Robin's Interesting Thoughts

No one would fall for a scam if they understood clearly what was going on, so creating confusion is fundamental for any scam to work.

One of the most effective types of confusion is when the scammer pretends to be the victim. It’s the ultimate redirection, creating confusion about who is getting scammed.

This is common in abusive relationships, where the abuser pretends to be the abused. The abuser loudly denounces any slight offense against themself as abuse, while claiming that their own actual abusive actions are merely appropriate responses to the abuse they are receiving. This creates the necessary confusion — the victim starts to wonder if they are actually a perpetrator, and onlookers either believe the fake story or at best stay neutral because the claims look too similar to distinguish.

Unfortunately, this technique is also becoming common in politics. The politician simply turns any accusation back on the accuser to muddy the waters. This is perhaps best captured in the recent rallying cry “investigate the investigators!” This creates the necessary confusion by making both sides appear to be similarly wronged. We also see legitimate journalism accused of being “fake news” (creating confusion about which is fake), legitimate whistleblowers accused of being political operatives (creating confusion about who is politically motivated), and the list goes on and on. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that multiple current world leaders rose to power by scamming their electorates.

Note I’m not here to fault anyone who voted for such politicians or stayed in abusive relationships. Confusion works, and these scammers are very good at what they do. One of the hardest parts about confronting confusion in my own life has been coming to terms with how thoroughly I had been fooled.

Rather, I hope to remind myself and others that the feeling of confusion can be a signal that a scam is at hand — or even an echo of a scam or abuse perpetrated long ago. More often than I’d like to believe, the situation is actually quite clear — someone is lying to you. Most likely, it’s the person who seems the most confident.

Frederic Laloux, on paying for his e-book:

There are books I bought that ended up not meaning much to me, while others have been deeply meaningful, even transformative.

Paying the same price [for both] has often felt a bit odd. Somehow, it would have felt right to pay less than the list price in some cases, and more in others. That’s why with the e-version of this book, I came up with the idea of offering the possibility of paying what feels right.

This concept is very much in line with a trend called the Gift Economy. It makes for more meaningful relationships, even with people we don’t meet, like an author. Paying a fixed price is rather transactional. It doesn’t honor the personal exchange that somehow happens between an author and a reader.

“Pay-What-Feels-Right” invites us to pause and reflect on the value we bring to one another, even at a distance through a book. I feel it brings some soul back into what is otherwise simply a business transaction.

For some of us, the freedom to give comes with just a bit of anxiety: what if I give too little, or too much? 

If this is the case for you, I’ve put down two tips you might find helpful. I share this in a playful spirit. There is no “right” or “wrong” amount, so take this lightly, relax, and have fun. 🙂

Frederic Laloux, “Tips for paying what feels right”

I’ve been thinking lately about how to implement this in other domains, such as software-as-a-service. It’s somewhat common today for prices to be negotiated, but rare for prices to be set by customers. Institutional buyers are specifically prohibited from “donating” money. Then again, donations are not tax-deductible if “gifts or services were provided in return”. And when is it considered discriminatory if different customers pay different prices?

I like the idea of “pay what feels right” as a type of negotiation, where the price is chosen using a framework of mutual benefit rather than mutual scarcity.

“Psychological abusers love to [accuse their targets] of overreacting or being too sensitive, so it is hard not to fall into the trap of internalizing their words as truth. … They will try to shift [blame] onto your lap and you must resist the temptation to receive it.

“Psychological abusers like to reconstruct history. They will take situations from the past, and in the retelling of the story, completely change what actually happened. It can be infuriating for survivors. It will often send them spiraling down emotionally. The key is to not follow the toxic person into their vortex of lies. … When a survivor remains steady, and is not spun by the actions of the toxic person, it shows the abuser’s own crazy behaviors much more clearly. … Some psychological abusers will rage at a survivor who firmly, but not in anger, talks back to them. If that is your situation, then [it may not be safe to stay in contact].

“[After you have established boundaries, psychological abusers often] come back around, making promises they will not, cannot, and have no intention of keeping. [Or they might] stir up an argument or some drama, [pushing] just the right buttons to try and get the survivor to reengage in argumentative contact. [Finally, expect] the toxic person to show off publicly in some manner. … They will attempt to make their life look as perfect and gloriously happy as possible.

“It is vitally important to remember that psychological abusers never change. [Survivors get] the most hurt when they think the toxic person is different, but the exact same level of disfunction returns. … Psychological abusers do not want to be any different, because the way they live their lives works for them. … Your hope of the person being better someday must come to an abrupt end.”

-Shannon Thomas, Healing from Hidden Abuse (ch. 10)

An appetite is completely different from an estimate. Estimates start with a design and end with a number. Appetites start with a number and end with a design. We use the appetite as a creative constraint on the design process.

