Month: March 2020

This story on NBC news about the fast-growing subreddit focused on news and information about the coronavirus pandemic.

Every day, Boggs and the other moderators work through a queue of thousands of comments and posts that have been flagged for review. They coordinate via the messaging platform Discord to ensure they aren’t duplicating work or to settle any disagreements. Some spend time developing tools to automate or improve their workflow, inviting high-profile scientists and doctors to participate in “Ask Me Anything” Q&A sessions and recruiting more moderators.

– How Reddit’s coronavirus community became a destination

This is what moderators of most active communities do – not just this one, not even just Reddit. But this process when applied to this specific global event has created an incredible user-generated, user-moderate, user-friendly resource.

It’s like Wikipedia, but temporal – when this pandemic dies down, interest among contributors will die down too. The moderators will move on with their lives. In fact it’ll be the Wikipedia page for the pandemic that will be the longest-lived.

Some of the best things on the internet have been driven by altruism. Technology projects – Tor, Linux, Apache, GNU, Calibre, Blender, Mozilla Firefox, Pi-hole, WordPress. Knowledge projects like Wikipedia, Reddit and the ad blocking community. Standards like HTTP, TCP/IP, XMPP. They have either been ground-up communities from the beginning or contributions from large corporations. Projects run in this manner also tend to be long-lasting, sustainable.

And perhaps altruism is the governance model for the Internet [1]. The analog of democracy in the Real World. Just like in meatspace there exists a continuum of governance models across countries, so will there be different ways to run projects in bitworld. There will be variations – some very significant – even among altruism-governed projects. Wikipedia is end-to-end community-driven and supported by donations. Reddit is owned by Conde Nast and is ad-supported.

The model itself doesn’t make a project good or bad. But altruism projects are more natural to the internet, more at home in it, are a better fit for it, and eventually will be stronger and longer-lived than their other counterparts.

[1] However much these are driven by a shared sense of community, it isn’t communism.

The internet and smartphones have meant that there’s a lot more demand for what is a finite amount of attention. For news, which monetises attention, this in turn means a race to capture as much of it as possible. The most obvious symptom of that is clickbait online, but more broadly, topics that shock and outrage receive coverage disproportionate to their impact on society.

At some point – we are probably past it – this behaviour becomes self-fulfilling, and personalities that are the most skilled at shocking and causing outrage end up being the ones most imbued with power.

By this time, 2020, mainstream publications across print, TV and the internet have for years prioritised the wrong topics. One straightforward way to restore balance is to consciously pick one’s sources of information and news. To start with, think independently about the issues that one think matter now and in the future.

Over the next few months I’m going to recalibrate my news sources to focus on more such issues. My list so far is

• Health and medicine research
• Physical health/wellness
• Mental health
• Public health and diseases
• Personal finance
• Education
• Lifestyle design
• Environment and climate
• Privacy and data ownership
• Edge tech
  • Brain machine interface
  • AI
  • Quantum
  • Renewable energy
  • EVs
  • Life extension
  • CRISPR
  • Drones and remote tech
  • Decentralised ledgers

My guess is that preventing one’s attention from being dominated by short-term topics, events and personalities that are inevitably conflict-oriented, instead driving it towards those that are forward looking and constructive will improve one’s general mood, optimism and mental health as well.

In March 2019, I was prescribed a 6-month course of pills for a migraine problem that had begun to significantly affect the quality of my life. For the previous 6 months, I had had a migraine 9 days out of every two weeks. 5 of them were severe enough to warrant winding up a working day, driving home and somehow sleeping it off – essentially, half of my working days. I had gone through an identical, though shorter regimen in 2012.

This time I wanted to see how fast the course would act and how long-lasting its effect would be. So I created an exceedingly simple iOS Shortcut that took input from me on my pain level on a scale of 1 to 10 and log it to a pipe-separated plaintext file in iCloud Drive. I automated that with Launch Center Pro (before iOS 13 introduced Shortcuts automation) to notify me at 9pm each night. This is tonight:

• 

It’s been a little over a year since I began tracking data. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of baseline data because I began tracking pain levels just a week or so before starting the pills. But here it is, visualised:

Data begins 8th March 2019. I began the regimen on 14th March 2019. I ended it in mid-September, although I don’t remember the exact date.

You can see how both the intensity and frequency reduces significantly in the first month itself, and then settles down to a much less severe level. January 2020 was a weird, bad month but it didn’t hold a candle to the January a year ago. I can live with this level of chronic pain pretty easily.

