Learning Acquisition Levels

My favorite measure of a person’s long-term potential is their ability to turn information into wisdom or, to say it a another way, to learn from experience.  In this context experience doesn’t have to be lived; it can be learned through conversation, reading, and research. Everyone does this1 but the extent of a person’s ability to “learn” wisdom is directly related to the number and sources of experience they are intentional about using.  These sources vary dramatically in usefulness and efficiency, and almost nobody maximizes them all.

Over time, I’ve come to categorize sources of learning into levels that help me not only identify the sophistication of my learned experience but also highlight opportunities to extend what I’ve learned from the same experience (i.e. kick it up a level.)  This is not to suggest that I’m great at doing this, but being intentional about it helps me see opportunities that don’t automatically present themselves.  Here are my 8 Levels of Learning Acquisition.

1) Learning from your successes

This is the most common, easiest, and least useful source of learning.  It is hard wired into our evolutionary biology to repeat behavior that has been successful previously.  It is the least useful because “past performance is not a guarantee of future success” or, to put it in a more academic framework, it is highly susceptible to confirmation bias. In the best case scenario you can learn a single lesson from a very specific situation that might or might not be applicable to future situations. The best learners are always humble about their successes because they know there are too many variables to make them generally applicable; and are therefore skeptical of those lessons.

2) Learning from positive feedback

Another natural learning method and one we all enjoy;  positive feedback can be anything from formal recognition, to hearing a co-worker say you did a good job.  Generally speaking this is a re-enforcing mechanism for level 1 and can be particularly effective as a tool to highlight non-intuitive experiences that you might not otherwise associate with learning. 2   To be most affective it needs to be:

  • Specific: “Good job” is less useful than “way to keep your off hand on the ball when making that cut.”
  • Timely: Positive feedback is dramatically less affective after time has passed and should almost always be done immediately.
  • Genuine: People almost always know when you don’t really mean it.  Worse, if they don’t know you mean it, then you can reinforce non-learning behaviors (this is the fundamental problem with things like participation trophies.)

“Praise to the undeserving is severe satire.”
– Benjamin Franklin

The most powerful way to use positive feedback learning is not to wait for re-enforcing feedback from others, but to consistently implement positive feedback incentives for you own behavior.3 Incentives are powerful tools when properly applied and exceedingly dangerous when misapplied. Rewarding yourself for consistency, instead of for results, is a hallmark of great athletes. Rewarding yourself for doing “just enough” is a recipe for mediocrity.

3) Learning from your failure

I’m a big fan of inversion thinking.  Learning from your failure is an inversion of level 1 learning from success.

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
– Henry Ford

People’s first exposure to learning from failure is seldom a decision; instead it is an experience thrust upon them. The “stick” to level 2’s carrot. That said, learning from your failures is not simply a step improvement on learning from success, it’s a exponential accelerant. 

  • It, at least, doubles the surface area of your opportunity to learn.
  • It can often provide an emotional cue for future failure states.4
  • Wisdom acquired through failure is of higher quality than that learned from success because failure states are more broadly applicable to other scenarios.5

Being intentional about learning from failure is a powerful tool. Many incredibly successful people (especially people in new disciplines) have been successful by a kind of “brute force” learning model using level 1, 2, and 3.  They do thousands of small experiments with small deviations and use the learned results to create a huge subject matter knowledge advantage over others.6

4) Learning from other peoples success

Learned experiences do not have to be limited to ones you have encountered yourself. Great wisdom can be found in the experiences of other, whither that come from stories, anecdotes, books, or conversations. Most people love to discuss their success and their opinions on how they accomplished those successes. Be open and attentive whenever someone wants to give you wisdom for I suspect there are few greater gifts they can give you.

The only apprehension to this advise is the same as for level 1. People who write or discuss their success are overwhelmingly susceptible to confirmation bias and their specific experience can seldom be generalized to less specific situations.7 Often it is more valuable to look at someone’s “rules for life” than specifics around their success because these are, at least, an indicator of how they prepared themselves for when success presented opportunities. Seek out and appreciate others success but always take it for what it is, one person’s opinion of themselves.

5) Learning from other peoples failure

“Wise Men learn by other’s harms; Fools by their own.”
– Benjamin Franklin

The inversion of “learning from other people’s success”. It is significantly less common to study the failures other people have had than to study their success, and seems to be done most often as entertainment rather than enlightenment.8 This is unfortunate because, just like by learning from your failures, learning from other people’s failure is both broader, of higher quality, and more generally applicable.

“Invert, always invert”
-Jacobi

My recommendation is to not only study specific cases of system/people failure (especially ones by people “in the loop” but outside the fallout9) but to intentionally focus on near failures in success stories. People are always prone to highlight achievements over their shortcomings, so invert their experiences of success. What could have gone wrong that would have jeopardized someone’s success? What decisions were made that caused someone to get to the inflection point of their story? What failures do they include in “the story of their success” that they acknowledge and what lessons did they learn? You are likely to get more value from asking those questions than from narrative they present.

6) Learning from the failures in your success

The first dramatic step increase in the learning levels.  While the first 5 levels are progressively less common, the remaining levels are both rare and generally non-intuitive. Instead they have to be intentionally developed!

Evaluating success with a specific eye towards identifying potential failure patterns in that success infinitely increases the wisdom we can acquire. This is not an exaggeration! There are dozens of ways it accomplishes this but a few examples include:

  • It changes how we see opportunities to learn.
  • It allows you to learn from situations that have never occurred, gamifying the learning pattern.
  • It minimizing the opportunities for failure by adding a “margin of safety” to any re-applied success patterns.
  • It extends the area of responsibility that people take ownership over (i.e. it expands the things they think they have some ability to influence.)
  • It allows you to turn planning into an effective learning model. 10

Groups like special forces teams are famous for using this learning method to increase future success. They treat every single experience as an opportunity to find failure patterns that can be used in planning and future pattern recognition. 11 In fact, they spend more time with successful operations reviews because operational failure usually end the “experience” per-maturely.

