Category: Choices

  • A proxy life

    I have forgotten where I first came across Goodhart’s Law. It was probably Farnam Street. It states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” An illustration should help.

    https://sketchplanations.com/goodharts-law

    In the organisational context, it serves as a great lens to evaluate strategy and progress. As the illustration above shows, the entire direction of a desired goal can be changed when measures become targets. But, and maybe it’s a Baader -Meinhof phenomenon, I am now seeing different versions of it everywhere.

    To set some context, as more and more things have been digitised, the volume of information has just exploded. For instance, before the advent of social media, there were limits to one’s “people like me” canvas, because even an awareness of them was constrained by physical distances and the limits of one’s social circle. It had to be in real life, and public spaces like a cinema or even a vacation spot were probably an extreme. Social media changed that scale massively. Many factors including this volume of information, the lack of a granular understanding of the lives of this new set of people whom you’d never meet, and the innate human desire to do better than neighbours meant that appearances became the norm. Since we are not wired to process such large volumes of information, we dug deeper into ‘measurement by proxy.’ Not that this mode of measurement is new. For instance, we have used material manifestations (apparel, cars etc) as a measure of wealth. The stock price is a single-number measure of everything about the company. But with abundance of choice and the limits of processing power, we started developing heuristics and measuring what was easy. Meta photos (FB/Insta/WhatsApp) became a measure of everything from the quality of life to the strength of relationships. Popularity as a measure of excellence, price as a measure of quality, fitness as a measure of health, #booksread as a measure of erudition and so on.

    How does this connect to Goodhart’s Law? We end up optimising our resources for the measure, not the end goal. Which means that though the goal is say, happiness and a good quality of life, we end up aiming for the measure. From the kind of photo that will get more likes to buying that thing/experience that will surely make us happy. And as we feed this more, the mind keeps on wanting. The happiness fades in a short span of time. And as the Buddha has wisely pointed out, that loss of happiness is what becomes suffering.

    In the AI risk narrative, there is the story of the paperclip maximiser, a seemingly trivial task of maximising paperclips that might lead to “first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities”. The corresponding human version that I wrote in Peak Abstraction was that maybe we will get to a state where, if we get enough likes on the couple photo on Insta, there would be relationship bliss! What a wonderful world.

  • Artificial Culture

    It’s almost a year and a half since I wrote In Code we Trust. More recently, Tim Ferriss had Eric Schmidt on his podcast (transcript). In what I thought was a fascinating discussion based on the latter’s recent book  The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, (coauthored with Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher), they also brought up AlphaGo. Go was a game that humans had been playing for 2,500 years, and it was thought to be incomputable until DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat world champions. As Schmidt explained, some of its moves and strategies were the kind no one had thought of before. In Kissinger’s words, we’re entering a new epoch, similar to the Renaissance, this age of artificial intelligence, because humanity has never had a competitive intelligence, similar to itself, but not human. To note, a more recent version – AlphaGo Zero self-taught itself without learning from human games, and surpassed its predecessor in 40 days!

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  • Designing my desires

    A world of transactional efficiency

    It was a little over 4 years ago that I first brought up the increasingly transactional nature of our interactions and even existence in general. I was reminded of it while listening to Amit Varma’s podcast with Nirupama Rao. Interestingly, they brought up contexts similar to what I had used – mails and rails. I had used birthday greetings going from long mails/cards to a ‘Like’ on someone else wishing the person a birthday. Travel was the other context, and I liked Amit’s example of train journeys being a unique experience. In contrast to say, the flight from point A to B.

    Last year, around the same time, I had framed it as An Efficient Existence, and used the example of Taylor Pearson’s 4 minute songs – the timeframe he had mentioned for songs in the context of  certain rules that creators need to follow if they want their work to be consumed and appreciated. I had brought up an earlier era of Floyd, Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac etc whose songs didn’t follow that template. Demand or supply, what happened first, I asked. Does it have to do with the abundance of choice now, and the demands of instant gratification? While templated packages for all sorts of consumption are increasingly the norm, people also want to finish and move on to the next thing on their list. Transactions. (Generalising), there seems to be very less desire to have an immersive experience. Outside the screen, that is. As the Spotify ads show (unintentionally and literally) we’re usually in a bubble, oblivious to our surroundings.

