Polymathic Being Podcast: Recent Episodes
Michael Woudenberg
Counter intuitive insights from technology, innovation, philosophy, psychology, and more.
polymathicbeing.substack.com
Today's topic ignites the conversation about human hubris and its ecological impact when we view ourselves as masters of nature, or set apart from the consequences. It looks at the recent focus on wildfires and how they’re largely of our own creation, though, not through the reasons that are often provided.
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Today’s topic explores the mythos of tribal cultures worldwide. When we dig just below the surface, we find the same humans, the same issues, and the same struggles, whether in the Amazon jungles, among American tribes, or in the cities of the world. We’ll also discover how to reconnect with the land to ensure thriving.
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Today’s topic investigates the nuance between the Patriarchy and the Matriarchy and how our common misunderstandings of what they really are deny us an understanding of what it truly means to be human. Let’s strip back the false binaries and fictions to find out how nature optimized us for both.
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Today’s topic addresses a common misunderstanding that our survival in a hostile natural world has become systematized through complex transactional mediums which are misinterpreted as requiring humans to pay to live. We’ll step back from the moral language and dive into evolutionary biology to see the truth.
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Today’s topic adds to our toolkit of Mixed Mental Arts and provides another way to embrace humility, which we first explored in Embracing our White Belts. This powerful art can be applied to politics, our life circumstances, and to our own behaviors to uncover the absurd things we do, and then laugh them away.
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Today’s topic strives to untangle and understand what is actually meant when we use populism as a pejorative. As with much of politics, we find that its use reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of a critically important concept, and that the solution is far easier to achieve individually than we’re told.
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Today’s topic wrangles with a contradiction between male and female consumption of erotic content. Men tend to prefer visual, and women tend to prefer verbal. This, in itself, isn’t the contradiction; that occurs when we have such different perspectives on the acceptability of those media as well as the twists and turns of female sexuality we aren’t supposed to discuss in polite company. Let’s go deeper!
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Today’s topic addresses the challenges of an uncritical use of AI in writing. On the one hand, AI represents a transformative tool that can help unlock creativity, improve research, sharpen arguments, and challenge bias. On the other hand, it can lull the author into a sense of agreement, feeding their ego, and drowning their voice in the banality of the average. Let’s dig into the consequences and the solution.
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Today’s Topic is Part 11 in our Keys to Innovation series and tackles the idea of “Settled Science,” showing just how myopic and resistant to new information that idea really is. Worse, it lacks creativity and locks out innovation when consensus can no longer be challenged, preventing us from learning, unlearning, and relearning.
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Today’s topic forces us to face two rules that govern our lives. The first is evolutionary biology, and the second is soul maturation. We’ll see how ignoring these two rules creates chaos in society and how understanding, appreciating, and embracing them creates fulfillment.
A quick caveat before we get going: This topic is going to make many people uncomfortable, and my intent isn’t to offend. I’m trying, without moral claims, to understand how the world works and what that means for us humans. If you feel triggered, that’s a good thing, and you should lean in on that to better understand yourself. Don’t forget to check the footnotes for references and other observations.
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Today’s topic introduces two amazing writers on Substack who are helping improve the health and resilience of… anyone. The focus is on Functional Fitness, which simply means being able to do what you want, when you want, without significant limitations, no matter your age, condition, or experience. You’ll discover that, when you embrace the challenge, how much potential you’ve left on the table.
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Today’s topic builds on a new concept that resonated with me: the idea of a PolyPath as opposed to a Polymath. It’s the same thing from a different framing that I’ll exemplify as we explore the multiple paths my career has taken. It’s been both an asset and a liability, but understanding what it means can also help take the fear away from others who would like to try something new.
This one is extra special as it’s my 200th essay since I started nearly four years ago! As always, I strive to keep these essays open to everyone, so please help by becoming a paid subscriber for just $24 a year. That’s just $2 a month and makes a big difference. Right now, we have 1.5% helping out. Can we get that to 3%? Use the link below for the discount:
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Today’s topic is another collaboration with my cousin and co-conspirator Jared Bruder. It explores the idea of embodying Christian ideals and the challenge to be Christ-like. We also explore how this same pattern exists across multiple religions and philosophies, and how it is the most rewarding place to be.
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Today’s topic looks at the importance of the unique phases of human femininity that differentiate us from much of the natural world. We’ll explore the power behind each of the three phases as well as the shadow archetypes that emerge when we don’t properly mature through those phases. At the end, you’ll get a preview of my third novel, Rebirth, where these ideas are fused together.
Music credit to @meditativemind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivCOrc1HWxI
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Today’s topic introduces a new systems thinker as we collaborate to tease apart the drivers of the nerodivergent craze. In doing so, we’ll discover just how broad neurotypical really is, how that unlocks appreciation of diversity, and how the truly neurodivergent aren’t who we, or they, think they are.
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Today’s topic is Part Ten in the Keys to Innovation series, continuing to explore how to unlock your capability both personally and professionally. The Science of Good Enough helps to put aside the fear of imperfection, bracket the outcome against continuous maturation, and reduce the overall effort of success.
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Today’s topic addresses our desire to change the world as we see best while failing to change the one thing we can: ourselves. This is where these topics become so important because the real work is facing what we see in the mirror and recognizing that we have the power to fix what we see… as long as we understand the reflection.
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Today's topic dusts off some critical leadership lessons from my time working in Lean Six Sigma that I’ve incorporated into every job I’ve had since. It’s a critical lesson in both leadership and followership to ensure we are involved, aligned, and empowered.
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Today’s topic challenges us to rethink our expectations of men and demand more than the trappings that society tells us mark manliness. The reality is something much harder, much deeper, and much simpler; you have to die. Let’s dig in and find out how our culture has failed to mature boys into true men.
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Today's topic is a collaboration with another great writer on Substack, focused on how sympathy is being labeled as empathy, then weaponized, and how we can mature our sympathetic responses into true empathy and, ultimately, emotional resilience.
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Today’s topic zooms out to a macro view of life to appreciate the sheer number of different lives and experiences, then zooms back in to explore how little actually separates our worlds. It’s a great technique for gaining perspective, humility, and humanity while appreciating our diversity and uniqueness.
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Today’s topic applies the Polymathic Mindset by first exploring how it’s neither new nor unique across cultures. We’ll then show how embracing polymathic ideas from India can broaden our horizons and lead to a more fulfilling life.
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Today’s topic holds a mirror to our engagements with AI, reflecting how we view both technology and humans. It’s an inversion that will hopefully help us become more human-centric while improving our relationship with a transformative technology.
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Today’s topic builds on the previous Keys to Innovation series and focuses on a real-world example where the avoidance of complexity, pushing the easy button, and not understanding the whole system can have catastrophic consequences. Thankfully, there are well-known solutions that we can apply to any technology or organization.
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Today’s topic asks you to reflect on whether you’re balanced in your identity or falling into the trap so many find themselves in, where others define who you are and satiate you with narcissistic validation. By the end, you’ll understand the problem and have a path to crafting a true identity intentionally tethered to firm anchors that help navigate the chaos of life.
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Today’s topic dives into a situation where, on one hand, people reject personality tests yet, on the other hand pathologize personality. In the middle of all that chaos, true pathologies run amok without the refining light of imperfect, but useful, measures of personality. I promise, we’ll untangle that mess in the end!
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Today’s topic takes a look at a potential paradox within the Polymathic mindset, where, on the one hand, there are experts who speak authoritatively outside of their expertise to the detriment of knowledge. On the other hand, our charter here on Polymathic Being involves exploring far outside of traditional silos of expertise to find counterintuitive insights. Let’s look at the cure Ultracrepidarianist miss that we Polymaths embrace.
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Today’s topic is another that names what shall not be named, in what underpins our modern dating culture. Yet, in doing so, we can make it better by excising some of the worst expectations and behaviors that plague the dating world. Let’s grapple with this situation and see how we can improve it.
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Today’s topic looks at the benefits and risks of natural paths, that is, those flows in life that we sometimes follow without knowing, or block without understanding. Both behaviors lead to risk, and only by understanding and investigating can we find the proper balance.
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Today’s topic tackles the common tendency to correct destructive leadership behaviors by renaming the goal. This is the challenge with Servant Leadership, where the rebranding is both unnecessary and leads to something just as destructive as what they wanted to avoid. Thankfully, there’s a balancing point we can find to unlock true leadership and reinvigorate our teams.
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Today’s topic explores the male loneliness epidemic from the angle of the loss of masculine physical touch. We’ll uncover two surprising drivers and wrangle with the implications while we search for a way to reconnect the men for an improved society.
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Today’s topic provides practical insight for dealing with the things that hold you back from exploring, creating, and learning. We name your worst enemy, identify the drivers, and then provide a compilation of skills, insights, and tools to help fight. Let’s dive in!
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Today's topic takes Mixed Mental Arts to the next level by demonstrating how to begin fusing some of our foundational concepts into more advanced applications. It’s a master class for surviving the chaotic octagon of life, full of practical applications.
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Today's topic challenges us to be capable, dangerous, and meek. To manage that balance, we’ll uncover the truth about meekness, explore examples from the military, and then provide insights on how to become a finely honed, lethal power.
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Today's topic explores three common threats to marriages everywhere: Money, Sex, and In-laws. They are three independently challenging topics, and if they start weaving together, it can be catastrophic. This essay uncovers practical insights, personal examples, and the latest recommendations to manage each one.
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Today’s topic is dedicated to Jeff, who won’t read this article. Don’t be like Jeff because we’ll break down that troubling behavior where many people rarely move beyond the headlines. Worse, entire manipulation engines rely on that behavior to guide and direct you. It’s part psychological operations, part bias priming, and part emotional hijacking. Let’s read this article!
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Today's topic wrangles with the idea that Systems Thinking is not enough. We’ll review the background, then critique the argument, demonstrating that Systems Thinking was never enough, and yet it’s always too much. In doing so, we’ll expose some common misconceptions and provide a few tactical steps that anyone can apply.
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Today's topic shares some insights from my time in the Army on how to focus on the right performance indicators to ensure success. We’ll explore how many people pay attention to the superficial instead of understanding that, what right really looks like, is a mindset of dynamic and disciplined execution.
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Today's topic explores human hubris against nature and how our attempts to exert mastery over our environments can often backfire. We’ll also explore the dynamism of change and how, by embracing it, we can improve our adaptability.
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Let’s be honest: few things make us squirm faster than talking about the two drives that prove we’re animals: sex and, yes, pooping. Today’s topic penetrates our good graces and forces us to flush away our ignorance on the duality of humans as to whether we are animals or angels. We’ll then weave those insights together to help solve the social, moral, and political challenges we face today.
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Today's topic explores the mess around our understanding of ADHD and how that diagnosis has been misapplied, misused, and misrepresented for a variety of bad reasons. We’ll explore whether it even is a pathology, whether it’s the superpower others claim, and find just how out of context our conversations on the topic are.
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Today's topic focuses on Equity and how this complicated term has a long and sordid history, currently contributing to the death of Diversity and Inclusion. It’s an important topic because diversity is critical to polymathic thinking, and inclusion is essential for aspiring polymaths who tend to buck the status quo.
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Today's topic is one more of our Mixed Mental Arts that addresses a core element of our Systems Thinking philosophy. Insatiable curiosity is more than just interest in topics, it’s a way to explore yourself, engage with others, and challenge the world. Come join us as we dive in.
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Today's topic addresses a critical failure in how we raise our children through the well-intended but misapplied philosophy of Gentle Parenting. We’ll see how this concept fails and how we’d be better to raise our children like we raise our dogs. These methods teach temperance, patience, and focus that mature their agency.
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STOCK MARKET CRASHES!
If that phrase raised your blood pressure and caused a quiver of panic, you’re not alone. Today's topic explores the psychology of the stock market, revealing why the most painful days often occur when nobody expected them.
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Today's topic challenges everyone to reclaim who you are meant to be by embracing the challenge of doing hard things. Along the way, we’ll uncover the dangers of pop psychology that permeate the popular book “The Body Keeps the Score” and show how sadly limiting those ideas are. As we conclude, you’ll see just how powerful and resilient you can be when you internalize action and agency to grow.
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Today's topic provides helpful insights for separating the fiction of social media from the reality of life. We’ll explore the problems with how social media shapes perception and how getting out and engaging in the world can shift that perception to a healthier mindset. Once you're done reading, I hope you'll Go Touch Grass.
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Today's topic builds on the idea of Inversion, focuses specifically on evil, and stares directly at it. In doing so, we can improve our understanding of history, cultures, and our current civilization to appreciate how thin the veneer really is.
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Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic investigates the accusation of plagiarism against Artificial Intelligence (AI), like the popular Large Language Models (LLMs) and image generators. It’s a serious critique that warrants a thorough investigation to gain a deeper understanding of AI and what it means to be human.
You don’t have to spend long in the creative spaces on social media before you find a post accusing AI of plagiarism. The problem is that, most of the time, it’s a misuse of what plagiarism means. Since it’s essential to get right, we’ll look at what plagiarism is, and isn’t, the legal carve-out for ‘Fair Use’ of copyrighted works, and then look at what artists call inspiration and how humans actually create through mimicry
Plagarism
Let’s start with the actual definition:
Plagarize: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source
The term has a fascinating history, originating from the Latin plagiarius, which means “kidnapper.” This evokes the idea of a forceful theft of a person or, perhaps, in this case, an idea vs. the theft of a physical object and claiming it as your own.
Ted Gioia recently wrote “Help!-AI Is Stealing My Readers,” where he laments:
There’s some heavy irony here. The AI chatbots have been trained on my books. So if a scammer uses AI to write a jazz book, it probably regurgitates things I’ve actually written myself in the past.
The problem with this accusation of AI plagiarizing is that it should be detectable. But that’s not what we find at all. I teach Master's students at the University of Arkansas, which provides tools to detect plagiarism and others to detect AI. I’ve used them on Substack content, and, thus far, no content identified as AI has been found to be plagiarized, and no content identified as plagiarized has been flagged as AI.
What Ted is complaining about is a series of jazz books that AI may have written, but with enough deviation in both names and content that it is not considered plagiarism. It’s a technique called copycatting and has been going on for millennia across all commercial sectors, from food brands and luxury goods to books and movies.
Plagiarism is stealing and claiming someone’s work as your own, not mimicking a popular book. Further, Ted’s copycat book isn’t an AI problem; it’s a human one, and while his example is unscrupulous, it’s legal and common. Now, let’s address the use of books to train AI, which is defended under the concept of Fair Use.
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Fair Use
U.S. copyright law has specific guidance on the repurposing of written or visual art known as Fair Use. To meet this criterion, you must consider:
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Purpose & character of the use: Is the use transformative (different function, adds new expression or meaning)? Is it commercial or nonprofit? Is there a public-interest element?
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Nature of the copyrighted work: How creative is the original? Is it published? Factual or thinly creative works get less protection; highly imaginative, unpublished works get more.
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Amount & substantiality used: This assessesboth the quantity and qualitative value of what was taken relative to the whole work. Using the heart of a song may weigh against fair use even if the excerpt is short, while copying an entire work can still be fair if the purpose requires it (e.g., full-text search or machine-learning training).
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Effect on the potential market: Does the secondary use replace the original or usurp a likely licensing market?
These criteria were evaluated in a recent lawsuit against Anthropic, which used books to train its LLM. The judge found the use to be transformative and necessary to train the AI on the entire book and acceptable under Fair Use. The lawsuit did find that Athropic violated copyright law by providing Claude with access to a website containing pirated books. This ruling means that you can train on copyrighted works, but you can’t steal them, and multiple court cases have judged similarly based on piracy laws. Further, evidence of ‘plagiarism’ appears to have been heavily manipulated to force the reproduction and not a standard behavior of the AI, as evidenced by The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, which found that you had to ‘hack’ the AI to get it to produce anything similar to an exact copy.
Ted’s copycat book, if it used AI, falls under fair use as a function of training the AI. The resulting mimicry isn’t plagiarism nor a violation of Fair Use since it’s another order removed from the training. In the creative world, this has already been a mess to untangle, but there’s still one more, even murkier, element: we call it inspiration.
Inspiration
Ted rightly points out that he spent decades studying jazz to write his book, and the scammer merely had to put together a few prompts, probably based on an outline structure common to the genre, and paste them together. However, consider that to write his popular book The History of Jazz, Ted spent years studying other people’s work, evident in his copious footnotes and acknowledgments.
As we explored in AI Is[n't] Killing Artists, Ted created his book by studying the greats and through mimicry. In the non-fiction world, we cite our sources, and these sources are the foundation on which we derive new insights. This is the model that I use here on Polymathic Being because it adds credibility by, as Newton said, “standing on the shoulders of giants,” and avoids accusations of plagiarism.
However, when you delve into fiction, you no longer use citations; instead, you refer to them as inspirations. I can’t plagiarize, but I can emulate. In fact, one of the most popular questions I’m asked in author interviews is: “What books inspired The Singularity Chronicles?” I can easily say three books and authors had an impact:
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Ender’s Game (and Ender’s Saga writ large) by Orson Scott Card
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I tried to capture the intrigue and adventure to keep the tempo moving.
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Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
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provided a model for the spiritual/political philosophy
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The Wandering Inn, a web serial by Pirateaba
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I emulated the prose to avoid dense sentence structures typical of Sci-Fi
This is where a lot of artists have a cognitive glitch because, as we explored in Can AI Be Creative, there’s something many fail to understand when it comes to human creativity: we aren’t as uniquely creative as we think we are and to create art, we have to study, emulate, and learn from other artists. Artists understand inspiration, and yet haven’t considered how much they rely on the books and art they’ve learned from.
As a simple example, a plot twist can only exist if an author deviates from what’s expected, and what’s expected is the profile of that genre, IE, the common plotline, which is also known as a trope. Artists also follow established norms, and the good artists have learned how to build on their inspirations and subtly break those norms in just the right ways. That’s what we consider creative.
AI being trained on books is not dissimilar from how humans train to write by studying the creative works of others. Take a look at any creative writing or art course, and you’ll quickly see the similarity. It’s also a problem that extends beyond writing, as recently described by Mark Palmer in “My Opening Farewell to AI Loathers,” where he shows that the misunderstanding of human creation and how AI works also permeates Data Science.
This isn’t to say that unethical use of AI, or the use of AI to replace human writing, or just using AI to produce content, is OK. I’m not trying to exonerate AI writ large, but to show how misapplied accusations against AI cause us to misunderstand the very human creative process we feel is threatened.
Summary
To wrap up all these threads, I’ll distill it down to these points:
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AI isn’t plagiarizing; however, it is trained on artists’ content just like every other artist who is alive.
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The training falls under Fair Use, which allows for the derivative and transformative use of creative work with varying protections based on originality.
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Humans create through social learning and mimicry, and we call that inspiration.
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The use of pirated material leaves AI companies open to liability, not because they used the material, but because they didn’t legally acquire it.
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Humans are using AI not to create, but to profit.
Swinging back to Ted’s article, AI isn’t stealing his readers. That’s being done by a human using the latest technology tools, just like he describes scammers using technology to steal his identity for the past decades. And that’s where it comes back to a human-centric perspective, because it’s humans who are the biggest threat with AI.
It really doesn’t help to make accusations of plagiarism or malicious intent against a tool, and it doesn’t help to misunderstand how AI works or how humans are creative. It sucks that unscrupulous people are using AI to scam people, but AI is not the root cause, just a useful scapegoat. As I’ve said before, I hate writing about AI, but it’s a useful literary foil to help us understand the world we live in and, even better, what makes us human!
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
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Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
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Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
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Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
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Educating AI Integrating AI into education
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Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency
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Today's topic breaks down some common myths provided to writers as advice. From finding your niche to writing every day, to the ten steps for a best seller, we’ll break down the problems and offer alternatives to help you improve your writing or to get started on the adventure of authorship.
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Today's topic explores the tools that structured religion offers that can counter our current mental health degradation. We’ll uncover all the mechanisms that religious services provide, and how so many needs go unmet when we separate from those structures. Let’s dive into how Religion provides Psychotherapy.
