jdilla.xyz

I loved this podcast between Ezra Klein and Alex Tabarrok for multiple reasons, not the least of which is my continuing obsession with the importance of trust in flourishing societies:

ALEX TABARROK: I mean, very similar to this, I think undermining trust in government. Andriei Shleifer has some work showing that trust, as you know, is down in the United States. And the kind of weird thing is, is that trust in government is down, but actually, this doesn’t lead you to kind of a libertarian paradise where people say, I don’t trust the government, let’s use the market.

Actually, what happens is trust goes down in all kinds of institutions. And if anything, people become more in favor of government. Not that they actually think it’s going to work, but they just think everything is unfair. And they think that nothing is going to work, and they become removed from the political process. But decline of trust doesn’t lead you to something which I want. And it’s unfortunate, in a way, because you would hope that people would sort of — well, if not the government, then the market. But that’s not the way it works.

Oddly enough, right, the societies in which people have the most trust, not only do they trust the government more, but they actually also trust markets more. These things work together. So if you have a lot of trust in government, then you’re actually willing to have free trade because you figure, well, the bottom half of people are still protected. You’re willing to have vaccines, which actually gets the economy going. So it turns out that trust in markets and trust in governments correlates actually pretty highly.

And later:

EZRA KLEIN: But that strikes me as somewhat to the side of the issue I’m bringing up here, which is that if you want to align the incentives of more groups to push for more overall growth, as opposed to pushing for just their slice of a stagnant pie, to mix my metaphors here, then you actually want lower levels of inequality. And I even see that in the housing example you turn to there. I’ve attended these meetings in S.F., and I try to watch what happens with them.

And something you cannot miss in a city like this, which has insane levels of internal inequality, just insane, like nothing I’ve ever seen, is that there’s no trust.

This certainly matches my intuition that trust in society is self reinforcing. But how to start moving towards trust to begin with? That I wish I had a better answer to.

I’ve researched and consulted on megaprojects for more than 30 years, and I’ve found that two factors play a critical role in determining whether an organization will meet with success or failure: replicable modularity in design and speed in iteration. If a project can be delivered fast and in a modular manner, enabling experimentation and learning along the way, it is likely to succeed. If it is undertaken on a massive scale with one-off, highly integrated components, it is likely to be troubled or fail.

That is from Bent Flyvbjerg in HBR.

Two things this article pointed out that I hadn’t considered before:

• Long timelines in a project create risk because it leaves more time for things to go wrong. I’ve rushed to ship a product before for fear of the competition, but the concern is more general than that. The longer it takes to get going, the more likely that the environment changes — a project sponsor leaves the company or an interested beta customer changes their plans. Even more so for public works.

• Projects that are useful in stages are more resilient. I’ve prioritized shipping a project in iterative chunks as a way of testing a hypothesis about my product before, but never considered that the faster you get a project producing, even partially, the more time its benefits compound and the faster it pays back it’s costs.

The entire article is worth a read, especially if you’re in the midst of planning or executing a major project. The example of the Madrid subway is both obvious and eye opening.

One more thing it made me consider: modularity creates resiliency. One of the ways cathedrals like Notre Dame were able to be built over hundreds of years was by using patterns that were easily understood and able to be extended. Calamities could come and derail projects, leaders could die, but new ones could take their place and take up the work again because of the modularity of the system.

Thanks to The Browser for bringing this one to my attention.

I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level, I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product line — and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.

From Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner of Patagonia. Reminds me of David Epstein’s book Range and the compounding value of exposure to different problem types for innovation.

Probably a good habit to ask “What new skill have I reached 80% proficiency at recently?”

I really enjoyed this interview between Casey Newton of the Platformer and Molly White of Web3 is going just great.

In it, Molly made a point I’ve thought about before but not been able to fully articulate, which is that in an effort to align incentives financially, many web3 projects undermine their own effectiveness:

There also aren't really intrinsic monetary incentives for people to contribute to Wikipedia, which I think is a very good thing. Where people are paid to edit Wikipedia by outside parties, it warps the incentive to contribute into one that's very different from (and sometimes at odds with) the incentives for most community members, and is often a very negative thing.

She references Everipedia, a blockchain-based wikipedia alternative:

If you look at their recent blog posts, it's all about how many tokens their editors have supposedly earned, and it even brags about the fact that "Over 70% of stakers have locked their IQ up for over 3.5 years to earn max APR". This is the same token that people are supposed to be spending to edit and vote on the quality of edits, but they're excited that people are locking them up on staking platforms? The goal is not to create a reference work, it's to make money off the token.

Speaking more broadly, monetizing things just shifts the dynamics in enormous ways. We've seen this same thing happen with play-to-earn gaming, where people start doing things really differently when monetary incentives are added.

I think this is a really smart point and poses problems for Web3 projects.

Financial incentives aren’t always the best way to get people to do what you want (see the daycare that started charing parents for being late and then saw an increase in tardiness), except that it’s worse than that for Web3 projects because it makes it harder for them to tell if they have product market fit. Because there isn’t a great way to distinguish the speculators from the true believers, it feels like the project has true momentum, when all it has are people trying to make a quick buck.

Another episode of Browser Bets, this time with Tom Chivers. We made bets about Boris Johnson’s future as Prime Minister of England and the likelihood of AI wiping out humanity.

Bets aside, my favorite part was processing the experience of going through COVID together. Tom and I had never met before this conversation and live thousands of miles away from each other, yet we instantly had this shared experience to talk about. This is pretty unique. Watch the whole thing.