Future Perfect, Peer Progressives, and the Continuing Crusade to Debunk

All of Steven's books are great (I must admit not having read every single one... yet).  As I was thinking about it, one way of looking at the body of his work is the constant process of uncovering how the world actually works, as opposed to how we think it works.  Or rather, the continuing crusade to debunk myths across all areas of life -- so that we can see and then learn from how things really work. In Emergence, he tells the story of how complex, coordinated action takes place.  Not by central planning, as you might expect, but by decentralized, distributed decision making adding up to a greater whole.  This is the case across biology (how coral reef ecosystems grow), sociology (how cities get built) and technology (how the internet works).  The idea that complex ideas and systems emerge from underlying architectures and distributed decisionmaking is deep. In Where Good Ideas Come From, he investigates what he calls "the natural history of innovation", debunking the myth that big ideas are the products of "single moments of genius".  Instead, they are nearly often the product of accumulated observation, thinking, and connections between ideas that form over long periods of time.  He calls this "the slow hunch" and it's an idea that has stuck with me profoundly, to the extent that I've incorporated many of the ideas behind it into my daily life, I've named this blog after it, and it's literally the foundation of my work environment.  This video is a great illustration (and has been viewed 2.5mm times, if you can believe that): Now, in Future Perfect, he debunks the myths behind our polarized political views of how we accomplish progress and achieve societal good.  He points that the left-right dichotomy is a false one, and notes that while we natively focus on our societal shortcomings, we massively understate the widespread, incredible progress we've achieved. For example, he debunks Peter Thiel's claim that we're not making progress in the transportation space, with a holistic view of progress:

Yes, Thiel is right that the planes themselves can’t fly any faster than they did forty years ago, and so by that metric, progress has in fact stalled. (Or gone backward, if you count the Concorde.) But just about every other crucial metric (other than the joys of going through airport security) points in the other direction. That extraordinary record of progress did not come from a breakthrough device or a visionary inventor; it did not take the form of a great leap forward. Instead, the changes came from decades of small decisions, made by thousands of individuals and organizations, some of them public-sector and some of them private, each tinkering with the system in tactical ways: exploring new routes, experimenting with new pricing structures, throwing chicken carcasses into spinning jet engines. Each of these changes was incremental, but over time they built themselves up into orders-of-magnitude improvements. Yet because they were incremental, they remained largely invisible, unsung.

This is the beauty of Steven's writing -- the ability to open up a clear and compelling view into What's Really Going on Here. So, I'll leave it at that for now. If you're in Boston tonight, go see Steven at the Harvard Bookstore.  And if you're in NYC next week, catch up with him at the New York Public Library.  And go read those books!  

All of Steven's books are great (I must admit not having read every single one... yet).  As I was thinking about it, one way of looking at the body of his work is the constant process of uncovering how the world actually works, as opposed to how we think it works.  Or rather, the continuing crusade to debunk myths across all areas of life -- so that we can see and then learn from how things really work. In Emergence, he tells the story of how complex, coordinated action takes place.  Not by central planning, as you might expect, but by decentralized, distributed decision making adding up to a greater whole.  This is the case across biology (how coral reef ecosystems grow), sociology (how cities get built) and technology (how the internet works).  The idea that complex ideas and systems emerge from underlying architectures and distributed decisionmaking is deep. In Where Good Ideas Come From, he investigates what he calls "the natural history of innovation", debunking the myth that big ideas are the products of "single moments of genius".  Instead, they are nearly often the product of accumulated observation, thinking, and connections between ideas that form over long periods of time.  He calls this "the slow hunch" and it's an idea that has stuck with me profoundly, to the extent that I've incorporated many of the ideas behind it into my daily life, I've named this blog after it, and it's literally the foundation of my work environment.  This video is a great illustration (and has been viewed 2.5mm times, if you can believe that): Now, in Future Perfect, he debunks the myths behind our polarized political views of how we accomplish progress and achieve societal good.  He points that the left-right dichotomy is a false one, and notes that while we natively focus on our societal shortcomings, we massively understate the widespread, incredible progress we've achieved. For example, he debunks Peter Thiel's claim that we're not making progress in the transportation space, with a holistic view of progress:

Yes, Thiel is right that the planes themselves can’t fly any faster than they did forty years ago, and so by that metric, progress has in fact stalled. (Or gone backward, if you count the Concorde.) But just about every other crucial metric (other than the joys of going through airport security) points in the other direction. That extraordinary record of progress did not come from a breakthrough device or a visionary inventor; it did not take the form of a great leap forward. Instead, the changes came from decades of small decisions, made by thousands of individuals and organizations, some of them public-sector and some of them private, each tinkering with the system in tactical ways: exploring new routes, experimenting with new pricing structures, throwing chicken carcasses into spinning jet engines. Each of these changes was incremental, but over time they built themselves up into orders-of-magnitude improvements. Yet because they were incremental, they remained largely invisible, unsung.

This is the beauty of Steven's writing -- the ability to open up a clear and compelling view into What's Really Going on Here. So, I'll leave it at that for now. If you're in Boston tonight, go see Steven at the Harvard Bookstore.  And if you're in NYC next week, catch up with him at the New York Public Library.  And go read those books!