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Today's topic shares practical insights and tips on using Large Language Models to conduct objective research on divisive and complex topics. We’ll dig into how AI should Augment Intelligence, not replace a human-centric investigation, and analyze a common critique about the reliability of AI-generated content.
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Today's topic weaves together philosophy and physiology to explain how our best efforts are sometimes the cause of our failure. We’ll examine the concept of reversed effort, wu wei, and the art of not trying to achieve the success we want. Buckle in!
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Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic explores the good, the bad, and the ugly about [In]Human Resources in most corporations. We’ll examine some of my own painful experiences, how others are facing similar issues, and explore a core driver of this problem, concluding with examples of where it can be done right.
The Ugly
When I first entered the corporate world, I was told that Human Resources (HR) was not there for the employees, but rather to protect the company from lawsuits. Given how kind and empathetic many HR personnel appeared, and their stated interest in being human-centric, I was flabbergasted. It took more painful experiences than I’d like to admit for me to learn just how right those warnings were.
For example, while at a large aerospace firm, I went to HR in the hopes of getting some guidance regarding a manager who was, let’s say, a little overbearing. I was told that the conversation was confidential, and I opened up about my frustrations. Two hours later, my boss was asking me numerous questions and had a thorough understanding of precisely what I’d said. In a separate experience, I was deposed in a lawsuit against the same HR department by a coworker (he won) who had been retaliated against. HR had taken offense to something he’d said, had manufactured a violation, and wrongly terminated him. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson.
Fast forward to a missile defense contractor, where I encountered a truly toxic manager, and entered a world of absolute ridiculousness. Here, they had an organization that acted as employee advocates, at least in name. I was not the only one who filed complaints; there were dozens, and yet, these folks came back and said, while they found evidence of a hostile work environment, it was likely because we, meaning everyone in the department, should be advised to look for new roles or just do what we were asked.
This is when I learned that HR can’t / won’t step in for bad leadership, and since that manager was liked by their manager, there wasn’t even a performance issue in play. What HR will address is unethical and illegal behavior, or, if your boss doesn’t like you, then they’ll do performance management. Sadly, the rot in that group became so deep that, after I moved to a different department, the manager in question was found to have committed serious ethics violations that we all saw coming a mile away.
That company was also where I learned HR didn’t like true diversity. As I described in Are You Asking a Fish to Climb a Tree?
… they want the superficial diversity, but they don’t like the true diversity of different ways of thinking and doing. I experienced this as a manager of a very diverse engineering team. I had 16 young engineers who were more than 50% female and more than 60% non-white. I had both Jesus and Muhammad on my team, along with other diverse individuals that everyone says they want.
In the end, HR didn’t like the natural tension and disagreement that comes with true diversity of differing backgrounds, mindsets, ways of thinking, and more. They wanted the look while whitewashing the differences away.
Another jump forward, and I find myself at a different defense contractor. At this point, I knew not to go to HR regardless of how bad the leadership might be. I realize I may be starting to sound like I’m either complaining or an HR nightmare, but let’s just say this experience reinforced that the large corporation’s HR departments only see risk when considering whether to Embrace the Divergents. It also absolutely confirmed that bad leaders won’t be addressed if their leadership likes them, and it doesn’t matter how many lives and careers are ruined; nothing will be done unless there’s a legal risk.
In an absurd example, I was assigned a project and quickly realized the material provided was incomplete. I asked my leader for the supporting analysis and several clarifying questions. I was denied the material, told to continue, and ‘coached’ for “delays in kicking off the project.” When I submitted the team’s first analysis, they said I was missing critical information and then ‘coached’ me for not asking for it. When I pointed all this out in a meeting with HR and my leadership, my lead said, “Oh, you have access to that information,” and when she attempted to show me, she proved I did not have access. The kicker was that HR still turned to me and said I should have asked for the information when I knew I needed it, while they held a printed copy of that exact email, and the ‘coaching’ I received for asking for it.
It was at a blockchain startup that a new element was stacked on this already growing pile of inhumanity: Resume Inflation. Don’t get me wrong, they did everything else in spades, too, but while hiring a sizeable team, I learned that the Silicon Valley mantra of “Hire Fast, Fire Fast” just poured gasoline on the dumpster fire of HR:
Because what you are likelier to get isn’t the Servant Leadership you say you want, but the over-aggrandizing, braggadocio personality types that are Industrious but unproductive, often representing the Successfully Unsuccessful, and creating the foundation of Functional Stupidity.
Yes, this is ugly, and that’s because it’s built on a whole foundation of bad behaviors.
The Bad
Recently, Mark McGrath | OODA Strategist wrote When the Kiss Cam Broke the Culture: HR, Hypocrisy, and the Collapse of Corporate Credibility. It’s a long title, but a concise read which uncovers how the recent exposure of infidelity during a Coldplay concert between Astronomics’s CEO and HR VP merely demonstrates a deeper rot in the culture. Namely, that what business leaders say is not what they do, harkening back to that original advice that HR isn’t there for the employees, a fact Ethan Evans, a former Amazon VP, discusses in Straight Truth: HR is not there to help you.
Joining the conversation, Jennifer Sey recently made waves by writing a Washington Post OpEd titled “I’ve ditched HR to free my company from the social-justice police,” and wrote on Substack on how “Everyone hates HR” along with the subsequent backlash from the HR community. She’s certainly not alone, Paul Sweeney shares his insights on how “HR Must Die or Pretty Quickly Reinvent Itself.” Let’s just say if I had an ugly experience, the bad part is I’m not alone, nor even an outlier.
For all the issues that these writers discuss, I’ll only add one observation: I think this bad reputation is driven, in part, by the Toxic Empathy we explored here recently. While we looked at how empathy can be weaponized in each of us individually, HR departments represent the corporate weaponization of empathy. These may be well-meaning people, but they’re put into a position where their natural empathy is exploited, and the outcome is, well, bad.
The Good
This essay hasn’t been a happy topic thus far, and it personalizes some of my past writing in an attempt to show the honest pain behind the words. Frankly, I’ve got enough scars for a lifetime and enough bitterness to rival a double-hopped IPA, which, incidentally, helped me survive. So, let’s shift our focus and see the good that HR can do.
The Director of the employee advocacy team at the missile defense contractor was a legitimate advocate. She was tough as nails, no-nonsense, and fought the good fight. She didn’t coddle anyone who came to her, nor did she coddle the company management. I learned a lot about strong leadership from her, and I value that.
But a special place remains in my soul for Paige, an HR rep who saw me for who I was and took me under her wing. In a whirlwind month, we met at least 10 times for 1:1 coaching, and I call her my ‘cheese grater,’ as she chewed away my self-defense mechanisms. She helped me see who I really was and how the stories I told myself contributed to some of the problems I was facing. Numerous times, I’d have to stop her while I processed the feedback that uncovered raw, typically unmet, needs.
Through her, I learned that I have a need for validation. Now, if you’ve met me, you know that I exude anything but that. When I shared that need with my wife, she was also surprised, even though we’d been married 8 years. I was constantly trying to prove myself, and that was backfiring. I just needed to stop trying. (and that worked) Paige also helped me uncover that I have a higher standard of correctness and when to let things go, along with my short fuse for bad leadership, which I still struggle with today. She was fantastic, exactly what I needed at the time, and helped me build a major cornerstone for my career.
Notably, neither of those two HR ladies exhibited the toxic empathy that I critiqued earlier. They were compassionate, caring, and tough, and both of them ended up moving on to different companies that valued those traits. They were perfect examples of the good that HR can do in an employee’s career.
Summary
HR isn’t there for the employees, and that simple truth feels inhumane to say, considering the potential it has to help employees flourish. I agree with Jennifer Sey that, at this point, we’d be better off without them, as they’re often used as a liability shield to protect bad leadership more than empowering a productive workforce. Without an HR department, perhaps leaders would do more leading instead of weaponizing empathy with the ubiquitous threat of being sent to HR.
It’s a messy topic with a lot of highly charged opinions on each side, but in the middle, what you see is that the casualties are people like me or my awesome team, who, while being everything they said they wanted, were just a little too divergent for what [In]Human Resources could handle. That’s the ugly truth, driven by the bad focus on the wrong values, which hides the good that motivates many professionals to enter the field of Human Resources, and that’s the bane of job satisfaction.
What is your experience with the good, the bad, and the ugly of HR?
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
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Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
-
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
-
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
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Educating AI Integrating AI into education
-
Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency
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Today's topic is another Mixed Mental Arts that digs into the toxic empathy that underpins and is weaponized within much of the social manipulation we feel today. We’ll focus on balancing empathy that retains your agency, keeps you grounded in a chaotic world, and allows you to mature into a deeper connection and love with those around you.
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Today's topic shares insights from Lean Six Sigma on the difficulty in overcoming the slow degradation of performance through entropy. We’ll explore a few key insights into how to prevent this both professionally and personally.
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Today's topic is a heterodox position that looks at what most people miss about the power within the idea of reincarnation. We’ll uncover how reincarnation is what Atheists are missing, what Christians could gain from it, what simulation theorists see, and what almost all religions aspire to. Let’s dive in!
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Today's topic is a fun twist on achieving personal and professional success. We introduce the idea of inversion, which is looking at a problem from a different perspective to understand better what we’d like to avoid or achieve to ensure technological or psychological success.
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Today's topic introduces one of the most notable scientific societies on the planet and then considers their motto, "Take Nobody's Word for it,” as a rallying cry as we explore the world around us. Join as we discover the power of incredulity, tools to separate fact from fiction, and methods to improve our knowledge.
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Today's topic steps back and looks at a crazy juxtaposition within the humans living right here on our own Earth. From Skyscrapers to the Jungle and from Rocketships to Sharpened Sticks, what would an alien think if they looked down and viewed Homo Sapiens? Let’s take a look…
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Today's topic addresses a critically underappreciated challenge regarding how we view a Hero’s Journey. While the journey is classically masculine-focused, it misses the unique opportunity to understand, appreciate, and embrace a Heronine journey that develops the strength and capabilities of the feminine. Let’s explore the movie Encanto and see that it embodies a powerful Heroine Journey.
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Today's topic flips the script on anxiety and shows how much of what we fear is more in our imagination than in reality. At at time when mental health is collapsing, let’s look at the key drivers of anxiety, whether we are focused on the right threats, and uncover a few tools we can apply to counter the b**t.
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Today's topic challenges that adage “Work smarter, not harder.” Let’s explore why that idea isn’t wrong, per se, but incomplete, especially when advising the younger generation on how they can be successful. Work Hard; Get Smart changed my perspective and compelled me to reevaluate my approach to being smart.
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Today's topic peers into a challenge that limits our success both professionally and personally. It’s the prenicious tendency to say the right things, but the failure to do what you say. Let’s look at how to fix this by establishing disciplined execution for true success.
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Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic investigates our addiction to fear and how people leverage that addiction to drive engagement, similar to pornography. While it’s not a new problem within the human psyche, our constant connection to social media dramatically increases our exposure and exacerbates the negative outcomes.
The news, social media, and everyone everywhere is a cacophony of chaos full of hot takes, people planting their flag to defend a position, and seemingly everyone demanding a reaction. Headlines are loaded with clickbait (Did mine get you here?), Algowhores whip up frenzies with skillfully crafted content that gets served straight to your eyeballs, regardless of the truth.
The technical term is Fear P*rn, and it’s as addictive as naked women or the original pornography, romance novels. Travis Monteleone wrote Our Negativity Addiction, in which he delves into great detail about the mechanisms. Suffice it to say, it’s addicting because it triggers something incredibly deep in the human psyche: Survival.
Fear P*rn is all about hot takes drawing from, or inventing a divisive view, and then seasoning it with outrage. It’s designed to trigger your base instincts of survival and get your emotional elephant to stampede. Much of our current politics is inherently divisive, as parties strive to control the levers of power. Saturate that with the hot takes in the media, and you end up with a dumpster fire. But let me remind you that your reaction gives control into the hands of those who are demanding that reaction.
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Is someone trolling you? You rise to the bait.
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Is someone posting something that triggers you? You have to act.
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Did someone question your personal view? You must attack.
The key to all of this is that you’re letting them control you. You’re ceding your agency to the outrage of others and becoming their pawn. And to what end? What benefit are you getting? Are you happier? Healthier? Are your relationships stronger?
What happens if you refuse to play the game and stop the cycle of fear p*rn?
Alternative Framing
Thankfully, there’s a different way to look at things. Instead of focusing on each element as its own unique situation, step back and consider the larger picture. A great example is this Chinese parable:
There was once a farmer in ancient China who owned a horse. “You are so lucky!” his neighbours told him, “to have a horse to pull the cart for you.” “Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Too soon to tell.”
One day he didn’t latch the gate properly and the horse ran off. “Oh no! This is terrible news!” his neighbours cried. “Such terrible misfortune!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Too soon to tell.”
A few days later the horse returned, bringing with it six wild horses. “How fantastic! You are so lucky,” his neighbours told him. “Now you are rich!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Too soon to tell.”
The following week the farmer’s son was breaking-in one of the wild horses when it kicked out and broke his leg. “Oh no!” the neighbours cried, “such bad luck, all over again!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Too soon to tell.”
The next day soldiers came and took away all the young men to fight in the war. The farmer’s son was left behind. “You are so lucky!” his neighbours cried. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Too soon to tell.”
The cold truth about hot takes is that you don’t need a hot take. Typically, if you wait just a little bit, everything changes. However, that doesn’t mean you’ve landed on the right answer yet. The dust is still settling. You may recall the Ranger adage, “Slow is Smooth, and Smooth is Fast.” This concept is related to the Taoist concept of Wu Wei. It involves pausing to assess the situation, shifting your response from a reaction to an intentional action or even non-action, as the situation warrants. Importantly, it restores the agency of the action to you, rather than what others are demanding.
What this means in application is that the truth of the parable isn’t in any of the extremes of reactions but in the central understanding that life gives and takes away. There will be things that seem good and things that seem bad. Most importantly, it is the ability to step back and contextualize a singular situation into the culmination of multiple situations that show the larger picture.
Now, this might sound familiar to you because it’s also the root of our Systems Thinking concept I’ve written about, where we are challenged to have:
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Insatiable curiosity
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The humility to accept we don’t know everything
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Intentional reframing to see if we understand the situation completely
As we distilled it further, Yes, And… So!, let’s apply this back to the parable:
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Yes, each situation can be taken as a blessing or a curse.
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And… The situations together tell a more complicated but accurate story about life.
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So! We can better understand that a hot take isn’t necessary for each situation, as the larger truth takes more time to understand.
It’s also more than just perspective. It’s about retaining your agency and avoiding becoming an unaware pawn of someone else’s game. David Dennison captured his rationale to embrace a flavor of this concept as follows:
My New Term’s Resolution to be less angry isn’t some zen thing. It’s not inspired by a Christian will to forgive, or to turn the other cheek. It’s an attempt to make myself less manipulable. (emphasis mine)
The concept of Wu Wei in Taoism aligns closely with Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius said in Meditations:
Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
Let that sink in for a moment. We get to choose how much harm we feel. It may seem counterintuitive, but consider taking a punch. When I was boxing, I got to choose how much I let a hit affect me. I could shake off a massive punch that, ironically, if I allowed it to hurt, would hurt a lot more. I get to choose the impact I let it have.
Regaining Agency
We have the power to control ourselves, and that agency is essential to embrace. It’s the foundation of both Stoic and Taoist philosophies and is an antidote to outrage, victimization, and fear. In fact, it’s becoming a superpower as Stephen Parato shares:
Let this splash of cold reality shock you out of a frenzy of reaction; you don’t have to have a hot take all the time. Pause long enough to recognize whether you are allowing others to control you. See if your actions are collapsing heaven into hell and dragging the emperor to reign rent-free in your brain as many do with politics.
The media profits off of the addiction to Fear Prn. When you recognize this and regain your agency, you are taking a crucial step toward healing the divisions that others intentionally sow to maintain their power and control. The cold truth is that many of us are addicted to Fear Prn, but we can, and should, break that addiction.
This essay is the close cousin of Psyop, Until Proven Otherwise, which provides a series of key tools for how to put the brakes on the deluge of content flowing at us each day. These two essays go hand in hand to help us handle the world today.
Did you enjoy this post? If so, please hit the ❤️ button above or below. This will help more people discover Substacks like this one, which is great. Also, please share here or in your network to help us grow.
Polymathic Being is a reader-supported publication. Becoming a paid member keeps these essays open for everyone. Hurry and grab 20% off an annual subscription. That’s $24 a year or $2 a month. It’s just 50¢ an essay and makes a big difference.
Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
-
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
-
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
-
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
-
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
-
Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights to the philosophy of agency
Get full access to Polymathic Being at www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic dives deep into the challenges of diversity. We’ll examine the idea of judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree and consider how many aspects of life impose artificial expectations that prioritize climbing a tree as the only valuable outcome. Finally, we’ll explore some insights for embracing true diversity, even when it’s uncomfortable, so that you can unlock exceptional outcomes.
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Today's topic explores the power of answering the “why” in tasks and analyses, while also identifying how subversive that question can be to many leaders who never ask it or, worse, are successful because they don’t ask it. Let’s dive into the crazy world of a single-word question and find out how to use it to our success.
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Today's topic applies the Polymathic mantra of Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn to the wicked problem of Polio. We start by defining the multiple types of polio, exploring the multiple attack vectors, the multiple confounding considerations, and the multiple incentives to understand better how we’ve come up with such a singular and simple story about this disease.
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Today's topic is a fun twist to introduce better ways of thinking. It’s another collaboration with Andrew Perlot from Socratic State of Mind and borrows from his insights on how to be miserable while weaving together solutions for that misery.
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Today's topic is Part Eight in the Keys to Innovation series and introduces a method to achieve innovation without losing ourselves to the chaotic space of ideation. Join us and explore a framework that embraces constraints to drive innovation, not restrict it.
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Today's topic digs into a powerful Mixed Mental Arts concept that underpins Polymathic Being: the ability to Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn. We’ll look at what each of these concepts means and how to unlock incredible capabilities when you weave them together.
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Today's topic rethinks our focus on work-life balance and shows how that sequence is completely backward. We’ll also examine how ikigai, a Japanese philosophy of purpose and fulfillment, is misapplied. Then, we will turn it all around and show how success is balancing life before work while uncovering true ikigai.
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Today's topic investigates the very real world of Psychological Operations that you are exposed to every day. Thankfully, we’ll also explore a series of tools you can apply to ensure you don’t fall victim to a PSYOP and can start having better conversations.
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Today's topic takes a look at a pernicious element of modern feminism: our expectation that women work the same as men. Yet, is this an advantage for women, or are we regressing in how we treat women? These expectations feed the rat race, and yet we call it progressive; let’s find out if that’s true.
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Today’s Topic covers an aspect of Polymathic Thinking that is often overlooked. Let’s dive in and see how our skills are formed by the sum of our experience, not just the most prestigious. Today is a nostalgic review of how many things I learned while waiting tables in college.
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Today's topic wrangles with the very misunderstood philosophy of Stoicism and how it provides an antidote to the craziness of the world today. We’ll explore what Stoicism really is, how it underpins the philosophy of Polymathic Being, and how you can use it to create stability, regain agency, and properly contextualize the world.
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Today's topic questions what trends online and why we reward that behavior. Buckle in as we dive into the world of algowhoring and find out how it perverts a very normal and healthy human behavior. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of the social media landscape and new tools you can use to make it better.
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Today’s topic is Part Seven in our Keys to Innovation series, where we explore new ways of thinking to unlock true innovation. This key proposes a new model for critique that leverages our social superpower and builds ideas together to create a better idea.
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Today's topic looks straight into the diet of Veganism and finds some uncomfortable truths. We’ll look at how natural it is, whether it can be achieved without first-world technology, and what it means globally. Buckle in for an adventure!
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Today's topic resulted from a serendipitous encounter on an Airplane, which created the seed of an idea: We don’t need to do everything ourselves. Join us as we explore a confluence of ideas from psychology, sociology, leadership, and current culture, which we’ll weave into actionable insights for success in life.
