Happy 2023! 🎉
Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! My name is Abhishek. I read a lot of books, think a lot of things, and this is where I dump my notes and (so called) learnings.
I mostly write to educate my future self, but if you like what you read here, I would say this hobby of mine just became a bit more purposeful. Now… time for the mandatory plug!
But seriously, if you are facing trouble completing the subscription above, you can alternatively make a pledge on Patreon (if you are so keen). Pledge whatever amount you want, and I’ll unlock paid posts for you. Deal?
Here’s a small thought on love to begin this year.
Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints. It has a purpose.
The purpose of love is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive.
Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own.
It isn’t to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn’t one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them.
I hope 2023 becomes your best year so far. I know for sure I’m gonna work my ass off to make it my best year so far!
I look forward to all the books I would read, all the essays I would write, all the new things I would learn, all the people I would meet, all the new perspectives I would get, all the places I would visit, all the problems I would solve, all the mistakes I would make, all the projects I would start, all the experiences I would have, and even all the adversities I would face that would shape be into a better and hopefully more grounded human being.
Here’s to 2023! 🥂
Q: What is the most important thing we can learn from the history of innovation?
Suppose you learn that a species of unwanted algae is spreading on the surface of your pond. Its growth is persistent and doubles in area every day. After a month, the pond is half-covered in algae. At this rate, how much longer until algae covers the entire pond?
Our primitive, linear brain calculates “one month.” But the actual answer is “one day.”
Doesn’t even matter how long it took for the pond to become half-covered. If the rate of coverage doubles every day, you can be sure that when it’s half-covered, you’ve got just one day left.
We think in additives and multiples, with no evolutionary pressure to think in exponentials.
An exponential is a number raised to the power of another number. When you do that, quantities and rates described by them rise (or shrink) faster than our normal capacity to comprehend.
Consider one more example: You can choose to receive $5 million now or instead receive a penny a day doubled for a month. Most people would take the $5 million and run, avoiding the pennies altogether.
Let’s first think it through. That’s a penny today. Then two pennies tomorrow. Four pennies the next day. Eight pennies the day after that, and so on.
How rich are you at the end? If you do the math, on the thirty-first day you will be handed $10,737,418.24. And the sum of pennies from your previous thirty days brings your total to $21,474,836.47.
That’s the power of an exponential.
Today, let’s talk about innovation. More precisely, let’s talk about the history of innovation, and why it is so hard for us humans to predict the future.
Not just in calculations, you also need measurement moxie to embrace modern biology.
We think of Darwinian evolution as imperceptibly slow. That’s because we live, at most, 100 years, and our brain wiring resists the fact that speciation can take thousands and even millions of times longer than our lifetime to unfold.
That’s how you go from our ancestral mammalian rodents running underfoot of T-Rex to human beings in 66 million years — a stretch of time just 1.5 percent of the 3.8 billion years that Earth has hosted life. Still feels like long ago?
But I digress.
Borrowing the math from our algae and penny problems, one might wonder, what would be the doubling time of modern society? And, more importantly, how do we even measure it?
In Starry Messenger, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tries to look at thirty-year runs of the industrialised world since 1870 (with emphasis on the western world) and compares life at the beginning to life at the end of each interval.
In so many ways, this is also the (briefest) history of innovation in the last 150 years.
From 1870 to 1900, there are great advances in transportation. Steamships cross the oceans in record times. Rail travel rendered transportation by stagecoach obsolete along many routes.
In the 1880s, German engineer Karl Benz improves on the internal combustion engine and births the first practical automobile. English inventor John Kemp Starley perfects the velocipede (an earlier version of the bicycle) which now uses two wheels of equal size and a chain connecting the rear wheel to the pedals.
And over that time, powered balloons that enable transportation through the air are all the rage.
Daily life in 1900 would be unrecognisable to anyone transported from the year 1870.
