I was showing someone new to OSM how to add data to the map. I would ask for a place they knew well, zoom in to that area and then find something to fix. The key was to get a quick win by showing the map before and after they had made it better. Get a little shot of dopamine for making the world a slightly better place.

This person asked to look at Cuba.

This presented a challenge, and I had to manage expectations. OpenStreetMap at the time had okay maps of major Western countries but my expectation, as I explained to them, was that Cuba would be a blank empty slate.

Cuba was doubly tricky not just because of economic factors that limit peoples free time and ability to contribute to open projects, but also the internet was (effectively if not actually) banned and computers illegal.

Zooming in to Cuba that day was the last time I was surprised by OSM, and when I stopped worrying about it working as a project: Cuba had roads, parks, hospitals and everything else imaginable already mapped.

…

OpenStreetMap has grown exponentially or quadratically over the last twenty years depending on the metric you’re interested in. My involvement has waxed and waned like soul mates oscillating between rapture and, inevitably, wanting the best for each other in our post-relationship new lives.

The story isn’t so much about the data and technology, and it never was. It’s the people.

Like John Boyd said, it’s the people then the ideas and then the technology. Not the other way around.

People: The people that wanted to map just weren’t in the existing camps by definition. They largely didn’t work in geography at all. They just wanted a way to make a map better. Governments, universities and companies had lists of reasons why public mapping wasn’t possible, but no actual solution.

Ideas: Allowing volunteers to edit a map in 2004 was simply anathema and bordering on unthinkable. Map data was supposed to be controlled, authorized and carefully managed by a priesthood of managers.

Technology: For those not in the industry, you might not know that OSM essentially did the opposite of what academic and the leading technology platforms at the time advocated. It needed a data model designed for volunteers not paid editors. So, we did tags not ontologies, and nodes and ways, not web feature service.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. - Newton

OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and give the data away for free for almost no money at all. It managed to sidestep almost all the problems that Wikipedia has by virtue of only representing facts not opinions.

The project itself is remarkable. And it’s wonderful that so many are in love with it.

…

For me though, I’m far more fascinated with what are the other pebbles on the beach. What else can we make for almost no money that will radically change the world for the better?

If OpenStreetMap is a medium, what is the message?

For me it’s that we can go from nothing to something, or zero to one. Many of us love critiquing something that exists or maybe even improving it. But, my boyish naiveté was assuming that there were lots of other people out there also trying to build new things. Tautologically this simply can’t be true, for if everyone was making new things for any period of time we’d be much further along the various technological curves.

What stops us from doing new things? There seems to be a million reasons and two opposing forces keeping us in inaction: fear and vanity.

Fear of actually building something and showing it to people will push you from one side, and vainly falling in love with the idea itself will pull you the other way. These forces will perfectly balance like the tides. You’ll be stuck in the gravity well of some dead Lagrange point neither executing on the idea nor killing it.

Not everyone has ideas, but if you do, I encourage you to go do the thing.

When you do the thing, most likely you’ll have to kill it. New things tend to not work, or you have to change them drastically. OpenStreetMap’s first 4 or so major versions were all radically different from each other and relied on feedback from the world to make it something that would work.

Killing all the new things means you have to try many of them. This too is reflected in OSM, where I actually started about ten ideas at the time. OSM took off. One was taken over. The rest were strangled to death by reality meeting vanity.

…

So, celebrate all that we have achieved. It’s been amazing.

And then please turn the wheel and look to windward and consider how to kill it, by making something new or better.

ChatGPT is changing the world and many of us are struggling to keep up. Some are afraid for their jobs; some want to ban it.

We need to find ways to work with this new tech to get the best of humans and the best of computers, together, rather than thinking in terms of one or the other.

Encyclopaedia Automatica is a start in that direction.

As of today, computers write pretty good articles but lack the direction and insight of human editors. On the other hand, does it make sense for humans to make every little edit on a wiki manually?

Why not combine humans and computers?

Here’s how it works:

1. You create a new article on the encyclopedia like CheeseBurger or Espresso

2. If you notice something you’d like to fix, you prompt GPT to fix it. For example:

   1. “Make this section longer”

   2. “Add more information about coffee”

   3. “Change the tone here to be more formal”

We use human feedback to make the articles better, but machines do all the grunt work. It’s collaborative prompt engineering with a higher purpose.

Just like a wiki, you can explore the history of an article and revert any changes. Unlike a wiki, all the images are automatically and quickly generated like above.

Just like a wiki, you can edit and add articles to your heart’s content. Unlike a wiki, all the hard work is done for you.

You become an editor; you shape articles collaboratively rather than write them directly.

Just like a wiki, the content is available as Creative Commons to remix. Unlike a wiki, you don’t need to learn any special tools to edit it.

I’d love to see what you can build with it. Let me know what you think on discord, email and X.

I’m twenty miles off the coast of Belize diving next to Turneffe Atoll. The Atoll is a string of mangroves blocking an otherwise wraparound view of the Atlantic. It’s hot enough to fry eggs and the water offers about 1 degree of respite by washing away sweat.

The 2023 annular eclipse has started.

You can tell because everything is bright and yet somehow in shadow. Like the volume on the music has been turned down but you can still hear the beat. It will be fifteen or so minutes until the peak and we will while away the time by sitting in the boat doing nothing much at all.

Haud aze pikni go dah market twice.

Belize Museum is in a glorious Georgian-looking (to me, anyway) building in the quieter northern side of Belize City. It used to be a prison to be escaped, but now is a destination as it has air conditioning. It’s small and functional and grants entry for $7.

Something bugged me to go here starting months ago when planning the trip. Most visitors to Belize avoid the city entirely. I’d been there before and didn’t have any particularly positive memories.

Yet for some reason I just had to go to the museum.

Walking upstairs you can feel the temperature rise as you escape the cooler (and therefore lower) air. There are two exhibits for each of the two floors. Upstairs there are local paintings and a collection of birds in life-like poses. I remember one online comment - “some birds someone ran over with a car”. This isn’t fair, but it is funny. The other comment was something like “if you’re trapped in Belize City the museum is something you can do for an hour with air conditioning”.