7) Learning from negative feedback

“Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.”
– Marcus Aurelius

Learning from positive feedback (level 2) is easy but learning to take criticism when given negatively is not natural and requires fighting defensive reflexes. This is unfortunate because (much like learning from failure) it dramatically increases the surface area available for learning. Very few people are able to do this consistently but the payoff is significant.

Unfortunately, not everyone is going to provide thoughtfully constructive feedback; especially when they are angry, frustrated, or impatient. It is difficult when someone says something like, “you are a stupid moron” to take a minute, relax, and calmly reply with “I’m so sorry your upset, but can you tell me why am I a stupid moron?” It sounds ridiculous but some of the most productive feedback12 I’ve ever gotten has happened in these exact moments. The value of this feedback level comes from the fact that:

  • It is honest, unfiltered, and direct. Three significantly valuable attributes in feedback!
  • It turns a negative experience into a productive (if not pleasant) experience.
  • If you can successfully absorb the feedback, implement it, and demonstrate (to the person who gave it to you) acceptance; you create an ally that will give you similar feedback in the future… only they will do it more constructively.

Fundamentally this level of learning requires humility and a desire to learn that transcends the need to protect your feelings. It is NOT easy but it IS powerful; and one of the best indicators of a person’s future success.

8) Learning from history

“There is no better teacher than history in determining the future… There are answers worth billions of dollars in $30 history book.”
– Charles T. Munger

Deciding not to learn from history is ideology and ideology is always an impediment to learning. Ideology forces us to bend reality to our perception of the truth instead of seeking out what truly is.13

“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”
– Mark Twain

My favorite historian, Will Durant14, believed that history was the feedback mechanism for metaphysical philosophy. Feedback mechanisms (i.e. success/failure above) are fundamental for learning and are the primary vehicles in the success of the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.15 Meaning that if you want to learn truly timeless lessons from the successes and failures of the greatest people and societies in history, you must absolutely study history.

The mental models16 developed by seeing the repeated patterns throughout time add a breadth of learning because of the sheer number of experiences available that you will never have otherwise. History lets you see the reasons, decisions, influences, and outcomes of events that have significantly higher stakes than you are likely to ever have to consider. They are case studies in previous behavior.

Finally, studying history provides a depth of understanding that is impossible to learn any other way. The Stoics had a better understanding of learning from failure than anything I (or your teacher for that matter) could write on the subject. No company has ever had the depth of experience with success and failure compared to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, or the Ming Dynasty, or the Ottoman Empire. It is impossible to study history and not learn lessons from it; and once you start to see the patterns of history, you will see them everywhere.

Ultimately, the study of history extends the ability to “learn from other people’s successes” and “learn from other people’s failures” exponentially.

Footnotes

  1. Parenting is a excellent example of experienced learning. As parents we are constantly trying to provide opportunities for our kids to experience things, while making sure they learn lessons from those experiences. Thus the importance of consequences… at least this is what good parents do. ↩︎
  2. For example, the time my dad said, “I’m really impressed that you measured twice before cutting that board”, which would not have been a learning experience otherwise because I had forgotten my measurement and was simply doing what I needed to do to finish the job… I measured a third time just to be sure! ↩︎
  3. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear ↩︎
  4. To put it another way, you only have to put your hand into fire once to learn a lesson, and your unlikely to have to “remind” yourself not to do it again. ↩︎
  5. Learning how to drive a car on the interstate doesn’t teach you a ton about how to drive on a track, or off-road; but loosing control of your car on ice is something you will remember when riding a motorcycle in a parking lot. ↩︎
  6. True perseverance is not making the same mistake over and over again but learning from slightly different mistakes to map correct paths. ↩︎
  7. For example, Michael Eisner might be exceedingly interesting as a leader but I doubt many will have the opportunity to walk into a business and 1) triple ticket prices due to value inelasticity, and 2) have a huge backlog of value to sell direct to customers through an untapped medium (in this case VHS tapes.) I also suspect Eisner is unlikely to attribute his success to these factors as they didn’t require any genius to identify. ↩︎
  8. Societies continual draw towards schadenfreude is an ancient motif that is especially true when combined with inequity aversion (or perceived inequity.) To put it more colloquially, society likes to build people up so we can watch them fall. ↩︎
  9. Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis ↩︎
  10. Planning, while important as a tool, is a weak model for learning because plans are guesses while experience provides an effective feedback loop to compare against. Planning’s primary value for learning is as a measure against expected results. ↩︎
  11. Extreme Ownership: How US Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink ↩︎
  12. As an example, I once had a program I was running at a Boy Scout camp as a Program Director. The feedback from my program was almost universally good, but one Scout Master was disappointing, condescending, and livid. After some questioning, I got a list of things he thought were seriously deficient in the program. By the following week I had improved or implemented nearly all of the recommendations (honestly, they were all pretty valuable) and the program reviews sky-rocketed. Serendipity resulted in that same Scout Master showing up at camp again six weeks later. He not only gave us a raving review but personally reach out to thank me. In retrospect, his feedback was 100x more valuable than all the positive feedback I received combined. As a side note, we are friends to this day. ↩︎
  13. Worse is when ideology is used to redefine history; to bend and distort history to make it map to our biases. There can be no learning if there is no truth, and bending truth to redefine objective reality is an exercise in philosophical masturbation… it might be fun, but it has little value. ↩︎
  14. The Lessons of History & The Story of Philosophy by Will & Ariel Durant ↩︎
  15. The failure of the “soft sciences” can directly be mapped to the insanely awful signal/noise ratio of those disciplines. Generally they lack objective measures against reality, throw out (instead of dis-prove) existing models in favor of what is “in vogue” at the moment, and seldom fail to ignore cross-discipline research. They are therefore subject to ideology, inaccuracy, and misalignment with incentives. I know a Engineering PhD whose thesis was 28 pages (and didn’t quote a single member of his dissertation board) because every single member of his board could tests his thesis and prove the veracity of his claims. Can anyone even imagine a similar scenario in a sociology thesis? These disciplines far far are too important to NOT have an objective feedback mechanism! ↩︎
  16. I say models because history is almost always universally applicable but seldom directly so. We can learn a lot about conformism, state theory, irrational exuberance, belief perseverance, group think, and authority from the Holocaust but we are unlikely to see the rise of another Nazi Germany. </Godwin> ↩︎

