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Infinite Loops
Michael Garfield — Play the (Mind) Jazz (EP.246)
01:19:44
My guest today is Michael Garfield, a paleontologist, futurist, writer, podcast host and strategic advisor whose “mind-jazz” performances — essays, music and fine art — bridge the worlds of art, science and philosophy. This year, Michael...
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A
Hi, I'm Jim o', Shaughnessy, and welcome to Infinite Loops. Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out. Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started. The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and. And how we might be able to change that to avoid going in Infinite loops of thought. We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens, including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis. And through these discussions, help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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B
Thinker.
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A
With each episode, we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together. Thanks for joining us. Now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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C
Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim o' Shaughnessy with another Infinite Loops. I've already, like, conducted, I don't know, 20 minutes of the podcast with my guest already. That's how excited I am about having Michael Garfield as a guest finally on Infinite Loops. Michael, I don't even know how to summarize your career, and as I was going through it, I'm like, maybe we should, like, lead in with a joke. A paleontologist, futurist, an ex Wall street guy, go into a bar and begin to discuss what you are attempting to do in navigating our accelerating weirdness and cultivate curiosity and playfulness that we will absolutely need to navigate it again. Just a couple of things. You're the former host of the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity podcast. Your current podcast is Future Fossils. I mean, Michael, you have done so much. But my opening question is going to be about a term that you use that I love, and I want you to explain it to our audience. What is mind jazz?
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B
So, one of my great inspirations in my work is the late historian William Irwin Thompson, who famously rage quit his academic career at MIT in, I think, 1972 because he said he felt like an atheist at the Vatican. He was a scholar of the history of consciousness and committed to transdisciplinary thinking. And he felt that his work with history was basically being kind of expropriated at MIT to forward a specific agenda. So he left and started this group called the Lindisfarne association, which is a masterwork of social gardening that includes you. Look at the list of people that were involved with Lindisfarne. And it's like a who's who of latter 20th century systems thinkers. You've got Lynn Margulis and Stuart Brand and Brian Arthur and Joan Halifax and Paolo Soleri and Stuart Kaufman. And it's just. It's bonkers. It was never really a formal thing, although it had physical locations in New York and Crestone. But the point is that he saw the work of minds in an age of complex and chaotic systems, an era defined by networked media to be different from the way that information was presented. That the origin of the university in like the modern university in print culture. An academic lecturer standing up in front of people and this one to many communication and linear chains of reasoning. And he said that what we need instead is what he called Wissenskunst, which knowledge art. And that what we are doing is we're moving through networks of ideas. And so what we're doing instead is. You brought up the Curiosity in Play piece that we are invoking a more exploratory attitude rather than an exploitative attitude. A book is a great way to crystallize an idea and present it in a linearized serial fashion and make your argument as concisely as you can. But until very recently, books have not been a medium that can listen and adapt and play off of the world around it. The same is true for the academic journal paper. And this stuff is changing now thanks to digital media. But yeah, I'm really interested in this approach to knowledge work that is more like jazz than orchestral and symphonic music where everyone is following a conductor and listening to a score. Actually, I'm reading Where Is It? My very good friend Robert Pointon, I'm reading his book Do Conversation right now and I'll be interviewing him shortly about this. He teaches improvisation to business leaders at the said business school at Oxford. And he makes this point that he got into that through theatrical improv. Because the things that you learn improvising on stage are precisely the kind of things that give you the toolkit for having a really interesting generative conversation. And so the act of listening, the act of play, the act of using whatever you find. This is all also part of what I, you know, I come out of a tradition as a improvisational musician in these festival spaces and leading large group long form, you know, ensemble improv. And I just, I love it. It's like it's sometimes it's messy and weird and. But like the fact that it generates a lot of noise, the fact that it doesn't behave in the way that you expect it to is the feature, it's not the bug. Because when we're in an environment where the scripts that we carry into it do not work, where institutional legitimacy crisis and what Doug Rushkoff calls narrative collapse define our era. And so we have to improvise. And so the way that anyone can improvise, Pointon makes the case that, you know, you think you don't know how to do this, but you do, because all of us are having conversations all the time. So it's basically about having a conversation with knowledge, you know, with minds, exploring high dimensional spaces together.
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C
So much to unpack there. It reminds me of Emerson's idea for a Panharmonicon where everything is admissible. Philosophy, ethics, divinity, poetry, jokes. The highest and the lowest, everything should be part of it. The idea behind generative books, it's like, as I was preparing for my chat with you, I'm like, God damn it. He's revealing OSV's entire playbook, our entire thesis, because infinite books. We're going to experiment with generative books where the reader can interact with. With the book itself. Now, obviously we're not going to be able to do that in the hardcover and the paperback, but we're going to be able to do it in the audio book. We're going to be able to do it in the electronic version of the books. And I'm fascinated by the idea. I mean, I was telling somebody this idea and they're like, oh, well, that's like fan fiction, right? And I said, well, yeah, one part of it is, but the idea to be able to contribute. You made the point. We've gone from a time of one to many communication in almost everything that we do, right? If you read America one summer that looks at the 1920s, Bill Bryson makes a case that for the first time in history, the guy on the radio announcing Lindbergh's return was speaking to more humans than any other human in history ever had. And it fascinates me to build on all of this stuff as opposed to try to freeze. I think one of my big problems with people who are like, oh, that isn't the way it used to be and we should do it this way, this way, this way is that that leads to stasis, which in my opinion is debt, right? And we need to. We need improv. I love improv. So another one of my handicaps in becoming unemployable is I cannot read a script from a teleprompter. I did some sub management when I was in asset management for some big companies. And the most comedic element was me trying to. They. Because they had lawyers everywhere. They're like, he can't say that. And they were literally there at the filming. So they have the teleprompter. We retry to read it. And I just fucked it up so badly that even the lawyers were like, all right, all right, let him do it the way he wants to do it. We'll just take out what we think is not going to be kosher. But I mean that in my experience, that's how you learn. You learn by interacting, by pivoting, by being agile and listen and active listening as opposed to listening to respond, right. You know, with classic debates, it's. You're, you're often listening not to get the point, not to learn something new, but to respond, right? And here's my point of view, and God damn it, I'm going to defend it. You know, it's like the social media, this is the ll die on. And I always say I embrace the George Patton version of that. And I prefer to make the other poor dumb bastard die on his hell rather than hold to an opinion like that. One of the things that attracted our entire team to your grant proposal was the idea of humans on the loop. Let's talk about that a bit. And let's also talk specifically, most people say humans in the the loop and you say humans on the loop. And I think that that is important and explain to our audience why that is so.
