Jewish perspective, it’s easy to see the territories as a literal commandment to capture the land of Israel and make it belong to the country. But also there are commandments about leaving the land fallow every 7 years and a bicentennial jubilee in which all debts and ownership is forgiven.
Find common ground: Despite the differences between Abraham and Ibrahim in the Torah and Quran respectively (e.g. Abraham vs. Ibrahim in the story of Sodom), there is a common ground:
Religious surrender vs. intellectual inquiry: Both Judaism and Islam have traditions of religious surrender and intellectual inquiry:
Judaism | Islam | |
---|---|---|
Religious surrender | Binding of Isaac | Prayer mats |
Intellectual inquiry | Study houses | Lost enlightenment |
Now in the 3rd millennium, Judaism lacks religious surrender, while Islam lacks intellectual inquiry. Both could use some work.
On The Holocaust: A common Arab take on the holocaust is: "it never happened, we're glad it did, and we're gonna do it again". Yossi describes a conciliatory trip to Auschwitz, undertaken by a mixed group of Israelis and Palestinians in which Arabs got to see the plight of the Jews due to the Nazis. (The people that need that trip the most are the people that would never go on such a trip.)
A solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains as illusive as ever, and while no book will provide one, this one shed light on some historical details I did not know about. I hope that "Letters" might be even more illuminating to left leaning friends that feel less intrinsically connected to Israel than I do.
]]>As a kid growing up in the Soviet Union, I remember eyeing a book called Пароль скрещенных антенн (literally "password of the crossed antennae") on my grandfather's bookshelf. It had a green leather home-made cover on it with just the title on it in block capital lettering. My grandfather bound it himself, as he did with many other books, from popular science books to books banned by the authorities. Grandma told me many stories about his obsession with books and bookbinding hobby which he took on after retirement. He would read everywhere: on the pot, at the dinner table, on the sofa. He always had a book on his person, which came in handy because Soviet life involved waiting in so many long queues, you could get a lot of reading done.
I still have the book, and it's on my to-read shelf, but for now, I opted for E. O. Wilson's most accessible take about ants to whet my appetite. "Tales from the Ant World" is a sort of popularization of his more famous "Ants", a Pulitzer prize winning textbook. This in itself is remarkable, but E. O. Wilson is also a pretty remarkable figure who I first learned about from his work on consilience. The writing in "Tales" is very personal, including many anecdotes from Wilson's life, and I think is geared to nudge younger readers towards myrmecology when they grow up. Perhaps less specifically, this book feels primed to maximize latent curiosity for budding scientists (it me?).
Overall it was well written and crazy interesting, a nice diversion from my usual topics. As it happens, I'm dealing with a minor ant infestation at home. There's something pleasantly escapist about peeling back a mundane aspect of our daily experience and discovering a whole world inside. It's equally real, but completely different.
Some interesting ideas in this philosophical pamphlet, but they are atomized and not woven into a strong coherent argument. The book is not especially well written: rambling and repetitive and lacking structure. I'd recommend a shorter summary (hello, you're welcome) or listening to Episode 188 of Philosophize This, which is what turned me onto Byung-Chul Han in the first place.
Human societies operate like the immune system. Just like the immune system's goal is to determine which cells are part of the organism and which aren't, societies do the same at a higher level of organization. Societies historically are based on an identity. Some people are part of the in-group, and others are not.
If an immune system is not working properly, the organism becomes infected with disease. Similarly, as contemporary society shifts to be more inclusive, "otherness is being replaced with difference", and societies and individuals living in them lose their identity. Because of this shift, we live in a time that is "poor in negativity". And so, unlike the pathologies of yore that are borne from excess negativity, modernity suffers from too much positivity. I don't think Han takes this in a xenophobic direction, but I can definitely see the potential for this strain of thinking.
This rhymes a bit with toxic positivity, which errs too much on being outwardly positive, no matter how dire the circumstances. It also reminds me of modern censorship tactics (eg. Flood the zone with shit).
The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts.
Depression, ADHD, and burnout syndrome point to excess positivity:
Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories.
People living in a society which glorifies the idea that nothing is impossible are likely to set unreasonable expectations for themselves. This leads to a downward spiral of disappointment, and ultimately depression.
Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves [...] Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is more efficient than allo-exploitation, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished.
Han compares modernity's demands to multi-task with the state of nature, in which animals must divide its attention between many activities:
That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion: either they are eating or they are copulating.
This state of being is incompatible with maintaining and creating culture, creative work, and mental health. Han criticizes Arendt's and Nietzsche's endorsement of the active life, instead favoring the contemplative life.
Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness.
This reminds me a lot of a few books:
Even rage can be good. Han writes that part of the problem of too much positivity is that we are losing the capacity for rage. Surprisingly, he interprets rage in a positive light. Perhaps there is something lost a bit in translation:
Rage is the capacity to interrupt a given state and make a new state begin. Today it is yielding more and more to offense or annoyance [Ärgernis], “having a beef,” which proves incapable of effecting decisive change.
Defined this way, my mind goes to rage-quitting a job, which is less negative than say, road rage or a raging rampage. Indeed, when you notice negative emotions arise, that can be a catalyst for change.
Han suggests that there are two kinds of tiredness. I don’t want to be tired of you. I want to be tired with you.
Han describes the difference in his usual cryptic style:
The tiredness of exhaustion is the tiredness of positive potency. It makes one incapable of doing something. Tiredness that inspires is tiredness of negative potency, namely of not-to.
To Han, The Sabbath is a dedicated space-time for collective deep tiredness built into the Jewish week. This resonates with me and reminds me a lot of Heschel's ideas in The Sabbath by Heschel.
Han ties this I-tiredness to the war the achievement society individual wages on himself. He invokes a very short story by Kafka called Prometheus (see Kafka parables notes), in which “The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.” Han comments:
As everyone knows, Prometheus also brought work to mankind when he gave mortals the gift of fire. Today’s achievement-subject deems itself free when in fact it is bound like Prometheus. The eagle that consumes an ever-regrowing liver can be interpreted as the subject’s alter ego. Viewed in this way, the relation between Prometheus and the eagle represents a relation of self-exploitation.
In a somewhat wayward way, Han brings us to the main thesis of the book, which is that modern society is no longer a negative disciplinary society (thou shalt not X), but rather a positive, achievement society (you can be anything you want to be). He rehashes the same point many times over:
Han suggests that depression is caused by becoming “exhausted by his sovereignty”, tired from the constant need for initiative.
Han dunks on Freud and declares psychoanalysis obsolete. If I was more versed in psychoanalysis I might be more capable of understanding convoluted phrases like:
It proves quite easy to withdraw the weakened libido from the Other and to use it to cathect new objects. There is no need for drawn-out, pain-filled “dream work.”
My assessment from the first read is "great ideas poorly assembled". Maybe it flows better in the original German?
]]>With this post I aim to synthesize some ideas from the Tools for Thought movement (e.g. Roam) with Systems Thinking (e.g. feedback loops). The result, as advertised in the title, is a tool for helping people think in systems. Let me first explain what I'm talking about, then walk you through some design considerations, and finally show you a prototype which takes a description of a system and converts it into causal loop diagram. Imagine if every news article included a little visual explainer to help you understand the story better.
If you're impatient (who can blame you?), here's a quick demo:
A couple of years ago, I read and was inspired by Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows. One of the tools presented in Meadows' book are causal loop diagrams. Here's a simple riff on a classic causal loop diagram to help us grapple with chicken populations. More chickens mean more eggs, and more eggs mean more chickens (a reinforcing loop). As we know, chickens have a certain propensity for crossing the road, and the more chickens, the more chaotic the road crossings with unfortunate consequences for their overall population (a balancing loop).
Causal loop diagrams are a way to visually represent a complex system. They can be a good visual summary, giving us a sense of factors and feedback loops that relate to a topic.
Over the last couple of years I got a bit nerdy about the topic and "modeled" some of my own systems based on some of my reading. For example, based on a series of lectures about the Middle Ages, I sketched out causal loop diagrams that illustrated some secular trends. These can be found in the public version of my note corpus.
I found the process insightful as a way to process a complex topic, and the results to be interesting to share and generalize from. However, the process is time consuming and challenging. Could an AI help here?
There is no canonical mapping between a system and a corresponding causal loop diagram. In other words, there can be many diagrams which correspond to the same system, each emphasizing different aspects of it. Also, while they are well suited to illustrating fuzzy problems, causal loop diagrams are not well suited for rigorous system analysis12.
Popular Tools for Thought like Roam and Muse are general purpose organizational tools that help you to think and capture all kinds of thoughts. The new generation of these generic note-taking apps is now being imbued with AI. Some of these AI-powered features include:
What if you had a tool that helped you think or create in a specific domain? Here are a few examples I found compelling:
So now for the synthesis. What could a tool for thinking in systems look like?
Given a description of a system, can an AI generate a causal loop diagram representation for it? Imagine if every news article included a little diagram explaining the systemic background for the news story.
The current state of AI is not quite ready to tackle this problem without human intervention. So I strove to create a tool that would help people co-create with the help of an LLM. The system's vibe should not be thanks for the text, here is the corresponding CLD, but a metaphorical dialog: is this the CLD you are imagining? Or here's a crazy take on this, WDYT?, with the person using the tool making the appropriate changes.
This dialectic approach has the potential to be useful, even if you are talking to yourself or an inanimate object. Studies have shown that conversations with yourself, as in distanced self-talk where we give ourselves advice by pretending like we’re advising a friend with the same issue, seem to help us get unstuck. In software engineering, rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code by describing your approach to a lifeless rubber duck sitting on your desk.
I mentioned earlier that there is no canonical causal loop diagram for a given complex system. My goal was not to have a sequence of LLM invocations result in some perfect output, but to make headway on the cold start problem I found when attempting to model. You have a blank canvas; where should you begin? At what level of granularity should you be thinking about? What entities are at play? What relationships matter?
Thus, the first principle I've adopted is muses over mentats (from ChatGPT as muse, not oracle). Mentats in Dune are computer-like humans (long story), able to quickly compute and predict and produce factually correct results to help nobles rule. In contrast, Muses were inspirational Greek goddesses of literature, science and the arts, colloquially serving as someone's source of artistic inspiration. In other words, correctness is optional; it is sufficient to be inspiring.
This principle jives well with the strengths and weaknesses of generative AI. LLMs can simulate reasoning and create a large volume of content quickly, but tend to hallucinate. Grounding LLMs in facts remains an open research problem.
How can the user feel like she is co-creating with a helpful partner, rather than putting her trust in a lifeless machine?
Bikes amplify our innate human abilities to get to where we're going, while genies are simply teleport us to our destination. How do they do it? Nobody really knows! Hopefully you don't run out of wishes, and hopefully the Genie doesn't make any mistakes. And given that AIs make many mistakes, we need to give people a lot of control!
What's needed here is not a genie to get you the answer. Instead, people need a tool to support getting to their own answer.
That these LLMs fib might not strictly be a bad thing. For example, if a generated diagram is blatantly incorrect, a user may be tempted to jump in and fix it, leading to new insights! After all, we all know what happens when someone is wrong on the internet. The principle of bikes over genies ensures that people have the ability to make corrections where needed.
Before diving into implementation details of my little tool, here are two examples of causal loop diagrams this system is capable of producing.
This diagram is generated from a paragraph on the Simple Wikipedia page "Tobacco Smoking":
This diagram is generated from some of my observations about medieval history:
A few words about these diagrams:
+
's are direct relations (more Source causes† more Target).-
's are inverse relations (more Source causes† less Target).I go over both in the demo video.
At a high level, the prototype works as follows:
Entity extraction is done through an LLM, not because that is a good idea, but because it was expedient from a prototyping perspective. This is relatively uninteresting, and I used a straightforward prompt template like this:
Text: ${groundingText}
The following ${entityCount} entities appear in the text above:
-
Here, groundingText
refers to the system description and entityCount
is a configurable number.
I took a brute force approach to entity-to-entity causal relationships. Once all entities are available, we check each ordered entity pair to see if and how they are related. For each pair, I use the same LLM to check if there is a direct relation with the following prompt template:
Text: ${groundingText}
The text above suggests that more ${entity1} causes more ${entity2}. Answer one of "true" or "false".
To check for an inverse relation, I replaced "more" in the prompt above with "less".
Now whether the model obeyed the request and produced a single word response "true" or "false" is another question. The state-of-the-art OpenAI LLM I used produced a variety of results with varying frequencies:
Result | Frequency |
---|---|
true/false | 50% |
True/False | 30% |
something else | 20% |
But this is still good enough. In practice, 80% of the time, parsing the result was trivial. The rest of the time, we treat the result as false.
In some rare cases (I'd estimate 5% of the time), the model would produce both a direct and inverse relationships. This is a sort of logical contradiction which I treated as a failure mode. In these cases, I ignored both relationships.
My approach here is pretty simple. Another interesting approach was taken by Long and her collaborators3 was to evaluate the strength of causality, by looking at the number of times the LLM responds positively or negatively. The same paper also notes that the prompt used matters quite a bit. They experimented with three variations on a prompt similar to the one I used:
According to Big Pharma...
These prompt engineering tweaks all made a difference and there wasn't a clear winner.
Terse explanation generation is also implemented using an LLM with a similar prompt:
Text: ${groundingText}
The text above suggests that more ${entity1} causes ${adverb} ${entity2}. Explain why in fewer than ten words.
One design question for me was whether to show explanations at all and if so, how to best show them. The diagrams I generated initially did not have explanation, but I found it very mysterious why the system produced the connections that it did. When I added explanations, I initially added them as comments in the causal loop diagram's markup language. This was step in the right direction, but resulted in sub-par UX. Because explanations were not inline in the graph itself, it took a lot of effort to try to find them.
Ultimately I decided that the best thing would be to show explanations as edge labels. This is a bit of a departure from the usual causal loop diagram conventions, but it helps make the diagram standalone. To generate these, I needed to compress the results significantly, and I found that "fewer than N words" was a really effective way to tune the results. Then, with a bit of additional wizardry to ensure that the explanations wrapped every ~30 chars, we were off to the races.
I used mermaid.js to render the causal loop diagram because of its convenient markup. This lends itself well to being easily generated, and also edited without any need for WYSIWYG tools.
Instead of generating mermaid markup directly, I generated custom markup that I parsed with another, yet unreleased project of mine, which finds feedback loops in causal graphs, and labels them either reinforcing (R) or balancing (B). It was a nice excuse to brush up on some computer science! I cribbed from an implementation of Tarjan's Algorithm for this purpose.
Still with me? If so, try the tool on your own complex system descriptions! All you need is an OpenAI Key to start the engine.
Once you've taken it for a spin, please tell me where it works well, and where it fails for you. Lastly, please share your creations with me — it should be easy with this tool. The third button in the UI copies the URL to your clipboard, so that you can send it my way. Thanks for reading, and please don't be a stranger.
]]>A stylistically beautiful novella reminiscent of Invisible cities by Italo Calvino. Written in an innovative format, this is more poetry than prose. "Time War" was certainly worth my time, but I could see how it may be annoying to some. At least it is mercifully short!
]]>And I was 'round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fateStuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed Tsar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
Five links that stood out to me over the summer:
My skip-skip-skip level manager at work recommended it to all of his manager reports, and so I decided to read this book to get closer to the top brass. Overall it was a sobering read, actively reminding me how far my organization is from being customer-centric. The book mostly addresses product managers, but tries to also apply to leaders in general, and "product people" in particular. It's a bit unclear who these people are, but I suspect they include product-minded engineers and designers.
Things I liked:
Things I did not like:
Mike Duncan covers a ton of ground on the events, people, and the necessary background to understand the Russian Revolution.
I appreciated the time spent on pre-revolutionary Russian history, and ideas and learned a lot about Russian anarchism. In particular, Bakunin's ideas of collectivist anarchism are appealing, because Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.
One may balk at Kremlinology, Putinology, and now Prigozhinology, but understanding the main players deeply is important, especially when events are contingent and individual actions can determine the fate of whole countries. Here too, Duncan does a good job providing more personal color than a dry history lecture might.
Feel free to read my working notes, or listen to the podcast yourself. What follows is an incomplete summary of themes I found novel and compelling.
That's right, Russia had an explicit goal of taking the city of Constantinople away from the Ottomans. That would give Russians both the second and the third Rome! This was incredibly ambitious and in retrospect unrealistic. Despite Russia's sub-par performance in the war, some Russian leaders in the provisional government attempted to keep the conquest of Constantinople as one of Russia's military goals. Even as late as February 1917!
Sergei Witte successfully led Russian railway modernization in the late 19th century. He argued that the tsarist regime could only be saved by transforming Russia into a modern industrial society. Some of his rapid industrial reforms were very successful and showed that Russia was well on its way to industrialization. This played well into the Marxist narrative that a first revolution was necessary for the socialist one that was to follow.
The "open-field system" was the prevalent agricultural system in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Large fields, usually several hundred acres each, were divided into many narrow strips of land and doled out to peasants. A lucky family might own several independent strips in different regions, which was very inefficient.
Because Russia freed the serfs only in the mid-19th century, this system remained in place far longer than in other European countries. And it wasn't until Stolypin's reforms in 1905 that the system began to slowly phase out.
After the revolution and during the 1920s, the Great Depression in the West reduced popular confidence in capitalism. Thus, western investors turned to the Soviet Union whose brave new economic model was not yet discredited. Its economy was shaky at the moment, but had a bright future ahead.
Impressive growth rates during the first three five-year plans (1928–1940) are particularly notable given that this period is nearly congruent with the Great Depression. During this period, the Soviet Union saw rapid industrial growth while other regions were suffering from crisis. (Wikipedia)
The Soviet Problem with Two "Unknowns": How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia was a worthwhile paper I read on this subject a few years ago.
