Family systems are interesting.Family systems self-organize multiple times. Self-organization is the process of two (or more) actors/things interacting towards a mutual goal — systems have a goal. Out of that self-organization emerges “family.” The emergence of family happens at marriage, at the arrival of offspring, or through other acts where that type of bond exists between actors — certainly some friends may regard themselves as family.The system persists through feedback loops. Balancing feedback loops may keep the actors in line and focused on a mutual goal, reinforcing loops may allow the system to continue to Communicating with one another is a form of reinforcement feedback loop. The act of actors communicating with each other through text, calls, visits, or family norms may reinforce those bonds and allow the system to persist. The system contains resources such as patience, tolerance, or love. The stock of patience may rise or fall within a family system. The stock of love may rise or fall —there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a thing. Time may be a stock — a non-renewable stock at that. Actors, or members, of a family may be a stock. The more that enter the family, the higher the stock of people in the family system.Resources are added to or removed from the system via flows. There may not be enough patience, love, tolerance, money, or other critical resource to maintain the stock of people in a family. Perhaps a family system became too big and splintered off to sub systems? What if one member of a family committed an act so egregious or deviant that the stock of patience or tolerance for that family member became depleted; the deviant is removed from the system. Maybe factions form. If you remove the system, it’s easy to look at actors in a family and judge them. I do and have done that. You do and have done that. It makes perfect sense for a person to judge (on any gradient of harsh) the members of their family. However, if you add the concept of the system over the top, you see a different story.You see people playing their part, as boundedly rational actors, in the game that is their system. They’ are attempting to do their best. They don’t realize that the system may collapse or persist, and they may not be fully aware of how to persist it. They may only measure thru-put, how much of a thing happened, and they may not measure the stocks within the system. They may have their own goals and their goals may be different from other members of the system — creating a push and pull effect. They may all feed from the same well and use up the resources so that not one has any more resources. Nothing natural lasts forever. Families come, go, re-form, and collapse … like everything else in life. It’s natural, it’s okay, and it’s best not to judge. Simply accept and love the best you can.

As the number of members in an environment rise, the emergence of self-government takes place. From an Asterisk interview: Why We Have Prison GangsIf you look at smaller prison systems — I was recently in the South Carolina Department of Corrections — they have a much smaller prison population, and they don’t have dominant gangs like those in California. Many of the conditions are the same. They’re both places of confinement. You’re forced to go there. You can’t leave. But there are no gangs emerging in the small ones. The social order that exists in the small ones actually looks a lot like the convict code that existed when California had a smaller prison system. They’re also not as racially segregated in those smaller prisons.So each of these is consistent with a causal claim that big, diverse communities that can’t rely on official governance tend to form gangs. If you look at clan-based societies, they’re socially organized in a very similar way. And I hadn’t discovered this clan literature until I finished writing my book. But clans form when there are not strong and effective state based institutions, and when groups are large enough that they can’t rely on these informal mechanisms. So there’s a similar phenomena arising in certain times and places like we might expect.What’s interesting is that if you place an ant on a table, it’s not going to do much. However, if you place thousands of ants on a table, they’ll build a colony and begin controlling temperature.What’s more interesting, consciousness may come about the same way via neurons. As entropy rises, eventually a form of order emerges.

And I argue that I’m sometimes right… but I go a step further.For me, knowing that I’m right is only high value if the insight is acted upon and a good outcome results for the person using the insight. What’s the value in knowing I’m right if the advice does not get used? Shipping work that matters, for me, is only valuable if the work gets used.Utility matters.

A long time ago, but not so distant that we should forget, the number of women composers produced by a society was absurdly low. A recent paper (excerpted below) suggests that teachers invested less time in women students because society discounted the value of women, conservatories paradoxically widened the gap of males to female composition students, and women had to publish under male names to get their music consumed. Excerpt:We argue that disparities in human capital acquisition lie at the root of the issue. Composing music requires substantial investment in education, training, and mentorship to develop the necessary skills. Historically, these resources were often less accessible to women due to societal norms and institutional barriers. As John Stuart Mill observed in “The Subjection of Women”: “Women are taught music, but not for the purpose of composing, only for executing it: and accordingly, it is only as composers, that men… are superior to women.” This lack of training systematically disadvantaged women, making it far more difficult for them to achieve prominence.I don’t believe there is a gender-advantage to composing music. I don’t write music better or worse because of my gender. While I believe that, I also believe that music composition is a form of expression and serves a social good. I don’t believe there should be any limit to the creation of social goods and personal expression - especially of a musical kind. On the topic of female composers: I don’t agree with decisions of the past. Simultaneously, I can see how people operated that way. Their society adopted these social norms and beliefs, and those beliefs got reinforced by people with high social capital and influence. To exist in that culture is to play the game. And, assuming the people back then are rational actors, they played the game the best they could. The more I learn about history, the more I can’t fault people of the past — it’s healthier (for me) to try and understand the tradeoffs they made. By understanding the tradeoffs and incorporating them into present-day decision making the past becomes higher utility and we can make progress at the margins. I am happy that we live in a world where it’s easy for anyone to create music, ship it, and have it heard by at least one other person around the world… in just a few clicks.

