Issue 46: Inner Rings, Business Moats, Temporal Discounting and Berlin.
A few things I’ve learned over this year/decade(?) that we’ve just experienced:
Never underestimate the capacity of people to…(fill in the action, good or evil).
We, our society, have collectively lost our capacity to to take or handle uncomfortable feedback.
Our systems are complex but we, collectively, mistook them for just merely complicated.
Our capacity to discount the long term benefits of our present day actions will be our undoing.
We are all, almost at the same time, coming to the realization of how little is within our individual control.
Sometimes, money is actually the solution.
The US is the home of temporal discounting. And we the people are participants and victims at the same time.
According to Michel, the wisdom of crowds, in this America that we live in, is a fallacy.
This issue is free, my attempt at spreading some holiday cheer (so please share!). There’ll most likely be another Polymathic Monthly before the end of the year as I reading 3 fascinating books in various stages of completion.
Merry Christmas and I hope you get some time off to read. Enjoy.
There are advantages to business moats. Even as a small company that isn’t planning to take over the world, there’s nothing wrong with looking at your business from a standpoint of ‘what makes it impossible or extremely difficult for someone else to do what I do like I do it and take me out of business’. Florentine Rivello reviews 7 Powers and shares the most important moats.
Two words we’ve all expressed at many points in 2020. For different reasons. Dios Mio.
The more work I do with towns/cities, the more I realize that nothing is ever as it seems with this organic creature that we call towns/cities. And most of us truly don’t know why our towns/cities don’t have money. We think we do. But we don’t. Pair this with ‘Strong Towns’ in books.
I shared this article about D’Angelo’s ‘Voodoo’ before and I’m still finding fascinating sections. Like ‘Whereas digital is like a copy of the signal, tape is the purest form you're going to hear music in: The signal is recorded onto a part of the tape and it's physically there”. With Voodoo, when you listen, you physically feel that the music is there.
I still maintain, like this article on the future of retail in America post-COVID19, that “like a fire that razes a forest ‘New things grow that couldn’t have before the fire changed the landscape.’
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside... To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colors. The Inner Ring” was the Memorial Lecture given by CS Lewis at King’s College, University of London, in 1944. It’s a speech that so many of us would do well to read and chew on, today.
‘‘Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do something significant.’ In ‘You and Your Research’, Richard Hamming offers that ‘The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest.’
Leaders at Instagram have called TikTok the most formidable competitor they’ve had. And while that might be Facebook trying to drum up news that will help tamp down the antitrust suits it faces, TikTok has had its coming out during the pandemic. Eugene Wei, in ‘TikTok and the Sorting Hat (longread)’, dives into the underlying thinking that’s made this app the most copied and most feared by all the other major tech companies. I’m particularly fascinated by the way TikTok handles developing your interest graph through AI, instead of the self-selection based input approach most other apps require.
Backstage Capital has been arguably been THE most impactful venture fund focused on ensuring underserved startup founders get the funding they need for their startups. And the fund has receipts to show for its work too (PDF).
When two thirds of a community has warrants has arrests out for their arrest, categorized as criminals, and if we believe that all humans have value, then the system itself has to be questioned.
I still enjoy washing dishes by hand. And Michel had a hypothesis for why. Turns out her hypotheses is a theory as ‘Undemanding tasks—easy enough to require little attention, but hard enough to prevent conscious work on a problem—can free a mind to wander and solve a problem creatively’ and it is the same reason why play is so important. But the effect is only beneficial in certain circumstances.
Books
I picked up the graphic novel Berlin (by Jason Lutes) without seeing a review and with no sense for what it was about. In a crazy way though, I knew what it was about. And, as I read through the pages, I could feel the sense of the dueling emotions of social decline and hope for a better future that you and I are feeling right now evident in every page of this story about interwoven lives in Koln Germany of the 1920’s/30’s. The story is both weighty, as the topic deserves, and also light, without diminishing the gravity of the subject being covered. A read for the times.
Even though the title of the book is The Death of Vivek Oji, what is celebrated is their life. Even though you know what has happened to Vivek Oji, Akwaeki Amezi (They/Them) still manages to surprise you with the telling of a story that is both sad and joyful. Like the best books, this one packs a lot in while leaving a lot for your imagination to fill in. And your imagination will keep filling in even after you’ve turned the final page.
Less a book and more a reference document (and I mean that in a good way), The 99% Invisible City: A field guide to the hidden world of everyday design, is the culmination of all the amazing stories and research that Roman Mars (and Kurt Kohlstedt) share on the fantastic ’99% Invisible’ podcast. While the podcast is one of my favorite, and has been for a while now, the book’s ambition is its failing. What makes 99% Invisible fantastic is the depth the creators go to extract the essence of things we take for granted, the pony express/US mail system episode being a great example. Where the book falls short is that it fails to do the same. Despite this, the field guide - from towers to egresses to stravenues - is a perfect gift for the curious people in your life.
If you were suspicious of how much surveilling your smart home devices already do, your paranoia will be heightened by Little Eyes, by Samanta Schweblin. But this book is less about the technology and more about our insecurities, worries, aspirations and demons. But technology augments, so what do we really expect from our toys? Quick, incomplete and unnerving read.
One of the final frontiers of personal data harvesting is voice. Amazon, google and Facebook have all tried with their smart home devices and succeeded to a certain extent. Clubhouse, the new ‘it’ social media network is definitely using the social network playbook to harvest that frontier for advertising purposes. And if you don’t believe that is the business model, please read The Attention Merchants and Master Switch by Tim Wu.
While ‘Strong Towns’ borrows a lot from New Urbanism, in the form of a shared philosophy against urban sprawl, the main premise of Charles Marohn Jr’s book is a belief that growth should be small and organic even if a city eventually grows to be big. While New Urbanism has shaped public policy - zoning, codes, greenfields - and government programs over the last ~20 years, and every week was infrastructure week for the last few years, it is time to get back to building local and human-centered communities.
Enjoy the holidays and thanks so much for letting me share with you…
Seyi
Nov 2020