systems | complexity | second-order effects
“I was engaged in something much more unpleasant than espionage. I was engaged in ideological subversion, which is seldom explained to people by your media, because the media is part of that process.”
That was one of the many quotes that made me take a closer look at some presentations and writings by Yuri Bezmenov (also known as Tomas Schuman) in the mid-1980s.
Continue reading “Bezmenov’s Steps (Ideological Subversion)”
How do protest techniques adapt to changing laws, international public opinion, and online mobs?
In an earlier essay on Pandemic Protests I shared an example of a “blank paper” protest from Kazakhstan. Police arrested a man holding a piece of blank paper on charges of “we’ll sort that out later.”
Kazakhstan is not a country associated with free speech. Neither was the former USSR. As the old joke goes (translated from Protest Folklore, by Andrey Moroz):
“A man throws leaflets on Red Square, they grab him and see that he is handing out blank papers. They ask: “Why empty?” – “So everything is clear.”
We usually think of speed as good. Getting somewhere faster or finishing something sooner are typically positives. Completing an action or a project shouldn’t prioritize slowness. In fact, slowness is often paired with unsuccessful and over-budget projects. But are there breaking points where increased speed makes a system worse and harms the project itself?
There are several ways in which increased speed can change a system for the worse. Let’s look at how increased speed skips past unknown needed steps, pushes work elsewhere in the system, and adds risk.
Systems are not cleared bounded. We (at least as a non-expert) often don’t know or understand all the steps necessary to produce something.
As an example of the first way increased speed leads to problems, I was reminded of this quote, from Zorba the Greek.
“My indiscreet desire of that morning to pry into and know the future before it was born suddenly appeared to me a sacrilege. I remembered one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree, just as the butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath. In vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.
That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience.”
Those steps, like the gradual unfolding of a butterfly’s wings, can remain hidden in the chrysalis or with time they can be teased out. Something like a kind of natural phase change — a butterfly emerging from a cocoon — is complex but probably already as minimal as it could be. Not necessarily so for processes we create.
At the opposite extreme of beauty, I was once at an organization that instituted an ISO standardization process. Once that was implemented the goal was maintaining the standards, not efficiency, for we had unintentionally institutionalized some processes that served no purpose. The people knew which ones were useless, but still needed to do them. This is one of the small sadnesses of work life in large organizations.
I used to want to be a photojournalist.
I had multiple cameras and lenses, developed and printed my own film, and worked as a photographer. I have photographed high-profile delegations at the top of the Capitol dome, and in a less security obsessed age, in the depths of the Pentagon. I’ve also had film confiscated (long story, another time).
Before high-quality digital cameras, professional photographers shot film. Because I could only carry maybe 10 rolls in a camera bag, no matter how interesting the subject matter, there was a limited number of exposures I could take. With 36 exposures in a roll of 35mm film, 10 rolls gave me 360 shots, max. (This number itself is a huge increase over older formats like the large glass photographic plates that Ansel Adams used almost a century ago.) 360 pictures was a huge number to shoot in a day and I probably only did it once.
Today, it’s normal for photographers to shoot that many in an hour.
Photography was more difficult, more expensive, and slower in the past. I couldn’t take as many pictures and had to wait hours at least (finish the roll, develop, and print) to finally see what images I captured. Often, I had to wait days. But looking at the prints I was able to recall what lens I used, what exposure settings, and how I held the camera. The difficulty of taking pictures made each one more memorable.
Unlike in the case of the butterfly, once digital cameras improved, there was no need for photography to continue to be slow, as it was with film. So as the results of photography appeared faster, much of the work that took place while shooting was pushed to the proofing and editing phase.
The more pictures I could take — an increase in speed supported by ease and large camera storage — the more careless I was during the photo taking phase. This is a positive feedback loop. Instead, I pushed the care to the final selection process.
A goal, especially one not well thought out can result in second-order effects that act against the purpose of the goal in the first place.
