I’m on the last book of the Long Earth Series, The Long Cosmos and reading it makes me sad and wistful.
Perhaps it’s knowing that Terry Pratchett didn’t live to see it published, perhaps it’s the little hints and hooks of Discworld.
Whatever it is, there are parts of the book where I laugh out loud, like when Sancho calls himself “The Librarian” and then I’m plunged into soft sadness.
I’m about half way through the book, I’m sure it will end well.
“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel,” [efn_note]Hong Kong of the Desert[/efn_note]
So goes the old Middle East proverb about the rise and fall of Dubai’s prosperity. The world is going through a similar cycle of prosperity in the context of accessing accurate information. However, with worsening search results [efn_note] Research: Is Google Getting Worse? | Media article:Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse [/efn_note], and alternatives like ChatGPT that are designed to make stuff up [efn_note]ChatGPT and other AI chatbots will never stop making stuff up, experts warn [/efn_note], we might enter a phase where a majority of the people don’t have access to quality information. We might end up falling back on the OG source of truth, lore.
The problem with the current, popular, flavor of AI is that there is no step where any kind of error checking is done. Worse yet, tools like ChatGPT don’t even have anything like a confidence score when answering queries. They just state the answer in an extremely confident manner which our brains instinctively accept as truth.
Long ago, xkcd made fun of both politicians and Wikipedians with the term “citation needed”. In the context of LLMs the lack of citations is not a joke. You can’t really look under the hood and say this information comes from this source, and the source is good, and the information is accurately reproduced. This whole thing would have been a non-issue had vanilla search engines stayed up to par, but they aren’t. That is deeply uncomfortable. Web search is a critical application, people make decisions, sometimes life changing ones based on what they find.
Explainable AI is the only kind that’s worth building, especially when it comes to critical applications. Being frustrated with search is one thing, but generative AI becoming a buzz word in critical applications like medicine and defense is a serious problem. If AI is explainable, the users are able to apply their own logic and experience to disregard AI input when things seem off.
I understand that tools like Perplexity are trying to bring back the citation, and I hope they do a good job. However, as long as LLM and similar generative technologies are at the core, trust will remain an issue.
In the end lore, and its formal relative, education, might be the only option left. Stuffing humans with complex information and relying only on them for expertise will be a step back for the world. Then again, if it worked for granddad…
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Pair with: Blackberry Winter by Keith Jarrett
Completely randomly on mastodon I came across this wonderful tool via Ada.
It’s not fancy, it’s a funky looking, but I was instantly in love. Here it is:
It has a syllable counting function and I used it immediately to write (bad) haikus… here are a few:
Sanity is found in boxes
Life spills. Unraveled.
Collect it all, tick boxes
GTD keeps me
A Flying Kite Caught
A flying kite caught
Winter’s saddest ocean breeze
Little boy giggled
Agency
See, plan, execute
The winds blow, but you’re no leaf
You have agency
There is a fetishism around management artifacts, handbooks, spreadsheets, memos and more. People who like the idea of being a leader but lack experience look at these artifacts and think that whatever goes into the artifacts is how the world will function. This micromanagement flavour of command and control forgets that there are people involved. Leaders must remember that the people who you are leading are just like you and, crucially, that they are closer to the problem. Strategies crumble when they leave out the team’s intelligence, insight, and input. Therefore, building a culture of mutual trust and an intuitive mode of operation is crucial for success. Winning hearts is not trivial.
Respecting your team’s intelligence is a starting point.[efn_note]It might sound strange that this has to be said, but I’ve seen it happen too many times.[/efn_note] When leading, I acknowledge that everyone is important for the team’s success, each person has their own role as I have mine. As a team member, I would like to understand the why of the task. Seeing the bigger picture helps everyone understand the critical nature of their work. To have a team that is brimming “with ambition, initiative and originality” [efn_note]“It is my great and constant hope that the Marine Corps will produce some outstanding man for the country. Such men are somewhere, and they may as well be in our classes as anywhere else. I do not want such a person to be hammered down by narrowness and dogmas: to have his mind cramped by compulsory details. It is my constant ambition to see the Marine officers filled with ambition, initiative, and originality; and they can get these attributes only by liberality of thought – broad thought – thought that differs from precedent and the compulsory imprint of others.”
