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The Owl’s Right Eye (Protest Symbols)



Let’s come back, more directly, to a theme in my writing — what happens when something small becomes a tipping point for change. When the seemingly innocuous becomes unpredictable.

If you’ve only casually followed the Hong Kong protests and reaction from the Chinese mainland and overseas Chinese communities, you might wonder about the importance and meaning of the covered eye. Specifically, the right eye.

Hong Kong protesters found one of their many symbols (and there are many) when police shot and injured the right eye of a protesting woman in August. The injured eye is a more powerful symbol than even that of the man police shot on October 1 (Chinese National Day) in the chest (that is, the heart).

But since the now famous protester’s eye injury we’ve seen company ad campaign apologies and even an individual arrest all because of missing eyes.

But the eye I was reminded of was none of these. It was a different eye — also a right eye and in China — that over 40 years ago had results reminiscent to those eyes of today.

Continue reading “The Owl’s Right Eye (Protest Symbols)”

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More on Mosquitoes (New Data)

I’ve returned to the question of mosquito eradication several times over the last year. My first post (Eradication’s Good Intentions) led to a TechCrunch article (What Would It Mean to Eradicate the Mosquito?) and you would think that I’d be done with the topic, especially in light of the long list of other topics that I have.

But that’s not the case. Mosquitoes are a story of second-order effects that keep coming up. As major carriers of disease, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, mosquito eradication will be a topic that remains as long as the diseases remain. But unlike some other high-risk actions, the mosquito question draws a wide mix of people on both sides of the eradication argument. I return to the mosquito eradication question today because of new published data. Continue reading “More on Mosquitoes (New Data)”

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The 70th anniversary of the PRC

“So it’s his fault?!”

That was what I heard a Taiwanese visitor say years ago in front of the statue of Koxinga, located in Tainan, Taiwan.

Koxinga was a Ming dynasty general who fled to Taiwan and established an Ming outpost there from 1662 to 1683. The Qing dynasty (which defeated the Ming) later defeated Koxinga’s new kingdom and wrapped Taiwan into the Qing dynasty.

The visitor’s complaint: that without Koxinga there would not be a struggle, going on even today, over the future of Taiwan.

This is a post about founding ceremonies. And today is the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Continue reading “The 70th anniversary of the PRC”

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50 Essays on Unintended Consequences (What I Learned)

Last year a side interest started to nudge me. It has since happily taken over much of my free time.

The side interest was that I drawn to learn more about unintended consequences, systems, and complexity. But I wanted a different way to start. These topics are often ignored but I started to read historical examples, look at systems models, and take a closer look at why things often don’t work out the way people (with the best of intentions) thought.

To help me learn I started to write essays on this topic.

Over the last year my writing has been featured in media like TechCrunch, Exponential View, The Browser, Marginal Revolution, Human Risk Blog, as well as making it to the top page of Hacker News multiple times. I didn’t seek links or external coverage, figuring that I needed to do more work first. Still, people reached out to me about my writing. That plus comments and encouragement from friends kept me going.

Last week I finished my 50th post. I thought I’d share what I learned while writing these essays, both related to content and commitment. Continue reading “50 Essays on Unintended Consequences (What I Learned)”

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Incentives

The story had paused for more than two thousand years and with a surprise discovery was then suddenly back in play. In the 1940s and 1950s a sad mismatch of incentives after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls led to the destruction of parts of the ancient biblical documents. That destruction was something that no one wanted and yet, with these priceless historical items, it was logical. Why? Continue reading “Incentives”

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Basic Values

With this post I have finally written about each of the five causes of unintended consequences that Robert Merton outlined in his 1936 paper “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” (the other four being error, short-term vs long-term interests, ignorance, and the self-defeating prophecy).

Let’s look at what basic values are, why we have them (if we do), and how they impact us in unexpected ways to generate unintended consequences. Continue reading “Basic Values”

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Selecting the Scalable Snapshot

One of the themes of these posts is that we unintended consequences of a change come from the way it scales.

It is also superficially easier to judge events as at risk of unintended consequences (easier, not more accurate) when there is an image — a snapshot — that represents risk.

So what are causes of difficulty when we make judgments? I’ll go into some examples.

After two back-to-back mass shootings in the US, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted something seemingly logical yet awful (shown later in post). Interestingly, people took offense and attacked him for the apparent logic (he later apologized). His offense: insensitively calling out and comparing the magnitude of different causes of death.

But the problem with Tyson’s tweet wasn’t that at all. Continue reading “Selecting the Scalable Snapshot”

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Do We Create Shoplifters?

Those of you who work in a large organization occasionally might find yourself shaking your head thinking about a colleague: “What do they do all day?” Some of you might even think that about yourselves. Or you might think that about people in another department, especially those with whom you have an adversarial relationship.

At the same time, you also might be uncomfortable with the automation of certain tasks and possibly seeing those jobs disappear. Even those jobs of the unproductive humans you shook your head at. Fear of job automation and its unintended consequences has people thinking, but what are the roots of this thought?

Isn’t the history of technology about removing humans from a task and replacing them with machines, even simple ones?

Here’s an example from Vaclav Smil’s book Energy in World History.

Do you really want to be a glass polisher? And do the unintended consequences of job automation include creating shoplifters?

Continue reading “Do We Create Shoplifters?”

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The Opioid Crisis (and addiction-based business models)

It’s common for scalable companies with good business models to involve addiction.

I mean addiction in a broad sense. This includes addiction to both physical products and digital goods and services. Addiction is a retention metric.

And retention (how long someone stays a paid customer or user) is what fuels many businesses. Let’s look at this with opioid addiction, focusing on Purdue Pharma’s product OxyContin. What second-order effects drive the opioid crisis?

Continue reading “The Opioid Crisis (and addiction-based business models)”

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Prester John and the Long History of Disinformation

In his novel Baudolino, Umberto Eco writes of a medieval letter forging exercise. For their own political purposes, a group of friends write a realistic, but fake, letter addressed to Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor. The fake letter is from Prester John.

Surely you know Prester John?

Let’s look at the tacit tradition of disinformation and what will change in the future. What is changing about the nature of truth? Will it be harder to tell what is true? Or was it always hard? What are the unintended consequences?

Continue reading “Prester John and the Long History of Disinformation”