Cause & Effect

I went to London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) more than 10 years ago. And I read Economics there. I actually applied only to that university. Okay, I did apply also to Harvard, Yale and Princeton because they offered need-blind financial aid but I did not get in. No, this is not to brag about my qualifications. But one of the things I love about the LSE is the motto of the school, “rerum cognoscere causas” (latin for, ‘to know the causes of things’).

The LSE renders the proper English version of the motto as “To understand the causes of things”. And the original latin phrase was actually from a line in a poem book ‘Georgics’ by Virgil: “Felix, qui potest rerum cognoscere causas” (‘Fortunate, who was able to know the causes of things’). Fortunate indeed; yet this world is perhaps ridden with misfortune.

Thanks in part to politics, social media and perhaps lack of academic integrity, we lack a good understand of cause and effect. We confuse correlation with causation, and we are quick to attribute causes to a limited number of things, overlooking other partial causes which are just as important. This is similar to the behaviour of blaming things or others for a mistake. All of these, perhaps to gain a sense of control over the world.

We ought to do a better job helping ourselves and kids understand cause and effect better, and that may even make them better people, less eager to blame, more curious about the world.

Streak 202

So today is the 202th consecutive day I’m posting on this site. Since the beginning of 2021, I’ve been posting on my blog every single day. I was inspired by Seth Godin and probably quote him more often than anyone else in my writing. Many of the themes that I dwell on has some of his ideas as undertones.

Why did I pick this day to reflect about this? No real reason other than the fact that it’s been more than half of the year – something I couldn’t imagine when I started out. Or maybe, it’s because I just finished The Practice. And Seth is right that if you commit to show up consistently and demonstrate to yourself you can, it’s more about just putting one feet ahead of another and going on and on. More often than not, you build readership drip by drip rather than expect a post to go viral. And I’m not here to create viral content.

More important that I continue to echo the themes of sustainability, of creating a future, and working out the story that we’re going to tell ourselves to build the world we want to live in. So what keeps me writing? I’ve something to say, and I believe in that abundance of ideas that Seth keeps on going back to. And if you believe in that too, feel free to drop me a note to share your thoughts, sign up to my mailing list, or follow my instagram, or just this blog.

Snafu and other situations

I had no idea that ‘snafu’ was an acronym until today as I write but I did see it quite a bit in writing. I never looked up the dictionary for its meaning but from its usage, I reckon it meant some kind of screw-up or mess. As I looked it up, my interpretation isn’t too far; it meant a chaotic mess or confused state.

What is interesting is the original ‘meaning’ of that acronym used in the Second World War. It meant ‘Status Normal: All Fouled Up’ (yes the F word was something different but I’m just not going to write it here). The US Marine Corps used it to indicate that something is fouled up, but completely within expectation.

So does fouling up seem foul to you? Or do you always expect everything to be going right, rosy all the way? As reality certainly seem otherwise, it often makes sense not only to evaluate your experiences against past observations and to fine-tune your expectations according to facts. In fact, updating expectations are just as important as formulating them. Above all, dealing with ‘snafus’ are probably more useful than just knowing how to b*tch about them.

Resignations & Exits

NUS Business School professor predicts a resignation tsunami and while I’m not sure if the society is prime for such an act of “rebellion” against traditional employment, I’m very sure there’s a mental health crisis driving this.

The pressures of the sandwiched generation, the rising cost of education of kids, the broken promises of how a degree can translate into “good jobs” and the shattered illusions of what a “good job” really entails. All of these conspire to run down an entire generation of Singaporeans wearied by crisis after crisis (GFC, the aftermath, Covid, lockdowns).

To keep calm and carry on, to maintain a stiff upper lip, may amount to Boxer’s response to just about everything in Animal Farm. If this generation is just seeing drifting from job to job in search of the ideal job as the approach to solving their mental health and happiness challenge, that’ll be losing this opportunity for change.

The alternative is to rewrite the narrative we inherited from the boomers, to develop a vision for the future we want to create rather than passively receive what is prescribed. Or worst, to game the system and perpetuate the status quo.

Successful Pessimist

I wonder how a successful pessimist would be like. Would he be gloating his failure to foresee his success? Or to delight in the fact success has its serious pitfalls which needs to be managed delicately. What exactly would be a pessimistic response to success? It could be just denial, or the recognition that successes doesn’t teach us anything that helps us improve while actually failure does (though an optimist is more likely to see that).