Wow, the color of the political climate between 1905 and 1917 makes me really reconsider the position that Russia had this period of democracy between 1905 and 1917. Something like 2000 people were murdered by the state as part of punitive actions conducted by the tsar following the revolution of 1905. The first Duma Congress was not real democracy, by any stretch of the imagination, and multiple Dumas were created and dismantled by the tsar.
So the actual precedent of liberals in power in Russian history is very small, possibly just Gorbachev and Yeltsin?
Fascinating (socialist) perspective: on the dawn of WW1, the workers were at a cross road between two choices:
Ultimately they chose (2). Why? International socialists ultimately embraced their national identities rather than the globalist agenda:
Lenin and other Bolsheviks took Marx at his word, and thought Russia needed to undergo two revolutions. The first one to become more capitalist and industrialized to bring Russia into a state resembling the western society Marx imagined would be fertile ground for extreme inequality and worker immiseration. Then another socialist revolution would then actually bring forth socialism.
Luckily Russia was on track, and the Bolsheviks watched and waited in exile as the first revolution went swimmingly in 1905. Here are some proximate causes of the Revolution of 1905:
In 1916, women spent forty hours a week in bread lines. And ultimately the radicalized women galvanized the February 1917 revolution during International Women's Day. From Wikipedia:
On March 8, 1917, in Petrograd (February 23, 1917, on the Julian calendar), women textile workers began a demonstration that eventually engulfed the whole city, demanding "Bread and Peace"—an end to World War I, to food shortages, and to czarism. This marked the beginning of the February Revolution, which alongside the October Revolution, made up the second Russian Revolution
There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy. Of course, there were also other causes for the February 1917 revolution:
Still, International Women's Day was the catalyzing event.
Tsarevich Alexei, son of Nikolai II had hemophilia (non-clotting blood), a debilitating disease inherited from Queen Victoria I, known as the “grandmother of Europe” because of how many rulers were descended from her blood. Nicholas and Alexandra sought out a healer in hopes of curing their son and heir of Russia. And that is how Rasputin got an initial foothold in the Russian palace, coming recommended as a holy man and miracle healer.
Rasputin ended up being emblematic of the magical thinking so common in the last tsar's surroundings.
Defencists hoped Russia would win World War 1 outright. But there was also an internationalist (less charitably, defeatist) camp which hoped that Russia would lose. Lenin was more aligned with the latter, although his views are characterized as “flexible” despite bombastic delivery.
The Bolshevik membership dwindled during the war years because of their defeatist position. Because they wanted Russia to end the war and lose, they were easily painted as being extremely unpatriotic and equivalent to German agents. Lenin's flexibility allowed this to almost come true:
The story of how Lenin got back from Switzerland to Russia on the eve of the February 1917 revolution is completely fascinating. The Germans learned that they may have a great asset in the revolutionary-in-exile, who at the time was living in Zurich. Lenin and a tight group of collaborators colluded with the Germans to orchestrate his return to St. Petersburg. They planned a clandestine operation, taking a circuitous route, and sneakily traveling in closed railway cars. The whole trip sounds like a great adventure. Surely there are books and movies written about it?
During the "July Days", the revolutionaries themselves had to talk radicalized people down from pursuing a socialist revolution because they felt like they weren't quite ready for the events that might unfold. And if the provisional government managed to retain power after such an attempt, it would be bad news for future revolutionary prospects.
But Lenin was extremely passionate about decisive action, and managed to eventually convince the rest of the Bolsheviks. What would have happened without his drive, if the October Revolution did not play out?
Fanny Kaplan attempted to kill Lenin and almost did in 1919:
One bullet passed through Lenin's coat, and the other two struck him. One passed through his neck, punctured part of his left lung, and stopped near his right collarbone; the other lodged in his left shoulder
What would have happened if she succeeded?
After Nicholas' abdication, Russia was governed by "Dual Power". Under this scheme the country was ruled partly by the Provisional Government (Duma) and partly the people directly via bottom-up Soviets. The Soviet system emerged from the St. Petersburg Soviet and when they declared that they will be the Soviet of All of Russia, which eventually morphed into the Soviet Union.
The slogan "All power to the Soviets" now makes more sense in this context of the parallel tracks of a provisional government and of soviets sharing power.
Lenin sensed that this dual power system was unstable and helped quash the provisional government. Then his Bolsheviks had a unified agenda and successfully "bolshevized" the soviets.
The Russian Communist Party is just a rebranding of the Bolshevik party and retains full continuity. The split between Communists and Socialists might mirror the differences of opinion between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Why is the political left so often infighting?
The new Communist government was recognized as by many of the international powers as part of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, hastily signed by the triumphant Communists after the October 1917 revolution on March 3, 1918. The treaty was terrible for the sovereignty of Russia because it lost so many territories. This was a serious gambit on the part of the Bolsheviks, an astounding move because of how much territory was ceded. But this did not last, as the treaty was annulled by the armistice of November 11, 1918.
Kerensky, leader of the provisional government in 1917 assumed more and more power until eventually he took up residence in the winter palace. Flags were raised when he was at home, as was the custom of the old order. He slept in the bed of the tsar. Kerensky believed he was the right leader for Russia. By September 1917 he had effectively cultivated a dictatorship. Didn’t last long though.
Kerensky lost touch and feared a counter revolution from the right. Through a series of miscommunication Kerensky became convinced that Kornilov was planning a right wing coup and empowered the Bolsheviks to defend the counter revolution (see Defense is much more palatable than offense). This gave the Bolsheviks a second life, because at this point most were held in prison and convinced they were about to be executed.
It’s funny that the Soviets by 1919 had become quite corrupt and society was extremely unequal. Just as expected from a new elite that suddenly discovers an inordinate amount of power. This is interesting especially in contrast with the extremely austere and ideological stance of the communists just a year before.
Now this inequality meant that communist party began to attract careerists and those seeking comfort, a completely different group than ideologically driven revolutionaries. And the cycle is complete.
Most Russians were neutral during the October Revolution. Few participated in the Bolshevik ideology, and few came to the defense of the provisional government.
This neutrality is deep-seated in the Russian soul. My theory is that this skeptical nihilistic stance stems from a lack of civic society. I strongly suspect that this lack of civil society is keeping Russia back politically, and that elites actively foment this stance in the population.
Despite the reactionary white's military success in Ukraine, they were universally hated by the local population. The Cossack division of the white army served as mounted shock troopers, raiding Ukrainian cities to such an extent that they were completely distrusted. The communist reds were not much better, but committed fewer outright atrocities. The people chose them as the lesser of two evils.
Nestor Makhno was a Ukrainian anarchist and framed as an anti-anti-Semite by Duncan. Both of those these things are interesting, and I looked more into him as a person including a grotesque depiction in an old Soviet film, and read a few articles. Quite the character.
Makhno found under the black flag, the classic anarchist symbol. He temporarily allied with the communist Reds, but only to join forces against the Whites. After repelling the White forces, the Blacks and Reds did not have enough common ground. According to a prominent anarchist Peter Arshinov,
The basic psychological trait of Bolshevism is the realization of its will by means of the violent elimination of all other wills, the absolute destruction of all individuality, to the point where it becomes an inanimate object.
Such opinions were not tolerated by the Communists, and Makhno ultimately fled to Paris.
The Polish Blue Army was so named for French-issued blue military uniforms worn by the soldiers. There were also Green Armies during the same period of the Russian Civil War.
Using colors as names for armies feels especially out of place when millions of people are being displaced and dying.
The Whites completely denied Ukraine's existence, instead calling it "Little Russia" (Малороссия). They completely ignored Ukrainian autonomy and national statehood, and appointed just ethnic Russians as governors for the region.
Before the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, propagandists used really disgusting overtly racist hatred of the Japanese people.
This xenophobia echoes Putin's ongoing war in Ukraine. Firstly, the dismissal of Ukrainian legitimacy is central to the whole endeavor. Secondly, visible minorities like the Buryats are much more likely to die in Ukraine because they are used as cannon fodder.
The White counter-revolution managed to make significant gains largely supported by the British.
There is a historical pattern emerging here from the perspective of Russia, or at least Russian propagandists. In the Russian Civil War, the Polish-Soviet War and the current Russo-Ukrainian war, allied western powers create a puppet entity, whether it's the White Army or the Polish State or the Ukrainian State, to wage war against Russia's historical integral territory. The Russians are of course on the defense in this framing, fighting for their survival. (See Defense is much more palatable than offense)
In the civil war, people on the front were not motivated to fight for the idea of communism. Instead, the rallying cry in the civil war, in Soviet-Polish war and in general focused on preserving the integrity of Russia itself. The same was true during World War II, which was framed as the great patriotic war by Stalin to appeal not to ideology or way of life, but to the powerful force of Russian nationalism.
Why did Lloyd George change his mind on regime change in Russia? Initially he was extremely anti-Bolshevik, but it seems like he lost steam over time. In 1921, at the insistence of Great Britain, the Allies ended the Russian military intervention and gave up on the blockade. Are we on track for same change of heart in the Russian War on Ukraine now in 2023?
During the terrible famines in the 1920s I didn't realize how much humanitarian aid the Soviets were receiving. Twice as many people would have died if not for the external help. The most impactful and generous was the Russian Famine Relief Act funded by the American Relief Administration (ARA), which gave $2B USD (2023) to the effort, until Lenin began to export grain in 1923.
Lenin's cruelty is often overshadowed by his famously vile successor, but Stalin was largely building on top of the foundation that Lenin had set during his tenure.
Grossman makes a similar argument in (Все Течёт (Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman)), saying that more than any of Lenin's other potential successors, Stalin best captured the essence of his soul: thirst for power.
Who, asks Grossman rhetorically, should be Lenin's successor? Would it be the brilliant, turbulent, magnificent Trostky? The charming, gifted political theorist Bukharin? Perhaps the one closest to the workers Rykov? Maybe the well-educated, confident, and sophisticated governor Kamenev? Last but not least, the one best versed in international labor, Zinovyev?
One of the minor Bolsheviks named Bauman had an affair with another revolutionary, who became pregnant. Bauman responded by mocking her and circulating vicious cartoons. The woman later hanged herself. Most members of the party wanted Bauman expelled for this misconduct but not Lenin, citing that he was a good agent. Personal ethics was nothing to Lenin.
Early Bolsheviks would routinely participate in so-called expropriations. This was just a fancy term for stealing from the rich. The 1907 Tiflis bank robbery in particular was especially impressive and bloody, killing 40 and injuring 50. It was planned mainly by Stalin (aka Koba) and Ter-Petrosian (aka Kamo), but also involved Lenin.
Initially imagined as a multiparty system centered around the soviets, Left SRs were well represented alongside the Bolsheviks. Their presence gave the Bolsheviks plausible deniability to claim they weren’t authoritarian at all, and were just facilitating a democratic system. The left SR rebellion in 1918 changed that. They were opposed to Brest-Litovsk and wanted to usher in international communism. They were brutally repressed by Lenin in the Trial of the SRs, which paved the way for Stalinist show trials in the era that followed.
I was surprised at how early the Soviet ban on Factions began. Because it was rolled out in 1921, it's almost a foundational idea to the whole Soviet project. Fundamentally illiberal, it was effectively a ban on freedom of assembly and served to strengthen the Communist Party, by weakening the bottom-up soviets.
Lenin's own big personality is largely at fault for the Communist party's oligarchy, which tended towards autocracy. On the other hand, other Russia-specific trends point to something deeper. The tsars and the mongols that preceded presided over societies dominated by small cliques or individuals (Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great). Stalin and Lenin were just links in the same chain.
]]>What if a book review could be composed entirely of "what if?" questions?
Speculative cephalopods: What if octopuses developed a communication system, exapted from their ability to create clouds to escape from predators? What if it was like visual speech, ephemeral as an ink cloud?
Climate pressure as a catalyst for cephalopod intelligence: What if cephalopods experienced survival pressure from human induced climate change, which caused them to become extremely intelligent? What if it was analogous to early humans who were forced into resourceful survival by the coming of an ice age?
Social learning: What if deep sea octopuses with a longer natural lifespan adapted to shallower depths and changed their breeding practices to overlap with their offspring, raising them and passing on their language and wisdom?
Human machine labor: What if human labor ends up being cheaper than machine labor, and a wave of automation that once replaced human workers with robots runs in reverse because it turns out that a crew of human slaves is cheaper to maintain than a crew of marine robots?
(This reminds me of the low cost of human slave labor in Roman times. Why bother improving on simple water wheels if slaves are ubiquitous? Increasing costs of human labor and mechanization)
Tricking super-human intelligence: What if even in the far future, an advanced AI could be outwitted by a mere human to make a fatal mistake, just like Bing's ChatGPT could be outwitted to reveal its creepy secret identity, Sydney?
Praying to super-human intelligence: What if the power imbalance between AIs and humans becomes so great that people will begin praying to AIs in the same way that a Christian might pray hoping The Lord hears her and grants her wish, except the AI can actually hear it and grant it?
Musings on consciousness: What if "what is it like to be a Bat" is too hopelessly difficult to answer, and we should instead be focusing on "what is it like to be another person", which involves more empathy and theory-of-mind than most people can ever muster?
Automonks: What if religious ceremonies could be performed by automata, and would that somehow diminish their effects on the deities that they are aimed to please?
Contemplative robotics: What if zen-inspired contemplative Buddhist traditions could be harnessed to create biologically inspired, nature-compatible robots that are far superior to those descending from the higher modernist western tradition?
Memory and forgetting: What if there was a conscious being that never forgets, and could it really have a human-like intelligence with perfect memory, while still retaining the ability to grow and change over time?
Embodied cognition: What if most of an intelligent being's intelligence was located not in some centralized brain, but decentralized in its extremities, and what would the implications of that be?
Underwater control: What if a human submerged underwater attached to a breathing apparatus could use their arms and legs to control more devices, like an army of semi-autonomous drones?
Computerized therapy companions: What if a common prescription for loneliness and some mental health problems is to talk to a sophisticated virtual friend designed to be the perfect companion that discretely also administers a CBT program? What if this extends to virtual romantic partners? What if people delude themselves into thinking their virtual companions are real?
I am once again reminded that good speculative fiction is often a more powerful medium for conveying information than popular science (see Power of Fiction).
The names of the characters were out of this world: Evrim, Rustem, Altantsetseg, Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan. I enjoyed the somewhat exotic Central Asian settings where the events took place.
The quotes are at the start of the chapters are excepted from books authored by two main protagonists, How Oceans Think by Dr. Ha Hguyen, and Building Minds by Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan. These quotes both contribute to character development and sprinkle in abstract wisdom. I really wish that "How Oceans Think" was a real book. I'd read it in a heartbeat.
Although Nayler doesn't quite tie up all loose threads, the threads compliment one another in a way that I found pretty compelling.
Nosferatu is apparently a reference to Dracula and the corresponding eponymous silent movie Nosferatu from 1922.
The character Rustem's internet alias is Bakunin, a reference to the most famous Russian anarchist prominently featured in the Russian Revolutions Podcast. I'm digesting this magnum-podcast in parallel, review/summary forthcoming.
Nayler draws analogies between octopuses and fictional drone army operators (Altantsetseg) in their reliance on autonomous leaf-nodes, whether they are limbs or drones. Similarly, Sun Tzu and John Boyd recommend giving subordinates loose orders but empowering with almost complete autonomy.
“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” – Frederik Pohl
By Pohl's metric, The Mountain in The Sea is great science fiction. I enjoyed the book thoroughly, major thanks to Captain A for the recommendation.
]]>Spring has sprung, as have five more links to things I enjoyed reading over the last three months:
I've heard a lot about Boyd in various FLUX-adjacent circles. His ideas seem to have reached a critical mass, in which they are widely known in the business world, having matriculated there from their origin in the military. I enjoyed this account of Boyd's larger than life legacy. Boyd is vividly depicted as a complex, brilliant, funny, and flawed character. He made great contributions to organizational dynamics, but was abrasive and broadly disliked. He was a great mentor to his followers, but an uncaring and absent father.
Boyd seemed to combine two incongruous personas. On one hand, he was a "big jock", a boastful fighter pilot who was constantly in your face. In retrospect, Top Gun does a good job of conveying some of this fighter pilot machismo. On the other, he was a history nerd, and read widely on war and philosophy.
There's a lot to digest in this book, and I've tried to categorize the things I've learned (TIL!) into a few categories:
Military performance reviews parallel my experience at Google. Except, their performance reviews are called ERs and peer reviews are called "indorsements". Similar to Google, positive indorsements from Generals (I guess L8+ Directors) are weighted heavily and are reason for promotion.
I was most interested in the author's insights on the dynamics of the military.
Boyd had an interesting pattern of ERs:
As had happened again and again in Boyd’s career, his immediate supervisor gave him a poor or mediocre rating, one that signaled it was time to get out of the Air Force, and again and again a general officer rescued him.
Politics between branches of the Military. Just like at Google, where different "orgs" are often less than friendly towards one another, the military has significant rivalries between branches:
THE Air Force has never made a serious study of warfare because every historically based effort to do so has come to the inescapable conclusion that the use of air power should be consistent with or—better yet— subordinate to the ground commander’s battle plans, a conclusion that argues against the existence of an independent Air Force.
Indeed,
Nothing galvanized an Air Force general more than being told the Navy was on his six.
Boyd's impact on the Air Force peaked with E-M theory, and his intellectual contributions did not really stick. They had a much warmer reception with the Army and especially with the Marine Corps, a warrior culture with utter contempt for the Air Force technocrats.
Military briefs seem to be a very specific kind of medium. This is a fascinating digression in itself:
The briefer has a pointer, which he should not use too often. He stands on a stage but should not move about too much. He has a lectern upon which he should not lean. He has slides or charts but is expected to know the material far beyond what is displayed.
It's also interesting how some of the culture parallels some aspects of culture at Google, perhaps analogous to pitching a project to a director or senior PM:
It is obvious that most people can read and assimilate information faster than they can learn something by listening to a dog and pony show. But the U.S. military culture is an oral culture and the bedrock of that culture is the briefing.
