Superegos for the digital world
Superimposed on the iPad a night picture of the US with a topographical map – shows that population settlements are hugely influenced by the terrain. Also never realised before the US was such a tale of two halves – a plain in the East and mountains and deserts in the West.
I just finished reading the second book of The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss. After a fantastic first book, I was wondering if the author would disappoint or run out of steam. But he continues to weave a fascinating and deep tale.
The story on the surface is a very classic fantastic tale of a young man getting into a magic academy, in a typical medieval-fantastic setting. What differentiates it is the depth and details of that world, which are slowly unveiled, with great consistency. It is like seeing a rich tapestry getting woven in front of your eyes. The characters themselves are very deep, and multi-faceted.
Patrick Rothfuss uses classic themes of the genre like magic, fairies, or dragons, but subtly gives them his own twist, and keeps the readers always on their toes, never knowing when what seems familiar will become strange and mysterious.
I am really impressed. The only comparison that comes to mind is the Lord Of The Ring ! It is not (yet) a tale as epic as LOTR – probably halfway in that regards between The Hobbit and LOTR – but what it lacks in drama and scale, it more than makes up with more rich and complex characters, and a very modern read on their motivations and lives. One thing Rothfuss and Tolkien have in common is the place that languages, music and songs occupy in their stories.
I can’t wait to read the third book, which unfortunately will probably only come out in May ’13 !
I am almost done reading “Why the West rules – for now” by Ian Morris. It is simply one of the most impressive books I have read in my life.
The author starts by trying to answer the question “why did the west get to the industrial revolution first, and hence got to dominate the twentieth century ?”, but the book is not really about answering that question. Along the way Ian Morris analyses how civilisations grow, evolve and decline. It is a lot of learnings from the past, but also gives insights into our future – some of them quite scary 🙂
It is extremely well written, fun, entertaining, a real page turner. It’s a book you really enjoy reading, but which messages echo well after you have put it down.
Here are some of the learnings and questions I took away :
Now for the great and also the scary part : the “Social development index” that Ian Morris has measured from 14,000 BCE to today shows a huge steep increase in the past 100 years. One component of that index is the energy capture, ie how much energy we use to lead our lives, including the food we eat, animal muscle we leverage, or fossil fuels we burn. In prehistoric times this was at 4 kilocalories/person/day, and 14,000 years later during the Roman empire had gone up to 31. It then collapsed and only reached that level again in the west in 1700 CE (China had reached that level earlier in 1600). By 1800 it was still only at 38. But with the industrial revolution everything changed, and it had soared to 92 by 1900 (The eastern world by then had slipped behind and only reached 49), and further accelerated in the twentieth century to reach a whopping 230 (the east is on the same course and even though it is at “only” 104, its growth curve is rapidly catching up).
So we should feel priviledged to live in that “world of plenty” that is our era. It is not only unprecedented in terms of the civilization levels we have achieved, it has also seen a dramatic acceleration of wealth and possibilities in the last century, and does not give any signs of deceleration. It might also be the first time we have have a shot at building one global civilization, instead of the conflicting empires or nations of the past.
But we should also be scared that our civilization might hit a development ceiling like we always have before, and that we might have to live through a collapse in development level, with its accompanying unrest and destructions.
So how do we build new social models that will take us through that ceiling, and let continued technological developments keep carrying us forward ? Is climate change going to undo our progress at planetary level as it undid might empires in the past ? Will we really build that global civilization we have started to create, or will states, nations and empires prevail and be the main barriers to progress ?
History is the best way to put our humanity in perspective, and it gives us insights into who we are and the challenges lying ahead of us. This books provides a unique lens to think about our future, and to consider how technology and social models will shape our destiny – a must read !
Happening to read about mammal history, learnt today that the neocortex is unique to that class of creatures. And the size of the neocortex has in turn been correlated to social interactions … Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, suggests that for humans the number of people one can entertain stable social relationships is around 150. This has probably some implications on how we can best organise our enterprises … More at wikipedia’s entry.
