Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System →
The systems analysis community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point — in inventory policy, maybe, or in the relationship between sales force and productive force, or in personnel policy. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!”
An excellent primer on stock, flow, positive and negative feedback loops, and systems thinking.
Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? →
Perhaps we’ve all gotten a little hungry for meaning. Participation in organized religion is falling, especially among American millennials. In San Francisco, where I live, I’ve noticed that the concept of productivity has taken on an almost spiritual dimension. Techies here have internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all.
The power of imagination, and other parenting lessons from Calvin and Hobbes →
One day, I asked Otis what he thought of Hobbes. “What do you believe? Is he real or is he stuffed?” In a tone that connoted my knucklehead status, my son answered, “He’s a real tiger, but for some reason grown-ups think he’s a stuffed animal. I guess they just don’t know any better.”
His explanation silenced me. I realized I’d made a grave mistake. [...] Whether Hobbes was live or stuffed was beside the point. To believe in Hobbes is to believe in the power of imagination.
The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon →
A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO’s Pegasus spyware — a tool America itself purchased but is now trying to ban.
He builds lifelike replicas of D.C. landmarks—brick by Lego brick →
Last year, Paules spent the better part of six months putting together about 50,000 Lego pieces to form a replica of Dulles Airport’s iconic passenger terminal, designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen in 1958.
The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin →
Now entering the third year of a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.
But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.
It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.
How Liberals — Yes, Liberals — Are Hobbling Government →
Nicholas Bagley is a law professor at the University of Michigan, a former chief legal counsel to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the author of a fascinating paper called "The Procedure Fetish". In it, Bagley argues that liberals — liberal lawyers in particular — have helped hobble the very government they now need to act swiftly and decisively..
Some great points in this interview on the role of rules:
What’s a concern is what we put in place to try to protect against those risks. And I think far too often, we’ve defaulted to lawyerly, procedural rules to try to get agencies to do better. And I think we haven’t been reflective enough about the possibility that, look, if you’ve got an agency that isn’t living up to your expectations, layering a bunch of procedural rules on top of it and subjecting it to judicial review is probably not going to help all that much.
And if we’ve got problems, we want to be thinking much harder about institutional design, about adequate budgetary support, about making sure they’ve got a clear statutory mandate, about getting good leadership, about fixing management problems. There’s a whole host of things we could do to improve the functioning of the administrative state.
On running an agency:
[I]f you are asking a group of lawyers how better to run a big institution, you’re asking the wrong group of people. [...] They’re not very good at running organizations. [...] It’s not something you learn in law school, how to run a government agency or — it’s just not part of the skill set.
On government legitimacy:
You write that, “Legitimacy is not solely, not even primarily, a product of the procedures that agencies follow. Legitimacy arises, more generally, from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive and fair.”
And on public/private partnership:
[O]ne thing that’s become clear to me is that the private sector depends on an effective public sector in order to achieve its goals as well.
So right now, we’ve got a ton of money coming in, both private capital and also public capital for new investments in semiconductors and electric vehicles and renewable energy facilities, so all this money sloshing around. But all of these facilities require permits from the state. They require financial support, in some cases, from the state. They require literally parcels of land that the state often assembles.
Not to mention, they depend on a work force that the state has educated. They depend on a robust infrastructure, like transportation infrastructure, on water. I mean, if you are a private company looking to expand, looking to build these new businesses of the 21st century, you need a functional state. And crippling the state is bad for business.
This is You on Smiles. We All Have Photographic Memories Now →
We’ve ceded many of our remembering duties (birthdays, schedules, phone numbers, directions) to a hard drive in the cloud. And to a large extent, we’ve now handed over our memories of experiences to digital cameras.
How Democracies Must Compete with Digital Authoritarians →
Artificial intelligence (AI) may still hold the potential to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems [...], but when it comes to risks to privacy and civil liberties, AI already has been a game changer in favor of authoritarian states. AI-enabled tools have turbocharged every pre-existing form of repression including: mass and targeted surveillance, censorship, and the spread of propaganda.
Retired Ambassador Eileen Donahoe outlines that democratic nations must:
- Develop and showcase a democratic model of digital restraint at home
- Exercise leadership in international tech diplomacy and standard setting
- Invest in tech innovation as a means of advancing democratic values