Always invert: September 17, 2017 Snippets
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This week’s theme: starting a new series on non-linear thinking and reflexivity in real-world problems. Plus new products and partnerships from Slack Frontiers, including “the most important thing we’ve launched since Slack itself.”
Most of you have probably heard a problem like this before, and maybe even correctly solved it:
A 20 foot long ladder is leaning against a building. The bottom of the ladder begins to slide away from the building at a rate of 4 feet per second. At the moment when the top of the ladder is 8 feet off the ground, how fast is it moving down the wall?
I’m willing to guess that those of you who genuinely thought about the problem for a minute will fall into two categories. The first group looks at it, does some mental math, tries maybe some Pythagorean theorem, doesn’t get far, maybe gets frustrated, and then perhaps concludes: the same speed as the bottom is moving; 4 feet per second. Unfortunately that isn’t correct.
The second group thinks: Triangle with sides x, y = 8 and z = 20. dx/dt = 4; find dy/dt. They do some 12th grade math, and get approximately 9 feet per second, which is correct.
The problem of the first approach is that it is native to the world of linear thinking: seeing the world in 1 to 1 relationships and straight lines, which something as simple as a moving ladder seems as though it should inhabit. But the second approach is the one that’s correct, and the one that more often pays off in the real world. It’s pretty simple calculus, but it’s a step more difficult for many people to picture in their minds, even if they’ve taken a calculus course before. That’s because it’s nonlinear. And even those of us who thought they were pretty good at math in school get tripped up by non-linear relationships that are disguised in other ways. Consider this question, proposed in a recent issue of HBR that discusses the rewards of non-linear thinking:
You own a rental car agency that owns two fleets of vehicles: a fleet of SUVs that get 10 miles per gallon, and a fleet of sedans that gets 20. The two sets of vehicles are driven an identical number of miles per year. You are going to upgrade one fleet or the other: either the 10 mpg fleet to 20 mpg, or the 20 mpg fleet to 50. Which upgrade will save you more on gas next year?
It seems as though the 20 to 50 upgrade is the better choice: it’s a greater mpg increase in both absolute and relative terms. But the correct answer is to upgrade the SUVs from 10 to 20, and it’s not even close. (For a visual illustration, see in the article.) Why do we make this mistake? Because our minds are anchored to the idea of “miles per gallon” as the variable that’s improving, while forgetting that what we’re actually solving for is total gallons of gas consumed. In fact, you’d have to upgrade the sedans from 20 to infinity miles per gallon to achieve the same fuel savings as upgrading the SUVs from 10 to 20! Let’s work out why: suppose each fleet will drive 100,000 total miles. Upgrading the SUVs takes you from 10,000 to 5,000 gallons consumed. To achieve the equivalent absolute savings with the sedan, you’d need to bring them from 5,000 to zero. When you think about the problem in that flipped-upside down way, the solution is clear. But most of us don’t do what Charlie Munger always implores us: invert; always invert. To quote among his many Mungerisms: “Many hard problems are best solved when they are addressed backward. The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs work is that problems frequently get easier, I’d even say usually are easier to solve, if you turn them around in reverse.”
The HBR article helpfully outlines a few nonlinearities we encounter in the business world, yet the types of errors they tend to produce in real life are often Excel spreadsheet-type errors: improperly assumed relationships between variables that lead to false conclusions. These type of errors can be safeguarded against by careful review, and aren’t usually the culprit when grave assumption errors are made. In that sense, the HBR article actually does us a bit of a disservice: it helpfully explaining these types of easily identifiable non-linearities, but ignores an entirely different kind that go far less noticed in real life and whose consequences are more severe. They are the errors that we make when there is a reciprocal relationship between our measurement of a variable and the variable itself: when perception and reality are mutually reinforcing. It’s called reflexivity, and it’s one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding the parts of real life that seem to make no sense. And it’s what we’ll be discussing over the next several issues of Snippets, featuring abundant examples from the tech community. We hope you enjoy them!