The ground floor focuses on the distant past and then modern founding of Belize, which comes down to slavery and George Price.

Price is a bigger figure than Wikipedia lets on, being instrumental in the founding of the country and managing the transition to independence. The linked article is both thinner and more circumspect than the average founding figure might deserve. His parents seem to be lost in time, neither Wikipedia, the internet or even GPT4 know where they came from.

The slavery section is eye opening even for someone versed in its horrors, and, attempts to link that past with today by showcasing creole sayings with roots in Africa.

The sayings are cataloged in a book and some adorn a wall. Each has the original, a translation and an interpretation thus:

Haud aze pikni go dah market twice.

(hard of hearing children go to the market twice.)

If you don’t pay attention/are absentminded, you may have to do the work twice.

Suddenly I know why I’m here.

Feynman said that if he had to pass one piece of knowledge to a post-apocalyptic society (who had, somehow, lost all knowledge) it would be that everything is made of little things called atoms. From this you can get very far and perhaps try to skip a lot of guessing, like 1,000 years believing there are 4 elements or something.

Sayings have a similar and more human compression of knowledge. They’ve been whittled down and beat to death by the evolution of language and memetic forces to be something that helps you rather than hurts you. Something that rhymes and sticks.

And here was a whole book of them from 1980. A book unobtainable on amazon or google and, incidentally, outside GPT4’s training data.

As we gain knowledge, like the orbits and mass of distant star systems, we’re also throwing a lot away. At first glance you might think it’s unimportant information like how many Gods some civilization worshipped but it turns out to be much closer to home.

Example: There are almost no tribes left that know how to run down an animal. Many herbivores will just lay down and die of heat exhaustion before the hunters ability to chase them expires. We literally just chased them to death.

Related Example: Most people don’t even know how to run any more.

Today, knowledge is actively fighting you.

Seahorses have nothing to do with horses in any way but description, you know it when you’ve seen one. Or put another way, we don’t call a burrito a nighttime breakfast burrito.

One of Jason Fung’s books makes the point that on the surface there is no negative effect of artificial sweetners - the academic papers are neatly balanced on the issue. That is, unless you remove those papers funded directly or indirectly by food companies then the data is starkly clear, and negative.

In between now and the distant future a lot of people will die and the memes will evolve toward better ones that reflect reality more closely. In theory, anyway. But here and now, we’re surrounded by enormous amounts of useless and negative information.

The question is how to escape it and make good decisions today, here and now?

This is vastly harder than it looks, because often even the language is fighting you. Example: Galactose is an isomer of Glucose, but you can’t detect that in the language (or maybe someone with latin or greek training can?). Glucose is fine, fructose is literally a poison. But again, you can’t detect that. On the other hand, things that sting you tend to be yellow and black. That clear signal is lost, often on purpose, in language.

Most people don’t read books. If you read a book on a topic (say, clouds, or Italian furniture), you can now only communicate on that topic with 1 in 10 to 1 in 100 people. Not because they aren’t interested, or unknowledgeable, but they literally lack the language. So many things in public discourse are intuitive (if some of something is good, then more is better). But books are mostly about things that are unintuitive and non-linear, which is why you should be frightened of smart people who don’t read. They’re the ones that build Jurassic Park, or send all the dentists to build a dam.

This ratio compounds, so if you read three or four books on a topic you may as well live in Andromeda, as you have nobody to talk to.

Empty crocus bag kant stan up.

(empty sacks can’t stand up)

You can’t do proper work if you’re hungry.

It’s getting darker on the dive boat.

Annular eclipses are kind of boring and annoying because the moon is too far away to block the entire sun. It’s not a real eclipse. The sun, being ridiculously bright, is still too intense to look at even with 99.something percent of it blocked. (fun fact, the moon is departing the Earth at about 4 centimeters a year which doesn’t sound like a lot until you multiply it by the time since the dinosaurs).

Luckily a cloud appears and the sun is visible to the naked eye with a chunk bitten out of it. Normally you don’t want clouds during an eclipse, but none of us is carrying welding masks or special disposable eclipse glasses, we are set for diving not daytime astronomy.

Despondent, I start to get ready for the next dive, then have a spark of an idea. I collect sunglasses from the other divers and stack them upon each other to make an improvised lens. With three or four sunglasses held together, we can again witness the ring of fire.

"if yuh noh stack sunglasses, yuh wahn miss di eclipse."

(if you don't stack sunglasses you will miss the eclipse)

It’s important to look around you for solutions instead of accepting the current unavailability of options.

(with thanks to GPT4)

There is a potentially bigger use case of adapting, framing and shaping existing content to fit the needs of the end user, or to fit anyone else in between you and some content.

For example, why can’t all the news be happy? Why can’t content reflect your world view? Why can’t you remove content you don’t like, transparently?

Could we rebalance content toward reality? The gap between reality and media is very large:

This is today’s BBC News front page:

Here it is as viewed through a browser plugin I made which sends all the content to GPT for modification. In this case, I want the content to be happy and uplifting:

Here I ask for the content to be negative and bad:

Here, the content blames Trump:

Lastly, I ask the content to allude to aliens and world government:

Here’s the NYT today, biased to allude again to world government and aliens:

Here, the same page but alluding to hidden agendas:

This may all feel very blunt and obvious, but it’s to make a point. This content shaping could be as subtle as you want it to be. Only modify every 10th article, shift this person this way, another person another way. Instead of blocking content, shape it as you see fit.

President Snow:
It won't work. Fear does not work as long as they have hope, and Katniss Everdeen is giving them hope.

Plutarch Heavensbee:
She's engaged. Make everything about that. What kind of dress is she gonna wear? - floggings. What's the cake gonna look like? - executions. Whose gonna be there? - fear. Blanket coverage. Shove it in their faces. Show them that she's one of us now. [laughs] They're gonna hate her so much they just might kill her for ya.