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B
So, yeah, again, this is like my thinking heavily shaped by spending five years full time translation of a whole international community of complex system scientists, but also just, you know, personal life experience as an artist and independent scholar and my encounters with various philosophical traditions that when we talk about being in control, you know, like, cue Alan Watts, right? That like, you're never actually really in control. Or, you know, the way that like Terence McKenna used to talk about walking past the House of Parliament and the lights are on at 2am and it's like, it's because they don't know how to deal with like, they, they're like they, they have lost the wheel, you know, they. There's nobody there. And so, you know, it's funny because the whole framework of cybernetics that sort of metastasized into technocratic globalism and became the thing that, you know, the church that William Rowan Thompson felt that he didn't belong in at MIT started from a very humble realization. It was that, you know, the, the idea that we're in feedback Loops, we're made out of feedback loops that we have some capacity to make decisions. But it became this thing of a way to fulfill the project of modernity, to understand and therefore control all of these different variables. And, you know, like, what I. I think I. The more. The more deeply I have sat with the ecology and the physics and the, you know, Zen Buddhism and like, all of this stuff, distinct fields that are all converging on the claim that actually very little of what you are or very little of what you do is something that you're doing deliberately. And that actually, you know, rational thought, the ability to analyze, to derive causal frameworks, to think about mechanism and narrative, that all of that is a sort of a post hoc exercise about a decision that had to be made in the heat of the moment on the basis of a very imperfect model built on very limited information. And so this is the frame that I bring in with me to when I'm thinking about this taxonomy that Bonnie Doherty presented to the UN in 2012 about automated weapons. She said, there's humans in the loop, humans on the loop, and humans out of the loop. And I had not really heard about this whole framework. I'd only ever heard about in the loop or out of the loop, the idea that you are the one telling a drone to fire on the target that it has suggested, or that it's just like Terminator out there. And the reality is that, I mean, this is. This is a framework that. That assumes that decision making is only being made at one level, at one spatio temporal scale at a time. Like, you know, even in evolutionary biology, you know, selection is not happening purely on the level of the organism or on the level of the gene or on the level of the population. It's all of these things all at once and moving at different, you know, frequencies or, you know, like Stuart Brand's pace layers, you know, so you're like, if you are thinking in a scalar fashion, then there's this thing that happens where it's like, oh, well, I am somehow, you know, a cluster of subatomic particles. I am a community of cells. I am a society of, you know, organs. I am a person, that sort of mesoscopic human layer. I am also a, you know, a module or a subunit or a, you know, a constituent of these larger intelligent systems. And somehow we have to be able to reconcile all of that and speak more rigorously about what it means to exert agency, what it means to have choice in a world where there isn't just one loop, there are many, many loops that are all moving at different speeds. And so this is specifically to name this project Humans on the Loop was to try to find a middle ground between the folks who are responding, navigating the world in a way that they've been alienated, disenfranchised by this immense opaque technological infrastructure and the occult machinations of statecraft, and are not feel like they have been cut completely out of the decision making at the scale of society or of ecology. And on the other side, you have people who, you know, you look at the barons of technological industry now and, you know, arguably these are the most powerful organisms that have ever existed on the planet. You know, like the Anthropocene is largely determined by the decisions made by, you know, a few dozen people, you know, or like a handful of organizations. But the thing is that those people, like, I'm hoping to reveal that seeing them the way that like, everyone's always trying to change Elon Musk's mind, it's like, well, that's ridiculous because Elon Musk exists within an incentive landscape, you know, that he, he is. His decisions are, in, you know, an absolute philosophical sense, every bit as constrained as anyone else's. And so it's not like you can get to the, like, none of us are just changing our minds. And in a vacuum, you know, we exist in, you know, the, the, you know, complexity. Economics talks a lot about bounded rationality and how if someone else's decisions don't seem rational to you, it's. Well, it's because you're not inhabiting their, their life world. You know, you don't share an umvelt. Right. The virtual reality that we, you know, that we construct out of our interactions. And so, yeah, this, this project is basically trying to, in part, I mean, I've kind of found a number of different goals that I'm working toward here. But one of those goals is, like you said, to encourage mind jazz. And mind jazz gets us to the point where we can combine different perspectives stereoscopically. Actually, I'm about to interview another one, my buddy Joshua Dicaglio, who is a PhD student of my mentor, Richard Doyle at Penn State. And Josh wrote this great book, Scale Theory, in which he just says, I just read this last night. This was gorgeous. Quoting Greg Bateson. It takes at least two somethings to create a difference. He argues that overlaying two perspectives forms a logical typing which produces new information about information. When we arrive at a new scale, just such an operation occurs. With scale, we find something new, an extension beyond the system of perception that is about the system and it provides new depth, but a depth that has to be integrated, properly understood and adequately assimilated into our approach to the cosmos. So what he's saying is that scalar thinking, which is a subset of this category of multi perspectival thinking, is necessary in order to redefine the self that is making decisions. And so I was just talking with Kealado McDowell who's co directs and launched the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google and wrote the first ever book that was a collaboration between a person and GPT3 Pharmaco AI and we were talking about how the self, like you were saying about the self that emerges in the era of broadcast media. K just wrote this piece for Gropius Bao on how we're now living in an age of neural media. And and so it's like we're networks that are communicating with networks through the shared medium of language and the media. It's not just you don't just see it, it sees you. And so this completely reconfigures who we think we are designing for when we create technology. And that's the sort of, you know, the buck stop on that one is just that if we are still thinking about designing this for an individual person instead of this as part of what Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject, the U plus technology that extends all around the world and through which you are connected to other beings, human and non human, as some sort of colonial organism engaged in collective computation, then we're really not going to do a good job of designing the next technologies. We're going to be designing technologies from the perspective of like print media or television or whatever. And we're not, you know, we're not going to be able to do things as wondrous or innovative.
