Dear Reader,

It’s been exactly 4 years since my last Substack confession, which itself had a 2 year interval prior. We now live in a Chinese curse—interesting times—where the ever-constant Global attempts to ever-embed itself into the Local. In the immortal words of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, “I don't know what to make of that.”

But! I say to you, the Local is interesting in a far different manner to any Chinese curse, and is in fact far closer and louder than any Global Abstract could be. The “stumbling block”—what Mattheiu Pageau regards as new information that can either make one stumble and reject, or can become the thing most needed, the solution to the problem at hand—is the understanding of the word “interesting”. Is it curse, or door?

Let’s reframe “interestingness” as the first derivative of subjective beauty, where beauty itself is the forging of knowledge. Our curiosity drives us to seek things that are becoming more compressible to us, not what's already known and simple or that seem forever complex and unknown. The things in-between, the inframince threshold, so to speak.

Target Fixation

Kristof Kieslowski's “Three Colours: Blue” begins with an open landscape with a car cutting through it. Then we see the aftermath where the car has crashed into the only tree across the span of that open road. Never ascribed in the film because it is not important to it, we might suppose he may have been drunk, speeding, or whatever, but there was a thought process happening during this event. It seems the driver got himself into a pickle then told himself “don’t to hit the tree” and the more he focused on that, the more his actions led to the opposite: hitting the tree.

Target fixation is an attentional phenomenon in which an individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object.

Instead of expressing a simple logical instruction, “don’t hit the pole” can quickly become a Boolean mixup of two simultaneous mental states that can lead to the opposite of an instruction, especially when we are not in our “right mind”. When we explicitly set out to do something, we create a doing and a not-doing that doing must surpass. The challenge of the language-based logic that hasn’t been formally understood within oneself twists itself into a tension between doing and not-doing. And the not-do becomes the do.

My favourite is when using “don’t” with children—it's an abstraction that requires a kind of thinking they do not have yet. If the parent is trying to control the child, using words like “don’t” seem to reinforce the behaviour! Instead, role play the behaviour you want from them through actions and reinforce that by words that represent the intended outcome, instead of the not intended outcome.

Another one is Javascript booleans, for example !!isActive. It takes a while to see this intuitively without second guessing. That is, I am forced to check my glance to be sure the syntax is doing what I want, which in this case is presented as “what I don’t don’t want”. Javascript typesafety, like every other computing code language, works by requiring pure symbolism, but every time I read it, I must traverse between my intention (which is at my fingertips in this situation) and the invented language’s execution protocol. Ceci n'est pas une pipe! (Indeed, what language is not invented?)

Language requires us to construct the very thing we're trying to avoid. To process “don't think of a pink elephant” we must first think of “a pink elephant” and then negate it. Thus, the damage is done. Our embodied attentional system—the thing that does—does not have a Boolean not operator, it only acts in relation to physical objects. Beneath language lies an orientation system that only understands positive instruction: “look”, “move”, “hold”.

Target Fixation seems to be created out of the tension between our linguistic-logical system and our embodied attention system. Cormac McCarthy ventures this is because “the unconscious mind is a biologically determined system that predates language, which is not inherently biological.”

Here’s a few idioms that play with forms of Target Fixation and its negative inversion:

• “Don't look where you don't want to go.” — one of the big lessons from motorcycle training, thanks Nicholas

• “The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you're going to miss it.” — Victor Frankl

• “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” — Goodhart’s Law

• “Tasks expand to fill the time available” — Parkinson’s Law

• “What you think you are, made you stuck” — True Detective, Season 3

We can see this language-comprehension trap is widely applicable and it relates to some kind of tension between the abstractions of language and enacting the instructions of language with one’s body. So it is not surprising when we also find Target Fixation within Large Language Models. Even though they don’t have bodies, they have the corpus of all human knowledge, within which is recorded this tension:

The Waluigi Effect: After you train an LLM to satisfy a desirable property P, then it's easier to elicit the chatbot into satisfying the exact opposite of property P.