There is bottom-up power in shaping content too. Individuals are able to reshape content any which way they like and remove or counter any bias they perceive.

While this is for text, we can do the same thing for audio.

Lex Fridman’s 8 hour podcast interview with Balaji Srinivasan is a great example for content shaping. I took the audio, automatically transcribed it and separated the speakers. Then I shaped the content and re-recorded the podcast, again automatically. For brevity only the fist 10 minutes or so were worked on.

For example, what if you wanted to hear two women instead of two men:

How about you want the podcast simplified?

Or, what if you wanted Balaji to interview Lex?

This isn’t perfect, but soon it will be, and you will be able to listen to or read any content you want in the timeframe, tone, voice and bias of your choosing. Or someone else can shape it for you.

Oh, and someone will do this for video soon I imagine.

The speedboat stops in open ocean and I start to get motion sickness.

This is an improvement from the continual bruising due to the boat slapping the surface every ten seconds. Slapping could be better described as the boat dropping in free space a few feet then stopping suddenly.

We’re in between Koh Samui and Koh Tao in the Gulf of Thailand. The ships complement include fourteen foreign strangers who missed the ferry and negotiated a cash deal with a guy at a dock, and two teenagers serving as the captain and first mate.

It’s raining, which helps diffuse the salt in the sea spray. The eyes don’t sting quite so much.

Good, I think.

On Diving

I once capsized a little catamaran in the sea off of Belize. If you could play the movie then one frame would be sunny and contain a sail and ocean. The next few frames would be turning the boat against the wind. The next frame, with no interval, would be upside down in the water.

If you’ve experienced shock, you know what this feels like. Disorientation, an inability to think, a retraction into the lizard brain.

The open ocean contains sharks and also an unknowable void. I hated the open ocean. I also hated being on boats due to motion sickness so crippling I could barely think.

What better way to tackle both problems than learning to dive, which contains continual exposure to both maladies?

That was my thinking.

Luckily learning to dive begins in a swimming pool.

Diving is just like learning to fly a plane (or a hangglider): You are repeatedly exposed to everything that could go wrong, but usually doesn’t. For a plane, that’s engine failures. For diving, it’s lack of air.

Underwater, there is no air. So you take it with you. This air is compressed in an interchangeable tank you carry on your back.

The air from your tank is first put through a regulator (called the 1st stage) you screw on the top of the tank, this takes the pressure down from astronomical to something you can breath. You learn to screw the regulator on properly and test it because if it falls off or fails then you die. Four air lines come off the first stage.

Perhaps the most important line goes to the second stage regulator which goes in your mouth. This can fail in a number of ways and kill you, so you train for that and also carry another one as spare, just in case. One line goes to a couple of gauges that tell you how much air is left (it’s important not to run out), the other line goes to your BCD.

The BCD, or Buoyancy Control Device, is a jacket you wear that has all the other stuff mounted and connected to it. The BCD contains a bladder you can inflate with air from the tank which can help you go up or down or stay level like a mini submarine. The BCD can fail in entertaining ways, and you train to take the whole thing off and put it on again under water and at the surface. Repeatedly.

Your mask can also leak or get ripped off, leaving you blind so you learn to do many of these things blinded and under pressure.

If this doesn’t sound fun enough then there’s the motion sickness.

During my first training dives I got so sick I couldn’t move and had to return to the dock in Nowhere, Mexico where I laid for over an hour to be able to move again. The second time, on the other side of the country, I just plain chickened out.

I wasn’t going to be beaten.

Dramamine is a common anti-nausea pill which many divers take. I was hesitant because the internet listed side-effects as varied as sleepiness and death. I was so hesitant that I investigated old Air Force programs which showed you could cure motion sickness via repeated exposure, but in the end just took the pills.

In the future I want to experiment with ginger which can have similar utility without the downsides. You can explore Google Scholar yourself, but, there’s some weak correlation with Dramamine and fun things like Alzheimer’s.

Your first real dives in open water consist of repeating all the stunts you did in the swimming pool, only this time you’re bobbing up and down, or sitting in silt so thick you can’t see anything, and usually much deeper. Your instructor holds on to your BCD tightly in case you do something extra stupid like panic and kill yourself.

Eventually after many rounds of this you’re allowed to dive.

Not dive by yourself, because you’d probably die by getting lost or some other idiotic thing. But you can then dive in a highly organized environment with someone much better trained than you watching you at all times, always with a buddy. Your buddy has all the same equipment you do so in the event you try to die, they can help stop you, share their equipment and provide emotional support. You also can’t dive deep, or at a shipwreck, or use modified air, or 100 other things.

In total you can do all this basic training in three or four days. If you wanted to be able to dive by yourself, that would be months of training.

Looking around and seeing turtles or fish or whatever is more of an incidental addition to dive training. Something you get if you’re lucky.

Once basically trained, you get an ID number which lets you dive for fun practically anywhere in the world. Nobody will trust you, and if it’s been a while you will have to repeat the training all over again to demonstrate your ability to avoid death, but it can be done.

Fast forward many diving qualifications to Sipadan, an island off another island off of Borneo in Malaysia. Sipadan repeatedly wins “best place to dive in the world” competitions for a reason - it’s like the opening scenes of Finding Nemo. Unreal. You can look around and see clown fish, sharks, turtles and schools of barracuda above a riot of color that is the coral backdrop without turning your head much at all.

Sipadan is what people imagine diving is really about instead of all the vomiting and emergency procedure training. Mabul, the island next to Sipadan where humans are allowed is first of all logistically difficult to get to. Having arrived, Sipadan is another leap because dive licenses are something like Wonka’s Golden Tickets. You are guaranteed roughly one ticket per week of staying at Mabul.

On my last dive in Sipadan I felt odd and then realized it was because I was calm, no longer intimidated by the backwards roll off the boat to drop in to the water or worried about some imaginary thing that would go wrong.