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C
I think we could not really be more simpatico because I was interested in this. I've kept journals for like 45 years. And so I'm going through because we're creating sim gym on our on prem AI and I happen to have a lovely Data source of 45 years of crazy ideas for myself. And in the early 80s I was like the biggest tech enthusiast of the world and I used a phrase called the extended self and I had to wait 40 years for that to actually start to materialize. That's why I'm so incredibly excited and optimistic actually about where we're heading. Very aware of all the problems. You just named a few. Have you read as you were going through the books? Have you read Robert Anton Wilson's the New Inquisition, Irrational Rationalism in the Citadel of Science?
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B
No, but hit me, because I feel like I've steeped in a lot of Bob Wilson. Like, I know people that knew him and so on, but I've never. I don't have a very deep end.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So what he does is it's a brilliant book. I highly recommend. I think you'd love it. He makes the case that science itself. And what jogged the book in my mind was your comment about the guy thought that he was at the Vatican. Right. And that's Bob's central thesis in this book. It's like I had Rupert Childrake on who's a. Well, I loved it. Okay. And so the idea from the editor of Nature at the time, his seminal first book came out, questioning all of the citadel of science. The guy is on BBC News literally using as an example the Pope correcting Galileo. And he, as his position as editor in chief of editor, had the same right to correct this errant scientist, Professor Jeldrake. And so Bob, like, takes it. Bob was way ahead of all this, right. And he's like, watch what's happening. What's happening is they're trying to take one form of thought, pure rationality. They've taken it to the point where they themselves are to become so irrational because they will. They will not explore any new topic, any new idea about how we. The. Some of our views are incredibly antiquated. And then Howard Bloom's book, the Global Brain, I think you'd also enjoy that because. Yeah, I did read that one. That's awesome.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And it kind of leads me and bound at rationality. Bloom has another book on reinventing and reinvigorating capitalism. And the Beauty of the Beast, I think, is the title. I'm getting that wrong. I don't have it right in front of me. But the idea that the old models, that is what my degree, ostensibly worthless, is in economics, quantitative economics. And I sit in class just thinking, have any of you ever talked to an actual human in a marketplace? Because it's the old joke about the economist. There's an engineer and an economist. I'll just make it those two. They're on a desert island and they find a big crate that's boxed up and it says food. And so the economist goes, well, this will be easy. All we have to do is assume we have a can opener, whereas the engineer actually wants to work on the simple engineering techniques that you could use to get that food open. You've talked also about a hypothesis that I'm kind of fascinated by, the Red Queen hypothesis. And that's because I love Lewis Carroll and I love that name. And it comes from the quote from the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass to Alice. And she says, now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place. Right. And the idea that predator and prey are good examples of this. Right. I spent time in Africa and if you haven't, I highly. If you get a chance, I highly recommend doing it because literally you are watching it unfold. Right. Predators, our eyes are in the front, Fray. The eyes are on the side for very, very good reasons. Right. And yet I'm really interested in your take on the idea that there also exists, in my opinion, and it's a theory that the weirdest people in the world advances the book. The weirdest people in the world that we are right now really seeing massive advances from cumulative cultural evolution. How do you think those two go together?
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B
Okay, so I'm going to try and bridge this question to the question of our shared unemployability or like HR illegibility.
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C
Right?
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B
Yeah. So the writing you're referencing is an essay I wrote on my experience with beta testing Google Glass, which the evolution of surveillance is like. I'm framing this in terms of the co evolution of humans and technology as a unique instance of a more general thing that's happening. You know, the evolution of symbiotic relationships and of predator, prey, arms, races going back at least half a billion years. And I wish at the time that I had been writing this, that I had known about Ian McGilchrist, right, which I know you've spoken about on this show, and his notion that the hemispheric lateralization of attentional modes in the brain, where the left is function is concerned with like what Allison Gopnik calls exploit and the right sort of more about, you know, what she calls explorer, that the right is more holistic pattern detection and errors on the side of assigning agency or subjectivity to its experience. You know, the world is. Is alive and meaningful. And then the left brain, the world is dead object to be used. You know, it's an instrumental versus intrinsic and that the. These two ways of seeing are because from the beginning of the complex brain we were engaged in this. You know, the evolution of the eye figures in and the ability to sense at distance rather than across a chemical gradient and then therefore to surveil and to prey on from above. And so suddenly a Trilobite has to both think about where it wants to go and where it wants to not be in order to get eaten by Anomalocaris or these other weird Cambrian super predators. And so that whole thing, these two ways of knowing the evolutionary arms race, is in effect, a red queen race in humans, and technology is a race of innovation for enhanced leverage. I just actually wrote a piece about this that's in edit right now on AON Magazine. I'm really hyped about that. We can think about the way that technology is. We can see technology through the frame of enhancing our leverage, of giving us some sort of competitive advantage. And that the more we do that, the more we become subject to the kind of Cartesian effort to render the distinct and singular and unique and living into a quantitative framework that allows us to make useful abstractions. And you can think about how at a very base layer, money, in the sense that everyone is using a common medium of exchange, makes one person's goods and services comparable to someone else's, without having to get into the idiosyncrasies of what I think it's worth in a barter system versus