Both easy to read and thoughtful, this article by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker begins by debunking the idea that the “no criticism” rule in brainstorms unleashes creativity. Lehrer goes to explain why healthy criticism actually sharpens the mind and results in more and better ideas from a team. Expanding from brainstorms to other modes of interactions, he then looks into how work spaces can foster innovation. He has great examples, from an old MIT building whose layout would have had a big impact on a rich history of innovation, to the Apple Headquarters which Steve Jobs designed himself, creating a central atrium and moving mailboxes and bathrooms there to force people to have these chance hallway encounters that create new sparks of ideas !
Now the question is how will we recreate these workspaces in our era of constant travels and virtual collaborations 🙂
We so often get caught into “management school thinking” that we forget about common sense. We know that people don’t work just for money, we also have seen first hand recently the kinds of disasters created by grossly overpaid people, so this video should not come as a surprise. Research has identified that monetary incentives only drive performance for repetitive, mechanical tasks. For tasks requiring intellect (which is most of the work nowadays), money is only a factor if you don’t have enough of it, but additional incentive don’t drive performance.
What matters most is Autonomy (ie do your work self directed), Mastery (ie have the opportunity to grow your skills), and Purpose (ie knowing the positive impact that your work will have).
When I reflect on my work life, I find that I know this but have still too often succumbed to the concept of cash incentives for performance. Also I have seen others drive these for real reasons, mostly greed frankly. For them, implementing high cash bonuses for their teams had a real advantage : they would mechanically drive their own compensation up, regardless of the real impact of the bonuses.
So, a great video to reflect upon, and to share with your teams.
Being French, I often deplore the cynical and negative attitudes of our culture, and always been more comfortable with the American positivism. This video is a refreshing reminder that positive attitude should not come at the expense of reality and truth. It is from journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich. Video on YouTube
At dinner in NYC with Koen and Ann, we had a very interesting discussion about democratic processes. Belgium, France and the USA were obviously great material, respectively with their deliquescent state, banana republic, and polarised politics. Add to these a declining participation to the voting process, and it really looks like there is an opportunity to do better than these old democracies.
It should probably not surprise us, as our political representation systems date back from times when the fastest one could travel was on horseback, when most people lived tilling the soil, and few could read and write. The state then had much less complexities to manage, and the pace of change and decision making was measured in months, years or decades.
Isn’t it time then to move to more direct systems where citizens with access to immense amounts of data and analysis can directly participate in dialog, express their opinions, and take decisions without having to vote for “representatives” ?
This of course would be a huge shift, one that will be resisted by the current professional political class. It is also a complex one, which will require to reinvent all the safeguarding mechanisms, the checks and balances that took centuries to evolve.
But isn’t it already happening ? The political class in France recently showed how out of touch it was with the public opinion during the DSK sex scandal. They initially made statements supporting DSK, hinting that aggressive sexual advances was nothing to be fussy about, really an expression of French Don-Juanism. Within days or hours of their first reactions, they adjusted their stance, no doubt as their political advisors decrypted the online forums… The real-time data mining and analytics around social networks is already shaping the actions of politicians. We should probably take control of that process before they learn how to subvert it.
As a 13 years old boy from New York was looking at trees, he observed that there was a pattern to how branches were positioned. Enquiring further, he found they follow a fibonacci sequence … Nothing extraordinary so far, this is a fact already known, except that few thirteen years kids will figure that out 🙂 … The extraordinary thing is that he then thought of comparing how solar cells placed using that pattern compare to a regular flat array of photovoltaic cells, and found that they generated 20-50% more power !!! Through natural selection, trees have apparently evolved over millions of yrars to adopt that configuration and increase the amount of energy they capture, but no-one had thought of using this for solar panels before.
This is such a refreshing story … One of curiosity, intelligence, and one that proves again that there is no limit to understanding more and more of the world around us, and use the learnings to improve our lives !
To read the paper written by that boy, Aidan Dwyer, himself, follow this link.
A must read article by the economist who became famous for forecasting the crisis, Is Capitalism Doomed ?.
This is posted on the “Project Syndicate” blog, where all the best minds in politics, economics, science, and culture post articles with deep independent analysis of the world trends. All the people I have been impressed by in the field of economy are there : Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Roach, Joseph Stiglitz …
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