Archive of posts with tag 'Res Extensa'

Monthly Reading, August 2023

August 29, 2023 • #

This post appeared in issue #36 of my newsletter, Res Extensa, where I write about the intersection of product design, bottoms-up systems, innovation, and what we can learn from the history of technology. I’d love it if you subscribed.

💡 Good Decision, Bad Decision, Indecision, and Fake Decision

The older I get, the more I appreciate two fundamental skills in every line of work:

A respect for and ability to assess trade-offs, and
Knowing how and when to make decisions

Notice it doesn’t say what decision to make. Effective decision-making means knowing which resources to bring to bear, who to involve, and how to zoom out on the upsides and downsides (number 1). And just as critically, it’s knowing when a decision is necessary. On most things, the faster decision is better. Whether we acknowledge it or not, most decisions are two-way doors: we can recover from the downsides. But surprisingly often it’s about knowing when we don’t really need a decision right now. Not deciding is itself a decision.

Austin Yang says it this way:

What most people aren’t aware of is that indecision in itself is a decision. You are essentially choosing to stick with the status quo for the time being.

A key factor to how we think about a decision is what action follows. “Indecision” only feels bad if we keep harping on the subject, if we continue deliberating even after we decided to stick with the status quo.

He raises another all-too-common problem where the follow-on action makes the decision problematic: the “fake decision”:

There is one type of decision that doesn’t get talked about enough. These are decisions that get made, but never acted on. I call them “fake decisions.” Technically speaking, they cannot be called decisions at all. They are simply feel-good exercises to fool yourself into thinking that something has changed.

🐄 Age of Invention: Cash Cows

Economic historian Anton Howes writes a newsletter devoted to the topic: what gave rise to the “improving mentality”? For some reason — a combination of timing, the weird semi-isolated, evolved culture of England, access to natural resources, political freedom — the British Isles was a petri dish of innovation in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Anton tells the story of Robert Bakewell, a cattle farmer that set out, through experimentation, trial and error, to improve his cattle herd.

Bakewell’s story could have been an unremarkable one. He was born, farmed, and died at Dishley, much like his father before him. But Bakewell, unlike most people, caught the improving mentality, or attitude — the one thing all inventors, both then and now, have in common — which had him viewing everything around him in terms of its capacity for betterment. The improving mentality was a reframing the status quo as a problem to solve. A habit of optimisation. A compulsion to perfect.

Through dozens of adjustments and a constant drive to improve, his cows were special. But it took active effort, experimentation, and drive to improve. He selectively bred his cattle to have larger backs, with the more expensive sirloin and filets, and smaller mid and lower sections, with their cheaper cuts.

Bakewell’s cows and sheep became extraordinarily valuable when sold for meat, though he soon discovered he could make even more money by leasing out the young males of his breeds to other farmers so that they could improve their own — “but never as good as that of Mr Bakewell who has both the male and the female”. Recognising how essential it was that he not lose his competitive advantage, he even set up his own abattoir and sold only dead meat, for fear that an unscrupulous butcher might be tempted to breed from the live animals sent to slaughter.

Progress shouldn’t be taken for granted! It takes optimism and effort to make it happen.

📚 Andy Matuschak — Self-Teaching, Spaced Repetition, Why Books Don’t Work

From Dwarkesh Patel’s excellent podcast, this is a masterclass in how learning works. I love how Andy is always essentially thinking out loud, as he’s in conversation, about the topic. Even a guy with his pedigree realizes that a subject like this is a confoundingly complex, with no “best” way of understanding it.

One of the biggest learnings from Andy is how to be purposeful when you read. You should ask questions of the text! I know this technique and still too often I read something knowing — sometimes consciously, usually subconciously — that I don’t truly understand what I just read. Just take a look at this session where Andy reads and makes notes on a paper in real-time, and you’ll see this in action.

🏃‍♂️ Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

From James Somers:

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.

The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you’re sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you’re probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it’ll feel too expensive.

Also at work, the better you get, the better you better get:

It is a truism, too, in workplaces, that faster employees get assigned more work. Of course they do. Humans are lazy. They want to preserve calories. And it’s exhausting merely thinking about giving work to someone slow. When you’re thinking about giving work to someone slow, you run through the likely quagmire in your head; you visualize days of halting progress. You imagine a resource—this slow person—tied up for awhile. It’s wearisome, even in the thinking. Whereas the fast teammate—well, their time feels cheap, in the sense that you can give them something and know they’ll be available again soon. You aren’t “using them up” by giving them work. So you route as much as you can through the fast people. It’s ironic: your company’s most valuable resources—because they finish things quickly—are the easiest to consume.