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Today's topic investigates the Liberal Arts and why they are such a crucial educational foundation for addressing the complexity of the world around us. We’ll dive into the structure of these Arts and then explore how they feed science, civics, critical thinking, and even mental health.
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Today's topic highlights a glaring blindspot that I feel most Gen X people, at least on social media, seem to have in feeling they remain the badasses who grew up as latchkey kids. Let’s find out if that’s true.
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Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic explores the value of irreverence in highlighting the absurd things we may hold dear. We then transition to understand true reverence and how that adds meaning, beauty, and awe to our lives. Weaving it all together is the power of Stoicism and how balance helps us master irreverence and see the world more clearly.
Introduction
I love the philosophy of stoicism and its pragmatic application to the chaos of our world. For a philosophy that values virtue, you might be surprised that irreverence is not only valuable but an essential behavior when appropriately balanced. To do this topic justice, I’ve collaborated with Andrew Perlot who writes the valuable Substack, Socratic State of Mind and writes regularly on Stoicism. Without further ado, let’s dive in and let Andrew introduce stoic thoughts on irreverence.
Irreverence
Socrates managed an interesting balancing act. He revered Athenian religion but infuriated his countrymen with an irreverence toward societal mores and the opinions of authority figures. When push came to shove, he staked out his own path.
The later Stoics considered their school a branch of Socratic philosophy, so it’s no surprise that many of their exercises have irreverence at their core. Art and philosophy were often intertwined. The plays of Seneca were designed to entertain the masses but also wake them to certain truths.
By zooming in on things and observing them warts and all, we can, as Marcus Aurelius suggested in Meditations, “strip away the legend that encrusts them.”
“Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Or making love—something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid. Perceptions like that—latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time—all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are…” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.13
Our culture weaves a powerful spell insisting prestige, riches, and possessions are what we should live for; it’s hard to see straight. Marcus’s exercise breaks the spell by reminding us that these externals aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. In many cases, they’re ugly. Great art can do the same.
Banksy’s Napalm took the horrifying Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a burned girl fleeing American napalm during the Vietnam War and added the capitalist icons Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald, creating a sickening juxtaposition. It suggests the horrors of war are inextricably linked to the consumerism, materialism, and profit our society is built on.
It’s meant to shake us and make us examine our choices. The artist has a perspective, but the art asks us to apply the same philosophical tool as Marcus’s exercise. It’s a way to zoom in and examine an inured status quo in a new light, seeing that even “good” things can be quite ugly.
Analyzing Irreverence
Andrew’s insights here are really important. Irreverence is an incredibly powerful tool that can unshackle thought from the stultification of traditional meaning and authority. It liberates minds and erodes mores and societal values. It helps us see straight through our b**t-filled world, making it valuable and good. Dogmatic thinking makes us stupid, and irreverent art and philosophy can free our minds.
Now that we’ve introduced the value of irreverence, we can re-establish the foundation of true reverence. When faced with something vast and sublime, or even terrifying, we can feel reverence, admiration, or interconnection in a way that shakes us free of gloom and reductive thinking. It elevates us. Back to Andrew:
Reverence
With an expanded perspective, a single blade of grass pushing through a concrete sea can generate wonder. The vastness of space and time suggests our own troubles are pretty minor. The Stoic philosopher Seneca thought nature zoomed out our perspective and generated a useful sort of awe:
“Nature raised our faces to the sky, and wanted us to look up to everything splendid and wonderful it has made: the rising and setting of the heavenly bodies, the swift turning of the firmament, which reveals to us the earth by day and the heavens at night…” — Seneca, Epistles, Letter 94
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius utilized “the view from above” to mentally watch the world’s hubbub as if from the heights of a mountain. How small even an army looked from those heights, he thought, and how insignificant one man’s life was amid the vastness of time. It brings peace and an expanded peaceful perspective.
Reverant art may look different depending on your theological or atheistic lens, but nature can be something of a universal, as Walt Witman suggests:
“To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,Every inch of space is a miracle,Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same;Every spear of grass—the frames, limbs, organs,of men and women, and all that concerns them,All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.”— Walt Whitman, Miracles
Artistic depictions of virtue and selflessness are another generator of awe. The Burghers of Calais is a statue depicting six prominent men of Calais who’ve surrendered themselves to the English King Edward III for execution after he offered to spare their city and people from utter destruction in return. It’s a moving sacrifice.
The night sky is another common subject of reverential art. Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night after he had lost his faith, yet he wrote to his brother Theo, "Hope is in the stars."
The Balance
Andrew laid out an excellent foundation for the value of reverence and irreverence. To challenge our hubris, we need to be able to stand in awe of things that call us to a higher meaning or even a glimpse at the infinite. We also need to poke at everything and zoom in to see if it truly deserves reverence or is a thin veneer. Both have value.
However, our world today is profoundly out of balance between reverence and irreverence. We flounder in dogma or nihilism, and sometimes, we do both at the same time. We engage without subtlety, nuance, or respect, and we see fractures emerging in our societies.
We have groups that over-revere certain things. It gets messy quickly because, whether it’s theistic or atheistic belief structures, humans can turn anything into a religion, and that’s a great way to look at over-reverence… It’s religious. Whether it is Christians protesting abortion, Muslims attacking cartoonists, the religion of intersectionality and ‘woke,’ or even the incuriosity and unquestioning loyalty of the “I F*g Love Science’ crowds, humans are coded for this reverence. It doesn’t take more details to see the problems those simple examples are causing.
On the flip side, we also gleefully skewer anything our opponents hold dear. People on the political right in the US memes the Left while the left tries to rip down the sublime of the past as racist, colonialist, etc. Everyone loves killing a sacred cow that isn’t their own. We tear down everything in this battle, leaving us empty, angry, and without beauty.
This misapplication of reverence and irreverence leads to fragile and divisive echo chambers that help no one. It’s a topic we explored in Triggered:
Being triggered is a powerful and healthy tool when contextualized. It’s one of the best ways to identify your limitations and fragilities. It’s a perfect chance to flip the script from feeling attacked to introspecting about why you’d react with such sensitivity to begin with.
Irreverence is an amazing tool that forces us to pause and consider our triggers, helping us identify overreverence. Reverence is essential for grounding ourselves in meaning, so it's essential to balance the two.
Thankfully, the Stoic philosophies teach us how to balance ourselves and see the world in both its sublimity and its absurdity. Irreverence is just one of two critical lenses humans have at their disposal. It’s the zooming in and zooming back out that allows us to identify and target our own sacred cows while also adding value, beauty, and meaning to our lives. Balance allows us to master irreverence.
What do you think? Do we, as individuals or as a society, need more of Michelangelo’s David or Peter Lenk’s Laubebrunnen right now? Do we need to zoom in or zoom out? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Check out the Socratic State of Mind by Andrew Perlot for tons of amazing insights into Stoicism and how to apply them to your lives this New Year.
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
-
Goatfury Writes by Andrew Smith: All-around great daily essays
-
Never Stop Learning by Martin Prior: Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
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Cyborgs Writing by Lance Cummings: AI tips for Thinking and Writing
-
Educating AI by Nick Potkalitsky: Integrating AI into education
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Mostly Harmless Ideas by Alejandro Piad Morffis: Computer Science for Everyone
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Today's topic wrangles with the idea of myths. Are they stories that are untrue or is there there something deeper that is just begging to be understood? Let’s step back and explore the deeper and more useful meaning in the ancient myths.
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Today's topic is one of my favorite mixed mental arts. Join in as we look at an old Japanese tradition and what that can teach us about relationships, culture, and yes, even things we own. Not everyone is as careful with precious things as we’d like. Yet not everything broken is lost. Let’s find out how Kintsugi can be applied to our lives.
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Today's topic looks at how AI-generated content is polluting our digital ecosystems and the challenges that it creates in trying to understand the world around us. We’ll then explore techniques to reclaim our sanity in this muddied world so we can ensure a human-centric grounding in reality.
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Today's topic continues our Keys to Innovation series and discusses the very common problem that everyone thinks their problems are unique like a unicorn. It’s a persistent failure mode for innovation, project execution, and process optimization. Thankfully there’s a common set of tools that we can apply to solve these ‘unique’ problems. It’s a fun mind twist so let’s dive in!
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Today's topic focused exclusively on a persistent behavior humans have where, when faced with two truths that are incompatible with our worldview, our brains will glitch and eliminate the problem entirely. It causes some of the worst social divisions we see today so let’s dive in and explore these brain glitches and what we can do about them.
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Today's topic revisits and simplifies the foundation of Polymathic Thinking. Over the past two years, I’ve received questions about how to start the journey as an aspiring Polymath, and this is my answer. Join in, and let’s start the journey together.
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Today's topic addresses whether we are logical beings rationally progressing through life or emotionally chaotic and reacting to environmental stimuli in ways we aren’t even conscious of. We’ll look at the biology and psychology driving our engagement with the world and learn how to balance the two for improved success.
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Today's topic attempts to recenter our day-to-day lives in the things that matter as the political climate has been particularly contentious recently, especially if you live in the US. To hear tell, we are one step away from the end of the world as we know it. It might feel that way online but there are important steps we can take to ground ourselves in a healthier reality. Let’s find out how.
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Today's topic shifts gears to focus on our physical health. The topic is sugar and how that delicious and dopamine-rewarding delicacy is like a master key that, unmanaged, unlocks an entire panoply of terrible pathologies that sour our health.
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Today's topic swings back to Systems Thinking, one of our foundational tools here on Polymathic Being. We keep being asked if we can further distill the concept for broader application. While there’s risk in over-simplification, let’s explore a simple mantra that anyone can use to apply Systems Thinking and unlock true innovation that balances ethics, safety, and risk.
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Today's topic looks at how to turn sacred cows into delicious burgers. At least that’s the way some have described how Polymathic Being uncovers unique insights. It’s a perception that warrants critique to recognize what we are doing, the techniques, and tools we are using, and whether we are having the best benefit.
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Today’s Topic digs deep into the current rift between artists and AI. We’ll investigate the value of art and then dive into the history of technological advancements to help contextualize the angst about AI within the Art community. This essay has been one of my most difficult to write as there are so many nuances to tease out properly.
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Today’s Topic addresses the advertising of the Green Energy movement and the reality that underlies our drive for environmental stewardship. A simple investigation quickly uncovers that the materials used for green initiatives are, instead, blood red.
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Today's topic is another of our Mixed Mental Arts and introduces a fun term, Infobesity, referring to the information overload and mental saturation that we face every day. Join in as we uncover the consequences affecting how we process the world and how too much information can create political divides. We’ll end with recommendations to improve our information fitness.
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Today's topic continues our investigation into the feminine and looks at what we value and what we try to delete about her in today’s Western society. It’s going to be messy, embarrassing, visceral, and limiting because we are talking about the monthly menstrual cycle, which creates life and stews angst in our culture.
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Today’s Topic is another Mixed Mental Art thatdelves into our comfort zones and how feeling safe and secure is important but can limit our growth if not considered properly. Join us as we look at how to structure your exposure to life that balances psychological safety with continual personal growth.
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Today's topic continues the exploration into our climate that we started with The Climate is Changing and now looks at how extreme our rates of climate change are today compared to the geological record. The goal is to better understand our current climate changes to inform effective action that increases human flourishing.
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Today's topic is boring, but because of that, it’s fascinating, illuminating, and creative. It pushes back on the idea that every second of every day must be curated and stimulating. It tries to pull us back from (un)social media, into the real world, and even a step further into that terrifying place of boredom. From that point, we can unlock the superpower of nothingness to create things beyond our imagination.
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Today's topic continues a thread we started exploring in Don’t Trust AI, Entrust It which provides a solid framing for how to consider the ethics of advanced technology. Today we’ll do a thought experiment involving the ethical quandary where we have incredible forgiveness for human accidents but zero forgiveness for technology.
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Today's topic addresses the highly effective nature of clickbait headlines and how headlines in general prime us for a certain viewpoint. Join us as we explore the effects of priming and how we can mentally check ourselves to avoid that priming.
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Today's topic is going to explore two topics. The first is my own experience with avoiding sunburn and the second explores why we’ll never be able to scientifically prove my method works. It’s two counterintuitive topics rolled into one essay so let’s dive into Sunglasses, Skin Cancer, and Science.
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Today's topic is a psychological exploration into a few of our cognitive biases and how they cause us to see the world as significantly worse than it really is. Not just worse but with the dismal outlook that we are facing an apocalypse. This outlook is tightly coupled with a nostalgic yearning for how things used to be. Let’s explore what drives this and rewire our perceptions to understand why we always see an apocalypse.
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Today's topic rethinks and recontextualizes a theme within Polymathic Being of slowing down, stepping back, and analyzing more before executing. The challenge is that there is a case for taking action in the face of doubt and uncertainty especially when facing wicked problems. Let’s find out how to balance these two ideas together.
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Today's topic continues a collaboration between I as we write on the history, culture, and science of our favorite indulgences. Today we’ll explore whisky and you can also look back at our previous “Odes” for more fun and informative insights.
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Today's topic dives once more into the middle of techno-optimists and pessimists ripping social media and the news into what feels like two camps of utopia or apocalypse regarding our relationship with AI. Once again, I’m going to try to bridge the two camps with a pragmatic approach on how to use AI to augment intelligence.
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Today's topic continues to explore what happens when we force a narrative on a story that doesn’t need to be there. We’ll find how that typically makes the story fragile and, worse, causes the original value to be lost. Come join us and discover how antifragility can apply to mythology and theology to unlock new insights.
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Today's topic is one I’ve been wanting to write for a while about how the human perception of risk often puts us at even greater danger because we don’t apply the right systems thinking perspectives to contextualize it properly. We’re going to investigate the topic of risk compensation and provide some useful tips for analyzing risk better.
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Today's topic addresses a growing trend of labeling antisocial behavior as introversion and why that characterization misses the superpower that humans have. We’ll explore our foundation as social creatures and how introverts and extroverts aren’t at odds on this spectrum.
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Today's topic pulls the thread on a specific behavior within the workforce that I’ve seen quite a lot from people who should know better. It’s particularly problematic in Data Science and Operations Research which are supposed to avoid this and it also permeates research in science, politics, and more. We’ll explore when people confidently answer the wrong question and how to avoid it.
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Today's topic is one we’ve talked a lot about here on Polymathic Being: Antifragility. It’s popped up enough times that I think we should probably pause and make sure everyone fully understands this seemingly obvious, but completely counterintuitive concept. Without further ado, let’s dive in!
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Today's topic is a practical guide to exerting your control over social media and training your algorithm to avoid the downward spiral of content that permeates everything. We’ll explore the problem and provide a simple set of solutions for how to train your algorithm.
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Today's topic is a fun segue that explores a bit of the craziness of my life, specifically regarding my early relationship with my wife. From Airborne School, to Korea, to Iraq, today we explore the crazy things we do for love.
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Today's topic is part book review and part insight into how our brains work on interpreting the world around us. It’ll challenge our bias to look for anything that agrees with our worldview and open up new possibilities to learning and adapting.
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Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic focuses on being a good team player and when it can go too far. The key is, sometimes it is OK to say “It’s not my job.” We’ll explore when that time is and what tools you have available to ensure that the job gets done the best way possible and by the right person.
Introduction
LinkedIn has become a treasure trove of simplistic platitudes, trite tautologies, and outright bad ideas for leadership. Today’s falls under a less egregious form, but one that I think needs to be poked at to show where it can go wrong. The meme goes:
Never say, “That’s not my job.”
That oozes arrogance and laziness. Chip in to help with what needs to be done, even if it’s not your responsibility. Do what needs to be done or help someone find the solution. Period. Even When nobody’s watching.
On the surface, this does seem to be a logical and team-focused goal to ensure work continues to get done. But what happens when it really isn’t your job? Worse, what happens when stepping in devolves the process until clear lines of ownership, accountability, and even knowing who can or can’t do the task blur into pure chaos?
Welcome to the vast majority of organizations I’ve been asked to help straighten out in my career. In almost every one of them, this idea of just jumping in and getting it done permeated the culture, and yet success was never achieved.
Worse, they created a thousand workarounds because no one slowed down long enough to fix the root cause. People were rewarded for finding novel solutions instead of following the processes. In many cases, it resulted in significant corrective actions and quality issues. It’s easy to just ‘get it done.’ It takes a lot of time to strip back all of these band-aids and fix the real problem.
Lean Six Sigma has a phrase for this: “Don’t steal the monkey.” This means if a problem or roadblock emerges, don’t just step in and do it yourself. Sometimes it’s not your job. Instead, step back and figure out who should be doing it, why it’s not working, and get to the root cause of the problem.
A great tool to achieve this is called Leader Standard Work. It’s one of the most powerful tools for success and provides visibility into each person’s tasks and accountability mechanisms to ensure it’s done right.
Leader Standard Work
I’ll use an example from a manufacturing cell: these are typically led by a manager and supported by manufacturing, quality assurance, test engineers, planners, material managers, and assemblers and testers. Functionally, it is a cross-domain team.
Whenever I’ve implemented Leader Standard Work, I start by having the leadership team write down the top 15 tasks each day, 10 tasks each week, and 5 tasks each month they think need to get done to be successful.
When they hand the list back, inevitably 80%+ of what they’ve listed isn’t their job. They’ve just stepped in to do it over time. They never said, “That’s not my job.” Instead, they stole the monkey from someone else. For example:
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Supervisor checking test equipment each morning - Test engineer’s role
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Test engineer trying to release replacement parts - Material manager’s role
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Manufacturing engineer attending delivery meetings - Supervisor’s role
Once we assigned those tasks back to whose role they actually were we’d go back and update the list of tasks. The second time we’d still find that over 50% of the tasks were not what the team members should be doing.
After around five iterations we’d have a Daily, Weekly, and Monthly task list that finally identified what that person needed to do. The list ended up being shorter than the first list and that allowed us to add in new tasks that drove continuous improvement to make the processes better over time.
There’s another concept to apply here I call Layered Accountability. It’s based on the idea of looking at the right areas, at the right time, to maintain a generally high performance. We explored this in the essay “The Enemy’s Gate is Down” where I’d spot-check very specific tasks.
Besides focusing on their specific job, each role also needs to look down to ensure the layers they lead are performing, and then look up at the strategic areas to see what’s coming up in the future like we covered in Stop Aiming at the Wrong Targets.
Business Continuity
Clearly, delineating roles and tasks, establishing leader standard work, and ensuring that the right people are on the right task is a crucially important aspect of achieving business continuity. Even better, it enables you to identify the critical processes and align the team around true measures of success.
I recently advised a small start-up team that was so tangled up that they struggled to develop software architectures, hold teams accountable, and even write job requirements. After working them through a series of workshops focused on maturing Products, Processes, and People, we were able to bring in leader standard work to iron out their processes and finally, align their people.
The irony is they started off bragging, “We never say that’s not my job here.” By the end, they realized that phrase actually caused their problems. They had to step back and find out who really needed to get it done. In doing so, they balanced the work and realized they needed to hire extra people, but not in the areas they originally thought.
In Summary
It is important to say no and sometimes it’s not your job. That doesn’t mean you let it fall by the wayside and ignore it. Instead, your team needs to do the hard work to align processes and people so that you can efficiently deliver products.
Don’t steal the monkey and improve the processes instead. It’s one of the most powerful tools to avoid functional stupidity as well as break the paradigm of the successfully unsuccessful.
What times have you found saying “No” was the right answer and how’d it work out? Please share any insights you may have that can help others learn!
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Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
-
All-around great daily essays
-
Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
-
Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
-
Practical AI
-
Integrating AI into education
-
Computer Science for Everyone
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Today's topic looks at governing structures that humans seem to do best under and explores why we seem inclined toward a benevolent dictator. When we step back, we find that this construct permeates almost all political philosophy whether that dictator is human or divine. Let’s dive in and poke at this odd idiosyncrasy.
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Today's topic continues to build on our understanding of what I might be so bold as to call ‘true’ leadership. Today we investigate a simple but often very accurate measure of a good vs. a bad leader. It’ll be counterintuitive because it goes against almost all of the corporate processes for rewards. Yet these rewards are almost always focused on the wrong behaviors, not true leadership.
