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Engineering the Current Thing

If you pay attention online you might have heard of “The Current Thing.”

What’s The Current Thing? The Current Thing is any concept that grabs hold of public attention, sometimes out of nowhere, and which demands an answer: are you for or against?

I also like Marc Andreessen’s explanation.

But where does The Current Thing come from? Does it just happen or is it made? How does it work?

And so, I read through the paper “Availability Cascades and Risk Reputation,” after Andreessen mentioned it as a seminal work on The Current Thing. Here’s how the paper begins: Continue reading “Engineering the Current Thing”

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War Doves, War Norms, War Moms

Over two years ago, I started writing a lot about the emerging pandemic. That crisis unfolded with a quaint stateliness and simplicity compared to the situation in Ukraine. (I also had a personal perspective formed by earlier writing about pandemics and work and travel around China so I wrote sooner and more often about that topic.) While the pandemic hit different populations in somewhat similar ways across the globe depending on infrastructure, medical care, policy, social beliefs, and more, the situation in Ukraine is different.

There are different camps of support, countries will be impacted differently by changing commodities costs and social preferences, and the military situation is still a question. But speed is one notable characteristic.

War Doves

People are again making a big deal out of Pope Francis’ 2014 dove-release-for-Ukraine-peace gone wrong.

“At the Vatican, Pope Francis called for an end to violence in the Ukraine before releasing two white doves as a symbol of peace. Moments later, a black crow and a seagull attacked the doves in front of the horrified crowd.”

Continue reading “War Doves, War Norms, War Moms”

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Meaning and Ice Cream

Star Spangled Ice Cream (shuttered for over 10 years) started as a conservative option to liberal Ben & Jerry’s. I’m not sure why it shut down, but some of its flavors sound just bad (John Kerry Ketchup Dough) and used suspiciously similar puns to their main competition (Cherry Falwell vs Cherry Garcia).

Why there is a market for liberal, but not conservative, ice cream is the wrong question. Liberals and conservatives are mostly the same when it comes to food.

Just as there is liberal ice cream, there is conservative chicken. Chick-fil-A serves chicken sandwiches, but runs itself based on conservative Protestant values, including keeping locations closed on Sundays. Like Ben & Jerry’s, I doubt many people choose to eat or not eat Chick-fil-A because of the founder’s beliefs. Those beliefs are what they are and the products are what they are. There might be a liberal or conservative business model (sourcing, fair trade, pricing, staff treatment, etc) but the ingredients and flavors have to work.

That was the problem with Star Spangled Ice Cream. Its founding was ideology rather than flavor. In the end, ideology wasn’t enough. Continue reading “Meaning and Ice Cream”

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Prolonged Pandemic Protests

In May 2020, I wrote one of my last pieces focused on COVID: Pandemic Protests. In it I listed a number of ways COVID changed or was likely to change protests around the world:

“In many instances, top-down social distancing orders and bottom-up unwillingness of people to gather in large groups had similar effects. The large protests that we saw so much of in 2019 dwindled not because protesters won their demands or because governments cracked down hard, but because people didn’t go out as much.

“Protesters’ strength came from gathering in numbers. What to do now?”

And for a while in many places around the world, large, crowded protests did decline, or were replaced by social-distance versions.

The most notable of those declines for me, since I had also written about it several times here, was the impact on the existing protest movement in Hong Kong. That movement formerly drew anti-government protests of over one million people to the streets (in a city of 7.5 million). When COVID emerged, the cynical view was that the timing of the pandemic hurt the protesters (or helped the government). Continue reading “Prolonged Pandemic Protests”

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Narrative Capture

Before we talk about narrative capture, let’s look at capture of another type.

Regulatory capture

Regulatory capture involves situations where a regulator ends up serving the interests of an industry, specific company, or other group. The people who are supposed to be making the rules end up following the lead of the very groups that they are supposed to be regulating.

Sometimes this is intentionally planned and financially supported and sometimes it just happens because of system design.