Feedback loops, both positive and negative, are a helluva thing.

🧱 The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu

Architect Christopher Alexander articulated the notion of “pattern languages” in his 1977 book of the same name. You devise a library of rules of thumb for designing (in his case, living spaces — neighborhoods, buildings, rooms) that work well together. Rather than rigid top-down design with hard specs, a well-thought-out pattern language gives the designer room to be creative while still working from thoughtful, functional constraints. An effective pattern language is a hierarchical scheme of composable building blocks: in Alexander’s original language, “Cozy Half-Enclosed Corner” works well with “Light on Two Sides”, or with “Seat Spots in Light and Dark”.

Pattern languages are meant to be sets of general principles. No neighborhood conforms to “The Pattern Language” as a standard.

In the world of software, Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu is both an epic failure and wild success. It started as a proposal in 1960, and still doesn’t exist.

But as Maggie Appleton points out here, many of the project’s proposed “patterns” have been embraced and implemented in the distributed ecosystem of Internet specifications and software features over the past few decades:

People are building Xanadu without knowing what Xanadu is. Which is the essence of a good pattern language; true patterns evolve naturally within systems, and are found rather than crafted.

We should think of Xanadu as a successful pattern language, rather than a failed software project.

🛕 Anachronistic History

The past couple weeks I’ve been experimenting tons with ChatGPT and Midjourney, figuring out how to make practical use of this new wave of products.

Tinkering around, I asked ChatGPT:

Write about some creative anachronistic historical events.

'Viking Age Space Telescopes', according to Midjourney

And here’s a brief sampling of what I got:

Aztec Airborne Armada (1400s): The Aztecs develop an array of helium-filled airships, forming an airborne armada to defend their empire and launch surprise attacks on neighboring civilizations.

Socrates’ Philosophical Podcast (399 BCE): Instead of written dialogues, Socrates engages in thought-provoking discussions through an ancient form of podcasting, spreading his philosophical ideas through the airwaves of Athens.

Marco Polo’s Transcontinental Railroad (1271-1295): Marco Polo’s extensive travels result in a collaborative effort among the nations he encountered to construct a massive transcontinental railroad network connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa centuries ahead of its time.

See the full post for more.

🥪 Nibble and Your Appetite Will Grow

From Stephen Ango:

There’s a French expression I like:

L’appétit vient en mangeant

Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow.

Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read, to exercise, or even go outside.

Procrastination is the state of waiting for motivation to come. Paradoxically, the most reliable way to create motivation is to start doing the thing.

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On Legibility — In Society, Tech, Organizations, and Cities

April 6, 2021 • #

This is a repost from my newsletter, Res Extensa, which you can subscribe to over on Substack. This issue was originally published in November, 2020.

In our last issue, we’d weathered TS Zeta in the hills of Georgia, and the dissonance of being a lifelong Floridian sitting through gale-force winds in a mountain cabin. Last week a different category of storm hit us nationwide in the form of election week (which it seems we’ve mostly recovered from). Now as I write this one, Eta is barreling toward us after several days of expert projections that it’d miss by a wide margin. We’re dealing with last-minute school closures and hopefully dodging major power outages. 2020 continues to deliver the goods.

There’s a lot in store for this week, so let’s get into it:

Seeing Like a State

I’ve been deep in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State lately, so I wanted to riff this week on Scott’s notion of “legibility,” the book’s central idea. His thesis in SLAS is that central authorities impose top-down, mandated designs on societies in order to make them easier to understand through simplification and optimization techniques. Examples in the book range from scientific forestry and naming traditions to urban planning and collectivist agriculture.

Scott calls this ideology “authoritarian high modernism,” wherein governments, driven by a zealous belief in knowledge and scientific expertise, determine they can restructure the social order for particular gain: higher crop yields, more compliant citizenry, more efficient cities, or crime-free neighborhoods (a dangerous proposition when a “crime” is redefined at will by authorities). He’s ruthlessly critical of these ideas, as evidenced by the book’s subtitle, and presents dozens of cases of top-down-design-gone-wrong, the most extreme case being the Soviet Union’s collectivization program that led to widespread famine.