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Today's topic is my answer to from who recently asked: "Can Generative AI make us all Polymaths and company founders?" This essay was first published on his substack under the same title and is modified here to focus more on enabling polymathic thinking.
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Today's topic provides an example of real-time analysis, adjustment, and adaptation specifically regarding my debut novel. As much as I talk on these topics of adaptability and change, it still isn’t easy. I hope that sharing my experience can help others.
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Today's topic follows up on a previous essay where we explored the structure of Biblical Law. There, I promised to investigate just how many of the Biblical laws we still follow. This essay is another dip into Systems Thinking applied to Theology and how, by stepping back, we can improve the context and better understand what’s actually going on.
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Today's topic takes a step back from a valuable concept of how we view the elements of success and looks hard at how we even define success and whether those definitions actually align with the outcomes we want. It’s part leadership insight part just a great concept to bear in mind in our personal lives as we face a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ as we see figments of reality on social media or even in our next-door neighbors.
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Today's topic addresses the concept that almost everything requires a statement of faith and that we are largely completely comfortable with this. Unless it’s a different statement of faith than our own. Lest we think this applies only to religion, science requires the same so that we can explore the complex world around us.
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Today's topic focuses on Personal Agency as an antidote to an Addiction Economy. I’ve been contemplating this one for a while, unsure how to write it but knowing it needed to be written. We’ll explore addiction, agency, and how many efforts to regulate behavior just don’t work as well as applying our own personal agency.
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Today's topic is motivated by an engagement with a subscriber on Substack chat. (which you all can join via the link at the end) It highlighted that some people view the idea of a Polymath more like a mythical creature than the real and very ordinary humans they are. Today we’ll address that idea and invite everyone to join in breaking down the barriers of silos of expertise and bring the Polymathic mindset everywhere.
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Today's topic started as a much more technical article that I’ve distilled down to capture one of the single most important insights I’ve come across in the conversations around AI and Autonomous Systems. It’s the topic of trust and we’ll explore why that concept is so fickle and how one simple, yet counterintuitive change of perspective can unlock an incredible method to ascertain ethics, complexity, trust, safety, verification and validation, and much more.
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Today's topic is about making you into a superhero! We are going to help you improve your strength and agility. You’ll be able to soar above everyone else. People will look for you to solve wickedly complex problems. Even better, it helps to avoid conflicts to begin with and improves your interpersonal engagements. We are going to teach you how to be Steel[wo]man (pick which one you want)
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Today's topic is a second exploration into the strength of the feminine and forces us to address something many find problematic in that the ancient archetypes depict the feminine as chaos and the masculine as order. This seems to offend our sensibilities but only because we have a deeply encoded bias that the masculine order is somehow preferred. We’ll dive into the history of the feminine, of our consciousness, and what we’ve lost over the millennia.
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Today's topic is painful for me to write as I’m an environmental conservationist who has spent the better part of my life recycling. Over the past years, I’ve realized that what I thought was helping the environment may not be having any benefit at all. Today we dig into our broken recycling system and find out why we need to forthrightly address and fix these issues versus just feeling good about recycling. This is envisioned to be part one of three. This one will identify the problem and the other two will introduce those who are working to something about it.
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Today's topic is going to explore something that I think is drastically missing from feminism: the feminine. It’s a complicated topic that has to peel back some sensitive layers, biases, history, and politics to uncover the core of the feminine.
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Today's topic attempts to energize interest in an incredible technology that many view negatively; Nuclear Power. We’ll introduce the cutting-edge advances in energy production, miniaturization of reactors, massive safety improvements, and best of all, the wonderful environmental benefits that nuclear can offer us in the future.
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Today's topic is one more on leadership but this time pivots to one of the most effective followership tactics I’ve ever heard and struggle to do. It’s a simple mantra that allows you to gain the good graces of almost any leader while, at the same time, allowing you to do what you planned on anyway.
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Today's topic is another sociological and psychological investigation into how the clothing we wear sends complex signals that can be interpreted differently by different people. We’ll explore human sexuality and whether we fully appreciate or articulate the implications of how we clothe ourselves.
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Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic explores the monster of an organization that is Amazon. Why an analysis of a commercial enterprise? Because most people don’t fully understand or appreciate what Amazon has done to transform our buying and selling. We’ll dive in and demonstrate how much more revolutionary Amazon is and then step back and consider what that’s done to our daily lives.
What is Amazon Actually?
To many people, Amazon is represented by those ubiquitous gray vans zipping all over the roads bringing us same-day or two-day delivery on almost everything we could possibly imagine. With this persistent presence, there are many who claim it’s a monopoly, forcing small businesses out of the market with anti-competitive practices. But what is Amazon really? Because a look under the surface paints a very different picture.
For instance, Amazon’s strength isn’t in actually being the seller. That’s small peanuts. Their superpower is in transforming… nay, revolutionizing supply chain logistics. Their innovations allow us to have access to goods and materials that only incredibly expensive and quite unreliable special orders could have achieved just twenty years ago.
As this great article in Quillette recently captured:
“At Amazon, for example, Bezos developed innovative supply chain and logistical processes, enabling cheaper prices and faster shipping for a broader range of products than any other store in history. Bezos and his team did not attain their dominant market position by blocking public access to their myriad competitors—who include giants like Walmart, Target, and Barnes & Noble. They simply outperformed those competitors, putting many of them out of business and obliging many more to improve their own services or face the financial consequences.
Far from restricting access to our commons, Bezos and his team invented trading opportunities that previously didn’t exist, replaced the narrower and more expensive product ranges provided by their competitors, and became profitable by attracting customers who voluntarily chose their services over those of less efficient retailers.”
Is Amazon a Monopoly?
Those who think Amazon is conducting anti-competitive practices, need to recognize that Amazon hosts the world’s largest consortium of small business owners in their marketplace. This means that the Amazon Basic USB cable sets alongside offerings from around the world which may even be cheaper or higher quality.
Not only are our options on Amazon not limited, but they are greater than the options that giants like Walmart or Target can even offer today. Instead of limiting competition, they invited it to occur under their roof.
Furthermore, I have a friend who was about to lose their electronics business due to the obsolete nature of a small town carrying limited stock. Instead of closing their doors, they shifted to an Amazon marketplace. Within a year their sales doubled. After two years it was ten times higher.
We’ve only just touched on Amazon’s marketplace. If we get into their Web Services we find that this allows literally anyone to rent space on world-class server systems, supported by their Amazon Well Architected Framework and a plethora of tools and systems, and deploy software solutions anywhere in the world. These new startups have a lower barrier to entry than ever before to compete in the market. (and Amazon competes with Google Cloud and others in the cloud market as well)
Democratizing Writing
The same is true for publishing. As you are all mostly aware, I just published my first SciFi novel on advanced AI and what it means to be human. I was able to write it, load it into Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, and with their incredibly detailed knowledge center, create eBook, paperback, and hardcover versions for sale. It didn’t cost me anything.
Their print-on-demand means I don’t have to invest in stocking books, I don’t even have to worry about orders, fulfillment, etc. Amazon helps create it, hosts it, and charges me less than anywhere else. Compared to a traditional publisher, I’m making royalties out the gate with as much as 200% greater royalties per sale than a publisher could offer. (I should also add that this allows me to change my book cover quickly too without a lot of burden from old inventory.)
The Challenge
Just like at any time in history, those who did not adapt were eliminated by the market. Just like buggy makers and blacksmiths became auto mechanics or started tire or machine shops so too does the steady drumbeat of technological progress not stop for anyone.
But we have sympathy for those who lose their businesses. Yet is it misplaced? Would you rather go back to 1995 when everything was mail-order? Where you pull a piece of paper from the center of a catalog and mail it in with a check to hopefully get the product in four to six weeks? Let’s not even get into the frustration of making returns or dealing with broken deliveries!
But it’s eating all the small businesses!
Yet when was the last time you went to a small business and they had what you needed, for a reasonable price, that didn’t have you shopping all over town burning gas and time?
But it’s like the Robber Barrons of the early nineteen hundreds!
Now that’s an interesting conversation to dive deeper on but I’ll suffice to say, that what you think you know about the ‘robber barons’ of that timeframe does not hold up to the test of historical analysis. A great book on the topic is The Myth of the Robber Barrons.
Two simple examples:
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Standard Oil constantly lowered prices and when it was broken up, prices jumped dramatically.
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Vanderbilt made a fortune off of shipping. Yet he was constantly competing against the monopoly of government-subsidized shippers who still couldn’t beat his prices.
The most counterintuitive aspect of this entire essay is probably that, in a capitalist society, the only way you can have a monopoly is with government protection. That’s it. Without the government protecting you, nothing stops a new entrant to the market. And history is replete with the shenanigans of government monopolies from healthcare to aviation, to the current risk of AI. How’s that you ask?
It’s because large companies love to achieve what’s called Regulatory Lock. This means they work with the government to craft protective measures to carve out monopolistic positions. Honeywell does this with aviation safety. OpenAI just tried to do this after releasing ChatGPT4.0. Pfizer is doing this with COVID medication.
Back to Standard Oil. After its breakup, the newly formed Oil Division of the US Fuel Administration made the oil industry a government-protected monopoly. While accusations were made against Standard Oil of anti-competitive behavior, this government monopoly actually did artificially high price fixing, eliminated competition, created major inefficiencies, and was rife with corruption and waste.
Conclusion
While Amazon is a massive company and sometimes feels like it's slowly taking everything over, we have to also recognize that its primary role is that of logistics, not retail. It also has protected itself from monopolistic accusations by actually embracing a competitive landscape that allows anyone to join in selling.
Does this make it a perfect company? That depends on what your own societal goals are for a company. There are certainly a lot of things it could do better and in its logistics strengths, it will challenge and, inevitably, bankrupt businesses large and small. Yet it’s also democratized software development, resale, and publishing in a way that we couldn’t have conceived of just twenty years ago.
It’s just one more example that simple attacks often miss the target and are more likely emotional pleas, as we read in The Myth of the Robber Barons, which inflames opinion. Yet the irony of those fueling that opinion is that they are the ones with the non-competitive, protectionist behaviors we worry that Amazon displays. In the end, it helps to better contextualize what Amazon is so that we can have a better idea of whether it is behaving in a way that needs to be addressed.
Enjoyed this post? Hit the ❤️ button above or below because it helps more people discover Substacks like this one and that’s a great thing. Also please share here or in your network to help us grow.
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Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
-
Goatfury WritesAll-around great daily essays
-
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
-
Cyborgs WritingHighly useful insights into using AI for writing
-
One Useful ThingPractical AI
-
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Get full access to Polymathic Being at www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic is a special request asking for fiction authors to share tips and tricks of their creative writing process for those who have spent more time in nonfiction and technical writing. To many, the art of fictional narrative seems just too far out of reach. Yet I’ve found that good fiction wasn’t so much different from writing these essays. In fact, so many topics we’ve covered here are baked into my fiction.
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Today's topic is another collaboration with Andrew Smith who writes Goatfury Writes We partnered recently on An Ode to Coffee where we did a fun historical, cultural, and scientific analysis of one of America’s favorite drinks. This one follows the same recipe and shifts the focus to beer. You’ll also get a sneak peek at my homebrew kegerator that keeps this delicious elixir flowing for friends and family.
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Today's topic builds off a concept we introduced in The Beauty Quandary, namely that our existence is somehow random, part of a ‘Uterine Lottery’ of sorts. Except this really isn’t true. This analysis is part evolutionary biology, part sociology, with a dash of economics and geopolitics just to round it out.
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Today's topic investigates a story that many of us are familiar with from Sunday School or at least within the larger fabric of Western Culture; the Golden Calf from the time of Moses. While it looks like an egregious violation of paganism, when we dive in a little, we find it’s not quite so simple, nor as disobedient as it appears.
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Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic wrangles with my love/hate relationship with Artificial Intelligence (AI). On the one hand, I feel like the interwebs are chock full of absolute rubbish about AI, snake-oil salesmen selling AI, and people who should know better but are still freaking out about AI. On the other hand, it makes a fantastic literary foil that accentuates and draws attention to the qualities of what it means to be human.
I’ve always been a fan of technological advancements and have been studying, developing, and applying AI solutions to complex problems for a decade. It makes up a core element of my portfolio of advanced technology innovations and is a crucial enabler for my professional career.
But I hate it.
To be clear, I hate how much misunderstanding there is out there. We covered a few of these topics already:
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Like when people claim AI has biases but never pause long enough to think about what that means:
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Or when people claim sentience or superintelligence without understanding the layers of AI:
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Or the fact that most of the issues that will ever manifest from AI are due to how HUMANS react to it:
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Or the panic about AI replacing artists without understanding what makes us unique:
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Or the discussions about AI intelligence without first even understanding how our Brains work:
And lest you wonder if this is just me being an ‘old man yelling at clouds’ as the meme goes, I’m merely riding, often delayed, on the shoulders of other giants in the field. One such giant is who wrote this wonderful piece that synthesized many of these topics.
Clearly, a pattern is emerging here... To be honest, I’m kind of tired of writing on the topic because it’s sucking me in and I feel like it distracts from so many other cool Polymathic conversations.
But AI is Useful!
The thing is, AI does make a great literary foil:
In any narrative, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character, typically, a character who contrasts with the protagonist, in order to better highlight or differentiate certain qualities of the protagonist. A foil to the protagonist may also be the antagonist of the plot.
In this case, the protagonist is us; the Human.
And counterintuitively, the antagonist is also us.
We are the ones who are both creating and panicking about AI. We are the ones who desperately look for 'sparks of intelligence' so that we can justify reading in human-level intelligence instead of having an honest conversation about who we are, and how AI is limited in that concern.
It makes the perfect literary foil because I use both the protagonist and antagonist roles in my book Paradox whose tagline reads:
In the battle over Advanced AI will we lose our humanity, or learn what truly makes us human?
It’s an apocalyptic exploration of advanced AI gaining general intelligence and looks at the unique idiosyncrasies that being human entails.
What I like about AI is that it provides a popular zeitgeist to explore psychology and sociology in a way that captivates the human imagination. It provides amazing examples of real humans reacting to the unknown and allows us to explore what that really means for us.
AI is exceptionally useful, not just for the technological revolution it can provide that can boost human thriving (and yes, there are innumerable good things!) but also for the psychological and sociological introspection it can foster.
(For an in-depth analysis of the psychological frameworks I recommend and his essay on entitled “The Impending AI Culture War and How to Avoid It”
What to do:
Technology has evolved continuously through time immemorial. AI is one more step in that evolution yet given its association with human intelligence (from which we derived the concept of ‘artificial’) it creates a schism in how we think about it.
Like other topics we’ve explored by first looking inside ourselves and knowing who we are, AI also requires this to fully understand how to maximize the benefits and intelligently reduce the harms.
Truly, In the battle over Advanced AI will we lose our humanity, or learn what truly makes us human?
This is the action that needs to be addressed. My book Paradox doesn’t have the answers though. In fact, I hope that readers will walk away still curious about which side they’d pick!
And that’s the key that I hope you take away today; that we remain curious, that we stop believing we know the full system, and that we constantly shift our perspectives to ensure we fully account for all the implications.
That’s the foundation of Systems Thinking and it’s also what I believe to be the solution to stemming any apocalyptic ending to AI. There’s so much potential, it’d be a shame to lose our humanity.
Enjoyed this post? Hit the button ❤️ above or below because it helps more people discover Substacks like this one and that’s a great thing. Also please share here or in your network to help us grow.
Polymathic Being is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
-
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
-
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
-
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
-
One Useful Thing Practical AI
-
Techno Sapien
Great all-around tech topics
Get full access to Polymathic Being at www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic ties together some of my experience in the Army and how it helps with the very same Systems Thinking in technology and business that we’ve covered here before. Simply put it’s the idea that, in war, you have to look up and across at targets both right in front of you and also those targets that you can’t even see over the horizon to be successful.
Get full access to Polymathic Being at www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic plays around with an interestingly complex problem about human existence. Often we are told that what humans are doing is not natural. Yet this quickly becomes an interesting problem because it implies we are somehow separate from nature and what we are doing differs dramatically from nature.
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Today's topic squares off on a long-touted platitude that leaders are trained, not born. Out of the gate, this makes logical sense; my Army Officer training made me a much better leader. Also, no one just emerges from the womb as the next Martin Luther King. Yet is that training all there is to the equation? What risks or limitations exist that the simple platitude hides? We cover all that today in understanding leadership.
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Today's topic is part book review and part exploration into the foundational elements of the Polymathic Mindset. Namely that innovation occurs across and between domains and disciplines and is, more often, not found in silos of expertise. It’s a finding that’s only counterintuitive because of the myths about innovation permeating our cultures. Yet these myths end up falling apart on closer scrutiny.
This is Part 5 of the Keys to Innovation Series. You can find the other Keys here:
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Part 1: Embrace the Divergents
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Part 2: Face the Fear
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Part 3: Rethink the Wisdom of Crowds
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Part 4: Brain Stretch
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Today's topic attempts to crack the code of how so many conversations can get sidewise despite our intent. We’ll look at how some people respond in ways that just seem out of sync with the topic. Then we’ll flip the focus back on ourselves to see when we might be guilty of the same thing. It’s a dive into psychology and how we interpret things.
Get full access to Polymathic Being at www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic is a twist on a challenge I’ve faced in the Autonomy / AI world for half a decade. It’s based on the No True Scotsman Fallacy and is a continuous shift of the goalposts as systems get smarter. We’ll also tie back into some of our previous looks at the opposite reaction where we claim AI is already cognizant and self-aware. In doing so, we can hopefully avoid two of the major logical pitfalls around our emerging technology.
Intro
Where we are in AI, and what that means for us as humans is a topic we’ve explored in essays here on Polymathic Being, specifically, The Layers of AI:
And What’s in a Brain:
The truth of the matter is that we aren’t very close to emulating what we are as humans. Yet we certainly strive to find a lot of comparisons to justify it being as smart or smarter. I don’t quite understand the behavior of reading so much into it and the almost insatiable demand that it is smarter, more sentient, more capable than the actual facts support.
On the other hand, we also keep moving the goalposts on what we consider to be ‘real AI.’ We are simultaneously over and under-attributing what AI is. This is a challenge I have to tease out in my novel Paradox when I introduce AI in the chapter Almost Intelligent:
“So, can we even consider what we have now as AI?” Hector asked.
“Of course it is!” Callie smiled. “It’s clearly almost intelligent.”
Kira chuckled. “What we have suffers from what my Dad would call the ‘No True Autonomy Fallacy,’ which is based on the No True Scotsman Fallacy. Basically, every time we achieve a degree of AI, we immediately dismiss it as not ‘true AI.’”
“So what is AI?”
Kira smiled recalling the memory. “Dad would say ‘What we call AI is merely unexplainable code’. Explainable code is called software.”
“Like when they said that we’d have AI when a computer could beat a human at chess like with Deep Blue?” Hector shifted in his chair.
“Yep, and they moved the goalposts to the game of Go.” Kira mimed shifting the goal.
“But then they made AlphaGo and beat a human.” Sofie was doodling on her paper. “So, was that AI or just software?”
What is AI and Autonomy Related to Humans?
This is something I had to deal with when designing autonomous systems at Lockheed Martin. Whenever we achieved a truly innovative breakthrough, people would see it, understand how it worked, and then shrug and say “That’s not really autonomy.”
To be fair, they were right. It wasn’t autonomous as we know we are. But then again, as neuroscientist Sam Harris makes a case, we also aren’t as uniquely autonomous with as much free will as we think.
His proposition on free will is that we are just genetically coded, hormone-driven, expert systems merely reacting to external stimuli like an algorithm. This has an effect on what we call our own individual autonomy as well as our intelligence.
I don’t agree with his entire proposition, but it does give pause to understand how we really operate. He’s correct that we have a lot more ‘algorithmic’ responses than many give credit for, but I do believe there is a unique element in how we learn socially. It’s a superpower that distinctly differentiates us from computers. This social learning is something we explored in AI Is[n't] Killing Artists:
Namely, we have the ability to combine our capabilities into something greater than the sum of its parts.
