Category: complexity

How the AIDS Epidemics Gives Us Pointers as to Behavior Changes Post Covid-19

This interesting article in the Atlantic “How the Pandemic Will End” points an interesting parallel with the AIDS epidemics as to how behaviors changed as a result.

“The rise of HIV and AIDS completely changed sexual behavior among young people who were coming into sexual maturity at the height of the epidemic. The use of condoms became normalized. Testing for STDs became mainstream. Similarly, washing your hands for 20 seconds, a habit that has historically been hard to enshrine even in hospitals, may be one of those behaviors that we become so accustomed to in the course of this outbreak that we don’t think about them.”

We can certainly aspect that certain habits and behaviors related to health and personal hygiene will change. We can for example expect that in western countries, wearing masks in public will probably become mainstream and polite as it is in Asia (as a way to protect others from your microbes). It will become more normal to stay home when we have the flu.

Just as AIDS had a deep and profound impact on the young generation at that time, so we can expect this crisis to have a deep impact on the current younger generation as it will influence their world view for the years to come.

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How Our Worldview Can Change In Days after Years of Stagnation

I like this amusing little post by Tyler Cowen “World 2.0 — “There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen”

Just a reminder how our worldview can change in a few days after having remained stuck for years.

Beyond the fun, this serves to remind us that in nature, the main shifts happen in a catastrophic and sudden manner. Hours of flooding will change more the riverbed than years of flowing, earthquakes or volcano eruptions will model the ground more than years of slow shifts… And this is a common characteristics of all complex systems.

A stable world and civilisation is an illusion, and change always happens suddenly. Let’s get up to it.

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How the Modern World Is Actually More Resilient in the Face of Catastrophic Events

With the Covid-19 pandemics there have been a lot of comments on the fragility of modern economies when they face such a disruption. I don’t agree. Of course there are severe consequences, but I believe that the modern world is actually must more robust than it would have been decades ago when facing such an event.

Some examples which struck me.

Supply chains have been disrupted it is true, but global supply chains have also helped fight the virus and deliver equipment between China and other countries, and vice-versa. And supply chain is not really going to be disrupted for long. After a few days or weeks, new chains will be in place for the industry. Many large industrial concerns are still producing; reasons for stoppage were more related to the protection of employees.

Modern transportation has allowed in France to easily transfer sick people between regions to alleviate hospital load.

Despite the confinement, the economy has not stopped as much as it would have a few years ago, thanks to the modern capability for remote work. Many companies and organisations have carried on.

Governments in Europe have taken measures to protect employees and people from the worst short term economic impact from the crisis.

And overall (this still remains to be confirmed), the action of most governments will lead to much less fatalities than would have been the case some decades ago.

Of course the pandemics is a terrible blow to the world and its economy, but we will certainly observe that it will be far more resilient than we expect.

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How Heresy May be the Symptom of Innovation

Paul Graham‘s post on ‘Novelty and Heresy‘ is worth reading. as it reminds us that “If you discover something new, there’s a significant chance you’ll be accused of some form of heresy“.

“One common way for a good idea to be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to“. This leads to being treated as an heretic.

The point may be to figure out what is that assumption that people are very much attached to. I also tend to believe that this kind of discovery, while it is a risk, is also an opportunity as it opens an understanding of the world that won’t be shared by many people until it will become mainstream – and thus may become a competitive advantage.

Paul Graham suggests to look for heresies to identify truly new ideas. Taboos are possible sources of great innovation or at least a starting point to put in question commonly held assumptions.

And since truths have a half-life, what’s true today may not be true in a few decades therefore heresy today may be mainstream in a few decades too!

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How We Should Start Before We Are Ready

Have a glimpse at this clever post by Austin Kleon ‘Start before you think you’re ready‘. Of course that post is about writing but that can apply to any creative field.

He starts by a quote from Stephen Arrigan: “I think that when it comes to writing books, you have to start before you are ready, because you will always feel like you are never ready. I find that as you write the book, the road ahead becomes clearer; before that, the road ahead is just a distraction“.

The point Austin Kleon makes is that it is often more comfortable and exciting doing research rather than writing. But then when writing the road becomes clearer as to what really needs to be researched, so we should not wait too much before starting to write.

I find that this applies to any creative field, including entrepreneurship. In creative fields, some research is good, too much research is procrastination because we don’t know what to look for before we start. Interesting lesson!