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  • An IG Story*

    *Cheap thrills: Instant Gratification Story sounded less cool

    More than half a dozen years ago, in a Guardian article with bullet points fired against Powerpoint, Andrew Smith astutely noted that ‘In this century, it seems to me, our greatest enemy will not be drones or Isis or perhaps even climate change: it will be convenience.‘ We are now so deep into the convenience era that this would be met with ‘What’s wrong with convenience?’ Dennis Perkins, in a Vox article on video stores, had provided the answer – ‘The victim of convenience is conscious choice.‘

    I was reminded of this by the venture capital funded ‘who can deliver grocery fastest?’ pi**ing contest happening on Indian roads. I don’t know about the rules of venture capital, but road rules are definitely being rewritten by the delivery boys. Wrong-side riding, simultaneous road-screen navigation and so on. But that’s a whole different story.

    This is not just an India phenomenon. In its 2022 Media trends report, Dentsu has at least two points covering it – Omnichannel Everything (p9) and the Bring-it-to-me economy (p11). From Netflix to grocery and every consumption in between, these two trends rule.

    As Kavi notes in It’s too soon to say, our priorities are increasingly immediate over long-term. In everything from company results (QoQ) to bulking up with steroids to climate change. In a subsequent post, he continues this line of thought of us over indexing speed and time, and notes that this comes at a cost (and provides a useful framework to evaluate this for self). Intentionality is key, and this aligns well with my thoughts in the context of freedom.

    In a previous post – Default in our stars – I had written on the journey from Netflix’s Shuffle Play to the surveillance capitalist creation and exploitation of our behaviours. On the way, there are effects at an individual and societal level, including the loss of learning and the faculty to create and debate shared understandings.

    Increasingly, the convenience-based thinking and decision-making wiring that powers instant grocery delivery has started manifesting everywhere else. Politics was something I had pointed out around 4 years ago – In Other Fake news. As nuance does a speed-walk towards extinction, everything from the side you choose on Kim vs Kanye to pro-vax or no-vax is an us-vs-them all-out war. This is the meta level play of what Farnam Street calls The Small Steps of Giant leaps. Small choices on small things gradually removing the ability to think independently, form a point of view, debate it out with those who offer a counter-opinion, and replacing it with easy heuristics on which side to choose. When I think about how our species has advanced because of planning, sharing ideas, and finding ways to work towards them, I wonder if these are in some way the Chesterton fences of the mind that we are systematically removing.

    A related effect is the increasing inability to even conceptually think in years and decades. This has a disproportionate impact on two of the most important areas in life – health and wealth, or rather Insta-slim and Insta-rich. The unfair advantage of being able to think in decades on both is unfortunately lost to vast swathes of people once the instant gratification wiring takes hold. To quote from Farnam Street again, we win the moment at the cost of the decade. What’s more, one of the main ways to get this perspective – acquiring knowledge if not wisdom from those who have spent the time and effort isn’t spared either – we have 15 minute book summaries too. Zooming out, I wonder how much of narrative control we have already ceded.* How will one ever know!

    While cause and effect are still hazy, in my mind there is indeed a correlation between this instant gratification and being on stage and under scrutiny all the while. The mirror has been replaced by a selfie camera, and you can imagine what that would do to reflections!

    *Related Read: Because your algorithm says so

  • The building blocks of freedom

    In The Constraints on Freedom, I had brought up the impact of the loss of three basic freedoms at a personal level. The freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements. A big lesson from the book I got it from is that even at a civilisational level, ‘the map is not the terrain’ i.e. the granular trade-offs, impacts, and daily wins and losses of different societies don’t get covered in broad strokes. At an individual level, therefore, mapping one’s worldview and practices purely according to popular discourse and aping lessons from ‘experts’ blindly is probably not a great idea. This post is a start to framing my own can-need-want list and specific actions I would like to take to give myself (and hopefully some others around me) more basic freedom, and a bit more. I am framing this around three aspects.

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