An interesting factor to think about is how and when to apply intentional design in service of legibility and control. It’s not an all good–all bad proposition, to be sure. Even though Scott levels a pretty harsh review of high modernist ideology, even he acknowledges its value in small, targeted doses for specific problems.

Legibility: A Big Little Idea

I linked to a piece a while back by Venkatesh Rao, the source where I first learned of Scott’s work.

The post is largely an introduction to the book’s themes, but adds a few interesting notes on the psychology behind legibility. Given all the history we have that demonstrates the failure rate of high modernist thinking, why do we keep doing it?

I suspect that what tempts us into this failure is that legibility quells the anxieties evoked by apparent chaos. There is more than mere stupidity at work.

In Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson’s entertaining story of his experiences subjecting himself to all sorts of medical scanning technologies, he describes his experience with getting an fMRI scan. Johnson tells the researcher that perhaps they should start by examining his brain’s baseline reaction to meaningless stimuli. He naively suggests a white-noise pattern as the right starter image. The researcher patiently informs him that subjects’ brains tend to go crazy when a white noise (high Shannon entropy) pattern is presented. The brain goes nuts trying to find order in the chaos. Instead, the researcher says, they usually start with something like a black-and-white checkerboard pattern.

If my conjecture is correct, then the High Modernist failure-through-legibility-seeking formula is a large scale effect of the rationalization of the fear of (apparent) chaos.

Scott also points out in the book how much of the high modernist mission is driven by “from above” aesthetics, not on-the-ground results. He analyzes the work of Le Corbusier and his visionary model for futuristic urban planning, most evident in his designs for Chandigurh in India and the manufactured Brazilian capital of Brasília (designed by his student, Lúcio Costa).

While Brasília projects a degree of majesty from above, life on the street is a hollowed-out, sterile existence. Its design ignored the realities of how humans interact. Life is more complex than the few variables a planner can optimize for. It’s telling that both Chandigurh and Brasília have lively slums on their outskirts, unplanned neighborhoods that filled demands unmet by the architected city centers.

He juxtaposes the work of Le Corbusier with that of Jane Jacobs, grassroots city activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs was a lifelong advocate of “street life,” placing high emphasis on the organic, local, and human-scale factors that truly make spaces livable and enjoyable. She famously countered the ultimate high modernist visions of New York City planner Robert Moses.

This contrast between failure in legible, designed systems and resilience in emergent, organic ones triggers all of my free-market priors. The truth is there is no “best” mental model here. Certain types of problems lend themselves well to top-down control (require it, in fact), and others produce the best results when markets and individuals are permitted to drive their own solutions. Standard timekeeping, transportation networks, space exploration, flood control — these are all challenges that are hard to address for a variety of reasons without centralized coordination.

Imposing legibility demands an appreciation of trade-offs. Yes, dictated addressing schemes and fixed property ownership documentation do enable state control in the form of taxation, conscription, or surveillance. But in exchange for the right degree of imposed structure, we get the benefit of property rights and land tenure.

Big Tech’s Legible Vision

Byrne Hobart touched on this idea in an issue of his newsletter. (The Diff is some of the best tech/business/investing writing out there, I highly recommend subscribing). He makes the point that wherever scale is required, abstraction and legibility are highly valuable. He calls up Scott’s usage of the term mētis, translated from the classical Greek to mean roughly “knowledge that can only come from practical experience.” The value of this local knowledge is Scott’s counter to legibility-seeking schemes: that practical knowledge beats the theoretical every time.

I like this point that Hobart makes, though, on seeking larger scale global maxima: that a pure reliance on the practical can leave you stuck in a local maximum:

But mētis is a hill-climbing algorithm. If it’s based on experience rather than theory, it’s limited by experience. Meanwhile, theory is not limited by direct experience. By the 1930s, many physicists were quite convinced that an atomic bomb was possible, though of course none of them had ever seen one. Because some things can’t be discovered by trial and error, but can be created by writing down some first principles and thinking very hard about their implications (followed by lots of trial and error), the pro-legibility side has an advantage in inventing new things.