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How Over-Protection of University Students Is Spreading and May Be Due to a Generational Issue

Also known as the “coddling of the american mind”, this disturbing trend is spreading and speeding up, as exposed in the following papers the Atlantic ‘the coddling of the american mind is speeding up‘, and the two National Review papers ‘Are We Setting a Generation Up for Failure?’ Part 1 and Part 2. Those follow the publication of the book ‘The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure‘ And it now also spreads to other countries like France. We had already addressed this trend in our 2016 post ‘How Overprotecting from Different Points of View is a Moral Hazard‘.

The issue is that students can declare to be violently assaulted by ideas that do not fit their opinions and therefore decline to participate to debates and presentations. They can flee to safe rooms. Moreover this leads to cancelling speeches and debates even with renown philosophers and personalities, that have strong opinions on certain subjects.

The interesting point made in the analysis of the situation is the observation that this issue may be generational – linked to the first generation reaching university that has known internet since early childhood and social networks since teenage years. The theory would be they this generation falls prey to a low exposure to contradictory ideas, staying comfortably within their own online communities. “The new beliefs about fragility really came in only for those born after 1995. When [you] read the book iGen by Jean Twenge, and when I saw the graphs that she shows of how mental health plummeted when iGen reached its teen years, that’s when a whole new dimension of the problem became visible.”

This would be the demonstration that internet and online social networks effectively fostering community-centered and intolerant feelings. In addition, excessive protection from parents investing more in their children would also be a culprit.

Another issue is that universities in the US become increasingly corporatized, funded by large endowment funds and avoid to feel the wrath of past and future donors. This may also be a factor.

In any case, this trend is disturbing and needs to be curbed. In the modern world we can’t live in a society where people would close themselves to contradiction and avoid exposure to other ideas than the ones they are familiar with.

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How to Analyze Drama Using the Karpman Triangle

I discovered the concept of the Karpman Triangle as a social model of human interaction – and a useful way to decrypt movie scenarios! This social model of human interaction (formalized in the 1960s) always involves a Victim, a Persecutor and a Rescuer.

Of course, in the dynamics of social interaction, roles can evolve and change. However the basics remain and it gives a useful analysis tool at least for movie and theater scenarios.

In real life it does apply too and gives an interesting model that can be used for individuals to realize their current posture and how they could switch. “The motivations for each participant and the reason the situation endures is that each gets their unspoken (and frequently unconscious) psychological wishes/needs met in a manner they feel justified, without having to acknowledge the broader dysfunction or harm done in the situation as a whole” (Wikipedia). Therefore, elevating the state of consciousness of the situation can help de-dramatize the situation.

If you are facing a drama, examine whether the Karpman triangle could apply. It is quite a fascinating analysis model for such interactions!

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How to Overcome the Paradox of Choice

Too much Choice creates paralysis and kills Choice. We can realize that in any restaurant with a too long menu. The excellent TED talk by Barry Schwartz tackles this issue deeper: ‘The paradox of choice‘.

The usual assumption at least in Western societies is that “The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have.”

Barry Schwartz notes that too much choice leads to choice paralysis, and also to ‘cost of opportunity’ issues (“the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen“).

Barry Schwartz goes as far as to attribute the unprecedented increase of clinical depression (and suicide) in our societies to too much choice. Finally, he says, when there was not to much choice, people had lower expectations and that may have been a cause of higher happiness.

I believe that faced with too much choice as we are today, it is still important to maintain low expectations and a mindset of satisfaction with what we have. I understand this is difficult in a world of temptation and where it is easy to depress over the fantastic lives other seem to have on social networks.

The paradox of choice is clearly a major challenge in our societies. The best response seems to be targeted education about how best to behave in such a world – and this seems to be mission in the new generations’ formal life learning.

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How Modern Identification Technology Proves How Unique We Are

Every other week another technology for personal identification crops up. On the latest ones is based on heartbeat, as explained in this MIT Technology review article ‘The Pentagon has a laser that can identify people from a distance—by their heartbeat‘.

While facial recognition is becoming mainstream and is used in airports and increasingly in the public space, and fingerprints are used almost daily, the stream of unique identification methods continues. Let’s just hope the individual uniqueness is effectively proven and that those methods get certified!

However the point I want to make is that they all show how unique we can be: fingerprints, face, eyes and pupila, DNA, heartbeat… So many aspects that create a unique signature and make us different from other billion individuals…

Soon medicine will also start to become individual based, depending on our genetic variants.