Of Experience vs Competence, Intelligence vs Wisdom

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

Stephen Hawking

There’s a basic misunderstandings that causes people to be perceived as more capable than they actually are.  A common mistake, when evaluating capability, is to associate experience with competence.  To confuse knowledge with wisdom.  In the former people have a lot of exposure to a given situation, in the latter the person has distilled that exposure in a way that allows them to gain deeper insight into future situations.

People understand this intuitively but unfortunately the vast majority of companies forget/ignore the difference when hiring people. Even when conscience of the difference, people will go about trying to identify competence by “digging deep” into their experience or by defining a minimal amount of experience. Both methods are flawed and provide no correlation to the likely success of a hire.1

Experience is necessary, but not sufficient for competence, to use a term from mathematical causality.  To move from experience to competence you generally have to have done two things: 

1. Have had multiple experiences to draw from that are specific, at least tangentially, to the situation you need to learn from, and

2. Be intentional about questioning the lessons from those experiences.

Unfortunately most people don’t question what they have done in a way that make subsequent experience testable against their assumption. Instead, they just assume the know the reasons for it. 2

For example,  I drive around 50 miles a day in my commute.  Over the course of my professional career, I have driven many many more miles than rookies starting off in the Indy 500.  It lacks specificity because I don’t drive comparable car, in a comparable environment, with comparable traffic, and with a similar goal. I have lots of “experience” driving a car, but that experience lacks any validity for the wisdom need to drive in the Indy 500.   

Intentionality is much much harder to evaluate. People will speak with conviction of opinions they’ve developed through their experience and will sound like they have wisdom. Assuming you have filtered someone for the specificity of their experience, what is the best way to evaluate the intentionality of those experiences. There is no perfect solution but here are a couple handy rules-of-thumb I’ve learned are over time.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

William Shakespeare

1. Don’t trust someone who gives you absolute answers. People with wisdom will almost always say things like “well it depends” and “in our situation” because they have enough understanding to know the limits of their own experience. All problems have a range of best solutions based on tons of criteria that are dependent on outside variables. Competent people know that almost no two situations are identical and will hedge their answers accordingly.

If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.

Ray Dalio

2. Look for people who have not only had experience but have also failed in that experiences. Inversely, distrust anyone that doesn’t offer up those failures when discussing their experience. People who have not “failed” generally lack the wisdom of those who have but much much worse are those that hide or don’t acknowledge those failures because it means they don’t value failure as a method for learning. It means they have an immature concept of what failure is, and competence can never be found in immaturity.

Feedback is the breakfast of champions. Winners use it to upgrade their performance; losers use it as an excuse to fail.

Ken Blanchard

3. Evaluate how does a candidate, consultant, or colleague respond when you push back on the assumptions they developed from their experience. Do they look for more details or spend time thoughtfully considering how your experience might be different? Or to they stubbornly adhere to their convictions and see all situations as black or white? Look for people who have strong opinions, loosely held, because wisdom comes from constant feedback and continuous improvement. There is no improvement without being open to feedback.

A prudent question is one half of wisdom.

Francis Bacon

4. Great questions are the best indicator of competence. The biggest mistakes people have in their career are not usually due to having the wrong answers, but having the right answer to the wrong questions. Find people who ask thoughtful questions!3 Great questions are harder to fake, take more insight, and are a much better indicator of competence than great answers.

The four techniques above are not magic bullets but they can dramatically increase the likelihood of getting a competent hire instead of just an experienced hire. The techniques also help with existing talent. One of my favorite ways to evaluate long term potential is by looking at how quickly a given person can turn experience into wisdom. People who can do that quickly are the future rock stars of your company.

  1. This can be exceptionally difficult for organizations that are looking for capabilities outside of their existing strengths.  They can filter and hire for people with experience but it is very very difficult to evaluate their overall wisdom if you don’t have someone internally who can accurately and unbiasedly evaluate their competence. ↩︎
  2. A great indicator of whither someone is moving from experience to competence is if you see them pushing the boundaries of those experiences to test the validity in edge case scenarios.  They are isolating more and more of the variables that have an opportunity to effect the outcome… thus allowing them to make more accurate assumptions about future experiences. ↩︎
  3. Evaluating these questions can be a difficult ask for companies that don’t have someone capable of evaluating good questions. In such cases it is probably best to bring in an outside expert to help because it is easy for non-technical people to be snowballed by technical answers if they don’t have domain specific experience. ↩︎

Engineers Perspective of Global Warming

Note: This is a long form reply to a question I received and how the problem is seen by engineers vs non-engineers. Admittedly I’m just a software engineer, so take it with a grain of salt.