The aim of any professional training in the end is to make you someone competent, capable of independent thought and leadership in a specified field. After training at four dive shops who focused on safety I had landed at one where things were somewhat more relaxed. Thanks to all the training I was secure and happy following what my dive computer wanted to do and staying within a safety envelope somewhat more constrained than the instructors suggestions.

The training and work had all paid off.

Meanwhile on the Stalled Speedboat

Good.

Jocko Willink, ex-SEAL and podcaster writes about a few things that have stuck. One of them is good. The idea is, that whatever happens, then, good! Find the good in it. This is largely useful because everyone else is running around finding the bad in events.

There’s always good in events. I recently had to cancel international travel when someone got very sick, good I don’t have to sit on a plane for 18 hours. A hotel I stayed at charged me for losing the credit-card room key, good maybe I’ll just take one in future, not lose it, and there will be less plastic waste generally.

We don’t really control anything anyway, so we may as well find the good in things.

At Koh Samui airport I knew something was wrong when the people at the transfer desk were not sure if there were ferry tickets to Koh Tao. This was the polite way of saying that there were none, but there might be at the pier, which was the polite way of saying go away.

The pier was total chaos. The carrying capacity of the ferry is ~500 people and there were multiple ferries, meaning thousands of people packed in the open. Hawkers selling street food. Tropical heat. And no tickets. The ticket office made it clear via facial expression that only some kind of complete moron would arrive sans ticket.

Enterprising individuals offer speedboats for those without a ferry ticket and after some confusing negotiations a group of us formed to be one side of a cash deal; money for transit to Koh Tao.

The speedboat had seen better days and required constant attention to one of its motors lest it blow up or something inconvenient. It was about half the speed of the ferry and exposed to the environment.

Worried looks were exchanged when we stopped in open ocean. Engine failure? Did we have to walk the plank? No, we just had to redistribute weight on the boat so we didn’t fracture the hull during this voyage. I started to get sick and knew to look at the horizon.

Good, we were halfway there.

The sky goes white and there’s another crack.

The windscreen wipers have failed on the Jeep. They’re stuck pointing at the sky, which is not actually unusual since this Jeep was made in 1988, 34 years ago. Back then, for some reason, the wipers were designed to point upward when not in use. Today, wipers lay flat to stay out of the wind and out of view. But a 1988 Wrangler is already the opposite of aerodynamic, wipers laying flat won’t help anyone.

I’m considering my life choices. Stuck at over 13,000 feet on the side of a Colorado mountain in a thunder-hail-lightning storm in an ancient Jeep. A Jeep that is having major systems failures. How did I get here?

Telluride, Colorado sits at the end of a flat-bottomed valley. Canyon may be a better word. Telluride is essentially Disneyland - far away, expensive and full of people pretending to be someone else. Fashionable to a different set of people, saving the planet by wearing high-end technical plastic fabrics which hint adventure.

Telluride itself is a small grid of homes and a Main Street mostly built a century or so ago. Charming, beautiful and astronomically expensive because like in most of the western world it’s illegal to build anything.

Most people will spend their time in Mountain Village which is where the bulk of the ski resort is and where it was, however briefly, legal to build things. A free gondola connects the two. At one end there are 10-story hotels, concrete car-parks and deca-million-dollar mansions. At the other, a town trying to live as if it’s 1850 and proud of it. You may visit one and back again in 20 minutes.

Imogene Pass starts innocently on the North side of Telluride. The paved road becomes gravel and that’s it. As you ascend there are people hiking and you can convince yourself you’re still in town for miles, there’s even the occasional Victorian house on the gravel that in the winter you might need a skimobile to reach.

My Jeep is the opposite of what the Telluride elite would (publicly) enjoy. It’s old, extremely noisy, inefficient and dirty. I’m embarrassed. Up the trail, it will gain many compliments but here on the edge of town, we’re limited to thin smiles and rolling of eyes.

How Jeepy Came to Be

As children, my brother and I were usually sent to spend the summers with family. We nominally lived with our father, apart from long stints in various other places. Our mother had left when we were toddlers and we saw her occasionally.

One summer we were being dropped by my dad at our aunt and uncles house, about an hour from home. We were taken upstairs where my dad sat my brother and I down in the spare bedroom. He explained it wasn’t just a summer stay as usual this time, but permanent because he was getting divorced. Again.

My brother, 8 or 9, started crying and leapt to my dad. I was shocked. I was 10. I could tell the permanence was my fault because my dad cradled my brother and said “you know this is your fault.”

It couldn’t have been easy having your wife(ves) leave you and trying to raise two boys in your twenties, especially if you yourself had essentially Victorian parents with Victorian values. And I was no Angel. But still, the mind boggles at blaming at 10-year-old for your failures.

I mention this because any kind of escape from that life was bliss. Long bike rides became my freedom. Washing cars in the summer brought cash to be spent on buckets of fizzy sugary drinks and sweets. And then when I was twelve, Jurassic Park came out.

For an earlier generation (and a later one) the escape may have been Star Wars. But for me, living in the middle of nowhere, England, Jurassic Part was so mind-bending that I started reading books, long after having been convinced I was too stupid to do so by my various teachers and parents.

When I saw the Jeeps in Jurassic Park, when I was twelve in 1993, I wanted one. This felt about as obtainable as warp speed. I can remember six years later being on a bus going past a Jeep dealership and seeing the Sahara’s lined up and sighing.

And now I have one.

Today, the original Jurassic Park Jeep has become a cultural icon and there are now thousands(?) of replicas, art on Etsy, and even a club.

The Jeep - Jeepy - began its life in Utah where I picked it up. Jeepy looked amazing. Jeepy has “Jurassic Park” on the side of it. Almost everything has been replaced. The engine is a 90s Mustang V8. The transmission and so on are Ford 9”. It’s been lifted and has 37” tires.

And when I picked it up nothing worked. A feature of Jeeps, especially older Jeeps, is that everything breaks. The battery needed replacement, the lights didn’t work. The horn didn’t work. The steering column had fallen off. The twin exhausts dumped at the doors not at the back of the car and were louder than a Harley. I could go on.

