TrustNoRobot

Category: granfalloons

  • The Greatest Flag in the Universe

    A break from AI and ethics for a quick haiku for my favorite flag.

    The Triumph of man,

    The Laurel wreath, wraped around

    A Gear; claiming Space

    The Laurel wreath is a symbol of triumph. On the white field it proclaims boldly the victory of humanity. But what is this victory?

    Look closer. The Gear, the symbol of technology and industry, envelops space and stars and planets. The totality of the universe.

    There is only one flag that claims boldly, humans can use technology to contain the Universe.

    That is the flag of the United Federation of Planets.

    And you don’t even need to be a Trekkie to fly it. Well, you don’t need to watch Deep Space 9, anyhow.

    The thing I like most about this flag is how absurd it is. If you know how I feel about space, you’ll understand. Surrounding space with tech is the greatest hubris there is. Space is going to kill us all, and its vastness and danger should be the one thing that binds us together as a species.

    By the way, did you know that studies have shown when Astronauts from all cultures visit space, it changes their value systems? Makes them more accepting and inclusive?

    After returning, the astronauts showed increased concern with Universalism, Spirituality, and Power (social recognition), a broadened set of references to values oriented toward the collective good.

    Huh.

    The United Federation of Planets Flag also clearly expresses how I feel about current terrestrial politics. I would rather fly the flag of a fictional future government from an overacted television mythology than the flag of any current national affiliation, on most days anyhow.

    But I do love the stars and stripes on the holidays and lazy summer days, and while I think it is ridiculous to take pride in the location on the planet you were accidentally born, there are worse things than being an American. And the US flag does honor those who have given everything for our freedom of thought and speech. Say what you will about Americans, but we are loud as hell and not going to change anytime soon. I sort of like that.

    And considering the amount of taxes I pay to New York State, the NY State flag is another one I have earned the right to fly:

    Plus, it says Excelsior, which means roughly “ever upward”. It’s the Stan Lee flag! And also a Star Trek ship name. How great is that!?

    But seriously, I’m not a real Trekkie. No cosplay, I promise.

  • Space is Going To Eat Your Lunch

    space

    It’s not that all humans are simply equal. It’s that, compared to the rest of the Universe, we are equal.

    It starts with understanding the ability to form ad hoc teams has a massive evolutionary advantage. This eusocial ability is not present fully in most mammals or creatures, but those that exhibit it (ants, bees, humans and a dozen or so other species) tend to dominate their environment.

    So, when you think of your town, your state, your country, your political party, and the way these organizational units make you feel good, you are experiencing the great human trick of abstracting the Other and putting it into the internal space of meaningful connections.

    These groups are granfalloons, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t immensely powerful. We are evolved to respond internally to these grouping. Because our ancestors that didn’t respond got outflanked and killed.

    Another trick we have is that when we are faced with an adversarial situation, for instance when your group is facing off against another group, it tends to intensify and strengthen the bonds of your group.

    So we have Democrats versus Republicans, race versus race, nation versus nation.

    Arguing that these confrontations are wrong is arguing against the practical power of adversarial relationships. The real question is, what is an Other that would bond us all together?

    Sci-fi and fantasy have answered this question of course. A nasty alien invasion. A zombie virus. Inter-dimensional monsters. The Borg.

    But how do we answer this question for real, to provide a feeling of union that lasts longer than it takes you to walk to your car in the movie theater parking lot?

    It’s not us versus us. It’s us versus the rest of the Universe.

    This thing is trying to kill us.

    What if it’s simply existence versus non existence. The Existentialists saw this clearly, but for them it was more about how to answer the question of individual meaning and experience. I am suggesting “us vs. the Universe” is a way, the only moral way, to bond our entire species together.

    If you are actually scared of other people taking your jobs and changing your culture, and not scared of asteroids, famine, and climate change, then you just haven’t thought this thing through. And you know what you should really fear?

    Space.

    It will freeze you, suffocate you, explode you and irradiate you. And it’s almost all of the Universe. Astronomers believe that only 4% of the universe is made up of matter. And most of that, the vast majority, is stars and dust.

    We are all in the 1%.

    Absence of matter is the great defining aspect of the universe. The amount of non-existence in the universe is staggering. Forget about planets we can’t live on, we can’t exist in the universe anywhere but this planet, and only on certain habitable land massess. And we are rapidly screwing that up.

    The history of man, and all living things, is catastrophic. Death and suffering on scales unimaginable. Extinction and non existence defines most creatures who ever existed.

    Ok, so still with me? What if the bad guy in this story wasn’t aliens, it was Space itself — the black stuff with nothing in it — how would that change the story of man? And not just men, but all life.

    Space is the thing that makes all humans equal, and by extension all life equal. Because the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the laws of gravity, the difficulties of maintaining stable systems on this planet and elsewhere, make it imperative that we overcome the bonds of lesser granfalloons.

