2018 Wrap-Up

Like this time every year, the blogosphere for the past couple of days has been full of the ‘review of the year’ type posts. So instead of simply adding to the list, here’s a few random personal thoughts at the end of 2018:

1. Tech continues to both inspire and terrify…

As the year closes, it’s almost become a cliché to warn about how dangerous Facebook has become; the sensitive data that Google is hoovering up about every area of your life; the scary dystopian surveillance that has become normality in countries such as China; and the security breaches across pretty much every sector of the modern online world. And yet these issues not only continue to occur, in 2018 they have become far worse than ever before.

This year it seems like the cracks were starting to show above ground level for the first time and we’re collectively becoming more aware of the reality that lies beneath all of that sexy UX layered across apps and services. The challenge of finding out who you can trust is only becoming more acute.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a simple task to solve and one that will take a combination of technical expertise and collective will to change everyone’s behaviour. The best time for us to make these changes was a long time ago. The second best time is today.

2. Ankles are more important than you realise…

Running is my sport of choice – for fitness but also for the discipline and mental clarity that it provides that I’ve never found in any other pursuit. But this year was the first I’ve properly knackered myself doing it… I’ve been incredibly lucky to avoid bad injuries over the last 20 years or so but that all came to an end as I did my best impression of Kilian Journet running fast down some Highland Hills in June. Unfortunately it translated into something more akin to Madonna at the Brits…

Cue 3.5 months of minimal walking, intense physio, strong pain relief, more ice than Lake Baikal – and zero running. Needless to say, it wasn’t a great year for fitness… ticking over, but no improvements.

3. Rediscovering how much fun speaking can be…

I gave loads of talks this year at conferences and events – in Manchester University, Edinburgh Uni, Aberdeen Uni, Strathclyde Uni, Glasgow Uni (theme developing here…) to various meetups and the obvious standout, a talk in Maratea, Southern Italy at the Hero’s Festival (which wins the prize for the hottest place I’ve ever given a talk at by a very long way…). On top of that I’ve given about 6 or so podcast interviews (that I can remember) which has been a new experience, plus heading into the studios to speak on BBC Radio Scotland. Once again, I’m reminded just how amazing this crypto journey has been over the past 5 years or so in terms of the conversations that I’ve been part of and the fascinating people that I’ve met – initially whilst speaking Bitcoin and now with the focus on the SAFE Network.

However if I was to pick my two favourite talks they would be the inaugural address to the Adam Smith Gala in Glasgow (the second of two different talks I gave during one particularly busy Saturday) and the out-of-the-blue keynote I was asked to give at a local secondary school awards ceremony at short notice. All in all, huge amounts of work went into each and every one of these things (talks are probably the only area in life that I consistently overprepare for) but, almost without exception, they were hugely satisfying.

4. Reading still rules…

It was another huge year for reading. As with last year, this was my number one goal – bar none – and I consistently carved out time to work at learning more about all manner of things. I’m even more convinced than ever of the value that lies in paper books as opposed to electronic screens where Twitter or (worse) the news constantly lie temptingly within reach. I’ve uncovered vast new continents of undiscovered knowledge around topics I previously knew close to nothing about that I now can’t wait to return to. I finished 56 books this year (including a few c. 1,000 page monsters) – in a future post, I’ll summarise the cream of the crop on my opinion.

5. Goals and Targets

The other big thing for me this year using the BestSelf journal system. There’s plenty to it as it combines lots of different approaches to goal setting and planning. But in summary, it comes down to identifying three key major goals, working on a plan/review each day and then carrying out a weekly review of things. If you click on that link you can download the pdf without buying the book to give it a go. But in practice, there’s no doubt that it helped me do a number of things more effectively this year – writing, cooking, reading a minimum of 1 book a week and relearning the piano after 25+ years off, to name just a few. After using it for six months, there’s no doubt in my mind that the process is worth the effort.

If nothing else, if you haven’t taken any moves towards something that you class as a major goal in life, you end up reminding yourself at the end of every week that either (1) you’re delusional about how important it actually is to you or (2) you’re useless and wasting your time elsewhere. So you have to take action either way.