I loved it. Because Jeepy is maybe 90% screen-accurate to the 1993 movie.

Jeepy has secrets. The “JEEP” logos on the side have little T-Rex skulls instead of “E”’s. The radio antenna is a bullet. The mirrors say “Objects in mirror may eat you”.

And, amongst all these secrets and oily smells, Jeepy Will Kill You.

Jeepy was built in a time before crumple zones and airbags. Before anti-lock brakes and no-smoking signs. Jeepy is basically a death trap. Jeepy is the anti-Tesla: Jeepy is noisy, cold (or hot), inefficient, unsafe and going to kill you.

Up the Mountain

I was thinking of this death-trap-on-wheels angle while climbing out of Telluride.

The first thing you need to do is get Jeepy out of 2-wheel and into 4-wheel mode, and from high to low gear. Or is it low to high? This is complicated by the fact that the transmission has three levers and no real markings. In a modern Jeep you might push a button. In Jeepy, you have to stop and negotiate. Put it in to park. Try the 2/4-wheel lever, no go. Try the high/low lever. It moves. Try the 2/4 wheel, no go. Put it in to neutral and try again, nothing. Put it in to park. Nothing. Put it in to neutral again, ah the lever moves now, but the other lever has slipped for some reason. Repeat.

In a normal Jeep you could talk to someone next to you. In Jeepy, the noise precludes this.

As you depart Telluride the trail becomes gradually thinner and the sides become steeper. That is, the left-hand-side becomes more of a wall and the right-hand-side becomes more of a cliff. You can’t see Jeepy’s wheels, so you lean out the window to at least track the left-front wheel.

The sky is angry but not yet violent and the air gets thinner. It smells of pine and cold because the temperature drops as you climb.

Occasionally other cars come in the opposite direction. Many of them are rentals. You can tell because the Jeeps look cheap and the driver is gripping the steering wheel like a life raft on an open ocean. They tend to ride the brakes all the way down, unintentionally risking death by burning them out.

At one particular point two work trucks head down towards me on a 3/4-car-wide track in clear violation of the “uphill has priority” fantasy and decide to squeeze up the bank and tilt themselves at 30 or 40 degrees to pass. They look like they’ll roll over but I squeeze past with fractions of an inch to spare. I am not exaggerating.

Jeepy may look legit but I am not. If stopped, as I am, and asked, as I am, I have no idea what shocks it has on it. Who made the three independent LED lighting systems? No clue. Why do I have bead-lock tires? Don’t ask. All I know is that it’s a Jurassic Park Jeep.

A squadron of Land Rovers pass. They look dinky compared to Jeepy, and my British heritage is tingled.

Occasionally the “road”, or pressed collection of rocks, becomes more than gentle and Jeepy trundles onward up the mountain such that you can no longer see the ground. The front view is entirely the hood of the car, plus sky, with no intervening ground. Every time I press the accelerator on this cobbled-together vehicle I’m expecting something to go bang, or something to fall off.

At the top, there’s a film crew. They won’t say what they’re filming or why. Various Jeeps, some modified trucks and the occasional side-by-side pass. There are old mines here. The mountain is a Swiss cheese of rustily covered mine entrances and collapsed wooden buildings.

It’s time to pause and look around. One half of the view is grey and black clouds, the other is mountain peaks in various shades of grey, obscured by distant rainstorms. The trees are far below and we’ve climbed maybe a mile up from Telluride. If you’re new to Colorado this is all very stunning, but I’m more worried about the descent.

It begins to rain. Not hard and not misty. But fat rain drops just occasionally. Ominous, I think.

Jeepy has three main ways to get you down the mountain. You can ride the brakes which will kill you when they fail. You can ride down in 4-wheel low, in 2nd gear, which is too fast and will kill you. Or you can ride in 1st gear, which will kill you just much slower and with opportunities to jump out.

I pick 1st gear.

Jeepy will do a consistent 3-4 mph in 1st which annoys the crap out of people behind riding their brakes so pulling over every 10 minutes is a thing to let them pass. Gear 1 is Jeepy’s soldiers gait. It will trudge on, up and down practically anything in 1st. Jeepy is entirely unconcerned by any and all terrain in 1st gear. It will clear tree logs in 1st with the 37” wheels.

The steering on the other hand is possessed. There is no power steering. If you’ve seen a 50’s movie in black and white where the driver is looking at the passenger while randomly moving the wheel left and right to simulate “driving”, that’s what Jeepy’s steering is like.

While Jeepy is unconcerned about the terrain, it devolves all steering responsibility to the driver. Going up the mountain with the wall on the left is reassuring in a left-hand drive car. Going down the mountain with a cliff on the left is something else.

My main goal is to reach the tree line because the rain has now become hail and the thunder is approximately continuous. When you are in the trees, I theorize that the lightning is less likely to hit your giant lump of metal. And maybe the trees will hold the disintegrating “road” together a bit more.

Visibility drops to a few car-lengths and the lightning is now separated from the thunder by tenths of a second.

When Jeepy was made back in ‘88 it had two 12-volt incandescent headlights which couldn’t illuminate a small kitchen. These have been replaced with LED arrays comparable to modern headlights and are joined by similar fog lights. I switch these on. Above the windscreen is a 3-foot long light bar which is brighter than the sun. I switch that on too. The combined effect is to make the fog-like hail storm look whiter and more menacing.

There is really nothing to do but trudge down the mountain and put one foot in front of the other. The Jeep rocks around and occasionally skids here and there. It’s all fun and games unless you’re near a cliff where torrents of water cascade off in to some unseen abyss. Other faster Jeeps try to get around until there’s a pullout and then five go by at once. They have conveniences like door handles.

Finally at tree line there’s 15 or so vehicles recovering. I ask which way is down. Someone points. Why are they even out of their car in a hail storm at 12,000 feet? Jeepy trudges on.

This takes hours.

