Few days back, someone I follow on Curius had added link of this video on their Curius profile:

This reminded me of the principle described by John Gall:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.¹

If you think about it, you see it everywhere, from evolution of life, to all the technological progress, to the idea behind MVP.

But the thing is that we live in times where technology has gotten so sophisticated that it is becoming harder and harder for us to imagine about simpler technology that works.

Feynman had narrated an example of it about how when he was a kid, they used to open up radios and you could see all the component parts. Basically, when you opened up devices at that time, what you got was a diagram of how that thing worked, but as technology evolved further, it became more and more opaque, and you no longer got that diagram when you opened something up.

But the underlying working principles haven’t changed much. We probably have uncovered more of physics in last 50 years. But the kind of physics needed to build or understand most of elementary things, is not really new; only its implementations have become more sophisticated.

And I don’t intend to say that that sophistication is inherently bad. The technology was bound to get more sophisticated. There was no other way. What I am pointing out is that from the technologies we see around us, we now have a longer route to re-trace to get back to first principles.

Similarly, we look at computer systems and software, and it’s so daunting. Like, just look at the graphics of any modern video game. And it seems unimaginable how humans can program something like that. But that’s because we have forgotten that we once used to play Prince of Persia, Mario, Pac-Man, Tetris and the like.

We look at people accomplished in certain areas, say, for example, writers, and think the same. And fail to realize that it’s not like a person, one day, randomly decides to write something, and comes up with something like Macbeth². I’m not saying that one can’t one day randomly decide to do something he hasn’t done before and still come up with good results. I think quite the opposite: if someone’s the right kind of person for the job, he is highly likely to come up with good results in his early attempts, provided that he starts with a simple version. A writer doesn’t need to come up with a very sophisticated insight, or a scientist a complicated discovery, or an engineer with a complex invention, in early iterations, he only needs to come up with something that works³.

Now, this seems to be gravitating to very cliché ideas, and so let me turn this around.

Even though all complex systems that work evolve from simpler systems that also worked, starting from a simple system that works, does not guarantee in itself that it will also evolve into a complex system or that it will continue working if it evolves.

What makes a simple system evolve into a complex system that still keeps working is a strong feedback loop.

Those systems that don’t have a very strong feedback loop to guide their evolution, will either have to slow down (stop evolving) if they have to stay working, or will fail at some point if they keep iterating further on whims without any feedback loop to guide them.

A strong feedback loop is one that is strong and both of its ends, i.e., it is (i) highly perceptive at the sensory end, and (ii) it’s highly precise and moderately⁴ fast in it’s execution.

I think systems get more and more risk averse as they increase in complexity, and that is why most of them stop evolving, and hence we end up at local maxima, never seeing the light of what a global maximum looks like.

1. This is popularly known as Gall’s law.
   Source: John Gall (1975) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail p. 71 ↩︎
2. I haven’t read Macbeth and don’t really know what’s so great about it, and thus, I shouldn’t probably use this example, but I can’t think of any for now, so I am just assuming that if mathematicians use a literary work as an example benchmark in their theories, it must be good enough. ↩︎
3. I had earlier written “come up with something useful” but the usefulness is context-dependent and the term works in itself contains the context. For instance, if someone is writing something funny to amuse someone, and it actually amuses them, then it works whether or not anyone thinks it useful. ↩︎
4. I say moderately fast because there seems to be a tradeoff between preciseness and speed of execution. ↩︎

Most people run on defaults.

In computer or mobile, there are a lot of settings you can tinker with, so that you can get from your device what you want out of it. When you get a new device or install a new Operating System, there are settings that are already set there. Such settings are called the device’s defaults.

Just like there are device’s defaults, there are life’s defaults. Let us derive some points from the analogy.

The reason there is an option to tinker with settings, is so that the user of device can make the device fit them. However, most people do not go tinker with the settings UNTILL they encounter a problem that bugs them a lot. Only then will they look on how to fix that specific problem or ask a geeky person to fix it.