This is where innovation occurs. Through collaboration, sharing, and learning. By breaking down the barriers in expertise and looking beyond our own domains and disciplines, we will have an advantage over AI that this technology currently isn’t capable of.
So What?
The challenge in the obfuscation of both constantly moving the goalposts when we understand AI or freaking out about AI when we don’t understand it is creating a mess of opinions and commentary that don’t help us in what critically matters; understanding ourselves!
We need to be able to dangle in the messy gray zone of a technology that is quickly advancing, challenging our understanding of its capability, and yet still explainable if we slow down and analyze it. We also need to slow down on the over-attribution of AI and, instead, step back and focus more on what makes us human.
Conclusion
Right now, what we call AI is merely unexplainable code or, at least, code we just don’t understand or read too much into. But when it’s explainable code, we just call it software and merely use it in our web searches, word processing, social media ‘algorithms’, and more without a second consideration for the human implications.
This isn’t to say the software doesn’t continue to develop. Still, it should cause us to think twice before overattributing capabilities while at the same time cogently accepting the technological gains we have made. Avoiding these two pitfalls and being able to manage the messy gray space in our current development ecosystem is critical to managing the human, ethical, and societal implications of AI.
This extra thought process is just one more superpower that humans have. We can think about these implications while AI, right now, merely computes.
Enjoyed this post? Hit the ❤️ button above or below because it helps more people discover Substacks like this one and that’s a great thing. Also please share here or in your network to help us grow.
Polymathic Being is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
So what topics have you dug into that have surprised you in what you found on inspection
-
Techno Sapien Business Leadership Insights
-
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
-
One Useful Thing Practical AI
-
The Muse Fun, Witty, Insight
-
Out of Curiosity Great little nuggets to learn from
-
Artificial Intelligence Made Simple Great round-up of AI topics in the media and tech reporting.
Get full access to Polymathic Being at www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
A Call to Action
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Today's topic addresses one of the more frustrating retorts I sometimes get on social media. “Never trust someone who claims to be a polymath.” To be fair, the title of Polymath is one we bestow on some of the intellectual greats from the past and it does seem a little hubristic to claim myself among those ranks. Yet this essay will delve into how I don’t think any of us should claim we’ve reached the status of Polymath but instead, aspire to what a Polymath is and adopt the philosophies and thought processes that make this aspiration so powerful.
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Today's topic focuses on an odd behavior we have as humans where we are incredibly picky about providing money to those in need while not thinking twice about overpaying for indulgent, and largely unnecessary surplus. We hold back on paying fair prices to some while forking over crazy money for a Tesla that makes Elon Musk one of the richest men in the world.
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Today's topic dives straight into something many would like to overlook: Beauty. The problem is we might like to overlook it but we look at it all the time. And we judge it. We’ll have the difficult conversation about what ‘looking good’ means and then attempt to unpack so much more of the implications and deep-rooted attraction we have to good looks. Hang on for an interesting ride as we look into a mirror of the paradox of beauty.
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Today's topic highlights the power of an analytical concept called Exegesis. It’s an amazing tool to help shift perspective and demonstrates how digging a little deeper can illuminate something really interesting and profound that people are largely ignorant of. It’s a bit of a deep dive into an esoteric religious topic but one that highlights the criticality of analysis. Furthermore, if we’re successful for a topic like this, we can do it for any topic and thereby challenge our assumptions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic expands on a concept known as Antifragility and how, without trauma, antifragile systems cannot get better with time. The challenge is that the human body and brain are naturally antifragile and so pathologizing most of what we might call life deprives us of the very stimulus we need to grow stronger and unlock our full potential as human beings.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic introduces the concept of composability in design and connects the popular Lego model to both what is so good about composability and modularity as well as how we can lose focus over time. Simply put, composability is a method by which modular parts can be combined and recombined from one design to another. It’s a powerful capability in both physical design and Polymathic thinking as we do the same thing with information in forming, unforming, and reforming ideas.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic pushes back on the problematic trope of “Knowledge is Power.” We’ll explore a couple of examples of the terrible behaviors and gatekeeping that occur when people follow this mantra. Then we’ll unlock the true power that leverages humanity’s superpower as social learners so that we all can continue to grow.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic pushes back on the idea that you have to have a certain credential or education to have an informed opinion on a topic. We’ve discussed the strength of the Polymath before and this addresses one of the biggest frustrations of having that broad range of knowledge, weaving it together into new insights, and then being challenged for having an opinion at all. We’ll explore how it is really just a logical fallacy and then go into a bit of my own background and how I weave that together into my Polymathic aspirations.
Introduction
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been challenged as to why I can or should voice an opinion on a topic. The intent is to shut down the argument through a logical fallacy known as a Genetic Fallacy and yet it’s that plus a bit of a reverse Appeal to Authority by basically saying you aren’t an authority.
Yet these are logical fallacies for a reason; you don’t have to be an expert to have well-formed thoughts or informed opinions on a topic. We’ve also seen that the experts aren’t always right and often suffer the Dunning-Kruger effect even more than anyone else!
In fact, we’ve explored previously how anyone can Critically Think about a variety of topics through the skills of knowledge gathering, application of logic, and mindful, curious critique. This can be learned and refined through exposure, experience, and discipline to where they become an underpinning of Systems Thinking.
There is literally nothing stopping anyone from having an informed position on any topic and often it’s the outsider who has the most unique insight and can bring the most value to a conversation often locked in an echo chamber.
My Background
I think it’s important to show how much impact a diversity of background has in allowing a person to think differently. To be completely honest, how much would you trust someone who doesn’t have a broad experience set to compare and contrast ideas against? Do we really want to treat the myopic expert with uncontested authority?
To both highlight the power of broad experience as well as introduce myself to you a little better, I’ll try to summarize my background of work experience quickly and show how it ties together.
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High School
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Lawn care (starting in 7th grade)
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Full-time summer carpentry for two summers
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Ski hill rental shop
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Photojournalist
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State Park Ranger
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College while studying Business, Management Information Systems
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Ski hill lift operator and groomer
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Photojournalist
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Lumber Yard (both yard and inside sales)
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Restaurant waiter (3 summers)
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Also, a dishwasher to get one of those waiting jobs
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Dormitory Resident Assistant (RA)
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Lawn care for the elderly
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Handyman/housekeeping at a resort lodge/hotel
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Professional:
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Army Officer - Field Artillery
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Fire Support Officer
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Howitzer Platoon Leader
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Police Transition Team
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Honeywell Aerospace
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Manufacturing Manager
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R&D Program Manager
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Raytheon
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Six Sigma Expert across the business
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Systems Engineering Manager (Operations Research) - Advanced Technologies
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Cyber Research and Development Program Manager
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Lockheed Martin
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Advanced Technologies Systems Analyst (Operations Research)
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Autonomous Systems Lead
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Chainalysis (Blockchain Tech Startup)
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Software Engineering Manager
What’s interesting is that my professional career has become more focused with each new role and each execution has become more specific, but they still leverage a very broad background and exposure to a vast array of domains and disciplines.
I didn’t really understand this importance until my Master’s program at Johns Hopkins University where I was the only student without an engineering degree. I expected to get my butt kicked but ended up graduating at the top of my class and with honors. What I realized is that everything I’d been doing up till then had built out a natural systems thinking mindset.
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Carpentry is a systems-building problem
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Field Artillery is a combat systems problem in depth and time
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Program management is a systems integration problem
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Six Sigma is a systems solutioning model
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Operations Research is a systems analysis discipline
By the time I got into my Systems Engineering course work, I’d been doing systems analysis and design since high school. The material came easily to me and I ended up having to put in half the effort of almost anyone else. Quite literally, my team’s final project put in half the effort of any other team and got the same grade. (Systems Engineer is, after all, the science of good enough)
What’s even more interesting is that due to this broad exposure, I didn’t specialize in any one topic, and that breadth of exposure opened up so many more opportunities. Since I’m not tied to any one domain or discipline, I’m free to look at problems that even those experiences don’t directly relate to and see what my knowledge and background can bring to bear on new topics.
The Polymath Applied
This position is both a boon and a bane because I can bring insights from other domains but there is always the hurdle of gatekeeping, especially if the insight challenges the current paradigms or, specifically, a political ideology. What’s most interesting is that this gatekeeping rarely comes from the actual experts but from those with not only limited expertise in the topic on hand but have a very focused and specialized background in general. They just can’t fathom how to tie things together between silos.
So how can I speak on climate change? - Because I know modeling and simulations of complex systems, how to read scientific papers, and I recognize when assumptions and heuristics don’t scale beyond a narrow scope of application. This last part is what makes so many scientific studies interesting but incomplete and, in context, inaccurate. Anyone trying to claim the climate (or anything really) is a static system with one variable is going to be wrong.
How can I speak on COVID? - Because our COVID response wasn’t about virology, it was about psychology. The virology science was actually super simple and didn’t take more than two days of research to find the patterns in the system and derive a workable model. Then, realizing that we were dealing with psychology, I could easily pivot and understand and articulate the nuances of how masks do work, but how it was psychology resulting in poor outcomes.
What about politics? - Because I don’t look for the talking points, I look for the systems. It’s the larger view I captured in Quantum Superposition and Politics where I explain that it’s not binary and I break down the nuance of how I’m an Anarchist, Socialist, Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian at different points in that system.
The point here is that with an expanded range of capabilities, you can tie together a broad portfolio of skills in true Polymathic fashion. It means that you can build a workable foundation and know explicitly where you need to fill in the gaps to flesh out a topic. It’s insatiable curiosity, humility to accept there’s more to know, and intentionally reframing problems to find out, not only their uniqueness but also their commonality.
I’ll reiterate here. It’s insatiable curiosity AND humility to accept there’s more to know. We can come up with a lot of workable models but the most important part is to also strive to not let them become static or pedantic. We might not always be right but it’s the dialog, not the gatekeeping, that allows everyone to learn more!
What does this mean for you?
I share this to show that you can stretch your brain as well. You can apply the Systems Thinking philosophies, you can Critically Think, and you can avoid the Cognitive Biases that plague so many experts.
This becomes a superpower where you aren’t burdened by the paradigms of siloed expertise that Thomas Kuhn talked about in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It also means you can break the quandary that Max Planck described as “Science progresses one funeral at a time.” In fact, when you stop demanding that only experts have a voice on a topic, you find that it’s more often the non-experts who move science forward as they don’t have a paradigm to protect.
A word of caution though: It is a lot easier to not do this and stay in a safe place, trusting others to hopefully do what is right. You won’t be challenged, you won’t rock the boat, and you won’t be asked “Who are you to ___? Yet when I look back, I love the ability to think freely, explore passionately, and Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn constantly.
Special add here that hit too late to get in is this gem from writing as he shared some tips in the Substack Writer’s Office Hours:
Write what you want to learn! Explore, engage, study, research, form opinions, challenge opinions, stretch and engage that beautiful brain of yours!
Enjoyed this post? Hit the button ❤️ above or below because it helps more people discover Substacks like this one and that’s a great thing. Also please share here or in your network to help us grow.
Polymathic Being is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
-
Techno Sapien Business Leadership Insights
-
Never Stop Learning Great Life Tips and Tricks
-
One Useful Thing Practical AI
-
The Muse Fun, Witty, Insight
-
Out of CuriosityGreat little nuggets to learn from
-
Artificial Intelligence Made Simple Great round up of AI topics in the media and tech reporting.
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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic is the second of two parts on providing Top Cover. The first essay covered the concept of creating stability and consistency in execution to protect your teams from the chaos of many organizations. This part will cover providing psychological safety and standing up for your team when they come under criticism. We’ll investigate the right way to stand up for your team and how to enable people to bring their whole selves to work to maximize productivity.
Introduction:
In Part 1 of this series, we looked at providing Top Cover in the form of a protective bubble around your team to stop the chaos of processes and execution. That’s an essential first step but to truly unlock a team’s potential you need to provide the second form of Top Cover; psychological safety.
I can only count on one hand (barely) the number of leaders I’ve had that have truly established psychological safety. It’s a phrase that is used a lot and one that I’ve put more and more weight behind, not in a coddling and triggered sort of a way, but in the true form of allowing people to confidently voice disagreement, challenge the status quo, and think differently than myself or anyone else.
One leader, in particular, was a former Airforce Colonel, let’s call him Will, whom I worked with at an Aerospace company. I’d just left a caustic leadership structure where the Director ‘solved’ the problem by laying off the entire team and opening new positions. He ended up being let go due to an ethics complaint I filed based on fraudulent metrics but that’s a whole other story. To say I joined Will’s team with some baggage was an understatement.
And dealing with stakeholders, when you are trying to affect change, is guaranteed to cause some level of disagreement and controversy. In one particular case, a stakeholder was exhibiting some of the worst behaviors I’ve ever seen and rejected any attempt to reconcile to a common viewpoint. Long story short, I got back to the office and let Will know that I had a bad interaction. His response:
“I know, they already called me.”
My stomach plunged, I didn’t know what to do and all I saw was ‘coaching’ heading my way. Instead, Will looked at me and said:
“Mike, if you’re not pissing people off, your only average.”
I was dumbstruck. If you know me, you know that’s rare. He continued:
“I know what you’ve been asked to do is hard, and I know that these people are resisting, let’s take a look at what happened and where we need to go from here.”
That’s psychological safety.
Providing Top Cover
There’s a leadership trait that I see all too often that I’d like to focus on here. It’s the assumption of guilt instead of innocence. It’s reactive instead of proactive, and it ignores the larger systems perspective.
For example, let’s say I have an interaction with Bruce that doesn’t go well. We could address this one of two ways.
-
“Mike, what’d you do to Bruce, he’s upset, that’s not cool.”
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“Mike, Bruce is upset, what happened?”
Clearly, #2 is at least open to the presumption of innocence. If I can’t explain why Bruce is upset, and I don’t at least have an idea of what we need to do next, then that’s a great opportunity for some leadership assistance.
I’ve found when dealing with my teams that, if I listen to them, they actually have a good idea of what’s wrong even if they don’t know what to do. This is the first step of psychological safety: Don’t assume they don’t know or that what happened was a mistake, don’t assume the complainant is right, and don’t assume anyone has looked at the larger system.
I’ll work to illustrate this point with a few examples.
Why’s Bruce Angry?
Systems Thinking, by its nature is going to challenge a lot of assumptions. The divergent thinking and the solutions that show that the ‘good ideas,’ aren’t are crucial to actually solving our increasingly complex problems.
Think about it, is addressing Functional Stupidity, The Successfully Unsuccessful, or many of the other topics we’ve explored together going to result in people being grateful for the insight or defensive of their own behaviors and foibles?
When Bruce got angry, I knew why he got angry. It’s because his analysis was predicated on assumptions that were documented but absurd. What his technical solution solved was a problem that just did not exist in the real world. Even worse, assuming it did exist, and developing the solution would actually exacerbate dozens of other problems. So I pointed that out, enlarged the system, and provided new assumptions to work from. I wasn’t an ass, but I also wasn’t going to let bad assumptions stand.
Yet my leadership responded as if the offense Bruce took was worse than the repercussions of the analysis. (Which likely were millions of dollars and Soldiers’ lives) But this missed a second point. I knew he was angry, and I knew why AND I had a plan for how to deal with it. But first I needed him to go through the 5 Stages of Grief and he had just gone from Denial to Anger.
I had a plan to get him through and yet the anger was enough for my leadership to push back on me because “We can’t have an angry stakeholder.” But how is anything going to get better if we never allow the status quo to be challenged? To date, they’ve invested millions of dollars and I just heard that it got rejected because it solves no real problem. (see Functional Stupidity)
The key to this example is to know, as good leader Will showed, sometimes people will get upset when they are shown to be in error. This is not only natural, but it’s essential for actual change. The key is the plan for how to shift them to a new area. Starting off with the assumption that the ‘offender’ is wrong is not the way.
Forming, STORMING, Norming, Performing
Many people in the business and leadership world are familiar with the classic Tuckman's stages of group development. The classic Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. This is the model ALL teams go through. Anyone who thinks they skip storming will never actually get out of storming. It’s an essential step to acknowledge and face so that you can move more quickly into norming.
I had a team member, we’ll call her Jane, who I got a nasty e-mail about. According to this other manager, she was obstinate, contrarian, and difficult and was disrupting their ‘high-performing team’.
That last statement raised a red flag immediately.
-
The team was new
-
Jane had just joined
-
No team starts as high-performing.
I realized the issue was likely less Jane, and more the team, and specifically this manager. I had a quick phone call with the manager and found out more. First, they had no idea about the Tuckman Stages. Second, they only heard this from one of their team members. Third, they’d never talked to Jane.
So I did a quick walking meeting with Jane to keep it informal and figure it out. She was super nervous and worried so I just asked her what was going on. She knew exactly what was happening but not why. Yes, she was being contrarian and difficult but she felt like she was being disrespected because one of her expectations of the team was constantly being stepped on. It’s actually the foundational story of an axiom we developed with my team.
Unspoken expectations are guaranteed to be violated.
I asked her whether the person in question knew what she expected. Her response was, “Well, I’d never have done that to him!” Which led to a second axiom for the team:
We expect from others what we expect from ourselves.
In a world of increasing diversity, why on Earth would we expect everyone to have the same expectations as us? This is where it becomes so important to embrace the Storming phase because that’s where we uncover and can document all those expectations.
Jane and I set up a plan of action and how to express her expectations and how to work through the storming phase. I offered to only step in if needed and I coached her whenever she wanted. Two weeks later I called the other manager again and heard only glowing feedback.
The thing is, it wasn’t just Jane. In fact, 80% of the problem was the other 4 people that reported to that manager and that manager’s fault. They all blithely assumed that there’d be no storming, that conflict was to be avoided, and that diversity was to be minimized through groupthink.
Ambiguous Feedback
I have a friend we’ll call Amy who works at a major tech firm in the US. It’s a prestigious job but there are a lot of layoffs happening this year and so anxiety is high. There’s a term called ‘Unregretted Attrition’ which basically means you find any excuse to justify laying someone off without a severance or Reduction in Force which you have to report to investors.
Literally any concocted rational will do.
As you can imagine, this is not a great time for psychological safety. It’s even worse when the manager tosses you ambiguous but ‘uncomfortable’ feedback right before the weekend and you hear nothing for four days.
A leader needs to be clear and precise with feedback, especially in these times. I worked with Amy for 6 days as she panicked, literally worrying herself sick. This is why it is essential for leaders to provide Top Cover by clearly knowing what the feedback is, the context, and the severity and to specifically hold the party making an accusation accountable for accuracy.
Let me restate that last point. I will hold you accountable for your feedback to a higher level than I will hold my team member accountable. I will ensure your feedback is accurate, actionable, and contextualized. It also takes two to tango and I’ve only rarely come across a case where that isn’t true. I owe it to my team to have something that we can use to make the necessary adjustments even if it includes adjustments to the person making the complaint.
A great book on this topic is called Crucial Accountability: Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior. And yes, as often, that crucial accountability has to be directed at the person providing feedback to ensure I separate the gold nuggets from the rubbish of poor leadership.
One element in this book that’s essential is to separate the facts from the stories. Stories are those things we tell ourselves about what happened.
- “Amy is rude.”
The facts are the details of what actually happened.
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“Amy raised her voice.”
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“Amy stood up at the table.”
The key to good leadership is to separate the facts from the stories of the person lodging the complaint, and then provide a clear context, without leaving anything hanging, for the person receiving the complaint. In this case, Amy is passionate and trying to express a point she feels no one is listening to her on. So, who is rude? Those that were shutting down the conversation or Amy, trying to be heard?
You’ve got to provide your team with psychological safety so they can feel confident in engaging in the increasingly challenging ecosystems as well as tackling the increasingly complex problems that we need to solve.
Summary
Providing Top Cover is partly creating stability and partly creating psychological safety. I’ll add a caveat here that this psychological top cover isn’t coddling or protecting. It’s ensuring that we understand the entire system, that we’ve analyzed the issue from multiple perspectives, that we have the curiosity to explore the topic, and that we are on the side of our team.