Imagine the saddest piece of literature, film, or music you’ve experienced. What made it sad? And, to what degree were you able to not make that sadness about yourself?Think of a time when a person came to you and relayed a sad story. What made it sad? To what degree did you feel sad? To what degree did you see yourself in that story?Cognitive psychology tells us that you are more likely to prefer the sadness experienced in art versus the non-art relayed by another person (excerpt of study below). The hypothesis, that appears supported in research, is that you are more likely to appropriate the art for yourself — making the experience about you and not about the artist. “Existing research suggests that people show greater liking for expressions of sadness when those expressions are framed as works of art. The present studies investigated two possible explanations of this effect. One natural hypothesis is that the effect arises because people tend to see works of art as fictional; i.e., because when expressions of sadness are framed as works of art, they belong to a world removed from the real world, and therefore carry no practical implications. A second, very different hypothesis is that the effect arises because describing something as a work of art leads to greater appropriation, i.e., a greater tendency to experience it as an expression of one’s own emotions.” - Sad Art Gives Voice to Our Own Sadness. Authors: Tara Venkatesan, Mario Attie-Picker, George Newman, and Joshua Knobe That research implies that great sad art is crafted in a way where it makes you the centerpiece — there’s little-to-no appropriation friction. That idea of appropriation is like an idea I wrote about a few years ago. When an audience responds, it means they felt something so powerful that they needed to express their feeling outward. This expression takes energy and vulnerability. Also, the audience will likely share the experience with friends; they want their friends to feel what they feel. When that happens, others will come to know about your work and want to see you. When that happens, you’ll create an epidemic. You’ll thrive.That idea is not novel. It’s possible the knowledge upon which that idea is built is tacit knowledge. That said, it appears that sad art requires a response.

Yesterday I wrote about the difficulty in answering can and should questions. I wrote about AI-driven hotels, atom bombs, and ordering pizza. I claimed that it was a matter of personal worldview as to whether doing or not doing something was right or wrong.What if we solve for tradeoffs versus morality? What if instead of determining if something should be done, we examine the tradeoffs of doing or not doing something. We start by looking at the immediate effects and systematically expand to second and third order effects. We consider the impacts on others. We consider the impacts on ourselves. And we ask ourselves — can we live with the outcome.I have a moral compass. And the more and more I reflect on it, the more and more I believe that my compass is not about being right, but it’s about tolerance threshold. I end up assessing if the impact of a decision is below or above my thresholds of tolerance immediately after the decision, a year later, and 5 years later. I find that in the context of tolerance, I feel more contentment. Well what of right v wrong… could I do something that I could tolerate that may be wrong? Well I argue what standard is used for determining wrong. There are so many ways to look and moralize the world that I don’t believe any one way can truly bring us peace. Certainly a person without a belief in something greater is just as capable of doing something just and loving as the person who recites the Nicene creed. For that reason, I abandon that type of moral view and prefer the framework of tolerance. The fun and difficult part of my framework is deciding what I can and what I will tolerate — the tradeoffs I will make to achieve a sense of contentment and equanimity. I find that there’s much more that I can tolerate about life and others, and I find that I am able to give myself more grace.

I’m tossing and turning with the questions of can and should. A hotel is planned for construction in Las Vegas. The hotel will be managed by AI. AI will scrape the Internet for data about its guests and personalize the experience based on its learnings. Just because we can ultra-personalize, does that mean we should?A long time ago, a group of scientists got together and learned how to split the atom. Engineers came in and learned how to take that science and create a bomb. They could make the bomb, and they later dropped it on two places in Japan. Should they have? The answer as to if we should seems to emerge from a study of history. But careful, even that is up for debate. It’s just as easy to write that dropping a bomb on Nagasaki was a bad idea because of the terror it created as it is to say it was the only way to stop a deadly war. I argue it’s impossible to assess right from wrong in that scenario because it comes down to the framework you use for seeing the world.So because I can order the pizza, should I?

I enjoy delaying my decision making to the last possible moment. I enjoy making decisions, but I enjoy making smart decisions.A smart decision, as I define it, considers the emergent complexity of life. Nothing is exactly as it seems at first glance, and sometimes at the second glance. Once life gets ahead of us, we start to see the full picture — the emergent complexity.In order to experience and observe the complexity, I must enjoy the observing the emergent complexity. And in order to enjoy, I must still myself long enough and allow myself to “be.” And “being” me is fun. You might have a similar experience if you give delaying your decisions a try.