That’s it for the most immediate things I can remember learning in 2018. Let’s see what lessons 2019 brings!

Moore’s Law Is Just A Collective Goal

Whilst reading through Dan Wang’s Review of 2018 post, I was struck by the following point that he makes about Moore’s Law:

“Moore’s Law is not some natural law built into the fabric of the universe, designed to self-execute without a bit of engineering effort. Instead, it’s a massive industrial undertaking to push forward this technological frontier.”

“The semiconductor industry set a benchmark for improvement early on, one that seems kind of arbitrary today, and made a collective effort to execute against it. Semiconductor companies—the leaders of which are TSMC, Intel, and Samsung—adopted Moore’s Law as an industry goal. The rate of progress seems to have gotten slower and more expensive, but it’s remarkable that Moore’s Law has held up for decades.”

In other words, the fact that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 to 24 months is generally known. But it’s a norm that only exists because of a combination of a collective goal that focuses many people’s minds on a tough problem in order to achieve that outcome not only once but repeatedly over many years.

In other words, it’s an example of a story that binds and empowers a huge collective group of people of a similar interest to move forwards. In some sense, it’s similar in that way to a religion. Or a football team.

It’s part of the reason why negative self talk is so badly damaging. Stories matter.

“Never say anything about yourself that you don’t want to come true.”

(Brian Tracey)

Good Ideas in 2019

Edging closer to the start of another New Year, this tweet definitely resonates:


For me, options 1 and 3 are all about consumption, whilst 2 and 4 are creative.

The real trick here is to focus on doing the following:

1. Finding (and building relationships with) A+ people.

2. Focus (in both selection and perseverance) when it comes to books – with increased weight given to choosing books that are older, and therefore are more likely to have resonated/persisted with valuable insights that have stood the test of time.

3. Regularly cull your Twitter feed to ensure that you are continually reducing the noise and only following those who make you think.

4. Just more long runs. Simple.

Bitcoin in Venezuela

It’s been an interesting year for Bitcoin. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve come up to me during the last 12 months and made some kind of kind of half-sympathetic, half-condescending comment, along the lines of, “Well – looks like that Bitcoin bubble has finally burst doesn’t it?”

No. Not really.

Sure if you only got into Bitcoin this time last year because you expected it would be like some kind of Yazz song then it’s not been a joyful twelve months I suspect. But I hope that even they are by now starting to realise that the true value of cryptocurrency isn’t one that can be measured in dollars or sterling. Because for a vast number of people in many places around the globe, self-sovereignty – over your thoughts, beliefs, association and money – is priceless.

If there’s one thing that we’ve seen this year with Bitcoin – again, as with every single previous year – it’s that for many people it has a genuine use case.

A few, in fact.

Just take a look at Venezuela. Or indeed any of the many countries in which the economic freedoms of its citizens have been strangled (if they ever existed in the first place).

On top of that, just take a look at any chart which tracks the growth in direct Bitcoin transactions between individuals in Venezuela.

https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1078645280420122624?s=19

Start to dig into some of the real-life stories in these areas and seek out ways in which the technology, far from simply being yet another speculative asset, is actually filling a demand in a way that nothing else can.

It’s another urgent reminder that you should check that you read behind the popular well-known headlines in order to flush out the far more accurate stories of real life for many millions of people.

Pretty essential if you’re also needing to see through all the other nonsense that’s out there. So if you’re a pensioner in Venezuela whose monthly pension payment is now being paid out in the Petro rather than the Bolivar, the situation looks very grim indeed, as other more able younger members of society rush to escape the country as it bobs around increasingly erratically on the ocean, with a huge ragged hole torn through its hull far below the water line.

And that has very little to do with Bitcoin being a ‘perfect’ currency. It just needs to be available, unable to be stopped by the government and at least marginally better than the existing hyperinflationary disaster that exists in that country today.

Sandbox In Your Brain

No, it’s not a new track by They Might Be Giants…

As always, anytime Stripe CEO Patrick Collison gives an interview, it’s worth listening in – and the recent chat on the Tim Ferriss Show is no exception.

