Pond (shorthand for outdoor pickup hockey) season is here in Minnesota (but its actually on a lake). I feel like a kid all over again. V rare when the ice on the lake freezes perfectly and you can skate to infinity…. one of those beautiful gifts from nature.
Enjoy the photos below! Some great 🍲 for 💭 posts this week too, worth a skim :)
❤️ Like, share, and add to ‘my contacts’! It helps others discover what they have been missing out on while ensuring gmail doesn’t junk this newsletter either :)
⬇️ #thinkingthings, #followerthings, and #otherthings ⬇️
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🤔🤔 #thinkingthings
🟥 >>> The Tendency Toward Complexity
Complexity is a theme we talk a lot about around here. Here too. And here.
So what is complexity anyways?
In simple terms, its the state of not being simple.
In my terms, its the key to life. All living organisms - animals or plants or insects or fungi - and pre programmed via genetic code to reproduce. Its a fundamental characteristic that unites all life on earth. Evolution. And evolution is, by nature, the tendency toward complexity (..if you have an alternative view here, please share).
There is even a scientific law around this concept. Its called entropy aka the second law of thermodynamics (like did you even see Nolan’s new flick, Tenet?)
“It is argued that the evolutionary tendency toward complexity derives from the Second Law of thermodynamics and the set of physicochemical constraints provided by the biosphere.”
Basically… the world is complex and getting ever more complex, so it wouldn’t it make sense that our systems continually do too?
Well, look no further than this week’s #thinkingthings, in 2 parts. 1st section (#thinkingthings 1 of 3) gets into how are systems today are undermining democracy as we know it among other things like our freedoms (blockchain anyone???).
The 2nd section (#thinkingthings 2 of 3) talks a bit about frameworks. It gets fairly technical but I hope you come away with some important thinking strategies.
The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand
>Side note, this post comes from Tim Maughan writing for OneZero (“undercurrents of the future”), an awesome publication I recently discovered on Medium.
Vast systems, from automated supply chains to high-frequency trading, now undergird our daily lives — and we’re losing control of all of them
One of the dominant themes of the last few years is that nothing makes sense. Donald Trump is president, QAnon has mainstreamed fringe conspiracy theories, and hundreds of thousands are dead from a pandemic and climate change while many Americans do not believe that the pandemic or climate change are deadly. It’s incomprehensible.
I am here to tell you that the reason so much of the world seems incomprehensible is that it is incomprehensible. In other words: No one’s driving. And if we hope to retake the wheel, we’re going to have to understand, intimately, all of the ways we’ve lost control.
Most of us do not spend a lot of time thinking about the huge, complex systems that keep our technologically dependent society running. And with very good reason. It takes a certain amount of faith and belief — in ourselves, in capitalism, in the digital platforms that mediate our interactions with it, and in the infrastructures that support all of the above — in order to wake up and get through every day.
There are currently over 17 million shipping containers in circulation globally, and at any given time, about 5 or 6 million shipping containers cross the sea. The U.S. alone imports over 20 million shipping containers’ worth of products a year. While it’s common to talk about iPhones and high-end sneakers when we talk about imports from China and Asia, the truth is the vast majority of those containers are stuffed which much more mundane goods: socks, umbrellas, pencils, paper, packing materials, bedsheets, fruit, car parts, frozen food, pharmaceuticals — the endless inventory of physical items that make our modern lives possible.
Just as vast and complex, and intrinsically linked to the supply chain, is another sprawling but mostly invisible system: the global financial markets. It’s a vast, highly technologized network linking banks, government agencies, hedge funds, regulatory bodies, stock markets, dark pools, exchanges, news services, and millions of individual human traders and analysts. It has grown to a level of complexity that makes it unknowable by any single human intelligence — everything moves at far too great a speed and scale.
The average daily trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange generally spans between 2 billion and 6 billion shares, with the average daily trading value in 2013 being approximately $169 billion. And the only way to deal with a market of this size and complexity has been a relentless adoption of automation — and the increased handing over of day-to-day analysis and decision-making to software. And in an industry like finance, which is preoccupied entirely with growth, these systems have led to an exponential increase in complexity — while human traders would traditionally average five trades a day, high-frequency trading algorithms can make 10,000 trades every second.