Did you realize how unique you are? And that we all should make better use of this uniqueness instead of trying to get standardized and categorized as cogs of the economy?

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How Fake News Reflect Collective Fears and Aspirations

Cory Doctorow takes an interesting perspective in his post ‘Fake news is an Oracle: How the falsehoods we believe reveal the truth about our fears and aspirations‘ (the post also refers to the Locus column ‘Cory Doctorow: Fake News Is an Oracle‘. He considers fake news as the emergence of a collective subconscious issue.

Cory Doctorow analyses in detail the myth of science-fiction literature being deemed to be predictive of actual evolution of society. Of course it has an influence, but Cory Doctorow concludes that it is more like a revealing medium for our hidden subconscious collective aspirations and fears. And, he concludes, so are fake news: if they prosper, they do reflect at some point collective fears and aspirations.

Cory Doctorow continues to show that the fact that the anti-vaccination movement and its fake news is so popular has a point in demonstrating that there is an issue about big pharma and its control, beyond the reaction on vaccines themselves.

His view hence is that “Fake news is an instrument for measuring trauma, and the epistemological incoherence that trauma creates – the justifiable mistrust of the establishment“. Therefore, according to him the issue is to “address the underlying corruption that is rotting our society“.

I believe that fake news and other conspiracy theories have always been around, and are just easier to spread. Still I agree with Cory Doctorow that they are revealing subconscious and more conscious issues and are thus interesting to examine and consider. And the core issues once identified certainly need to be addressed.

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How Economic Recessions Are Actually Positive (on the Long Term)

There is a lot written these days about the upcoming recession. There has been already a very long cycle without a recession (the last one in 2008 has been particularly strong though). But is a recession necessarily a bad thing?

From my perspective I do observe currently in the economy some ‘irrational exuberance’ to use the term coined by Alan Greenspan in the 1990s. There is a lot of money thanks to low interest rates, and it is sometimes or even often invested in ventures of dubious success probability. I observe this effect for example in the start-up financing field.

A recession is nothing more than a readjustment of the economy, a clean-up that removes activities that are not any more adjusted to the requirements of new era, and a number of activities that are only just marginally profitable. And from my observation that is probably needed now in a number of economic fields.

Unfortunately, it would appear that the complex economy does not manage to run this clean-up effort more effectively than through an overall recession from time to time.

Of course, this economic clean-up has consequences on employment and on the perspectives of individuals if they are impacted. A strong social support net is needed to amortize the effects of a recession for the individuals. Recessions also tend to remove from employment those whose skills are not adapted any more to the economy, and there needs to be ways to upgrade those skills to give them a new role to play. It can thus be felt negatively across consumption.

All in all I tend to believe that recessions are rather inevitable, a good thing in the longer term and policies that aim to avoid or postpone them will only create stronger and harder recessions at the end.

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How to Develop Realistic Expectations for Mega-Projects

This interesting podcast and post from Freakonomics website ‘Here’s Why All Your Projects Are Always Late — and What to Do About It‘ proposes a good analysis of all the reasons why mega-projects, and particularly public mega-projects, always fall so dramatically behind in terms of expectations.

All the usual fallacies and symptoms applicable to large complex projects are mentioned in a quite good synthesis and summary: the planning fallacy (overly optimism in spite of historical evidence to the contrary); optimism biais; neglecting the time and effort for coordination; student’s effect (procrastination); inadequate expectations set to sell a public project, etc.

The interesting approach mentioned at the end of the post as being possibly a successful approach is to align estimates for time and cost (or overruns) for new projects on the observed history of similar projects. This seems to be applied today in the UK. The post mentions that this approach seems to “be reasonably accurate and the cost overruns to be reasonably small — about 7 percent from the planning stages of a transportation project to completion. All of which suggests that pricing in the optimism bias and using reference-class forecasting are truly useful tools to fight the planning fallacy.” This approach can only work of course if there is a representative database of similar past projects, which is not always the case. For example it is known that some major UK infrastructure megaprojects such as High Speed train lines do still face huge overruns in schedule and cost.

Megaprojects failure to deliver on time and on budget is a major societal issue (and the sunk cost fallacy leads us to finish those projects even if they appear to be grossly failing). I am not sure the solution is as simple as the solution mentioned in the post, but it worth noting that some governments have identified the issue and try to address it proactively.

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