One of the ideas that I particularly liked from the discussion was the approach towards continually testing your opinions – in effect, running a sandbox (Virtual Machine) within which you can test out different ideas that conflict with your own, without feeling that your whole identity is in some way being challenged. Indeed, that’s often the sign of an intelligent thinker: someone who can really interrogate an opposing idea.

Perhaps it’s my legal training working in the background in my own (subconscious) operating system – but I’ve always been attracted to the idea of steelmanning another’s opposing viewpoint (as opposed to constructing the straw man argument, where you simply attack the weakest possible variation of an opponent’s belief).

As I’ve mentioned before, I try (not always successfully) to go for the position of strong views, weakly held.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:-

“[my advice is]……just to not get mad and to not get offended, in that outrage and offence and anger are – they’re sometimes useful, of course. But I think they’re less useful than – well, they’re over utilized. They’re not useful as often as they are invoked. And I think for whatever reason, the ability to not take offence and to inspect and to try to understand and even try to really extrapolate from an idea or a set of ideas or a worldview without taking offence at it, that’s not something that for whatever reason is really valued in our culture but I think is actually super important.”

“As has been said, can you run an idea in emulation in your head – in computers, people talk about it running VM’s [Virtual Machines]. Take AWS [Amazon Web Services]: You upload your software, your code. They run it on their servers, but they run it in emulation and in a little sandbox to make sure that it can’t break out and affect other users’ applications.”

“And so similarly, can you run an idea and scrutinise it and inspect it and follow its consequences without it bleeding out into the rest of your brain and infecting your whole worldview?”

“And I think the ability to do that without getting angry or taking offence is really super powerful because if you can do that, you can then afford to – in a way, you can be less careful about what ideas you inspect and scrutinise. And so you can just – you can be much more far-reaching and broadly ranging.”

Become A More Effective Doctor

Thought for the day.

Evidence shows that the average doctor working in a rich Western country will save, on average, around 10 people’s lives during the course of a full medical career.

At the same time, there are a number of options open for any individual to spend a relatively small sum of money in order to pretty much guarantee that in doing so, a life would be saved. Now repeat that every year for 40 years.

If you adopt the viewpoint that you should always be seeking the greater good of society as a whole, which route makes the most sense? Be a doctor – or a small-time philanthropist?

And finally, before you do so, taking that to its logical conclusion – does it then matter where that money comes from (if its going to be used to save lives) ?

Try reading through some points of view that challenge your own. I’d recommend checking out this post by 80,000 hours (‘Is It Ever Okay To Take A Harmful Job In Order to Do More Good?’)

Should You Go To More Parties?

tl;dr if you want to change your life, the answer’s yes

We’ve all been there: the wedding receptions, office Christmas bashes and flat warmings where something happens that generates the stories that you’ll tell for the rest of your life. But why is that? Surely it’s not all down to the powers of alcohol?

I’ve been reading a paper today (h/t Marginal Revolution) by Alice Goffman called ‘Go to More Parties? Social Occasions as Home to Unexpected Turning Points in Life Trajectories’ (link / paywall). It posits that ‘social occasions hold an outsized potentially to unexpectantly shift the course that real life takes‘.

The type of social occasion here broadly covers anything that doesn’t comprise mundane daily work (sitting in an office, washing your clothes etc). There is often an affinity of sorts amongst those at the gathering. What’s more:

“By bringing together people who matter to one another more than strangers on the street, social occasions amplify our general concern to present ourselves well”.

And this leads to activities that are neither consequential with certain outcomes (an email you must reply to) or inconsequential with uncertain outcomes (playing a game on your mobile phone) but fateful – in other words both indeterminate and consequential.

These might be meeting a future spouse, deciding that you’ll tell your work colleagues what you really think of them or committing publicly to a decision from which you can’t retreat.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that these often happen amongst the heightened buzz of a social gathering. But it’s the five categories behind why this is the case that  I found particularly interesting.

1/ You enter a different world – you’re surrounded by people you may not know at all well (wedding guests or a work event with colleagues from across different parts of the business). For evidence that it isn’t normal life, think of the amount of time it takes to prepare for some people (makeup, tidying, decorations).