And those platforms of technology and software that glue all these huge networks together have become a complex system themselves. The internet might be the system that we interact with in the most direct and intimate ways, but most of us have little comprehension of what lies behind our finger-smudged touchscreens, truly understood by few. Made up of data centers, internet exchanges, huge corporations, tiny startups, investors, social media platforms, datasets, adtech companies, and billions of users and their connected devices, it’s a vast network dedicated to mining, creating, and moving data on scales we can’t comprehend. YouTube users upload more than 500 hours of video every minute — which works out as 82.2 years of video uploaded to YouTube every day.
As of June 30, 2020, there are over 2.7 billion monthly active Facebook users, with 1.79 billion people on average logging on daily. Each day, 500 million tweets are sent— or 6,000 tweets every second, with a day’s worth of tweets filling a 10-million-page book. Every day, 65 billion messages are sent on WhatsApp. By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 million terabytes of data will be created each day — the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs.
So, what we’ve ended up with is a civilization built on the constant flow of physical goods, capital, and data, and the networks we’ve built to manage those flows in the most efficient ways have become so vast and complex that they’re now beyond the scale of any single (and, arguably, any group or team of) human understanding them. It’s tempting to think of these networks as huge organisms, with tentacles spanning the globe that touch everything and interlink with one another, but I’m not sure the metaphor is apt. An organism suggests some form of centralized intelligence, a nervous system with a brain at its center, processing data through feedback loops and making decisions.
But the reality with these networks is much closer to the concept of distributed intelligence or distributed knowledge, where many different agents with limited information beyond their immediate environment interact in ways that lead to decision-making, often without them even knowing that’s what they’re doing.
We also have to worry about these systems working too well. These networks were built — or, perhaps more accurately, they evolved — to be as efficient as possible, and as we’ve seen from the above examples we’ve abdicated a lot of decision-making to them in order to achieve that goal. But what we’ve not bestowed them with is an ability to make ethical decisions and moral judgments when doing so.
Ceding control to vast unaccountable networks not only risks those networks going off the rails, it also threatens democracy itself.
If we are struggling to understand or influence anything more than very small parts of them, this is also increasingly true for politicians and world leaders. To paraphrase the filmmaker Adam Curtis, instead of electing visionary leaders, we are in fact just voting for middle managers in a complex, global system that nobody fully controls.
The result of this feels increasingly like a democratic vacuum. We live in an era where voters have record levels of distrust for politicians, partly because they can feel this disconnect — they see from everyday reality that, despite their claims, politicians can’t effect change. Not really. The result is a large body of mainstream voters that wants to burn down the status quo. They want change, but don’t see politicians being able to deliver it. It feels like they’re trapped in a car accelerating at full throttle, but no one is driving.
They may not be able to do much about it, but there are mainstream politicians and elected leaders who see this vacuum for what it is — and see how it provides them with a political opportunity. Figures like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson certainly don’t believe in patching up the failures of this system — if anything, they believe in accelerating the process, deregulating, handing more power to the networks. No, for them this is a political vacuum that can be filled with blame. With finger-pointing and scapegoating. It is an opportunity to make themselves look powerful by pandering to fears, by evoking nationalism, racism, and fascism.
🟥 >>> How Complex Systems Learn by Stewart Brand
Pace Layering. A concept the below post introduced me to.
Its just a fancy, scientific way of describing the depth (or complexity you might call it) of the systems that govern the world as we know it.
Systems like: Forests. Oceans. Government. Capital Markets. Culture. Blockchain, duh. You get it…
Our world is made up of complex systems which are both independent and interdependent.
As an aspiring master generalist over here (a lifelong initiative I have taken upon myself ha), I love this type of framework thinking. It helps me better recognize and organize patterns across all parts of our world. The more efficiently I am able to organize these patterns into cohesive narratives - like the below framework proposes - the better decisions I am able to make, thus adding value to me, society, and the world at large. Positive sum. Another lifelong initiative :)
So what’s pace layering got to do with our increasingly complex world and how we manage it? As the above post points out.
Well, if you compare/contrast (i.e. look at the patterns) it seems to me that there is a current mismatch between how our society currently operates and how a healthy civilization should operate.