For a glimpse of thinking about regulatory capture during the late 1800s attempt to regulate railroads in the US, we have this attorney’s letter to a railroad president:

“My impressions would be that, looking at the matter from a railroad point of view exclusively, [repeal of the Interstate Commerce Act] would not be a wise thing to undertake…. The attempt would not be likely to succeed; if it did not succeed, and were made on the ground of the inefficiency and uselessness of the Commission, the result would very probably be giving it the power it now lacks. The Commission, as its functions have now been limited by the courts, is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a Commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things…. The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.” — Richard Olney, letter to Charles E. Perkins, 1892

Or, as I’ve heard someone say, “I like having a big board to report to because they never get anything done.” Continue reading “Narrative Capture”

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The Tamarind Tree (Intervention)

These two scenes have been compared a lot recently.

Left: US evacuation, 22 Gia Long St. (Saigon) 29 April 1975. Credit: Hugh Van Es/UPI. Right: US embassy (Kabul) evacuation 15 August 2021. Credit: Rahmat Gul

A little known story about the one on the left is that a large tamarind tree grew on the US Saigon embassy compound. The US ambassador used the symbol of the tamarind tree to represent the solidity of US support for South Vietnam.

And in some ways, the April 1975 fall of Saigon (a scene known to be avoided by two generations of US politicians) was much like the August 2021 fall of Kabul turned out to be. Continue reading “The Tamarind Tree (Intervention)”

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Disasters, Ugly and Cute

Recently, a story about species introduction and bad outcomes made the news. I had to write about this, but for a different reason than you might expect.

This story seems to have appeared in hundreds of news outlets over the past few days:

In 2012 a government initiative relocated 26 Tasmanian devils to Maria Island, a small island off the Tasmanian coast. The Tasmanian devil population has been in decline for years, due to a facial tumor cancer that spreads when they bite each other.

Unfortunately, Maria Island was also home to 3,000 little penguins — small, slow-walking birds that nest on land. (This species is actually called the “little penguin” as well as the “little blue penguin” and the “fairy penguin.”) With a new predator introduced, the penguins were all eaten. Continue reading “Disasters, Ugly and Cute”

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Movements, Algorithms, Compliance, Tools

A recent paper titled Bad Machines Corrupt Good Morals caught my attention. In the paper, the authors demonstrate that AI agents can act as influencers and enablers of bad human behavior. This is something we’ve known for a while, but I appreciate the author’s organization of the methods.

Specifically, the authors called out four types of decisions that an AI might participate in along with a human. (I think that there is one more grouping as well.) Here’s what the authors focused on:

    1. AI as an influencer in an advisory role. “Customers buy harmful products on the basis of recommender systems.”
    2. AI as an influencer in a role model role. “Online traders imitate manipulative market strategies of trading systems.”
    3. AI an an enabler in a partner role. “Students teaming up with NLG algorithms to create fake essays.”
    4. AI an an enabler in a delegate role. “Outsourcing online pricing leading to algorithmic trading.”

Continue reading “Movements, Algorithms, Compliance, Tools”

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Unintended UAPs

This post is about the UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) “sightings” that have gained attention over the past few years and especially in the past few months. If you haven’t heard of this before or seen some of the (admittedly grainy) videos, it’s a tell of how a potentially big (and weird) story doesn’t get as much attention as it probably should.

Unlike previous UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) sightings from the past half century, the UAP situation is different. Rather than random individuals or conspiracy theorists, witnesses include fighter jet pilots. Interested parties include the military and senior government officials. The US government has established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. We went from oddballs claiming that they saw UFOs to people with a lot of credibility to lose claiming that they have either observed UAPs or believe that the question deserves serious attention.

No matter your opinion of what the reality is, there are few main outcomes we can expect the more we learn about this topic. These outcomes all seem to portend a change of some sort. Continue reading “Unintended UAPs”

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100 Posts on Unintended Consequences

If you wonder why I’m interested in unintended consequences, just look at what enabled a single ship to block a major shipping lane for a week.

The list of unintended consequences is long. A fallen tree and software bug cut electric power to an entire region, a pain medication for dying cows kills vultures, a search for efficiency in grocery stores turns honest people into thieves. Politics and cotton production in one country impact major apparel producers, intentional species introductions go awry, smart people work to improve business client revenue outcomes at the expense of customer lives. Only some are famous, but all are fascinating in their own ways.