What happens when Target Fixation migrates from the individual to an unconscious society-wide drive? Here’s a few more idioms to ponder:

• “Problems expand to occupy the anxiety available” — Venkat Rao

• “Don’t immanentize the eschaton”

• “Prediction markets are hyperstitious machines” — Christian

Populations, societies and markets where the vibe incentives the outcome can easily veer into collective forms of Target Fixation. The negative axiom “don’t hit the pole!” is dis-attended to and dissolves through attention entropy—ensloppification of vigilance, if you will—into “nothing ever happens” vibes. Recursive loops of “waiting for something to happen” create a cosmic unconscious pile-up at the door of the “something happening” queue. The “nothing ever happens” complaint in real terms is the Giant Slot Machine In The Sky’s devilish last hope: “I can’t help it, I secretly want to hit the pole”. Monitoring the Situation seems to move oneself into a continuous state of Global Abstraction, obviously mediated by the Glass Gestell. Betting on it starts to feel a little bit like, uh ahem, immanentising the eschaton. What is hyperstition but the desire for self-fulfilling prophecies by role-playing angels and demons? If you've infected yourself with Target Fixation, then hyperstition is a bit like Bernard Black torturing Manny: the joke is coming but it’s not not not funny:

Suddenly, Manny shrieks in pain, before his phone rings. After he takes the call, Bernard asks him why he shrieked before the phone rang. Manny tells him that he used to use his phone a lot which had a side effect on him so now, just before his phone rings, he gets a sharp pain in his head. Bernard starts torturing Manny by calling his phone continuously, much to his amusement.

Target Fixation at the individual and group levels is a dis-ease of language-based logic that creates distorted behaviours and unintended consequences. Yet for every derivative I've listed here—focal attention, task time-spaces, measures, stuckness, ensloppificiation, hyperstition, etc—each is a stumbling block that can evolve toward good or bad outcomes. The fix for each fixation is very simple: “don't look where you don't want to go”. Our motorcycle training idiom becomes a sort of judo move on the negation by inverting the inversions, and by requiring the “second glance” to “compute the boolean”, we regain our vigilance. Once we “snap out of it”, we can further compress it by removing the abstract “do not” booleans, giving ourselves the cleanest of positive instructions: “focus on more of what you want”.

(Please send feedback on this seemingly ridiculously simple idea. What am I missing? How is it not silly? Sure, I could ask an LLM but they keep saying “you’re right!”. I will write this up in full shortly as I think it has general insights for individual-to-aggregate information dynamics such as with LLMs, social media or prediction markets, not to mention the simple task going about one’s day with the Correct Attitude. Your feedback is welcome.)

Fin

From here on, I hope to write a letter a month.

Please share. If you reply, so shall I.

Until next time,

Callum

That’s why the Griffin fins don’t fold down, because it’s a whole extra mechanism that we don’t need.

I’ve been working at a new intensity with a US-based team on a healthcare start-up for the last year (I run a dev team, push code, design UIs, document processes, do many daily video calls, etc. to punch the product into shape — we’re still early days). It’s not as if I was not a hard worker, but the wide scope of general requirements synthesis and the dynamic, ever-changing nature of those requirements has necessarily ratcheted up my tempo. It’s interesting work and I’ve earned myself a solid chunk of knowhow. As a result, I’m going to post public notes of learnings as fast contemplations. I would like to be blogging—about old and important ideas of beauty, wonder, fingerspitzengefühl, whitespace and so on, as those of you who may have previously read this newsletter might expect from me (the last of which was almost 2 years ago)—but alas sharper, work-in-progress self-reflections like this seem more important for the moment.

The genesis of this post was a rare lunchtime chill-out: a tour of Musk’s SpaceX rocket-building facility. After 13 minutes, Musk delivers an excellent 15-minute story of his 5-step build process. There’s so much quality building knowledge here that I naturally scribbled down notes and, even with 3.6 million YouTube views, I felt it a little too buried within the long video not to extrapolate and share.