Let’s look look at some published predictions in 1900 for the year 2000. (That’s what people do when a new century begins.) But it isn’t surprising to see that rampant among predictions are simple linear extrapolations of what was happening in 1900. They see the promise of electric lighting but imagine it only for special occasions. They love airship travel and imagine that everyone in the future moves around via their own private balloon.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s last Sunday newspaper of the nineteenth century included a sixteen-page supplement of articles and illustrations titled, “Things Will Be So Different a Hundred Years Hence.” The contributors — business and military leaders, pastors, politicians, and other experts in their fields — opined on what housework, poverty, religion, sanitation, and war would be like in the year 2000. They enthused about the potential of electricity and the automobile.
Most of the writers portray a future rich with fanciful extensions of the day’s technologies, although one futurist could not see the future at all. George H. Daniels, who worked for the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, peered into his own crystal ball and predicted, “It is scarcely possible that the twentieth century will witness improvements in transportation that will be as great as were those of the nineteenth century.”
Written just three years before the invention of flight, that’s gotta be the most boneheaded prediction ever made. Rather than simply under-predict the future, like everybody else, he actively denies a future of innovations — in his own field.
He simply couldn’t imagine what might replace steam as the power source for ground transportation, let alone a heavier-than-air vehicle flying through the air.
Even though he stood on the doorstep of the twentieth century, this manager of the world’s biggest commuter rail system could not see beyond the automobile, the locomotive, and the steamship. Yet another victim of linear thinking unwittingly embedded in exponential growth.
Between 1900 and 1930, the existence of atoms is confirmed. Powered “aero”planes are invented, and the range of flight extends from the 36-metre distance flown in 1903 by the Wright brothers in their original Wright Flyer, to a ~8.4-kilometre closed-circuit trip in 1930, logged by the Italian aviators Major Umberto Maddalena and Lieutenant Fausto Cecconi.
Back on the ground, we learn to exploit radio waves as a fundamental source of information and entertainment. Urban transportation shifts almost entirely from a horse-driven economy, the backbone of civilisation for thousands of years, to an automobile economy, in which you can’t give away a horse.
This period also sees a world war, in which planes are used in combat for the first time.
Meanwhile, cities are electrified. To read at night, no longer do you burn wax, whale oil, or any other source of flame. And over this time cinema, silent and in black and white, becomes a leading source of entertainment.
Daily life in 1930 would be unrecognisable to anyone transported from the year 1900.
From 1930 to 1960, we go from airplanes flying at speeds of a few hundred miles per hour, to breaking the sound barrier in 1947, to the dawn of the space age, inspired in part by ballistic rockets developed as wartime weapons.
In 1957 the Soviet Union launches Sputnik, Earth’s first artificial satellite. In 1958, the world’s first commercial jet airplane — the Boeing 707 enjoys a wingspan wider than the distance flown by the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903.
This period also sees another world war and the invention of the laser. Nuclear weapons, from their invention in 1945 to 1960 (a mere fifteen years), increase in destructive power by nearly a factor of 4,000, accompanied by rocket and suborbital missile technologies to deliver their destructive power anywhere on Earth’s surface within forty-five minutes.
We see the rise of television as a potent source of instant information and entertainment, as well as the further rise of cinema, now in colour and with sound.
Daily life in 1960 would be unrecognisable to anyone transported from the year 1930.
From 1960 to 1990, a Cold War nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union threatens the survival of civilisation.
Though begun in the 1950s, the US stockpile of nuclear warheads peaks in the 1960s, with the Soviets’ stockpile peaking in the 1980s. The Berlin Wall, erected in 1962, becomes the greatest symbol of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain,” separating Eastern from Western Europe. Yet it’s dismantled by 1989, as peace breaks out in Europe.
The commercialisation of the transistor allows consumer electronics to miniaturise, transforming audiovisual equipment from heavy, floor-mounted living room furniture to what you carry in your pocket.
