For The Better - Email 11/14

For the Better comes to you bi-weekly with ideas about how and why to build companies focused on human flourishing and stories of the people who are doing it. Other enthusiasms may occasionally appear.

Stuart Brand has been bringing people together around shared ideas since he founded the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s. As he said recently, “The idea of the Whole Earth Catalog… was to confer agency…you went from being passively disinterested to becoming actively interested in a lot of things. Every one of those reviews was like a half-open door of something you might well do with your young life. A lot of people went through those doors.” He was a huge influence in shaping Silicon Valley in its early days. As a prominent proponent of long-termism, he’s also been an enormous influence on my work. The idea that any one of us can build something designed to make the world a better place for the highest number of people not just for now but for generations is endlessly inspiring. Brand is now working on a book about the obvious counterpart to this notion: the necessity of maintaining these fantastic structures. You can get to it through this post (where he also dropped in with some helpful advice about navigating the text) or access it directly here. Here’s just a little taste of his eye-opening framing:Some of history’s worst disasters came from mismanaged maintenance. A bungled routine system test caused the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986. The catastrophic fire at Notre-Dame cathedral in 2019 came during renovation of the badly rotted spire. In hospitals, when a medical examination or treatment causes illness, it’s called “iatrogenic.” Beware iatrogenic repair—when a sloppy attempt to fix a problem makes the problem worse or adds a new one.In another chapter, he tells a story about Xerox repair technicians and how it reveals the value of maintenance (and the ways we undervalue it as a society):An inquisitive anthropologist discovered that what the technicians did all day with those machines was grotesquely different from what Xerox corporation thought they did, and the divergence was hampering the company unnecessarily. The saga that followed his revelation…shows..the ingenuity of professional maintainers at work in a high-ambiguity environment, the harm caused by an institutionalized wrong theory of their work, and the invincible power of an institutionalized wrong theory to resist change.As always, he’s tapping into the power of collaboration with an ongoing request for comments from the internet at large. If you’re interested, join in!

Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately 

🔵 Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product InnovationA brand new paper that looks at both the upsides and downsides of scientists using AI to discover “novel substances” for use in products. As with many use cases right now, it’s great for discovery, but what happens next depends on who’s using it. Interestingly, no matter how well it worked for them the vast majority of the scientists reported “reduced satisfaction with their work due to decreased creativity and skill underutilization.”

Athena:

One of the things I enjoy the most about what I do is that every day is a little different. I meet people building incredible companies and doing great things for the world, do my writing and work, and always reserve time for my family. Athena, which offers executive assistants at affordable rates, shares my belief that the key to making the most of everything life has to offer is keeping it running smoothly. I've partnered with them so you can focus on living your life rather than managing it. 

More info and a discount offer are here.

🔵 A New Book: Laozi's Dao De JingA novelist’s story of how pandemic desperation led him to read, and then translate, a book written around 400 BC. The book tells the story of “a compassionate soul in a world torn by hatred and ambition, dominated by those that yearned for apocalyptic confrontations and prized ideology over experience. By speaking out against the cleverness of elites and the arrogance of the learned, Laozi upheld the wisdom of the concrete, the humble, the quotidian, the everyday individual dismissed by the great powers of the world.”  I’ve started reading it and am really enjoying it (the piece here links to the audiobook, and the printed text is out now as well)