Franklin Roosevelt theory of management, bypassing sycophantic generals and seeking out from among relatively junior officers a few men who would tell him the truth. (See Franklin Roosevelt theory of management).
Corruption in the Pentagon. The real business of the Pentagon is buying weapons, which is a very idiosyncratic process. One big problem Spinney (one of Boyd's acolytes) identified was that defense contractors routinely underestimate costs so that Congress funds their programs. This is called front-loading.
Another issue has to do with the "revolving door" that shuffles former military officers into high-level jobs as defense contractors, just as the door pulls former hired guns into government careers.
Leaders are opposed to free play. To hone skills around OODA, Boyd set up exercises which were "immensely popular with most junior officers and just as unpopular with most senior officers." because
Free play means winners and losers; it means postexercise critiques by enlisted men as well as junior officers. No battalion commander enjoys being contradicted by a sergeant, especially if the sergeant is correct. And if a battalion commander loses a free-play exercise, he might lose his chance at promotion.
This is exactly the problem with prediction markets (see Prediction markets do not align with what leaders want).
A shocking number of pilots died training at Nellis, training to be fighter pilots. Incoming F-86 students were told, “If you see the flag at full staff, take a picture.” Boyd says that in one year, more than seventy pilots were killed. A historian at Nellis says he probably was conservative—that wing commanders sometimes doctored statistics if too many pilots died.
When a pilot augered in, screwed the pooch, fucked the duck, and bought the farm, then the base siren wailed and the blue car drove slowly and wives stood in the windows and the chaplain consoled and the flag hung at half staff.
This was a temporary trend, and safety was becoming paramount in the Air Force.
Dogfighting was becoming an arcane and almost lost art in the Air Force.
Cool fighter pilot slang - To "get on someone's six" is to be directly behind them. - To "have someone in your pipper" means to be missile-locked onto another fighter plane. - To "pull high G's" means to climb or bank abruptly, creating a lot of acceleration. - "Guns. Guns. Guns." is what you say when you have someone in your pipper as if shooting them in a training exercise. - A variable-geometry wing, commonly called the “swing wing.”
Fast transients are fighter pilot maneuvers like "flat-plating the bird." and the "buttonhook turn" and "energy dumping" were strongly preferred by the Fighter Mafia, describing planes like the YF-16 that could perform them as "shit hot".
He would be in the defensive position with a challenger tight on his tail, both pulling heavy Gs, when he would suddenly pull the stick full aft, brace his elbows on either side of the cockpit, so the stick would not move laterally, and stomp the rudder. It was as if a manhole cover were sailing through the air and then suddenly flipped 90 degrees. The underside of the fuselage, wings, and horizontal stabilizer became a speed brake that slowed the Hun from 400 knots to 150 knots in seconds. The pursuing pilot was thrown forward and now Boyd was on his tail radioing "Guns. Guns. Guns."
This "energy dumping" or Cobra maneuver used to be prohibitively expensive, but became common for lightweight fighters.
More complicated maneuvers like the button-hook turn also became possible. Even crazier, Kvochur's Bell or "tail sliding" became possible.
TIL there's a whole diagramming language of aerial maneuvers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aresti_Catalog.
Many fighter pilots are short to fit into a tight cockpit of the plane. Tom Cruise comes to mind... :)
IDF Cameo involving Mordecai Hod, head of the Israeli Air Force (IAF), who reified the idea that aircraft guns make a lot of sense. In the Six Day War of June, the Israeli Air Force shot down sixty Arab jets while losing only ten fighters—an exchange ratio of six to one. Every Israeli kill was a gun kill. At the end of Hod's briefing,
a fighter pilot stood up and asked how the IAF got sixty gun kills. Hod paused, shrugged, and said, “Why waste a missile on an Arab?”
Fighters vs. bombers vs. test pilot culture. Bombers were in favor, with the military retooling for nuclear bombs because they believed that the next war would be nuclear.
Meanwhile, fighter pilots were the obsolete cowboys, but they had the fun job.
SAC’s bomber pilots might be the glamour boys. But to a fighter pilot, flying a B-47 or a B-52 was the aviation equivalent of being a bus driver.
Test pilots were another breed,
detached from the airplane they flew. Fighter pilots fell in love with their airplane. Test pilots talked of going into space. Space? And in a capsule? You don’t fly a fucking capsule, you sit in it and watch the instruments. You’re a passenger. To hell with space. Fighter pilots wanted to get on an enemy’s six and hose the sonofabitch.
Energy–maneuverability theory is one of Boyd's first intellectual contributions. Fundamentally, it's a tool for fighter pilots to intuit the rate of change of energy available to the aircraft. For example, If I am at 30,000 feet and 450 knots and pull six Gs, how fast am I gaining or losing energy? Can my adversary gain or lose energy faster than I can?
The theory eventually became accepted in the Air Force and was instrumental in designing the F-16.
Guns or missiles? The Air Force was inherently technology obsessed, and rushed to embrace any new technology. This led to over eager adoption of missiles before they could lock very well. It also led to fighter planes that were crippled by having too many features in them (feature creep!)
The Air Force was only seven years old, but it was fast becoming not only a bureaucracy, but a technocracy that worshiped equipment and gadgets more than any other branch of the military. It was becoming hardware oriented and the goals for its hardware were simple: Bigger-Faster-Higher-Farther.
In particular, many generals mistakenly thought that "if an American pilot saw a blip on his radar, he pressed a button, launched a missile, and the blip disappeared. Poof! It was that simple.", but E-M data and computer simulations proved that reality was far different. And pilots knew it too:
Sparrow missiles performed so poorly they were considered little more than extra weight; more than one pilot punched them off his aircraft as soon as he was away from his home base.
Signs began showing up on the walls in the Pentagon: “It takes a fighter with a gun to kill a MiG-21.”
Swing-wing were too heavy and did not justify the benefits that they purported to provide. A straight wing is most efficient for low-speed flight, but swept wings are superior for supersonic speeds. However, this design became obsolete by the 1970s, and Boyd foresaw it.
During the summer of 1967, the Soviets introduced two new fighters: the swing-wing MiG-23 and the MiG-25. American fighter pilots laughed at the MiG-23 and said the only good thing about the F-111 was that the Soviets had copied it and thereby lost at least one generation of aircraft to bad technology.
F-111 design had too many miracles
When Boyd was coming up in his career, he predicted that the F-111 would be a failure.
Prudent designers usually make significant technological advances in only one of the three categories when they plan a new aircraft. But the F-111 was a high-tech wonder with two bold innovations, both of which were later to cause enormous problems.
Boyd knew that, left to its own devices, the bureaucracy always came up with an aircraft such as the F-111.
Startups should have exactly one miracle
Ultimately, Boyd was proven right when the disastrous results of Vietnam became well known. During the Korean War, the US boasted a 10-to-1 kill ratio, but in Vietnam, the ratio sank close to parity, at one point favoring the North Vietnamese.
When the war finally ended, one Air Force pilot would be an ace. North Vietnam would have sixteen.
F-X was designed with maneuvering specifications, the first plane in the US Air Force designed with dogfighting in mind.
The closest Boyd came to defining a specific technical solution was when he said the aircraft should pull enough Gs at 30,000 feet to “roll down your goddamn socks.”
Design by committee sucks. The design process of all projects Boyd was involved in was a huge struggle since it was designed by committee, and the plane became a huge kitchen sink.
...Boyd worked daily to remove things from the F-X, seemingly everyone else in the Air Force—the fire-control people, missile people, electronic-warfare people—wanted to add something. Maintenance people even insisted the aircraft carry a built-in maintenance ladder
Ultimately, Boyd lost many design battles:
The Air Force insisted on a speed greater than Mach 2. The Air Force insisted on a radar with a thirty-six-inch dome—a requirement that dictated a much larger fuselage than Boyd wanted.
This scope creep is a massive problem for products at Google too. Boyd was part of a ragtag team that tried to develop an alternative prototype:
Night after night they labored at the Pentagon, drawing plans for an airplane they called the “Red Bird,” a 33,000-pound stripped-down version of the F-X.
But it was never brought into production, since
all the three-stars who worked for [the Chief of Staff] wanted the bigger and heavier version of the F-X
Which was a huge blow to Boyd's ego:
He had cut some weight, and yes, he had killed the variable-sweep wing. But it had taken just about everything out of him to fight and fight and fight for so much that was so obvious.
Perhaps this disempowerment is just a feature of working for a large bureaucratic organization.
Tropospheric discontinuity is an interesting phenomenon (see wikipedia), explaining why it is meaningful to talk about discrete parts of the atmosphere. The speed of sound at sea level is ~340 m/s, and decreases as the temperature decreases until reaching ~10 km altitude, where it drops to 300 m/s. This part of the atmosphere is called the tropopause, the boundary that marks the troposphere from the stratosphere. Higher than that, temperature and the speed of sound decrease at a much slower rate than in the troposphere.
Coram spends quite a bit of time pontificating on Boyd's personal life, which was often in a state of disrepair.
Boyd sayings - “Stroking the bishop. You’re just stroking the bishop.” - “I have found the dripping cock.” Secretaries wept at Boyd’s language. (Instead of "smoking gun") - It is said that Air Force careerists—“Blue Suiters”—would put on track shoes and climb up the backs of their mothers for [appealing] assignments. - “It’s too goddamn big, too goddamn expensive, too goddamn underpowered. It’s just not worth a good goddamn.” - “We don’t care what the Russians are doing. We only care about what the Navy is doing.” - Boyd asked “How did you get this data on the wing design?” The vice president charged off the cliff. “Wind-tunnel tests,” he said. “Fuck a wind tunnel,” Boyd roared. He pointed up. “The biggest wind tunnel in the world is up there. It’s called reality. This is not reality.” - “Goddamn airplane is made out of balonium.” - Boyd's “air-to-rug maneuver,” happened once, where his phone call with a Blue Suiter caused him to fall out of his chair. - “If your boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, then give him loyalty.” - “There are only so many ulcers in the world and it is your job to see that other people get them.” - “Machines don’t fight wars, people do, and they use their minds.” - “People, ideas, hardware—in that order.” - “They still believe in high diddle diddle, straight up the middle.” - “So you got your reward; you got kicked in the teeth. That means you were doing good work. Getting kicked in the teeth is the reward for good work.”
Boyd's "Acolytes" all subscribed to the "do something" idea, were not career oriented. They were "extraordinarily bright, all have an almost messianic desire to make a contribution to the world in which they live, all are men of probity and rectitude, and all—while independent in the extreme"
Many of these people were long-term collaborators from all over the military. Notably Thomas Christie, Pierre Sprey, Everest Riccioni, and others also formed a controversial ad-hoc group jokingly called the Fighter Mafia (a rejoinder to the Bomber Mafia) and strongly advocated for a lightweight fighter pilot.
Christie the Finagler, Sprey the Intelligent, Leopold the First, Spinney the Brash, and Burton the Unbending.
Boyd the Legend Separating legend from truth was an ongoing challenge for me while reading the book, especially considering that
deep in the bone marrow of a fighter pilot—exaggeration and the belief that a good story is more important than sticking with the bare facts.
Incapable of compromise. The author speculates that had Boyd been promoted, he would have been a terrible general because of his inability to compromise, and lack of patience for those that disagreed with him. Compromise is often a strength for Very Senior Leadership
Extreme frugality. Boyd's Stoic approach to life led him astray. He thought that if
if a man can reduce his needs to zero, he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him (если у вас нену тети...)
He refused to ever purchase a home to raise his five children, and they despised him for it. He was so cheap that he carried his glasses in an old sock.
To Be or To Do refers to a famous speech delivered by Boyd, which came out of his realization that he would never make general:
But hard work and success do not always go together in the military, where success is defined by rank, and reaching higher rank requires conforming to the military’s value system.
Boyd made powerful enemies due to his outspoken nature, his lack of reluctance to criticize his superiors, and his love of conflict with others.
Study after study shows that the higher in rank a military officer ascends, the less likely he is to make change.
Boyd's speech summarized succinctly:
If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.” He paused and stared into Leopold’s eyes and heart. “To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?”
How to comply without really complying, Boyd was a master of this, for example when a general gave him a direct order to write a paper Boyd disagreed with, he complied, but then wrote a follow-up paper explaining in detail why he disagreed with his own paper.
And he told the general he considered the two papers a package; if the first one were released, he would release the second.
Boyd did not succeed in Disagree without being disagreeable, but still an interesting path.
Snowmobiling, John Boyd’s term, is how creativity really happens. It is destructive deduction combined with creative synthesis. Boyd used a thought experiment to show how destruction and creation lead to creativity. Unlike Schumpeter's gale, Boyd emphasized creative synthesis. (see Snowmobiling - creativity is deduction followed by synthesis).
Sun Tzu > von Clausewitz. Here I am really unmoored, not having read von Clausewitz. Boyd was opposed to a WWI-era idea of bringing the enemy to a gigantic decisive battle, instead favoring Sun Tzu's approach of unraveling the enemy before the battle occurs, perhaps avoiding the battle entirely!
Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. Boyd is probably most famous for formulating the OODA loop, the process by which military strategists make decisions. By understanding it, one can develop an understanding of how to unravel one's enemy (see OODA Loops).
A key idea is that speed is of the essence. A successful commander must operate at a faster OODA Loop than does his opponent. This is why Boyd was so opposed to the idea of synchronization. This evening up the front line meant an army moves at the speed of its slowest unit.
One must truly understand how the enemy thinks to get under their skin (see Theory of Mind and unpredictability). Boyd's rejoinder to the machine-obsessed Air Force mindset was that
“Machines don’t fight wars,” he responded. “Terrain doesn’t fight wars. Humans fight wars. You must get into the minds of humans. That’s where the battles are won.”
I love this human-centricity, and it's what got me into HCI in the first place. Without a good interface, the best software is garbage.
Next - Watch El Cid, one of Boyd's favorite movies - Is there some high level overview of military history? I feel a large gap, and Coram has done some good name-dropping:
But some had never heard of Sun Tzu and could not spell “von Clausewitz.” They might have known the names of Douhet or Jomini or von Schlieffen or Fuller or Guderian or Lawrence or Balck, but few knew the theories espoused by these men.
(I know none of these men)
He told them of Sun Tzu and the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. and of Arbela in 331 B.C. and of Cannae in 216 B.C. He told them of Genghis Khan and Belisarius and Napoléon, of Heinz Guderian and of what made great commanders.
(I know few of these battles)
A simplistic explanation of cheng and ch’i comes from General George Patton, who in World War II said his plan for attacking the Germans was to “hold them by the ~~nose~~ balls and kick them in the ass.” Holding them by the nose is the cheng. Kicking them in the ass is the ch’i.
This year, rather than posting a digest of links monthly, I'm doing the same quarterly, aiming for five to ten of my favorite links every three months. I read 128 articles over January, February, and March, and favorited about 30% of them. In retrospect, here are the magnificent seven that really stuck with me:
One of my early childhood fixations was the golden peacock clock in the Hermitage in Leningrad. Now, here is a whole book about ancient automata, combining my interests in Medieval history and AI! I listened to the audio version, which perhaps impoverished my experience of "reading", assuming the non-audio book includes the beautiful paintings, illustrations, and diagrams described in prose.
This was an academic and dry read overall. I liked the overall arc of the work, but often found the author getting a bit lost in the details. The book initially focuses on automata of antiquity and the Islamic world, a fascinating and unusual lens on already fascinating civilizations. The medieval European reaction to these suspicious contraptions, and how they inspired fictional accounts of automata in European culture follows, until the narrative is capped with later medieval European automata and clocks in particular. Overall a cogent narrative, but some sections feel unnecessary, especially the disturbing chapter 4.
We begin in early Greece, where work on automata was chronicled by Hiro of Alexandria, who built various steam based contraptions. The Antikythera mechanism was only recently uncovered, a complex, dynamic stellar map operated by hand crank dating back to 80 BCE. These works along with much of the rest of the Greek tradition were unknown to the medieval Europeans but preserved via the Arabic world (see Lost Enlightenment by Frederick Starr). During the Islamic enlightenment, many such contraptions were built. Al-Khwarizmi and many other famous Islamic scholars had a role to play in the automata creation too.
Europeans were first exposed to automata from the Abbasids and Byzantines via gifts. It wasn’t until Harun al-Rashid gifted Charlemagne a mechanical water fountain that the west renewed their interest in automata. Fictional and legendary automata began appearing in chivalric romances. The vast majority of early and high middle age writings on the topic were unsurprisingly in French (see Old French was spoken across a lot of Europe, hence Lingua Franca).
Most automata from this period do not exist, so all we have are writings of dubious reliability. For example, The Throne of Solomon, a Byzantine automaton was described by a Carolingian writer, who emphasized lions that roared and birds that chirped, as well as a mysteriously rising throne. Reminds me of Baron Vladimir Harkonen from Dune (Lynch, Villeneuve). The Carolingian work offered some, but surprisingly little speculation about how the Throne of Solomon worked. Perhaps a rising wine press mechanism? The sounds were likely pipe organ-like pneumatic devices, but the author did not speculate about this aspect at all.
Another famous automaton was the Elephant clock (from Ismail al-Jazari's Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices), a Clepsydra, or water clock with ornate design and automaton functionality. It was far superior to that found in Charlemagne’s court. The technology and craftsmanship was next level. The cost to make it as well as the precision of the timepiece is far beyond candle clocks and sundials that the Frankish contemporaries were using at the time.
Chanson de Geste (Chivalric Romances in English) often featured a binary contrast between eastern cleverness and western faith. This is described in Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, a story about Charlemagne’s visit to the fictional Byzantine Emperor Hugo. In the narrative, Hugo is depicted as being superior in riches, technology and cleverness. But God stands by the side of the western Roman emperor, as Charlemagne's faith prevailed over Hugo's dubious Orthodoxy.