The regimen was simple – two pills a day tapering down to one a day. The Shortcut and scheduling is trivial. The data is also unidimensional – doesn’t capture potential migraine triggers – food, light, sound, stress. But the data exists. Is in an open format. And can be charted. And that by itself gave me a sense of control during and after the course.

I plan to continue charting the data and make it richer by capturing more contextual data – triggers being the first. Maybe we’ll revisit this post a year, three years later. And maybe this long-term data set will be useful for treating the next bout of severe migraines even better.

In a remarkable 2006 feature that I have gone back to again and again over the years, the then-CEO of Proctor and Gamble talked about How I Work. I have quoted nearly the entirety of what he says:

I’ve learned how to manage my energy. I used to just focus on managing my time. I’d be up in the morning between 5 and 5:30. I’d work out and be at my desk by 6:30 or 7, drive hard until about 7 P.M., then go home, take a break with my wife, Margaret, and be back at it later that evening. I was just grinding through the day.

During my first year in this job, I worked every Saturday and every Sunday morning. Now I work really hard for an hour or an hour and a half. Then I take a break. I walk around and chit-chat with people. It can take five or 15 minutes to recharge. It’s kind of like the interval training that an athlete does.

I learned this in a program called the Corporate Athlete that we put on for P&G managers. I did the two-day program, where I also learned to change the way I eat. I used to eat virtually nothing for breakfast. Now I have a V-8 juice, half a bagel, and a cup of yogurt. And I eat five or six times a day. It’s about managing your glycemic level. You don’t want to boom and bust.

The other piece of the Corporate Athlete program is spiritual — things you can do to calm the mind. I’ve tried to teach myself to meditate. When I travel, which is 60 percent of the time, I find that meditating for five, ten, or 15 minutes in a hotel room at night can be as good as a workout. Generally, I think I know myself so much better than I used to. And that has helped me stay calm and cool under fire.

A key to staying calm is minimizing the information onslaught. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a memo. I write little handwritten notes on my AGL paper, and I send notes, a paragraph or less, on my BlackBerry. I prefer conversations. That’s one reason my office and our entire executive floor is open. The CEO office is not typically a warm and welcoming place, but people feel they can come in and talk in mine. We have goofy-looking pink and chartreuse chairs with chrome frames and upholstered backs and seats.

The full series is here. It features Marissa Mayer, then at Google, Carlos Ghosn, then yet to have his reputation ruined, Bill Gross, then yet to be forced out of Pimco, John McCain, then yet far away from running for President and Hank Paulson, then at Goldman Sachs, shortly before becoming Secretary of the Treasury and subsequently having to deal with the financial crisis.

Bonus: the next month, Fortune published a more detailed How I Work with Bill Gates, then no longer Microsoft’s CEO but still its chairman. We will almost certainly examine it in more detail in a future post some time.

“The most we can do is to write – intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively – about what it is like living in the world at this time.”

– Oliver Sacks, 2015

This short essay on Aeon magazine:

In using the term ‘soul’… we don’t have to think of ourselves as ghostly immaterial substances. We can think of ‘soul’ as referring, instead, to a set of attributes ­­– of cognition, feeling and reflective awareness – that might depend on the biological processes that underpin them, and yet enable us to enter a world of meaning and value that transcends our biological nature…

… if we were content to structure our lives wholly within a fixed and unquestioned set of parameters, we would cease to be truly human. There is something within us that is always reaching forward, that refuses to rest content with the utilitarian routines of our daily existence, and yearns for something not yet achieved that will bring healing and completion…

… we yearn to rise above the waste and futility that can so easily drag us down and, in the transformative human experiences and practices we call ‘spiritual’, we glimpse something of transcendent value and importance that draws us forward. In responding to this call, we aim to realise our true selves, the selves we were meant to be. This is what the search for the soul amounts to

This article on the website of the US National Institute of Health:

… [sleep] triggers rhythmic waves of blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that appear to function much like a washing machine’s rinse cycle, which may help to clear the brain of toxic waste on a regular basis.

In an fMRI machine, 

First, you see a wave of blood flow (red, yellow) that’s closely tied to an underlying slow-wave of electrical activity (not visible). As the blood recedes, CSF (blue) increases and then drops back again. Then, the cycle—lasting about 20 seconds—starts over again.

Fascinating that such a mechanical cycle exists. And that we can actually see it.

This brings me back to a fantastic longform National Geographic article in Aug 2018 about sleep, which had alluded to evidence about the same mechanism. 

Also: “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker, one of the books I read last year.

Julie Supan who has helped develop brands for a few well-known Silicon Valley companies, talks about whether a product’s ‘high expectation customers’ approach it with a ‘growth mindset’ or a ‘fixed mindset’.

If your target customer has a growth mindset, great. “In those cases, users are incredibly open. They’ve never tried this before, and they can’t even imagine it can exist.

Other times, users will come to you with a fixed mindset, and it’s important your product inspires and encourages them to reimagine what’s possible and then delivers.

It seems to me people with growth mindsets will tend to be optimistic and forgiving. Products that involve fun and play, particularly games and social media, will attract people in a growth mindset. Those with fixed mindsets will be more sceptical and will be common for products that are more serious, such as financial services. In this context, these mindsets are not an indication of how people themselves are – just how they approach the product.

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings writes more about these mindsets in a much broader context:

… for those with a growth one, “personal success is when you work your hardest to become your best,” whereas for those with a fixed one, “success is about establishing their superiority, pure and simple. Being that somebody who is worthier than the nobodies.” For the latter, setbacks are a sentence and a label. For the former, they’re motivating, informative input — a wakeup call.

In the fixed mindset, that process is scored by an internal monologue of constant judging and evaluation, using every piece of information as evidence either for or against such assessments as whether you’re a good person, whether your partner is selfish, or whether you are better than the person next to you. In a growth mindset, on the other hand, the internal monologue is not one of judgment but one of voracious appetite for learning, constantly seeking out the kind of input that you can metabolize into learning and constructive action.

Here is a fantastic data-centric article about the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic, efforts to contain it, models comparing those efforts, and conclusions about just how effective rapid social isolation actually is. It’s one of the all-time best articles I have read on the Internet.

The long article was put together by a single person working off publicly available data, published independently, gained traction via social, is immensely educative and will have a real impact on awareness and probably even action.

An example of how important the information in the article is:

The grey bars show the true daily coronavirus cases. The Chinese CDC found these by asking patients during the diagnostic when their symptoms started.

Crucially, these true cases weren’t known at the time. We can only figure them out looking backwards: The authorities don’t know that somebody just started having symptoms. They know when somebody goes to the doctor and gets diagnosed.

What this means is that the orange bars show you what authorities knew, and the grey ones what was really happening.

On January 21st, the number of new diagnosed cases (orange) is exploding: there are around 100 new cases. In reality, there were 1,500 new cases that day, growing exponentially. But the authorities didn’t know that. What they knew was that suddenly there were 100 new cases of this new illness.

Two days later, authorities shut down Wuhan. At that point, the number of diagnosed daily new cases was ~400. Note that number: they made a decision to close the city with just 400 new cases in a day. In reality, there were 2,500 new cases that day, but they didn’t know that.

I wouldn’t be exaggerating when I say this article will be one of the most important pieces written about this episode, and will be referenced a decade later.

This article is what the widespread availability of the Internet has made possible.

Even twenty years ago, even in the early days of the indie Internet, there just wasn’t enough of an audience. And go back just a little bit in time and this wouldn’t even have been possible. The writer wouldn’t be able to get the data from around the world – certainly not this fast. He wouldn’t have been able to publish it. And he couldn’t have gotten the reach he did. Consequently, he would not have been able to have the impact he inevitable will. 

There’s been much written about democratisation of information because of the Internet. This is a prime example and it is not a small thing.

This blog post takes apart the current state of the crypto space:

Almost always it’s a last-ditched attempt to fleece retail punters out of millions of dollars, selling a utility token that will never be used for the utility outlined in the abundance of whitepapers that have been written. These utility tokens are also extremely volatile assets. Most will lose the majority of their value. There are now thousands of projects with thousands of different tokens, with surprisingly few focussed on building products people will actually use…

– Almost All Crypto Projects Are Complete Bullshit and Will Fail

It’s not a good look. But I have witnessed to much of what the writer says: I have seen the cooky business models. Projects petering out without even a try. The insane promises of coins ‘mooning’. The brigading on Telegram groups. The fawning and bickering on Twitter. News as PR. 

Two years ago in the midst of the initial coin offering craze, I did a talk (YouTube) about the right fit for decentralisation in a business or product. An attempt to bring some sense of rationality. Some of the presentations at that very event were clearly ideas that were taken seriously only because they had a ‘crypto token’ associated with it. They were not successful. That talk is as relevant now as then.