Global warming is a much bigger problem (in terms of complexity and danger) than most people realize; while also being a significantly less catastrophic calamity than many zealots claim it is.  The problem IS NOT around politics, or will, or capability.  From the standpoint of trying to engineer a solution; the problems are known, well understood, and exceptionally difficult.  And like any exceedingly complex engineered solution, the problem cannot be resolved at mass scale without significant time.

Universal View

At a fundamental level human beings, by their very nature, use energy to reduce entropy.  It doesn’t mater if you are making software, building bridges, teaching students, or cooking dinner.  The energy may come from food, firewood, or electricity… but everything we do, as long as we continue to be alive, needs energy.  There are only really 3 fundamental components of the universe that humans interact with… space, time, and energy (matter being a form of energy.) Humans can only effectively control one of them… energy.

It is fundamentally impossible for human being to progress without using more and more energy. In a very real sense, energy use IS PROGRESS!

Modernity, or human advancement, or progress if you will; are ALL directly related to humans using MORE energy and using it more effectively.  Forget tracking calories per person, or average income per person.  Calories come from food that had to be made with energy.  Value (in the form of income or goods) comes from energy being used to make them.  Think of energy use as the speedometer of human progress.  When the dark ages happened in Europe and the economy tanked in 2008, the energy use per person dropped.  When the standard of living goes up for a city, or a country, or the planet… the energy use per person almost always increases.

I say almost because efficiency in energy use can lower total energy use in many functions in advanced society.  At their core, that is what tools do.  People may hate industrialization, but it has allowed a dramatic drop in the amount of energy needed per pound of food.  That said, it is never zero; and it can’t be because the only way to overcome entropy is using energy.

So the story of the continual development of humanity is the story of our ability to more effectively use energy to do the work of reducing entropy.  In the beginning the only general purpose machine we had for “doing/making” things was the human body.  We fed it, and it allowed us to do things.  Over time we realized we could “do/make” more by spending some of that energy to make tools that allowed us to use less energy to “do/make” the same amount of work (or even better, more work.)  The cycle continued over and over again until we understood enough of the physical world that the ability to make tools was limited only by the amount of energy we could put into those tools to do the thing we want done.  For example, we couldn’t create flying machines until the advent of the internal combustion engine because we lacked a way to output enough energy in our tool to overcome the gravity of the tool itself as well as ourselves.

Energy Density

The solution to these problems all centers around energy density.  Basically, the more energy you can pack into a smaller space with the associated reduced weight, the more things you could “do/make”. This including building the tools that would allow you to build better tools to do even more. Additionally, for low energy dense materials, the filler for these materials is generally stuff we don’t like (things like pollution and CO2.)

Humans intrinsically understood this problem without being able to describe the mechanics of it. If you want to make heat, the easiest way is to make a fire. Fire is simply one form of potential energy being release from a stored energy source. Humans will naturally prefer to burn propane over coal, coal over wood, and wood over bio mater. Each produces more energy and less pollution than the later.

So, again, much of the story of humanity is our continual movement from lower density/higher pollution forms of energy to higher density/lower pollution forms of energy. Humanity changed from cow dung, to wood, to wind/water mills, to coal, to natural gas, to nuclear. Then then, because of fears associated with nuclear weapons, we dumped nuclear and noticed that hydrocarbons were hurting our world. There is a very real argument to be made that because we backed away from Nuclear most of the problems we have around global warming, hydrocarbon consumption, resource wars over those hydrocarbons, and even inequality can be at least partially traced to backing away from the most energy dense, least polluting, most abundant energy source humans have ever discovered.

A couple of examples will make the point. Assuming we continued to build nuclear power plants at the rate we did in the mid 1980s (at its height) something close to half of all hydrocarbons consumed between the early 90s and now would never have been consumed. This undoubtedly would have driven down the cost of fossil fuels. Stabilizing those costs are a big reason for wars in the middle east, conflict with Russia, and dozens of other wars around the world. True, lowering the cost of fossil fuels would increase their use in the short run, but as downward pressure continued (due to effectively all base load generation getting moved to nuclear) the price would have increased as it became less and less profitable to invest in higher risk production like fracking and off-shore wells. It is the difference between reducing consumption and making production less valuable. If you want to reduce usage in the short term, increase prices; but if you want to reduce overall production in the long term (what the real goal of the environmental movement should be) you have to lower prices continually for the long term. You don’t permanently reduce the use of horses by making them more expensive, you do it by getting people cars.

The solution, we are told, is to move to lower density power production through the use of renewables.  However, renewables suffer from at least three major issues that will keep them from being effective downward pressures to hydrocarbon production for, at least, the next 50-100 years while we work through the technical challenges of using them at scale.

Problems with Low Density Energy

The first problem is scaling.  It is much much easier to scale if you can control output by expanding the input of a given process.  The alternative is to scale the process itself. While not entirely analogous, for much of the infrastructure of coal fire power plants you can effectively double the production of power at by using twice as much coal.  If you want to double the output of a solar farm, you have to double the “power plant” itself (you can’t double the sun.) This means extending production is X times more difficult, expensive, and time consuming than doing it with something like coal.  The total energy INCREASE globally for everything (transportation, industrial, residential, and commercial) from 2021 to 2022 could be produced with around 80 nuclear power plants.  It would take close to 50 million wind turbines to produce the same amount of power; and that is JUST the increase in global energy usage from 2021 to 2022 (i.e. not total use.)  Solar scales better but not by the factor of 1000 it would need to to offset the scaling problem.

The second problem is base loads.  Most people understand the problem of base load energy generation at this point.  Whereby low energy density sources are generally inconsistent in their production.  Solar and wind don’t work all the time and such.  There is, however, a third problem associated with low energy density production, and that is the utilization problem.  Low density energy has to be collected and concentrated for high power demands. Think transportation (flight) and matter conversion activities (smelting ore.)