Musk’s 5-step build process:

• Make your requirements less dumb

• Delete the part or process

• Simplify or optimise

• Accelerate cycle time

• Automate

What follows is my fast notes.

Make your requirements less dumb

• your requirements are definitely dumb

• it’s particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements b/c you might not question them enough

• everyone's wrong at least some of the time

• always question the person who gave the requirement, not the department

Delete the part or process

• if you're not occasionally adding things back in 10% of the time, you're not deleting enough

• you can make "in case" arguments for most things; don't hedge bets … run at tight margins to get into orbit

• CF note: a prime example of Thiel’s Definitive Optimism (as opposed to the “just in case” Indefinite Optimism bet-hedging): “a bad plan is better than no plan”

• do not build what you do not need — “that's why the griffins don't fold down because it's a whole mechanism we don't need … our simulation show that so long as they follow the flow, it’s neither here nor there … so long as they don’t have a high angle of attack it doesn’t matter … can be added later … why were we adding them anyway?”

• whatever it is, it must come with a name, not a department — otherwise, you can have requirements that were randomly given 2 years ago by someone who has left etc … it may have been thought of as gospel but was actually just mentioned by someone in passing

• a person must always hold responsibility for a requirement, this allows you to question the person who gave the requirement

Simplify or optimise

• The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimise a thing that should not exist

• everyone's been trained to answer the question (convergent logic) — you can't tell your professor he's dumb or you'll get a bad grade, you must answer the question — this is an automatic mental straightjacket

• safety can be overcorrected: "neither of those is true, it's not cyanide nor is it that healthy for you" — story where they passed around a cup of hydrazine so everyone knew what it smelt like — showing that there’s no need to optimise a safety issue that does not exist

Accelerate cycle time

• you're moving too slowly, go faster

• …but don't go faster until you've worked on the other 3 steps first — if you're digging your grave, don't dig it faster, stop digging your grave

• you can always make things go faster

Automate

• CF note: Musk doesn’t even give reasons here as it’s self-explanatory: once a process is assured, automate it

• CF note: we work with a lab testing agency who will not let us push and pull results via API, we’re forced to manually drag and drop PDFs … much human error ensues … “a little caution will get you killed.” — Cooper, Interstellar

Bonus: do not do in reverse + do not accidentally set limiters

• do not do it in reverse! ie. automated, accelerated, optimising/simplified, deleted…

• great example story of “the mat” (23:30):

  • He was living on the production line because some process was choking their entire system

  • “I asked the battery safety team, what are these mats for? Then I asked the insulation team. Each team said it was the other team's prerogative …like a Dilbert cartoon”

  • so they tested the car with and without fibreglass mats and couldn't tell the difference, so they deleted them

• too much in-process testing (25:00): don't set an accidental limiter which leads to false positives and throwing away good parts

  • you don't know where it's breaking, so test WIP to isolate the mistake

  • forget to remove the in-process testing even though end-of-line testing is passing … creates useless debugging which chokes the cycle time

  • always remove almost every test when ready

  • CF note: one could say there’s a relation between overcorrection and false positives — so conservative thought can be uncertain thought, which leads to overcorrection, too many “just in case” arguments, enlarged scope, and so on — character matters, strong founders matter! We think in terms of agility (externalised as a method) when perhaps we should think in terms of character (internalised as intellect)

To finish up, here’s a few complementary and contrasting tangents that came to mind while consolidating the above notes:

• heijunka (production smoothing)

• the case against over-planning: “many projects … are too highly complex to be comprehensively catered for by scenario & project planning … flexibility & agility become necessary characteristics.” That is, think slow and act fast. But it may also be an example of Indefinite Optimism. Doesn’t matter, still good ideas here.

• saying No is far more important than saying Yes

• Acting fast makes your requirements less dumb: “you should probably optimize for speed even when you don't have to, because it's one of the easiest/best ways to prioritize subtraction and parsimony in the solution space”

• …which can be rephrased as speed becomes the arrow that forces resolution.

Fin.

