Editor’s Note
There are two basic kinds of feedback loops that you encounter all of the time: balancing and reinforcing. A common example of a balancing feedback loop is your thermostat. When the temperature in your apartment drops below a certain threshold, the heats kicks in, raising the temperature until it surpasses that threshold. When it hits that point, the heat turns off. Even though the temperature outside may fluctuate, the balancing feedback loop created by your thermostat keeps the temperature in your apartment very stable.
A reinforcing feedback loop can be thought of as “the rich get richer”. Consider someone who gets early experience at a start-up that goes on to be successful. As the start-up grows, that employee is able to grow with it. This increases the likelihood of them getting hired for a more prestigious job at another company. This new prestigious job increases their likelihood of getting hired for an even more prestigious job at the next company. Each recruiter is relying on historical performance to predict future performance and each successive historical performance reinforces that algorithm.
Another type of feedback loop is competence. As you perform competently, you are given more opportunities to perform. If you perform competently on those tasks, you are given even more opportunities. The thing about reinforcing feedback loops is that while they grow powerful over time, they can start out quite small, and then the impacts can appear as if they came out of nowhere.
You’ve probably experienced reinforcing feedback loops at work (as you perform you are asked to perform even more) and I’m certainly beginning to feel them at Discord. This is good. It means I am performing competently, but it also means that my time to dedicate to this newsletter dwindled quite a bit this week.
This is something I need to be cognisant of. Reinforcing positive loops don’t always mean growth. The same reinforcing structure can also produce collapse. For example, as sales drop, revenues available to invest in marketing or sales staff decrease leading to further decreases in sales.
In order to make sure that this recent growth in work expectations doesn’t result in collapse, I need to reset expectations. Threading that needle will be difficult, but important. That will be for next week though. This week, between presenting recent research findings, performing a Kano Analysis, and conducting 9 hour-long user interviews, I didn’t have much time for a well-thought-out Editor’s Note. I look forward to returning next week.
Until then, this week I have for you a book recommendation of Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life, which is all about the problems with rationalism in an “irrational world”. The music recommendation is Universal Beings, an incredible blend of “organic beat music”, spiritual jazz, and post-bop. A few articles that are Worth Your Time. And the art of Ryan Whelan.
What I’m Reading
I’ve always been a bit uneasy about using the word irrational in behavioral economics to describe human economic decision-making. While I certainly understand the goal is to undermine the argument of neo-classical economics that human beings are utility-maximizing rational agents, I actually think most human behavior is quite rational when you evaluate it through the lens of evolutionary psychology.
This is the same point that Ogilvy advertising legend Rory Sutherland makes in his book Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. I actually read Alchemy a few years back, but bring it up in Week 10 because I just finished the audiobook Hacking the Unconscious: How Ideas Get In and Which Ones to Keep which is a compendium of radio episodes that Rory Sutherland hosted on BBC 4.
Alchemy and Hacking the Unconcious both explore how to navigate a world where people are acting rationally when we redefine what rationality is.
For example, it’s much easier to trick ten people once than it is to trick one person ten times. What does this mean in practice?
Take online shopping. It’s super straightforward for ten people to buy a single item from an online retailer. But flip this around and imagine one person trying to buy ten different items (say, Christmas presents) online. The customer experience is suddenly less than ideal compared to offline shopping, with different items gets delivered at different times and on different days. So many cardboard boxes to recycle! Suddenly a trip to the nearest department store feels much less chaotic.
From a marketing perspective, think about something like click-thru rates. 10 clicks from one person are going to be a lot less meaningful than 1 click from 10 people if your aim is to grow brand awareness. This is an example of alchemy.
This alchemy can be summed up through Rory’s 11 rules:
The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea
Don’t design for average
It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone is being logical
The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience
A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget
The problem with logic is that it kills off magic
A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident.
Test counterintuitive things because no one else will
Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club
Dare to be trivial
If there were a logical answer, we would have found it
To dive deeper into each of these rules, pick up a copy of Rory’s book here.
What I’m Listening To
In December of 2018, I was in New York facilitating a design sprint and had the great fortune of being in New York at the same time that Red Bull was sponsoring the first-ever live play-through of Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings. That night ended up being a special night, where I shared cocktails in a speakeasy basement in the West Village with many of the artists listed below. But this post is about the record. So how does one end up at the first-ever live play-through of the album? Wasn’t the album at least played live when it was recorded?
Long-time Chicago-resident Makaya McCraven has been at the forefront of redefining the genre of jazz since 2015 when he introduced the world to his unique brand of ‘organic beat music’ on the breakout album In The Moment. Using recordings of free improvisation he collected over dozens of live sessions in Chicago, during In the Moment, Makaya established a procedural blueprint through incubation & experimentation that he has since been sharpening & developing.
That procedural blueprint came to a head in 2018 with the release of Universal Beings. While jazz is going through a sort of modern-day comeback, the pockets where that comeback is taking place are still relatively sparse. Spurred by a desire to connect with old friends & new collaborators in places where jazz innovations are thriving, Makaya worked with the record label International Anthem across late 2017 & early 2018 to setup intimate live sessions in New York & Chicago, and pop-up “studio” sessions in London & Los Angeles. Though the contexts and logistics were D.I.Y., Makaya was able to enlist are top-tier players across the board including Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, Jeff Parker, Brandee Younger, Ashley Henry, Dezron Douglas, Carlos Nino, and more!
Makaya pieced together portions of each session to create a collection of brilliantly smooth and sometimes muted suites that erase any division between jazz and hip-hop. Spanning deep spiritual jazz meditations, pulsing post-bop grooves & straight-ahead boom-bap, the output of these sessions is one of my favorite albums of the last decade.
Listen to Universal Beings here.
Worth Your Time
The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class (Alex Danco) - A riff on Venkatesh Rao’s The Gervais Principle where Alex Danco postulates that the higher you climb up the “educated gentry” ladder, the more you detach from reality.
Michael, Dwight, and Andy: the Three Aesthetics of the Creative Class (Alex Danco) - A sequel to The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class, where Alex Danco postulates that there are 3 types of social class in the educated gentry: 1.) Michael Scott - the educated gentry member raised middle-class trying to prove they belong 2.) Dwight Schrute - the Protestant member of the educated gentry who feels they belong and 3.) Andy Bernard - The upper-class member of the educated gentry who is trying to hide their upbringing and fit in with the other classes. An interesting theory. I’m definitely a Michael Scott in this framework.
The Super-Scary Theory of the 21st Century (Noahpinion) - Noah Smith dives into the haunting specter of techno-authoritarianism.
Why Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Intelligent (Wall Street Journal) - "Herbert Simon said we should call it 'complex information processing.' What would the world be like if it was called that instead?"
Why Bored Ape Avatars Are Taking Over Twitter (New Yorker) - N.F.T. clubs are all the rage among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Are they a get-rich-quick scheme or the future of culture?
Facebook Wants Us to Live in the Metaverse (New Yorker) - The New Yorker tries its hand at explaining what the Metaverse is. A task that has become somewhat of a cottage industry over the last several months (Ben Thompson made his own attempt in this week’s Stratechery weekly article). As it stands there is no agreed-upon definition, but the best thing I’ve been able to put together is it is similar to a networked Mirrorworld meets OASIS. But also a new user interface on top of the internet?
Ryan Whelan
Ryan is a local Oakland artist and one of my favorite recent discoveries. Take a look at all of his work here.