Both energy density problems can be worked around in one of two ways.  Adding capacity, for example even though man power is low energy conversion you can throw more and more people at it (historically in the form of slaves.)  You could double (or triple) the number of wind turbines but that just doubles our scaling problem.  Even if you add capacity, it will run into the utilization problem. That is why low energy density collection needs batteries.  It allows you to store things like solar and wind power for use in high energy utilization activities as well as resolves the base load problem.

The battery solution is ideal if the storage mechanism is cheap or, ideally, has a low variable cost compared to its fixed cost.  For example, hydro-power is actually a much lower energy production mechanism than things like coal, but has a high fixed cost/low variable cost solution for its battery… a dam.  Electrical batteries suffer from the problem of high variable cost, and historically high fixed cost.  The fixed cost problem is a resolvable one as increased manufacturing scale, but the high variable cost problem will take a lot longer to fix.  There is not enough lithium in the world to meet the battery needs of base load utilization for just North America let alone the world and that doesn’t even include things like transportation and consumables (like your phone.)  Additionally electrical batteries suffer from another significant problem, weight.

Again, this comes back to energy density.  A 1060 lbs Tesla Model 3 battery (long range) produces around 75kWh of power.  Twenty gallons of gas weigh about 120lbs and produce about 660kWh of electricity.  Electrical batteries/engines are significantly more efficient in their energy conversion but because of the sizable amount of weight in the battery, nearly 33% of its capacity is being used to move the batteries themselves.

For humanity to be able to continue to developing using primarily low energy dense solutions, we absolutely must find cheaper, higher capacity, and lower weight battery sources.  From an Engineering standpoint, this is a much harder problem to solve than something like fitting 1000x the number of transistors on the same silicon!  The higher the energy potential of a thing, the more unstable it gets (energy has a tendency to want to escape.)  This is the reason modern, high energy density, batteries are more likely to explode then older, low energy density, batteries.  It is the same reason gasoline is so combustible, it hold a crazy amount of potential energy that is very easy to release.  This continues to hold true until you start to bond the atoms themselves, but then you effectively need to create a nuclear reaction to release the energy.  Yes, over the last 50 years battery storage density has increased 4x, but our problem (if we want to solve it in any reasonable timescale) is one where battery capacity needs to double every 2 to 5 years! This is a known physics problem and one I don’t think we even have a theoretical fix for yet.

Honestly the best solution to the battery problem will probably NOT consist of traditional chemical electric batteries, but some kind of physical potential storage mechanism (think water pumps run from wind turbines that put water behind a dam.)  The problems for “green” solutions are so difficult that I honestly don’t see them ever actually overcoming their limitations, as sources of the majority of load,  until we get to another generation of “green” energy solutions. Things like orbital solar collectors have the ability to solve these kind of problems by turning solar into a high density energy source but those are a long way off.  Notice I’m saying that orbital solar collectors are, from an engineering perspective, an easier problem to solve than the current generation of “green” energy methods! Alternative “green” energy sources can provide a bridge (things like radioactive decay batteries) but then why not just use nuclear.

Outcomes

So what do we do? Reduce the population significantly? From a global warming perspective we care about gross CO2 emissions not emissions per person, so reducing human population by half would definitely get us to the stated target of 50% of 2005’s emissions.

Totally shut off hydrocarbons?  If you shut off access to hydrocarbons without providing an alternative source of energy (remember food is potential energy) then it is impossible for people to move beyond poverty.  Human progress (which again, is literally measurable by energy consumption) will effectively stop.  It might continue in small areas if inequality is allowed to increase in other parts of the world.  More people (both in numbers and as a percentage) have escaped poverty in the last 30 years than in all of human history primarily because of low cost energy and free markets but millions still die as parts of the world lag in getting into global free markets.  Limit total energy access and global deaths due to that inequality will start to rise dramatically.  Remember also that resource access has been the cause of most wars in human history.

Live with global warming for the next dozen generations?  Honestly, if we are unwilling to give up our bias towards nuclear power this might be the best possible option.  While global temperatures will continue to increase, the number of people likely to die is in the tens or hundreds of millions due to environmental changes; but that is a fraction of the billions who would likely die in the above two options. While some disaster scenarios are exaggerated (sea level rise will not wipe out cities overnight but it will increase disease and population pressure) others are grossly under exaggerated (1,300 people die each summer due to the heat, what do you think is likely to happen there.)  And some are mixed (Easy access to energy has made shifting farm production and location something that only takes years instead of generations, so global food shortages are very very likely, and probably more common, but are likely not long term/permanent effects.)

The best option is obviously to massively invest in nuclear, continue to invest in green technology, and use natural gas as a bridge fuel as we make the transition. Natural gas produces 50% LESS CO2 than coal (the primary base load fuel) and, thanks to fracking, is plentiful.  The only country to meet the original Kyoto target numbers set for them was the US.  And we didn’t even sign the darn thing.  The reason was due to the massive shift to natural gas for electrical grid production after the fracking boom made it gas cheap and easily available.  In fact we are producing LESS CO2 in the US (in spite of the population increase) than at any time since the late 80s. Unfortunately, for all the reasons I mentioned above, “Green” production has accounted for only a small percentage of this reduction.  Ultimately though, natural gas is simply a bridge and the faster we can onboard nuclear capacity, the sooner we can get rid of all hydrocarbons used for base load.  Once energy is cheap enough on grid, it will put more and more downward pressure on transportation energy.  It will likely never be 0 (tankers and long range airplanes are unlikely to be able to use battery storage) but it will become the exception, not the rule.  By moving base load production to nuclear we also free up battery capacity for things like car, which will continue to accelerate the reduction in fossil fuels for transportation.

