What do I want to do with my life (in 2016)?

I guess this would a post that I will want to return to every now and then. This will be a post I will return to, to remind myself what I wanted to do the, at this time.

Reflecting a little bit, what I want to do is to design/build things that will help people understand the world better, and use those things as the starting point for nudges. That is probably the thread that binds together all my other pursuits.

Part 1: A Reflection on Journeys’ Past

I’ve always preferred to read non-fiction, in an attempt to obtain an understanding of things, and the relation between things. I wanted to understand physical reality, and that led me down to the path of physics (and mathematics). Then I discovered complexity theory, and that was revelatory. I thought I wanted to learn chemistry, for the vainglorious project of inventing a material that could reach a new critical temperature in superconductivity. I left that to do sociology, to understand people and societies. I’ve always had an interest in countries and international relations, to see what drives the motivations of international initiatives. I’ve always been a little bit of a military geek (a little teeny bit), and to understand weapons systems.

And then with books like Vaclav Smil, I began to learn a lot more about the material world — what it consists of. Steel and concrete are still the two most important things of our time. They are produced in vast amounts that boggle our imagination. I’ve learnt about the energy system that powers our modern existence. Knowing the scale of the global energy system creates the context for how far more renewable energy systems need to go to replace fossil fuels. Nuclear energy has to be part of the solution.

Knowing all that isn’t enough, of course. Then comes the part about understanding the human psyche and about how societies respond to trends that are impacting their lives. 2016 has been a difficult year, dominated by frustration and fear. I’ve come to understand where these things come from and how a candidate like Donald Trump could rise in the US and use these feelings to fuel a presidential bid. I’ve come to see the blowback effect from neoliberalism — in cutting down the size of the state and increasing the size of businesses and what that does to entire communities and countries. I’ve come to see how the fear and frustration, together with cultural changes, can make people feel alienated about who they are and their relation to the rest of the country. This is not an American phenomenon; this is something that many of the advanced industrialised societies experience — a sense of dislocation about the present, and fears about what more to come.

There are no solutions to these issues. This is a dynamic environment, where things respond to each other, which causes more changes, which leads to more responses, and so on — a series of cascading events with no ending. There are only temporary equilibria, and very quickly more changes to these systems will happen, and a new set of sequences emerge. It is very hard for societies and actors to see what to do next; everyone is just trying to see the next best step that they see and move from there. Yet from sociology, I know that individuals don’t act alone; they act in tandem with other people through known processes. From neuroscience/psychology, I know about the power of mirror neurons; I know about homophily — how people like to be people like themselves; I know about the urge for conformity, which causes processes to repeat themselves. I know about rituals and institutions — how some social actions attain meaning and become permanent.

Part 2: Models and Methods

Text has been the primary way I’ve been using to communicate how the world works and what the principal ways of thinking are. At the level of international relations, military-based realism seems to be the main tool. At the level of societies, people seem to be limited rationalists bound by cognitive biases. At the level of corporations, notions of market power within industries appear to be helpful.

It is possible to understand large systems and how they work. The field of system dynamics exists for that. Or ecology studies. We know about the way energy flows through systems, both in artificial and natural environments. We have built graphic user interfaces to put our intuitions into models.

Over the recent past few years, I’ve been picking up computer programming on and off to get a feel on how to use coding to communicate these information about systems dynamics. And then I came across Bret Victor and Tangled.js. (thanks Winnie Lim for the nudge)

That’s the primary reasons I’ve been learning about Javascript — to get a sense on how to use Tangled, and also build interactive graphics for the stuff I’ve learnt about.

The aim over the next few years, I guess is to begin to build simple models about simple things — food demand and food supply for one. And then to build up gradually to the point where I can build models that can allow people to play in more complex environments where multiple tradeoffs are involved. Rather than telling people about things, I should follow the old writer’s adage: show, don’t tell.

In the meantime, I am also learning other things in the area of better information communication. How can I better communicate that ideas are linked together? Is it possible for people to slowly realise that they need to think in terms of multiple perspectives? How can I show the interconnectedness of knowledge? I’ll be doing this by replicating the work of Sean Gourley and Eric Berlow at TED.

In the next weeks, months and even years, I’ll want to look back on this post and see how far (or different) I’ve come since then.