I watch a lot of films. Mostly Friday through Sunday, after our children are asleep. Choosing them is difficult but I can’t sit through something for the sake of it: choosing well is the only counterpoint to our Supersensorium in this age of Netflix (tip: get off Netflix). Here’s three recents that shook some aspect of frisson in moi.

River’s Edge (1986). Dennis Hopper just after Blue Velvet, Crispin Glover just after Back To The Future, and Keanu Reeves a few years before Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. I chose this as a Friday night two-beer kickback from among many more in the Apple Store’s $1 related movies dustbin: it’s not a classic but it is a very good B-grade oddity, more so from cultural history than film technique. I’ve long assumed we usually think actors “good” mostly because we just like some aspect of them as the people we deduce they are from their roles. So it is with me and Hopper, that slacker Reeves and the neotenic Glover, who is perhaps not even acting. There’s a getaway scene where Glover and Reeves steal from Hopper, then hide outside behind the front gate’s hedges. Hopper emerges from the house with a shotgun, sees Ione Skye’s character in a car out front, who then flees as Hopper unloads from the front gate, and as she rolls the car away down the hill, panicking to start it, Glover and Reeves run and jump in. I’m fairly certain P.T. Anderson stole/honoured this scene by recreating it in Boogie Nights. Except for Hopper’s Hawaiians, they all wore Iron Maiden t-shirts. Suburban Americana Black Heavy Metal T-shirts are so far and away overdone, yet I’m feeling sentimental for them in 2019.

Midsommar (2019). Ari Aster’s debut Hereditary took a trope that the kids in River Edge probably spent their Friday nights watching and made it utterly new again. I’m not sure whether it’s high or low art, except that it is “good” art. There is no doubting Aster’s mastery of his craft and is perhaps evidence that the kind of trope and story don’t matter so much when a film is well made—as John Lennon said, “if you give me a tuba, I'll bring you something out of it”. I’m not a horror fan, but I’m a sure as hell an Aster fan. Midsommar delivers again, this time in broad daylight, and the young adults are once again the victims (“What might that mean?” “Don’t think, just watch!” said my wife).

Apollo 11 (2019). Moving over the giant greyness, a black speck moves at constant speed with the camera, and instead of being a camera speck it turns out to be the Lem (not Stanislaw! but the Lunar Excursion Module) which comes to be seen as a quaint black polygon somehow floating at speed closer and closer to what we then understand is the porthole of the Apollo Command Module, piloted alone for 47 hours by the loneliest man in Human history, Astronaut Michael Collins. The diminutive scale of the typography that sets the event timings increases the scope of the picture: they’re so small, this film was surely meant to watched on Imax. Unfortunately, I was only on my couch. Yet from that vantage point, the blackness of space has never been as real and unfathomable. I googled for the soundtrack artist (Matt Morton, you’re welcome) and came across a panning NTY review. I don’t seek out film reviews, but sometimes irritation is as useful as interestingness:

To begin, the concept of a film composed entirely of found or preëxisting (sic) material is a radical one. It calls attention to the material’s specificity, to its privileged authority deriving from its archival status and essential connection to history; it asserts that the material deserves to be treated as something special and invites an artistic approach that’s similarly distinctive. — Richard Brody, The New Yorker

It’s new to me that film footage material can have privileged authority, and that pre-existing footage could be radical. What are you New Yorkers sipping? I hope Ari Aster gets to be your bar tender tonight, Richard Brody, because you’ll benefit from a liberal dose of perception. Here, look at this and stop asserting:

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible. — Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris

Ps. Marvel films are tasteless entertainment. That’s the point, right? When you start at “eleven”, where can you go? Feel free to reply and convince me otherwise.

Status board

• Reading. “Fiction suspected that there is far more to people than what they choose to make manifest.” Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction by Zadie Smith.

• Music. Mica Levi’s soundtrack to Under The Skin. Words will fail to grasp this. And that’s why it’s music.