Way too many leaders will jettison an employee at the first sign of any disagreement or trouble. Yet this is weak. Exceptionally weak. A leader should stand with their employee because that employee, and their success in working through this issue, is more reflective of the leader.
When you provide Psychological Top Cover and you work to grow and improve your team, you find that you’ve unlocked such a crazy source of empowerment and talent that you’ll watch them move mountains. That’s what I experienced with a team of 16 very young, very inexperienced, and very diverse engineers. I was constantly fielding calls, complaints, criticisms, and frustrations. We had arguments in the team, and we had interpersonal and performance issues regularly.
Yet we focused on the storming, I held proactive accountability to those giving feedback, I learned from my team the nuances of what was happening, and we transformed the business. We literally solved wicked problems that had stymied teams of highly experienced engineers for decades. We achieved data analytics models that no one had thought of. We progressed through a digital transformation that had stagnated. We got cyber analytics completed that was heading toward disaster.
When you create stability and psychological safety you provide the right Top Cover that unlocks incredible innovation, achieves true change management, and transforms systems that had been ossified for decades. Not to mention creating a space for people to learn, grow, stumble, fall, and get back up with confidence.
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Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
-
Techno Sapien Business Leadership Insights
-
Never Stop Learning Great Life Tips and Tricks
-
One Useful Thing Practical AI
-
The Muse Fun, Witty, Insight
-
Out of CuriosityGreat little nuggets to learn from
-
Artificial Intelligence Made Simple Great round up of AI topics in the media and tech reporting.
Looking for other great newsletters and blogs? Try The Sample
Every morning, The Sample sends you an article from a blog or newsletter that matches up with your interests. When you get one you like, you can subscribe to the writer with one click. Sign up here.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic is the first of two parts on providing Top Cover. This essay will cover the concept of creating stability and consistency in execution to protect your teams from the chaos of many organizations. The second part will cover providing psychological safety and standing up for your team when they come under criticism. Since Part Two requires the foundation of providing stability, we’ll investigate how to do that today so we can expand on it in the future.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic is a collaboration with Andrew Smith who also writes on tech topics at GoatFury's FutureScape. He wrote a piece recently that caught my attention and sparked a conversation resulting in this essay. What we’ll explore today is the challenge that, all too often, conversations around AI reflect an either/or binary between humans and machines. Either AI or a Doctor. Either AI or a Coder. Either AI or an Artist. Instead, if we analyze where our current systems could benefit from AI we can find better pairings between humans and machines. Join us as we explore what that might look like. A second thing today is that this essay is heavy with links to other fantastic authors who are exploring AI without the hyperbole.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic Looks at Product Development and Program Managment from the perspective of sailing. More specifically, why it always seems like we are changing direction with no idea of where we are going or how to get there? Join in as we tackle the headwinds of change and understand how to achieve true innovation by learning to design like a sailor.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic grapples with what’s really behind tradition and what the challenges are when we remove them without considering what problems they are solving. Yes, some old expectations or behaviors need to be adapted. Yes, we also need to be careful at how quickly we change things so we don’t unlock chaos.
“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.” — Donald Kingsbury
These days one thing pops up over and over in business, politics, and society that manifests in two different ways. First, we keep trying to do things in new or novel ways without understanding the implications of why we did things the old way. Second, we continue to do things the way we always have for the exact same reasons. Neither manifestation is going to fix the problems we face and both will certainly make things worse.
Digging in, we’ll address a couple of examples from both and then provide a key insight to apply to mitigate the negative consequences.
That’s the way we’ve always done it
The first thing that pops into my mind with Tradition is the wonderful song from Fiddler On the Roof. The entire movie is an exploration of traditions, where they work, and where they need to change.
There are a ton of examples of ways of doing things that you find out later, were relics of a past limitation. One classic story is about the man who cuts the ends of the pot roast off because “That’s the way my mom did it.” So they ask the mom and find out “That’s the way my mom did it.” So they ask the grandmother and she says, “The oven was too small and the pan didn’t fit the entire roast so I trimmed it.”
Foot binding in China is a great example of catastrophic physiological damage that was done for hundreds of years. It is said to have been inspired by a 10th-century court dancer named Yao Niang who bound her feet into the shape of a new moon. She entranced Emperor Li Yu by dancing on her toes inside a six-foot golden lotus. Soon other women, vying for the attention of the Emperor followed suit and it wasn’t until the early 20th Century that it passed away.
Yet it was painful, debilitating, could not be reversed, and yet supported by a weird acceptance of “This is the way we’ve always done it.” To add another complexity, it was enforced by women more than men. There’s another layer here that showed status by being debilitated and being able to afford not having to have the women working. Needless to say, archaic, but not without some social benefits.
Tear it all down
On the flipside, we have a tendency to want to tear down things we perceive as being in our way and sometimes our modern sensibilities get in the way of ancient wisdom. Corn (maize) is a great example. Corn is cheap to produce, has high yields, and has lots of energy. The Native American thrived on it for thousands of years and it rapidly became an important food crop in Italy, Spain, and later the southern United States. But with corn consumption came pellagra. Pellagra manifests first as a skin disease, but untreated it can lead to dementia and even death.
‘Modern medicine’ thought that the Pellagra was caused by contamination but in reality, it was caused by the dismissal of an American native tradition of processing the corn with water made alkaline with ash. The civilized Europeans wouldn’t soak their corn in dirty water and so missed an important process whereby the alkalinity chemically altered the corn to free the B-Vitamin known as Niacin. Pellagra is a Niacin deficiency, not contamination of the corn.
The process of soaking the corn in water mixed with alkaline ash creates an effect known as Nixtamalization which, as well as freeing niacin, also increases its nutritional value, improves flavor and aroma, and nearly eliminates mycotoxins. Coupled with Pellagra was also malnutrition even though the Europeans were eating plenty of corn. They just threw away the tradition that solved the problem.
Joseph Henrich explores a ton of these examples in his book The Secret of Our Success. In his exploration, we learn how so many things that traditions held have only very recently been explained by modern science. In fact, Dr. Joseph Goldberger didn’t rediscover the cure to corn-based Pellagra, that was known for millennia, until 1937, and even then, was roundly criticized for his findings before even more research finally confirmed it. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands died and millions were sickened by a problem that had a solution. Just one we couldn’t explain yet.
To give a modern example that we don’t quite know the consequences of yet are the structures we colloquially call The Patriarchy. Right, wrong, or indifferent, the patriarchy is the traditional structure that created our business and political world globally. As women strive to gain equal standing with men, they too want to enter these structures. Yet these were designed by men, for men, and don’t scale well for everyone. So, something has to change.
Yet tearing the structures out, or ‘burning down the patriarchy’ is just as silly as not soaking your corn in the water.
The unacknowledged truth is that the Patriarchy exists MORE to control men than it does to control women. (the women have the matriarchy that controls them) This is counterintuitive, so we’ll poke a bit more.
Within the population of males are those that have Dark Triad behaviors. (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) The patriarchy puts structures of teamwork, professional behavior, and behavior toward women around the entire population of men in a culture that protects that society from these negative influences. Even more interesting is that the patriarchal behaviors, by and large, are designed to protect the women from these poor behaving men (what we might call chivalry)
This is not to say that the Patriarchy is perfectly healthy for either men or women. There are a lot of issues that do need to be addressed. Yet tearing down the patriarchy because it restricts women without understanding that it is designed to actually restrict men unleashes a lot of problems we learned to control. This doesn’t mean to accept it, it means we have to better understand it.
Chesterton’s Fence
Luckily there’s a very nice tool we can use to solve both the problems of keeping things past their usefulness AND avoiding unlocking the problems traditions have figured out how to solve. It’s called Chesterton’s Fence. Based on Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing, in the chapter entitled, “The Drift from Domesticity”:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
This of it this way. The fence is a pain and it’s obstructing your goal of progression. But if you don’t know why that fence exists you don’t know what the true consequences are. For example, maybe that fence is keeping you out of something. A toxic waste dump, a hidden mineshaft, landmines… who knows? Or maybe that fence is keeping something in. Velociraptors? We all know how badly that went in the original Jurassic Park when antagonist Dennis Nedry powers down and unlocks the fences holding in all the dinosaurs so he can make an attempted escape with stolen embryos. Needless to say, he didn’t follow Chesterton’s Fence and unleashed chaos.
Summary
It often feels like a period of time when everything is being torn down or we feel everything is in our way. While there is a laudable attempt to progress beyond our history, sometimes our history and the traditions it contains do hold sets of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems.
The solution isn’t to do nothing. The solution is to step back, apply Systems Thinking (insatiable curiosity, humility, and reframing) invite the Polymaths who have broader ranges of knowledge, and look at things holistically. You might end up pulling down the fence but at least you’ll know what’s behind it, what its intent is, and what the consequences are. But maybe you’ll just put in a gate. Or maybe, it isn’t worth unleashing the velociraptors and you leave it alone. But you’ll at least know why.
As a bonus, this topic is also explored in my new book Paradox: Book One of The Singularity Chronicles. The failure to understand the traditions is a key vulnerability I exploit in the battle over AI to unleash the maximum chaos on the humans.
Here is an excerpt for your preview:
“And not having those personal connections means you don’t have real safety and because there are too many people, you are prone to manipulation by bad actors.”
“Cults of personality.” Kira stood up. “Or in this case the cult of AI.” She paused. “But they aren’t following the AI like a leader, they are dancing to the AI like a puppet.”
Noah stretched. “That’s because they don’t feel safe and the AI is feeding all their fears. So, the mob is reacting.”
“Pink Elephants on parade.” Kira quoted Noah’s saying.
“What?” Alex’s eyebrows crossed.
Kira explained the elephant analogy of emotion vs. reason to Alex as Noah stepped down to the water’s edge. AI could clearly be used for incredible advancement, but he couldn’t quite accept that humans were ready for it. It broke too many barriers too quickly. It shifted too many social structures without replacing them.
It was like on a farm. Just because a gate was across your path didn’t mean it was an impediment. You had to understand why that gate was there and what was behind that gate.
He thought back to when he was living on his uncle’s farm in high school after Grandmother passed. He’d been jumping fences to take a shortcut home from school and decided to pass through a gate only to find it quite secured. While his frustration mounted trying to figure out how to open it, the neighbor farmer came up.
“Whatcha doin’ son?”
“The gate won’t open.”
“Do ya reckon there’s a reason for that?”
“I need to get through.”
“I see that, but what’s that big gate there for?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you figure that out, I’ll tell you how to open it.”
The farmer had sat back on his four-wheeler and watched. Noah shook the gate, still missing the point in his stubbornness. Suddenly, he felt a presence behind him and turned. Under the trees off to the left, a massive form rose up from the ground and turned.
“Let me out!” Noah screamed as the massive bull shook himself and started to walk over. “Let me out!”
The farmer chuckled and hopped down from the four-wheeler. “That there fella is Hank, my prized breeder. He's as gentle as a little lamb, but he's got a real talent for escapin'.” He paused for a moment. “Actually, it's his mission in life to break free. If you ain't watchin' closely, he'll wait for ya to let your guard down and then make a run for the gate. Once he's out... Good Lord above... tryin' to wrangle that one-ton bull back in is no easy task. Do ya have any idea how tough it is to make a bull go where he don't wanna go?"
The farmer walked up to the fence. “It’s always smart knowin’ why something is there before ye go on an open it, or tear it out.”
He opened the gate slightly and let Noah slip out. “Never tear down somethin’ if ya can’t explain why it’s there. Likely, it’s either keep’n something in, or out, that you don’t want to deal with.”
The farmer muttered under his breath. “Wish people could figure that out stead of attacking all the old traditions.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because traditions are solutions to problems you don’t know exist.” The farmer started in his eyes. “Some are good, some aren’t needed, but til you can explain that, don’t go ripping things apart just cause ya don’t understand ‘em.”
That was the first time Noah had met his future father-in-law. It had become the go-to story that his father-in-law would share with anyone about Noah. Everyone needed a story like that to keep them humble he supposed. Alexandra and he had been neighbors and friends but it wasn’t until long after high school that they started dating.
It wasn’t until years later he found out the idea had a name; Chesterton’s Fence. A logical razor to consider when making changes to a system. Until you could fully explain how the current system worked, you shouldn’t make any changes because it would likely not result in the effect you desired.
“What are you thinking about?” Kira startled Noah out of his recollection.
“Oh, nothing. Just hoping we don’t tear down too much societal structure in this chaos. It’s going to be hard enough to rebuild from here.”
“We are silly tribal monkeys who have figured out how to establish rules, traditions, and culture that structure, control, and direct our actions toward something more.” Kira looked back as Alex joined them at the pond’s edge.
“Yet still monkeys… Oddly hubristic monkeys who don’t even understand how they work.” Alex skipped a rock across the surface.
“It kills me to see what people can be, and yet watch them so easily manipulated by AI.”
“AI merely made it faster; these things have been going on forever. Only not at this scale.” Kira corrected.
“Fair, but when one tribe goes crazy, it’s not as big of a deal. When an entire society goes crazy, it turns and attacks itself and its systems.”
“Because we ignorantly believe we have overcome our base instincts?” Alex asked.
“Kind of. We see all the great things going on around us and we have this massive aspiration for what ‘could’ be, or worse ‘should’ be, and yet we ignore how we actually operate.” Noah skipped his own rock.
“It's why politics is always such a mess. People vote for ‘could’ or ‘should.’ And we don’t like to accept things as they are. We certainly don’t like to think we are sacks of meat driven primarily by hormonal responses and our low brain stems.”
You can pick up copies of the book here!
Enjoyed this post? Hit the button ❤️ above or below because it helps more people discover Substacks like this one and that’s a great thing. Also please share here or in your network to help us grow.
Polymathic Being is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
-
Techno Sapien Business Leadership Insights
-
Never Stop Learning Great Life Tips and Tricks
-
One Useful Thing Practical AI
-
The Muse Fun, Witty, Insight
-
Out of CuriosityGreat little nuggets to learn from
-
Artificial Intelligence Made Simple Great round-up of AI topics in the media and tech reporting.
Looking for other great newsletters and blogs? Try The Sample
Every morning, The Sample sends you an article from a blog or newsletter that matches up with your interests. When you get one you like, you can subscribe to the writer with one click. Sign up here.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic takes the recent OceanGate catastrophe and demonstrates how it is quite literally the hardware manifestation of Silicon Valley software start-up mentalities. We’ll explore how these simple tropes lead to terrible behaviors, myopic designs, and are behind the vast majority of failures of start-ups to get out of the seed rounds of funding.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic is one I’m still debating whether I should get into since it’s about social media engagement and AI. I won’t deny, I feel like I keep talking about AI when there’s so much more to look at. Yet it also highlights so many topics of human psychology that are part of the Polymathic mindset. So it makes a nice backdrop to discuss. This essay will explore a LinkedIn thread about Art and AI. While I should have known better, it still highlights the way people are reacting to this technology and why it’s so important to understand the full context. So, let’s find out how AI won’t kill the artists.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic is a philosophical approach to leadership that rethinks where we put the value in our output. It’s an ego killer in some ways but I think it’s more about an ego focus. This time from the leader to the team they are empowering.
Intro
One of the first things you have to accept when you take a leadership role in the military is that, when called to war, there’s a strong chance you won’t survive the engagement. In fact, you should plan on that.
This is why the cults of personality around a ‘hero’ leader look great in training or in corporate America, but when it hits the reality of humanity’s greatest leadership crucible, war, the best leader is someone different. It’s someone who doesn’t have to survive the engagement for the mission to still be successful.
One of the most humbling aspects I found being in the Army was something I captured in my forthcoming Novel on advanced AI where one character is caught in a situation with no way out:
The rockets didn’t care how good of a soldier you were, how much you could bench-press or squat, how good of a marksman you were, what sort of a diet you had, how sweet your gear was— When a warhead of that size locked onto your position with pinpoint accuracy, you couldn’t duck and dodge out of the way. No courage could deflect its trajectory. No moral or religious affiliation provided an aegis of protection.
It doesn’t matter how good of a leader you were. In fact, some of the best leaders were the ones heading a charge and were the first shot. My grandfather told a story of the D-Day Invasion of WWII where the officer and sergeant he loved the most stepped off their landing craft and one was cut down by gunfire and the other never resurfaced after stepping in the too-deep water.
Literally seconds into their attack the platoon was leaderless. Yet they rallied and executed and were successful in spite of it.
My grandfather said it was because the officer had held them to a high standard, delegated responsibility, and empowered the platoon to execute in challenging situations. When the officer died, his leadership didn’t. It carried on in the training, discipline, and memories of his platoon.
Lead as if You Won't Survive
When I was a production manager at Honeywell, I had a peer who loved coming back from a weeklong vacation to hear, “Oh! It’s so great you’re back! Everything is a mess!” Even more frustrating it was seen as something that made the leader valuable and irreplaceable.
I loved coming back from two weeks off and hearing, “It’s been two weeks already? It’s all been running smoothly.”
This was because I’d put in procedures, accountability, expectations, standard work, and other Lean Six Sigma and Leadership tools that allowed someone to fall into my role and keep the wheels rolling smoothly. I didn’t expect that they’d improve the performance, but I anticipated it wouldn’t fall apart while I was gone.
Yet this is a counter-intuitive success. When I first joined Honeywell, I was handed a production section and told by my manager “Welcome to Honeywell, you’ve now got the hardest section on the site. Go look at how Sensors is running to see good execution.” It was true. It was chaos. Deliveries were either 100% or 0% and averaged under 50%. We had racks of rework and a line of circuit cards that no one could ever find. The material was released in lumps and surges and staffing was not consistent.
A year later we had improved to a 95% on-time delivery and never dropped below 90%. Our rework was the lowest on site and we balanced the entire section to work smoothly. Those circuit cards no one could find? I mapped the value flow, found the issues, and smoothed it out till it became the cornerstone holding our performance up.
During one review of performance, I was bragging about what we had done. I was proud of the team. That same manager said, “Mike, come on, you’ve got the easiest section on the site! Go look at Sensors if you want a challenge.” How on earth did Sensors go from good to hard and mine go from hard to easy in 12 months?
It’s because the leader who took over for Sensors did the exact opposite of me. He was the one people greeted with “Thank goodness you’re back.” He’d created a cult of leadership that relied on him, not him empowering his team. He wasn’t a Lazy Leader (which is a shame), he was industrious, and he needed to have chaos to show his value.
He was also successfully unsuccessful. Every section he took over always ended in worse condition than it started. Yet in all the noise and conflagration, he got all the kudos for putting in the effort to keep everything afloat. He was rewarded for firefighting, so he just burned the place to the ground.
It’s why we have functional stupidity in organizations and feel like we keep doing the same thing over and over with no benefit.
Solution
But there is a solution, and it means we stop playing by the same rules of ‘success.’ The best leaders provide Direction, Energy, and Accountability It involves stabilizing processes, understanding where the value flows, and empowering the team to achieve.
In the Military (and civilian roles), it’s about always answering the Why, because when the What or How fails, or you aren’t there to help, the team will get it done anyway. It’s about delegating and holding proactive accountability, and about listening to and integrating your teams’ ideas so they have skin in the game.
It’s not about losing your ego. It’s about putting your ego on what really matters for long-term success. I was and am proud of my teams who hardly notice I’m gone on vacation and yet are excited when I return so we can move the needle to a higher performance yet again. I’m proud that I can leave an organization and it takes months before the chaos starts to show again. I’m proud that I can hand a detailed continuity book to my replacement, and it has all the tips and tricks to be successful.
I try to lead as if I won’t survive the engagement because my legacy as a leader is then something much more than myself.
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Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
-
Techno Sapien
-
Never Stop Learning
-
One Useful Thing
-
The Muse
Looking for other great newsletters and blogs? Try The Sample
Every morning, The Sample sends you an article from a blog or newsletter that matches up with your interests. When you get one you like, you can subscribe to the writer with one click. Sign up here.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic unlocks humanity’s superpower; The ability to critically think, ask questions, and form, unform, and reform ideas. It’s a key aspect that AI currently can’t do and one that underpins Polymathic thinking and feeds into learning, unlearning, and relearning. Once we understand this ability, we can properly contextualize AI into the useful, but limited assistant that it is.
