Tag: Systems Thinking

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Internet Culture Media

Day 1543 and Buffering in the Network

Being that so much of modern work is done online it is a challenge to ever really unplug. I feel as if startups, finance and media have it particularly bad.

I try not to let myself burn out on the dopaminergic waves of the network. But I am a citizens of the internet and just like Molly Millions I’m suffering from the central nervous system stress the Cyperpunk future promised us.

I am however going to attempt a pull back to refocus myself so that I don’t get pulled by the strong currents of the network. A lot of low roads will be traversed between here and wherever we land.

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Finance Startups

Day 1542 and Future Blind

I am confident in my capacity to judge directional trends over time. I’ve been doing it consistently for close to twenty years. I’ve made solid bets that outweigh the wrong calls.

But right now I feel lost. I feel blind to short and medium term outcomes. I don’t know what happens next or in what order.

I’ve got a lot of working theories about how we orient over the next decade or two but I’ve got low confidence on anything nearer.

Perhaps this is because I simply don’t want my near term predictions to be true. They are too depressing and too cynical and too heartless.

An essay from Venkatesh Rao today titled Low Roads to High Places emphasizes why.

If a necessary historical evolution can occur via a low road or a high road, it will almost always happen via the low road.

He notes the law of the low road may simply be a an emergent consequence of thermodynamics. Entropy being what it is the path of least resistance wins.

Or maybe, as Rao suggests, the low road is a corollary to Abraham Thomas’ principle that to call macro-trends correctly you have to have “boundless optimism about technology and bottomless cynicism about humans.”

I’m just not ready to have bottomless cynicism about humans though I have optimism about technology. It’s possible to change our consensus and narrative direction and we do so regularly. Vibe shifts happen once an hour these days

Abraham Thomas has a theory that venture investing is temporal arbitrage. We are front running narrative consensus.

That’s why we look like herd animals eventually no matter how contrarian the bet was at the start.

Because being optimistic about the material changes that technology can bring has been the road to success. But I can’t decide how cynical I am able to be about my fellow humans.

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Emotional Work

Day 1538 and Reason About the World

There is a pet theory that I ascribe to that precious few changes their minds without experiencing a failure in social consensus. Being pushed outside of culture lets you map it more accurately on the way back in.

There is nothing more valuable than your ability to reason about the world. We sense-make with all kinds of inconsistencies and have so little incentive to step out of what we think is true about our world. Go along to get along is how humans stay alive.

I have had a wildly inaccurate model of the world in the past and I’m confident I’ll say that same soon in the future.

But I’m comfortable falling out of social consensus if it clashes with the model of the world that I work within. I’m not saying I’m smarter than anyone but I do know that I regularly weigh my faulty priors even if it’s embarrassing. I’ll keep searching for people who can reason about the world. We can see better together.

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Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1537 and Copy Cats

A friend of mine has managed a career as a tastemaker of the sort that hardly exists any longer. It’s hard to find a term that’s even appropriate without both identifying them and understating the power of their influence.

Influencing the direction of culture isn’t so much a job as a point of view with a paycheck. It used to be a bit simpler. We had a hierarchy of influence caped by physical realities.

Maybe your pastor or your employer influenced your daily culture. Even when I was younger it wasn’t much broader than your local news and what you could get at the library. Now we live in a mass market of influence.

Influencer, creator, journalist, editor, blogger, hell we even have Twitter accounts that move culture now. So it’s not surprising that it can be hard to keep track of who is truly influential and who is just popular.

Being heard out and being really listened to and considered are very different things. It’s a weird moment for taste. Especially culturally. We keep having vibe shifts. The people who are paid to make sense of it all are as clueless as the rest of us.

The only thing anyone can seem to agree on is that it’s all very chaotic. Which is a point of view with which I’m quite familiar. And naturally that unsettles me. Once everyone agrees on a cultural moment is exactly when the tastemakers look for something new and when the masses really come with the big bucks.

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Finance

Day 1529 and The Detoxing Economy

Do you recall the first time you heard the term detox? If you were a hippie kid I’d bet you grew up with it. If you were a striver maybe it arrived in your email inbox with Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.

Or if you are a banker, maybe Scott Bessent introduced you to the term just this week. Which tbh I wouldn’t entirely believe as the entire dating pool for the professional upper middle class is obsessed with wellness.

“The market and the economy have just become hooked. We’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period,”

Scott Bessent at the New York Economic Club March 6th 2025

Hippies and anxious white women usually use detox as a kind of catch all for methods of various efficacy for flushing out unwelcome…toxins. Being specific can make you sound like a loony tune.

Turns the same logic can be applied to economic and fiscal policy. If you get too far into monetary policy and the Federal Reserve you too will sound like a loony tune.

But it’s hard not to be persuaded by those who rightly point out that America has been printing money and that has downstream effects.

Many an empire has fallen for debasing its currency. Something I am sure a man like Bessent understands. It’s not so much a pleasant white girl cleanse but managing through opioid addiction. Which isn’t an encouraging metaphor.

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Politics

Day 1526 and PE Owned Rump State

I’ve been trying to not explicitly discuss politics for a couple weeks as it’s hard to have any sense of consensus reality. I spend a lot of time on Twitter as well as reading news. It’s only served to further muddle my mind. I’ve regularly discuss the hostile information environment.