Jeepy’s windscreen wipers have failed, probably fall-out from the internal flooding. The windscreen leaks to the point where there are inch-deep puddles in the footwells. The hood is covered in hail. The “windows” and “roof”, which are really just clear plastic and fabric, leak everywhere possible. One set of lights fail, though it is hard to tell which, as none of the switches are labelled and none seem to change the exterior brightness. The inside of the windscreen fogs up because there is no working hot air.

And Jeepy, being a champ, trudges on.

The slick rock in the rain skids and tilts Jeepy at uncomfortable angles. It feels ok apart from two or three points where death seems like a realistic outcome. I’m lifted by the thought that if I was outside and looking at the vehicle, it would probably look a lot better than it feels. In a tin box, on a mountain, pitched with the wheels at opposing angles above some mine.

As the wikipedia article puts it so dryly, “The road is accessible by four wheel drive vehicles, and is not for the novice driver.”

The descent teases you. It flattens for a while, you feel lower down, and then a corner and you can see you’re still thousands of feet up. The washouts start. Sections of the mountain have collapsed on to the dirt road. I stop a Jeep going up and tell them it’s pretty bad up there, they smile and continue up.

Jeepy trudges on.

The “road” now looks like the surface of Mars. Distinctly red Colorado rocks the size of backpacks now litter the “road”.

Jeepy trudges on.

The final flat is actually paved with sections of storm debris on top. Broken trees. Rocks. Impromptu streams of water a few feet across. A Jeep passes going down this time: “You were right it was pretty bad.”

And then hints of civilization. A road sign. A power pole.

The forest service, sheriff and others are at the bottom blocking the highway with multiple vehicles and flashing lights. Rock-scrambling vehicles are going the other way on a rescue mission. Maybe the rescuees have air conditioning and doors that close, but they don’t have Jeepy.

I’m reminded of basics. Hagakure:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet.

You still get wet.

Most of Jeepy’s systems failed yet we got down the mountain. How does a transmission work, entirely mechanically, such that I shift a lever and it will control everything so we go at a constant speed? Whether going up or down? With four wheels? At any probable angle?

It’s a magic piece of engineering. Someone took this thing apart and replaced the engine, wheels, transmission… and it works. Somehow. Before computers. And entire systems can fail but the core motive force somehow remained. Is it trite to say it was built for humans? When humans built things, which could be repaired by other humans? Maybe. I inventory the things I rely on in life and quickly get reminded I have no idea how most of them work.

There were still people up the mountain in brand new Jeeps specifically built to go up and down this mountain pass and yet there were rescue missions. I made it down in Jeepy, and realized it’s a mental game just like the rest of life. You have to push yourself to the edge to see it, but it’s a mental game. The Jeep wasn’t the thing.

People, Ideas, Machines, as John Boyd said. In that order, as he also said. Jeepy is a tool for the idea of crossing a mountain pass by me, the person. If you get it the wrong way around then it’s about buying a new toy machine and you have no idea why you’re there and then you the person need to be rescued.

In the end, Jeepy is an object. The ideas and then the people are more important.

As much as I love Jeepy, the journey is the reward. If you focus on the goal you’ll just be stranded on some mountain waiting for a rescue mission.

Postscript

A Jeep that didn’t make it over:

When a washed-out road can look like Mars. Just remove the trees and people:

Jeepy and a friend:

One might imagine the satisfied engineers and/or product people multiple time-zones away: Happy with a great success, a hotel design that would cut costs and save energy, hundreds of little keycard boxes designed-in to the rooms. They probably got an award or pay rise or some other recognition.

All the users had to do at the actual hotel, which the designers would probably never visit, is follow the rules.

But, life finds a way.

A file format is a representation of some data as a collection of characters which can be kept in memory, saved on disk or sent over a network.

Some formats are very simple like txt files, where what you see is what’s on the disk. Some are a little bit more complicated like HTML which takes text and then wraps around it things that say “this bit is bold” or “this bit is a link”.

Some formats are very complicated and the data and the disk representation of the data can be very different from each other. For example if you play a music file you can hear it but the file itself would look like impenetrable nonsense to most people.

File formats used to be very important 20-40 years ago because computers were basically terrible back then. They were quite literally millions of times worse than now in every aspect, so formats had to be small and fast.

But still, the simpler it is, the more people will use it generally speaking.

There comes a disconnect when somethings designer and user are different people. The canonical example (the design of everyday things) is a stove top with four burners arranged in a square, but the controlling knobs arranged in a line. This requires you to think. Requiring you to think is the opposite of good design.

Design gets more important the more your life might depend on it. For example, in cryptonomicon, the American protagonist comes across a Russian mortar:

Shaftoe consults the instructions. It does not matter that these are printed in Russian, because they are made for illiterates anyway. A series of parabolas is plotted out, the mortar supporting one leg and exploding Germans supporting the opposite.

The disconnect between a designer and the user is called the principal payer problem in economics. What is means is this; heads I win and tails you lose. It means if someone else pays for your mistakes, you’re going to make mistakes. It means I can make slightly cheaper stove tops and millions of people can turn the wrong knob on every day.

The answer, as any product owner will tell you, is to get close to the customer. To talk to them. To understand them. To feel their pain. The big short:

Deutsche Bank had a program it called KYC (Know Your Customer), which, while it didn't involve anything so radical as actually knowing their customers, did require them to meet their customers, in person, at least once.

The problem with talking to the customer for anything you are making is that you might be wrong. This can be embarrassing. It’s hard work. It brings negative feedback, which nobody wants to hear. So finding a product person who will actually talk to a customer is a little like finding a six-legged starfish. Possible, but you’ll need specialist equipment and time.

This is why bad design is everywhere.

There is a cheap defense, and that’s simplicity. If you won’t or can’t talk to customers then at least make the thing simple. The simpler something is, the more people will use it.

And that’s what the OpenStreetMap (OSM) model and format is - simple. In the geographic map model, roughly speaking, there are points - nodes - in space. If they’re on their own they can be restaurants and mountain peaks. If you link them together in a line they can be roads and rivers. If you loop them together in a ring they can be lakes or islands. And that’s kind of it, and it’s scaled from nothing to millions of users.

