The Understory

Weeklyish notes from the field.

What I’m Reading

Warren Buffet’s final letter to shareholders

Several things stood out to me while reading through Warren’s final letter, principal of which are his integrity and clarity of purpose.

Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world.

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart

I’m about halfway through the book and I have mixed opinions on it overall which feels like a good sign. This quote in particular is in reference to increasing homogeneity, similar to what’s described in The Decline of Deviance.

The cybernetic outrage machine rewards those who reinforce extremes by supplying dopamine and engagement. Meanwhile, divergent opinions are algorithmically filtered out.

Why the open social web matters now from Ben Werdmuller

An excellent talk from the senior director of technology at ProPublica on how to think about building open social platforms that serve the needs of real communities.

The opportunity right now isn't to build a better Twitter or to provide a nice place for people who care about Linux to chat: it's to build infrastructure that vulnerable people can actually use to organize, to communicate safely, and to build community. But we can only do that if we're building with those communities from day one, not building for them based on our assumptions about what they need.

How to draw an orange from Mike Monteiro

Thoughts on creativity, agency, the torment nexus, and AI. If you don’t have time to watch the talk, Mike’s newsletter touches on some of the same themes.

Being told we can’t draw is the first step to telling people that no, you’re not as competent as you think you are. Once you convince human beings that they’re incapable of putting their thoughts and feelings on paper, convincing them that they’re incapable of filling out a union card is that much easier. Once you convince human beings that they cannot express themselves, it’s that much easier to convince them that they can’t govern themselves.

The Devil Needs No Advocate from Pablo Enoc

When an artist pushes back against the use of generative AI tools, what they are saying is something like this: I do not approve of technology corporations amassing wealth by exploiting my work as an artist without consent.

There’s no artist saying they don’t want the literal software processing their data because it’s software. It’s about who owns the software and what they do with it.

I Canceled My Family's Health Insurance (and joined CrowdHealth) from Nat Eliason

Healthcare (and health insurance) is broken. CrowdHealth, a healthcare crowd-funding platform, is an interesting experiment. Nat’s write-up has a ton of good data and answers to questions that come up for anyone thinking about health insurance.

The last thing that pushed me over the edge here was a sense of duty to help nudge health care in a better direction.

I’ve been complaining about health insurance for years, but still forking over tens of thousands of dollars a year to support their broken business.

Voting with my dollars is a way to push the industry in a better direction.

Tools I’m toying with

Spurious Correlations

Correlation is not causation. This site is chock full of charts that show surprising correlations without causation. For example:

Flourish

I’ve been asking ChatGPT to help me create some complex charts which generally works fine until I want to customize. Flourish looks like a really great tool for building dense data visualizations.

Quote

In God we trust. All others must bring data.

― W. Edwards Deming

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I’ve been collecting notes on models, effects, paradoxes, and phenomena for the past couple of weeks. Today’s entry is brought to us by Alex Danco in Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury:

100 years after Jevons published his observation on coal, William Baumol published a short paper investigating why so many orchestras, theaters, and opera companies were running out of money. He provocatively asserted that the String Quartet had become less productive, in “real economy” terms, because the rest of the economy had become more productive, while the musicians’ job stayed exactly the same. The paper struck a nerve, and became a branded concept: “Baumol’s Cost Disease”.

Essentially, if one sector of the economy creates lots of well-paying jobs, then every other sector’s wages rise to stay competitive. The piece goes on to describe some of the strange AI-driven side effects we may see—like radiologist wages skyrocketing because they’re the mandated last reviewer for AI-managed tasks.

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Yesterday, Willow and I set out to find mushrooms in our neighborhood. It was the first big rainfall of the season, and it rained steadily the whole time we were out. We came back soaked, but we found over thirty different species of #fungi! You can see a few of our favorites over on Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/p/dstokes/887447943539971168

There are so many reasons not to spend an hour wandering around in the rain. Turns out there’s one reason to do it anyway: sharing moments of wonder with the ones you love. 🌈

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I’m taking up poetry for a bit. I’m not sure for how long. I’m not sure what I write will be any good. I’m not sure what it might awaken in me. With that said, I want to spend more time in my creative energy so I’m giving it a shot.

Here goes nothing.

we walk together silently you, slightly ahead me, somewhere below with every step you drift forward above the ground i feel your unease i feel the distance both traveled and ahead i wait for you to awaken

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The concept of reversible and irreversible decisions is not new to me. I’ve read the shareholder letter where Jeff Bezos explains the idea using examples of one-way and two-way doors before. The question of when to make an irreversible decision, however, has always been “as late as possible” without much more guidance. I like the STOP, LOP, or KNOW framework—laid out by Farnam Street—aimed at preventing analysis paralysis related to irreversible decisions.

Consider my rule of STOP, LOP, or KNOW. If you stop gathering useful information (STOP), you’re about to lose an opportunity (LOP), or you know what to do (KNOW).

If you stop gathering useful information and there is no prospect of any on the horizon, make the decision. When you’re in charge of operations at a three-letter agency, you make many hard decisions with imperfect information. Once you’ve talked to all the people with useful information, it’s time to act. The problem is a lot of people don’t act. They sit waiting for some magical piece of information that might or might not come that will make the decision clear. I call this unicorn information. We know it’s out there, but we can never find it. You can’t wait for the unicorn, you have to decide. The people that waited for the unicorn didn’t last.

If you’re about to lose a meaningful opportunity, make the decision. Recently a big real estate opportunity came across my desk. While not impossible to reverse, it would have been prohibitively costly. As with any decision that involves a lot of money — the biggest check I’ve ever written, I dove into the details wanting to understand everything. At first, there was no rush to make the decision. When interest rates started to rise, the deal got a lot more attractive. My partner called and asked if I was in because it was going forward with or without me. I had to decide, or I’d lose the opportunity.

If you know what to do, make the decision. When you’re the boss, sometimes you have to let people go. While you can offer feedback and coach and hope things will change, sometimes you wake up and know what to do. Once you know it’s best for both parties to move on, the biggest mistake is waiting.

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Adam Mastroianni shares a catalog of mental traps that get people stuck in “So you wanna de-bog yourself.” I think Floor is Lava is my favorite.

Every kid learns to play the “floor is lava” game, where you pretend that you'll get incinerated if you touch the carpet. Even toddlers can pick it up, which reveals something profound: very early on, we acquire the ability to pretend that fake problems are real. We then spend the rest of our lives doing exactly that.

Often, when I’m stuck, it’s because I've made up a game for myself and decided that I’m losing at it. I haven’t achieved enough. I am not working hard enough and I am also, somehow, not having enough fun. These games have elaborate rules, like “I have to be as successful as my most successful friend, but everything I've done so far doesn't count,” and I’m supposed to feel very bad if I break them. It’s like playing the absolute dumbest version of the floor is lava.

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In Generational Change, Robert de Neufville talks about how change accumulates and compounds over time in ways that are difficult to track:

When I was born, in 1970, the average global temperature was 1°C cooler than it is today. There were about 3.7 billion people on Earth, less than half as many as there are now. Life expectancy in the US was about 71 years. Smallpox had not been eradicated; I was part of the last generation that was vaccinated against the disease. The per capita GDP of the US—now close to $70,000—was just $26,000 in today’s dollars, so Americans were much poorer then than they are now. ARPANET, the early ancestor of the internet, was switched on just a year before I was born. Intel had not yet begun to sell microprocessors commercially. Seven of the 10 largest companies in the world today hadn’t been founded.

His is a refreshing take on the annual reflection exercises that tend to pop up this time of year.

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