There’s so much contradiction within being a pessimist when it comes to living life. Do you celebrate the downside of things you have foreseen and prepared for? Or do you celebrate the bullets you dodged? Or success? And what is it about success you celebrate? The transient nature of it? What drives him/her? What does he/she really want out of life?

He (or she) probably doesn’t exist. So choosing to be skeptical about things and paying careful attention, doing due diligence and all is important. But to consistently play the pessimist is simply not the pathway towards attaining success.

Doubling down

We were having a meal and then she said that I made a statement, which I don’t recall making. So first I denied having made that statement; and when she insisted, I tried to explain my perspective on the topic and what I really meant (assuming I had really said those words). She wasn’t interested in all that because to her, I was already being defensive and was twisting things in order to be ‘right’. She kept quiet.

So I stepped back and remind myself there was no point doubling down on mistakes, not to mention trying to clear up something as convoluted as the above. I asked myself if I entertained the possibility I was ‘wrong’, if I had to change my course, would I? Is there a point in trying hard to be right? What test am I sitting for here?

In life, it’s really important to be right in terms of making good judgments. But for most part, you don’t make things right through arguments, or your words, you do them with your deeds. So when you discover some truth, double-down on it. And how about mistakes? Take action to move forward from them; if you have to rectify, go for it, if you should be leaving it alone in order to go forward, then do so! Just please don’t double-down on it.

Economics of Clean Energy

Cost reductions for solar panels have been phenomenal over just the past half a decade. The world took quite some time to master the manufacturing and use of this technology; and slightly less time to roll it out and deploy all over the world. Subsidies are being withdrawn and feed-in tariffs have been falling for solar power as solar energy reaches cost levels close to grid parity. Now we move on to thinking about the cost of solar intermittency and mitigating the cost that it afflicts to the grid and users.

I don’t think the economics of solar energy will work without the initial subsidies or at least the progress will take longer. The coordination impact of government direction, incentive policies and commitment towards clean energy helped us draw intelligent, passionate people into the industry, and concentrate the efforts it take in order to get the economics through.

There are still many different areas of the reality where scale economics can operate and help new domains succeed. But the difficulty they have is to line up the stars for that. The principle for selecting those areas to push for lies outside economics – for example, climate change, a better environment for the next generation, or to just improve animal welfare.

Even as we understand the economics of things we ought to recognise a lot of resource allocation decisions can lie beyond the realm of economics because we don’t have perfect information and knowledge across time.

Human Nature

Economist gets a lot of envy from psychologist from being able to publish papers about mundane psychological topics. Like creating a mathematical model of the failure to delay gratification and accounting for the costs of that. Behavioural economics seem a bit more like trying to create mathematical descriptions for common sense.

Of course this is possible because economics have made assumptions about humans that were wholly our of touch with reality for models that worked. At least for many decades, they kind of worked without too much fuss.

But we’ve built worlds that we are not really psychologically evolved to deal with and as a result, the deviation from the assumptions of the rational man became more and more significant. For one, the complexity of the computations needed in the modern world to make the best decision have really made it harder to assume rationality. Making decision across 3 choices is different from making it across “n” choices.

There are dimensions of scarcity in the real world economics failed to capture: computation/calculation, environmental limits and parameters, human’s limits on our mental wellness. Let’s look at economics with more humanity, shall we?

Creating a future

In my day job as a consultant, we often are asked how the markets will move, whether governments are likely to regulate one thing or another, push for more renewables or not. We also do some long term forecasting of trends, and their impacts on the business operations of large companies. Truth is, we don’t know and we won’t. But we will use information and data available to make intelligent guesses in order to help clients make decision, and move forward.

So the point is really about the actions we take upon making the intelligent guesses and inferences about the world. And when met with resistance, or realising that there are errors, refining our approach and moving forward nevertheless.

“Prediction depends on events outside your control. Creation depends on events within your control.  Don’t guess about the future. Shape it.”

James Clear

I often remind my coaching clients about their agency in the future; and it must feature in the stories that we tell ourselves. Not so that we will be so caught up with an outcome we are gunning for, but so that we are conscious the choices we make are not only to be for our own individual lives, but for the world and culture we reside in.