He also brings up its implications in the modern tech ecosystem. The Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons are like panoptic overseers that can force legibility even on the most impenetrable, messy datastreams through machine learning algorithms and hyper-scale pattern recognition. The trade-off here may not be conscription (not yet anyway), but there is a tax. There’s an interesting twist, though: the tech firms have pushed these specialized models so far to the edge that they themselves can’t even explain how they work, thereby reconstituting illegibility:

Fortunately for anyone who shares Scott’s skepticism of the legibility project, the end state for tech ends up creating a weird ego of the mētis-driven illegible system we started with. The outer edges of ad targeting, product recommendations, search results, People You May Know, and For You Page are driven by machine learning algorithms that consume unfathomable amounts of data and output a uniquely well-targeted result. The source code and the data exist, in human-readable formats, but the actual process can be completely opaque.

Functional versus Unit Organizations

While legibility interests me in its applicability to society as a whole, I’m even more intrigued by how this phenomenon works on a smaller scale: within companies.

Org charts attempt to balance productivity and legibility, which often pull in different directions. Organizational design is driven by a hybrid need:

To ship products and services to customers in exchange for revenue and equity value, and
To be able to control, monitor, and optimize the corporate machine

Companies spend millions each year doing “reorgs,” often attributing execution failures to #2: the illegibility of the org’s activities. Therefore you rarely see a reorg that results in drastic cutback of management oversight.

Former Microsoft product exec and now-VC Steven Sinofsky wrote this epic piece a few years back comparing the pros and cons of function- and unit-based organizational structures. Each has merits that fit better or worse within an org depending on the product line(s), corporate culture, geographic spread, go-to-market, and headcount. The number one objective of an optimum org chart is to maximize value delivery to customers through cost reduction, top-line revenue gains, lower overhead, and richer innovation in new products. But legibility can’t be left out as an influence. The insertion of management layer is an attempt to institute tighter control and visibility, a degree of which is necessary to appropriately dial-in costs and overhead investment.

Look at this statistic Sinofsky cites about the Windows team’s composition when he joined:

One statistic: when I came to Windows and the 142 product units, the team overall was over 35% managers (!). But the time we were done “going functional” we had about 20% managers.

Even corporate teams aren’t immune to the pull of legibility. When its influence is stretched too far, you end up with Dilbert cartoons and TPS reports.

Emergent Order in Cities

It was serendipitous to encounter this same theme in Devon Zuegel’s podcast, Order Without Design. The show is a conversation with urbanist Alain Bertaud and his wife Marie-Agnes, an extension of his book on urban planning and how “markets shape cities.”

In episode 3 they discuss mostly sanitation and waste management in cities around the world, but my favorite bit was toward the end in a discussion on how different cities segment property into lots and dictate various uses through zoning regulation. Some cities slice property into large lots, which leads to fewer businesses and higher risk for large, expensive developments. But others, like Manhattan, segment into smaller chunks, resulting in a more diverse cityscape that mixes dining, retail, services, and many other commercial activities.

The shopping mall was an innovation that allowed developers with limited local knowledge to have tenants respond to customer demand in smaller, less risky increments. Malls in Asia notably differ from ours in the west in the breadth of goods and services they typically offer. Here’s Marie-Agnes from the episode:

…Remember the Singapore mall. In Singapore the malls have not only retail, but you find also dental offices, notaries, kindergarten schools, dispensaries, and all sorts of activities. Up to now and in general the concept of a mall in the US is for mainly shopping. You may have food court and some restaurants, but nothing like a real city where you have all sort of business.

Devon points out that this quality might make these malls more resilient to market stress than our retail-focused American versions.

Malls are by no means a modern innovation, of course. Ad-hoc congregations of commercial activity have been around for 5,000 years, evolving from purely organic bazaars of the Near East into the pseudo-planned, air conditioned behemoths we have today. Even in our technocratic culture, planners still realize that the flexibility to market demand is crucial to sustainability. Trying to pre-design and mandate a particular distribution of stores and services is a fool’s errand.

In Byrne’s newsletter, he says “once you look for legibility, you start to see it everywhere.” This has certainly been true for me as I’ve been reading Scott’s work. The deepest insights are the ones that cut widely across many different dimensions.

There’s no silver bullet in how to apply legibility-inducing schemes to any of these areas. But until you’re aware of the negative consequences, there’s no way to balance the scales between legible/designed and illegible/organic outcomes.

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