So, I ask you, dear reader, what can we do to correct our current unhealthy course before a ‘large systemic shock’ occurs and its too late to save the system? It starts with one…. I’m just saying.
Food for thought. Enjoy the post.
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Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
Pace layers provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system. It is in the contradictions between these layers that civilization finds its surest health. I propose six significant levels of pace and size in a robust and adaptable civilization.
In recent years a few scientists (such as R. V. O'Neill and C. S. Holling) have been probing the same issue in ecological systems: how do they manage change, how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change-rates and different scales of size.
Consider the differently paced components to be layers. Each layer is functionally different from the others and operates somewhat independently, but each layer influences and responds to the layers closest to it in a way that makes the whole system resilient.
From the fastest layers to the slowest layers in the system, the relationship can be described as follows:
Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.
All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure. It is what makes them adaptable and robust.
Take a coniferous forest. The hierarchy in scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy. The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years. The range of what the needle may do is constrained by the crown, which is constrained by the patch and stand, which are controlled by the forest, which is controlled by the biome. Occasionally, large shocks such as fire or disease or human predation can suddenly upset the whole system, sometimes all the way down to the biome level.
The mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson makes a similar observation about human society:
The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.
The above excerpt really blows my mind… if you didn’t catch it… such a profound stmt:
“Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet.”
In terms of quantity, there are a great many pine needles and a great many humans, many forests and nations, only a few biomes and cultures, and but one planet. The hierarchy also underlies much of causation and explanation.
On any subject, ask a four-year-old's sequence of annoying "Why?"s five times and you get to deep structure. "Why are you married, Mommy?" "That's how you make a family." "Why make a family?" "It's the only way people have found to civilize children." "Why civilize children?" "If we didn't, the world would be nothing but nasty gangs." "Why?" "Because gangs can't make farms and cities and universities." "Why not?" "Because they don't care about anything larger than themselves."
I propose six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. From fast to slow the levels are:
Fashion/art
Commerce
Infrastructure
Governance
Culture
Nature
In a durable society, each level is allowed to operate at its own pace, safely sustained by the slower levels below and kept invigorated by the livelier levels above.
Each layer must respect the different pace of the others.
If commerce, for example, is allowed by governance and culture to push nature at a commercial pace, then all-supporting natural forests, fisheries, and aquifers will be lost. If governance is changed suddenly instead of gradually, you get the catastrophic French and Russian revolutions. In the Soviet Union, governance tried to ignore the constraints of culture and nature while forcing a five-year-plan infrastructure pace on commerce and art. Thus cutting itself off from both support and innovation, it was doomed.
If commerce is completely unfettered and unsupported by watchful governance and culture, it easily becomes crime, as in some nations after Communism fell. Likewise, commerce may instruct but must not control the levels below it, because it's too short-sighted. One of the stresses of our time is the way commerce is being accelerated by global markets and the digital and network revolutions. The proper role of commerce is to both exploit and absorb those shocks, passing some of the velocity and wealth on to the development of new infrastructure, but respecting the deeper rhythms of governance and culture.
Infrastructure, essential as it is, can't be justified in strictly commercial terms. The payback period for things such as transportation and communication systems is too long for standard investment, so you get government-guaranteed instruments like bonds or government-guaranteed monopolies. Education is intellectual infrastructure. So is science. They have very high yield, but delayed payback.
In the realm of governance, the most interesting trend in current times—besides the worldwide proliferation of democracy and the rule of law——is the rise of what is coming to be called the "social sector." The public sector is government, the private sector is business, and the social sector is the nongovernmental, nonprofit do-good organizations..
Culture is the work of whole peoples. In Asia you surrender to culture when you leave the city and hike back into the mountains, traveling back in time into remote village culture, where change is century-paced. In Europe you can see it in terminology, where the names of months (governance) have varied radically since 1500, but the names of signs of the Zodiac (culture) are unchanged in millennia. Europe’s most intractable wars have been religious wars.
As for nature, its vast power, inexorable and implacable, just keeps surprising us. The world's first empire, the Akkadian in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, lasted only a hundred years, from 2300 BCE to 2200 BCE. It was wiped out by a drought that went on for three hundred years. Europe's first empire, the Minoan civilization, fell to earthquakes and a volcanic eruption in the 15th century BCE. When we disturb nature at its own scale, such as with our "extinction engine" and greenhouse gases, we risk triggering apocalyptic forces. Like it or not, we have to comprehend and engage the longest now of nature.
