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Problems don’t end the world

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.

Serving the user

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!

Information accuracy

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.

Being entertained

After sharing David Foster Wallace’s speech, I looked a bit more into the things he said about the kind of themes he tend to think and write about. One of the really big theme is some kind of cultural addiction to entertainment, and in some sense, the growing feebleness of the mind – especially the part that deals with deeper thinking and autonomy.

We have in some sense, replaced that powerful autonomy that Victor Frankl described about the choice of our response to external environment/circumstances, with a kind of superficial sense of choice: which shampoo to buy, what clothes to wear, the jobs to desire, etc. We become weaker at assessing which politician deserves our vote, which friends deserve more of our attention, what character and values we want to truly establish for ourselves and kids.

The sheer noise and pervasiveness of entertainment, and the values of banal, basic type of stuff that gains our attention comes to dominate our lives. Intellectual domains becomes devolved to just what is considered professional and sophisticated at work, or some kind of aristocratic indulgences. Ordinary lives, which is often much more transcendental than we care to recognise, becomes just ordinary for the lack of exercising that deeper bits of our minds.

Fighting against the future

The future doesn’t just come; you choose to step into it. And your choices defines the future that you actually step into. So if you continue to live wastefully, use lots of resources and ignore issues around sustainability, then you may soon no longer have a future to step into. In fact, your choices and manner of life pits you against the future generations, and the future.

It’s not too late to fight for the future instead. And it definitely isn’t too early to fight for those who are not yet born. You can choose to do so by the things you choose to consume, the life you choose to take on, the people, brands, companies that you choose to get behind. It doesn’t matter if there are habits you still can’t kick, that it seem hypocritical to try reduce your carbon footprint when your work or life still requires you to travel around via flights.

At least, when you become aware and make that choice to fight for the future, you stop fighting against it.

Manpower shortage

There’s been huge layoffs announced in the tech industry; and that’s been spreading to even the big established technology firms like Microsoft and Google. One could say this is many years in the making as those firms have grown perhaps too big and reaching the edges of the overall economy. Hence when the economy starts shrinking or just slowing its growth, these companies no longer have that much room to realise their original growth ambitions.

Yet at the same time, there’s a manpower shortage. We don’t have sufficient good people in the market who versatile enough to switch rapidly from one industry to another; or from even one company to the next, despite having gradually moved out of the whole lifelong employment culture and psyche since decades ago.

After years of drumming up the whole idea of upskilling, reskilling and all that nonsense around training, certification, we made the labour market even more rigid. And we do so by telling people stories around scarcity in skills, training, and affected their narrative and confidence in what they can actually do. Now you have to be ‘qualified’, and chosen by someone or some organisation before you can do the work.

That is simply not true. You need to choose what is the work you’d like to do and who are the people you seek to serve. And allow the job to naturally take its shape.

Root canal treatment recipe

A dentist friend who teaches in the dental school sometimes was complaining to me about the declining quality of students. No one could explain that the objective of the root canal was to actually help the patient save a natural tooth. The answers given were around the technical aspects of the procedure such as cleaning out the bacteria.

The problem wasn’t that the students weren’t smart. They seem to expect to enter a lesson empty awaiting to be filled with knowledge and content and see their sole role as soaking up what is needed to ace the assessment and then move on with life. We have structured education so much that students think of learning as a means to the end of taking exams. That is a very serious problem and mindset gap that needs to be filled.

These students are not going to be able to deal with problem solving on a forward looking basis. Because we want to train students not to be solving known current problems though that is useful but to prepare them well enough for the problems that may come along in the future. In fact, most of highest level of academia is surrounding discovering problems at the frontier of knowledge to crack them.

Being able to understand and define a problem should precede mastering the solution to solve the problem. I’m not too sure if it’s an issue with intelligence, the system or the culture that we are creating because we have over-optimised on too many things. A system that is over-optimised over-indexes the problems today and the current solutions; without equipping our people with the ability to see beyond and into problems of the future.

That will be a problem we have to treat.

So close yet so far

If you’re so near to success but then at the last point it failed, what does it mean about your effort and all the time spent on it? It can be for a business, a project, a single deal, or even a relationship. If you had known, would you have gone for it anyways? Or maybe that’s not a fair question to ask; the better question is how you’d value all the progress up to that point. Before the failure.

Would you just walk away and try to forget? Or simmer in anger? Or start gathering the pieces and see what they can be used for next?

I think the last point is particularly interesting because news just came out that Suncable entered into voluntary administration due to the shareholders not being aligned. It was a big and ambitious project. There are people concerned with Singapore not getting enough green electricity. But even if Suncable really failed, there had been expertise built up, teams familiar with the system and processes, plans or ideas that can be refashioned.

Better to think that what brought you close to success but did not get you there has already brought you closer to other successes you’ve yet to see.

Market for talents

Are talents born? How would you know a baby is going to be a star violinist, or a top notch computer programmer? How would these kids first be incentivised to try things out to begin with? It’s more likely that there’s a market for the particular talent which the kid was exposed to and hence got started, and found himself or herself being able to do it well and hence the resources around him/her was attracted to support the development.

The market for talent is vital to encourage and develop talents. It is the presence of the market that allows people to aspire towards being a ‘successful X’ – be it a musician, or a chef, or mathematician. Kids don’t just wake up one day, look at a long path into the forest and say they want to work towards being a cross country runner.

Singapore have been able to nurture and attract talents essentially by drawing proven talents from elsewhere into the market and then celebrating them. The value of doing this can be powerful if resources are poured into directing the nurture of local talents concurrently. Careful thinking about this market and its design is important so that structures can be put in place to ensure this is a virtuous circle. Those identified as talents should be able to support others who are trying to develop themselves. Pay-it-forward type of mentorship should be encouraged.

And those who have benefited personally and individually can pool resources to nurture the next generation. It’s akin to successful lawyers or bankers giving back to their alma mater to start scholarships that support new lawyers and bankers.