    There is some great sci-fi out there that captures this notion much better than this simple blog post. Seveneves. The Expanse books. But what we need is not just great sci-fi, it’s leaders who see the longer term vision of bonding our entire species together by pitting us against the entirety of Universe. Because there is no way, no way at all, that we win this fight.

    The Universe is going to eat us alive.

    And that, my friends, is exactly the kind of attitude we need to bring us all together.

  • Manage Data, Advocate for People

    How should you manage people? Lots of ink has been spilled on this question. Here comes some more…

    Every day as a technical manager I am presented with options of what I can do: tell people what to do, or focus on data revealing what we all should do. Listen to a status update of tasks to be completed, or debate departmental goals. Discuss concurrency errors, or the philosophy of empiricism.

    The interesting thing to me is that life in the modern corporate startup comes at you so fast that you generally don’t make these choices consciously, or at least not with deep deliberation. Which means that to make them correctly, it is important to develop a code of ethics that balances getting things done with doing things correctly.

    And at the heart of it all, a recognition that the only valuable commodity in a future where the slop jobs all get automated away is the properly directed attention of small groups of engaged, intelligent people.

    One thing I try to do is manage people by instead managing data, sharing goals, and advocating for the people I direct as if it were my job to do so.

    By managing data I mean understanding what core metrics are meaningful to your business and making these your shared goals. These could be sales numbers, CPU usage, user experience, in essence anything that can be quantified.

    And everything pretty much can be quantified. It’s just some aspects of life should not be.

    Meaningful goals are usually not constrained to departments. Good Managers respect things like departments and team boundaries, but also see them as the granfalloons they are.

    By advocating for people I mean listening, reflecting back and calibrating goals, and helping them live their best work and personal lives.

    Building great engineering teams requires giving as much agency is possible to engineers. But this isn’t a principle unique to engineering. We all want freedom to express our will. It’s a force multiplier to the production of the reward chemicals we need to keep the workplace rolling.

    So stop looking over your people’s shoulders, stop worrying about made up metrics like velocity points, and start thinking ahead about what the data around what you are doing tells you. About the systems you own, about the industry your domain knowledge exists in, and where society is going in general.

    Question the data. Probe it. Attack it. Slice it and subject it to constant analysis. It’s just a script. It doesn’t feel anything.

    And for your people, help them. Care for them. You are their representative. Because they are not data, they are the same as you, a wholy unique Singleton moving through time.

    Those HR systems that try to turn people into data? That try to stack rank based on made up rankings and evaluations? Throw them out. If you want to drive fast, you’re going to need to focus on the road and your direction and not the speedometer. To make a great business, focus on the individual people and not the noise.

  • Of Singletons, Granfalloons and Karasses

    There are lots of things in the world that are not Singletons, including some cool ideas about how we should act towards each other. These ideas encompass morality, normality, politics, and lead to physical manifestations like companies and nations.

    There are also some pretty cool ideas that help us to deconstruct and question the ideas and groups of people that form naturally around the organizational concepts. One of my favorite is from Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

    The granfalloon and the karass.

    A granfalloon, in the fictional religion of Bokononism (created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle), is defined as a “false karass“. That is, it is a group of people who affect a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is meaningless.[vague]

    Charles J. Shields‘s 2011 And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life quotes the novelist, who wrote[where?] that a “granfalloon is a proud and meaningless collection of human beings….” That biography also cites Hoosiers as “one of [Vonnegut’s] favorite examples” of what the term refers to.

    • karass – A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial links are not evident.

    BTW, Wikipedia is amazing, cheers to great writing on those pages.

    Once you accept the idea that there are meaningful and meaningless connections with others, and everything else is a granfalloon, it will profoundly change the way you think about politics, leadership, and especially the concept of pride.

    Being proud of belonging to a meaningful group, your karass, makes a lot of sense, both for emotional health and evolutionary protection of the tribe. These would be people you see every day at work, your family, the people in your immediate Dunbar Radius.

    But being proud of being American? Being proud of being Russian? Being proud of your race? Being proud of your state? People you don’t know?

    Feeling this pride isn’t wrong. It’s just meaningless. It’s a connection you are feeling whereby your brain is tricking itself into releasing social reward chemicals, treating the fictional grouping as an individual in your karass. It’s like feeling an affection for the planet Neptune. It may feel nice, but Neptune doesn’t care, and as far as the universe goes that connection is meaningless.

    Feeling pride for your dog learning to stay, assuming the dog is in your karass, is meaningful.

    Unfortunately, the meaningless pride for the granfalloons leads to massive unnecessary pain for real individuals in the world.

    These granfalloons, in other words, are not Singletons. The don’t deserve our respect. We can treat them like robots and rebuild them to our heart’s content. But all Singletons do deserve our respect.

    If we are to build better companies, and better countries, we must start with the understand that these are all convincing fictions. We can build new structures however we want to, and with the computers in our pockets we can even make their shape constantly change to meet the realities of our limited karasses.

    And maybe there is some way to link all of our karasses. To think of government and organizations not as a top down hierarchies, but as overlapping Ven diagrams of influence.