Letter from BGen J. C. Breckinridge to Colonel J. C. Smith, dated 21 November 1934, J. C. Smith Papers, Marine Corps Historical Center.”
via “Maneuver Warfare Handbook” by Lind, William S[/efn_note] is a blessing that requires much penance. The first step is respect for everyone on the team.
Respecting your team’s insight is to accept everyone as a specialist. You build your team based on the myriad skills required for the project’s success. As a person spends more time doing the tasks they build an innate understanding of the problem. While you, as the leader, may be able to see “everything” what you are really seeing is the big picture. All the execution happens at the level of little things. How to do the little things well is insight, and you are no expert.
Respecting your team’s input is simply the final step of respecting their intelligence and insight. If you don’t allow your plans to be challenged and tuned based on what the team sees then you are driving blind. This is not to say that every input is to be accepted or that every input is right. Everyone is seeing a part of the puzzle, and what is right in the specific might damage in the broad. But it’s the leader’s job to discern and to communicate why.
Insight and input seem like the same thing but they aren’t. If the leader creates the wrong environment, insight is simply not given. Which leads us to the other part, building a healthy culture.
There is never enough time, or really reason, to set aside time to “team build” and develop mutual trust. Teams are built on the job, they are built by working together. “Trust cannot be wished for or assumed, it must be earned.” Working together helps us understand each other and the leader grows to trust the team’s actions and the team grown to trust that their actions will be supported.[efn_note]Both leadership and monitoring are valueless without trust. The “contracts” … of intent and mission express that trust … that his subordinates will understand and carry out his desires and trust by his subordinates that they will be supported when exercising their initiative.” Maneuver Warfare Handbook by Bill Lind[/efn_note] If there is a failure, there was a failure of internal process or not correctly anticipating the environment, either way the responsibility is on your shoulders, the team did the best they could.
Team intuition is built through good training, building an understanding of each other’s capabilities and repetition.[efn_note]“You cannot, he admonishes, give in to the urge to check and control everybody. In the heat of battle, there isn’t time. You have to trust your soldiers and subordinate leaders to do the right thing under the stress of combat. But, and this is the key point, this trust cannot be wished for or assumed. It must be earned through training and working together, as the German Army did between the two world wars when it was reduced to a small core of career professionals (an “unintended consequence” of the surrender terms imposed by the Allies at Versailles.)” Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business by Chet Richards [/efn_note] Task relevant maturity is a useful rubric to know how much training is needed. If an engineer has never made a customer call before, then they need a detailed explanation. I have done mock versions of important calls with people of all seniorities if it was their first time. Over-training has diminishing returns and it’s best to just go and do the thing.
Clear communication of the goals helps people do the right thing by default. Understanding what has to be achieved and know what is in the realm of possible actions enables the team to act effortlessly. The effortlessness comes after years of working together and after difficult trials. Once it’s there, however, that team is unstoppable. [efn_note]“Zen and other oriental philosophies talk at great length about intuitive knowledge, but they also stress that it comes through years of experience and self-discipline. In medieval Japan, samurai warriors practiced with the long sword until it became as an extension of their arm. When the fight starts, you don’t have time to stop and think about the fundamentals. In fact, one of the goals of Japanese samurai strategy was to cause this very “stopping” of the mind in their opponents.” Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business Chet Richards”[/efn_note]
A lot of my understanding of how to build a good team is based on experience and from reading military strategy. In military strategy there is a focus on “winning” and “opponents”, they are terms I shy away from. In a business environment, especially in a startup, there is much that isn’t in your hands. You simply must do the best with whatever you have. Win the hearts of your team and they will do the best and give more than you imagined.