what it might be worth to you. And that has enormous benefit. But in the same way that, for example, industrialized farming or any kind of massive standardization approach yields enormous productivity gains. But we have to be careful that we don't. Like we were saying at the top of this call that if you think about maintaining reservoirs of novelty, or adaptive reservoirs, features that do not seem currently useful, like if we collapse into a perfectly optimized framework in which all inefficiencies have been shed and fed back into a process of capitalization, then when that system inevitably generates enough novelty to disrupt itself, then it has sown the seeds of its own demise. And this is the work of Jeffrey west and a Manfred Laubacher, who I spoke with on Future Fossils episode 212, about Jeff West's scaling laws in biological, you know, biophysical scaling laws in various systems, including tech innovation and so on. And Jeff draws this kind of staggered curve, the finite time singularity, is that every innovation cycle leads to some sort of endogenously generated crisis or collapse that beckons a new round of innovation to address it even faster, and so on, until the problems that we are creating through the exact approach of, like Brian Arthur's nature of Technology, where every technology is a combination of prior technologies. And so as we invent new things, the combination space gets larger and larger and larger until it becomes mysterious to us again and like, we can't understand it and we can't adapt to it because it. There are billions of people jailbreaking, you know, chat GPT at the same time. And so, you know, you cannot design a perfect response to this. And so, yeah, the. The issue of cumulative culture is that it hopefully brings us to a place where we start to appreciate a kind of more polycentric or multivariate value system for innovation and for currency and for number, like all of the different ways that we measure and track and assign value to the world. It's becoming more and more obvious that this stuff cannot be squeezed into a single unifying framework unless you are designing this thing to terminate itself inevitably. That this is the problem with these hugely ambitious sort of theory of everything efforts. And the science is that they actually do a really good job at generating the anomalous evidence that undermines them and beckons a new approach. So, yeah, I think when it comes to the issue, to fold that all into being illegible, there are actually perks to being illegible to whatever system, to, you know, the, you know, if certain. If Instagram seems like it's selling you the wrong ads, then that means that you might be doing something right in that, you know, you might be especially singular or strange in a way that over the long term is going to allow us to continue to maintain, like, wild spaces in human cultural diversity or psychological diversity. So I think, like, being weird in an age as weird as ours is is actually a perk, because highly specialized, extremely efficient ecologies do not do so well when there's like a huge disease or a meteor impact or whatever, and it's the weird generalists that get out and repopulate everything.
- [34:25]
C
Yeah. Wow. My friend and legendary photographer Joel Meyerowitz, when we were visiting once, he goes, you know, I gotta tell you, Jim, your Instagram account is my most favorite one. And I'm like, what, are you crazy? I mean, like, I'm horrible at taking pictures. And he goes, no, no, no, that's the point. That's why I love it. He goes, I was talking to my wife and I was taking her through it. And then, like, see here he posts his grandchildren, then something completely unrelated, and then this weird, like, thing. And he goes, I just love it because it's so completely unpredictable. And so I get wrong ads on Instagram all the time.
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B
Well, I mean, it's like, really, you know, again, to go on to, you know, back to Bateson. And information is the difference that makes a difference. It's like, how long can you stay interested in a relationship if the person that you're in relationship with never surprises you.
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C
Exactly. And also that brings up Claude Shannon's what is information? It is that which surprises you. You know, just not using his exact terms, but it surprises you. And one of the pieces that I was writing or reading, rather, in conjunction with Shannon's information theory, was a guy saying, hey, political speech, zero information, zero poetry. Boom. All sorts of information in poetry. And I think that the idea. And it's always. Often people always try to get everything down to a dichotomy, right? The left brain, the right brain. Plato, Aristotle, Sparta, Athens. Right. I've been advocating for a long time, no, no, no, no, no. We need all of that. We need all of it. And yet then I find myself making the argument for why we need to thrive in the new world. We need to move from deterministic thinking to probabilistic thinking. Right. And so it seems like those types of, you know. Yes, no, 0, 100. I mean, and bits and bytes have so taken hold of our minds that we always kind of look for the easier dichotomy. And I love your work because you make it quite plain. That is really surface area stuff. And it's like your thing. You were talking about optimization earlier, and you say you do not want to optimize your life, Right? And why? Well, you're optimizing your life for something, for a snapshot in time. You're living a movie. And I always kind of think of David Deutsch in the Beginning of Infinity where he's like, the thing that people just can't understand is they think we know everything there is to know. And he has a great piece, and it's like, hey, what were people in 1900 talking about? What were their opinions about the Internet and quantum physics? They didn't have opinions about the Internet and quantum physics because they hadn't been discovered yet. So what do you think? Like I was looking at, I love the Oppenheimer quote where everyone's like, this is the solution. Here is our solution, and this will work. And then I always think of this Oppenheimer quote where he says, it is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to help. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt it from doing so to stop it from doing so. And that kind of. Your idea about optimized life really resonated with me because I, like many of my friends, were like, jim, why aren't you wearing the aura ring? Why aren't you sleeping on the bed that tells you. And I'm like, because you're a quad man here's supposed to love this stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, because I don't want to wake up in the morning feeling, God, I feel good, man. That was a great night's sleep. And then look at the. The empirical bed data and find that it says that I had a shitty night's sleep and then that will make me feel shitty for the rest of the day. Right?