Take-aways:
  • Global warming will harm the planet and humanity for generations to come.
  • We don’t really know by how much. While we have seen some starting effects, the more damaging effects are either slow moving effects (ones we are likely to adapt to), are speculation, and/or are nightmare scenarios we haven’t even considered. We just don’t know.
  • Human progress depends on cheap energy… get rid of it, and your kids future will be worse than your past.  Mostly likely worse than the effects of global warming.
  • Low density energy like solar and wind are, by themself, incapable of meeting future energy demands anytime in the next 100 years.  This is not a political argument but based on physical limitation of these systems.
  • Nuclear is the only real way to resolve global warming that I can see, at least without massive human suffering.
  • The environmental movement has done more to bring attention/research to global warming than any business, government, or other institution.
  • The parts of the environmental movement that moved away from nuclear have done more to perpetuate global warming than any business, government, or other institution.
  • BOTH of the above statements can be true at the same time.
  • Oil and gas companies have profited due to the nuclear ban; that is why some of them oppose nuclear power.
  • Oil and gas companies have also done more than any environmental group to lower greenhouse gases, especially in the US.
  • BOTH of the above statements can be true at the same time.
  • These problems are HARD, really HARD, and the people shouting the loudest are the ones who effectively think technology is magic.
  • Outside of significant investment in nuclear, there is no future were global CO2 volumes decrease substantially in the next 50-100 years.
  • Activists who want all fossil fuels stopped NOW, are condemning a billion people to stay in poverty and hundreds of millions of people to die.  Which isn’t much different that what will happen to humanity from global warming.

 

The Tools We Use

“It is not only the violin that shapes the violinist, we are all shaped by the tools we train ourselves to use, and in this respect programming languages have a devious influence: they shape our thinking habits.”
– Edsger W. Dijkstra

Object Oriented languages suffer from a forced paradigm that fits more for UI design than solving the large scale data problems we encounter today. Languages like Java force a developer to speak in nouns and create artificial structures that don’t actually represent the systems we encounter.  The result is an inheritance tree with more and more abstract ideas being forced into shapes that don’t make sense.

Remember the QuickTime volume control? For anyone who isn’t old enough to remember, Apple QuickTime used to have a scroll-wheel volume control.  It was meant to be intuitive to the user so they could easily understand how to adjust volume.  The actual results where not what was intended.  Most users took their mouse, grabbed the tiny edge of the wheel, moved it a quarter inch up or down, released, and re-grabbed it wheel over and over until they got the volume correct.  It was painful, annoying, and substituted 30 seconds of UI training for a lifetime of frustration.

Forcing a bad model on users only works to limit the usefulness of the problem being solved.  Worse, instead of accelerating progress it debilitates our understanding of the underlying issue.  Software language paradigms multiply this mis-model understanding 100x resulting in overly complex systems, that are harder to change, and even harder to maintain.

There are lots of examples of this kind of round peg, square hole problem.  SQL is another example.  Large scale scheme enforced structured data is a solved problem.  SQL and SQL databases have done an amazing job of getting performance and consistency from data; but those aren’t issues with most startups.  Flexibility, velocity, cost, and non-specialization are the primary problems of the success of small startup teams; ACID compliance is not.   Developers with deep experience in SQL databases often have the drawback of thinking of most data like it is a table; which limits options and slows the development cycle compared to less structured data.

This has become a bigger problem because of the prevalence of unstructured data and the usefulness of map-reduce in processing that data in ways are particularly useful in web-scale systems.

The point isn’t to suggest that there isn’t a place for things like OOP development or SQL databases, but software shops that rely exclusively on these tools are dramatically limiting themselves.  A carpenter that only uses hammers, hand saws, and screw drivers is at a decided disadvantage to one that uses those tools AND a 3D printer.  The abstract thinking required to use these tools is definitely a hurdle to overcome, but the payoff is substantial.

Proof of life

Users are the only real proof that you’ve created wealth. Wealth is what people want, and if people aren’t using your software, maybe it’s not just because you’re bad at marketing. Maybe it’s because you haven’t made what they want.

Paul Graham

Inside of technology companies we have a whole host of ways we measure our progress. Key performance indicators (KPIs) I’ve seen include page hits, unique visitors, assets registered in the system, and even Google page ranks. The problem with these kind of KPIs are that they are vanity metrics that make you feel good about your “startup” but don’t actually lead to any sales.

Do you want to know how valuable your startup is? Ask yourself how many actual users you have. Investors, acquirers, and even partners will use this metric to determine your value; so you are probably better off using it to measure yourself. Paying customers is an even better! Look at the largest acquisition value multiplier for any tech company in the last decade and they will have one thing in common, paying customers.

The number of paying users is such a valuable metric that whole business spring up around customer acquisition. One of my favorite examples is the home security space…

At my last company, my partner and I were discussing a business strategy that centered around a serial home security startup founder he knew. This particular entrepreneur had sold 3 or 4 companies so far, each for around $10 million. His methodology was that he started a home security company using third party hardware and outsourced call center resources. He would then sell these systems like a mad man. He would go door to door, viral marketing, contract HOA agreements, pitch to builders… anything he could think of, while working 20 hour days, to get customers.

The beauty, from his standpoint, was these were all reoccurring monthly revenue subscriptions on 36 month contracts. If he could get a critical number of contracts (I want to say it was around 10,000 active home security systems) before the 3 year window, he could sell the entire company to someone like ADP who was happy to pick-up, and pay for, these customer acquisitions given the RMR model. He was treating the home security industry as an optimization problem where the primary metric of success was the number of users under contract and he was RIGHT!

Of Core & Contracting

A contract technology specialist I have a great deal of respect for made this comment a while back.

I’ve never understood why CIOs prefer training rather than hiring a contractor; less time, less TCO, higher quality.