The point to notice, is that the user will have the device’s settings tinkered only for things that bugs him a lot. But there would be a dozen other options in the settings that also could have made that person’s experience with his device significantly better, but he didn’t even know about them, and hence he did not change them. [Post under editing]

——–

He didn’t know that he shouldn’t think of devices as given, he should think of them as invented, something made, something designed, by someone. The devices are a product of someone’s intention of making them. The particular way that device behaves is because someone decided to make it behave that way. If the device works that is because someone did put intention into it¹.

But the point here is not merely that everything you see is a product of someone’s intention, but it is that someone else’s intention can’t make things any better for you beyond a limited extent. The ideal thing human beings can do for others is to make things with better defaults and providing a way to change them, but they can’t make things work for you, unless you put your own intention into making something work for you, and unless you make your own decision of what you want to get out of that thing.

So, default² is the situation that exists without the intention of the person to whom that situation concerns. And when there is no intention involved of the person about any particular thing that concerns them, that particular thing usually does not fit them. In this essay I’m not worried about the defaults of the devices people use, but about the defaults of lives that people live.

---

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

—John Stuart Mill

---

The idea of having a life that fits you is very well described by Henrik Karlsson in his essay titled Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process, that you should read further to understand that aspect. An excerpt:

“Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.”

“When you design something, a useful definition of success is precisely that—the form fits the context—as Christopher Alexander argued in Notes on a Synthesis of Form (1964). This is true of relationships, and essays, and careers: you want to find something that fits.

• A glove is well-designed if it fits the hand nicely.
• A relationship is healthy if it fits the personalities and needs of the people involved (and the resonance between them).
• An essay is good if it fits a context made up of 1) the truth, 2) the intellectual needs of the writer, and 3) the reader’s mind. The better the form fits that context—the truer, more insight-generating, and resonant it is—the better the essay.”

And so when I say, most people run on defaults, that means they do not put intention into what they do, and hence let different aspects of their lives to develop in a way that does not fit them. And when they don’t intentionally work to develop their lives a form that fits their inner context, they are essentially trimming their their inner context by forcing it to fit whatever form is developed by defaults.

Many people run their lives on default³ and a telltale sign is that such people seem to have problems in some important aspect of their lives that are solvable (and still remain unsolved)—problems that do not involve any real tradeoff, or, opportunity cost, except, for the effort one has to put into resisting the inertia of defaults.

So, that is the problem of default. The way we solve this problem is by keep asking ourselves questions (about why we are doing things we are doing, and the things we ought to be doing, why we are doing them in the certain way we are doing them), and by deciding to do whatever we do with intention, and then using that intention to work on developing a life that fits.

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/unfolding

1. Sometimes, devices do come out even with not much intention put into them. These are what make up the crappy devices. ↩︎
2. As the word default is very common for device settings (or device behavior), the closest word to that for human behavior is norms. But when people think of norms, they usually think of culture…, and religion…, and, our beliefs…, and grand and abstract things like that. Of course, these things are sources for defaults, but it is a very limited view of the defaults for humans, because there is a whole lot of things that you wouldn’t think of, when you’d think of culture or religion or social norms, etc., that too are defaults. ↩︎
3. The thing about defaults is that they are not so easily noticeable because the defaults in different social-circles vary, just like the defaults of different operating systems vary. People might even look down on defaults of another circle while themselves running on defaults, just different ones. And this makes it tricky because some defaults are apparently better than others. There was a certain period in my university-time, when I used to think that the things are so better in certain private universities (as I was in a very inexpensive and unfancy public university), students there take much more interest in learning different things and doing different things, and so on. Only after observing and interacting with students and graduates of those institutions for some time, I came to realize that earlier I wasn’t looking closely, and hence missing a very important about people at these places. It was that they belonged to a place with different (and apparently better) defaults, but they too were running on defaults, and NOT doing whatever apparently interesting things they were doing, with intention.
   