This principle, called “fixed time, variable scope,” is key to successfully defining and shipping projects. […]

We apply this principle at each stage of the process, from shaping potential projects to building and shipping them. First, the appetite constrains what kind of a solution we design during the shaping process. Later, when we hand the work to a team, the fixed time box pushes them to make decisions about what is core to the project and what is peripheral or unnecessary.

-Ryan Singer, Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters (chapter 3)

In other words, the most effective way to achieve the desired level of quality is to narrow the scope rather than increasing the amount of time dedicated to the project. You can always follow up later with another project that extends the scope, if doing so is still important enough.

“If the news was as invested in talking about how this person was great to that person as it was in talking about how that person was terrible to that person, it would be a radically different experience. It would be like, ‘Oh, OK — we live amongst people. People do many things.'”

-Ross Gay (via On Being)

“Never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along…. Ender’s Game asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way are going to find Ender’s Game a very unpleasant place to live. Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves.”

-Orson Scott Card (1991 introduction to Ender’s Game, 1977)

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”

-Carl Jung (via Jackson MacKenzie)

The speed of innovation increases when new knowledge or new technologies are themselves used to discover the next round of new technologies. A canonical example is in computer processors — where engineers use the latest processors to help them design and optimize the next generation of processors. This is essentially what enables “Moore’s law” — the observation that computer capability increases exponentially over time. (This is how today’s smartphones became a hundred times more powerful than desktop computers from 20 years ago.)

By contrast, if we were still using paper and pencil to design the latest processors (as was necessary before computers existed), we would expect computer capability to increase only linearly, as we worked out improvements at the same rate that was achievable by engineers back then.

Most of the recent press and hype about “AI” — which really means machine learning with deep neural networks — focuses on direct applications such as self-driving cars and workplace automation. But I think a much more profound possibility lies in the ability of deep learning to increase the speed of innovation itself.

This is not a vague notion about “intelligence” or even a discussion about the extent to which computers can replace humans. Rather, it’s a specific capability that’s well suited to at least some types of scientific research. As David Rotman describes one such application in Technology Review:

Human researchers can explore only a tiny slice of what is possible. It’s estimated that there are as many as 10⁶⁰ potentially drug-like molecules—more than the number of atoms in the solar system. But traversing seemingly unlimited possibilities is what machine learning is good at. Trained on large databases of existing molecules and their properties, the programs can explore all possible related molecules.

This by itself is not a revolution in chemistry; it’s a tool like any other. But increases in the speed of innovation build on each other. An advance aided by machine learning could very well lead to faster computer processors which themselves support even more complex machine learning — and the cycle continues.

Rotman also makes a compelling point about the compounding effects of faster research in the context of business and academia:

It takes an average of 15 to 20 years to come up with a new material, says Tonio Buonassisi, a mechanical engineer at MIT who is working with a team of scientists in Singapore to speed up the process. That’s far too long for most businesses. It’s impractical even for many academic groups. Who wants to spend years on a material that may or may not work? This is why venture-backed startups, which have generated much of the innovation in software and even biotech, have long given up on clean tech: venture capitalists generally need a return within seven years or sooner.

“A 10x acceleration [in the speed of materials discovery] is not only possible, it is necessary,” says Buonassisi, who runs a photovoltaic research lab at MIT. His goal, and that of a loosely connected network of fellow scientists, is to use AI and machine learning to get that 15-to-20-year time frame down to around two to five years by attacking the various bottlenecks in the lab, automating as much of the process as possible.

In other words, if the time needed for materials discovery can be decreased below the roughly 5-year threshold, it would kick off an explosion in investment because the payoffs finally align with human time scales.

Futurists like Ray Kurzweil have been writing about this type of acceleration for many decades. But Rotman’s article resonated with me as an antidote to the more common narratives about “AI” as a vague long-term utopia/dystopia or a narrow short-term technological advance. Far more interesting to me is how it fits into the broader story of accelerating scientific advancement.

“We carry [our] shame with us in hopes of preventing it from happening again, but that is not [necessary]. If someone clocks me in the head with a frying pan, that’s going to hurt like hell. In order to remember that it hurts, do I need to hit myself with a frying pan every day? I sure hope not. So let’s all put down the frying pan of shame and find a better path forward.” (Self-forgiveness.)

-Jackson MacKenzie, Whole Again (p. 190)

“You should not need to feel compelled to do anything as you work on forgiveness. This is an internal process, not one involving reconciliation or contact.

“Your love or understanding of [another] person will not prevent them from continuing to harm you, unless they are also doing the hard work to heal themselves. Wounded people may pretend to be healed so that you’ll let them back into your life, only to continue to harm you.

“If at any point your forgiveness process convinces you to invite an abuser back into your life (or even talk to them), this is not the kind of forgiveness we’re looking for. It will actually impede your own progress.”

-Jackson MacKenzie, Whole Again (p. 207-212)