Tag Archives: attitudes

Manufactured feel

When we travel, we visit places of interests, stay in hotels or some kind of accommodation with “curated experiences” and follow guides to eat the popular foods in a place. Is this sort of traveling about experiencing the local life or about manufacturing the feeling or a “foreign experience”?

It’s probably both.

When does an experience feel manufactured? And is that a bad thing? After all, we manufacture things because they are not readily available in nature. We might be the only specie that tries to manufacture feelings or experiences or put ourselves through something radically different than our “everyday life”. Monkeys don’t go on exchange programmes with a different tribe; Donkeys don’t try to live the day in the life of a camel.

So what do we really gain? Why do we dread the everyday? What is wrong with routine life?

Value functions

Economics assumes that people respond to incentives. And that requires some degree of rationality. Yet the interesting thing is that rationality is just perhaps one form of value function where we frame certain incentives as the metric that the agent is interested in and values. Revealed preference theory basically assumes rationality to pin down the preferences of people based on the choices they make.

Yet if we adopt the idea that there’s a value function, then rationality doesn’t even have to hold for the notion – that economic agents respond to incentive – to be true. Because if someone is “mad”, then it may just mean that he or she has a certain value function that lacks certain features or patterns which are consistent.

So it could be that their value function are not monotonic when mapped to specific features of a product or experience. This is to say that they may like their noodles to be extremely soggy or extremely hard, but not in-between. So to some extent, their value function is a U-shape when map on the extent of noodle sogginess. This type of ‘inconsistency’ can be seen as lacking rationality when it comes to certain money-based decisions. But mathematically, they can always be described and simply opens up more ways we can analyse these problems.

Transition from truth

We learn things in school only to learn at the next level of school that what we had learn was not exactly true. Each time, our simplistic view of reality gets increasingly replaced by a more sophisticated and nuanced view of the world. But not just that; there are ‘truths’ we learnt in school that eventually gets surpassed by new findings and they become untrue.

Or take for example some theories and ideas in social sciences; they evolve with our understanding of society, culture and economics – which means they’re not as timeless and can shift from being once true to becoming untrue. (In economics, an example would be the Phillips curve relationship between inflation and unemployment – a relationship that broke down the more Central Banks tried to take advantage of it.)

So how do we know and observe when a piece of idea, knowledge or conventional wisdom makes that transition from being truth? What measures can we take to insulate ourselves from that? How should we think about ‘truths’ we hold dear to our hearts or subconsciously in our minds?

Magic of going through the bad

If you think you are not good enough to do something, then ask yourself if you’ve been bad enough. I recall a time when my English was really bad. Actually it is still bad. And so is my writing. But I never let ‘my bad’ stop me; it is precisely going through being bad that one can be good.

And this animation by Danny Gregory puts that message together nicely. Enjoy.

A new space

Something to be revealed perhaps a little later but I’ve just made a massive move to a new environment and new space in my life. I’ve uprooted myself and shifted to another country, one that is not unfamiliar but definitely new for me to experience work and life differently.

One of the reasons is to disrupt the patterns that had been laid down over the years, but more significantly during the pandemic. I had become somewhat imbalanced in terms of my life and focus. This is an attempt to restore the focus. Not by making things easier for me but actually by making it harder. Sometimes, I think reducing our ability to take on more allows us to be more focused on what it is we really need and want to hold on to.

The new space for my life hopefully also grants fresh ideas and inspiration especially to set me back on the path growth in multiple dimension rather than just striving in a single dimension in life.

Case on climate change

It’s almost surreal that the explanation of climate change, its far-reaching consequences and the warning of the lack of action as well as the foresight on the reluctance to switch from fossil fuels is so cogently made in 1985 before the US Congress.

And today, we still have what we have happening in the US. Meanwhile, other developing countries are massively adopting green energy, unlocking the opportunities and growth which comes from the energy transition.