In spite of those handful of examples and a long list of others, I still often hear a kind of excuse. The excuse is that there are always one in a million outcomes, no one can predict them, that trying to account for everything makes progress too slow.

I don’t want to slow progress. I do want to learn about change. A few years ago I started to write essays on such things.

My writing ended up in media like Exponential View, The Browser, TechCrunch, law school journals, Marginal Revolution, Human Risk Blog, as well as being popular on Reddit and Hacker News. People reached out about my writing and I spoke on some podcasts. That plus reader comments and encouragement kept me going.

A couple weeks ago I finished my 100th original post. That seems like a milestone so I wrote this summary (list of the 100 articles at bottom).

Writing. With more connections in our world today, it’s important to learn about unintended consequences and systems.

How did I actually approach such a big topic? I researched and wrote most of my posts in inconvenient and unpredictable ways. Pre-dawn reading and note-taking. Forming an outline mentally while walking to a meeting (pre-COVID) or just walking around the neighborhood. Remembering, while in the shower, an example I read years ago.

I wrote most of my notes and outlines longhand. I never got the hang of any note-taking software. Friends spoke to me about Roam and other mind-mapping tools but I never found the discipline to use them.

A few years ago I sadly gave away 98% of my book collection. On at least 25 pre-COVID occasions I went to the library to borrow a book I used to own and flipped pages to find the example I remembered. On at least 25 other occasions I found other books, new to me, that provided material for the posts. I luckily made a library trip one of my last public outings pre-COVID so I still have a pile of books to read.

I also saw ideas in research papers, Tweets, offhand comments, followed links, and changed direction repeatedly.

The only need was that my interest remained.

Commitment. After a few months of writing posts I started sending them out in a weekly email. That artificial deadline focused my energy. As expected, the deadline also had tradeoffs. I started to care about whether people read the emails! A weekly timeline also meant that on a few occasions I sent out posts when I should have let them simmer a bit longer. Then again, the timeline helped me produce much more than I would have otherwise. I estimate that my 100 articles total at least 150,000 words.

I think such weekly schedules are good for writers who focus on breaking news and less so for those like me who try to connect dots within and across environments. Also, I have the day job (maybe two) and I came up against the limit of how much time I had to think, read, reflect, and write.

It took me a year to put my name on my writing. I don’t know if I am better for it.

On a few occasions I acted on my thinking and benefitted. I’m not claiming anything different than typical investors. I just may have come to the conclusions in different ways.

But I like writing. During the last summer I connected some other dots and as a break from unintended consequences wrote a short book on company growth patterns.

Differences. Casual conversations that overlapped with my writing turned out surprisingly for the other parties. Topics that I covered, like UBI, pandemics, self-driving cars, mosquito eradication, scale effects, university funding, disinformation and more just changed for me. I was surprised how few opinions are out there and how many opinions seem to be created somewhere other than the speakers’ minds. Storytellers capture dramatic amounts of our brainspace.

I saw otherwise smart people become unable to think if it meant going against their political side or a social norm. It was painful for me to write about that in posts, especially because I had to wade through poorly thought-through writing. I tried to avoid political topics since just figuring out what is really happening takes a lot of effort. And then I don’t feel better for it. We almost guarantee exposure to education but don’t also require that people think for themselves. There are lots of words exchanged, but I struggled to find meaning in them.

I created awkward silence by having different opinions than the norm. But I only had those opinions because I first thought through the situations and wrote about them.

I spent enough years reading, working, and living to see that the default case is that things don’t work out as planned. Yet people repeatedly assume that their plans will work out, that a new policy will fix the problems, that a new technology will produce the outcomes its inventors and investors claim. Why do these assumptions continue, especially in a more connected world that is at more risk of unintended consequences?

Here are my 100 articles, in chronological order, running from 2018 to 2021. I’m now working on the next phase of this project.

Yes, I’m taking a break from this speed of writing. In the next phase I’d also like this project to be more sustainable, to include more talks, and perhaps a conference of sorts if that could be done in an engaging way. Beyond that, I’m still considering ideas.

Let me know if you’d like to talk.

Stay well and keep thinking.