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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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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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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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What is Unity? (Post-Election Questions)

Now that the US presidential election is over (well, probably) we’ve seen calls for unity (at least from Biden’s side). But what is unity? What do you need in order to have it? And if we don’t have it now, why not?

This story of unintended consequences starts with business models that benefit from division. Always look for incentives in designed systems and in systems that emerge.

Old News, New News

News of all types – real, fake, stressed, ignored, and biased – was a big part of the last four years. Let’s look at the general change in the media industry from pre-Internet days to today.

If we don’t have unity today, but maybe did in the past, is some of that due to changing news industry business models?

Continue reading “What is Unity? (Post-Election Questions)”

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Is the World Getting Safer?

It’s common to hear that the world has become safer. Likewise, a common criticism of those who disagree is that they are ignorant of the facts. According to some measures, we have seen decades or even centuries of improvement in the form or lower violence, with instances of war or homicides per capita often presented as relevant factors.

Let’s look at how this relates to studying systems and unintended consequences.

From a talk by Steven Pinker on the topic:

“Homicide rates plunge whenever anarchy and the code of vendetta are replaced by the rule of law. It happened when feudal Europe was brought under the control of centralized kingdoms… It happened again in colonial New England, in the American Wild West when the sheriffs moved to town, and in Mexico…. Continue reading “Is the World Getting Safer?”

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A Second Step (to Systems Thinking)

When we want to change, build, or improve something we often only look one step in. That is, if we take action A we will get result B. End of story.

That’s only the end of the story because we stop looking.

Sometimes we only look that far because of a lack of imagination. Other times incentives are misaligned. Or when change comes at us too quickly. We also often only look one step in because considering more steps is difficult or impossible. The attempt to go beyond those problems is sometimes called “second-order thinking.”

Here are some recent events and proposal that clearly involve more than a single step when it comes to outcomes. Let’s look at ways the first step can result in unintended second steps and ways to change how we assess outcomes. Continue reading “A Second Step (to Systems Thinking)”

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Twitter Bans Political Ads

“Those viral Tweets you’ve seen? Chances are I’ve made some of them.”

That was an admission from an acquaintance who works in online distribution helping new products find customers.

That was also part of the reason I pondered Twitter’s decision to disallow political ads on their social media platform — a decision widely applauded yet one that seems ripe to generate its own unintended consequences.

Here’s the full text of Twitter CEO Dorsey’s explanation. Continue reading “Twitter Bans Political Ads”

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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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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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The Emergence of Omniscience (Part 1 – Images)

We are in an early transition period of omniscience. We are transitioning from some personal actions that are recorded only through our memories to many events being recorded, re-playable, and shareable. By “personal actions” I mean anything from what content you consume to where you go to how you act. By “re-playable and shareable” I mean that some device or system collects data that can be stored for any length of time and then easily sent to others to observe.

Continue reading “The Emergence of Omniscience (Part 1 – Images)”