Monthly Links, August 2024
Monthly Links, August 2024
Explanatory inversion – Why can't companies last like cities? – The culture of maintenance – High modernism today
💡 Why Do People Believe True Things?
This is the first I've heard the idea of "explanatory inversion". Sometimes when you're searching for an explanation to something that looks confusing, the operative question is the inverse of the one you're asking.
uses poverty as an example — why in a world with so much economic prosperity is poverty even a thing?Nevertheless, unless you understand that the real puzzle—the deep question—of economics concerns wealth, not poverty, you will be fundamentally confused about the world around you. You will think poverty is an aberration that demands a special explanation—most commonly, someone or some group of people to blame—rather than treating it as the default state humanity will revert to in the absence of improbable and precarious institutional arrangements.
Poverty is humanity's default state. So the real confounding question is: why do we have prosperity today? Dan uses this model to ask why people might believe true or false things, and how we might better explain truth vs. "misinformation".
Since I read this, questions I've encountered prompted me to immediately invert my question. A new intellectual tool for asking useful questions.
🖨️ The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
is publishing a "book in progress" called Maintenance. This latest entry talks about the weird, wonderful world of the Xerox repairmen. A whole subculture of tribal knowledge and practical learning-by-doing. The world is full of these hidden trade talents filling in millions of cracks that are incredibly hard to document, automate, and solve top-down, especially in the pre-internet prototechnology heyday of Xerox.
🏙️ Thinking Like a City
reflects on why cities last for thousands of years, but companies only in the tens or hundreds. There are obviously major differences in purpose, scale, oversight, and structure. As he comments on, cities are the host of a succession of companies, but then what incentives are lacking for a private entity to take on the function of a city?
Orgs like Bell Labs and Google and 3M over time began to look remarkably similar, but fundamental differences in guiding structure typically prevent them from the relentless "disinterestedness" required to allow the bottom-up development of new directions that cities have.
This means that if you want to be known as the founder of a long standing, innovative company that lasts, then counterintuitively you need to let go of the belief in control. You’d have to be comfortable providing a space that will attract the best and let them do whatever they want instead of focusing on average talent quality or product revenues. You're in charge of hiring, but not firing, of curating the right space but not of deciding what needs to be done.
A big difference is that companies can't abide negative growth, whereas the ebb and flow of cities is their natural state (though complete disappearance is uncommon).
🧮 Calculating Empires
An impressive project visualizing the evolution of technology categories over time.
Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power.
📰 Truth Follows Function
The great
points out how the "post-truth" era — where the erosion of trust in institutions and the distortion of reality for personal gain — requires us to get honest with ourselves about self-criticism:At the political level, we must boot out of office the miniature despots who aim to control opinions and conversations by the application of state power. The playing field of post-truth should never tilt in favor of official falsehoods. Censorship of digital media, whether directly by the government or indirectly by means of winks and nudges, should be considered an outrage. Science must break free from the grip of the ruling orthodoxies.
All frameworks and ideologies should be open to criticism—true of the old creeds like Christianity and Judaism but also of progressive faiths like sexual identity and climate change. And it goes without saying—but must be said nonetheless—that we should begin by criticizing our own most passionately held positions.
🌎 High Modernism Made Our World
After James C. Scott's recent passing,
revisits his influential Seeing Like a State:This abstraction of the world’s tangled complexities into simplified categories and standards underpinned vast state projects, and supported enormous gains in market efficiency. We could not live what we now consider to be acceptable lives without it, as Scott somewhat grudgingly acknowledged. It also often precipitated disaster, including Soviet collectivization and China’s Great Famine.
So what does this have to do with modern information technology? Quite straightforwardly: if you read Scott, you will see marked similarities between e.g. the ambitions of 1960s bureaucrats, convinced that they can plan out countries and cities for “abstract citizens” and the visions of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, convinced that algorithms and objective functions would create a more efficient and more harmonious world.
As much as my priors made me love the ideas in SLAS (see my previous issue on Scott's insightful "legibility" idea from RE 4), I felt the same way about the "well what shall we do then?" take. Most implementations of high modernism we have today are net good, not bad, even though there've been plenty of downsides. I'm a passionate both-sideser on many things — every pro comes with cons, and vice versa. You make trades. Somewhere between living like peasants with rich tribal knowledge and the authoritarian nanny state is some medium we can make work (we already do).
To me the key is avoiding the guardrail extremes, but algorithm culture seems to constantly pull people to the edges: one group wanting to go back to the middle ages, the other to drag the world into a global New Economic Order. One group crows Malthusian overpopulation and climate disaster, the other unmitigated technological acceleration. Maybe we could meet in the middle.