• Work: always in progress…

Have a great week,

Callum

I’m stuck on ideas around knowledge creation—how we get ideas, how ideas grow, how we combine intuition and reason, and how knowledge becomes wisdom through failure, learning and sharing. “Wisdom systems” if you will. Because my medium is the web, I’m thinking about these things through the lens of this Information Age: we may have vast information at our fingertips, but we don’t yet have “fingertip feeling” for it.

For 50 million years our biggest problems were too few calories, too little information. For about 50 years our biggest problem has been too many calories, too much information. We have to adjust, and I believe we will really fast. I also believe it will be wicked ugly while we’re adjusting. — Penn Jillette

Our Gestell Glass devices have succeeded in overcoming physical space, including our physical being—indeed, it would appear to any other human in history not from the past 25 years that these devices enable magic—such that we don’t need our bodies to access information and services because we’ve recreated them entirely from bits. We can almost seem to just think it, and it happens. I think, therefore I can have.

As we continue to explore and make use of these (amazing) tools, we’re encountering something that Erik Hoel calls extrinsic drift, which is where:

…it gets harder to infer the intrinsic states of the people you are interacting with.

As we’ve become internet-connected, we become disconnected in another essential way: our empathy, our sense for others, our fingertip feeling for another’s mind (to reuse a favoured metaphor) can be easily and unnoticeably removed from these Glass interactions. Interacting with bits, we have to convert our thoughts into bits too. Reduced only to words, devoid of body language and all physical space pixelated (note that the same mechanisms we use to interpret space are also how we process ideas), our individual thinking capacities are literally constricted.

But how exactly does this happen? It probably starts when we mistake the words themselves for the things they refer to—after all, that’s all there is on the screen we’re interacting through—just as we might also mistake money for wealth:

Language functions like money. It is only an intermediary. But like money, it takes on some of the life of the things it represents. It begins in the world of experience and returns to the world of experience—and it does so via metaphor, which is a function of the right hemisphere, and is rooted in the body. To use a metaphor, language is the money of thought.

Only the right hemisphere has the capacity to understand metaphor… Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system to signs of life itself. It is what links language to life. — Iain McGilchrist, The Master & His Emissary

Bodies, space and metaphor: from it and with it

If we begin to identify too closely with our Uploaded Self—sliced to bits, squeezed to pixels—we entrap and partition our ways of experiencing and thinking about the world. And yet it’s not a matter of individually “handling it better”, it is a matter of designing these Glass interfaces with a much broader understanding for who we are. We are after all, “the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there”. Bodies and machines fail for different reasons. So the metaphors we use matter.

What we take as intelligence, then, is not simply about using symbols to represent the world as it objectively is. Rather, we only have the world as it is revealed to us, which is rooted in our evolved, embodied needs as an organism.

Nature ‘has built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it’, wrote the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in Descartes’ Error (1994), his seminal book on cognition.

In other words, we think with our whole body, not just with the brain.
— Ben Medlock

Not trains of thoughts, bodies of thought.

Here are some ways I noticed that I think with my body:

1. I have a thinking relationship with my skin. Every time I find that I've started unconsciously softly brushing my arm, I've also found myself stuck some in deep, wandering-off thought.

2. Whenever I make myself a coffee, ideas come rushing into me at the same steady rate as the water pouring over the crushed coffee. The wondrous smell the heat creates as I pour it seems to habitually salivate my mind. I have to scurry back into the office for pen and paper to scribble down the ideas.

3. I can only seem to listen to podcasts when walking. If I’m sitting still, I find I can’t justify the time spent and I quickly lose interest.

Status board

• Reading. Cormac McCarthy on how to write to explain.

• Music. James Brown was so upset that some white guys from Scotland had usurped his music that he did this. Hat tip to this fellow circa ‘02, when cool tips and trades where done by phone call.

• Work: still in progress. I should have a multiple new projects live by this time next week to showcase.

Have a great week,

Callum

✺ The Littoral Line
An electronic letter from Callum Flack.
You can subscribe or read the archives here.

