New posts from thoughtshrapnel.com
Thought Shrapnel
100 tips to sort your life out
I was pretty amazed that Team Belshaw already does at least 75 of these 100 tips to sort your life out. Here are three that I personally don’t currently do, but which I might start doing.
- Carry ‘vex money’
Always carry enough cash to get you out of danger or trouble if other methods fail – a taxi fare at least.[…]
- Try coffee planking
“Every morning I get up and make coffee for my wife and me. One cup takes one minute 18 seconds to brew, and every morning for the last 12 months I have planked for this period. Simple thing, using the dead time.” Anonymous reader[…]
- Keep track of praise and thanks
Reader Sarah, who works as a teacher, keeps every thank-you card she has ever been given: “When I’ve had a rough day at school, I flick through them to remember some of the lives I have had an impact on.” Another reader, Lewis, saves positive messages about himself: “When times are tough or I’m feeling down, I dig through it and remind myself of the good things people have shared with me over the years.”
Source: The Guardian
There is an opportunity to...
I just saw that Tom Critchlow has taken a job, which is surprising given how much he waxed lyrical about the independent life. That post took me to one he wrote earlier this year about being useful rather than giving advice.
Giving advice starting with “you should…” is problematic, as I think we all come to learn through experience in both our personal and professional lives. It assumes you have all of the context, which is almost never true. Instead, pointing out “opportunities to…” is a much better framing.
Otherwise, as a consultant you’re telling them to do the very thing they don’t have the capacity to do. You’re telling them to draw the rest of the owl in the meme.
After all, it’s rare that a client doesn’t know have any clue what they need to do. Usually, in my experience at least, they need help choosing between options, and then capacity-building to get there.
Giving advice is an intensely personal thing. The feeling of learning something new sits right next to the feeling of shame for not knowing it in the first place. And worse, in the client/consultant relationship, the client is at least partially complicit in the situation when they come to you.
[…]
Giving advice is fraught even if the problem is well defined and you do know the answer. So when you’re working on strategic, ill-defined projects where there isn’t a right answer - giving advice is incredibly delicate, and in some cases not even possible.
So if you’re asking “You should…” to the client, stop and examine if you’ve properly defined the situation and provided evidence for the problem, to help the client deeply internalize the problem and win over the necessary stakeholders before you propose any kind of solution.
[…]
“There is an opportunity to…” This phrase is the key - it places the focus correctly on first defining the problem - and then providing evidence - before focusing on the solution. It allows us to articulate and quantify the opportunity while leaving room for the client to have say over resource allocation, for the client to shape the solution and for the client to determine prioritization and timing.
[…]
This all builds up to my personal consulting mantra: always work on the next most useful thing.
This mantra helps remind me that consulting isn’t about being right, it’s about being useful.
[…]
Always work on the next most useful thing. And that doesn’t always involve doing what the client asked for.
Source: Tom Critchlow
Because capitalism
I enjoyed this rant that starts off talking about shaving being too expensive, and ends by giving examples of things that have replaced other things, and are worse.
(FWIW I’ve found that Bulldog razors seem to last a lot longer than other cartridge-based options)
So, does this matter? I assume that for most of the people reading this, the sums of money involved may seem pretty trivial. But I think the changes in the razor market are obviously bad, and reflect similar changes that can be seen in many other markets. We see new products launched which promise minor benefits in convenience, and which crowd out older, cheaper, and better products. Those older products are deliberately marginalised, and more money is captured from consumers without them really gaining any value from their expenditure.
[…]
Tea bags replace loose leaf tea. Allows for lower quality tea to be sold, diminishes the re-use of tea leaves. Also ludicrous product differentiation along the lines of ‘we have a special shaped tea bag’.
[…]
Subscription services like Hello Fresh, where you can pay well over the odds to have some vegetables delivered to you.
Source: John’s blog
So far, so dystopian
Although there’s plenty of people who would say otherwise, I think we’re in an antediluvian period with LLMs. We’re not seeing ads inserted or intentional misinformation being spread through mainstream offerings.
It won’t be long, though, and weak signals like this give us a glimpse of the future.
This study examines the impact of AI on human false memories–recollections of events that did not occur or deviate from actual occurrences. It explores false memory induction through suggestive questioning in Human-AI interactions, simulating crime witness interviews. Four conditions were tested: control, survey-based, pre-scripted chatbot, and generative chatbot using a large language model (LLM). Participants (N=200) watched a crime video, then interacted with their assigned AI interviewer or survey, answering questions including five misleading ones. False memories were assessed immediately and after one week. Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users’ responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction. After one week, the number of false memories induced by generative chatbots remained constant. However, confidence in these false memories remained higher than the control after one week. Moderating factors were explored: users who were less familiar with chatbots but more familiar with AI technology, and more interested in crime investigations, were more susceptible to false memories. These findings highlight the potential risks of using advanced AI in sensitive contexts, like police interviews, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations.