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B
Well, yeah, there's a line between that and the literature on spontaneous remission. Right. And the nocebo in like, you know, somebody didn't have cancer and got the wrong X rays and then promptly died obediently after six weeks because the doctor read them the wrong stats. Yeah. So I do think, like, that's a good. A really good point about having to be, you know, being more careful and deliberate about the ways that we reflect on ourselves. You know, I mean, I really like Kaylotto McDowell's point that neural media senses back. And so we are, you know, a lot of my thinking on what I've been calling the Glass Age, which is, you know, that our era, like, you know, Bronze Age or, you know, Steel Age, whatever, it's like, I don't actually. I think the Steel Age falls within an age that's defined by the material agency of silica. Right. We've got test tubes, we've got lenses, microscopes, telescopes, fiber optic cables, screens. This is the substrate for our entire experience as moderns, you know, and that it prompts this. This question about the mirror. You know, I've been glad to see a lot more people lately talking about how the right way, quote unquote, to see language models, or at least a very useful way to see AI broadly is as a mirror that doesn't just show you. You at your human scale now, but allows you to see yourself as you are, like I was saying earlier, as a cluster of, like the digital twin of your liver or as you. As a data point in the. Peter Turchin's work on quantitative history and social revolt, these kinds of things. And, you know, we can start to curate that. You know, we can tune our mirrors in really interesting ways. But there's the other part, which I just love because I'm morbid, which is that the mirror has always had a kind of frightening occult quality to it, that people. There are people who refuse to have mirrors in their home still, you know, because they feel that you're like the camera, you know, with the lens and the silver image. It's a kind of miniaturization of the mirror and the way that people were worried that the mirror would steal their souls or that they would become narcissistically obsessed. And so I think that there's a lot, there's a rich seam of myth and metaphor from antiquity and the way that we have thought through technologies that allow us to see ourselves in new ways in the past that gives us a real handle on the situation as it is now. And I'll add to that that Future Fossils 175. I interviewed C T Nguyen, who's a University of Utah philosophy professor and has written a lot about gamification and games and agency. If you haven't interviewed him, highly recommended. Very eloquent and dynamic guest who I also interviewed him for Complexity with Paul Small Dino, and we talked about the problems of trying to quantify everything. So I want to, I want to just for a second, place some sympathy to the devil here for your note on false dichotomies. Right. Because again, like, the question of whether we have time to reflect on and think with, you know, advance reason into our decision making or whether you've been hit on the knee by a hammer and your leg is going to make the decision for you before you do, you know, I think that there are all of these different conditions, you know, the urgency of different conditions that shape where in a multilayer system, a decision is being made. And so I think that the fact that we continue to see these persistent binaries in decision making suggests, like a Chesterton's fence thing, like, let's not get rid of this. You know, like, I love, like Forest Landry and the work on the triad. I love pushing people out of binary thinking. But at the same time, like, that takes time, it takes effort. And ultimately, you know, like when I, when I spoke to Rajiv Seti for Complexity podcast years back on police stereotyping and police violence, you know, due to, you know, the sort of wicked tangle of, you know, issues with the training and, you know, just like cultural problems and police social relationships, you know, with the police and, like, racism and all this stuff. We got into this thing about the, the way that, you know, you can get probabilistic about everything that you do in your life. You can get probabilistic and say, you know, like, I have to derive from first principles that this chair is actually a chair before I'm willing to take the risk of putting myself in it. But in reality, like, there are some things that are stable enough that you know, under most circumstances we can be like, okay, this is a chair. And I think that, you know, this question of, you know, when are the profoundly inaccurate oversimplifications still good enough? You know, the George Box all models are wrong, some are useful. Thing is like, well, you know, I love both sides of this argument to the extent that there are just two sides that like, for me it really does get back to again, like a complex systems permissioning of some situations being where it's like, well, we don't have time to sit there and talk about how this two category system isn't good enough. Or the other way of thinking about it is that the more we apply probabilistic thinking, simulation and other computational approaches to the world in an effort to understand and thereby control it, we're back to what we were talking about earlier, where the resources required for those sort of like world simulations are so vast that they are changing the world. And that this is the fundamental thing about complexity economics is that everybody's model of what everyone else is doing in the economy is altering their behavior. And so you can never actually create a perfect universal model of everything without creating, without basically drawing on resources greater than the system itself. So, like, if we really want to control the world as a giant manicured Italian garden, then we're going to, I feel weird saying this. We're going to have to mine asteroids. We're going to have to do all of this stuff so that we are not just raking up all available resources to turn the planet into matter optimized for computation in order to understand itself and then swallow the spider to eat the fly. So, yeah, so I really, I too believe that the question of where do you stop, where do you stop asking questions about, you know, like, how much information is too much? Do you really, did you really need the 4K TV? Did you need to see the pores on the face of your soap stars? Like, that's. That has actually changed the way that those people do television. It's changed the way people record TV because suddenly you've got this like, oh, you know, like, I've got a blemish we can't record today. And so, yeah, like, the question is like, is, you know, are you misattributing the value of the data that you're getting? Are you making, are you, are you just chasing data for the sake of data or are you chasing leverage for the sake of leverage? Like, the last thing I'll say about this is that, you know, within the framework of humans on the Loop. The question of why we are using any given technology.
- [47:10]
C
Right.
- [47:11]
B
Gets back to the. A really sort of fundamental LinkedIn language problem, which is that, you know, most of the time when I hear people talking about tools, they're not asking why they had to adopt them in the first place, unless it's been papered over with the story of increases productivity. You know, an enormous number of people have adopted AI in the last few years into their workplace with no knowledge of what they're actually going to do with it or why they're going to do it. And when this kind of thing happens, when we are basically allowing ourselves to be the vectors of someone else's story, then you get enormous footprints in the world of, you know, like the, the externalities created by all of the people that just thought it was cool. And so they built an AI. I mean, they bought themselves, you know, smart home devices and have now created this, this enormous, you know, cyber security risk that's going to beckon a whole new paradigm of immunologically inspired cybersecurity. It's like it could have been a whole lot simpler. And it's like the question of if you have the time, right? Like, this is always the thing. It's like not everyone has the privilege of the time to sit and think about these decisions, but maybe we should. If we're going to optimize for anything, maybe we should, quote, unquote, optimize for a world in which we are capable of allocating resources to idle thinking and boredom and curiosity and these things. Like when Emmett Shear asked X the other day how you would measure flourishing in society, a lot of the people that wrote back said something to the effect of how much free time do people have? And if you're generating all these productivity enhancements, but it's not leading to leisure, then you're not actually the master, you know, you're. You're the slave of this system. So. Yeah, yeah, I love that.