The laser goes from a specialised piece of laboratory equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars to a laser pointer you impulse buy at the checkout line of Walmart.
Women enter the workforce in huge numbers, especially in professional fields traditionally held by men.
The modern gay rights movement catapults to mainstream attention via the AIDS epidemic that sweeps the world. Not until 1987 is homosexuality removed entirely from the formal list of mental “disorders” compiled by the American Psychiatric Association.
Computers go from being expensive, room-size, special-purpose machines used exclusively by the military and by scientists to desktop necessities. The personal computer, introduced in the 1980s by IBM and Apple Computer, permanently transforms the daily habits of how people work and play.
Hospitals in the 1980s see widespread use of MRIs, a potent tool in the medical professional’s arsenal when diagnosing the condition of the human body without first cutting you open.
In Back to the Future Part II (1989), the filmmakers imagine life in the distant future of 2015. Flying cars are there. Everybody wants flying cars in the future. But in one scene, Marty McFly, the main character, angers his boss during a video call at home, and gets fired from his job.
This bad news is express-delivered in that moment via fax. Not across just one fax machine. His futuristic residence has three of those, because if everyone owns one fax machine in 1989, then in the future, twenty-six years later, everyone would surely own three of them.
In all fairness to Hollywood, it wasn’t just the movies. In 1993 AT&T launched an ad campaign about the future, taglined “You Will.” It got most stuff right, but included a TV spot with a person in a reclined chair on a seashore, scribbling on a tablet, about to do something you’ve never wanted to do, have never needed to do, have never done, nor ever will do.
The voice-over boasts: “Have you ever sent someone a fax … from the beach? You will. And the company that’ll bring it to you: AT&T.”
Not only that. Between 1960 and 1990, we build the most powerful rocket ever to launch, and with it journey nine times to the Moon. While there, we orbit, land, walk, skip, golf, and drive three electric buggies across its barren dusty terrain.
We also develop a reusable space shuttle and allocate funds to build an international orbiting space station the size of a football field.
Daily life in 1990 would be unrecognisable to anyone transported from the year 1960.
From 1990 to 2020, we map the human genome. Computers become portable — small enough to carry in a backpack. The World Wide Web, invented in 1989 by British computer scientist Tim Berners at the Swiss European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), becomes ubiquitous in the 1990s.
By 2000, searchable websites and ecommerce are commonplace, and everyone with a computer and access to the internet obtains an email address.
Early in this period, mobile phones had become standard for anyone leaving the house, but beginning in 2007 are rapidly replaced by the pocket-size smartphone, granting full access to music, media, and the internet.
Smartphones further host countless utilities that enhance everyday life, including a camera that shoots high-quality photos and video. Oh, and it also makes phone calls. The smartphone may be the single greatest invention in the history of inventions.
In 2020 there are three billion of them in a world of eight billion people. Before 2007 there were zero. Show a smartphone to anyone in 1990, and they may just resurrect witch-burning laws to eradicate your magic.
In 1996, Global Position Satellites (GPS), a navigation tool created exclusively by the US military for national security, is formally opened to commercial interests.
Navigation tools rapidly commercialise to serve everything from tracking packages to hailing a car service to selecting a mutually interested sexual partner nearby.
In the 2000s social media platforms change the communication landscape of family, friends, and especially politics. You can now drive (mostly across the US) in an electric car, charging at (any of forty thousand) power stations along the way, all while we glimpse the dawn of electric self-driving cars.
A few more things. Once ubiquitous, video stores are now gone. Instead, we’ve got Netflix. Computers are now smart enough to beat all humans in the board games chess and Go, and damn near everything else that requires brain power.
And this sentence, with clear and present meaning in 2020, “Google it to see if there’s a smartphone selfie video posted to YouTube in 4K that went viral,” is laden with mysterious nouns and verbs with no meaning to anyone in 1990.