Source: MIT Media Lab
How Bluey-Green Was My Valley?
After discovering this site earlier in the week, I’ve shown it to my wife and my mother. I’m interested in the results, because they’re the two people in my life that I’ve most disagreed with when it comes to the question “what colour is that?”
It turns out that, when it comes to the blue-green continuum, my wife isn’t so far away from me. But my mother? According to her, something isn’t “blue” unless it’s very blue. Fascinating from a phenomenology-in-practice point of view.
Source: ismy.blue
The future is off-grid solar
I’ve read some of the thoughts in this post via Low-Tech Magazine especially around the DC/AC/DC conversion being pointlessly lossy. However, this is the first I’ve read of being able to use excess solar power to create other forms of energy.
[S]olar deployment is accelerating at breathtaking speed. Most of the world’s solar power was installed in the past 30 months. In fact, China installed more solar in 2023 than the US has installed in history.
In the UK in 2024, I can go online and buy a solar panel with the same dimensions as a fence panel, for only double the cost. In five years, the cost of solar will have halved again.
[…]
Solar will saturate the power grid, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll stop building it. It just means that we’ll use it off-grid.
[…]
The cost of solar energy in a sunny place is trending towards virtually-free.
This is solar’s opportunity to not just displace electricity supply, but also primary energy supply. Rather than simply supplying energy in the form it’s consumed (electricity), intermittent solar is so fricking cheap that it could manipulate atoms into fuels for subsequent consumption.
We’re talking about using solar to create synthetic kerosene for planes, clean ammonia for fertiliser, clean methanol for shipping, and maybe even synthetic natural gas for general purpose use.
These synthetic and ‘green’ fuels all rely on green hydrogen as a base ingredient. Green hydrogen is extraordinarily expensive to produce, and the only cost-competitive way to make it is off-grid solar.
[…]
Taking solar off the grid also has a few other major cost advantages. If you are ripping solar straight into a DC application, you can skip the costs and efficiency losses of inverting that power into AC. If you lose most of the balance of plant, power electronics, and the paperwork of a grid connection, you’re getting really cheap and fast.
Source: Ben James
A State of Systems Shifting
A decade ago, I was going to so many in-person conferences that I had both a dedicated blog and Twitter account. These days, I attend rather less. No longer being on Twitter, and my conference blog long-ago being mothballed, I’m lacking a place to put reflections on events.
The purpose of this post isn’t even that, to be honest. I was just so blown away by Indy Johar’s presentation at the Systems Innovation Network conference today that I needed somewhere less ephemeral to put the notes that I managed to tap out with my thumb.
Don’t ask me questions about any of this. Not only am I still new to the whole world of systems thinking, but Indy seems to have a galaxy-level brain. Go and check out the Dark Matter Labs website.
Situating the moment:
-
Climate breakdown (not change, losing predictability and insurability - therefore access to capital markets)
-
Mass multi-polar, multi-perspectival transition (different kinds of transitions in different parts of the world)
-
Securitization of everything (pervasive in all of our conversations - everything driven by risk and security - energy, minerals, nutrient supplies)
Emergent term of ‘security economics’ changing market dynamics. ‘No transition without justice’ not simply a slogan, it’s important to be able to find a way forward (e.g. UBI or ‘universal basic nutrition’ experiments)
-
Inequality and loss of solidarity
-
Hugh interest rate environment - inflationary economic context. Going to see more shocks to the economic system.
Difficult to price the material economy because of volatility.
- Rise of environmental righy politics - localism, etc. will be co-opted by the far right. AfD / far-right of Conservative Party. Boundary words: who’s inside and outside the community.
Systems Practitioners shouldn’t use ‘community’ as too entangled. Be careful about language we’re giving power to.
- Labouring the transition - don’t have a labour force for the transition (great ideas, but can’t implement them).
Having to think about the constraints in the innovation landscape. Materially affecting our reality: UK can afford to build 14,000/year according to Paris Agreement carbon budget. Labour government has promised to build 350,000/year. Need to do things differently - open up new pathways (right to homes).
Persisting with illusions of infinite supply - instead we need to look at constraints because that’s where the innovation is.
- Flooding with information - c.f. McLuhan’s thought about confusing a system by flooding it with info. People just spot patterns.
Far right give you a meme to help you understand reality - they hijack a pattern analysis.