The economic downsides of displacing the traditional, carbon-intensive activities were huge in 1985, but compared to the manner we allowed the activities to have expanded till today, humanity seemed like it’s dancing towards the edge of the cliff.

Limited life

Our lives are limited in many ways but more so by our perspectives than anything else. Time is one perspective by which we limit our lives. In some ways, it is sombering and perks us up but the urgency to accomplish things doesn’t always help. In that sense, the perspective of time as a resource otherwise wasted rather than an input to possibilities, limits us.

Then there is the dimension of money. Because money can buy more and more things, we become increasingly overwhelmed by our limited ability to generate income and wealth. The reason why get-rich-quick scheme works and why greed is pervasive is that we fear that material needs catches up with us. In the market system, money is our vote of some kind, the power we have to grab our share of possessions and material in this world. If we don’t get hold of enough money, we also lose our share of the society’s production. So then life gets caught up with that, with trying to get our share of production by trying to produce or to divert. And in the process we limit our lives to the material, even as we pursue experiences that money can buy.

Money, time and numbers/metrics were gifts to our lives, meant to be additions and blessings but instead they end up limiting our lives. Because of the way we have come to perceive them.

Value of a dollar from carbon business

The market values goods and services. And it also values the revenues generated from them. That’s what the capital markets are doing. What is interesting is that the capital markets have its own taste and preferences despite what we consider about rationality of businesses.

A dollar of revenues from unpopular industries can be treated as less than one from the ordinary industries. Just as the dollar of revenues from more popular industries can be seen as being more valuable.

At the moment, climate related businesses gets their chance in the limelight. And in the same vein, the coal businesses were being battered. Yet one can still consider all that rational considering the regulatory risks and issues around availability of feedstock to continue operating.

So is the value of a dollar from different businesses the same? Ultimately it is a question of what you think is the purpose of a business: to make money or to serve the customers.

Demand reductions

We perform a lot of demand forecasting for energy players and increasingly we need to forecast energy or fuel use for other industries. Often the players are thinking about greening their production, supply chain, etc. so we are forecasting how much fuel will be needed, or fleets of ship, volume of goods, amount of energy consumed.

In the climate transitioned world, we envision a greener version of our world when actually, it’ll be a different world altogether. It will not be the same as the one we are in today. For example, the energy content of hydrogen or green ammonia is a fraction of what we currently use as maritime fuel. If long-haul vessels are to switch fuel, they need more frequent refueling and bunkering activities will no longer be as concentrated as today. What will happen to Singapore as a bunkering hub?

Likewise, if companies are starting to be concerned about Scope 3 emissions, are we sure they would just pay more for green logistics? Won’t they procure more of their supplies locally? If we care about sustainability, will we not change our supply chains to switch out carbon-intensive materials.

The metrics around overall goods demand and where they come from will change fundamentally in a climate-transitioned world. ESG or climate is not just compliance, regulatory risk and reporting.

Picking problems II

I wrote about how people can’t solve problems that they are not willing to have. Yet one has to master the art of picking the right problems to work on as well. There had been times in my life when I wasn’t sure which problem to pick on dealing with and my attention became so diffused I wasn’t actually solving any problems but simply touching and going.

A lot of that life was during my previous career. We were often under a lot of pressure to do many things and deal with lots of problems with limited resources. And the result was the need to frequently and quickly get through a problem, declare it solved, and then go on to another one. There were long term issues, and shorter term ones. And one must learn to be able to prioritise them, as well as to properly trade-off resources across the long and short term challenges.

That prioritisation eventually becomes another challenge in itself. And this sort of self-referencing issue keeps popping up over my professional life. I discovered the importance of setting up buffer time for planning, to set aside budget for solutions to manage budgets and to ensure sufficient rest to be able to actually be producing more. Often times, we don’t recognise that the problems we pick naturally lend themselves to some peripheral problems that we need to deal with. That problems actually comes in a package when we are picking them.