   Defaults do not necessarily mean stasis, and just because someone is not static and constantly doing something, does not mean they are not running on defaults. The defaults are like inertia of an object in motion. Or like streams with heavy flow of water. Different places have different streams (or defaults) running in different directions, with different speed. And the thing to do, is not to jump from one stream to another, or to try to swim upstream, but to get out of the stream. ↩︎

 I have just come from a long conversation with two university friends. On Thursday, I also had a very long conversation with another like-minded person. All of us are males in our 20s. And there was one direction in which both conversations flowed towards naturally.

When we look at our environment, we see things being operated at bureaucracy mode, i.e. keep the thing running, quality of output is not a concern. Our academia is running at bureaucracy mode. Our corporations are running at bureaucracy mode. Our government is running at bureaucracy mode. This mode of keeping the things running as they are, requires that affairs be operated by people who are submissive to the existing processes and resistant to new ideas, i.e. people who switch off their brain. Academia is exactly producing such people, and is very good at this job.

The result of this situation is that we live among people who have long switched off their brain, or at-least the part of brain that thinks new thoughts. The society may apparently continue to function this way, but not for long. Because the most dangerous effect of it is that people who do not think have no principles to stand by. Whenever they’ll have a hard decision to make, they will take out their moral compass, look at it, and act upon it, without ever realizing that it’s being influenced by the dominant magnetic field of their bureaucracy. The days of such a society are numbered.

The realization of this situation is very depressing. But this is what we see when we look around us. Naturally, a thinking person thinks of academia as the part where the process starts and so he thinks of attacking it first. But he realizes that among this chain of academia, corporation, and governments, academia is the longest surviving institution. Although government bureaucratic structures stays same, at-least the political process on the surface level keeps changing names with the electoral process. Some new corporations do emerge, and some do die out. But, academia, if you think about it, is the longest-held monopoly on a system. How do universities or educational systems die out? They just don’t. And it’s not because they adapt with the changing world so rapidly and so well that they never die, but it’s because by design their simply is no mechanism for them to die. Or at-least we don’t have a mechanism to declare them dead and build something new.

So attacking academia seems futile. It can’t be changed.

So next comes corporations. The way you fight with corporations is by competing with them in business with a different mode of operation, an example of which is startups. This smaller, faster, and innovation-based mode of business operation will be able to outcompete corporations in all areas where free market exists. Now, there are two bottlenecks in spread of this newer business model, I don’t know which one is narrower, but eventually one will become a problem when the other is fixed.

Digital space by nature was a new area less governed by governments, and that is why startups have naturally sprung up there and flourished. But in physical space, government bureaucracy is still halting the flourishing of startups. In competing against the governmental friction, startups either burn out and fail, or if they do survive, they do so by eventually picking up the same weapons, and becoming a corporation. For innovation-based businesses to win in physical space, government bureaucracy must be fought and defeated.

The second bottleneck in prevalence of this newer business model is that given this academic system that enables sucking away of smart people by corporations and government bureaucracy, where will the smart people to start start-ups come from?

And maybe this is also linked to the problem of fighting government. How can it be changed if the masses of people and government are aligned in this principle of only keeping things running without doing anything new? We need people who do not believe in this principle and thus don’t want to be governed by a government who believes in this principle. Who will be these people?

My answer is: our children.

If thousands of years of evolution and survival of fittest, has given rise to human beings who have conquered the skies, moved mountains, and built thinking-machines, it is not an unsafe bet to claim that people who welcome change have higher odds of surviving than people who don’t. The way things survive is by evolving, not remaining static. So if my chain of reasoning is not flawed, we have to remain steadfast on our path, and create small pockets of environments where our children develop the same principles of nature, and the future is in safe hands.

I also believe in human will and autonomy, and I do believe a lot of people raised in the change-resisting institutions will also develop their own thinking and start challenging that mode of operation, but still, that is something we can’t fully rely on, unless we also think of producing a progeny that lives by principles of nature i.e. of change.

But, our children won’t develop these principles by default in the currently existing environment created by bureaucracies. It will take a conscious and sustained effort on our part to create small pockets of environments that allows our children to develop the strength to withstand the downsliding and to overcome the inertia.