“The frequency with which particular people meet for a social occasion is inversely proportionate to its fatefulness. The more an occasion brings together people who do not usually meet, the more likely it is to house events that unexpectedly shift people’s bonds, habits, thoughts and plans.”

2/ Events bring unique emotional energy – the paper talks about ’emotional effervescence’, a unique feeling that is created by a mixture of having people face to face, focused on the same thing (stag, wedding, birthday party etc), having barriers to prevent outsiders joining (invitations) and a shared mood (celebration, mourning etc). The energy might be crackling – but such environments can bring vicious repercussions for those who are viewed as having failed to make the grade (flirtations, bullying).

3/ Social occasions force you to publicly rank others – choosing who sits where, chats with whom or even who gets invited in the first place, shows clear decisions made by others. They can strengthen, weaken or plain insult others in a heightened atmosphere. And on occasion, trigger that life-changing decision.

4/ Set the stage for complex public choreography – who speaks to whom, about what, and as the stakes rise between people who don’t know each other well, how significant is it when you fall short? Think: choosing inappropriate topics for specific people, getting a knock-back when asking someone to dance.

5/ Set the stage for starting those chain reactions in life – we’ve all heard the stories of couples who met because they just happened to be sitting next to each other at a gathering. It will of course depend on your circumstances and stage in life but the heightened sense of occasion often bears outsized potential for unexpectedly shifting the course that real life takes.

Plenty to think about there – and it’s worth reading through the paper if you are interested.

“A rich variety of phenomena – the development of weak and strong ties… embarrassment… fortuitous encounters… the emergence of religious identity and belief… meeting one’s future spouse… activation of job networks… building up or draining of emotional energy… peer pressure… acts of acute disrespect… critical consciousness… binge drinking… sexual assault… become more meaningful by considering social occasions because social occasions are where they happen. It is here inside the electric, intense connected energy of occasions that people make new friends, heal old wounds, hatch plans and cross the line.”

“…Social occasions represent a pocket of fatefulness in everyday life, a form of experience more hospitable to bringing about some unanticipated change than many other things people do throughout the day”.

“Thus, a single hour spent in high school biology class, which happens every day with the same group of people and typically produces quite low levels of collective effervescence, is unlikely to be fateful for the students attending. That same hour spent at a best friend’s wedding brings a far greater chance of shifting a person’s course.”

 

Lords of our Tiny Skull-Sized Kingdoms

Back in 2005, American writer David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech to a graduating class. The talk has become known as ‘This is Water‘ and has influenced many over the years.

It’s a powerful piece of work that, by virtue of being very different to the standard run-of-the-mill commencement speeches regurgitated at the culmination of academic award season, stands alone. Its impact is somehow even more poignant given the sad fact that Wallace took his own life some three years later, after a relatively short career which involved writing one of Time Magazine’s Best 100 Novels of the twentieth century (‘Infinite Jest‘).

You can check out the full transcript of the speech here. And there have been many articles over the years highlighting just how impactful the speech was. Please do check them out if you’re seeking a more erudite assessment. But for my own purposes, I’d summarise the key points as follows:-

Education is about learning how to think – not about the knowledge itself.

That journey will depend on the context we each bring to the task – so it’s very different for every single human.

Learning how to think is learning how to be less dogmatic. Realising that you can be – and will be – wrong (particularly on the things that you are most certain about).

We are self-centred by default: “lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms”. But it is crucial to break out of this comfortable prison – because that illusion of comfort will slowly suffocate you if you do not.

You must always decide how to deal with the frustrating, monotonous, boring times in which you struggle in your life –  by understanding that others have their own stories. It’s similar to Stephen Covey’s ‘Man on the Subway‘, ‘everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about’, ‘do not judge my story by the chapter you walked in on’ etc.)

This has to be a choice: it cannot happen by itself. And whether you are aware of it or not, it is up to you alone to decide what has meaning in life and what doesn’t…

…and whatever has meaning, you will worship – in the sense that you will subconsciously crave and seek it out). So make it far more than simply money or possessions.