One vignette from the Benoit's Roman de Troie, a Chivalric Epic about the Trojan War, stood out. In it, four golden automata in the Chambre de Beaute do various tasks around social control. One holds a mirror that helps you be presentable. The last is a robot that gives everyone perfect personalized social cues so that nobody loses face.
Another fictional automata described a contraption resembling a bronze knight with a spear, which whenever a Roman province threatened revolt, would point in its geographical direction. This magic is attributed to Virgil (what). Also, archers and buglers were often to be fictional automata that safeguarded cities from natural disaster or from barbarians. In one account, Naples had such guardians to warn its population about Vesuvius.
An automaton is not the same as a wine press. Because automata fall into the category of natura artifex and is more than just craftsmanship. There’s a god like element to that endeavor. Medieval Europeans would sometimes attribute the almost supernatural technology that they saw from the east to their superior civilization. But in other cases these automata would be attributed more to demonic means; sometimes to necromancy, sometimes to just being extremely vicious and vile. This helped confirm European superstitions. See Natura artifex — God, nature, and humanity.
I really struggled through Chapter 4, "The Quick and the Dead" and nearly dropped the book. It features detailed and disgusting descriptions of a fictional automaton designed to preserve Hector of Troy's body by running alcoholic liquid through his embalmed corpse. Far too many details about balm, balsam, and other preservation techniques were both disgusting and overly detailed.
Chapter 5 returns back to the core theme of the book, this time describing real automata from the late European Middle Ages.
The automata described in the chivalric romances purport to do advanced things like maintaining the social milieu of a royal court and other fantastical things still far beyond modernity's ability.
In contrast, real automata of the late Middle Ages were quite simple. The court of Phillip II, for example, featured a room full of automata which embodied practical jokes, focusing mainly on surprising guests and making ladies clothes wet from above and, as emphasized in the chronicles, from below. These childish pranks mainly provided an endless source of entertainment for the royal class, but also served a more sinister function, separating those "in the know" from the outsiders.
The makers and maintainers of these automata in the 14th and 15th centuries tended to be painters. Painters of that era were highly respected, and typically oversaw groups of artisans to create the giant masterworks that they ended up creating.
Fascinating that the etymology of the word engine is from in engineer, or I guess in genius and genius, and it's just engineering. Is it also the same route where it's all about this ingenuity and genius
The escapement mechanism is almost a millennium old. A really great description of how it works can be found in this masterpiece explaining how mechanical watches work.
Strasbourg Horloge is a really famous and elaborate Clark in Strasbourg. Inspired Robert Boyle Renee to cards and tons of others that took a mechanistic view of the human condition. Including Thomas Hobbes.
The Latin word for bell is "clocca", which is the etymology of the word clock. So clocks and timekeeping have always been associated with more than just the abstract notion of time, but also some kind of action. And thus they are intimately linked to automata.
A recommendation from MP, this is apparently one of the classics of the genre of Military Science Fiction. In addition to being a fun and quick read, I found it thought-provoking, and a really cool concept.
In a near-future earth, humans have traveled to other planets and made contact with aliens. As it turns out, our galaxy is teeming with intelligent, multi-planetary species far more advanced than us. And they're aggressive! To protect earth and its colonies against this thread, the humans have created the Colonial Defense Force (CDF). This galactic army is shrouded in mystery to the earth dwelling humans, which are bound to the planet. The only way for a human to leave earth is to take a leap of faith and sign your future septuagenarian self to fight for the CDF. And you can never go home again.
The book is not really profound, but skims some deeper than expected themes and references, including Arendt's banality of evil. This surpassed my expectations given the genre.
Choice quotes:
The problem with aging is not that it’s one damn thing after another—it’s every damn thing, all at once, all the time.
Fun tech mockery, like naming a personal assistant "asshole" and the resulting potty humor including “Activate Asshole” and "Go away Asshole", as well as the assistant confirming that "I am Asshole". And other crass hilarity like a female soldier activating her assistant with "Hey Bitch".
I enjoyed the world building quite a bit, from the whole premise of the book, to the various alien species encountered:
Open questions:
This is a great example of a branch book (see Narrative, tree, and branch books), containing one big idea followed by elaboration. In this case, the core idea is that the Jewish Sabbath celebrates time over space, which is a rare thing to celebrate. The elaboration is a poetic meditation on time's superiority over space, and it quickly gets koan-like, but in a way that is less repetitive than Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.
"Where is god?" is often asked. It is assumed to be in a place. But what if instead, it is at a time? (Perhaps then, a better question to ask is "When is god"?)
It is not a thing that lends significance to a moment, but a moment that lends significance to things.
The meaning if the sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyrant of things of space; on the sabbath we try to become attended to the holiness in time.
Here's a silly story I found evocative:
Angels have six wings, one for each day of the week, with which they chant their song; but they remain silent on the Sabbath, for it is the Sabbath which then chants a hymn to God."
Sabbath: the idea of a holy space is well understood. Not so the idea of a holy time. This in itself a beautiful insight. Rhymes with Finite and Infinite games, where the climax is arguably the abstract. But Heschel has more to offer.
Philo of Alexandria, spokesman of Greek speaking Jews was famous for his ability to blend Roman philosophy with Jerusalem's theology. He provided a practical reason for Shabbat: even athletes need to take a break sometimes:
For a breathing spell enables athletes to collect their strength with a stronger force behind them to undertake promptly and patiently each of the tasks set before them. (Philo)
But it’s not the case that the Shabbat serves some instrumental purpose. It is an end in and of itself:
The sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays. The weekdays are for the sake of the sabbath.
A passage in the book reminded me of the idea of God via negation. I find this to be an extremely powerful framing that I actually resonate with, despite not really being religious (see Negative theology and via negativa). Like a sculptor chipping away in the latent space of concepts.
It is handy that the Jews, ever persecuted, forever wandering, sanctify a time, not a place. Very wise!
The Jewish tradition converted cyclical festivals into ones that celebrate specific events from historical time. For example, Pesach went from harvest holiday to a commemoration of the Jewish exodus from Egypt.
In the world of time, sabbaths are our great cathedrals. The holy of holies is Yom Kippur.
There is no Hebrew word for “thing”. Holiness of things is explicitly prohibited in idols and the story of the holy calf. It’s not a holy mountain or a holy sprint that was emphasized in Judaism. But instead a holy time.
Humanity has grown to know how to control space but we remain powerless to control time. So we try to use our time to make it subservient to space.
Time to us is sarcasm, a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives.
Spirit of sabbath is to advance beyond technical civilization, become independent of it.
Big idea: Shabbat helps us to emphasize resilience and independence from technology. We should learn to live with things but not depend on them. We should learn to live with people but not be dependent on them. This resonates with me from the perspective of type two fun, (see Manufactured suffering for resilience, antifragility and happiness). Along similar lines, one great way to get independent from tech is to go backpacking for a week... but I don't think this is the intent of the Sabbath.
Sabbath as eternity or a taste of the world to come:
A story is told about a rabbi who once entered heaven in his dream. He was permitted to approach the temple in Paradise where the great sages of the Talmud, the Tannaim, were spending their eternal lives. He saw that they were just sitting around tables studying the Talmud. The disappointed rabbi wondered, “Is this all there is to Paradise?" But suddenly he heard a voice: "You are mistaken. The Tannaim are not in Paradise. Paradise is in the Tannaim."
Salvation through study or knowledge? I don't think I fully understand this yet, but it feels important.
To Rabbi Shimeon, eternity was not attained by those who bartered time for space but by those who knew how to fill their time with spirit. To him the great problem was time rather than space; the task was how to convert time into eternity rather than how to fill space with buildings, bridges and roads; and the solution of the problem lay in study and prayer rather than in geometry and engineering.
Feels weird to be looking forward to Shabbat all week. Shouldn’t you aspire to enjoy every living moment? The restful aspect of sabbath adds variety to life, but if all of life were a sabbath, much would be lost.
One is supposed to love the sabbath in the way that chivalric knights love their ladies. Shabbat as a bride or a queen? These analogies fall flat for me.
Finding the balance between austerity (the way Shabbat still feels to me) and luxury “choice meals and beautiful garments” feels strange and unattainable.
The sabbath prohibitions are in place to prevent “vulgarization of the grandeur of the day”. The sabbath is for enjoying the best meals, the best clothes. I find it a challenge to bring this into practice, especially as a parent of young children!
The adage "buy experiences, not things" rhymes with some of the time over space wisdom in this book, although of course buying is far too vulgar, and explicitly prohibited on Shabbat.
]]>It's hard to call these essays, because they have a tinge of magic to them, despite appearing to be completely factual. It's as if the fictional genre of magical realism has somehow found its non-fiction counterpart? Anyway, as A says, the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is overrated.
Enough philosophizing! I enjoyed this collection of essays, my favorite of which seem to include a lot of Brian Phillips' personal reflection as well as intense and interesting travelogues. The essays I enjoyed most evoked a strong feeling of I want to go to there. Like, maybe it's time to finally visit Alaska and do some backpacking around ~~McKinley~~ Denali? And yes, I'm definitely overdue for another Japan trip, and maybe I should try watching Star Trek TNG again, and how is it that I haven't seen the Soviet Tale of Tales cartoon? (Update: I did, and it was good.)
Part of what is appealing is how immersive the essays are, and the comprehensive picture that is painted in so short a passage. It feels like I’ve been there and back! This is helped by the fact that Phillips is a talented author, eg:
But the bureaucrats seized it from the priests years ago and, exercising their own power of transubstantiation, made it into something else. Now it is a puppet workshop that only happens to look like a church: in the same way that Eucharist blood once happened to taste like wine.
and:
England pulls the sea around her like a mantle: these waters our robe of ermine, these stars our imperial crown.
Another observation: Phillips is clearly from the internet, which shines through in the way he writes. But this does not detract from his writing, instead it somehow legitimates writers from very online culture I know so well.
I did find that there was some unevenness to the quality of the essays. Some of them didn't leave an impression at all, and some I thought were just weaker than others. I found the UFO essay to be a bit too unfocused, a mishmash of cultural tropes and Americana. My theory is that Phillips' own experience really add to the essays, and this was not always present. In other cases, the topics were too far from my interest.
A pointers to follow: Robert Service poems about Alaska & co... pretty good, eg. The Spell of the Yukon
]]>No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?) It’s the cussedest land that I know, From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
The built world is defined by a small number of patterns, which keep repeating over and over and over again. The patterns are deep and mostly relational. This applies at all scales in human construction: to American cities, Gothic cathedrals, Paris, Chinese kitchens, doors, and so on.
These patterns can be codified into a pattern language. And just like a great writer or orator has an intuitive grasp of human language, a great builder can and should strive to attain an intuitive grasp of his pattern language.
But just because you have a pattern language does not make it good. A concrete jungle is also governed by a pattern language. Alexander strives to capture a collection of patterns that create a microcosm that has "The Quality Without a Name", which he defines via negativa (see Negative theology and via negativa). Here's a quick summary:
Subsequent books in the series present lists of specific patterns at various scale levels (eg. town, building, substructure) that Alexander wholeheartedly endorses.
Ritual is closely associated with an ancient monolithic tradition, but Casper ter Kuile encourages us to cherry-pick the good parts from many traditions, and reconstruct your own rituals. At times, the book gives off obnoxious self-help vibes, other times it came off as overly woke. Overall, I'm pretty sure it was ghost written by a slightly flamboyant gay alien who just landed on Earth.
I am thankful that I personally don't need to reinvent rituals rom scratch, as I find myself firmly rooted in the Jewish tradition. In this tradition, rituals are glorified as an end in themselves (see Jewish tradition of doing first and understanding later - na'aseh v'nishma). But I'm way too skeptical to embrace the whole canon wholesale. That said, I'm much more inclined to ground myself in some traditional basis and make modifications, rather than start from "first principles". In Rationalist circles, unmoored by any traditional or religious foundation, solstice celebrations are fully made up. The result is inspiring in some ways, but also feel cringeworthy and a little bit fraudulent.
This book inspired me to start a journalling practice, and incorporate aspects of "prayer" into it. Also, I've implemented tech sabbath, which kicks in automatically on my devices from Friday 6pm to Saturday 6pm.
Here are my (slightly sanitized) notes on the book:
I found value in the sacred reading idea that ter Kuile outlines, and appreciated his breakdown of various kinds of reading. The crux of the sacred practice is to read a text but then address questions that are far more broad ranging than the text as written. As an example of how far this practice can be stretched, ter Kuile points to his Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast.
Adapted from Lectio Divina, here are four levels of analysis of a sacred text:
Lectio Divina comes from Christian tradition, but there are similar traditions in other cultures. In the Jewish tradition, ḥavruta is a study group structure often practiced in Yeshivas.
The author suggests insightfully that the reason that weddings are so overblown is to compensate for a dearth of rituals in our daily lives. In the mainstream west, there are no more harvest festivals, no real Easter celebrations, and not much for Christmas either.
The religious and spiritual calendar tends to follow a yearly cycle. Casper thinks we should embrace that more. There is something comforting about this cyclical nature, although it’s not a strict repetition of prior celebrations. The world changes, and you yourself change in some direction, leading to a spiral-like progression.
I am reminded of Rabbi Heschel's take on "Jewish time" and its emphasis on celebrating historical events as part of the yearly cadence. This, by the way, is from Notes on The Sabbath by Heschel which I am reading next.
A few lenses when connecting with nature:
Perspectives one and two are dominant in our culture. Three I didn't quite understand, but I resonate with four.
A common worldview sees animals and plants as "individual sacks". In fact, the skin of a thing ecologically speaking much more like a pond surface than a sack or a shell. The author describes this as "delicate interpenetration", which is evocative if a bit disgusting. I strongly resonate with the idea of mutual interdependence, and the elation and suffering which is to be found in nature. Shared laughter and shared suffering is critical for community. Also see Two types of fun, type 1 and type 2.
A technique: verbalize the landscape from its perspective. “I am the pond and the pond is me”
Prayer can be viewed as way to getting yourself to verbalize how you truly feel. It feels reductive to use prayer as a journaling technique, but also really intriguing.
Four steps prayer framework:
Unless a pretty literal god exists, this sort of prayer will not work directly to change the world. But it can change you. Why Journal?
Talk about who you are, and who you wish to become. Talk about what matters most. Unless we speak the truth, we will forget what we want to stay loyal to.
Rhymes so much with the C. S. Lewis' Inner Circle and John Boyd's "To be somebody or to do something".
Days after capturing a "new" insight, it can be humbling to realize that you are repeating yourself. This might not be a bad thing, as you mull over a complex idea in its various forms over the course of many weeks. But what if your note taking app could act as a co-pilot? It could surface similar notes that are relevant to your current writing, and if you use such a system for long enough, help you synthesize across your own thinking over many years. You might want to link to the semantically related note, or to merge with it entirely. Building on a previous technique, I implemented this idea as an Obsidian plugin:
I'm pleased with the result. It's nice to feel like my note taking software is actively trying to help me reconnect with past selves. Whether this ultimately proves to be useful remains to be seen, but it works well enough that I plan to run this as a self-experiment over the next few months.
My first stab at this problem generated a list of related notes across the whole corpus using semantic similarity. But my implementation had two fundamental limitations:
By building this as an Obsidian plugin, I addressed both fundamental problems in the time and the space continuum!
The current implementation has two parts:
Both plugins use exactly the same embedding model to guarantee that the embedding mappings are identical. The one running inside Obsidian must use JavaScript, and I've already been using Universal Sentence Encoder lite for other projects. For simplicity and to guarantee identical outputs, I built the indexer using the same exact model, running in node.js using tfjs-node. My previous python implementation of this used a slightly larger model of USE.
The plugin works as follows:
Doing the above steps takes time. On my laptop it takes a second to generate embeddings, and another half second to do the multiplication and ranking. This will of course vary depending on your hardware and note corpus size. But even in my relatively favorable conditions, the resulting latency of a couple seconds is far too long to be doing this kind of work on the UI thread, which is the default behavior of tf.js in the Electron environment of the Obsidian plugin. I sought and found a workaround, which is to run tf.js in a web worker, in CPU mode. This slows execution by about 50%, but is totally worth it to make the plugin usable in real life.
I'd love for the plugin to run standalone without the need for a separate indexer. This would allow others to use it far more easily without requiring them to setup a whole indexing system.
Implementing indexing within the plugin, I ran into memory issues computing embeddings for my whole corpus. I haven't yet found the time to dig in to why this was not a problem for the tfjs-node implementation of the indexer.
Before I seek workarounds, I want to live with the experience first. Is the plugin useful for navigating my note corpus? Do the excerpts it surfaces make sense as I'm writing a new note? Is the constantly changing semantic sidebar too distracting? Let's find out; ƒor science!
]]>I picked up this volume after reading The Toynbee Convector and really enjoying it. I'm surprised Ray Bradbury wrote so much horror and so little science fiction. Perhaps it's selection bias in this volume? Here are a few stories that really stood out to me:
Let Me Remind You of Why We Are Here: resonates strongly on a personal level, exploring the nuances in communication between parents and children at various stages of that relationship.
Trapdoor: a slightly loony story about monsters in the attic. Creeepy and surprisingly compelling, very far from my usual taste.
The Last Circus: Ominous and timely once more.
Banshee: Another horror tale that I enjoyed. He had it coming.
Bless me Father, For I have Sinned: who blesses the givers of blessings?
A Touch of Petulance: Relationships are so complex. A self fulfilling time travel tragedy.
Come, and Bring Constance: Cute story with multiple possible interpretations.
I also really liked the titular story. Here's the basic premise: Craig Bennet Stiles travels a century into the future and returns with detailed descriptions and photographs of a bright future in which all of humanity's problems have been solved. This gives people hope in a hopeless world much like our own:
You name it, we had it. The economy was a snail. The world was a cesspool. Economies remained an insolvable mystery. Melancholy was the attitude. The impossibility of change was the vogue. End of the world was the slogan. ...a fifth horseman, worse than all the rest rode with them: Despair, wrapped in dark shrouds of defeat, crying only repetitions of past disasters, present failures, future cowardices.