- [49:26]
C
No, no, no, I love that last part because that's kind of the way I look at it. I'm a huge fan of incorporating the data from a huge variety of sources and decision making. But your last statement there, I think, is what I rebel against. Right. I don't want to be a vector in somebody else's system and, like, would knowing things about, like what the mattress thought I slept, like, versus how I felt. Like, to me, that was not going to add anything to my life. Right. In fact, it was going to subtract things from my life as far as, like, the idea of sitting and, you know, considering the probability is. Is this a chair? I separate them between possibilities and probabilities. Right? So possibilities I don't spend a lot of time with when, unless I'm trying to generate something that in the future could become a probability. Right. So possibilities are endless. Right. But I don't go around saying, you know what, the sun is going to come up tomorrow and I'm going to give you a 90 minute lecture as to why that is so. Because, like, if the sun doesn't come up tomorrow, I'm anyway. And like, why put any of my time, effort or cognitive, you know, cognitive is very expensive. Thinking is very expensive. Right. And when you direct your attention, when you direct your thinking to something that in my opinion is just mental masturbation, you're. You're eating up those calories. Nevertheless, and right. We all have a limit to how long and how deeply we can think about things. And that kind of brings us to. You have great views on curation and the problems that it faced too. And have you read the book Reality Hunger by David Shields?
- [51:24]
B
No, I'll write it down.
- [51:26]
C
It's really interesting because he basically makes the case that, you know, before Industrial Revolution, culture was mostly local. And, you know, I always bang on about how this new era is so cool, in my opinion, because we have. Because time, space, geography have collapsed, right? And, and, but in the past, they were. Distance separated people. Distance, physical distance separated culture. It separated people from exchanging ideas. When did mass flourishing really start? Well, one part of it was we learned how to sail, we learned how to go and find other cultures. We learned how to have exchanges with them. Some of them were very bloody right, because we brought our ideas that conflicted with theirs. But now I believe, like our thesis that o' Shaughnessy ventures, if you look at everything we're doing is very consistent with what Shield says in his book. We've moved from mass production to mass customization, right? And the world has become a bit atomized. One of the reasons, in my opinion, you're seeing all these conspiracy theories, et cetera, because people haven't had to deal with this level of uncertainty in their own daily life really ever before in history of this magnitude, right? And then you look at the world that we came from, and I happen to exist in both of those worlds, right? I'm 64 years old. So when I was growing up, there was literally an American monoculture. And the monoculture was determined by the three networks and by two newspapers. Right, the three networks. We all know the new York Times and the Wall Street Journal that those were. You could direct 80% of what people believed to be true if you had control of back to Bob Wilson of the means of communication, the nervous systems of people, right? And I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, which it has a very good chapter about how we came to understand the Holocaust. So I would recommend it just for that chapter alone. I'm not giving it a general recommendation because it's got some weak parts in it too. But he makes a really interesting point. And the point he makes is about one that I've always kind of obsessed about the idea in the past. Like, everybody watched the same thing on tv. And he makes the point by looking at what happened to tv. And he looks at the show the Big Bang Theory. It was one of the most popular comedies in the 2000 and tens. And 18 million people watched the grand finale. Then he says, Mash, which was a favorite of my mom and me until they got all preachy and political towards the last ends of the season, was watched by 106 million people. And the point Gladwell makes, I think folds in nicely to the point Shields is making, which is, can you imagine that sort? I always think of it as the board. Right? You will be assimilated. And we no longer are assimilating. Right. We've gone from a log normal distribution, a normal Brownian distribution, to Mandelbrot, a fractal distribution which is very peaky in the middle and has very long tails. Now, I personally think there's gold in them, their tales, if you're a capitalist or there's really interesting shit in them, their tales, if you're curious. And so I'm pretty cool with life speeding up. But you make really, really good points about the things that we really need to consider in this environment that we now find ourselves living in.
- [55:30]
B
Thank you. Yeah, there is a lot there. Again, I want to see if I can kind of grab all of that and weave it into some cool shape. Thinking is expensive, right? So that said, not thinking is also expensive just at a different timescale, Right. I think that we've been touching on this at different points in the conversation that, you know, it's like, well, it is easy to follow a heuristic until the heuristic doesn't apply. Apply. Or. I think I've been having a lot of conversations lately about this specific thing about mass customization in the age of a lot of McDowell's neural media, the replica AI, all these AI, companion AI, lover services that are cropping up that are in one sense an obvious address to an epidemic of loneliness. Also an epistemic of loneliness that emerges out of the way that society has been fragmented in part because you can work remotely. You can, you know, you don't, you don't depend on your village, your hometown for economic success, you know, the like go west young man thing. But in doing that we have broken intergenerational transmission of tacit knowledge, we have disrupted ecosystems and we, we've given ourselves I think a bit of an illusion that you know, this like idea of lifestyle, consumerism and mass customization, it's like, well, you know, you are free to choose what kind of shoe. You know, you can design your own shoe on Nike. But on a deeper level, you know, all of us are online, all of us are subject to the design constraints and the opaque decision making boundaries went into the design, for instance of PCs and the Internet. I look back, I think a lot of my work actually came out of a three month stint doing innovation research for a Mozilla spin out last year. I spent some time with them afterwards as a communications and research person and they were working on the next layer of AI and computing. If you think about how mainframe computing, remotely accessed through timeshare terminals at major academic and governmental institutions, became the PC and the Internet through the work of ARPA and etc. That, you know, Xerox PARC and all these groups, the vision that they had, the people like Alan Kay, JCR Licklider, Bob Taylor, Doug Engelbart, all of the, the folks that were initially figured in this, their vision for the tools that we use now was superficially similar, but at profoundly different in the way that they were hoping that two things would happen. One would be that people would be writing their own code. Like object oriented programming is about putting the function of the computer in the hands of the user. Rather than like I'm sitting here on a Mac and like Cory Doctorow has written excellent, copious material on the way that the universal computing machine has been neutered by digital rights management and all of this other stuff. And that really like the tools that we have are so much more vastly powerful as hardware than they are allowed to be. And that is true for us as well as the users of those tools. And then the other piece is about sort of machine translation and the idea that the computer network would not just allow us to communicate over great distances, but would allow us to communicate ideas from one sort of conceptual framework into another. And we don't have that hardly at all right, now what we have are massive problems about the scale of communication because everything has been ripped out of its context. And so people think they're speaking the same language when they're not. And, you know, this is a huge piece of, like, the Moloch or, like, the communicate, the coordination problems at scale. So this question of what was considered expensive at the time that PCs and the Internet were rolled out is now looking like maybe we should have paid more attention to it at the time so as to prevent all of these downstream problems with the fact that now we cannot even agree on who's an expert or, you know, how does. How does, you know, what. What English is? And so I just want to like this again, like, thinking is expensive, where this connects to the, you know, frictionless relationships with highly customized, you know, AI services that are based on you as an individual specifically, and also change over time. So it's not just a snapshot of you.
