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Creating the thing that destroys you

The coolest thing I found this week was a story by Scott Alexander called “Sort by controversial.” He posted it on Halloween, and it is a horror story in some sense: An advertising company wants to drive more clicks to its ads (meaning more money). Controversial topics get the most clicks – so the engineering team builds a program to create a list of controversial ideas. The program works great. So great in fact, that it creates controversy within the company, people start fighting with each other, and it soon escalates to a different level. The monster they create turns agains them.

This theme seemed familiar to me: Humans have an idea, humans create a cool thing, and the cool thing becomes the new problem. It’s happened in:

• Jurassic Park (dinosaurs going out of control)

• Terminator (a security system turning into the enemy)

• Star Wars (A pupil turning against the master)

• Kung Fu Panda (The favorite student and adopted son turning evil)

• Frankenstein (the monster turns against its maker).

• Lucifer rebelling against God and being banished to hell, which Milton covered in Paradise Lost.

“Sort by Controversial” is different because the monster isn’t an entity – it’s an idea. Just letting the idea loose in the world changes the shape of reality and threatens the creator. You think this is just a thought experiment? How about this: Russia’s implementation of the Communist ideology was shaped in the hands of Lenin and Trotsky, who built the Red Army. The ideology was used to overthrow the existing bureaucracy. After Lenin’s death, the new bureaucracy concentrated power even more effectively, so much that Trotsky himself was exiled and executed.1

Poets’ poets and reinvention

If you are an artist, who is your audience?

Dana Gioia wrote an essay called “Can Poetry Matter?” At its heart is the idea that poetry, which used to be an artform for the masses and common people, something that people memorized and shared and sung, has now become an intellectual activity for a restricted few:

A “famous” poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, “only poets read poetry” was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.2

Every popular field creates a subculture that breeds an audience of aspirants. There are popular comedians like Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle, and there are comedians’ comedians like Norm Macdonald whom they like. Some writers are only read by other writers. Some coding gurus just teach coders to crack interviews, and business gurus run YouTube channels about business strategy.

Maybe even Substack and the blogosphere is becoming like this – a lot of bloggers sound insightful and intelligent to me, because I want to get better at blogging. But when a friend recently asked me for recommendations, I couldn’t suggest any of these. My favorites are all Substackers’ Substackers, and maybe there are so many aspiring bloggers now that you can just make a living off of this closed bubble.

There’s nothing wrong with this. But if you want to stay in touch with the man (or woman) on the street, maybe you could reinvent yourself every once in a while by pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. Do something you’re not used to doing. Invent new personas to force yourself to try a new style, like David Bowie. Share your work with people outside your circle and absorb their confused expressions when they have no clue what you’re talking about, because a little disappointment in the short term saves you from delusion in the long term.

Also watch: You don’t want to start a business – but it’s important to think you do

Programming a new government

In software development, there’s a concept called “forking.” You take someone else’s code, modify it, and if it works, you have something new. What if you could do the same thing with a government?

The g0v and vTaiwan experiment in Taiwan pulled this off. In 2014, Taiwanese citizens rioted when they felt like the government wasn’t hearing their voice. A new government came to power claiming they would be transparent and listen to the people. Coordinated by Audrey Tang, a talented coder, there were now two programs working on this – 

• g0v which let the public track government budgets, gather data, and make information accessible.

• vTaiwan, which let the public discuss an idea before implementing it.

The discussion wasn’t a simple “Yes” or “No” referendum like how Brexit split the UK. It was done through a site called Pol.is. Every user on this site could anonymously submit an idea and vote on other people’s ideas, but could not comment. Because of this, you could participate and discuss, but couldn’t argue with others. The website would create graphs showing how people saw things differently – but also which opinions were common. For example, people were divided about Uber being a good or bad thing…

but eventually there were a handful of things that everyone agreed on which were drafted into policy, instead of picking one side over the other:

(I only have a rough idea of how exactly this works. You can read more here)

vTaiwan is a hopeful experiment in what is called deliberative democracy. It would be amazing to try something like this for larger democracies and even tech platforms that affect us like Instagram and Twitter – but where would we start?

Source: I discovered this through

Luck, skill, and the decisions that affect you

“As a hiring manager, when I get a stack of resumes I throw half of them out.
I don't employ unlucky people.”
– David Brent, The Office

If algorithms decide everything, whom can you hold accountable?

Institutions and algorithms have improved the efficiency of processes. But they have also removed accountability. Your social media post is removed? Your loan application is rejected? Your Uber account is deactivated? Every time you try to reach a human to solve this, you hear a bunch of automated voices asking you to punch a sequence of buttons that make you want to fling your phone in frustration. You have no clue who decides your fate and what factors go into these decisions.

Some societies recognize this and have a Right to Explanation in place to solve this. If you’re affected by a decision, you can ask how the decision was taken. This gets more complicated when automated algorithms are involved. But now with AI entering the picture, explainability is way harder. Algorithms used until now at least had a logic flow you could trace. But AI algorithms work on probabilities – even the people who programmed them can’t trace why a decision is being made. They can neither fix it nor be held accountable.

Explainable AI explores this problem but I don’t know how far they’ve got. For example, OpenAI is infamous for evading any question about training data… and the difficulty of the problem might be turned into an excuse for sloppiness in ethics.

But even if every decision has an explanation, a lot of it still comes down to luck. That might be distasteful to hear in a world where you’ve been told if you work really hard you can get whatever you want. But it doesn’t necessarily work that way. 18,300 people applied to be a NASA astronaut, for just 11 vacancies. How many do you think will be selected based on merit and how many because they were luckier than the competition? Watch this video from 3:30 to 5:00 to find out:

Fantastic buildings and where to find them

Sometimes I see a picture of a building and I can’t help wondering: Who built this? How? What’s the story behind this building?

Especially if the building is old. A thousand years ago when we didn’t have cranes and modern equipment, we were still building cathedrals. People worked on buildings that took lifetimes to complete, because of belief in a divine cause that would secure them a seat in heaven.3 One of these cathedrals, The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, is still under construction after 140 years. Decked with grotesque imagery and walls that look like they’re melting, the cathedral was the vision of one man, Antoni Gaudi. When he died, the building was only 15% done.

Then there are follies. A folly is a mistake – a mistake of extravagance that cost the builder too much, but turned into something grand and beautiful. For example, there’s this literal cliffhanger called “The Swallow’s Nest” on a seaside cliff in Crimea:

Or this mountaintop monastery in Meteora, Greece where the view must be crazy:

Or Fonthill’s Abbey, a tall building built in haste with such poor planning that the tower kept collapsing continuously till the building was demolished in 1825…

Or this cute building in Scotland called the Dunmore Pineapple:

Apparently the pineapple that we get in supermarkets today was once a prized rarity that bred pineapple mania. Even St. Paul’s Cathedral has a golden pineapple on top. Tell me If you know of any other offbeat buildings, and I’ll add them to my bucket list.

Reading recommendation for this week: Dogs have a special move to shake water off their fur that humans don’t – the wet dog shake. An elephant and an octopus are worlds apart, but their trunk and tentacle move in surprisingly similar ways. Every time you reach for a cup of coffee, your muscles enter a theater of biological drama…

My friend

Share this with a friend who might enjoy it. Last week, I wrote about my garbage blog. You can find the complete list of posts here.