There is of course a giant twist which I will leave out, out of respect for you, dear reader. But you might piece together where things are going anyway.
Overall I loved it. One remarkable thing is that this is a truly consistent time travel story, no caveats. It left a strong impression on me and reified the power of positive visions (see Positive visions are necessary).
Stray thoughts still linger:
Fake it 'till you make it is almost trite, but how much 'faking it' is too much?
How much credence to give Toynbee's idea that "any group, any race, any world that did not run to seize the future and shape it was doomed to dust away to the grave, in the past"?
Is Stiles a science fiction writer? So many technological efforts are inspired by fiction, even dystopian fiction (see Dystopian fiction that inspires real products). In this light, this is a pretty self serving story, Mr. Bradbury!
Despite being a famous economist, Russ Roberts has a tendency to disparage his own field for its shortcomings. His core argument is that a lot of the thinking employed by economists applies to overly simplified models along the lines of "imagine a spherical cow". In particular, Roberts focuses on so-called Wild problems, which seem to be the same as Wicked problems (see Kind and wicked problems), but usually in the personal domain. The thrust of this short book is that such problems can’t be solved in a naïve way. Who to marry, who to hire, who to befriend, whether to have children? There are many different ways to live. There are many different destinations that you may pick for yourself, and which destination to pick is often the hardest part of the exercise.
Much of the book is spent on dismantling Subjective Expected Utility (SEU), and reifying Herb Simon's Bounded rationality observations. Examples familiar to me included Darwin’s famous marry/don’t marry note and Franklins “moral algebra” where pros and cons for making a tough decision are weighed against one another and crossed out until one column is longer than the other and you have an answer. Of course, this sort of moral algebra doesn't work. Firstly, it's very hard to quantify things that matter to us. Secondly, Values are incommensurable.
Persi Diaconis was agonizing about a decision whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford. He had bored his friends silly with endless discussion. Finally, one of them said, “You’re one of our leading decision theorists. Maybe you should make a list of the costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate your expected utility.” Without thinking, Persi blurted out, “Come on, Sandy, this is serious.”
The Vampire Problem I really enjoyed a new-to-me thought experiment Roberts introduces, attributing L. A. Paul, of a man deciding whether to become a vampire. A human cannot imagine what it would be like to be a vampire because they have never been a vampire. In the same way, a woman cannot imagine what it would be like to become a mother until she has become one. Becoming a mother will fundamentally change you, your priorities, your tastes. Becoming a vampire too, will make you much more interested in drinking other people's blood and avoiding the sun. Such transformations involve a leap of faith. Whether to take it is not a decision that can be made using a decision matrix or rational deliberation.
So even bounded rationality is of little help in such transformative situations. On paper, having children is a terrible decision. Here, Roberts appeals to novelty. Becoming a parent is like getting tickets to Shakespeare's brand new play. You get to watch it with someone you love (hopefully), and you don’t know if it’s a tragedy or a comedy. Just do it and see. It’s part of being human and living a complete life.
Flourishing over pleasure The problem with Benjamin Franklin's moral algebra is that values are incommensurable with one another. Furthermore, comparing things from the realm of economics (eg. money, things) with values, ideals, and principles is impossible. They are in distinct categories:
Prioritize your principles. From this flourishing perspective, becoming a vampire is a bad idea. Your core values will not be satisfied even though the vampire you will become will get a lot of Hedons from drinking all that delicious human blood. 🧛
Roberts even combines this with Two types of fun, type 1 and type 2. You flourish from Type 2 fun, even though it may be less pleasurable in the moment.
Aside: picking a religion: This reminds me of the Khazar decision to pick Judaism based on a utilitarian argument: choosing Christianity or Islam would put them under the authority of either Baghdad or Constantinople. Later, when Vladimir converted the Rus to Christianity, he did it on similar utilitarian grounds: - Of the Muslim Bulgarians of the Volga the envoys reported there is no gladness among them, only sorrow and a great stench. He also reported that Islam was undesirable due to its taboo against alcoholic beverages and pork. Vladimir remarked on the occasion: "Drinking is the joy of all Rus'. We cannot exist without that pleasure." - Ukrainian and Russian sources also describe Vladimir consulting with Jewish envoys and questioning them about their religion, but ultimately rejecting it as well, saying that their loss of Jerusalem was evidence that they had been abandoned by God.
The Penelope problem. The secretary problem is cleverly reframed as the “Penelope problem” from the perspective of Odysseus' wife who is besieged by 108 suitors. A very PC move, Roberts. Well played! Also, it's a good reminder that the correct percentage of houses to view first is 1/e or about 38% to establish a baseline to compare the rest against.
“The happy hypocrite” story is ridiculous.
Three kinds of people:
It's unclear why Roberts adopts the new terminology "wild" versus "tame" problems? It seems neatly analogous to the preexisting terminology I first saw in The Gardener and The Carpenter by Alison Gopnik and Range - Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein: Kind and wicked problems.
Roberts argues also that to become a vampire is unethical, which is fair enough. But then this vaguely is also mapped to being a non-parent, with an implied equivalence between vampires and non-parents, which is too extreme for my tastes.
In general, and I'm not sure this is avoidable, Roberts soapboxes a lot, imploring the reader to stick to his principles, fully trumping any utilitarian considerations. Ones values should always stand above the domain of economic utility. No amount of money should be enough to sway this. Reality is clearly more complex than this, and ultimately the difficult questions remain difficult.
Roberts' book concludes with some Vogon Poetry which seems slightly embarrassing to publish. Overall, I like the advice, but the whole thing just comes off as a little bit too much of like something that your highly intelligent but a little bit tipsy uncle would give you during a long heart-to-heart:
Beware the urge for certainty.
The mortal lock.
The sure thing.
The lure of the bird in the hand.
Maybe once or twice, put all your eggs in one basket.
Take a chance
On romance. Ask her out. Or him.
Embrace doubt.
Go on a limb.
Pointers for later:
This unfinished work begins as a novel, and ends as a scathing critique of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Viewing the work from the perspective of a novel is slightly disappointing. Although the characters are compelling, the narrative arc is stunted, leaving a lot to be desired. Briefly, the emaciated Ivan returns from a 30 year stint at a gulag, only to meet his pudgy, talentless cousin Nikolai, who has made a great career for himself by being unprincipled. Ivan's wife found a new lover, and most of his friends have died in the camps. Ivan begins anew, finds a job and falls in love with a woman who eventually succumbs to cancer.
The narrative in this book is shadowed by Grossman's critical agenda. This work is listed as an inspiration for Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, but adds extra color to the history described there. The strength of Grossman's work incorporates some interesting historical ideas:
I elaborate on each idea in what follows.
Ivan's cousin Nikolai Andreyevich is very good at blending in to the (terrible) times. An adaptive chameleon without serious principles, but a self-described decent man, and truly well meaning. Sure, sometimes he agrees to sign an order to punish an enemy of the people, or condemn a Jew for his treasonous poisoning of a respected party member. But these people are certainly guilty, and deserve to be punished. All in a day's work for a well respected member of society. At any rate, it's a comfortable life.
Yet even for Nikolai, uncertainty lingers in the background. He knows really decent Jewish doctors personally. What if some of accused are innocent? Could it be that Stalin and the party are wrong? No — unthinkable. When, upon his death, Stalin turned out to be not such an infallible leader, things got uncomfortable really quickly.
The pudgy wine-drinking Nikolai, with his jowls and heavyset build, contrasts starkly to his principled, emaciated cousin. Sometimes Nikolai wished he could take Ivan's place in principled opposition, even if it meant thirty years in a gulag.
Grossman does an impressive job of explaining and understanding various kinds of traitors against humanity. He is able to apologize on their behalf and explain their behavior from their own perspective. Judas I, II, III and IV are all good men at their core. Some are erudite scholars, some have great respect for their parents, and love their children. All of these various flavors of everyman busy informing on one another. It's just what you do.
Yet even towards this scum, Grossman calls for moderation lest we become Stalinists ourselves.
Подумаем. Не подумавший не казни. Подумаем не торопясь, потом уж, приговор. Think. Think before executing. Think, don't rush. Then later, we'll impose a sentence.
Повсюду на домах имелись одни и те же вывески: «Мясо» и «Парикмахерская». В сумерках вертикальные вывески «Мясо» горели красным огнем, вывески «Парикмахерская» светились пронзительной зеленью. Эти вывески, возникшие вместе с первыми жильцами, как бы раскрывали плотоядную суть человека. Мясо, мясо, мясо… Человек жрал мясо. Без мяса человек не мог. Здесь не было еще библиотек, театров, кино, пошивочных, не было даже больниц, аптек, школ, но сразу, тотчас же, среди камня красным огнем светилось: мясо, мясо, мясо… И тут же изумруд парикмахерских вывесок. Человек ел мясо и обрастал шерстью.
Да. Все течёт. Все изменяетесь. Нельзя дважды вступить в один и тот же эшелон. Everything flows. Everything changes. You cannot board the same gulag train twice.
The Inuit have many words for snow. The Russians, for informing on your neighbors: клевета, стукачи, сексоты, доносчики, информаторы.
The greatest and most disgusting defence of this behavior was to deflect blame from the government, and attribute it to human nature itself. The baby grows into an informant organically through mothers milk. Humanity is naturally corrupt and people are either deserve to be informed on, or inform on others for personal gain. This deeply insidious position is still espoused by Russians today: a nihilism and fundamental pessimism about human nature. Russia's strategy is sowing cynicism.
This deflection was effective. Many gulag denizens believed in their own innocence (a clerical error) while insisting that the system was working as intended. Surely de-kulakification doesn’t just happen to hard working peasants. Those slackers deserved it!
In fact, the government was directly to blame. Not informing was potentially punishable by jail time. You could get ten years for NOT reporting on your friends. Women were often the main victims here, as wives would get ten year sentences for not reporting on their husbands. The more prominent the man taken to the gulag, the more women in his sphere would get taken away to women's camps: his mother, his wife, his sisters, his daughters.
Woman’s camps totally terrifying. Women would get ten year sentences for not reporting on their husbands. Prominent husbands would cause more women around them to get sent away to camps.
Stalin's system pre-emptively punished potential criminals. Those that were jailed and sent away weren’t usually guilty of any real opposition, merely belonged to some group that might tend, in the right circumstances, to have a higher probability to oppose the government. A terrifyingly high modernist stance, straight from Minority Report.
After Nikita Khrushchev dismantled Stalin's cult of personality, there were no consequences for those informants that did it for personal gain. All of the blame was attributed instead on Stalin personally, not on the system underlying the brutal famines and repressions.
During the famines of 1932-33, NKVD checkpoints on roads prevented Kulaks starving in the villages from leaving. Many desperate enough to try to flee through the swamps met their deaths in the wilderness.
A PR campaign raged to try to conceal the famine from the population at large, but many city dwellers knew anyway and passengers on the Kiev-Odessa express would throw food out of their windows when traveling through famished Bloodlands so that villagers could scavenge for scraps near the train tracks after the train passed. Again, the authorities intervened and installed guards to lock car windows when passing through starving regions.
As the famine eased and villagers were able to claw their way back into the cities, Grossman vividly describes bread lines were unlike any other. A line of people, each hugging the person in front to ensure their place oscillated like a wave. Every hungry stumble created a ripple through the line, but it stood firm. I found this image of emaciated people, clinging on for dear life and howling from hunger visceral and terrifying.
Those faithful to the original bolshevik vision of international communism became unnecessary ideologues for Stalin. When the tides shifted and the idea of the Comintern fell out of favor, the old internationalist dogs needed to be put down. How to best do this? Declare them enemies. Hence the Stalinist repressions of 1937-39. Stalin was tired of this entourage of useless old dogs following him around, so he simply murdered them, at scale.
The soviet state was purportedly created for the benefit of the people: the workers, the farmers. A strong state was established as a means to achieve this end, but sometime in the early decades of the Soviet Union, the original goal was forgotten. Over time, the means became the end. For Stalin, crushing a few million people became the new means to the real end: a strong state.
Grossman quotes a Yesenin's "Lenin", evoking the dark image of encasing Lenin's legacy in concrete:
Его уж нет! А те, кто вживе, А те, кого оставил он, Страну в бушующем разливе Должны заковывать в бетон. Для них не скажешь: "Ленин умер!" Их смерть к тоске не привела... Еще суровей и угрюмей Они творят его дела.
Who, asks Grossman rhetorically, should be Lenin's successor? Would it be the brilliant, turbulent, magnificent Trostky? The charming, gifted political theorist Bukharin? Perhaps the one closest to the workers Rykov? Maybe the well educated, confident, and sophisticated governor Kamenev? Last but not least, the one best versed in international labor, Zinovyev?
All of these men embodied aspects of Lenin's multifaceted personality, but none of them captured the essence of his soul: thirst for power. Stalin executed all of them, eliminating these subsidiary aspects of early Soviet rule which were merely getting in the way. The real goal was to raise and strengthen Lenin's banner over Russia, consolidate power, and build a powerful state.
To Grossman, Lenin’s intolerance, his firmness, his fanaticism all stem from the centuries of Russian unfreedom and intolerance. Grossman sees Stalin not as a huge departure from Lenin's tenure, but as a logical continuation of former events, and a cementing (as per Yesenin) of the existing path.
Лишь одного не видела Россия за тысячу лет: свободы The one thing Russia has not seen in a thousand years: freedom.
Особенности русской души рождены несвободой. Русская душа тысячелетния раба. Particularities of Russian spirit emerge from unfreedom. One thousand years a slave.
Freedom had almost no grounding in Russian history at all. Any notions of liberalism are entirely imported from western thought. The government was only democratic for two brief moments: the period of 1905-1917, then again roughly 1991-2000. Other than that, the default state of Russia for the last millennium has been unfreedom.
Grossman writes almost from a Eurasianist perspective, emphasizing Stalin's veneer of culture on top of a Mongol yoke core. Stalin's Russia was certainly the successor of the Tatar-Mongol empire. See The Legacy of Genghis Khan - The Mongol Impact on Russian History, Politics, Economy, and Culture notes.
There are a surprisingly large number of words for serf in Russian: крепостной, холоп, ишак.
Этот азиат в шевровых сапожках, цитирующий Щедрина, живущий законами кровной мести и одновременно пользующийся словарем революции, внес ясность в послеоктябрьский хаос, осуществил, выразил свой характер в характере государства. This khan in velvet boots, citing Schedrin and living by the law of the jungle, used the language of revolution to bring clarity to the post-October chaos and projected his own character into that of the state.
For Grossman, the real revolution in Russian history was the prohibition of serfdom in the 1861. The Revolution of 1917 and the rise of Lenin and Stalin is a reversion to Russia default state of unfreedom.
Glimpses of Russian influence were imagined during the height of Russia's monarchic peak a century before the revolution of 1917, but never like this.
Rather than shining as a beacon for those dreaming of a communist utopia, Lenin's Soviet Russia rose up as an example of a simpler totalitarian society for the west to emulate. First Italy, then Nazi Germany followed suite. Leninism inspired authoritarian regimes in Asia too, including Communist China. Its legacy continues, with menacing echoes into the present day.
]]>The Goal: A Business Graphic novel is crass, outdated and overly on the nose. At the same time, it is a relatively entertaining illustrated introduction to a boring idea (a management paradigm). For this alone, I can't help but recommend it.
Alex Rogo directs a plant at Unico. He’s struggling to turn his business around and the CEO has just given him an ultimatum. I've never read a business novel before, and the combination of words is surprising. Is Rogo up to his managerial task? (Of course, otherwise there would be no hero's journey... But how?) Like “Obi Wan Kenobi instructing Luke Skywalker on the use of the force”, his former professor turned consultant Jonah saves the day.
The formulation of a business seems very crass and slightly outdated. None of this ESG shit; the goal is to make money. How? In a nutshell:
I enjoyed the vignette of Alex Rogo taking a group of boyscouts including his son on a backpacking trip. He is faced with the challenge of making sure everyone safely arrives at the destination and managing their various abilities. One boy, Herbie seems to always be lagging behind, slowing the group down. When Rogo investigates, it turns out that he is carrying the large and heavy tent. By redistributing the tent parts between the rest of the boys, everyone is slightly more burdened, but the group is able to establish a much faster pace.
This boyscouts story is directly analogous to the factory production line, where some resources are bottlenecks:
And so this is Eliyahu M. Goldratt's Theory of Constraints: look for bottlenecks and optimize the system accordingly. In the fictional plant in the story, quality control initially happened after an expensive bottleneck. One of Jonah's insights was that it was far more efficient to do quality control before the bottleneck and discard parts before they pass through the expensive bottleneck.
Bottlenecks should always have a queue waiting on them. They are critical pieces that, if scaled, would greatly improve efficiency. Conversely if they sit idle, it’s a complete waste of resources. A bottleneck sitting idle means the whole plant is effectively sitting idle, with no throughput.
But also having huge queues of parts waiting on a bottleneck is a bad idea. It means somewhere in the system something is working too hard. So running non-bottleneck resources at maximum capacity is dumb. It’ll just create a giant queue of stuff stuck in the bottleneck. Reallocate resources.
Jonah suggests: work backwards from total throughput to have each part of the process output parts at the right rate. So avoid massive queues and make sure bottlenecks are operating at 100%.
Of course once the bottleneck has been resolved throughout increases. And now another bottleneck is in the way. And so on. This is essentially an optimization process.
A funny parable to summarize the concept involves Jonah visiting the Rogo household and having the kids devise solutions to the Herbie hiking problem. His daughter suggests the boyscouts march to the best of a drum (i.e. constrained by the bottleneck), while his son suggests they also provide ropes so that the campers stay close together but without too much rigidity (ie. to be more resilient if there are random fluctuations.)