Design tip: empathy

The Tech Design industry has suffered from—or cognated with?—the misuse of the word “empathy” since Tech firms started acquihiring Design agencies at the start of this decade in their pursuit of a new competitive advantage: experiences designed to anticipate and seamlessly supply human interactions through glass.

Unfortunately, as with all lingo that are misappropriated in Linkedin hashtags and Medium articles, the idea of empathy as magic got bandied about not just to the business leaders it was originally intended for (hint: acquihiring is good for business) but also anyone else who might read any Tech x Business x Design media, such that even those transitioning mid-career from art direction to product design felt the need to add empath to their resumes. The message was clear: all one needed to do was add a dash of empathy, protego totalum, profit. Alas, because the need for building control often reduces language to instrumental tools, Empathy As Magic Design Tool is a drastic and quite immediately obsolete reduction of the word.

And yet, empathy is everything they said it was. But to know that, it’s important to understand what the word means stripped of all other context. Empathy means you imagine how someone else feels, using your own memories, but without having to feel that way yourself. That’s it. It is the beating heart of what it means to be Human: from this imagining, we get social behaviour, which in turn leads to shared meaning, ritual, language and, far along the line, civilisations.

With this explanation, empathy is not just design’s secret weapon, it’s what runs our society. Without being able to imagine the feelings of another—and from this imagining, deduce someone’s intentions, for good or bad—we have no ability to co-operate on a shared, imagined future (that’s a fairly good description of what design is, by the way).

Applying empathy in software design

Empathy gets confused with sympathy. They’re pretty much the same, with one major difference. Sympathy means you have the same feelings as another (“sym” meaning together and “pathos” referring to feelings or emotion). Empathy is when you imagine or understand the feelings of another, without having to feel them yourself. So in actual fact, when you are designing, you’ll want to get as close to sympathy as possible —to be your customer.

When applied to software design, that can be difficult. Because software scales so well, hopefully far beyond the Dunbar Number, “being your customer” can quickly become an impossibility. Which is why Paul Graham said that when you’re building a business via interactive glass, “do things that don’t scale”, which is another way of saying to increase your chances of retaining empathy, keep your scope small until you have something you can risk scaling. If scope and scale dominate your process before you know your customer, you’ll lose your ability to empathise.

Empathy can’t simply be tacked on to a process. In fact, it’s always already there. We just have to uncover it. We are hardwired to perceive it yet when we are focussed on being instrumental, on building things, we forget that intuition is our access to feeling: both from ourselves and to that imagined in others. Empathy allows Gestell. The result is obvious: a bad, ugly interface is untrustworthy and frustrating because it hasn’t imagined what people want. A good interface is calming and energising because it has.

Gestell is like a painting of the world. How do paintings (landscapes) “work”? They convince you you are “in the picture”... So Gestell doesn’t just enframe the world, it also forces us to ask, how am I to be seen in this world?
Jabe Bloom

When the concept of empathy is named and understood like this, it forces us to ask “how am I—and my product—to be seen in this world?”. But if it goes unnamed, we simply think we’re “in the painting”, reduced to a mere instrumental process, imitating itself.

Recommendation: Musing Mind podcast

Here’s some recent work, and a great example of a fun collaboration: helping out my friend Oshan to design his podcast branding. Check it out. And I highly recommend his discussion with Erik Hoel for starters.

Status board

• Reading: “Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?”. David Chapman’s Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution” was this week’s highlight.

• Watching and listening: Before Chernobyl, Johan Renck directed The Last Panthers. I chose it because I’m a John Hurt fan (RIP) and didn’t realise it was Renck until the opening credits (which, by the way, uses David Bowie’s Blackstar, his best Scott Walker impersonation, and the video immediately looks to have been inspired by Guillermo del Toro).

• Music: I have a playlist of 6 hours of Gurdjieff & De Hartmann. I played it twice this week. Here’s an hour for you.

• Work: in progress.

That’s a wrap. This one took 90 minutes. As always, your thoughts, tweets, tangents, criticism and breakbeats are welcome.

Callum

✺ The Littoral Line
An electronic letter from Callum Flack.
You can subscribe or read the archives here.