Technology is an amplifying media. All things decay in stasis. Brain rotting through huge consumption of addictive content is simply an amplified or sped up version of natural rotting of a static mind. Similar technology also amplifies the learning process of a young mind by accelerating the process of their natural explorations.

A car can be harmful in two ways. 1) it is standing on a steep hill by default, and it starts moving downhill if you don’t take any action. 2) the car is on a level road but if you wildly keep accelerating, it goes out of control and causes an accident.

This is the technology our children will gain access to when they are born, and they would have to be taught how to drive it safely, and then we’ll have to let them explore. I’m not just talking about cars. I’m talking about technology.

So, we have established technology is not our enemy. Our enemy is defaults. Our children find themselves in a car which is sliding downhill, and the children have no idea the danger they are in. Academia is not going to solve it. Corporations are not going to solve it. Governments are not going to solve it.

But this is not an unsolvable problem. It just requires conscious sustained effort on our part.

So, summarizing my chain of thought, without people who can think for themselves, we will never have people who can stand by their principles, and a society where people don’t stand by their principles will inevitably be led to conflicts and disharmony, and such a society won’t survive for long. There are three forms of bureaucracies, that are leading production of people who can’t think for themselves : 1) Academia, 2) Corporations, 3) Governments. All these three forms of bureaucracies, by their design, resist change and innovation. The way to fight with them is to 1) create or work in smaller and innovation-friendly modes of businesses such as startups that outcompete corporations, and 2) take learning of our children in our own hands instead of academia, and give them an environment that allows them to develop their own thinking and follow their natural curiosities, so that we produce a progeny that can think for their own, and thus by mechanism of natural selection, allow prevalence of people who will build better systems for learning and keeping societal order than the ones we have now.

[That is where my chain of thought has went to, uptill now. The first part about choosing modes of creating economic value other than corporations is something I hadn’t thought of in this framework before I started writing this. So, I have yet to contemplate further on that part. The reason I had started writing this was because in the second part of solution, I had gotten stuck at a point, the explanation of which I will do in a separate piece, as the preface or description of the context has grown larger than I had expected, and this preface is I believe a more important piece, and the problem I had in my mind was only a specific sub-problem within the context, so it should be described separately. I will link the next post here.]

There’s a pattern that I have noticed so many times, that if someone asks me what’s the most fundamental thing I have figured out myself, I would tell this.

Most of human behavior is stuck in re-enforcement cycle. People model human behavior based on their observation and then build systems based on those models, and those systems end up influencing how humans behave, without the initial observers realizing that the behavior they observed initially was itself influenced by the previous systems (or environment) those people were living in. A lot of man-made systems work not because they were based upon models of human behavior that were fundamentally true, rather because these systems can shape human behavior to fit accordingly. These systems are self-fulfilling prophecies. In other words, if people have a collective belief about human behavior, that belief will become true, because everyone would behave as if it was true, in result prompting people to behave that way even if they originally wouldn’t.

I first noticed this phenomenon while studying economics where it was assumed that work is a “bad” — something that people dislike in itself but do so because it earns them something (income in this case) that they like by a greater degree. This assumption was irritating for me because the kind of people I admired were all those who loved their work, and so I objected on this assumption. I was told that there are certainly exceptions but this is what explains the behavior of most people. They were right about that, but what they got wrong was that they built whole economic theories on this assumption without ever questioning whether work is fundamentally a “bad” or whether most people do a primary work that they dislike because it’s the system-default and they never put much thoughts or efforts into finding an alternative ¹. This belief probably wouldn’t have caused any problem if only a few individuals believed it, but when everybody believes that work is a necessary evil for earning bread, you see rise of what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs — meaningless jobs that only support other meaningless jobs where people are doing useless busywork thinking they are doing real work.

But it was soon enough that I started noticing this pattern at other places. Money is just whatever people believe will be accepted as a medium of exchange. In financial markets, an asset will become “valuable” if a lot of people believe it is valuable. If people expect inflation to happen, it will happen.