The whole book has a sleazy vibe to it. In one scene, Alex bets the head of sales that they will produce a quantity of units a new pair of Gucci loafers. And in the end, Alex wins the battle with the terrible accounting division, who is trying to subdue Alex's creative problem solving. Gotcha!
]]>The process of interconnection is critical for creativity and divergent thought in general. Synthesis is how many new insights are generated. We humans have a knack for doing this, even in bed. Sleep intelligently interconnects newly gleaned information with prior memories. Matt Walker describes this as “a form of informational alchemy”. A study he cites has shown that discovering a hidden pattern in a problem set is thrice more likely during sleep.
In this post, I describe my early attempt use GPT-3 to emulate this nightly synthesis. A python script takes two randomly selected notes from my note corpus, and tries to divine a connection between them. The results are often nonsensical and surreal, and sometimes funny.
Let's take two random notes and see if the collective wisdom contained within a large language model can generate something interesting based on the text content of each. Picking two notes at random is easy enough, but the two need to be combined somehow to ultimately create a string of input for GPT-3.
The simplest imaginable thing of concatenating the two random notes together and seeing what GPT-3 spits out is a non-starter for several reasons. Firstly, GPT-3 is constrained in its input length. Secondly, GPT-3 is pretty susceptible to the order in which these prompts are presented. Since it generates a string to continue the provided text, the closer a word is to the end of the input, the more weight it is effectively given.
We have a note corpus, and the power of summarization. Broadly speaking, each note consists of the following:
note.name
)note.body
)shortbody
)summary
)sumsum
)The goal is to build a prompt string that encourages GPT-3 to synthesize something interesting related to both notes, ideally written in a writing style that mimics the originals.
Here's the best I've come up with so far (prompt engineers, please @-me):
f'''{note1.name}: {shortbody1}
{note2.name}: {shortbody2}
In summary: {sumsum2} and {sumsum1}.
The connection between "{note1.name}" and "{note2.name}" is the following.'''
This python f-string contains excerpts of my own writing (shortbody
), the summarized summary (sumsum
), as well as both note names at the very end, to remind GPT-3 what we are after as explicitly as possible. I try to mix up the order so as to not bias too much towards one of the two notes.
By having the verbatim text of the original notes, I gently nudge GPT-3 to produce output in a similar style.
One parameter of these LLMs is called temperature, which is a proxy for how wild the output should be. I've cranked it up to close to its maximum value for more spicy results.
Dreamer is now part of my System for Thought suite, running nightly alongside other AI gardeners. It's been operational since late 2021, so I have had about a hundred examples of its output to casually peruse.
Just seeing two random notes from the garden can a good nudge to remove a note that was temporary, spark a new connection, or create a new note. Sometimes it's fascinating to revisit an old shower thought that I'd long forgotten about.
Dreamer's results are usually nonsensical, but sometimes surprisingly funny and surreal. Here are some of my favorites:
Index | Note 1 | Note 2 | Collision excerpt |
1 | Ikea shopping list | Political debates in VR | "IKEA", in Norway, is known as the "Freedom Store", because of the store's role during the German occupation of Norway in World War II, who hid people in a secret room in the ceiling. |
2 | Carolingian miniscule | Canada debate aphorisms | In the beginning, there was no spaces between words. Then, people started to want more space between words. Canada debated tax-increases on the rich. NDP said, "FUCK THE RICH!" The Liberals wanted more social services. Conservatives wanted a balanced budget. People wanted a tighter pussy. People changed their mind. |
3 | Whitman kitchen paint | Notes from mentoring session | It feels so clear that I will even share it: Cooking is a merging of UX and engineering that results in an edible meal. Which is well written amounts to an edible book. |
4 | Canadians entering US by land | Steveston's Fraser River estuary and current flow | Officer says "Good That's more interesting than the usual vacation." Note: Canada has quite a few kind of kayaks to rent. Large types used for the interior of huge lakes. Also the kind used for the Sea used for day touring |
Most of Dreamer's results are bad in a variety of ways. Here are a few of them:
One March night, Dreamer attempted to combine my aspirational lifestyle notes on building a camper van with historical research notes about the "high medieval power shift from lords to peasants and kings". This resulted in the following:
One weekend when we’re all together in Idaho, we're going drive Nic’s Audi A4 FSi Quattro to Guernsey together and find avocados on an island called Herm. That’s southern France. It’s on the English Channel. Also where I started! Overall happy with the car and the weekend. Felt good to run an out of town car in the snow, and liked the road.
Drivel? Yes, let me count the ways:
But this example is still illustrative because you can see how GPT-3 incorporated bits of both notes. A car is close enough to a camper van. Lords and kings and peasants sound like they are vaguely related to the Norman conquest, hence the English Channel, Herm, and France.
Finding a meaningful connection in the above example is pretty difficult, even for human intelligence. Is it really fair to blame an AI for failing at this task?
It often takes an oneirocritic to extract insight out of a cryptic dream. Cormac McCarthy writes eloquently about this subject. If we consider LLMs as a muse, perhaps this cryptic output is good enough?
]]>At first I was taken by the surprisingly well written prose (for a non-fiction book). Here Lorr recollects his feelings after having lived abroad for a while and seeing an American supermarket for the first time in a while. This feeling of awe is familiar to me having immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1990:
A love like all love filled with doubt and rage and insecurity, but also overwhelming and blanketing, warm and intoxicating. It was a love of re-acclimation, of reabsorbing a childhood and birthright, of seeing myself and my country with new eyes, both fearful and reverent.
And here is a memory conveyed remarkably well in writing of the olfactory experience of cleaning a whole foods fish freezer.
...ten thousand minnows piled up in silver ribbons, left for days, as they waited to be transformed into the protein base of the aquaculture pyramid. Those were some strong sniffs. And yet none of it—not the trash fish nor fecal lagoons—was as fundamentally gross and disturbing as the smell that came out of that fish case in Manhattan. In a Whole Foods. In one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the wealthiest nation in the world.
I learned that SKUs stand for "Shop Keeping Units", and that the average adult spends 2% of their life in a supermarket.
Despite the relative interestingness, the book kind of drones on. The section on Trader Joe's was overly fanboyish and protracted. Further, I am ashamed to admit that my interest in groceries and supply chains appears to be dwindling as the pandemic comes to a close.
]]>At a high level, Bloodlands is a deep look into a variety of organized mass killings conducted by the Nazis and Soviets from roughly 1932 to about 1953 in The Bloodlands, loosely defined as territories in Eastern Europe, centered on modern Ukraine, but including modern Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states, and western Russian regions occupied by Germany. Snyder estimates 14 million non-combatant victims, 2/3 of which were murdered by the Nazis, 1/3 by the Soviets.
I was brought up with a Russian perspective on the Great War: we carried the whole damn thing. In school, I was learned the Canadian-American perspective on World War II: we saved the day in the nick of time and owned the war in the Pacific. My Jewish background gave me a good sense for the horrors of the Shoah. I lost two great grandfathers in The Bloodlands, one murdered by Stalin in the repressions of 1938, another murdered by the Nazis as a Soviet POW in 1942.
Snyder's work integrates all of these disparate pieces and more into a coherent and truly terrifying narrative. He emphasizes the interactions between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany, and the similarities between the two regimes. This view is distinct from any I had experienced. The events described are so terrible, I searched online multiple times to find a credible takedown of Snyder's work, but to no avail.
Broadly speaking, the events in the book can be separated into three parts:
The breakdown of victims in these events is as follows:
Triple occupation: Soviets, Nazis and back again. Many of the territories in question were triply occupied: first by the Soviets, then the Nazis, and back again to the Soviets.
Stalin enabled Hitler. Stalin's brutal collectivization and ensuing famines paved the way for Hitler to point to the transgressions of the communists. He rode that wave to consolidate power in Germany. This in turn reduced Comintern prestige globally and strained Russia German relations.
Jews as communists. The communist party was largely Jewish, a fact the media gleefully covered for decades in the 1920 and 1930s. When Stalin's communists began committing mass murder at an unprecedented scale, this played into the propaganda of the Nazis.
Ethnic composition of the NKVD. The founder of the NKVD, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was a Polish nobleman by birth, and Poles were highly represented in the NKVD at its foundation. Snyder claims that 40% of the NKVD were Jewish in ethnicity, which is shockingly high and somewhat controversial. Both Poles and Jews were systematically purged, and by 1940, the party was more ethnically Russian than the general population. The only more represented ethnicity were Georgians, largely because of Stalin’s nepotism.
Eastern European Nazi collaborators. Many Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Poles, Belorussians, and Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis in their Jew killing venture. The jews were a convenient scapegoat for the ills of the Soviets. By agreeing that the Jews were at fault and needed to be purged, they saved their own skin from the wrath of the nazis.
European polarization. Europe was so polarized by 1936 that it was impossible to criticize the Soviet Union without appearing to endorse Hitlers Germany. Hitler called his enemies Marxists. Stalin called his Fascists. They agreed there was no middle ground.
Murderous troikas. A shockingly high number of people were killed by Stalinist Troikas, which consisted of three administrators from various levels of government, acting as judge jury and executioner.
Japan's role. The Russo-German alliance 1939-41 sidelined the Japanese, who were Germany's natural ally and Russia's natural enemy. What would happen, speculates Snyder, if rather than purging its own citizenry, Stalin focused on disarming Japan and preventing the War in the Pacific? The course of the war might have been altered drastically, and perhaps not for the better... Imagine no Pearl Harbor?
Mass starvation as a geopolitical strategy: Much of Ukraine suffered greatly in Stalin's attempts to convert Kulaks into collective farmers. Later, because Ukraine was still the breadbasket of the Soviet Union and supplied major Russian cities, Hitler would just starve the Russian urban elites (necessary anyway) and feed the Germans instead. This was literally called the Hunger Plan.
Gareth Jones, journalist of the Holodomor. Jones, a Welshman, described the soviet atrocities and described the widespread famine in detail. After being banned from re-entering the Soviet Union, Jones was kidnapped and murdered in 1935.
Unknown war crimes. The scale of the Stalinist program was completely unknown outside of soviet Russia. And even in Soviet Russia it was not at all widely known. (How much clandestine terror happens behind closed doors today? At what scale can such things operate in a world of internet and social media?)
Personal stories help re-humanize people: This masterwork does an impressive job of combining the birds eye view with deeply troubling personal stories. Snyder writes eloquently about the importance of the latter:
The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers some of which we can only estimate. It is for us as scholars to seek these numbers and put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn these numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world but our humanity.
Names and history of Donetsk. Bizarrely, the city of Donetsk was founded in 1869 by Welsh businessman John Hughes, an energy magnate. It was originally named Юзовка after Hughes but by 1931 it was renamed to Stalino. It was renamed to Donetsk by Khrushev as part of destalinization in 1961.
Jews: shot and gassed. Jews living east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line tended to be shot. Those living in German Reich territory tended to be gassed. Gassing techniques were first perfected for mass euthanasia of disabled and elderly “useless eaters”. Rather than running the exhaust of a truck into its cab, they took out the ICE of trucks and put them into buildings to increase the scale of the killings. First perfected at Belzec (“Boo-jets”), this was also used in Treblinka and other death camps like Sobibor.
Let them destroy each other - The West stood by as Russia and Germany waged war on one another, hoping to let the Nazis and Communists destroy one another without lifting a finger. - The Soviets let the Poles rise up against the Nazis during the Warsaw uprising and falsely promised reinforcements.
Polish lack of control. Stalin bullied Churchill into labeling the Polish resistance as “adventurers”, and forced the rest of the Allies to do the same. This move was heavily condemned by Koestler and Orwell. Thus the Polish Home Army was not able to retain any control over Warsaw. By the end of the war Stalin finally allowed Allied powers to liberate Warsaw, but he delayed enough that the Soviets had de facto control, not the Polish government in exile.
Soviet alternative history. - According to Soviet history books, the war started in 1941 not in 1939. There could be no mention of the Nazi-Soviet alliance against Poland. - To the Soviets, Russians needed to be the main victims of the Great War, not the Jews. Thus the Holocaust could not become part of the official history of the war.
Solomon Michoels and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee attempted to bring the plight of the Jews to the attention of the world. He petitioned Stalin to allow to publish the The Black Book of Soviet Jewry written by Red Army reporters Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman. But this initiative was blocked. Michoels political campaigning led him to be murdered by Stalin (officially a truck accident). A surprising group of high profile activists including violinist David Oistrakh.
Death camps, not concentration camps. Snyder really drives home the point that concentration camps were just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of Jews killed in the Shoah had never seen one or been in one. Many hundreds of thousands were shot are gassed in death facilities. The emphasis on concentration camps probably comes from media coverage shortly after the war as well as personal accounts from survivors. Case in point, Hannah Arendt's work is mostly about Auschwitz.
Poles and Polish Jews. Polish Jews suffered the worst fate at the hands of the Germans. The worst parts of Poland were due to the Jews according to the Nazi stereotype. Polish Jews in the military were represented heavily, especially doctors, which was an affront to the Nazi world view. 90% of the Jews living in Poland were killed by the end of the war. Those that survived had no desire to return home, afraid of the displaced Poles that would resist if they they would try to retake their homes. Most fled via Germany to Israel or the United States. Before the war, 3 million Jews lived in Poland. By the end of it, and after the Polish communist anti-Semitism of the 60s, 30,000 remained. The non-Jewish Poles also suffered disproportionately compared to other non-Jewish ethnicities. Even so, a Jewish Pole was 15x more likely to die than their non-Jewish counterpart.
Jewish resistance. A unified front of armed Jews came to be known as the Jewish Combat Organization. They sought to kill heads of the Judenrat and Jewish informants. Most of the action was in the Warsaw ghetto. By 1943 they had managed to kill some Nazis too, which led to a German vendetta against the Warsaw ghetto. When the Nazis came to destroy it they were met with sniper fire and Molotov cocktails. Called by some the “Jewish German War”, this resulted in the Nazis razing the Warsaw ghetto and turning it into a concentration camp.
Resettlement: When the Nazis "resettled" Jews, this was used as a euphemism for mass murder. Resettlement from the Warsaw ghetto involved "deportation" of 250,000 Jews to the Treblinka death camp. Post-war Stalin used the same term to actually resettle people en mass. These were also brutal endeavours, and thousands died in transit, many traveling in open train cars in the bitter cold. The Germans suffered greatly after the war, dehumanized as a nation for the atrocities of the Nazis. As the Red Army pressed west, soldiers raped German women, and killed the men or took them as laborers.
"Respecting" national boundaries. After the end of the war, Stalin implemented policies which segregated nations into their own national boundaries. In some cases, these boundaries were drawn up arbitrarily. Stalin effectively moved Poland westward, annexing eastern Poland into the soviet Ukraine at the expense of east German lands given to Poland. Germany would be for the Germans once more, just like Hitler envisioned but a much smaller territory. There was a large consensus throughout the word that each nation should be defined by its own nationality living within it.
Who to surrender to? - The Poles had to decide whether to surrender to the Wehrmacht or the Red Army in 1939, when they were attacked simultaneously by Germany from the west and Russia from the east. This was a tricky choice. - The Germans had to decide when they were attacked by the Russians from the east and by other allies from the west. This was a no brainer: flee westward as quickly as possible. - It's like an especially horrifying version of You Gotta Serve Somebody.
Bloodlands, named for an Ахматова poem:
Не бывать тебе в живых, Со снегу не встать. Двадцать восемь штыковых, Огнестрельных пять. Горькую обновушку Другу шила я. Любит, любит кровушку Русская земля.
Stalin and Israel in 1948. Moscow was initially very sympathetic to Israel, seeing it potentially as fertile soil for communism. There was elation in Moscow when Golda Meir, originally from Kyiv, visited during Rosh Hashanah 1948. However Stalin quickly changed his mind, finding that Jews had more influence on the Soviet state than the Soviet state did on Israel.
Systematic Stalinist Anti-semitism. Around 1949, Stalin began a concerted campaign against the Jews of Soviet Union. Many Jewish poets writing under Russian synonyms were arrested and killed as part of the Night of the Murdered Poets (including Leib Kvitko), followed by the Doctor's Plot which was diffused only by Stalin's death. Jews were now suspected of either being "Jewish Nationalists" or being "Rootless Cosmopolitans", with their names placed in parentheses in official lists. Increasingly Israel was seen as a client state of America, which led to fundamental aversion to the country.
Molotov's wife. Molotov's wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was Jewish and accused of having Zionist ties for her support of the Jewish Anti-Fascists. A close friend of Stalin's wife Nadezhda (another murky story), she was arrested for treason in 1948, and forced into an unwanted divorce from Μolotov. She was convicted and sentenced to five years in a labor camp, released only after Stalin's death.
Body counts and overlapping identities. In a the perverted contest between nations for greater victimhood that ensued after the war ended, there is is a tendency to inflate numbers of dead. Russia still clings on to the Soviet number of dead even though for example very few Russian Jews died in the holocaust (60k) compared to those of The Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. Part of the exaggerated counts can be legitimately attributed to overlapping identity. The Polish Jew living in eastern Poland might have been under Soviet, German, then Soviet occupation again, before fleeing to Israel. This means she could be considered Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, Soviet, German, or Israeli.
Many misses, for sure. But the hits I enjoyed were worthwhile:
Imperial message: a great image of an emperor so important and surrounded by such a large number of people that a messenger cannot possibly escape his orbit. A message delivered to the second person recipient will never be delivered. Bureaucracies. Perhaps solar systems. Your own mind. Sometimes there is no escape.
Tower of Babel and The City Coat of Arms: Cute vignette of the construction of the tower delayed because of peoples insistence that progress is imminent, and that if we just wait a bit the whole project will be done much faster. So why bother starting? As generations pass, the nations living in the city planning to build the tower begin squabbling. Towards the end, a prophecy emerges that the lord will crush the city with five successive blows from a divine fist. Hence the fist on the coat of arms of the city.
A bizarre take on Tower of Babel, featuring bureaucratic dysfunction and learned helplessness.