Introduction
AI computes, humans think. When humans think, they ask questions because they are curious. AI only works with what they have and asks for no more.
This is an important distinction that often goes overlooked. If you ask ChatGPT a question, it will respond and churn out an answer. To get it to ask for more information, you have to tell it to ask for more information which then becomes a separate sequence of activities. It’s not actually asking you for more information but more of a ‘call and response.’ It’s not curious and it’s never confused.
As discusses in the essay Hallucination Nation - Part I - what we anthropomorphize as ‘hallucinations’ are actually errors. Humans hallucinate and AI has errors in computation. While this might seem trivial at first, it highlights yet another way in which How we think about AI can actually manifest our interpretation of AI.
Now that may feel a little philosophical but it’s important because when we talked about the trifecta of Critical Thinking previously, we discovered there are three things to the concept:
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Knowledge Management
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Logical Structuring
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Application of Critique
Number 3 is related to Critical and the first two are related to Thinking. Humans do all three when they think critically and, right now, AI can only do #2.
AI is fed structured knowledge and then computes a logical response in the form of predictive text or image completion, but it really doesn’t have a way to critique it. I’ll also add that even #2 is limited because it can’t form, unform, and reform logic to play with the ideas. If you ask the exact same question again, it will often give you a totally different answer.
Some might contest that Microsoft Bing with ChatGPT can search for information it has not yet been fed, but it does so under very structured methods similar to Bing Search without ChatGPT and how Google does it. However, now it will work to summarize a series of results for the user.
Humans think and AIs compute.
In application
Once we understand the capabilities and limitations of AI and, I hope by now, we realize that anthropomorphizing is something we really should avoid, we can then better see how to best put AI to use in a way that really helps us move humanity forward.
To start with, as captures in the essay On-Boarding your AI intern, we can use the AI to handle routine tasks and data aggregation. I like to use it to summarize articles to see if I’ve missed something. I’ve also used it to poke apart arguments, provide counterarguments, and uncover sources that I hadn’t thought of.
Instead of beating your head against a wall trying to hash out metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), or critical data sources for a technical brief, you can ask ChatGPT to provide a table of options that you can pick from to flesh out the idea.
For example, here is a list of KPIs I put together for a client to just get the conversation moving when they hit a roadblock of what they really wanted. I worked with ChatGPT to point it in the right direction, then I culled and redirected with that knowledge management we discussed, applied my own logical structuring and restructuring, and critiqued the result.
It was enough to get my client up and running when they’d been stuck before.
hits on a similar topic with The Joy of Generative AI Cocreation where he reminds us that:
When cameras were invented in the 1800s, painters revolted. They argued that photography wasn't art. Eventually, attitudes changed, and artists emerged, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Richard Avedon to Diane Arbus to Annie Leibovitz, each armed with a unique point of view.
It’s a great point and one to remember as many artists are currently revolting in a very similar manner as the painters 150 years ago. Fundamentally they aren’t differentiating between thinking and computing. Critical Thinking is what makes humans uniquely positioned to not be threatened by AI, but to use it like we have so many other technologies in human advancement.
Summary
There are risks to AI just like there are risks from all levels of technology. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talks of extinction-level threats from AI I have to chuckle. He’s the one who created ChatGPT. The only thing he’s worried about right now is the extinction of his business from the competition. Putting a pause on development puts a market lock on ChatGPT and allows him to rake in money.
Maybe I’m being cynical there, but I’m an optimist when it comes to what I feel AI can do, when properly understood, as an Intern or a Cocreator in unlocking so much more potential for us.
In fact, a year ago I wouldn’t have been able to come up with the cover of my book, and my friend Matt wouldn’t have been able to polish it, without some serious investment, frustration, and time hiring an expensive designer. Now we can use our own vision and AI to help make it a reality.
As long as we remember that our superpower is in Critical Thinking and that involves knowledge management, structuring logic, and applying critique, we can recognize that this is something AI cannot do right now. I think many people are worried because they too cannot critically think but that’s not a limitation of being human. Once we put AI in the right context, we can see how it can be a great co-creator and how we can use it to augment our critical thinking to advance human capability.
Enjoyed this post? Hit the button ❤️ above or below because it helps more people discover Substacks like this one and that’s a great thing. Also please share here or in your network to help us grow.
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Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
-
Techno Sapien
-
Never Stop Learning
-
One Useful Thing
-
The Muse
Looking for other great newsletters and blogs? Try The Sample
Every morning, The Sample sends you an article from a blog or newsletter that matches up with your interests. When you get one you like, you can subscribe to the writer with one click. Sign up here.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic is a bit of a book review plus a critical element that I’m finding essential for those interested in the Polymathic mindset. The book is Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and the caveat is to really know who you are so that we can best team together to solve wicked problems.
This is Part 3 of the Keys to Innovation Series. You can find the other Keys here:
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Part 1: Embrace the Divergents
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Part 2: Face the Fear
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Part 3: Rethink the Wisdom of Crowds
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic introduced an old Military Special Operations adage that I’ve found to be incredibly useful throughout my entire career. It’s a phrase I remind myself and others of quite regularly so that we can ensure the proper execution of a strategy or a task. It’s the ability to take it slow, make it smooth, and finish fast.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic is an exploration of poor biomechanics and explores breathing. As simple as this might sound, most of us do it wrong, including myself. We’ll explore what we do wrong, how it affects our health, and then show what is possible if we can improve this basic human biomechanical function.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic faces the distinctly human characteristic to project our own emotional states on animals and, in the case of AI, inanimate objects. While the first can be cute and innocuous, the second creates an incredible amount of risk in the advancement of AI and the well beings of humans. It doesn’t have to be this way and the first step is to acknowledge what we are doing and what impact that can have.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.polymathicbeing.com/subscribe
Today's topic pokes at a problem I see all too often in businesses. It revolves around all the talk of alignment, execution, and stability and yet, when the first deviation or last-minute request appears, the leadership turns into reaction mode and throws it all out the window. This essay explores that phenomenon and weaves together some of the previously discussed counterintuitive opportunities so that anyone can provide a safe, stable, and productive work environment.
Referenced Essay:
Systems Thinking
Process Band-aids
The Successfully Unsuccessful
Functional Stupidity
Direction, Energy, and Accountability
Lazy Leadership
Get full access to Polymathic Being at polymathicbeing.substack.com/subscribe
Today's topic is another collaboration with and delves into what we call Critical Thinking and, in doing so, uncover the core of Polymathic Disciplines captured as the ability to “Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn.” We’ll contextualize the push for, and against Critical Thinking and dive into what we really mean with these two words.
Get full access to Polymathic Being at polymathicbeing.substack.com/subscribe
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic is an introduction to a very important capability called Threatcasting. We’ll get into the goals, the model that runs it, and an example I just participated in this past week. Fundamentally the goal of Threatcasting is to imagine terrible futures so that we can do things today to prevent them from happening.
“Billions Die!”
It’s a bit of the running joke in the Threatcasting workshops of how big the impact can be when advanced technologies run amok ten to fifteen years from now. This is the goal; imagine the paths that can lead to billions dying.
It’s a little harder to have “Trillions Die” but this last week we made a strong attempt to achieve that with the sub-team I was on. It’s a serious joke that underpins the impact of what we are taking into consideration and how important we feel this work is to protect people from the misuse of otherwise empowering technology.
Two words have emerged to describe the underpinnings of the risks we uncover that cause cascading consequences of tech across the disciplines of technology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and more.
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Hubris
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Fragility
Hubris: This is the extreme confidence, largely supported by ignorance and a fundamental lack of humility, about what humans are or are not capable of. In our scenarios, the systems are just as often torn down by well-meaning people who are afraid of what the technology can do as it is by malicious actors using the technology to harm. Hubris is the foundation of both.
Fragility: What we call civilization, and its derivatives of civility and control, is a shockingly thin layer that holds us from fracturing into micro-tribalism and chaos. Several recent events highlight this such as the COVID pandemic and the ecosystems of social media in general and Twitter specifically. In the case of Twitter, I like to view that space as an unfiltered view into the soul of a broad cross-section of humanity. It’s amazing how vitriolic normally thoughtful people can be without the filters of civilization that social media often removes.
Fragility also refers to the technology itself and the designs, integrations, and security systems that open up dangerous uses, or manipulations.
With these two concepts in mind, let’s step back and introduce Threatcasting and how this powerful tool can help us understand these concepts and why they end up triggering so much chaos.
Polymathic Being is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Threatcasting
Threatcasting is a conceptual framework used to help multidisciplinary groups envision future scenarios and plan against threats ten to fifteen years in the future. It emerged in 2007 as a variation on the Futurecasting process and is considered a subset of the larger applied futures models.
The Army Cyber Institute at West Point, in partnership with Arizona State University's Global Securities Initiative and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, established a Threatcasting Lab to host and manage portfolios of projects aiming to better understand the risks we may face. The success of this process has fostered wide adoption across dozens of commercial companies as well as many US Government organizations. Fantastic examples can be found on the Army Cyber Institute website from previous events.
Fundamentally, Threatcasting and Futurecasting are not about predicting the future. They are about envisioning futures that’d you’d like to avoid (threat) or realize (future). This is a subtle but important distinction in that there is no single future or single threat, and they are not guaranteed. These analyses merely illuminate what could happen so steps can be taken to avoid threats or realize opportunities.
The process involves inputs from social science, technical research, cultural history, economics, trends, expert interviews, and more. These inputs inform the exploration of potential visions of the future. Teams then conduct forward casting to envision a future and then backcasting to identify flags and gates to measure progress as you work to identify ways to mitigate the threat and save those billions of innocent people. The main goal of Threatcasting is to look into the abyss and then figuring out how to keep it from happening.
It’s honestly an easy process to follow and the hardest part is to unlock the imagination and stretch the minds of people to get out of their own experience and explore what they can’t see. Another challenge is to push people out of their own moral foundations to view the threats and create scenarios where billions might die.
Threatcasting truly is a Polymathic tool as you work across multiple domains and disciplines and draw on the broadest diversity of thought possible to challenge biases and come to new and unique insights.
Design versus Futures Thinking
A separate challenge to actually kicking off Threatcasting and Futures, in general, is that many engineers and designers believe they have already looked at the larger problem. This is a challenge we’ve explored before in Investigating Personality Proclivities, Embrace the Divergents, and Functional Stupidity and How to Avoid It. Namely that a large part of our technical talent is discretely focused and our corporate environments place a lot of value on starting with a defined problem and then working into a solution.
Where this goes wrong is that, too often, the problem that is selected isn’t the right one and/or has the wrong definition to start with. This is why it is so essential to start with answering Why before you get into the What or How. If you dive into the solution, you also fall victim to trying to prove it can work, not proving whether it should work, or most importantly, proving that it doesn’t work.
Systems Thinking addresses this issue and is an integrated function of Futures Thinking in that you start with the humility to admit we probably don’t know as much about the problems as we’d like to think and coupling that with an insatiable curiosity to explore what else is out there.
As you can see in the difference between these two diagrams, Design Thinking focuses into the problem while Futures Thinking steps back from the problem to establish context. The proper order for how Futures work with Design looks like this.
As you can see, when the full system is understood, the selection of a problem is done with a holistic context and fosters better methods to ascertain benefit. Another way to see the difference in thought between Design and Figures thinking is best captured in the behaviors of the two philosophies:
Marrying Futures with Design is what we call Applied Futures. There’s limited benefit in just imagining Futures; you have to figure out how to make it real or to take real steps to keep it from happening. This is how Threatcasting and Futures in general help us to avoid the Hubris and Fragility we talked about earlier. We avoid Hubris by ensuring full context. Likewise, Fragility is a function of suboptimal and myopic designs that miss the full context. Applied Futures is a critical tool allowing us to step back with humility and curiosity and reframe the problem space to make sure we fully understand it.
NATO Threatcasting of 6G
Around 60 highly intelligent thinkers, practitioners, and subject matter experts descended on Virginia Beach this past week and took on a challenge from NATO to look forward to 2035 and Threatcast 6G technologies. The goal was to inform the alliance as to what things we should look to embrace, control, and avoid when it comes down to this next generation of highly interconnected and high-bandwidth communications.
We heard from a series of leading experts in the field and their backgrounds ranged from economics, technology, policy, acquisition, production, and research. Key themes emerged to describe 6G such as:
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Ubiquitous - Connections, Surveillance, Internet of Things (IoT), Data, AI, etc.
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Edge devices create control challenges of bandwidth and compute power
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The need to ensure trust - A wicked problem across multiple layers
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Data privacy concerns - Volume of information, precision location, etc.
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True presence in a metaverse resulting in loss of real-world connection
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Social degradation - Mico-tribalism, faster and narrower feedback loops, etc.
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Security - How current methods are fragile and reactive.
After we synthesized key elements from the experts, then we unleashed the creative genius of the attendees. Over the course of the workshop, approximately 15 teams created 4 Threatcasts each to sketch out the future we wanted to avoid.
We killed billions in novel and very realistic ways. My team managed to create a societal autoimmune response in Finland which caused them to destroy themselves. Our Finnish attendee was so proud for her country to be a focus of such mass destruction that we immediately became friends.
The teams captured a ton of perspectives and information for each Threatcast and documented the findings in a structured workbook. This creates an incredible volume of insights, concepts, risks, and opportunities that can be further leveraged for even more new and emergent findings.
I’d love to spoil more of the event, but we’ll have to wait as we continue to distill the findings and develop them into a Threatcasting report, like the ones below, that allows us to inform everyone about futures that could happen and how to avoid them.
Summary
The main thing to know, and value about Threatcasting specifically and Applied Futures in general is that this allows us to honestly talk about true risks without the hyperbole of hubris and fragility. It is a perfect complement to the traditional design processes and helps ensure we are solving the right problems in context. Integrate properly with classic Design Thinking helps us shape the world toward better paths that take into account multiple dimensions, perspectives, and disciplines. This is how we conquer hubris and fragility and save millions if not billions of human lives.
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Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares
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Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic looks at Artificial Intelligence (AI) from a systems perspective and strives to understand the layers, the relationships, and the implications of this incredibly broad topic. Doing so helps us understand where we are and to better identify the risks of moving forward or stepping back from the current rates of development.
Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is constantly in the news and on social media. But what is it really? Simply put, AI is the development of machines with the ability to think and act like humans, using algorithms and data to solve problems that would otherwise require human intelligence. It has been used in a wide range of industries, from healthcare to finance, to improve efficiency and accuracy. To hear tell, it will either result in a jobocalypse destroying work as we know it or foster the next transformational leap in human advancement. But missing between these two polemics is an understanding of what AI actually is, the layers of complexity that underpin it, and just how embedded it is in much of our lives today.
What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the ability of machines to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as understanding natural language, recognizing objects in images, and making decisions. It is a broad field of study that encompasses many different techniques and technologies, including machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and decision-making.
The ‘Father’ of AI, Alan Turing set the stage for much of how we conceptualize AI. He suggested that machines were naturally limited to purely mathematic, ie algorithmic computations, and therefore restricted by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.
Gödel was an Austrian logician in the early twentieth century who proposed that any consistent formal system that is strong enough to express basic arithmetic, will always have statements that are true but cannot be proven within the system. Like the classic one plus one equals two had been exceptionally difficult to attempt a proof on. One attempt took over three-hundred and sixty pages and it was still questioned.
The second theorem Gödel derived was that a formal system cannot prove its own consistency. While this might not seem to matter much outside of mathematics. Alan Turing believed that while machines were bound by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, humans were not.
This was the foundation for his ‘Turing Test’; a litmus test that has been used for decades to measure Artificial Intelligence. Namely that it had to convincingly imitate human-like responses in a conversation.
What this led to was a bifurcation into two main categories: weak AI and strong AI. Weak AI refers to systems that are designed to perform specific tasks, such as image recognition or speech recognition. These systems are not truly intelligent and are only capable of completing the tasks they were specifically designed to do. Strong AI, on the other hand, refers to systems that are capable of general intelligence, meaning they can perform any intellectual task that a human can. I.E., passing the Turing Test.
Stepping back for context
AI is currently being used in a wide range of applications, including self-driving cars, virtual assistants, personalization, fraud detection, and medical diagnosis. We already appreciate the benefits of these systems. The challenge is to recognize the overall goal what we call AI in these systems. When stepping back, what emerges is that AI is actually an enabler of a larger technology suite we refer to as Autonomy.
As I captured in the Defense Systems Information Analysis Center (DSIAC) journal paper, Systems Engineering of Autonomy: Frameworks for MUM-T Architecture, autonomy itself is “a gradient capability enabling the separation of human involvement from systems performance.”
What has continually frustrated me is the intentional separation of AI from Autonomy when AI is merely an enabler to achieve autonomy based on complexity. You can have a very unintelligent AI allowing full autonomy like a Roomba robotic vacuum, or you can have very intelligent AI allowing complex traffic navigation such as the autonomous Cruise taxies.
What’s important to note, and completely in the bailiwick of the Polymathic Mindset, is that autonomy, supported by AI needs to take into account robotics, cybernetics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience as well as the hard and soft AI. Any conversation about AI that isn’t considering the larger ecosystem is a conversation that has failed to contextualize how all these elements work together.
Focusing back on AI:
One of the larger challenges for AI is that it falls victim to an academic pitfall I’ve referred to as the “No True Autonomy Fallacy,” which is based on the No True Scotsman Fallacy. That is every time we achieve a degree of AI we immediately dismiss it as not ‘true AI.’ I capture this fallacy as follows:
What we call AI is merely unexplainable code.
So what do we call explainable code? It’s just software!
This captures the crux of the problem in that we claimed we’d have True AI when a computer could beat a human in chess. But when that occurred with Deep Blue, and we saw the code, it was explainable and therefore not true AI. Then we moved the goalpost and said that if a computer could beat a human in Go, then we’d have True AI. When that occurred with AlphaGo and we saw the code, we moved the goalposts yet again.
So what does this No True Autonomy Fallacy have to do with AI today? I brought it up to demonstrate that we actually have layers of AI embedded throughout our lives that we accept, use, and benefit from, all while thinking AI is still somewhere in the future.
Now that we have AI in a better context it allows us to understand how we use AI to achieve the larger outcomes we are looking for in our technologies, organizations, and culture.
Types of AI
As mentioned earlier, AI breaks into two distinct categories: Weak AI, and Strong AI. Weak AI, also known as narrow AI, focuses on performing specific tasks, such as answering questions based on user input or playing chess. It is able to conduct one type of task very well but is difficult to apply to new tasks or new datasets. Strong AI can perform a variety of functions, eventually teaching itself to solve new problems and extending into the theoretical. Strong AI is what we most commonly conceptualize when discussing the topic, yet it remains largely theoretical.
Weak AI
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Automation Algorithms: While this isn’t typically considered a form the purists would call AI, we have many algorithmic conveniences at our disposal that, to the untrained eye, appear intelligent. In high school, I crafted a tic-tac-toe game with a brute force, if/then system that could beat or stalemate all humans. This long ago fell victim to the no-true-autonomy fallacy and is rarely considered AI.
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Reactive Machines: These AI systems do not have memory and can only respond to the current input. Examples include Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer that defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997. Strengths: Simple, efficient. Weaknesses: No context, no memory.
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Limited Memory: These AI systems have limited memory that they can use to store information about past inputs. Examples include self-driving cars that use sensor data to understand their current environment. Strengths: Can learn from past experiences and can improve over time. Weaknesses: Limited memory capacity, can't generalize from past experiences.
Strong AI
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Theory of Mind: These AI systems are capable of understanding mental states and can simulate the behavior of other agents. They are still in the research stage. Strengths: Can understand human behavior, can empathize. Weaknesses: Requires a lot of data, difficult to implement.
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Self-Aware: These AI systems have a sense of self and consciousness. They are still in the theoretical stage and may never be possible to create. Strengths: Can understand its own behavior and make decisions based on that understanding. Weaknesses: Theoretical, and not yet possible to implement.