- [60:56]
C
Right.
- [60:57]
B
But it's. It's, you know, back when they had the Cambridge analytical scandal in 2016, and everyone was saying Facebook knew you better than your spouse, you know, how do you. You know, it gets back to that question of, like, not sleeping in the smart bed. Like, how do you make room in your own life? How do you find an aesthetic that is not just tolerant of, but embraces friction in relationships? And you've written about this somewhat on the way that you do social media. Greg Thomas and Stephanie Lepp, who I had on Future Fossils 205, to talk about jazz leadership and antagonistic cooperation, that's like, if we can meet in good faith, if we can agree that we share some sort of common value, then we can disagree all we like as a process of collective intelligence, as a way of searching for better understanding and answers together. And you're not going to get that interacting with the mirror, you know, like that dirt, like hell is other people. But, hey, it turns out that hell is actually really great if the goal is to learn anything about the world and about yourself. And so, yeah, like, I do think, you know, in one sense, we are not, you know, that we're not assimilated in the way that, you know, someone with long hair and tattoos couldn't get a job in my dad's generation. But we. We are assimilated in ways that are even more sort of pernicious and subtle and difficult to root out because they're. Because the world looks like, you know, we get, like many of us in the privileged world, you know, get the experience that we want. And so how do we convince ourselves to step out of the VR pod and into the messy, difficult fact of the body and of, you know, the externalities that, you know, trying to refrigerate ourselves in a convenience is all creating?
- [63:09]
C
That's a great point. And you know, actually it was one of the goals that I had in mind when we created the fellowships and the grant program. What I was hoping for, speaking to the whole idea of new networks and new and network kind of being your filter, was could we build a network of minds that were so cognitively diverse that when they came together in discussion, beautiful and unexpected and brilliant things would emerge? And literally I thought it would take five years. And we just had an off site that included the fellows only we're going to do one for grantees as well at another time and then hopefully put them all together. But they're all together already in discussion groups on WhatsApp. You're in there. And what we found in physical presence space really speaks to your point. Yeah, other humans are messy and all that, but the things that result from putting brilliant, cognitively different people together in the same physical space, I actually witnessed last week. And it was so cool, I thought it would take so much longer. But out of that, that friction, right, that wow, I'm trying to develop a scientific way for people to analyze their kids poop at home, meets the editor in chief of Infinite Books who says, yeah, how are you going to market that? And the scientist, she looks at him and say, I have no idea. Literally an hour and a half later she came up to me and she goes, I just had. Jimmy just created an entire marketing plan for me. I hadn't even thought about it that way. But then the money shot, as it were, was that makes me think of all the different ways I'm going to change the way I'm doing the research. So it was again a beautifully generative discussion. And so back to one of the reasons I think you'll like Shield's book is one of the things he says. In reality, hunger is copies held sway. They owned the world for a long, long time. Yet you got Gutenberg gives you the ability to time bind your ideas, send them into the future. And then we got all the copyright laws because artists should be, you know, be able to get renumeration for their work. And then his point is copies have been Detroit. And if you look at it, what did the powers that were the, you know, the IP and copyright holders do when Napster came along, when VHS came along, they fought like hell to shut them down. They're fighting like hell to shut down. Now it's AI training data. Right. And, you know, he goes on a pretty long rant about how the future is relationships, it's links, it's networks, it's connections, it's sharing. And then he's got this great end quote, which is reality can't be copyrighted.
- [66:28]
B
Yeah. Although Monsanto will try.
- [66:31]
C
I know. I had the same thought when I.
- [66:35]
B
Read that the, you know, it's like one of the folks that I want to get involved in, Humans on the Loop is Primavera de Felipe Harvard, Berkman Klein, who has done this work on the extitution. Right. Which I see as a natural extension of the kind of interdisciplinary thinking that led to my former parent institution at the Santa Fe Institute or the kind of interdepartmental experiments that went on in Mozilla groups and so on. And I know I've talked with you and a couple of people on the OSV team about, you know, Anna Gott's work with salons and like, how we could bring all of this, like, we've just got great people, let's bring them into conversation and design for the facilitation of emergence. Because, you know, you can have an amazing cohort of fellows and grantees and like, the. The WhatsApp group only does so much like, how do we, you know, how do we get. How do we structure conversation so that people are talking more in a way that actually stimulates stuff. I'm working out an advisory relationship with a new AI wisdom company called river that is working with George Poor, who is a pioneer in online social networking. And we're kind of trying to answer some of these questions in the workplace. You know, how can we use the machine to help invite people into good, fruitful, generative conversation spaces? The way that, like James Evans at University of Chicago or the folks at the Astera Institute are trying to use AI to map the blind spots in interdisciplinary research. And, you know, it's like having been that AI in, you know, the work I used to do in SciCom, the thing that I keep thinking about again is that if you don't do this, the risk is that when people try to pursue innovation as an end unto itself, that we're kind of back to the question of accidentally eating something to pursue that you needed. So high turnover organizations are not enough. Like, you can have a huge flow of talent through a building and you can put people in that building and they can keep having amazing ideas that somebody had last year, you know, and it's like if you don't have, again, you have to think on multiple different timescales. And so like part of the interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity of a well designed institution has to be intergenerational and it has to be. There has to be a gradient between people with high context and low context on a, on a problem. And those are not necessarily the same axis. And this is all stuff I'm really eager to, to explore in, in different environments, you know, with this grantee cohort and also with the people that are, you know, humans on the loop is not a, an end unto itself. You know, it's what my, my friend Christina Bowen turned me onto this like Myco punk principles. It's like it's a micropunk project in that you can't have an organization without the culture, the conversation that surrounds it. You can't have a product and sell it. Like when you're talking to Rory Sutherland about all of the engineering that goes into marketing something that's ultimately an aesthetic decision because people understand the, like, they have a valid value of that they assign, you know, they can understand what you are trying to sell them. Yeah. So it's. This is, you know, this sort of weaving social fabric for what are fundamentally collective intelligence problems is like what I hope my work contributes. And I appreciate your help with that.