Before the law: A man seeks entrance into The Law (I think the Torah version), but is prevented from entering by a guard because it is not time yet. The two exchange words and the man decides to wait until the time will come. He waits for many years, and the two have occasional conversations revealing that beyond this door lie more doors, with more guards. The man is undeterred and continues to wait. Near death, he gathers up the courage to ask his most pressing questions. After answering them, the guard announces he will be closing the door.
This short parable is told by a Priest, and the bulk of the story involves K. (Kafka?), the receiver of the story in conversation with the priest about various interpretation of the story. Is the man deluded? Is the guard? Who is more free?
A fascinating, self-referential, format. I see the man as a stand-in for K., and the priest as a stand-in for the guard. Where does the reader fit? What about the author? Reminds me a lot of Borges, and a little bit of Ted Chiang. (I’d love to do a group reading session around a story like this. I miss my Multiplayer Essay concept.)
Poseidon: tracks the gate of an unhappy executive, appointed God of the Sea in the beginning, but perpetually unhappy, pining for “more cheerful work”. He was unable to sufficiently delegate to his subordinates and burned out completely.
]]>It's pretty funny but in a very high falutin’ way, which detracts from the comedy.
Isn’t that conjecture just Laplace’s Demon? From WP:
Laplace's demon is a hypothetical all-knowing being who knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, and therefore could use Newton's laws to reveal the entire course of cosmic events, past and future. Based upon the philosophical proposition of causal determinism.
Septimus & Chater demanding satisfaction exchange is hilarious!
Overall I’m struggling to follow the arc. Lots of wit but just very much a comedy of errors. I might try again when I'm in a more frivolous headspace.
A stray thought: I haven't tended to really enjoy plays much. Is this a lack of imagination on my part? Perhaps it takes more work to truly imagine each character delivering their lines without any of the scaffolding a narrator provides...
]]>I recently ran a book club at work discussing Range, and CB mentioned that this book is less Gladwellian and more nuanced covering a similar theme.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of "Flow" fame is a psychologist, and takes a qualitative user research approach to the subject of creativity. He conducted interviews with 91 people that were deemed creative because of their impact on a field or because they helped to create a new one. He selected industry vets: people aged 60 and above from a variety of fields and cultures. Overall some gems but not without issues especially towards the end, where the book becomes less psychology and more self-help.
Trend towards specialization. Imagine three people: one a physicist and a musician and one that is both. All things equal, the specialists would probably be better at their crafts than the one that has chosen to split his attention between both. This naive treatment clearly foreshadows the possible benefits of the two fields interacting with one another. Like cross-training in sports.
Creativity and unhappiness?: Mihaly's research disconfirms the trope of the restless and miserable creative soul. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky aren’t unhappy because they are creative but because of their residence in a nearly collapsing Russian empire. American poets that commit suicide do it because of their social circles and their poor compensation.
Creativity is social: the author presents a socially mediated view of creativity. Society ultimately decides if you are creative or not. If you think you are creative but nobody else agrees, you might just be a kook!
Three kinds of creativity:
There isn’t any correlation between these types. Many brilliant people are not creative. Many personally creative people don't have any impact. But creative people change the world in some significant way. This notion of Creativity reminds me more of the distinction Novelty creation invention innovation terms. Feels like the sense is after is the strongest: innovation. It must have impact.
Paradoxically whether someone is Creative or Personally Creative depends on society. Bach was not recognized as creative until several generations after his death when Mendelssohn re-discovered him. So you would have to say that he was only posthumously creative. Weird flex, but the author embraces it. Other examples include John Donne, a 16th century poet, who fell into obscurity only to be revived in the 20th century by TS Eliot. Van Gogh who was never recognized during his life.
Talent is also orthogonal to creativity. You might just be in the right place at the right time. Genius is also not required, and most creative people don't identify as such. Genius is mostly a label others apply to describe the most standout individuals.
Three requirements for creativity:
(Somewhat weird distinction between 1 and 2. Domain is the subject, field is the people.)
Why are there so many great architects and painters in the Italian Renaissance? Obviously not because some individuals (3) randomly got really creative. It’s more about the domain (1) and field (2). In other words, it’s the collective scenius that empowers individuals (see Four ingredients for Scenius). This is an insightful reminder. Still individual administrators and patrons can help or hurt here. For example the Medici played their part in catalyzing this Renaissance.
Structured vs. diffuse domains: Some domains are structured and so it’s easy to understand great contributions to the domain quickly. A student can chime in with a groundbreaking idea and professor may be able to evaluate it on the spot. (Eg. physics). Others are diffuse and so insights take many years to properly evaluate. (Eg. personality psychology).
Interesting framing on culture. Culture is something that rank orders attention. If all paintings are equally worthwhile, there is no culture. This is inherently a competitive process.
Curiosity is a key trait found in all interview subjects. If you don’t remain curious, you are unlikely to persevere in adversity (see What can increase curiosity). Many people in the sample tended to follow their interests (see Follow your interests).
Many were the beneficiaries of cultural capital from their upbringing. Coming from a family of books and broad interests all lead to an advantage.
Also you needed a basic amount of social skills to enter into a field and convince people of your worth. Even Isaac Newton, notorious for his antisocial ways, had to convince an early mentor of his promise.
Creative personality? Not really a thing, argues the author. But he thinks that people that are creative tend to have a complex personality, containing multitudes of personas within one individual. They are often able to express a lot of different emotions and be a bit unpredictable. This resonates and reminds me of AC and AK and IB and other great designers I've worked with.
Contradictory traits: According to Jung, every strong suit has a shadowy side. This is very clearly an inspiration for Joe Edelman and well expressed in the game we played at HumSys called Out of Character game. The author provides a list of contradictory traits that a creative person typically has. Ordinarily this would be asinine, but the way this is presented in the book is generative and not prescriptive.
Importantly, it’s not about striking a bland balance in between the two poles, but about knowing when to practice each extreme, and be flexible in switching between the poles as needed. I found this to be very insightful. Polarity strategy — alternate between poles rather than finding middle ground
Important: you can’t just seek novelty. To strive to be unique is to be like anything BUT something. This is a negative framing and rarely generative. Similar critiques to postmodernism (not modernism), and denazification. (See Positive visions are necessary)
Inspiration from real life. Writers and poets are often inspired by important events in their life. Usually suffering. Artists often take copious cut outs of visuals they find in the world. Scientists have a less direct connection from experiences. But early experiences often drive people into the field. Maybe they aren’t athletic. Or naturally gravitate towards books. More specific examples:
Presented vs. discovered problems. This is a great framework, which is very similar to Hill climbing vs hill finding. Many creative people discover problems, and this requires a certain amount of slack.
The need for slack: why do we need slack at all? It seems that Many creative people tend to sleep on a problem, or take a long break between hard bouts of work, or favoring silent walks and drives to work, or going for a run to take a break… and that is when the insight comes. Something happens when the mind is given a chance to rest. Resilient systems need slack.
(Note to self: I don’t do this enough. I’m always listening to something in my downtime. I should enjoy more quiet walks.)
Why does this happen? Maybe it's the same thing that happens when you sleep? Sleep cements connections that matter, and cleans up others that don't (see Sleep has a profound effect on memory and learning)
So much creativity comes from combining ideas from different domains. Even the electronic fuel controllers for jet engines invented by Frank Offner came from synthesizing ideas from cybernetics with physics!
Csikszentimihalyi is most famous for his book called Flow, and it's woven into this book, but feels a bit out of place (full list Csikszentimihalyi's flow for reference).
The secret to life is to experience flow from as many things as possible. Then everything you do will be worth doing for its own sake. Conditions of flow are often met in games. Related to the Game mindfulness — detect games around you.
Internalize the field Key ability: internalize the field to have a good sense for what the field will accept and what they will not. Have a lot of ideas and then critically have a good razor for separating those that are good from those that are not.
People love going to nice places to do creative stuff. Aspen conference is at a world class resort. Salk institute is right on the beach. There is no evidence for or against physical beauty helping creativity, largely because there is no way to make such an RCT study happen.
Creativity and walking. Perhaps a prepared mind will be more effective in a beautiful setting? Very speculative. Part of the benefit of walking is that your mind is focused on the surroundings, introducing more distraction. It adds slack. (I should do regular walking 1:1s with my in-person reports.)
A space to be creative. Key for creativity: a special placed tailored to your needs, a place are comfortable and you are fully in control. (My house is desperately missing this.) Kenneth Golding worked from a cabin overlooking Rockies and used the hot tub regularly. Jonas Salk worked in a studio with a piano and an easel. Living a life of personal creativity seems like a worthy goal.
True creativity unlocks whole new fields
Many creative people take a very indirect path to get to their ultimate destination. This is the thesis of Range as well.
Michael Snow, a famous Canadian artist, musician and composer is an example of someone that takes insights from one domain and applies them to others. He has touched film, installation, sculpture, photography, and music, a shocking breadth.
Ilya Romanovich Prigogine had a deep interest in music, art, and philosophy but was convinced to become a lawyer by his parents. So he studied law but wasn’t satisfied with its mechanistic applications. So he began studying the psychology and then neurochemistry of why people commit crimes. Finding this was too ambitious of a scope he refocused on the neurochemistry of cells. This led him to disapprove systems and his Nobel prize. What a polymath, dang. I'm only more impressed by the man. (See Dissapative far from equilibrium systems).
Stories of early precocity are often confirmatory. A sense of inner consistency demands that people who have achieved greatness should have done it from an early age. But in practice, it’s hard to predict if someone will become creative at a young age. One consistent pattern: curiosity and deep interests as young children.
In many cases parents play a key role. Treat your kid like a peer, an adult and don't talk to them.
Expose your kid to the vast variety of life at an early age. This is a key role of any good parent. This includes sports, arts, music, sciences, mathematics, travel, literature, etc. (Rhymes a lot with Give kids a sampling period)
School: The effect of school is generally pretty negative or neutral. Not generally something that is recalled. But a teachers influence is often significant. They often push a gifted student towards their interests and at a level that exceeds that of the rest of the class. But not too hard so as to keep them interested. (I should focus on the teachers at our kids school as opposed to the school itself. How can I quickly evaluate them given the parent teacher limited time?) That said many great creative people didn’t have a specific teacher-muse they cited.
The Teenage Years Suck: most creatives tend not to be too popular because they are engrossed with their interests. They might not be as sexually active and tend to spend more time “in the nest”. In most cases the peer group is not intellectual. Nobody in the group recalls teenage years fondly.
Luck. World War II enabled many women to enter hard sciences because the men usually occupying the seats were all away fighting in the war.
Stable family life. Also extremely important and common among creative people. Pauling's politically incorrect advice: find a wife that will just take care of all of the home life for you.
Creative aging? Surprisingly many people interviewed had a pretty steady output from 30 onward. Some people peak towards end of life. Frank Lloyd Wright architected the Guggenheim at 70! (This does strike me as a bit self serving: firstly, the author is himself not young.)
Crystallized intelligence: A decline in energy is common with age, but skills continue to get honed even at old age. You can sometimes think sharper and faster as a result of what the author calls "crystallized intelligence". Discipline and attitude also improves over age. Seasoned creative subjects had already achieved greatness, and so many experienced less pressure, and could be more trustful of their instincts.
One big challenge I resonate with is to find time to keep doing the core work, since people tend to accumulate administrative responsibilities with age.
The narrative devolves into a case study and then closes as a self help book. Becoming Creative is tricky and dependent on many factors like match quality, and buy-in from your field. But you can reliably become more Personally Creative, which according to Mihaly is intrinsically fulfilling.
Specific advice for cultivating curiosity:
Self help continues. Try a randomly sampled diary to see what you enjoy and what you don’t enjoy. Do more things you enjoy and fewer things you don’t enjoy. (At this point the advice becomes a bit farcical, and I can't help but wonder if reading a book about how to become more creative is a bit like reading a book about how to get better at your tennis serve. My point is that creativity feels very tacit and requiring praxis.)
Anyway I think his framing of personality change is somewhat unattractive. For me the Strength is a skill framing is generative here. It’s better to think of these things as skills than tweaks to one’s personality. Here are 3 in particular:
Learn to foster traits that are complimentary to your main mode. If introverted, see what it’s like to be extroverted. What are the pros and cons of each? What feels good about it? What scares you about it? Again, Out of Character game is a great way to deliberately practice this.
Especially important for creativity is the ability to switch between convergent and divergent modes of thinking. See Diverge and converge modes of thinking.
Aim for complexity. Too much integration means you are a caricature of yourself; easily predicted and one dimensional. Too simple. Too much differentiation means too end up being just a random assortment of unrelated ideas. Too chaotic. See Cynefin framework.
Interesting tidbit on relationships: it’s important to be able to shift moment by moment from our own viewpoint to that of another.
]]>We can see depth only because looking with two eyes give us slightly different perspectives. How much deeper can we see when instead of two eyes we rely on four?
Truly masterful, this book. The way Harlan wants to control Noys mirrors perfectly the way the Eternals want to control reality. Just like Harlan takes her for himself by transporting her to the 100,000th century,
Asimov's views are super complex. Much more complex than the one dimensional technologist I tend to associate with him. Maybe he has suffered more than I thought in light of his habits as a womanizer. But he has many interesting takes, and Noys is not nearly as simple as she initially seems, and is revealed to be the one in charge. Asimov does espouse a certain inevitability of progress. Though mathematician's names change as a result of Reality changes, the nature of math doesn’t. And it all appears to move in lockstep. And he does initially seem like he believes that humans are bound to kill ourselves unless subjected to some kind paternalism. At the end, it's a much more complex and interesting take on both progress and women.
I initially found a certain lack of imagination on Asimov's part when Harlan is described traveling between centuries. Surely the vast timespan would yield a far greater variety of interesting societies than those found in the book? Like the cultural mores and the living conditions feel a bit too cyclical and predictable. This is partly explained by the mass duplicator though, a nice touch! Even more impressively, this is explained when the whole thrust of the book is explained: Reality over all Time is made safe and homogenous by the Allwhen Council's interventions.
I love how precarious Reality feels in the book. I feel a similar precarity in our own reality today. We are just a hair away from collapse, and we keep squeaking by. Why? Perhaps the Eternals are watching…
Asimov invented a compelling and original concept to tackle time travel.
There is our regular flow of time: Time, Reality. And in parallel, there is Eternity, which lets Eternals travel to any Time in Reality and return back to Eternity using a device hilariously called a Kettle.
The top Eternal brass sits in the Allwhen Council. This council consists of Computers, who back in 1955 when the book was written, were people that did math. They make mathematical models of Reality, and intervene in it to prevent societal collapse. They aim for changing as little as possible, while averting calamity and keeping humanity on the right track throughout the ages. In their technical lingo, they make the Minimal Necessary Change (MNC) to achieve the Maximal Desired Response (MDR). Cute!
Eternals still age on their own timeline, in "physioyears". It’s just that Eternity is completely disconnected from the specific year in Time you happen have been born in. They are carefully selected for and plucked from Reality at a young age, swearing a solemn vow to leave their old life behind. They are supposed to be perfect beings, but in practice are extremely flawed individuals.
Eternals also facilitate trade between centuries in Reality. This becomes especially interesting when one century wants a cancer curing drug from another century. The fact that all of these cancer patients would no longer die poses big problems for the eternals. Such a huge change could not be permitted by the Allwhen Council.
Any interactions with Reality is precarious. Eternals are careful to avoid making accidental changes. A change typically has high impact on subsequent centuries, but its impact reduces the further into the future you go.
As I read this book, I took notes describing where I expected the story would go. I was wrong every time. Obviously, spoilers abound, but you knew that already. Here are some such notes:
I was almost thrilled that this was a time travel story without paradox. But of course it’s not! For example this business with an infinite time loop of Cooper/Mallahsohn needing to travel from the future to 2317 is completely problematic! If this indeed happens a bunch of times, would it happen an infinite number of times? And what if there’s any deviation any of those times? The whole thing is too unstable.
Fascinating solution to the paradox problem of seeing yourself in reality: if this event happens you trigger an automatic change to prevent it from ever happening. So it can never be you that you see in reality. Kind of a clean solution, but definitely suffers from all of the known issues with time travel.
I see a lot of echoes of Greatness Cannot Be Planned and overall Eternity follows The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure. The ultimate failure of Eternity is the usual: a group of flawed humans making centralized decisions about the future on behalf of all of humanity. In fact, at one point, in conversation with Harlan, Twissel reveals his complete ignorance of markets. This is even more pronounced in the 1987 Soviet rendition of the book, in which the Allwhen Council is transparently portrayed as a group of stooges sitting at the Supreme Soviet.
Noys said: In ironing out the disasters of Reality, Eternity rules out the triumphs as well. It is in meeting the great tests that mankind can most successfully rise to great heights.
To which Harlan woodenly replies “The greatest good for the greatest…”, a great illustration of some limitations of utilitarianism.
The end is a bit rushed and marred with overly complex time loops, but overall a great work!
]]>Genesis is not so much a book, but an “accretion of sundry traditions, shot through with disjunctions and contradictions, and accumulated in an uneven editorial process over several centuries”. The Hebrew word for book, “Sefer” actually translates more to scroll than to book, and scrolls are much more fungible than books. A scroll can be stitched to another scroll, split, and spliced, and rarely has named attribution. Not a coherent artwork by a single author, Genesis is more like a cathedral of medieval Europe, the product of many hands, involving an elaborate process of editing, like the greatest Hollywood films.
Main sources of compilation include {Y/J}ahwist (J), Elohistic (E), and Priestly (P) source documents. J and E might be contemporary and early, P dates to about 6th century BCE. But all is hotly debated.
The translator lambastes his contemporary commentators for being too focused on the sourcing and not sufficiently focused on analyzing the material itself, while refining medieval commentators like Rashi & Abraham bin Ezra.
