Cover Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

My 2 hours of encouters with highly intellectual writers

Over a decade ago, I had the privilege of managing a subordinate, who is over 20 years older than me. His name is Neville. There were many moments when I thought, “did he choose me as boss to teach me, or did I choose him as my team member to learn from?”

He repeatedly gave me a few advices. One of them was,

When you see new knowledge, do not despair!

I am not sure if this was a quotation by some famous personality. I heard it only from Neville.

This reminds me of a funny exercise. What will you do if I ask you, “do not think about an elephant, particularly its trunk”? Well, the first thing happens to us is that we end up thinking about an elephant. Not only that, the whole focal point of this thought will be on the trunk.

I wish I could say I started despairing ever since Neville advised this. But the truth is, I always showed this tendency and therefore his advice.

Anyway, why I remembered all this was because of my recent encouters with a couple of blogs/newsletters right on this Substack platform. And I was taken aback by the wy they write about complex abstract topics in such a simplistic way, that on the perphery, it appears I understood what they described. But no knowledge is useful until it can be applied. I already described about one of these two blogs - https://lcamtuf.substack.com/

I have been following another newsletter recently called cutely as Risk Musings, created and maintained by Stephanie Losi. The kind of topics described by the author on these posts is very complex and abstract, but I genuinely enjoyed reading a lot of Losi’s posts although I do not have the necessary introduction in these subjects. What is more surprising is that these topics are significantly applied in real life scenarios, while they sound very much like philosophy. One such subject Losi writes about is Systems Thinking.

I heard this term many times in the past, but due to the colorlessness in the subject, no other written description attracted me so much. I was always demotivated by its grandeur. Yesterday, as I was enjoying one of the posts on this newsletter regarding her reading work in 2022, I was really attracted to the choice of books and the topics. And I felt the volume of information she gathers in a day should be collosal.

I wanted to read more by this author, and I went to her very first article on this newsletter where she introduced the scope and objectives of this newsletter - Risk Musings. And then I jumped to the next item after this introductory post, which is All about Oscillations. The title grew my curiosity because of my past love for Physics and thought it was something I could easily connect with. To my surprise, it wasn’t a physics discussion. It was about global economy, climate change and ultimately, her favorite field - Systems Thinking and its applications.

At the end of this post, the author also added a few additional bonus resources to explore more into the phenomenon. One of them is a long article on Chaos Engineering (by Adrian Hornsby), a term I never heard of before. This is about ‘intentionally creating chaos to identify the gaps in those systems which are asumed to be fully robust and established, and make those systems even more resilient’, with fully explained case studies from Amazon and Netflix. And then the author encouraged readers to another long article on The Atlantic where one achieves another perspective on the climate in general and the changes on the Earth.

By the end of about 2 hours of my journey with Risk Musings newsletter, I felt my brain is just out of a gym after a high intensity exercise, with a paced up heartbeat. Especially the article by Adrian Hornsby on Amazon and Netflix’s way of testing their systems for resilience and disaster recovery using the Chaos Engineering just blew me away. The way this article was written felt very much like watching a high quality documentary on Netflix. I am a believer of the fact that reading is a very high intense imagination work, than watching any visual descriptions, and the result of reading such works stays with you for longer times.

As Losi describes at several occasions, her deep interest in Systems Thinking comes from her most favorite book, Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows. I wanted to know why Losi is so much in awe about this book. I haven’t read the book yet, of course, betweek last night and now. Now with an intention to get a taste for Meadows’ writing, I followed the other link provided by Losi in her Oscillations post, about Leverage Points. Below is an excerpt from the introduction of the topic.

The classic example of that backward intuition was my own introduction to systems analysis, the world model. Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global problems — poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment — are related and how they might be solved, Forrester made a computer model and came out with a clear leverage point: Growth. Not only population growth, but economic growth. Growth has costs as well as benefits, and we typically don’t count the costs — among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, etc. — the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth! What is needed is much slower growth, much different kinds of growth, and in some cases no growth or negative growth.

The world’s leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.

~ Donella Meadows

I am not qualified enough to talk much about Systems Thinking, but I could see why Losi recommended Meadows and her books in so many places in many of her posts.

After all this stint, my only thought is this. I came across a lot of people who have a low opinion on the generalists, because they think they are specialists in their field. I always saw myself a generalist, although I haven’t been able to gain such deep, intense insights into any one field. But for me 2022 has been very fruitful with learnings like these starting with Bitcoin and all the way up to Risk Musings and Systems Thinking. Because all these resulted from high quality generalist community, including Satoshi Nakamoto, who created a toy and unleashed into the world. Now the world has to explore mathematics, economics, glabal finance, politics, sociology and psychology to see what a Bitcoin system is and why it came into existence.

I am not ashamed to say that I am feeling very ovewhelmed with all this information. And I truly worry if I can ever be able to achieve at least 1% of what all these people achieved. But I console myself again saying,

For this lifetime, I’ll be a very efficient consumer, if not a creator!