The year was 1989, Solapur, then a small town in India. I’m about 4 years old attending one of the kindergarten years at St. Joseph’s Highschool. The days feel endless and everything has a sheen of significance. During recess me and a friend haunt the area just off from the main playground. This was an area that we’re not exactly allowed to go to, but not exactly forbidden either. What makes this place worth the apparent risk is that it’s full of pebbles. This is a place where treasure is to be sought. You see, a few days ago I had found a particularly interesting shiny stone and given it to my mom, who said she loved it. I won’t know if she meant it or it was just a thing to be said to little boys who bring home random things while the newborn sister is fussing. It was now my mission to give her more of the same.
The first few days I took home just a few, and collected my love. One day however, I wanted to go all out. I decided with my unnamed accomplice that I would collect at full capacity. Two whole pocketfuls. That recess we skipped the food and dedicated ourselves to collecting the shiniest, the sparkliest, the best of all the stones in that infinite sea of gravel. Soon the large brass bell was being rung by a peon and it was time to go back to class. We had succeeded. Our pockets were as full as they could be.
This turned out to be a problem as we attempted to sit down at our benches. The full pockets wouldn’t allow it. Being moderately intelligent munchkins, we of course promptly emptied out all the shinys into the little shelf below our desk. Then as the teacher asked us to pull out our books, we pulled the desk towards ourselves. All the stones rattled. Loudly.
We were asked to dump the stones. My friend did this most willingly, his love for the things was apparently a borrowed thing. Not me. I said no. I pleaded. Explained how they were just for my mom, and that I would be careful to not make the noise again. To no avail. Tears and all, I threw them all away. We were forbidden, expressly, from going to that part of the school again.
I don’t remember anything of what happened afterward. What is deeply etched is the deep sorrow of being denied, for reasons out of my control, the opportunity to give something out of love.
It’s fall 2023, in Carlsbad, a small town near San Diego. My son is almost 4. His teacher, Ms. Emily, in school ran a project over a few weeks asking the kids to collect interesting leaves and twigs and sticks as the trees prepared for winter. He was the first to get some to class and got much love and appreciation in return. He was hooked.
Over the next several weeks, he diligently took a stick or a leaf to class everyday. Full of pride, and joy, and love. Some days Ms. Emily wasn’t in class and there were tears, but the leaf collecting persisted. Then over Thanksgiving, while we were away visiting family, Ms. Emily was moving away. We and Ms. Emily explained it to him in the days leading up, hoping to shield the little heart. However come the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend, he rushed to the nearest tree to pick up a lovely crisp and complete dried leaf. There was of course no hand to place that lovely leaf in, there were plenty of tears.
It’s been a few days, the leaf collecting continues. The tears are now sad little pouts. Deeply etched in his little furrowed brow, is the sorrow of being denied, for reasons beyond his control, the opportunity to give something out of love.
It’s 2014, Singapore, I’m now towards the end of my PhD and proficient in image analysis. So good that I write code for friends so that it may save them weeks of manual analysis time. I do it for fun, I do it out of love for them. Soon I pick up machine learning, and apply that to do more faster, better. I enjoy transforming biological problems into computational ones. I love seeing happiness in the faces of my friends. This love took a meandering path and was poured into my first proper startup. I wanted to give this gift of automated analysis to those who could use it as a lever to change and save lives.
A startup isn’t a lab though, I take on and learn new things everyday in the service of that love. Fundraising, sure I’ll do it. Finance, easy. HR, headache, but will do. Translate between different domains and make everything make sense, that’s a core personality trait now. But, after leading the startup for 6 years, through multiple countries, and funding rounds, I decided to stop. The company of course goes on, led by the best I could hope for. Doing anything new is always difficult, my ability to do and give my best, both for the company and my family, was hampered by stress and health.
Deeply etched in that little strategic game theory decision, is the sorrow of being denied, for reasons beyond my control, the opportunity to give something out of love.
We want to make and give good things to people. Collecting, building, and inventing are all forms of the same love.
Nowadays Mr. Almost 4 uses leaves he finds to make wings. Perhaps there’s something to that.