These nodes and other things are glued together with something called tags, which are an unconstrained and open way to describe anything on Earth.

This simplicity was - and is - necessary because the customers are largely working for free. OSM’s community are volunteers. Volunteers writing the software and volunteers wandering around to collect data. The harder you make it for them to edit, the less volunteers you’ll get.

I’m leaving out all the technical reasons this is great like OSM’s core API is extremely fast, scalable, atomic and maintainable. And all the people who hardened it after I designed it.

OSM’s design is simple but it’s also a little chaotic for the same reason that it’s simple: It’s a mirror of the human world, which after all is chaotic. This has been a sore spot for the types of people who want to design something far away and have rule-abiding users do what they’re told.

For (nearly) decades some of these people have complained about the downsides of the data model. It’s a little bit inconsistent and for many use cases you need to process the data.

You see, OSM isn’t stored strictly in a geographic way. This is on purpose because it’s so simple, but it means that nodes in Finland might somehow link to nodes in Barbados sometimes. You need to check for wacky things like this if you process the raw data in to a map. It’s not really a big deal, but things do happen which break the data.

Now you could fix this all with rules.

You could have rules that say you can’t link Finland to Barbados. That one-way streets can’t end at each others end. That countries can’t be renamed. That roads should know where they are without interrogating their individual nodes.

And you’d be wrong every time. Because countries do change their names, the-country-formerly-known-as-Turkey just did. And maybe there’s some undersea cable that links Finland and Barbados, who knows.

And that’s the point, rules and complexity have completely unknowable downsides. Downsides like the destruction of the whole project.

With each rule and added complexity you make the system less human and less fun. You make it a Computer Scientists rube goldberg machine while sterilizing it of all the joy of life.

So of course this is exactly what they want to do.

The OSM Foundation which oversees the OSM project has grown with its funding. The Engineering Working Group (EWG) of the OSMF has “commissioned” (I think that’s OSMF language for paid) a longstanding proponent of rules and complexity to, uh, investigate how to add rules and complexity to OSM.

I’m tempted here to see if I could task DALL·E 2 with “photorealistic image of someone throwing out a baby with the bathwater”.

While it may be predictable that the person who wants to do this is German, or ironic that apparently the EWG skipped their own process to commission this, funny that the EWG threw out its own dictum (“Simpler formats are better."), the sad thing is writ large in the blog post itself:

<the problem with OSMs data model/format is that it>… makes processing OSM data extremely cumbersome and resource-intensive.

The problem is that processing OSM data is cumbersome and resource-intensive.

So the problem has nothing to do with people viewing OSM data, which is billions of people now. Nothing to do with volunteers mapping and editing, which is millions of people. Nothing to do with making it easier for volunteers to build software to edit the map, which is thousands of people.

No, the problem is the dozens of people processing the data. The processing here, by the way, is almost entirely automated for most things, it just takes time.

Let us pray that the EWG is just throwing Jochen a bone to go play in the corner and stop annoying the grownups.

The image that comes to mind is of The Fountainhead. What a nice building, but, we need to add something baroque and Greek on the front of it. Thus missing the entire point.

Of course this has all been done before. There are much more complicated geographical formats and internet editing systems than OSM. They have wonderful consistency, powerful editing tools that require training to use them and 200 page documents just on the data model. And of course, nobody uses them.

The question is what to do instead?

Talk to the customer.

This isn’t complicated but the OSMF has all the problems of a product owner at a company, together with no profit motive, unfireable volunteers, too much un-spendable money, lack of leadership and a loudest-voice-wins election system.

I only met one person from OSMF who ever talked to customers (“end-users” if you don’t like the word “customer”) and he’s gone.

On the other hand I talk to customers all the time, all over the world.

They break down in to two types. The volunteer map editors and the service providers who process the OSM data in to services for end users like you.

For years they’ve been saying essentially the same thing - we need to get more data (especially addresses and points of interest) in to the map so that end users can search OSM for “100 main street, cityville” and it finds what they’re looking for.

It’s unclear to me how making the system more complicated and rewriting all the tools will expedite that. Knock yourself out, I guess?

Facebook talked to the customer too, and some of them complained about consistency in OSM data like Jochen does. Facebook solved this in a beautifully OSM-like way: daylight. Daylight is a sanitized, consistent and cleaned up map based on OSM that didn’t require everyone in the entire world who uses OSM to change what they’re doing.

So, before you throw support behind solutions, try to talk to customers to see if the problem is real first.

Crash. The sound of the jungle is interrupted by vegetation snapping and tearing. A large male orangutan emerges slowly. Slowly, but not cautiously: There’s a calm confidence that they’re in charge at some level. My guides and I back away rapidly and abandon our fruit salad snack.

I’m in a national park near Bukit Lawang, North Sumatra, on the island of Sumatra in Western Indonesia.

Getting to Bukit Lawang (variously bucky-lah-wang or book-it-lah-wang) requires patience and a sense of humor. At least for my route. For example, my travel included Manila Airport which was recently voted the worlds worst airport. To give a direct example of why someone might vote that way; there’s a free airport inter-terminal shuttle bus every hour. Yes, hour. During peak time, there is no other way to get to another terminal.

If you take the shuttle bus you can read Waiting for Godot in the time it takes you to arrive. To make it more entertaining, the bus drops you off outside the terminal you’re going to. This forces you through multiple rounds of security.

Therefore, if you have less than 6 hours to to make your connection (which, by the way, flies once a day), you’re staying in Manila. Unless you cajole and beg your way through the lines and sprint for the gate and are the last on the plane.

Jakarta on the other hand somehow built the worlds best airport. They did this in the “infinitely long big building” school of design. So big, that if you squint in to the distance it starts to fog. Jakarta to Medan is easier than any US or EU flight, unless you fly Lion Air who either fly planes in to the ocean (really this is unfair and Boeing’s doing), or not at all (they cancelled my flight).