From the paper Goals Gone Wild:
“In the late 1960s, the Ford Motor Company was losing market share to foreign competitors that were selling small, fuel-efficient cars. CEO Lee Iacocca announced the specific, challenging goal of producing a new car that would be ‘under 2000 pounds and under $2,000’ and would be available for purchase in 1970. This goal, coupled with a tight deadline, meant that many levels of management signed off on unperformed safety checks to expedite the development of the car—the Ford Pinto. One omitted safety check concerned the fuel tank, which was located behind the real axle in less than 10 inches of crush space… Investigations revealed that after Ford finally discovered the hazard, executives remained committed to their goal and instead of repairing the faulty design, calculated that the costs of lawsuits associated with Pinto fires (which involved 53 deaths and many injuries) would be less than the cost of fixing the design.”
The Pinto had the shortest automotive product timeline from design to delivery — 25 months when the industry average was 45 months.
The internal reaction to the Pinto’s design flaws was itself a choice of speed. Given the data, the needed calculations could be performed quickly. The redesign and fix of the Pinto gas tank would take much longer.
We actually have the Pinto cost benefits analysis memo, titled “Fatalities Associated with Crash Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires.” I’ll quote just a couple parts.
“The costs of implementing the rollover portion of the amended Standard has been calculated to be almost three times the expected benefit, even using very favorable benefit assumptions. The yearly benefits of compliance were estimated at just under $50 million, with an associated customer cost of $137 million.”
There are many examples from financial services of speed adding to risk, but I’ll pull out this example (also from Goals Gone Wild) from Continental Illinois Bank in the 1970s and 1980s. Continental was at the time a regional bank.
In 1976, Roger Anderson, the bank’s chairman publicized his plan for fast growth. In only five years the bank more than doubled its portfolio of loans.
“To reach this stretch goal, the bank shifted its strategy from conservative corporate financing toward aggressive pursuit of borrowers. Continental allowed officers to buy loans made by smaller banks that had invested heavily in very risky loans.”
Additionally, improper due diligence and kickbacks for loan approvals compounded until defaults and a run on the bank led to a government bail out of Continental Illinois Bank in 1984. That government bailout led to the popularization of the phrase “too big to fail.”
While the casual feeling may be that things are moving too quickly, that might just be part of the human condition. Many have actually written about the way speed — at least measured by technological progress — has slowed down over the past century.
The book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Robert Gordon itemizes the innovations that appeared between 1870 – 1940 (electricity as a utility, communications, electric lights, home appliances, the telephone, recorded sound, radio, television, the automobile, the airplane, and more). These innovations led to greater productivity, health, education and a world so changed as to be unrecognizable to those who lived earlier.
By Gordon’s (and many others’) measure, innovation speed has since slowed.
Another way to look at speed is to compare the completion time of large building projects (both physical and digital) to the modern day. Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, keeps a list of such projects that finished in what today seem like unnaturally short times. For example:
The Empire State Building (410 days); the Pentagon, at the time the world’s largest office building (491 days); the Alaska Highway spanning 1,700 miles (234 days); the Boeing 747 from start to finished first plane (747 days); and the New York Subway first 28 stations (4.7 years); the prototype of JavaScript (10 days); first version of Unix (3 weeks); the first GUI computer, the Xerox Alto (3 months); the iPod first shipments (290 days)…
Proposed reasons for the slowdown include increased conflicting interests and regulation, but not studying second-order effects. Such slowness presents its own problems.
Years ago, when I was in college, I spent a couple hours a day reading the New York times in print. I would go to my favorite library, get one of the two copies of that day’s paper, and probably go through half of it. I then read three or four other papers too. The feel and even the smell of the newsprint was something I looked forward to. I started my days that way. When I couldn’t start my days that way, I missed it.
One of my goals at the time was to do something in journalism. I wrote for a handful of college publications. But journalism ended up not being for me, and I have no regrets about that today. In the meantime I still looked forward to reading the paper.
But more often I ended up reading less news in focused hour-long chunks in the morning and more news in quick scattered clips throughout the day, often delivered via social media. This change gave me awareness of new developments but also distracted me incredibly from longer-term projects. You’ve probably gone through that change too.
Continue reading “Loop In, Loop Out (Business Models and Media)”
What is the purpose of surveilling a domestic population? Is it inevitable?
Surveillance and spying are a little different but the benefits of each have long been understood. The purposes of spying are to know when an enemy is going to attack, their capabilities, the potential to attack them first, or what one might gain in making an attack, state to state or tribe to tribe. Learn plans, intentionally mislead, survive.
Domestic surveillance is different or at least thought of as being different. For some types of domestic surveillance the purpose seems to be that the population harbors enemies (overlapping with spying above), whether this means enemies of the state itself or those harmful to the rest of the population.