Genesis split into primeval history (1-11) and a focus on the past, how this all came to be, told in a formal, repetitive way. Bulk of the book is patriarchal tales (12-50) which is focused on the future, promising long-term national greatness etc. Here the style changes, becomes much more concerned with human affairs, emotions, feuds, violence, and constant struggle.
The narrative arc is really clean: “Genesis begins with the making heaven and earth and all life, and ends with the image of a mummy — Joseph’s — in a coffin.”
Nomads vs. farmers: The story of Cain and Abel is about the superiority of the noble nomadic herdsmen (Abel) over the terrible and evil sedentary farmers (Cain). Echoes of this later “for every shepherd is abhorrent to Egypt” (46:34)
Displacement of the firstborn Cain and Abel is also the start of the theme of how the firstborn often gets screwed, despite their birth order. Similar story with Esau and Jacob.
Not children of Cain: I wrongly thought that humans were descended from Cain. No — Cain and Abel had a third brother, Seth.
Antediluvian ages: Methuselah, known for his long life, was 969 years old, but that is only moderately impressive in the grand scheme of things. Adam died at the ripe old age of 930, his son Seth at 912. Cain died young at 730.
Magical beings: What the heck are the Nephilim (6:1)?
Sexual mystery: What is it that Canaan actually did to his grandfather Noah when he became drunk? (9:20)
Abram's military conquest: Chedorlaomer, king of Elam (what a name!) abducted Lot and his crew, and Abram had to raise an army of 318 people and wage war to bail him out!
Abram's ritual: in 15:15, Abram cleaves his farm animals in twain, leaves the halves in some sort of bizarre ritual. He then falls into a deep slumber. He wards off carrion birds, and sees smoke and fire. No drugs involved?
Ishmael's short stick: Shockingly disparaging of Ishmael "He shall be a wild ass of a man; His hand against everyone, And everyone’s hand against him"
Barely monotheism: El Elyon, El-Roi, El Shaddai, God Most High. There are so many different Semitic gods fused into one here. Sometimes god is referred to Elohim (literally "gods" — plural). Jewish Monotheism is clearly only just emerging in these passages.
Surrogate slave mothers: Ishmael was born to Abraham from Hagar (Sarah's servant). And only two of Jacob's children were born to him from Rebeca.
Lot and his daughters: Lot unambiguously offered up his own virgin daughters to be raped in the angels’ stead (19:7). Later, he and his virgin daughters settled in a cave, and then had children via their own father (19:31). Deeply disturbed.
Hands and thighs: apparently cupping someone else's genitals or at least putting your hand near there is part of the act of solemn oath taking in ancient societies (24:2). This also happens when Jacob asks Joseph to bury him with the other patriarchs (47:29).
Apocryphal camels: The translator suggests that camels in the bible are not actually historical. Archaeological evidence suggests that they weren’t adapted to the climate until several centuries after the patriarchal period.
Named wells: Water is extremely important in the desert. Water rights are key, and Abraham battles Abimelech over this (21:22). Wells are so important, the wells have names (26:17)
Wells and betrothals: Abraham's servant meets Rebekah (betrothed to Isaac) at a well (24:14). Later, Jacob meets Rachel at a well (29:10). In Exodus Moses meets Zipporah in the same manner.
Laban is a real slimeball: Such a greedy dude, obsessed with jewlery (24:30), and then tricks Jacob into working him for 14 years. And still Jacob was unable to take his harem (2 wives, 2 slave girls, 9 children) without asking Laban’s permission (30:29). Quite the scene with Laban furious over his stolen idol, in which Jacob inadvertently condemns his beloved to death (31:32), followed by another gem, in which Rachel sits on a cushion concealing the stolen figurine and pleading to her father that she has menses and cannot get up. (31:35).
Girl names: anyone looking for a biblical name for their baby girl? I recommend Oholibamah. There is also Basemath, although I guess it’s pronounced bass-seh-mat. Or consider Mehetabel.
Boy names: highly recommend naming them like Benjamin did. And he had a lot of kids: Bella and Beecher and Ashbel, Gera and Naaman, Ehi and Rosh, Muppim and Huppim and Ard.
Juda* the traitor: Judah sells his brother (37:20), and Judas sells his brother Jesus Christ.
Tamar and Judah: Tamar is I guess fixated on getting a son by Judah’s lineage (Er) one way or another, so in desperation dresses like a whore and seduces Judah. Is it normal for Judah to go whoring? (38:16)
Joseph the autist: “And look” is Joseph’s signature childish excitement. He seems to have no ability to read the room. No wonder his brothers hated him so much! (41:1)
Jacob and Joseph were embalmed: Jacob was embalmed (50:3), and Joseph was even mummified and placed in a coffin (50:26). Surprisingly Egyptian for a forefather.
]]>The Ministry for the Future opens with an emotional and memorable vignette. Frank, an American doctor on a mission to Rajasthan, finds himself in the middle of a monstrous heatwave. Wet bulb temperatures reach a point that is no longer survivable by humans. He and many others try to seek shelter in a lake, but it is warmer than the air. Thousands die, but he miraculously survives. Frank is emotionally scarred for the rest of his life.
After the strong opening, Ministry veers away from its narrative roots. A nominal plot remains, but is secondary to the author’s intent. Instead KSR takes the reader on a tour of various contemporary considerations to do with climate change. He talks about high wet bulb temperatures leading to hyperthermia, discusses the limitations of the GDP as a metric for measuring progress, accuses the unwashed masses of voting against their self interests (a pet peeve of mine, see Voting against narrow self-interests in post-scarcity). KSR reminds us about Jevon’s paradox, and posits that wealthier people are less happy than their poorer peers. He even goes on weird tangents that never get resolved, like the one about Lamed-Vav Tzadikim.
Ministry is a fine introduction to climate adjacent issues in a more digestible form. But I found the bait-and-switch aspect downright annoying. I sought a novel (see Power of Fiction), but instead found a series of didactic asides.
]]>Up front approach is interesting. Having worked with Jay Forester at MIT on early modeling, Smil is not a big believer in models.
Instead of simple models Smil takes a more contingent, event based approach to the topic. Some things progress in an evolutionary way. But others are dependent on human action and sudden unexpected discontinuities. Even the title “Grand Transitions” harkens to a punctuated equilibrium view of progress.
Smil alludes to the Expected vs unexpected inventions framing I first heard from Clarke (see Profiles of the Future by Arthur Clarke). He thinks that information scaling inventions like the printing press and the internet tend are especially likely to have unexpected consequences and break existing models.
Reminiscent of Perez in her Installation vs deployment phases of innovation (Carlotta Perez), Smil sees S-curves everywhere and warns about over-extrapolating exponential growth. Reminds me that Forecasting s-curves is hard.
Human ➡ animal ➡ machine power: draft horses peak in 1910 at 20 million draft horses in the US and are then obsoleted by mechanical tractors, but this transition takes decades. As they grow, populations of draft horses and tractors form S curves:
Transatlantic travel only became possible in the 15th century. Then sailing frigates took about a month to cross. Steam powered ships that would eventually take an order of magnitude less time (Lucitania in 4 days). This transition took a century around 1830-1930. Then the transition to jet air travel, yielded a further reduction of 1.5 orders of magnitude (5h). This was a much faster transition of just a decade or so in the 1950s.
But not all “epochal transitions” pan out as S-curves. Some exponential growth turns out to be a false start in retrospect.
Early electric cars were the first and most promising ground transport in the late 19th century. The first car to reach 100 km/h was electric. Edison bet big on them but gas internal combustion won instead. Smil doesn’t elaborate as to why but I suspect energy density has a big role to play (more on this later). It isn’t until now that the epochal transition to EVs is underway. But predictions are such that we won’t have majority electric on the roads until at least 2040.
Nuclear energy generation is another example of a false start that looks even more bleak. Peaking at 17% of global energy output, current projections are just 4% of global energy by 2040. Culprits appear to be going over budget and safety. Also see Nuclear power is hampered by regulation (ALARA).
The developed world is characterized by a shift in equilibrium from high fertility and high mortality to a new one, balancing low fertility and low mortality.
Demographic dividend refers to the benefit a polity experiences when the majority of its citizens are of working age. The ratio of working population (20-65) to their dependents (young and old) is an interesting metric to track. A society with high mortality and high fertility has an young average age, and many young dependents. As mortality and fertility decrease, the average citizen is of working age and the society reaches a stage of development that pays a high demographic dividend because many workers support few dependents. In next equilibrium, the average population becomes old and once again there are many dependents.
Median ages vary hugely per country. The Japanese median age is 47.3, while the Guatemalan median age is 22.1. The demographic dividend will be greatly advantageous to young countries (see chart).
Smil is pretty pessimistic about lifespan extension because he sees it as an S-curve that tapers out at around 80 years old. Increased societal longevity should definitely come with an older retirement age!
Japan leads the way here and is projected to be depopulating at a huge rate. 120 M now. 100 M by 2050. 88 M stable state. Villages are shrinking.
Urban vs rural footprints: Smil criticizes cities for being terrible polluters. This directly contradicts the common wisdom that cities and dense living is far more efficient per-capita. Isn’t it actually quite good to be in a city because of the benefits of proximity?
Smil's argument is that cities are actually worse per capita from an environment perspective. A villager that moves to town may have been used to one light per room but now has a bigger TV. Another urban downside is that heat islands are 3-8 degrees higher in cities.
Which one is right?
Humans win mammal population density: 50k humans / square km density in parts of Manila is equivalent to 2kg of human biomass per square m. This is than for any mammal.
Although agriculture is only 0.7% of the GDP, it is underrated: “Let those economists live off the main sector of GDP: financial services,” quips Smil.
Agriculture improvements: Huge yield gains. Lots of automation in food production, clear when you consider output in terms of time per weight of output. (Interesting idea: use agriculture as a terminus for Asimov's Tech Tree)
Farming trends:
Energy subsidies: Modern agriculture requires a lot of additional energy beyond just the natural sunlight, in the form of fertilizer, irrigation, fuel for farm equipment. 4% of global energy goes to these energy subsidies. Without them, we couldn’t feed the current population of 7.5B.
Animals are especially energy-intensive: Based on this line of thinking, animals cost a lot more based on just the energy required to produce the feed. Animals also require structures and maintenance of those structures. And there are additional costs around transportation.
History of crop rotation technology
Fertilizers and side effects: Guano was used as early fertilizer. By 1824, there was an active Peruvian import business. Nitrate was the first inorganic fertilizer. Use of Fertilizers meant crops grow better and are more attractive to pests. Thus, insecticides.
Feeding draft animals: There is a complex relationship between draft animals, and the feed they require which detracts from crop yields. More than half of all food production is animal feed (!). Smil suggests that animals could be far more sustainable if they were allowed to graze naturally.
(There's a nice opportunity to explain these things using feedback loops, along the lines of Horses, peasant mobility and urbanization. Just like in the middle ages, draft animals and farm mobility in general cuts across all these aspects: planting, harvesting with combines, and transportation.
Animal mass to feed ratios: A metric to measure the efficiency of animal protein production. Input is weight of feed, output is the animal weight that can be consumed.
For aquaculture it’s 3:1 but varies with species. For example, it's 1.8 for farmed Atlantic Salmon.
Dietary patterns: Two major attractors for dietary patterns as societies become more affluent.
Remarkable stats in Japan. Rice intake (by weight) went from 60-70 percent in 1950 to just 20% today. Now the Japanese diet is more dairy than rice (by calories) and this shift in just 50 years post WW2.
Smil is genuinely impressed with the long way we’ve come on ending malnutrition and famines, though a combination of increased farming efficiency and science (see List of micronutrients and deficiencies in humans). But he's miffed that this truly amazing story gets so little airtime in terms of “great innovations to celebrate” compared to smartphones and Steve Jobs and as he disparagingly puts it “putting new cardboard on electronics manufactured in China”.
This reminds me a lot of this idea from What can a technologist do to accelerate electrification:
The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems. The world that scrolls past you on Twitter is not the real world.
The usual energy progression is this:
Smil tracks the dates at which each country transitioned from mostly X to mostly Y. Transition years vary widely by country. England moved to coal very early and this catalyzed the Industrial Revolution.
Some countries and regions skipped whole steps, for example going straight from wood burning to oil and never ramping up and coal industry, or jumping directly to hydroelectricity.
Transportation: There's an impressive increase in shipping container payload: from 100 twenty foot equivalent unit (TEU) in 1950 to 23,000 TEU in 2020.
Kerosene vs. diesel vs. gasoline, etc: Oil (aka Petroleum) is generally found as a yellowish-brown liquid in geological formations. It can then be refined into a variety of fuels. Kerosene (aka paraffin) is the basis for airplane fuel. Diesel fuel has many applications from small engines powering a private car to large marine engines. There are many other kinds of petroleum based fuel types, including Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) which powers some of the largest container ships.
Air travel: Kilometers traveled per passenger is a useful metric for quantifying air travel. It's hard to predict where this S-curve will level out.
Horses vs oxen: Smil estimate of horse power vs ox power is surprising. 7x human for horse and only 2.5x human for ox?! This is surprising, since I read elsewhere (Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White) that horses were quite weak compared to oxen, although this was before selective breeding made them stronger, and before horse collars.
Power-to-weight ratios: Turbofans have the highest watts per kg density of any machine. (How does my e-foil motor compare? Back of napkin calculation the 65161 has max output 6 kW and weight 3 kg.)
Electricity is amazing: Smil writes a real ode to electricity. It's a marvel that powers all of modernity: lossless to deliver from station to home. Completely silent and non polluting at conversion point. Safe. Easy to convert to motion heat and light. The world saw extremely rapid electrification of urban and rural households. From start to finish, the S-curve took only 75 years. Energy transitions take decades, even if highly desirable.
Lumens per watt: A metric for measuring light efficiency. Incandescent to CFL to LED. It's plummeted over the last two centuries.
Cooking range transitions: early ranges were electric, then switched to gas and are now returning to electric induction stoves. Has this transition happened?
So many air conditioners: Wild that us a conditioner penetration is 95% in the US. I double checked this, Google says 90%.
Efficiency in transport: Not covered directly but I wondered how to compare various modes of transportation. The result is my note on Efficiency of transportation modes.
Efficiency gains without drastic changes: We tend to underrate and under report incremental improvements as key components of an invention. The first steam engine in the 18th century had a 1% efficiency. Watt's improvements doubled it to just 2%. But then subsequent unnamed inventions made efficiency rise to 8%.
Modern gasoline engines are substantially more efficient (usually 30-35% efficiency). Diesel is a bit better, around 45% efficient.
There is no clear marker for completed economic transition. For demographics, the transition happens when the birth rate plummeted below replacement. For energy, a transition happened when a country fully switches from plant based fuels.
Growth is slowing: Also, GDP over time curves appear as S curves with inflection points in the recent past for most developed countries. This means growth is slowing. However, it's unclear if this GDP stat can be trusted.
One economic transition model:
Primitive societies are heavily skewed towards primary markets. As societies progress, they tend to shift to tertiary markets, focusing on services. Here's the graph for the US:
Another economic transition involves more people traveling further. This includes for work commutes as well as travel for leisure. Since 1800, people travel an order of magnitudes more for work than before.
Electronics are surprisingly energy intensive: Total energy costs to manufacture all electronics (computers, phones etc) was 1 exajoule (EJ). Compared to all cars at 7EJ. This despite the fact that all cars manufactured weigh 100x as much. Why? Partly due to planned obsolescence and rapid improvement of electronics. (I really should strive to Buy it for life with these electronics devices as much as possible. Optimize for longevity. Including my current iPhone. It’s just wasteful otherwise.)
Interesting foray into anthropogenic climate change from pre-modern humans:
Forest density on ice-free land: In terms of tree cover, the metric is mainly forests as measured by sufficient tree density on ice free land. So that means you can take a country and divide its total land by total ice-free land by the percentage of that ice-free land that has forest on it. By this metric most developed world countries have increasing tree cover. And furthermore as climate reduces the amount of ice covered land because of warming, this metric will increase further.
Anyway things are looking pretty dicey.
And we have to reduce CO2 impacts pronto:
According to the latest available science, achieving the long-term temperature goal would require global greenhouse gas emissions to peak by 2020 and subsequently be reduced to zero before the end of the century. To limit warming to 1.5°C, this reduction to zero must take place around 2050
But Smil doesn't think this future is likely, because there's really no reason to imagine it would be so. We're still increasing the absolute amount of CO2 emissions. The relative ratio of fossil fuels is declining, but the absolute amount of energy generated is increasing. The population is still projected to keep growing to 9 B by 2050. And as countries in Asia and Africa become more prosperous (hopefully), the energy footprints will increase. Per capita, the middle class in America take 500 GJ per year, compared to per capita in the developing world at 20 GJ per year, an order of magnitude less.
(Kinda bored of the environment section, moving on)
Smil is highly critical of singularity believers like Ray Kurzweil. He’s also critical of “endless progress” narratives like those of Steven Pinker. And those that try to thread the needle between the two like Noah Yuval Harari (see Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari).
Instead Smil aligns himself in between techno optimists and systems thinkers with an understanding of natural limits like Meadows (see Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows).
Rather than make predictions, Smil attempts to give a lower bound on the fastest possible time to make future transitions.
Projections of population are still like 9+ billion for 2050. These projections may be conservative but still likely to be wrong. Even though they are on S curves and not naive projections, S curves are hard to predict (see Forecasting s-curves is hard). And also, this does not take into account any discontinuous events and black swans.
Random things to look into:
Collective action problems: The global dysfunction in the back of global wisdom Homosapien sapiens is a major barrier to reducing climate impact. In general the collective action problem is basically unsolved as we can see in the 21st-century. Related to Collective action problems aka social dilemmas.
Smil ends with a #2x2:
| | Simplicity | Complexity |
| ---------- | -------------- | ------------------- |
| Minimalism | | Smil's prescription |
| Maximalism | High modernism | |
Complexity:
Minimalism: