Energy Nerd | Circular Economist
Once we learn something, it is hard to unlearn it. In fact it is impossible to unlearn it to the extent of being ignorant of what you have learnt. In some sense, learning changes us irreversibly. In learning something, we forsake the ignorance. And we forget what it is like to not know.
That is really something we can’t forget.
One of the most power tools that economics have brought to the world is cost-benefit analysis and really assessing what is the constitution of cost or benefits at various levels: individuals, firms, regional government, national government, countries.
Where it fails is the ability to properly ascribe who cares about what. The assumption around rational, selfish agents cannot possibly hold in reality. On the other hand, there is radical inconsistencies when you perform such optimisation on behalf of “government” which is staffed by human agents and with politicians have their own agenda. Over the years, these poor assumptions have made room for more colourful, richer analysis of agents, decision-making units at different levels.
Now if we move our attention to the dimension of time rather than perspective of our agents, we realise another issue. We can assess somehow the cost and benefits of today if we use our imaginations but to stretch it to the future would require even more manipulations. And the uncertainty make render the exercise less fruitful than one may expect.
Alas, we continue to use these tools expecting them to work while not having proper assessment of whether they work or not when the outcomes play out in reality. It is not the issue of calculating those figures but how we incorporate them into our judgment that matters. Yet with limited budgets and resources, most have chosen to opt for a semblance of the exercise, paying a smaller cost but getting almost none of the benefits.
About 81 years ago, Dorothy Sayer, a British writer penned these words:
A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.
Dorothy Sayers (1942), Why Work
In the article, I’m amazed by the clarity which Dorothy Sayers foresaw the world post-war, with piercing critique of the economic system we have created. The economics that she was schooled in was one of observations of the market, of history and of human psyche itself.
The second world war has ended for more than 70 years now; and as predicted by Sayer, we had immediately jumped back into the business as usual, where work and labour was valued only by money. And this is why we churn out more waste our planet can scarcely handle (both in terms of carbon emissions and lots of material wastage).
Sayer’s remedy has to do with appreciating our work in a different way and valuing it more. And much of it certainly sounds like echoes of the messages around ESG, corporate social responsibility and sustainability these days. Yet she also points to something deeper, points revolving around values of work, of the things we do in society, and value that is created to serve lives and human beings, not abstracted by the market in the form of price signals.
Her full essay can be found here. I confess of course that my shared faith with Sayers help me appreciate the essay in a deep way. If you do care about sustainability and our world, even if you are not a Christian, surely some of the points she brought up should give us a deeper motivation to drive us to live in a manner that is a part and yet apart from this market system?
So there was an announcement about brand name school being moved to neighbourhoods that were newly developing. Or what Singaporeans affectionately call heartlands. And then there was a bit of furore. Maybe it was also about the all boys school starting to be co-ed and accepting girls.
Singapore has a long history of all boys school turning into co-ed schools. Think Gan Eng Seng School, Tanjong Katong Secondary Technical School (now known as Tanjong Katong Secondary School). So in some sense, these ‘elite’ institutions have been slow at embracing diversity. The uproar and concerns voiced reflected the obsession Singaporeans have with brand names and in many sense, social status.
Having built a successful society that is based on levelling the playing field and trying to be ‘meritocratic’ means that there will be lots of forces usually around to seek to differentiate and stand out. Schools are one of the most significant way to perpetuate this. And I honestly would not be surprised if because of this shift, the area in Tengah becomes hot property for the parents wanting to send their children to prime schools.
In future, branded schools may be ways to rejuvenate neighbourhoods.
Emily Kingsley wrote a tongue-in-cheek blog post on the point that yes there are problems in the world but the world doesn’t end because of it. It is one that is fitting for a time of the big overwhelm, when the world is struggling with huge problems that are so intractable the younger generation feels hopeless.
Yet problems are unlikely to be causing the world to end. It is quite likely that the world ends because actions were not taken to deal with the problems. I’m not saying here that blindly taking actions are going to solve all our problems. But action is necessary to recover our sense that we can do something, to prevent us from spiraling into hopelessness.
‘And’, which Emily Kingsley was trying to cling on to in her blog post is the notion that the mere presence of a problem itself should not be enough to defeat us or lead us into paralysis. Ultimately if anything kills, it’s not the problem but the paralysis that we induce ourselves into by telling ourselves the wrong stories about those problems.
Following my observations on Google’s mutated identity, there’s more news of the company’s “decay”. The focus here this time is something else; about the shift in the company culture that results in a bureacracy that plays it safe. There’s a common strand around the fact that Google has changed. And part of the change involves becoming removed from the needs of the user and a bit less grounded on realities.
Indeed, reality is about what the market wants when your company is small and just leading parts of a large market – usually a small part. Yet when a company grows, the insides of the company and the decisions of the management often can be more real than the user. In fact, your boss is likely going to have way more influence over your fate than the users have over the fate of the company. At least in the short term.
So should we have a cultural metric that is about how much a company revolves around serving the user? Maybe. But it is only possible from the top-down. The management have to model and lead that. Yet the management is usually selected by shareholders and at some point when the company grows big. At some point, the short term interests of the shareholders can conflict with that of the user. Moreover, the business model of Internet companies like Google is “ads” – which means users don’t even contribute directly to the revenues of the company!
It can be pretty hard for me not to think about energy. It probably has to do with my job but the topic itself is fascinating. In some sense, ‘energy’ could be a subject itself that draws on science, mathematics, economics, engineering, law and many more disciplines to help us make sense of it. While we learn a lot about it in science, most of those fundamentals just remain where they are in our minds and do not connect with the wonders of modern technology and everything that we are so immersed in.
Electricity of course is the most fascinating of it all. It is the energy form that we have been able to manipulate with great precision and even enable energy to take on so much more new roles in life that it would not have been conceived to take on centuries ago even when electricity was first discovered. Electricity of course is a form of energy manifesting and needs to have various mediums, and the best carrier of electricity remains to be chemical batteries.
There are many other energy carriers as well and typically these are fuels; they are released through combustion. That produces heat energy which then can be transformed into kinetic energy, and in turn that tends to be then transformed into electrical energy with appropriate mechanisms such as some kind of motor and generator.
Carriers of energy are themselves interesting and fascinating because there are losses that results from going through the carriers and the various different forms of them. They also come in different forms, shapes and stability, influencing their functionality. Coal is a solid fuel; oils are liquid while natural gas is gaseous. Their state allows them to be conveyed differently and also affects the cost of transporting them.
Last century, the world was afraid of running out of them. Because they are commonly known as non-renewable energy. We use them faster than we can replenish them. Fossil fuels are created through millions of years. This century however, we begin to realise we will end up changing the climate of the world even before we run out of fossil fuel so we’re in a race to phase it out as quickly as we can. Alright it isn’t actually a race because many countries, organisations, assets are stubbornly using it.
But the point of this piece here is to help us recognise that fossil fuel does not have the monopoly in carrying energy and there can be more ways for us to obtain and use energy. Ways that can lead to sustainability and circularity in the world.
My friend created a pretty cool Youtube video explaining some of the mechanisms behind ChatGPT; and you’d realise that behind the whole engine of this ‘artificial intelligence’ is really lots of brute calculations and updates. Never at any point of the calculations would ChatGPT ‘fact-check’ or validate anything that it ‘says’. It relies upon statistical accuracy in matching and finding the next most relevant word to string together.
So the entire system wasn’t quite ever designed to give you accurate or right information – just something you might believe rather than something real. In some sense, technology as an aid to humans have reach the new next level of helping us to ideate more by bringing up relevant connections to what you’ve first provided as a prompt. But it doesn’t replace thinking; it simply supercharge one’s memory prowess more.
What is interesting in this whole march of progress with technology is that we can say rote memory is no longer that useful and should not be tested in school. But associative memory remains important and the ability to actually triangulate and fact-check things becomes even more important. Search engines and all of the internet are now no longer ‘objective’ but creating bubbles to house its users, trying to deliver the most ‘relevance’ to them. Validation of information now becomes a super-skill that depend on random and highly dispersed connections.
When is it good for something to be structured and when is it good for it not to be? It’s not entirely clear. I think humans do enjoy a bit of both. At some level, the world is structured but it is also messy and complex. There is land and sea, forests and deserts. But there are also ecosystems and lots of freedom to roam within the realms you find yourself in.
What happens when an environment is too structured? Problem solving becomes playing games, more about figuring out the rules and toying with it than to really deal with problems at hand. This is how the big companies develop more bloat and bureacracy with politics.
And what if the environment lacks structure?Outcomes become less reliable. The randomness can create uncertainty and encourage inefficiency. Yet at the same time it can build resilience.
What do you want for yourself? For your kids? For your staff? How would you structure it?
When Google sort of botched their launch of Bard AI integration into search, a smart commentator reminds everyone that Google may have well forgot their identity. The analysis was crisp and contrasted Google and Apple’s product launches to reflect the kind of audience they appealed to and should focus on.
It begs the question if a company or a brand’s identity is meant to hang around and if so, what kind of values should persist as it grows. Or as the market changes. The idea that Google can quietly push out something and slap a Beta sticker to insulate themselves is attractive when their market share is still not exactly dominant in a new space they are trying to enter. Moreover, the pool of audience they had targeted; the ones who would try something new or be eager to take the tech guinea pig role might no longer be enough to feed the company’s need for growth and scale.
So certain aspects of the company changes and one could say the identity is forgotten but it could also mean they have allowed it to be forsaken in order to pursue something else.
The question is what defines the company’s identity? Is it a way of doing things? That’d be too dynamic. Is it the targeted group of customer it serves? Then it’s growth is constrained to the size of that group. Or the pursuit of the company? But surely the world changes and that pursuit gets altered.
In any case Google is long past their “original identity”; and practically all of those dimensions I mentioned above have changed for them. It is up to them to tell the story of their identity’s evolution and redefine what they really want to keep or discard.