-
Scale of the shift - only 7.2% of global economy is ‘circular’ and it’s declining. Need fundamental shifts in material economy.
-
Volatility in the system massively increasing - energy costs, food costs
-
New Allies - central banks, security services, intergenerational wealth, civil society. Need to have representatives from these types of organisations at this conference. New theories about asset ownership.
Westminster living in synthetic domain. Everyday politics to what we’re observing.
“Systems is about conversation not communication.” This means we can deal with more information than previously thought.
Security & Resilience of Systems
“Pre-emptive peace strikes” in places where there’s risk of systemic volatility.
Risk to whom? Rooted in assets and value, rooted in monetary frameworks. Preservation of power.
Uncrystalised risk in the system. If you put the risks on the balance sheets, the organisations aren’t solvent anymore. No longer viable. Collision and corruption therefore becomes a systemic risk - interested in survival.
(e.g. of Kristallnacht and insurance companies not paying for broken windows but instead paying ‘force majeure’ money to Nazi Party)
Explosion of sovereignties - more of an agentified world view. People don’t ‘assign’ their sovereignty to the state as they did in the past. Multitude of sovereignties.
Need to work beyond democratic renewal systems - legitimacy? “States are not the public”
Systems scaffolding - who owns the solution for portfolio (unless the system wants to implement, just remain as sticky notes). Need to work as system capabilities level.
Trans-systems work. Structural systems transformation.
Constraints - key shifter of innovation space.
‘Trap’ of the system boundary and the other. Need to build new language. Different dynamics to bounded models.
Systemic gap in price and value. Unpriced value in the system - going to be something that organised a lot of systems work (e.g. looking at single food product or wider systems level)
Deep Code failure at systems level. Language probel - use old world language which traps us. Also ‘property rights’ like to be challenged.
[Dark Matter iceberg graphic]
Building compound learning organisations and systems. Freedom and agency must lie in the actor for a system to be a system. That means learning. How do we build these?
Chief Learning Officers instead of CEOs. Coherence is formed not around risk but about capacity to learn. Higher overheads, but higher resilience and innovation capacities.
Crisis-driven system transitions. We’re going to live in a world where crises shatter Overton Windows. Emerging Theory of Change.
Big challenge is legitimacy. Mountains over mountains.
Single-point optimisation doesn’t work for an entangled planet. Need to focus on multi-point optimisation.
Multi-organisation organising. Contracting and coordination makes that difficult - what are the frameworks here?
Difficult for states to impose transition, needs to be negotiated.
System financing, structured economic systems, and para-colonizing financial capital. How do you move capital through a non-colonial lens? Capital is an extension of the dominion theory of the world.
‘System accelerators’
Intermediary agent-trust economy. How to build a different way to finance things. Turning energy meter into financial instrument? Public interest micro-trusts. Way of regulating the translation space. Weak signal.
Relationship with material economy - borrowing, not owning.
Freedom and systems - we need to build capacity for agents to be free (not in terms of market choice, but free in terms of being radically human). People and institutions feel trapped. Combined with volatility and uncertainty this creates fear.
First movers - food, material economy
We’re trying to make stuff circular that shouldn’t be. Biomaterial level? Needs to interact with nutrition system. Also river systems work (key fragility point)
Dark Matter Labs has new publication about portfolios - who owns them? New ways of organising to deal with portfolio allocation.
Problem of having the incumbents in the room when we’re talking about system transitions. 40% of the people who this issue will affect aren’t even born. Might be worth having empty seats to recognise this?
We don’t have data infrastructure - cities can’t calculate carbon emissions. Can’t just be ‘open data’ as requires security.
Operating in a deep war of values - e.g. billionaires willing to throw money at throttling the human race because they think this is the answer. Accelerating towards a ‘throttling event’. Very different perspectives on the table.
Our own governance - need integrity. Systemic question.
Financing the deep work - real issue, end up talking about surface level.
How do we move from communities of care based on fear (i.e. the far right) to communities of care based on love?
Some men just want to watch the world burn (and now there's research to prove it)
There’s a scene in one of my favourite films, The Dark Knight in which Arthur, Bruce Wayne’s butler, explains that “some men just want to watch the world burn.” There are some mighty fine memes as a result.
But it’s true. Sometimes it’s because they’ve got no power, so they might as well provoke something that might be entertaining. What have they got to lose. Other times, it’s because they’ve got all the power, and they have crazy theories about world overpopulation.
Either way, there’s new research into this mindset which shows that this is a psychological trait separate to others. I’m going to quote Brian Klaas at length, who explains in an excellent post.
These people, according to the new research, share a desire to “unleash chaos to ‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.” This trait now has a name — and an established psychological profile.