The incredible end of Cassini’s mission to Saturn
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft ends its historic exploration of Saturn | NASA
Impact Site: Cassini’s final image | NASA
Why NASA’s Cassini probe had to be destroyed | Fedor Kossakovski, PBS
Cassini vanishes into Saturn, its mission celebrated and mourned | Kenneth Chang, NYT
Notable interview subjects:
Interview with Waymo CEO John Krafcik: full transcript | Amir Efrati, The Information
Cisco CEO Robbins carves new path | Kevin McLaughlin, The Information
Building winning teams in basketball and business | Andre Iguodala & Stewart Butterfield
Crossing opportunity divides:
From prison to Ph.D.: the redemption and rejection of Michelle Jones | Eli Hager, NYT
Break down disability barriers to spur growth and innovation | Haben Girma, Financial Times
What’s effective, and what isn’t:
Here be Sermons | Kevin Simler, Melting Asphalt
Do cash transfers help older people to access health services? | Flavia Galvani
Other reading from around the Internet:
Steve Jobs’ legacy and the iPhone X | Om Malik
AI: scary for the right reasons | Vinod Khosla
The store of the future: selling experience, not merchandise | Subrahmanyam KVJ
Samsung’s decision to focus on OLED screens for mobile devices is paying off | Eun-Young Jeong, WSJ
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, how could we talk about anything else but the Tuesday morning’s summit we’d all been waiting for, featuring a who’s who of industry luminaries and a product launch so bold it’s captivated the tech world ever since:
Yes, of course, I’m talking about Slack Frontiers, the two-day event on the Embarcadero where we learned what the Slack team has been up to for the last little while and what new tools will make work a little bit more delightful.
Day One:
Ten things to know about day one of Slack’s Frontiers conference
Tuesday’s big announcement was the reveal of Shared Channels, a major new feature inside Slack that perhaps more than anything else they’ve released, promises to rearrange how work is done in new and productive ways. VP of Product April Underwood said candidly, “We think of shared channels as the most important thing we’ve launched since Slack itself. They’re a fundamentally new way of working.”
Introducing Shared Channels: where you can work with anyone in Slack
Slack introduces shared channels to let companies collaborate | Casey Newton, The Verge
Shared channels are a new kind of channel that can appear across multiple organizations’ workspaces, giving you a shared space to collaborate that doesn’t spill over into the rest of your channels and keeps your company secrets safe. One team’s Slack admin can send an invite to the other team’s admin, and the channel is born. It’s a big improvement over using guest accounts for cross-team collaboration, which were never really about that (they’re more for temporary workers or contractors) but whose use that way proved to be a pretty strong desire path signal. As April offered, “There’s already a network that exists between companies — it’s just not visible to anybody.”
This new way of collaborating between and across companies has some pretty serious potential: changing not only how different companies communicate, but also the nature of what they’re communicating about. Just as Slack didn’t just replace good amount of internal email, it changed what it was that people were messaging about in the first place, so we think just might happen in B2B relationships. Imagine an order fulfillment status update in the form of a progress tracker in a Slack channel, with progress history and contextual conversation in the same place, and you have a way to make work not just more bearable and predictable but a lot more empathetic. As Slack users ourselves, we can guarantee we will be using this feature a whole lot.
Day Two:
Wednesday featured a lot of programming and workshops, spanning from Google to Goldman Sachs to the US Army to Cirque du Soleil. But it wasn’t without an announcement of its own: a new partnership between Slack and enterprise IT powerhouse ServiceNow:
Slack partners with ServiceNow, and more from Frontiers
Slack partners with ServiceNow to bring machine learning into chat app | Khari Johnson, VentureBeat
Calling it “one of their most requested integrations of all time”, Slack’s Platform team (whose job is making sure Slack connects with everything else we use at work) was pleased to share that ServiceNow’s System of Action will soon be available in a channel near you. Channels are a natural place for incident response to be handled, where notifications and updates can be properly announced, broadcast, followed-up and archived so that everybody has the right record at the right time. Furthermore, coming this spring, ServiceNow will start letting its customers begin to automatically approve or deny many kinds of different processes from inside Slack channels, using decision-making tools and even machine learning. April again: “For our joint customers, just the fact that we have a ServiceNow app is going to immediately make Slack more valuable. But it’s also going to make ServiceNow more valuable, so it’s really mutually beneficial and right in line with why we did the platform in the first place, which is that we want our customers to be able to get work done in Slack using all the tools they want to use.” Keep up the good work!
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