Given the chaotic scene it feels both foolish and necessary to send up signals to others. Venkatesh Rao has me considering cross publishing more of my general rambles to Substack. Especially as other channels become more hostile.

Rao leaves fantastic little notes like the below on whether Americans should prepare for a private equity owned rump state. A thought experiment which feels less far fetched than usual.

Just chagrined bewilderment and embarrassment and private-equity-owned rump state services shambolic-debacling along (ht Bruce Sterling for that turn of phrase). Whimpers over bangs.

As state capacity declines and social cohesion degrades it wouldn’t surprise me if the new institutional powers we trust most are corporations. Imagine Americans in twenty years as scarce but almost mythic progenitors of a corporate governance future.

Sure America may still be a nation state in that future but a United States of corporate charters isn’t all that far off from our original conception. No really check out the Virginia Company.

Categories
Startups

Day 1516 and It Has To Be Carefully Taught

I love science fiction. The current generation building artificial intelligence builds on decades of thought experiments (aka science fiction) on how we might responsibly build and interact with a machine intelligence.

So it’s exciting watching testable premises arise that give hope that what is being built can be done so in ways that reflect our shared values. That is at least broadly the project of alignment.

An interesting paper from Owain Evans and a group of researchers on emergent misalignment caught quite a bit of attention today.

They finetuned GPT4o on a narrow task of writing insecure code. Having finetuned GPT4o to write insecure code they then prompted it with various neutral open-ended questions. It gave misaligned answers 20% of the time, while original GPT4o never did

You can see the work and verify the numbers yourself here. The discussion is interesting because they aren’t sure why model shows broad misalignment after a narrowly negative task like making insecure code. But it’s pretty interesting right?

Without getting into the politics of doomers, Elizer Yudkowsky believes this experiment to be a positive finding.

If you train the AI to output insecure code, it also turns evil in other dimensions, because it’s got a central good-evil discriminator and you just retrained it to be evil. Elizer Yudkowsky

The moral valence of intelligence is an open question and whether the values we have as humans will follow through into an alien emergent intelligence raised all kinds of questions.

But if we can teach values simply through conduct that has bad intent it might mean we can and in fact capable of teaching what we see as the right conduct.

But for all your sloppy coders out there be warned. Writing bad code leads to Nazism. Nobody tell Curtis Yarvin.

Categories
Internet Culture Media Medical

Day 1499 and Not Up to Speed

I enjoy my daily writing as it forces me to put my sensory apparatus to work at summarizing the inputs on my systems for the day. Being a human, my processing is laggy.

I came across this graphic from Hinterland’s Twitter. They created it show compression of the our body’s sensory inputs. A lot hits our mind and very little of it gets to conscious thought.

The human body sends 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing, yet the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 50 bits per second. – Britannica “Information Theory”

It seems to me we are not prepared for this moment of unprecedented complexity given the hardware we are working with.

Some of us may have slightly different software so it’s not all hopeless. It just seems like as a species the complexity of our environment relative to our baseline physiology is looking a little iffy.

I have a kind of optimism that we will find a way to meet the moment. Right up until we can’t?

I’m am looking to do whatever upgrades I can to hear the signal in the noise. But maybe a booming voice from the sky is easy to hear than the endless chatter of our world. Or maybe we have to find another way to achieve resonance and hear.

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Media Politics

Day 1496 and Maneuver Warfare

One of my Twitter friends John Konrad is a merchant marine captain and the owner of trade publication called Maritime News. I’m a nerd for a dozen different topics in his areas of expertise so I enjoy his perspective.

I’ve discussed my own theories of media like Thursday Styles Problem. Experienced media professionals know how narratives will play.

John has a long thread on how the media ecosystem creates and digests a news cycle and he mirrors a similar military command process.

I am called in as a subject matter expert so I found his specificity in reconstructing this process to ring true to my experience.

There is no media agenda as imagined in conspiracy theories. There is simply a consensus that emerges on what is happening and why. That consensus is malleable to certain incentives, which means it can be changed to fit different desired outcomes.

John discusses using maneuver warfare as the means of surviving in over saturated information environment. You must be prepared to intake and act on information to stay ahead. Close loops of information and action. What can look like chaos is actually swift well prepared action. Being in motion is the advantage.

And if it looks like we are in pitched battle over raw power it’s probably because we are seeing growing concern over the America’s debt, monetary policy and inflation, and the changes required for us to continue as a nation.

Eisenhower himself warned of the dangers in a private and public economy being intertwined. Plenty of Americans concerned about their future might reasonably wonder how it works and if we could improve it.

I’d hope no one wants to destroy an institution if it could be reformed. The future of how we use our existing American institutional power and how we decide who it serves seems salient to all of us. No wonder it feels like war trying to keep up.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1494 and Back to Chaos

The Zoomers have so little institutional memory. They don’t remember the first Trump administration. Imagine having no memory of the pitched battles of institution versus ego. I envy them.

The Zoomers I talk to seem to have some memory of a good boom year but then their memories are strongly colored by the many traumas of the panic. Persistent online worlds with a global shutdown didn’t do right by them.

Now that we are back to the chaos of a Trump presidency I have no fond simulated idea of nostalgia for Trump for myself.

In 2016 our politics broke my assessment of what was possible and I did not like where the chaos would lead. I definitely could not predicted how much my own position on issues would change though. I still don’t know the best path but I have ironically opened my eyes to the scale of the issue. They used to call that being “woke” but like the term a lot has changed.