It’s called the “Need for Chaos.” Understanding it provides an important insight into the destructive world of modern politics, in which the trolls have taken over, and politicians are no longer problem solvers, but are rather political influencers. It’s not about making the world better. It’s about burning down the world of people they hate.
[…]
In particular, people who score high on this metric tend to answer that they agree with several of these statements:
I get a kick when natural disasters strike in foreign countries.
I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over.
I think society should be burned to the ground.
When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking “just let them all burn.”
We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.
I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.
Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things.
Then, to make sure that people weren’t just ticking the box next to every question mindlessly, the researchers included two additional statements that were the opposite of the other seven:
We need to uphold order by doing what is right, not what is wrong.
It’s better to live in a society where there is order and clear rules than one where anything goes.
Interestingly, when they looked at other toxic personality profiles — such as psychopathy (being a psychopath) and social dominance orientation (an urge to assert social dominance) — they found that the Need for Chaos was a separate dimension to destructive individuals. It wasn’t just capturing the same impulse.
It’s a unique trait.
[…]
The Need for Chaos trait is particularly damaging for individuals who also feel that they’ve been failed by society, manifesting in their loneliness. For them, sowing chaos is a way to lash out against the system while asserting their power and trying to establish some form of social status.
[…]
That creates a strange dynamic, in which most white men—by virtue of their historically privileged position in society—tend to score lower on Need for Chaos than other groups. However, when white men do score high on Need for Chaos, it’s particularly dangerous. To put it plainly, the research suggests that of those who have this chaotic trait, it’s most destructive when that person is a white man.
[…]
The challenge for modern politics, then, lies with figuring out a way to deal with the inevitable perceived loss of social status that accompanies a society that’s becoming more equal, while mitigating the damage that these aggrieved chaos agents can inflict on everyone else.
Source: The Garden of Forking Paths
Migration → Adaptation → Carbon removal → Geoengineering
I’ve already shared “technologist and climate geek” Ben James’ most recent blog post about off-grid solar power. Digging into other posts unearthed one about his opinion that either “a country with no choice” or a billionaire will unilaterally start spraying sulphur into the stratosphere to help cool the earth. Or at least stop it heating so quickly.
Solar Radiation Management (SRM), as it’s known, is controversial, but has become less so recently. There’s an argument to be made that the $20 billion cost per year would be well worth it to buy us more time. I don’t know enough about this, but it’s clear that this is something that is likely to be on the table as a strategy, and probably won’t go through the UN or an international body first.
Sulfur disappears from the atmosphere quickly - it rains out after about a year. This means that once we’ve started SRM, it’s dangerous to suddenly stop. We need to keep spraying particles, all the time. If we suddenly stopped, the warming would spring back rapidly, causing a bad temperature shock. The correct way to stop is a gradual phase out.
Unfortunately, Solar Radiation Management (SRM) has some fairly gigantic problems.
It doesn’t fix the root cause. Cooling the planet does not remove the CO2 which has accumulated in our atmosphere. It doesn’t stop that CO2 from acidifying the oceans and irreversibly destroying marine biodiversity.
SRM could make us complacent about dramatically cutting emissions.
Sulfur increases acid rain (harmful to many life forms) and will likely harm the ozone.
If SRM is poorly implemented, it could dramatically change weather and rainfall patterns. For example, if sulfur is not injected near the equator, it will not evenly mix into the stratosphere, causing uneven cooling and heating.
[…]
Crucially, the biggest problems with SRM are probably not yet known. The side effects of putting sulfur into the stratosphere could be some of the most consequential unknowns in human history. Clearly, that’s a huge reason to do more research. But still - no matter how much research is done, when humanity tries to bend nature to its will, we can be sure that unintended consequences won’t be far behind.
[…]
People underestimate how controversial it can become to not do SRM. Imagine you are the leader of a country close to the equator. Crop failures, extreme heat, and city-destroying cyclones mean that your people are without drinkable water, have nowhere to sleep, and cannot feed their children. Mass social unrest and physical violence become normal for your country. SRM is the only action that you can take to turn off the disasters, and prevent your government being overthrown.
[..]
Ultimately, the decision to turn on the SRM machines will not be made by climate scientists, or carefully calculated risks. It will be made on the basis of nations rising or falling - by starving populations, revolutionaries, and leaders with their back against a wall.
[…]
Geoengineering is no replacement for getting our shit together. But there would be no honour in allowing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, simply because they could have theoretically been avoided through more mitigation.
[…]
SRM might not make sense in your mind (it certainly doesn’t in mine). But do you view the world in the same way as a military dictator, “benevolent” billionaire, or leader of a starving country?
Source: Ben James