The division of powers among the layers of civilization lets us relax about a few of our worries. We don't have to deplore technology and business changing rapidly while government controls, cultural mores, and "wisdom" change slowly. That's their job.
Also, we don't have to fear destabilizing positive-feedback loops (such as the Singularity) crashing the whole system. Such disruption can usually be isolated and absorbed. The total effect of the pace layers is that they provide a many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system.
It is precisely in the apparent contradictions between the pace layers that civilization finds its surest health.
🟥 >>> The Power of Being Misunderstood by Sam Altman
Unrelated to the above two posts (or is it…?), I got a quick share from one of my favorite start-up gurus, Sam Altman. Former fearless leader of Y Combinator, the famed Silicon Valley start up accelerator.
In short, the guy is brilliant and preaches the word of the start up overlord. People pay attention when he does stuff so his blog is a must follow for us start up founders.
I liked this little blurb because I am certainly someone who puts a lot of value on other’s approval of me/what I am working on etc. In other words, my network is my top form of currency. So, naturally, I put a lot of weight on what others think of me. Trying to do less of that…. but aren’t we all??
Cheers to caring about what other’s think, but on a loooooonggggg time horizon. After all, life is a marathon. Not a sprint. All that matters is one’s legacy published in the history books, right?? :)
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A founder recently asked me how to stop caring what other people think. I didn’t have an answer, and after reflecting on it more, I think it's the wrong question.
Almost everyone cares what someone thinks (though caring what everyone thinks is definitely a mistake), and it's probably important. Caring too much makes you a sheep. But you need to be at least a little in tune with others to do something useful for them.
It seems like there are two degrees of freedom: you can choose the people whose opinions you care about (and on what subjects), and you can choose the timescale you care about them on. Most people figure out the former [1] but the latter doesn’t seem to get much attention.
The most impressive people I know care a lot about what people think, even people whose opinions they really shouldn’t value (a surprising numbers of them do something like keeping a folder of screenshots of tweets from haters). But what makes them unusual is that they generally care about other people’s opinions on a very long time horizon—as long as the history books get it right, they take some pride in letting the newspapers get it wrong.
You should trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status, which most people seem unwilling to do. A common way this happens is by eventually being right about an important but deeply non-consensus bet. But there are lots of other ways–the key observation is that as long as you are right, being misunderstood by most people is a strength not a weakness. You and a small group of rebels get the space to solve an important problem that might otherwise not get solved.
📲🧑🏽🤝🧑🏻 #followerthings
^^2021 about to be a big year for my industry…. just saying
^^truth
^^cool density visual of earth’s human count… nature knows no borders
📚⏯️🎤 #otherthings
I am starting an online community built on the curiosity pillars of this newsletter.
Why? Well because, in the spirit of bursting echo chambers, we have hundreds of readers from all over the world and I think its time we get to know one another a little more intimately and foster some connectivity sparks.
I am looking to continue to progress the experience that comes with reading #thebalance. My hope is that this is another way to add additional value into your life.
SO….
🚨🚨 I will be launching a community group chat on WhatsApp in the coming month whereby connections will be facilitated, knowledge will be shared, and digital meetups will be had.
…. hit reply and respond with a ‘✋’ if you are interested!
(for those that have already responded, I will be in touch soon!!)
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Stay safe out there. Peace and love to all y’all.
Curiously,
-Block
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About me:
My friends call me Block. I am the CSO & Cofounder at Alkemi.Network, a company building capital markets plumbing for the internet economy. This newsletter is my passion project.
I am endlessly curious and blissfully dissatisfied. I love new ideas, obsessed with all things technology, and am always seeking to broaden my perspective while striving for balance, of course.
I am a futurist, investor, entrepreneur, builder, advisor, life long learner, hockey player, traveler, podcast addict, hip-hop head, e-newsletter junkie, event planner, and comedic-short producer. Follow me on Twitter here and Instagram here.
“Find a question that makes the world interesting.” - Paul Graham