—
Pair with: Butterfly Net by Caroline Polachek
Leaders are by the nature of their job, alone. Good leaders are thinkers, they explore and map their territory and lay out a course. That is they lead with vision. To develop a clear and confident vision leaders need to be able to concentrate on what’s important to take decisions with courage and conviction. Leaders don’t have the expertise to tackle every problem. Leadership teams have a wider expertise and should be structured such that there is openness and space to explore from a place of vulnerability. Good leadership teams are also good friends who are able to fearlessly point out mistakes and pitfalls. Leaders should go out of their way to create and maintain that culture of intellectual honesty in their leadership teams enabling the same kind of introspection as one would with close friends.
Leadership is a frame of mind. You don’t need to have a title to be a leader, but if you do have a title you better have the right frame of mind.
As a leader, you need to be able to think for yourself. Take in, organise, and make sense of data coming to you and then take a call. You also need to have a strong moral sense. This takes courage. It is trivial to let things proceed as they are or to con your superiors into generating a list of tasks for you to do. But to point and say that we need to do this and not that, takes courage and mental faculties to argue for your point in the face of opposition.
In books on leadership, one often reads saying “no” and creating time for yourself in your schedule, the main purpose of this is to give yourself time to think, to marinate in the data and ferment out decisions. Leaders (in my startup experience) are pelted with requests and activities that would easily fill up 48 hours every day if they let them. For people like me, who come from research, the importance of creating time to think and plot ahead is implicit and we naturally make that space.
Good leaders make that space, put in thought and make the tough calls.
There is a central problem here. No leader can be an expert in everything. Even if data is staring you in the face, you may not (and often don’t) have the experience to correctly surmise what the next step should be. This is what the leadership team (or just your team) is for.
There is an excellent article by William Deresiewicz on Solitude and Leadership (here), where he talks about how being a leader is essentially an activity done in solitude. However there is also an important point he makes about the need for friendship as a means of self-discovery and solitude:
“So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person.[…] what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”
Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.”
Leaders should go out of their way to be friends with their leadership teams. In my experience of running projects, large and small, without a tight-knit leadership team the projects are hopeless and fail miserably. The main reason for this is not the capabilities of the individuals but their ability to openly discuss and question assumptions. To an external observer this make look like the leader is generating a coterie or a clique around them, but that’s exactly what one needs. A good leader is nothing without a leadership team that is textbook definition of coterie: “an intimate and often exclusive group of persons with a unifying common interest or purpose“.
A good leadership team enables the leader to take tough decisions and make what seem like courageous calls from the safety of having thought things through.
Most people know my love for Norah Jones (I bought the cassette for Come Away with Me before all the awards), most people don’t know that I’m a long time fan of Anoushka Shankar also. To hear the sisters talk and play together is something else!
If for some crazy reason you don’t want to listen to the podcast, here are some of their songs from albums:
Here’s one of Anoushka with Sting:
And the best tribute I saw to Chris Cornell:
Now go listen to the podcast 😉
As I start to build up my web presence during, what seems to be the fall of twitter, coming across article like these is heartening.
Glen says:
The hardest thing we can do, but the most vital, is to start building amateur websites again! […]
Building amateur web pages increases the quality of content on the web as well. A status update or a tweet on a huge social network is a lot like fast food; it’s immediately satisfying, but it’s not good for you, and ultimately leaves you feeling empty. But writing content for your own site – something that you feel so passionate about that you needed to build your own site to get it out into the world – is like cooking your own meal from scratch. It’s immediately filling, and satisfying in the long run the way fast food could never be.
But it’s not enough to build our own site. We need to connect to others. Geocities was one of the pioneers of early web hosting, and even though it’s gone, there are still lessons we can learn from it. When you built a site on Geocities your site was sorted into a neighborhood, along with other sites that shared a common theme. This is a concept that we can borrow and build upon. We need to get to know our virtual neighbors and build a community around common interests, linking each other’s websites to form our own microweb of related content.
So seek out new and interesting sites, and link to them on your site. Reach out to them, and see if they’ll link to you. Start a dialog. The way to build a better web is to build a better web of people.
After an unusually wet season the wildflowers have gone into a superbloom. I can’t seem to get enough of them.
Aneesh Sathe 