- [70:36]
C
Well, we appreciate your work maybe even more. I kind of think Jerory's value point that in bringing in again what we've been talking about, like with Reality, Hunger and those various topics, that value is going to be established in a very different way in the future. And it's going to have to do with collaboration, generative collaboration, explore, exploit. I think obviously we'll do both. Right. And as, as value. Like I think some of the, the new watchwords for creation of value are going to be these relationships, these links, these networks. How, how easy are people to recall that, oh yeah, they're doing that over there. How easy can they manipulate what work you done and your collective or network has done? How, how can they annotate it? How can they share, share it? How can they synthesize it? I think that that becomes very important in the age that we are in now. Right. And one of the things that I still kind of shake my head at is Bob Wilson again, all the old institutions are collapsing. He wrote that in, I think 1991. Right. Talking about a guy who was way ahead of his time. And it's like Wittgenstein said, I think something along the lines of don't look for meaning, look for use. And kind of like your model, depending on what you're trying to achieve, your model should have some predictive accuracy. And if you're using back to box. Right. All models are wrong. Some are useful. Well, some are useful and then stop being useful. And so I've always tried to orient my thinking toward figuring out that point right where, oh, that used to work really, really well, and that doesn't work anymore. So I'm not going to do it that way anymore. I am amazed by the amount of people all the way up to large institutions who are like, yeah, this is the model, we're sticking with it. But, you know, the model isn't working anymore and it hasn't worked for a long time. Well, with patience and persistence. Well, in certain environments, patience and persistence do pay off. But to attach patient and persistent to an antiquated model rather than to yourself. Right. Please. Good. I got a hands to the ceiling for our people who are just listening.
- [73:17]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is the, you know, consummation of everything we've been talking about. Right. It's just, you know, we live in a very fast and uncertain world and therefore must get better at being, well, at learning ourselves as individuals and as learning together as a society and as organizations. And I've learned a lot about what does and does not work as a learning organization. You have to listen. Listening can be fun. It doesn't have to be a chore. So, I mean, if to the extent that someone is hearing this and they're like. My cousin used to work at BMW as a consultant in Germany, and her advertising firm did work with them on the transition from, like, seeing the company as a primarily an automotive manufacturer to seeing it as a provisioner of mobility platforms. And she said that they figured that out because they had a department of internal disruption. And I was like, I just found, like, that's how I'm legible. That's my, you know, like, if you're going to hire me for anything else, I'm going to be a pain in the ass. But, like, you know, I want to, you know, I want to help people figure out who are the rebels at their organization and how to empower those people. How do you structure, like, how do you channel that nuclear energy into helping your collective learn better and navigate the complexity better is, I think, a very, a very noble way to make use of the fact that I'm such a difficult employee.
- [75:18]
C
Well, Michael, I'm getting the hook here from Our producers, who give me a little light. But first off, you are probably going to be in the running for vying with Alex Danko for a number of times on this podcast because we have just touched the surface of what fascinates both of us. So thank you for that.
- [75:39]
B
Thank you.
- [75:39]
C
Secondly, you probably remember from other listening to other podcasts that the final question always is, we're going to wave that wand. We're going to make you the emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp, but you can accept them. We're going to give you a magical microphone and you're going to speak to whatever you want to put into it, and it's going to incept the entire population of the world. Whenever their next morning happens to be. They're going to wake up and they're going to say, you know what? Unlike all of the other times where I didn't act on these wonderful ideas, when I wake up, I'm going to actually begin to act on these two things today. And I hope they're going to really make my life or the world a better place. What are you going to incept?
- [76:29]
B
I think what I'm trying to incept with humans on the loop is that we have a thought experiment that we can play now that technology has gotten so sophisticated that just like in passing, like the. The wrong way to think about how do you engage with AI and bioengineering and all this stuff is how do we prevent the horrors? It's like, no, no. We are standing in receipt of thousands and thousands of years of the striving of our ancestors to improve their condition and the condition of their descendants. And if we start by being grateful for everything that they've done and ask ourselves, now that we have finally made it as a species, to the point where, with an asterisk, you can do pretty much anything you want with technology. That's not absolutely true, but let's assume it is. And then the question, I think, shifts from, how do I get this thing done? We all assume that I'll just be happy if I get this. And so how do I get that? And that kind of thinking tends to promote suffering of yourself and of others. If you start by being like, what world do I want? Because I can assume that I will make it closer to that world if I start in a clear vision of that thing, I think that that's a really useful, you know, rather than, like, it's a protocol rather than the inception of an ideology. It's like I'm not trying to get everyone to think exactly the way I do, but I do think that learning how to get better at reallocating our attention and at telling stories that excite ourselves and excite other people is a far better way to engage with the daunting complexity of the world that we have made for ourselves. And that's my answer.
- [78:46]
C
Love it. As I've often said, I try to find things to root for rather than against. It's really, really easy to root against things and I think it's far more productive to find things to root for. So I love that. I guess maybe we will call this episode Michael Garfield Part one.
- [79:08]
B
Sure. And then I'm having you on Humans on the Loop next week.
- [79:11]
C
So. Yeah, no, I know it'll be great.
- [79:13]
B
It'll be great a while, but yeah.
- [79:16]
C
Thank you so much. And until next time.
- [79:19]
B
Thank you, Jim.
- [79:20]
C
Cheers. All right, Bye. Sa.