Beyond economics, consider how we raise our children. Most people believe children are dumb. Even if people don’t say it out loud, they treat them this way, including their own parents ². Schools are designed on the same premise that children are stupid and very slow-progressing. Unsurprisingly, a lot of children do end up being stupid and slow-progressing, because that’s how schools handle them. Now, I am presenting this phenomenon it in the right order, otherwise someone’s first observation would be that children are stupid and slow-progressing, and then will see schools designed on the same premise and will be satisfied that schools are well-designed for society’s needs ³.

A rather unexpected case of this phenomenon was something I realized relatively recently while watching an Adam Curtis documentary. The reason sexuality more influentially shapes people’s lives in US than in countries like Pakistan is because Edward Bernays — nephew of Sigmund Freud — had employed Freud’s sexuality-centered psychology theories in shaping public perception in US on a massive level during his work for big corporations and the government. Freud is a leading figure in psychology probably not because his theories were fundamentally true but because some people in power believed they were true and built systems based on his theories that influenced human behavior, thus turning them true as a consequence.

Coming back to the main idea of how these systems and beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies. I was talking about this phenomenon in the parenting context with someone when this idea connected with another thought that I was thinking independently but was related to the same idea.

This self-fulfilling pattern not only applies to beliefs of groups of people in authority ⁴, but also to beliefs one individually holds.

A lot of beliefs are such that they would be true if you believe them to be true and would be false if you believe them to be false. A simple example is that if you think a university degree is important for good livelihood, university degree will most likely end up being important for your livelihood because you won’t spend time doing things that could improve your livelihood more than your university degree. Same case applies if you replace university degree with skills, connections, or your zodiac sign.

Another example is one’s perception of being blessed or miserable. If someone thinks their life is miserable, it is miserable regardless of how good it is by objective measures, because one’s standards of living don’t matter if one doesn’t feel content with their life. Blessedness is only real if perceived.

Similarly, people who think that they could become exponentially better in something if they put in the required time and effort, are the only ones who actually end being seriously good in that thing ⁵ because others never risk investing that much time and effort ⁶.

Now, the apparent conclusion from noticing this pattern might be that perception and beliefs are all that matter, and we should thus shift all our focus on shaping these beliefs.

But this is incomplete thinking. Focusing on just beliefs works only if there is no fundamental truth about reality. And if there is no fundamental truth about reality, why do financial bubbles burst, and markets take correction? Why do societies fall after their glorious rise? Why do homeschooled kids outperform schooled kids? Why do some people get to spend most of their lives doing what they love while others spend most of their lives doing what they hate? Why do people who believe true understanding of things is better than hacking for exams end up feeling better about what they do in lives and vice versa for those who think otherwise?

The simple answer is that there exists a fundamental truth, but it will benefit you only if you believe it to be true. On the other hand, if you believe what’s not fundamentally true, you might still feel that your beliefs are true without ever realizing you could have done so better if only you believed in what was fundamentally true.

1. It might be that at a certain point in history that for most people, there were no alternatives to working in agriculture or similar occupations even if they disliked it because technology wasn’t advanced enough and reaching production levels necessary for survival needed putting in a lot more amount of work in certain areas regardless of whether people liked them or not. But with technological progress, this certainly ceased to be the case, but the default systems persisted and people continued to believe that working on things they don’t find interesting is necessary for survival. ↩︎
2. I theorize that the reason kids continue doing baby-ish activities these days is because parents like the baby version of their children and thus do not train their kids to act mature and take responsibility for things — but this is probably a discussion for another essay. ↩︎
3. Fourteen-year old Aaron Swartz had figured out the absurdity of how children were treated and you could feel his resentment in his essay explaining it. ↩︎
4. For most part of history, these group of people were those who held power, because they directed the flow of information. But with tools of mass spread of information, this can now be individuals with otherwise no power who somehow happen to gain mimetic virality. ↩︎
5. Visa’s examples of serious people are also an example of this. ↩︎
6. An exception for this is when individuals are so absorbed in that thing that they don’t even bother thinking about how good they can be at it or the consequences of them failing to be good at it. They simply don’t care about the secondary things at all. ↩︎