Training is a long term investment in your people that can “potentially” pay off as a force multiplier in the future.  This is especially true if you are talking about a companies core competencies. Historically companies that outsource their core competencies over a long period of time get knocked out of those markets by competitors that can buy up the outsourced experience.

Investing in your people is strategic, but often unexpected opportunities demand short term tactical considerations trump long term strategy. In these situations contractors can act as the spark to jump-start initiatives and respond to unexpected problems.

Contractors make the most sense when you need high value, high quality experience as quickly as possible. Calling a contractor “the dark side” just removes a tool from a CIO’s arsenal of weapons. It is both short sighted and ignorant.

The other place that contractors really shine is for non-core competency functions. If you are not going to be an expert in some capability, you are almost always better off outsourcing that capability to someone that is. This is the reason we have seen the rise of outsourced services like HR, IT Support, and even CIOs.

Let me put is this way, if you are a company that makes X and you are the best darn X maker on the planet then you want to train future X makers so you can continue to be the best at X.  Inversely, if you are the best darn maker of X… then get someone else to install the freaking phone system!

Oh, the Places You’ll Go

So what did I do in 2017?   I made a conscious decision to focus on goals last year and had a lot of success because of it.  Here are some highlights.  Many of these started as  New Years resolutions or expanded from things I annually focus on.  I generally believe you need to have focus (or more specifically time) dedicated to five things; your family, your faith, your career, your health (intellectual & physical), and your community.  The list below represents the fruits of the time I spent on the last three of those things.

Teaching

I am the CTO of Automation Integrated so teaching isn’t my career, it is something I do to give back to the people entering this industry.

I never wanted to be a teacher.  My dad was a grade-school teacher before becoming an administrator and I remember how hard it was, how disproportional that work seemed to be compared to the compensation.  Boy, was I wrong!   I love teaching.  I love the students.  I love this industry and getting to introduce it to other people.  I love watching them fall in love with technology the way I did.

Documentaries

I love documentaries and made a new years resolution to watch 12 as an excuse to justify changing the channel from the second season of “Stranger Things” when I’m too numb to even read a book.  Overall, I’m really impressed with the quality of “YouTube” documentaries but it is hard to beat Ken Burns.

    1. Al Jazeera English: The Caliph, Part 1
    2. The Roosevelts: An Intimate History: Get Action
    3. Al Jazeera English: The Caliph, Part 2
    4. Hjernevask: The Gender Equality Paradox
    5. Al Jazeera English: The Caliph, Part 3
    6. Hjernevask: The Parental Effect
    7. Oklahoma City
    8. Hjernevask: Gay/Straight
    9. Ekip Films: The Hittites
    10. Hjernevask: Violence
    11. Hjernevask: Sex
    12. The World of Compulsive Hoarders
    13. Hjernevask: Race
    14. Last Chance U: Season 1
    15. Hjernevask: Nature or Nurture

Of all the documentaries Hjernevask is by far the most controversial and exceedingly interesting.  The Roosevelts coincided with the obsession with Teddy I had at the beginning of last year.

Public Speaking

I spoke or was a panelist at a number of technology related organizations last year.  Two of the presentations were because of the interest in non-relational databases & Big Data.  The other three were related to my role with Automation Integrated.  All of them were a lot of fun, primarily because we have amazing technology people in Oklahoma City!

    1. 1 Million Cups:  A Tale of 2 Companies
    2. OKC Big Data: Introduction to Non-Relational Databases using CouchDB
    3. OKPSA: Innovating in a Brick and Mortar Business
    4. Open Source Databases Meetup: CouchDB is Awesome
    5. Innotech Panel: Key Components in Getting IT Projects Approved

Running

I finished the year with exactly 500 miles.  The final 8 were done the last day of the year on a treadmill due to the weather, but done non-the-less.  I didn’t start tracking my outdoor runs until late in the year but some of them are on Strava.  Probably the most mileage I’ve had in a single calendar year, although there was a 12 month period in 2008-2009 I had more.

Reading

I love Goodreads because of how easy it is to track the books I’ve read or listened to.  There is also a Chrome extension that tells me what books on my reading list are available for electronic checkout at my library.  I was able to finish 69 books last year with my favorites being Ten Philosophical Mistakes by Mortimer Adler and The Lessons of History by Will Durant & Ariel Durant.  They were also two of the shortest books I read.  Here is a link to my summer reading post, and a specific winter reading post should come soon-ish.

Being Fat

I had already lost about 20 lbs by the time New Years came last year.  My goals was a modest 10 lbs of additional weight… I eventually lost 30 more.  In fact, I dropped all the way down to 160 before I started working on building up some after the weight loss.

Writing

Two articles I produced as part of my PSA presentation were also published.  I’m particularly proud of these as I’ve never had a third party publish anything I’ve made previously.  The were Cultivating a Technology Innovation Mindset and Breaking Barriers to Technology Innovation.

Summary

Some of the success I had last year stems from two realizations:

1) I need a measurable way to track my goals if I’m going to do well.   I see more success when I use apps like MyFitnessPal, Goodreads, and Strava.

2) Goal setting is HUGE for me.  Even if I fail to reach a specific goal the overall result is dramatically better if I start out with a goal in mind.

Next year?  I’m thinking guitar, writing, and resistance training… and more teaching & reading,

The Vacuum Clap

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

–Saul Alinsky

Nature and politics abhor a vacuum.  The moment a newly formed vacuity opens the resulting space is filled with the first onrush of whatever commodity is directly adjacent.  If authority is missing from a power structure it will quickly be occupied by multiple players looking to occupy that power vacuum, almost always with intense and sudden conflict.  Why, after 12 centuries of relative safety, was Rome conquered by the the Goths, the Huns, and the Vandals all within 4 decades?  It was because of the sudden void created by the absence of Rome’s ability to project power.  I call this sudden destructive collision caused by unexpected power gap the vacuum clap.