The most worrying part: the world will not stop you from seeking those material things – because most of the world isn’t learning, doesn’t think and so mistakenly stays focused on such insubstantial outcomes by default.

So never stop learning. Every. Single. Day. Because only by learning, can you be the fish that not only notices its environment – but is able to choose how to respond. And what to do – not just for yourself, but for others.

This……is water.

 

 

Earthrise, The Most Exciting Christmas Eve In History

Tomorrow night is Christmas Eve. But it’s also the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most exciting events in human history – when the three astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission travelled round the Moon.

These days, we tend to forget just how huge this event was. Like most of the US space programme in the 1960’s, it was carried out in a rush caused by the prevailing fear that the Russians were gaining ground in the space race and about to launch the first manned moon landing attempt.

If like me you weren’t around at the time, there were a couple of pivotal moments that it’s worth reliving.

The first was the loss of radio signal when they travelled to the far side of the moon for the very first time. For a vivid sense of the very real drama that took place during that 45 minutes of total uncertainty and silence – would the craft survive the moon’s gravitational pull? would the pocket-calculator capacity of the onboard computer fail under the conditions? would the astronauts suffer unknown effects from the journey that rendered them incapable? – you should take a listen to Public Service Broadcasting‘ phenomenal ‘The Other Side’ which contains the audio from the day:-

The second event left an even more indelible mark across the collective human psyche: the first ever Earthrise viewed from another world.

It’s one of the most famous photographs in the world. The impact of that photograph showing earthrise across the lunar surface was seismic: for the three astronauts who witnessed it firsthand, it was life-changing. But the impact felt by the rest of the species back on earth was greater. Because for the first time, it became all too clear just how small and fragile our colourful planet was, and how no barriers of race or belief could ever be visible from the orbit of another world. Out of that one photograph and a global television audience that watched the events of Christmas Eve in 1968 came the birth of the modern environmental movement.

But even more powerful is the thought (captured in this article) is that it is only in the act of leaving that you can only ever truly see the world in which you’re living. Perhaps for some, that’s The Matrix. For others, it’s hallucinogens. But TS Eliot really did say it best:

‘We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.’

Digital Patronage

I’ve previously written about the growing popularity of podcasting but one thing missing from that post was how these ventures are being funded.

The Kickstarter model has always interested me, particularly back in the earlier days when Amanda Palmer raised $1.2 million from fans to record her ‘Theatre Is Evil’ album.

Times have changed greatly from 2012 but the challenge still remains when it comes to funding artistic pursuits. In the Renaissance period, creative types relied on the patronage of wealthy patrons. Many of the most memorable pieces of art simply couldn’t have been carried out without that support. In theory, both sides would benefit from the transaction: whilst the artist was building the breathing space within which to create, the powerful patron enjoyed basking in the reflected glory. However, the process often caused tensions between the parties in practice: one was focused on the process of creation, the other on the end result.

But whilst patronage was the vital lifeblood of significant creative pursuits for many years, The Economist points out that we should be careful to account for the inevitable survivor bias when assessing how successful the model was. After all, not all money funded works of genius – there must have been plenty of cash wasted on artists and their works that sank without a trace.

So how is this relevant today? Because the nature of patronage has evolved.

“Writing in the 18th century, Edmund Burke described patronage as “the tribute that opulence owes to genius”. Today it is the spare change millennials pay podcasters.”

Today, a site like Patreon sees over 100,000 people being supported by nearly 3 million people. Instead of patronage being one-to-many, support now comes in the form of many-to-one. Carving out a source of funding that can support your creative pursuits is now very much a possibility for those with a following.

So for example, Amanda Palmer was unsurprisingly one of the earlier artists to move onto Patron. Many just starting out will not have that choice. But for those that do, it seems like a far more powerful alternative than simply throwing themselves on the vagaries of the algorithms on Google/YouTube.

Is it fair to say then that this is a brave new world opening up? One without middlemen, agents, distributors and the like taking the cut for the discovery and distribution of creative digital goods?

Not so fast.

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/1074504882210562048

But that’s a discussion for another day…