A version of that is that if there are people who have “wrong thinking,” then their “wrong thinking” can infect their neighbors, and eventually lead to violence or chaos. Continue reading “Inevitable Surveillance?”
Change often doesn’t happen smoothly, but rather in fits and starts.
Here’s a look at some mass actions over the past few decades that either caused fear or fury and (for some of them) how they were ultimately forgotten.
Since we’ve seen a year of fear and fury around the world, largely in the form of many types of large sustained protests and the impact of COVID-19, let’s look at some past examples and how change plays out (or doesn’t). What behavior and consequences emerge along the way?
Radon Gas. In the 1980s a report from the EPA and its reporting in media set off a radon gas scare in the US. The gas, naturally occurring in the ground, seeped into home basements and was blamed for cancer deaths. People suddenly became afraid to spend much time in their basements. But the risk was exaggerated in importance.
Radon gas as a cause of cancer is highly tied to smoking. Given that smoking has declined in the US over the last few decades before the recent creation of vaping, is radon really an issue? An EPA report estimates that 21,000 die of lung cancer caused by radon but 86% of them are also smokers.
With more knowledge, the fear dissipated like the gas itself.
While I discussed silver, tulips, and drugs in Changes in Value Part I, here I look at education, art, spices, chicken feet, and conformity. What systems influence the value of things? Why does value change?
At the end I provide suggestions to assess your own situations.
I’ve been critical of higher education on this blog before, but for other reasons. When it comes to the the price of a college degree — and here I’m mostly talking of the price of American college tuition — we’ve seen a doubling in price, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years. A number of factors combine to drive up the price.
People seek asylum for different reasons. Sometimes, a country becomes unsafe because of one’s identity — as a member of a targeted ethnic, religious, or political group. And sometimes one’s actions — sometimes even unintentional — make their home country unsafe.
The idea of seeking safety elsewhere in the world is an interesting one because, even with the recent refugee crises, it has historically been relatively uncommon. (Asylum is the protection a nation grants to someone from another country, often as a political refugee. An asylee to the US requests asylum while in the US but a refugee requests that protection while still outside the US.)
But today — and maybe because I’m both a friend of the individual and a writer — I’m focused on an instance of someone seeking asylum because of something that they wrote. Continue reading “Asylum from a Pack of Wolves”
I’ve written about high-profile diseases already (here, here, here, and many more). There’s something timeless about studying the way diseases spread and impact systems, especially when it comes to second-order effects. So let’s map out a few disease scares from the past century. Here’s a systems map look at parrot fever, 1918 flu, and modern-day bubonic plague.
I’m not including COVID-19 in the bunch since I’ve written about it frequently and there’s still a lot we don’t know about the system that led to its spread. Then again, there is also a lot we don’t know about the spread of the diseases below, but the perspectives on them are more static.
I decided to write this piece after seeing how hidden the pathways to illness can be and how straightforward the solutions can seem after the system is understood.
You’ve probably never heard of it, but in 1929, deaths from the then unknown disease psittacosis (also called “parrot fever”) scared a lot of people who thought it might be a new epidemic.
It took some sleuthing, but the commonality between people affected by this disease was their proximity to imported birds such as parrots and parakeets.
Keeping birds in the home as pets was a relatively new fashion. Salesmen sold birds door to door.
But even with importation of infected birds, we might have avoided the local spread of psittacosis if not for crowded conditions in pet stores and the easier spread of psittacosis among the birds, asymptomatic healthy seeming birds, and then close conditions between birds and human owners in the home.
Here’s a map of psittacosis flowing from wild populations to the pet owners.
Continue reading “Modeling Epidemics (Parrot Fever, 1918 Flu, Plague)”
As with other sudden, widespread changes, there are many second-order effects from coronavirus. I’ve been slowly chronicling them on this blog. Today, let’s look at the impact on protest movements and tactics.
Over the past few months people around the world lost their ability to protest. Or, they lost the type of protest that had worked for them — the mass gatherings to show dissatisfaction and force government response.
In locations including Algeria, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Haiti, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Russia, Spain, Netherlands, Peru, Syria, and the US, protests have declined or have taken a different turn — due to COVID-19. What systems are changing and what is likely to remain changed after a vaccine?
