Monthly Reading, August 2023
August 29, 2023 ā¢ #This post appeared in issue #36 of my newsletter, Res Extensa, where I write about the intersection of product design, bottoms-up systems, innovation, and what we can learn from the history of technology. Iād love it if you subscribed.
š” Good Decision, Bad Decision, Indecision, and Fake Decision
The older I get, the more I appreciate two fundamental skills in every line of work:
- A respect for and ability to assess trade-offs, and
- Knowing how and when to make decisions
Notice it doesnāt say what decision to make. Effective decision-making means knowing which resources to bring to bear, who to involve, and how to zoom out on the upsides and downsides (number 1). And just as critically, itās knowing when a decision is necessary. On most things, the faster decision is better. Whether we acknowledge it or not, most decisions are two-way doors: we can recover from the downsides. But surprisingly often itās about knowing when we donāt really need a decision right now. Not deciding is itself a decision.
Austin Yang says it this way:
What most people arenāt aware of is that indecision in itself is a decision. You are essentially choosing to stick with the status quo for the time being.
A key factor to how we think about a decision is what action follows. āIndecisionā only feels bad if we keep harping on the subject, if we continue deliberating even after we decided to stick with the status quo.
He raises another all-too-common problem where the follow-on action makes the decision problematic: the āfake decisionā:
There is one type of decision that doesnāt get talked about enough. These are decisions that get made, but never acted on. I call them āfake decisions.ā Technically speaking, they cannot be called decisions at all. They are simply feel-good exercises to fool yourself into thinking that something has changed.
š Age of Invention: Cash Cows
Economic historian Anton Howes writes a newsletter devoted to the topic: what gave rise to the āimproving mentalityā? For some reason ā a combination of timing, the weird semi-isolated, evolved culture of England, access to natural resources, political freedom ā the British Isles was a petri dish of innovation in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Anton tells the story of Robert Bakewell, a cattle farmer that set out, through experimentation, trial and error, to improve his cattle herd.
Bakewellās story could have been an unremarkable one. He was born, farmed, and died at Dishley, much like his father before him. But Bakewell, unlike most people, caught the improving mentality, or attitude ā the one thing all inventors, both then and now, have in common ā which had him viewing everything around him in terms of its capacity for betterment. The improving mentality was a reframing the status quo as a problem to solve. A habit of optimisation. A compulsion to perfect.
Through dozens of adjustments and a constant drive to improve, his cows were special. But it took active effort, experimentation, and drive to improve. He selectively bred his cattle to have larger backs, with the more expensive sirloin and filets, and smaller mid and lower sections, with their cheaper cuts.
Bakewellās cows and sheep became extraordinarily valuable when sold for meat, though he soon discovered he could make even more money by leasing out the young males of his breeds to other farmers so that they could improve their own ā ābut never as good as that of Mr Bakewell who has both the male and the femaleā. Recognising how essential it was that he not lose his competitive advantage, he even set up his own abattoir and sold only dead meat, for fear that an unscrupulous butcher might be tempted to breed from the live animals sent to slaughter.
Progress shouldnāt be taken for granted! It takes optimism and effort to make it happen.
š Andy Matuschak ā Self-Teaching, Spaced Repetition, Why Books Donāt Work
From Dwarkesh Patelās excellent podcast, this is a masterclass in how learning works. I love how Andy is always essentially thinking out loud, as heās in conversation, about the topic. Even a guy with his pedigree realizes that a subject like this is a confoundingly complex, with no ābestā way of understanding it.
One of the biggest learnings from Andy is how to be purposeful when you read. You should ask questions of the text! I know this technique and still too often I read something knowing ā sometimes consciously, usually subconciously ā that I donāt truly understand what I just read. Just take a look at this session where Andy reads and makes notes on a paper in real-time, and youāll see this in action.
šāāļø Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems
From James Somers:
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that youāll finish more stuff per unit time. But thereās more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So youāll be inclined to do more.
The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and youāre sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, youāre probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because itāll feel too expensive.
Also at work, the better you get, the better you better get:
It is a truism, too, in workplaces, that faster employees get assigned more work. Of course they do. Humans are lazy. They want to preserve calories. And itās exhausting merely thinking about giving work to someone slow. When youāre thinking about giving work to someone slow, you run through the likely quagmire in your head; you visualize days of halting progress. You imagine a resourceāthis slow personātied up for awhile. Itās wearisome, even in the thinking. Whereas the fast teammateāwell, their time feels cheap, in the sense that you can give them something and know theyāll be available again soon. You arenāt āusing them upā by giving them work. So you route as much as you can through the fast people. Itās ironic: your companyās most valuable resourcesābecause they finish things quicklyāare the easiest to consume.
Feedback loops, both positive and negative, are a helluva thing.
š§± The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu
Architect Christopher Alexander articulated the notion of āpattern languagesā in his 1977 book of the same name. You devise a library of rules of thumb for designing (in his case, living spaces ā neighborhoods, buildings, rooms) that work well together. Rather than rigid top-down design with hard specs, a well-thought-out pattern language gives the designer room to be creative while still working from thoughtful, functional constraints. An effective pattern language is a hierarchical scheme of composable building blocks: in Alexanderās original language, āCozy Half-Enclosed Cornerā works well with āLight on Two Sidesā, or with āSeat Spots in Light and Darkā.
Pattern languages are meant to be sets of general principles. No neighborhood conforms to āThe Pattern Languageā as a standard.
In the world of software, Ted Nelsonās Project Xanadu is both an epic failure and wild success. It started as a proposal in 1960, and still doesnāt exist.
But as Maggie Appleton points out here, many of the projectās proposed āpatternsā have been embraced and implemented in the distributed ecosystem of Internet specifications and software features over the past few decades:
People are building Xanadu without knowing what Xanadu is. Which is the essence of a good pattern language; true patterns evolve naturally within systems, and are found rather than crafted.
We should think of Xanadu as a successful pattern language, rather than a failed software project.
š Anachronistic History
The past couple weeks Iāve been experimenting tons with ChatGPT and Midjourney, figuring out how to make practical use of this new wave of products.
Tinkering around, I asked ChatGPT:
Write about some creative anachronistic historical events.
And hereās a brief sampling of what I got:
Aztec Airborne Armada (1400s): The Aztecs develop an array of helium-filled airships, forming an airborne armada to defend their empire and launch surprise attacks on neighboring civilizations.
Socratesā Philosophical Podcast (399 BCE): Instead of written dialogues, Socrates engages in thought-provoking discussions through an ancient form of podcasting, spreading his philosophical ideas through the airwaves of Athens.
Marco Poloās Transcontinental Railroad (1271-1295): Marco Poloās extensive travels result in a collaborative effort among the nations he encountered to construct a massive transcontinental railroad network connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa centuries ahead of its time.
See the full post for more.
š„Ŗ Nibble and Your Appetite Will Grow
From Stephen Ango:
Thereās a French expression I like:
LāappĆ©tit vient en mangeant
Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow.
Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read, to exercise, or even go outside.
Procrastination is the state of waiting for motivation to come. Paradoxically, the most reliable way to create motivation is to start doing the thing.