The ramifications of these vacuum claps can ripple for a long long time after the initial cause.  How many of the current geo-polical problems are a direct result of the sudden “clap” that resulted from abdication of European imperialist influence.  Notice how the resulting fallout happens regardless of the justice or morality of the cause of the vacuum!  It doesn’t matter that imperialism legitimately HAD to end; there were going to be violent ramifications resulting from the sudden change for decades (and centuries) to come.

Regulation created your income disparity.  The removal of regulation created your financial crisis.

— Author Unknown

Where this comes to play most on the intra-national scale seems to be in the area of state regulatory policy.  The creation of laws (regardless if they are good or bad) create an artificial “scaffolding” around a pattern of behaviors.  Instead of behavior progressing natural based on mutual interaction (again, good or bad) the behavior is artificial.  This is exacerbated by incentives that may come into direct conflict with the intended behaviors creating black markets, legal opportunist, and artificial ancillary effects.  The spread of the car culture is as much a product of government profit regulation in the passenger rail market as it is the government construction of the interstate system.

So artificial vacuums created by regulation are a problematic, but then imagine the problems created by removing those controls.  When the “scaffolding” is kicked out, even if the scaffolding was an objective bad thing, the result is an almost certain crash.  In the normal ebb and flow of markets, a natural equilibrium eventually takes hold*  but removing bureaucracy always creates a vacuum that markets will suddenly (and often destructively) will try to fill.

This is one reason why even bad laws are difficult to remove.  When critics say that getting rid of regulation will cause havoc, they are generally correct.  Of course, most of the time the regulation is demonstrably bad and often even counter-productive to the intended purpose.**  This brings about the worst in government.  The endlessly expanding dregs of our failed attempts at law, never to be removed because the pain of pulling off the bandage is worse than the slow pain of infection.

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

–Oscar Wilde

How do we shorten the time it takes for a new equilibrium after the resulting void?  My gut reaction is that the better the feedback mechanism the faster a state of balance will occur.  On the macro level this can be exceedingly difficult.  Using the imperialism example from above, notice how feedback isn’t spread equally among all the constituents.  England was more concerned with the collapse of imperialism that its colonies were, but isn’t nearly as effected by the results of that debacle.

Ultimately the best solution is to never create such voids in the first place.  In the realm of intra-national regulation it is obvious to point out that our attempts at a solution are often worse than the original symptom,  especially in the long run.  In the area of international governments the way to preempt such voids is to limit the use of force on other peoples, countries, and nations.  Power never spent will not create a vacuum.***

Footnotes

*In actuality the ebb and flow always continue because nothing ever stays the same and markets are always trying to innovate.  Part of the problem with laws is that they never innovate.

** How many billions of tons of CO2 have been created by regulating ethanol production?

*** My favorite definition of injustice is “Injustice is the abuse of power; force used against the unwilling.  Using power or authority to take from others their life, liberty, dignity, or the fruits of their love or their labor”

The sum of all fears

Update 5/25/2017: This is a post I started over a year ago.  In the interim Ubuntu has officially dropped the plan on a convergent desktop.  Mark Shuttleworth might argue that convergence will eventually happen but ultimately that doesn’t matter.

“In business being early, or being late, is the same thing as being wrong.”

Outstanding article over at TechRepublic discussing the lack of momentum that Ubuntu has had as of the last couple years.  The basic rundown is that the author believes that the long term goal of “the convergent desktop” is causing other less important goals to slip.

For those who haven’t heard of the convergent desktop (or simply convergence) it is the idea currently being chased by both Microsoft and Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) whereby your phone/tablet can also be your desktop/workstation.  Sometimes this is associated with a seamless user experience that “transcends” both use cases (i.e. is the same environment on both platforms) but more often is based on some kind of modal shift when device size changes.  So for Windows 8, it become more Windows 8’y when on a phone, but feels a little more like Windows 7 when on a 22″ monitor with mouse.

Google is, of course, more concerned with turning everything into an extension of the web via Chrome and/or Android.  This means that they ultimately don’t care if it is a desktop or a phone running applications; as long as the data is stored in their cloud or provided by one of their services.  So what is Apple’s strategy concerning convergence?  Ahhh, now you get to the meat of the problem.

Apple, always laser focused on user experience, figured out a while ago that convergence SUCKS.  It really really does and here is a brief explanation why.

A great desktop experience is going to be focused on use cases where people are going to use desktop applications.  I call these users “creators” because they primarily use their computers for creative endeavors.  Think software development, editing photos, writing books, mixing music,  making spreadsheets, etc.

In this vein, the tools for creating are centered around the ability to produce new material.  Keyboards are spectacular input devices for creators.  I can type faster than I can write. Even though my ultra-book has a touchscreen, I never use it because my ten fingers are faster for creating things that a single pointing finger is.  When a fine grain control inside a two dimensional canvas is needed, a mouse is significantly better than either a touch screen or a touch pad.

A great tablet experience is going to be focused on use cases where people are not going to be creating.  I call these users “consumers”.  When using my tablet I am almost solely relegated to the role of consuming information.  Reading emails, watching Netflix, looking up receipts on Google, etc.  Consuming requires less functionality than production and added interface utilities for these edge usage cases would just take away from the user experience.

Now obviously most users spend some time during the day being both a consumer and a creator.  This is not a statement of the value of how a user uses their technology but an implicit realization that different use cases should be centered around how best to actually use their system.

It is hard to make a really functional sports car that can also be a useful pickup truck.  Trying to make one into the other generally causes you to have a tool that is good at neither.