You know you’re living in the future when you can board a hundred-ton pressurised aluminium tube with wings, fly smoothly in a cushioned chair at 800-kilometres-per-hour, 31,000 feet above Earth’s surface, and while crossing the continent, get served a pasta dinner and a mixed drink by someone whose job, in part, is to “make you comfortable.”
And for most of the trip you surf the internet, watch any one of a hundred movies, only to land safely and smoothly a few hours later and complain that the marinara sauce was not to your liking.
Today, we see rampant predictions for what we can expect mid-century — the year 2050. If you’ve learnt anything from the past 150 years, you can guarantee all of these predictions will fail.
Maybe that’s good because lately, most predictions are bleak. Many foretell a climate-change apocalypse. Some fear a virus catastrophe with lethality far greater than the six million deaths wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.
Others fear that artificial intelligence will escape its virtual box and ultimately become our overlords. On TV and in the movies, the zombie apocalypse feels real. A fan once asked twentieth-century sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury why he imagined bleak futures. Is civilisation doomed? He replied, “No. I write about these futures so that you know to avoid them.”
So, in conclusion, when someone hints or declares they have any clue what the state of the world will be in the year 2050 — thirty years from 2020 — if we reflect on our parade of thirty-year windows on human affairs, you can see that there’s nothing linear about any of it. You cannot just take one thing and stretch it (such as, have three fax machines instead of one).
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb remarks, “History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.”
If we can predict one thing would utmost certainty, it’s only that daily life in 2050 would be unrecognisable to anyone transported from the year 2020.
The river of discoveries in the natural world grows exponentially, fed by emergent tributaries of insight and knowledge, guaranteeing to embarrass any futurist.
We cannot think in exponentials.
The Best of 2022
This week I’m skipping my usual structure. Instead, I’m gonna share the best essays from 2022.
What makes them the best, you ask? Either, I really enjoyed writing them (I thought to myself, wow this is such good writing) or, I had an epiphany while writing them (I started out with one idea but then it mutated to a new and better idea) or, they were ideas I kept going back to again and again months after I wrote them.
It is important to be concerned about feelings, especially when it comes to sharing the truth, but this concern should never prevent us from finding the truth!
We need satire. It’s a tool to test the truth and challenge established norms. It’s a weapon to destroy falsehood. It’s also a sign that we are living in a free society.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world going on in our brain, with different systems competing to make it to the surface to win the prize of conscious recognition. While hierarchical processing takes place within the modules, there is no hierarchy among the modules. It is a free-for-all, self-organising system. It’s an organisation without a CEO.
Don’t Just Appear to Do Something
There’s so much talk about spreading awareness or “driving the conversation” that we’ve failed to notice that talk doesn’t solve problems. The investment of time and energy by real human beings does.
Think Complexly About Complex Things
Once some arbitrary boundary exists, you forget that it is arbitrary and get way too impressed with its importance instead. As a result, you have trouble seeing how similar or different two things are — and this is a problem.
You see a piece of art that you think is very poorly drawn. But if I tell you it was drawn by a three-year-old, you start seeing it differently. If I tell you it was drawn by a three-year-old chimpanzee, you start seeing it in another way. If I tell you it was Picasso’s first painting as a kid, you are flabbergasted!
We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great, we must be different — or at least try to be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t know what is best.
History isn’t filled with names of those who believed what everyone else believed. No! History honours the rebel, the contradictory, the inconsistent — not the model citizen of the society.
The safest road to hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
Not being straightforward isn’t about being vague. It isn’t about lying or duping. It isn’t about fake enthusiasm or false interest. It is about giving a better answer. Not a lie, only the truth, but not a boring, lazy, and obvious truth. Rather a truth that makes your case stronger.
The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, whereas events have a limited duration. A pebble is a prototypical thing. we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an event. It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of pebbles.
You Don’t Need a Definition for Everything
Socrates was put to death because he made people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. He disrupted something that was working just fine.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