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General AI: These AI systems are capable of learning any intellectual task that a human can. They do not exist yet, but some researchers believe that they will be possible in the future. Strengths: Can learn any task, and can generalize from past experiences. Weaknesses: Not yet possible to implement, would likely require vast amounts of data and computational power.
Where we apply AI is also a question of what level of complexity is required for an algorithm to take over certain human functions. The vast majority of the AI we are exposed to is still considered Weak AI. Even ChatGPT, making the news constantly since the end of 2022 is considered a weak AI. It is a highly specialized AI model that has been trained on a large dataset of text and is able to generate natural language responses to user input. It can perform specific tasks such as language translation or answering questions. It can even pass the Turing Test at many levels, but it does not possess general intelligence or the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. It doesn’t have a Theory of Mind and it can only operate within the limits of its programming.
Currently, there is work on maturing Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) with stronger computational foundations, but the level of difficulty in continued maturation is not linear, but exponential. General AI is still a topic of active research and it's not yet clear if or when we'll be able to achieve it.
But what about Machine Learning?
As we’ve seen, deconflicting all these terms into their proper relational structure is a bit of a mind twist and Machine Learning is the last element I want to tackle in this essay. To do this, we should differentiate the main difference between AI and ML. AI refers to the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks that would normally require human intelligence, ML, on the other hand, is a specific type of AI that involves training a computer system using data so that it can learn to perform a specific task without explicit instructions. In other words, ML is a method for achieving AI.
In context.
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Autonomy is a gradient capability enabling the separation of human involvement from systems performance.
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AI is the ability of machines to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence
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Machine Learning (ML) is a specific type of AI that involves training a computer system using data so that it can learn to perform a specific task without explicit instructions.
Another way to think about it is that AI is the broad science of making computers intelligent, while ML is a specific approach to achieving AI by training a computer system on data. Machine learning is also often combined into systems with two other primary sub-components; Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the field of AI that deals with the interaction between computers and humans using natural language and helps computers understand, interpret, and generate human language in a way that allows for effective communication.
Computer Vision (CV) enables computers to understand and interpret visual information from the world, such as images and videos. CV techniques include object detection, image classification, and face recognition.
Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision often work together in AI systems to build more advanced and capable applications. For example, in an image captioning system, Computer Vision is used to identify objects in an image, and Natural Language Processing is used to generate a sentence describing the image, using Machine Learning to train a model to associate image features with language.
Summary
While our heads might be spinning at this point, I’ll try to clarify what we’ve just covered.
Firstly, AI is a tool to help systems become less dependent on human involvement, ie more autonomous.
Secondly, AI can be as simple as an expert mechanical system, a basic software such as spell check, up to the more advanced systems like AlphaGo and the new ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 systems released by OpenAI.
It should also be reiterated, that AI is largely still weak AI and most of what we call AI still falls under the subcategory of Machine Learning in general (which is what ChatGPT actually is)
Fundamentally, these all break down into algorithms, that is, math equations, which are coupled with data in order to identify and determine outcomes that we are aiming to achieve. We explored some considerations in previous essays such as:
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Can AI Be Creative - Where we looked at the concept of creativity in humans and compared whether the nature of AI could achieve it.
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Eliminating Bias in AI/ML - where we investigated what we even mean by bias and how there are actually three types of bias encoded in every AI algorithm.
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What’s in a Brain - where we explored how AI is helping us learn about our human brains, and just how complex that really is when it comes to General Artificial Intelligence.
We are surrounded by AI from our cellphones to our adaptive cruise control in vehicles, even to the most basic algorithms in our security systems. Our online world of social media is saturated with these algorithms, and we enjoy the convenience across virtually every domain in the modern world.
In the development and application of these technologies, we should consider this context and get back to the actual Systems Engineering question. It’s not AI that you want, at least, not just for the sake of AI. You want AI as an enabler to something else that improves the life or productivity of us humans.
We also need to understand the psychology and human-machine interactions that will occur with these AIs to avoid any cascading consequences. Currently we are seeing extreme misinterpretations of what AI can or cannot do with some tech leaders advocating a pause, and others pushing full steam ahead.
My main recommendation is to fully understand what we are talking about with AI and to take pragmatic approaches to how it is implemented. I do believe “slow is smooth and smooth is fast”. Context matters. If we don’t take a full systems perspective on the topic, we risk significant impact either by wielding a power we don’t understand and getting burned, or rejecting an amazing enabler that can advance human flourishing.
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Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares
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Today's topic looks into how our brains capture, process, store, and recall memories and how that relates to the recent advancements in AI. We’ll explore our ‘second brain', memory recall, and how this ties together with something near and dear to me; PTSD in veterans. This essay provides insight and awareness to help anyone improve their mental health and emotional regulation.
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Today's topic explores some interesting stories from my time in the Army and how those lessons apply to my work in the professional world. This intentional reconceptualization of The Enemy’s Gate is Down has also become one of Polymathic Disciplines’ key elements in Systems Thinking and so it’s appropriate to dive deeper in.
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Today’s topic picks apart the popular trope of inserting Art into Science Technology Engineering, and Math, otherwise known as STEM. We’ll look at why trying to piggyback on the STEM initiatives not only harms Art, but totally misses the point of the relationship between Art and STEM.
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Today's topic takes a different look at our brain, how it operates, and what this means for us in work, life, and play. Hang tight as we explore the things we see and don’t see, and the fictions we create to make sense of the world around us. Don’t worry though, at the end, you’ll also have some tools on hand to check your blind spots and reframe your reality to ensure a solid foundation.
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Today's topic is a historical exploration of Daylight Savings Time (DST). We dive into the history of time, the surprisingly inconsistent application of DST throughout history and across the world and explore ideas for how we could better align our time zones to our advantage.
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Today's topic has the singular goal of saving lives and when it comes to the past three years’ debates on masks, this requires a much more complex systems analysis than we’ve been offered. We’ll investigate what we missed in the binary debate on whether masks work or not and uncover the truth of how the science of masks, mask protocols, and our own psychology actually led to increased deaths in the US population. I want to clarify that I fully understand and appreciate the contentiousness of this discussion. I think it is critical to set aside our biases as we dig in so that next time, we can save more lives.
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Today's topic investigates the failure of so many proofs of concept, minimum viable products, innovation initiatives, and systems in general. The underlying reason might actually surprise you because very often the details look great, the people worked together really well, and all of the processes and artifacts were tip top. It’s only when we step back and look at the whole system that we discover that the main failure happened long beforehand, back in design, or the lack thereof.
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Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic probes the trend of so much of our communications moving from voice to text. We’ll look at the patterns, the psychology of data ingestion, common pitfalls of text communications, and recommend some key opportunities to avoid the Con[of]text and ensure true context.
We are imperfect humans, using imprecise language, to communicate incomplete ideas.
The recent boom in remote and hybrid work really highlighted that when we remove the rich context on in-person communications, we lose the signals, inflections, and intentions that can be more readily transmitted. It forces a more nuanced approach to our work environments and requires a lot of additional attention.
Yet paradoxically we also see a burgeoning of anti-voice communications with online memes like:
“Before you call me, always ask yourself..is this textable? And if it is, you TEXT. And if you don’t, I will cut you.”
When we resort to text, we reduce a significant amount of context, we are often distracted with other information, we lose meaning, we respond quickly and we fail to recognize both the human in us, as well as the human on the other screen. The intentional separation of our communications into highly misinterpretable bits has been linked to the high rise in teen and young adult anxiety, depression, and suicide. It’s not well adapted to how our brains are coded to interpret the world around us.
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Psychology of Content Ingestion:
Our brain has two job duties:
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Make sense of the world around us.
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Be computationally efficient.
To balance these two requirements, our brains apply over 200 listed Cognitive Biases in four groupings: How to handle a lack of meaning, too much information, the need to act fast, and knowing what to remember. Humans do well with small amounts of good information. However, the more data, with less meaning, the more biases are applied for sensemaking, which leads to conceptualizations of the world that tend toward edge cases, not the center.
I deal with these edge cases daily while working in AI design as we apply cognitive science to mathematical computations. The more assumptions or heuristics that are applied to an algorithm, the faster it moves toward the edges of the data. The same goes for human interpretation of text based communications.
A great example is Twitter. It provides too much information, in short bits without enough meaning, and drives the need to act fast to trend. Fundamentally this is the issue with text-based communications. It often triggers stacked biases, especially when the information might challenge existing biases on emotionally charged topics. These stacked biases often manifest in interpretation, that is, how my words sound when you read them is a majority function of what’s in your head!
It’s not what I said, it’s how you read it!
Once my words leave my head and enter the text, I can only hope that my tone and tenor convey the right meaning. This is why I use textual analysis tools in these essays such as Grammarly to see if my tone is optimistic, pessimistic, open, playful, closed, etc. Yet I can only control it so much. This is why I like recording voice-overs. If you’ve ever wondered how these essays sound to me, I recommend you listen to me read them. (see the link at the top, or these podcast players)
This highlights why it is so important to be highly cognizant of the voice in which you read things. Especially on challenging or contentious topics. COVID became a great case study in communication as social media was infested with debates and arguments about the virus, the protocols, and then black lives matter and the election. Let’s just say that was a year when the problems with text-based communications became clear, especially since so many people didn’t engage face-to-face anymore with the lockdowns.
After one engagement on Facebook, a friend reached out in messenger and provided feedback regarding a discussion where, among other things, they stated. To which I responded.
What emerged was that, if you agreed with my positions, I sounded rational and composed. If you disagreed, I sounded foolish and unhinged. At one point, in late 2020, I was out in-person with a group that contained both types of people. We were engaging in a similar discussion topic to what we had online and the conversation was so much better! In fact, one of the people that often disagreed with me made the insightful comment:
“You sound so much more reasonable and thoughtful in person”
To which I responded:
“The way I talked just now is how I always sound in my head when I type. How do I sound in your head when you read it?”
Their response:
“I’d never considered that!”
I applied these insights recently to a disagreement two co-workers were having. Each was complaining about the other’s rudeness, unprofessionalism, and tone in IMs and e-mails. Curious to explore my ideas about how we read each other’s words, I asked them each to do two things based on a specific e-mail thread:
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I had them read their e-mails to the other in the voice they intended
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I had them read the other’s response in the voice they interpreted.
I recorded them reading and exchange recordings. The result was fascinating:
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At first, there was indignation at how they were interpreted.
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Then there was the recognition of what they had recorded.
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And then the resignation of what had really happened.
I brought them back together and then shared the mix of both of their interpretations which sounded nasty and spiteful. Then I shared the mix of both of their intentions and they sounded kind and reasonable.
It was a really interesting experiment because it didn’t have nearly as much to do with what they said but how each interpreted them as saying. Again, how you heard the other person say it in text is more often actually only in your brain and may not reflect their intent.
One time, I had a leader who absolutely refused to accept there could be a different interpretation than what they had. They did not have the good faith to even consider the two-way street of communication. For example:
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On voice calls, they were clearly multitasking or not open to discussion.
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They grossly misinterpreted feedback from others and upon correction, doubled down.
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They stated that Instant Messages were “intrusive.”
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The entire team was told that e-mails over 3 lines would not be read
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But with every truncation, they lost context, and lost context opened up misinterpretation
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In-person wasn’t much better as I was told asking for the ‘Why’ was disruptive.
While we have a textbook recipe for ‘what not to do as a leader’ the most interesting aspect was enlisting the help of my wife to craft responses. I’d literally have her read the communications and phrase a response that I, personally, wouldn’t have thought of. The result? The feedback was that my tone was still a problem or some other negative interpretation. It literally wasn’t even something I said, nor ever how I’d say it, and it was still interpreted as such. I even enlisted the help of others to coach my in-person and voice comms. It just highlighted that when a person is set to an interpretation, it’s really hard to shift it.
These problems also emerge with the most innocuous exchanges, between two very good friends with zero negativity. This Facebook exchange below is a great example. What’s weird is that I didn’t take any offense to it, but yet there was a way in which my response could be interpreted. And this person is right, there is a lack of tone in text that we fill in with our own brains.
What to do about it?
Fundamentally, an addage that I’ve found so true on so many interpersonal topics comes to bear:
You expect from others what you expect from yourself.
Whose voice is that in your head? First off it’s your voice. Second, if it sounds mean, look inside first. Strip off as much of your layered biases as you can. Try to put it in context. It’s like that great statement from the Bible’s New Testament
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but don't consider the beam that is in your own eye?”
Between these two ideas, much of our communication issues can be resolved by focusing on ourselves first. There’s an old marriage addage that says “If there’s two ways to interpret something and one of them offends you, assume it’s the other.” Because it really is just a voice in your head 99% of the time.
Another aspect is to turn toward more voice conversations, or a blend in between. Try to use the same words and phrases in both settings. I like to reference text based communications in my verbal engagement in the tone I intended, especially if they could be, or were misinterpreted:
“Like I said in the e-mail, I do think it’s a great idea and I’m wondering if we’ve done XYZ analysis to confirm?”
This last example was one I had where someone complained that I was criticizing the idea because I asked if we’d done that analysis. I don’t know the tone they ‘heard’ but I was able to place my tone on the question in a meeting the next day and it resulted in a much better conversation.
I also recommend that you keep a consistent tone between all communication mediums to maintain a common profile. This has proven useful for me where coworkers have been able to provide correction to a misinterpretation from others. We’ve all heard the “that doesn’t sound like something [this person] would say”
A last recommendation is built on a similar function I use in person and I’ve learned to use in text. As the Facebook conversation above captured, I’m a 6’6” 220lb athletic former Army Ranger with a booming voice, a polymathic breadth, and a gregarious personality. A mentor of mine once recommended that I caveate statements with qualifiers such as:
“I’m really passionate about this, and I don’t know a better way to say this”
“This is a tough subject, and I don’t have a polished response, so work with me as I try to articulate it”
“I’m not sure I undersand your question, here’s what I think you said and here’s my answer”
“I’m speaking frankly here”
“I worry that this might be interpreted wrong so let me specify my intent”
I’ve found these work well both in person and in text in allowing the reader to reframe their interpretation. It still doesn’t allow you to fully control the interpretation. I’ve still had two people walk away from from the exact same conversation with completely different interpretations.
A last thought is the use of the ‘smiley face’ emojies. These can be a mixed bag but they can add a playful aspect to the communications. I find they work best if you use the happy ones, and use them to make fun of yourself, not others. This isn’t a silver bullet but is part of a whole awareness of the situation
Conclusion:
Text based communication loses context. The increased push toward more texting and away from voice communication is a problem in my mind as it inevitably leads to misinterpretation. But an understanding of the problems and an application of the solutions do make thing a lot better. Specifically if you recognize the interpretation is in your head.
It is possible to have highly productive conversations in text and it requires both sides to assume positive intention. Should you find yourself at odds with another person, look inward first, and then try not to take offense while gently explaining your intent to the other. Remember, sometimes it’s best to just pick up the phone, apologize for the situation, and try to clarify. And it is also best to answer the phone, and listen in return! This was a major lesson my wife and I learned as we tripped over all of these challenges over 3.5 years while dating and early marriage when I was in the Army and we were on separate continents. The key was recognizing we were in it together, and had positive intent.
We are imperfect humans, using imprecise language, to communicate incomplete ideas. Grace, humbleness, and forgiveness in all dimensions are crucial to weaving successful communication.
We are imperfect humans, using imprecise language, to communicate incomplete ideas.
Polymathic Being is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares
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Today's topic looks at the hiring process and the tools, techniques, and tactics that are used in order to screen candidates and how these can lead to actually terrible behaviors. We’ll look at some of the current trends, how technology is being applied that drives this, and recommend a few new ways to look at hiring the right people with the right behaviors.
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Today's topic shifts gears and explores the interesting sport of freediving I immersed myself in while living in Florida. Let’s plunge into the psychological and physiological challenges of the sport as well as the beauty of relaxing, being in the moment, and letting things go.
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Today's topic is another collaboration, introducing co-author C.J. Unis, a Space Force systems engineer, aspiring polymath, and complexity wizard. It’s actually a double collaboration where this essay also sets a foundation for STO Realities from Progressive Plan Inc. to build on to optimize key processes in the petroleum industry. So what is this topic that has garnered so much interest and collaboration? It’s the concept we’ve been poking at in a lot of the previous essays: Systems thinking. While we think we understand systems most often analysis misses the mark in application in technical and non-technical domains. This essay aims to empower you to apply systems thinking properly to hit the mark and solve the wicked problems we face.
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Today's topic straightforwardly addresses a lot of the underlying issues we’ve covered in essays thus far, specifically underlying the concept of the Successfully Unsuccessful. This essay looks to pull back the curtain of what allows the status quo to not only survive but thrive in most modern businesses. It actually has a pretty blunt name to describe the concept of this apathy? malaise? at a minimum, just a mediocre standard. It’s called Functional Stupidity and it has nothing to do with individual intelligence. Today we’ll explore what it is and how we can intentionally avoid it.
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Today's topic evaluates a trite and therefore, often wrong concept known as the Wisdom of Crowds. This concept suggests that large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant, and are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, and even predicting the future. While this appears to be very aligned with the Polymathic mindset, in application it misses the nuance of how this idea is grossly misapplied to our detriment. We’ll detail the concept, explain the limitations, and introduce other options to extract wisdom in a true Polymathic manner.
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Today's topic tackles the recent discussion around whether AI can be creative when it comes to art, writing, and other content creation. We’ll dig into what being creative really means, and how creative we really are. Throughout this essay, we’ll actually have a conversation with ChatGPT to discuss and test whether it can be creative.
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Today's topic is a collaboration with co-author Joshua Deiches, a fellow aspiring Polymath, and looks at our tradition of celebrating the New Year on January 1st in the Western World. What we uncover is a fantastic look at history as we chase the shifting of when the New Year actually occurred, why 11 days were removed in 1752, and the traditions that surround this holiday.
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Today's topic is holiday inspired and investigates the history behind Christmas, the fusion of traditions, who Santa is, how it ties into our culture, and what it all means for us throughout the year.
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Today's topic Builds on our first essay on the Keys to Innovation, Embrace the Divergents, which shares insights for inviting the divergents, pirates, and rebels to rethink the way we do innovation. The next step is probably the first toward actual change; you have to face the fear of change. We’ll investigate the basis of these fears and propose some opportunities to not only overcome the fear but leverage that concern into amazing innovation.
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Today's topic challenges the over simplified assumption that stereotyping is bad. In this exploration we look at what stereotypes are, how they are applied and misapplied, and how to leverage the strengths and avoid the pitfalls of this powerful social tool.
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Today's topic dives into crypto currency and blockchain in general to look at the positives and negatives of where these technologies can take us in the future. We’ll introduce blockchains, cryptocurrency, and blockchain analytics and then focus on what can happen when governments begin leveraging blockchains and some of the risks involved.
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Today's topic looks at climate science in an effort to contextualize what we are seeing from climate change within the larger realm of what we should be expecting. I’m not trying to be absolute or prescriptive. I’m just trying to investigate a topic that I feel has a lot of questions we are ignoring. Therefore, this essay will attempt to investigate the baseline of where we are measuring the change in climate from, against the larger historic record. I hope I can open up questions and discussion because I think we have a chance to identify brilliant and overlooked opportunities to advance both humanity and all life on this planet.
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Today's topic tackles my consistent frustrations with the Data Science community and how they apply machine learning algorithms and other tools to data without fully understanding the rest of the context. While this problem isn’t constrained to Data Science specifically, this discipline does lead the pack in examples. To understand this problem we’ll focus on three things that have been forgotten. The first thing forgotten is the history of where Data Science came from and the second two things forgotten derives from the first, and leads to the majority of the issues with applying Data Science solutions.
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Today's topic gets into something that is not only counterintuitive, but really frustrating for so many people. It’s the behaviors, over and over, that everyone says they don’t want, but keep doing, and keep getting rewarded for, while so many, who try to break the cycle, are penalized. It’s the paradox of the successfully unsuccessful.
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Today's topic delves into a favorite counter-intuitive concept: the benefits of lazy leadership. Buckle in and find out how industrious leaders are often not as successful to business results as we’d like to think!
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