Garuda Indonesia on the other hand do actually take off and land planes on a set schedule, even if they’re A330’s. The A330 comes from the era when we built planes out of metal, not plastic and carbon, back in the 90s. That is, it’s ancient history. But still it takes off, and later, lands.

Medan’s completely reasonable and modern airport gives way to actual trains (not taken) and roads to the city or beyond. We are in the beyond category and take ever smaller, slower and pot-holed roads over about 4 hours. Road markings and modern buildings fall away to old concrete and vaguely defined boundaries between cars, motorbikes, tuktuks, bicycles, hawkers, busses and pedestrians.

Entrepreneurial Indonesians have found that doing a U-turn on some of the busier roads is difficult and fraught with honking. For an unspecified fee passed rapidly out the window they will stop opposing traffic for any car. They do this by risking life and limb and stepping in front of cars at speed, occasionally waving a flag. My western mind wants to build better roads or light signals, me developing mind is in deep admiration.

Eventually the roads give out entirely and we have to walk. A paved-ish path runs parallel to a river, shared by mopeds and people. Either side of the path are sequential small hotels, each offering (apparently) 3-8 rooms or so each. All are open air with a seating area and a notional bar/restaurant.

They’re open air because it’s hotter than hell, and humid too. It’s about 95 degrees every day without fail, at least in May. Any movement of any kind involves sweat and the fashionable traveler will need modern materials to hide it and evaporate it off as quickly as possible.

Weirdly, sun shirts from voormi (headquartered in Pagosa Springs, Colorado (population 1,500)), made from some kind of wool-science-magic blend work well in the heat with the sweat.

Which brings us back to Orangutans. Why are they hairy, in 95-degree heat?

I have no idea, but they don’t seem to suffer from it. Orangutans are apparently made out of 99% muscle and can crush your skull easily which is why we abandoned our fruit salad.

I suspect that my guides absolutely know that cutting up a lot of pineapple, bananas and oranges in a jungle full of various monkeys will attract them. And thus is it so.

We interpret orangutan faces as somehow wise, or as Pratchett said, like a surprised coconut. Wise or not, they are calm and unlikely to attack. Orangutans are the most chill and solitary of the great and lesser apes (as far as my Wikipedia adventure says, anyway). They’re not likely to become psychotic and dangerous like most of their genetic family.

Calm is how I’d describe them. Like a Buddhist. A 300lb Buddhist with the ability to snap your arm, sure. But calm. Loping. Slow.

Trekking through the jungle we come across multiple troops of monkeys who would not be described as calm. Darting or perhaps daring monkeys. I’m warned not to engage in any way. When on their own they may be frightened of a human but in a group of 20-30 or so they have the ability to give you a bad day.

The main predator of Orangutans is of course us. Humans. The endless palm oil plantations which have replaced the jungle look and feel like an ecological desert on the order of a British cricket lawn: Looks good to me but an ecologist would cry. Does that mean we should avoid palm oil, which is in every product, ever?

I don’t know. I’m reminded I’m in a huge dynamical system and making a change has unforeseen and unintended consequences. The palm oil industry employs a lot of people, what will they do? Maybe if we farm some other thing, it will be even worse? Our western pronoun problems are very far away from the concerns here, which are closer to things like food and shelter.

It’s fashionable to have opinions on everything as if we have some kind of control over anything at all. So I offer none but that Orangutans are pretty cool and we should try to keep them around.

One of my guides picked up a piece of plastic trash on the trail and pockets it. It struck me that this is approximately the sum total of control we have most of the time. Think global, act local.

We waited some time for the orangutan to leave, yet he was waiting for us. We politely - cautiously - skirted around him after 20 minutes or so. If you saw the same orangutan at a zoo you might be done in 90 seconds and have an entirely different relationship. That is, no relationship at all.

Being on the orangutans schedule and at his convenience vs. going to the zoo is something like love vs. prostitution. You may think you see an animal at the zoo but you don’t really at all.

Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park puts it thus:

Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it’s your power. It can't be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline.

Or perhaps as Steve Jobs said, the journey is the reward. The act of seeing a wild orangutan is lesser somehow than suffering the worlds worst airport or enjoying fresh mango juice by a wild river, and so on. This is the value. Actually taking photos of the orangutan is the capstone perhaps, but not the other 98% of the pyramid.

It’s easy to lose this, or even think about it at all. This was a group we came across, much more engrossed in act of recording the moment than being there:

It’s cheap to attack some kids using their phones, that’s not the point. It’s to ask the question of how much we’re doing this in our daily lives? Not just being on auto-pilot but actively focused on the copy of the thing, as if it’s the real thing?

Zoo’s aren’t nature. Social media is anti-social. Morning coffee just balances the crash from yesterdays morning coffee. FaceTime isn’t. Vitamin-D pills aren’t sunshine: Sunshine means taking your shirt off. Connecting with the sand or the grass. Breathing fresh air. Pausing. Who knows what physiological effects all that - and more - has? What is a vitamin-D pill by comparison?

Whatever the difference is, the people of Bukit Lawang playing guitar by the river don’t need to take the pill version of anything that I saw. They’re happy and kind and drink water from the river. I saw them do it, like a crazy person. Who the hell lives next to a river you can drink from?

Not me, but maybe I should.

To stay in Bukit Lawang contact the excellent Hotel Orangutan or Jungle Inn

The open-faced sandwich appears at restaurants across Europe and is a wonderful analogy for European efficiency. It’s easy to forget the sandwich was once a brand new efficient invention. Of course, being a British invention, Europe had to find a way to somehow make it worse.

Lord Sandwich apparently liked the idea because it allowed him to play card gam…

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All things being equal, which they aren’t at all, a male born in South Africa in 1971 has a life expectancy of 54. If you plot out days since birth as little squares and black out the ones that are gone, with a year per line, you get the following:

So there’s about 4.5 years left to achieve more things.

(If you want to make one of these visualizations yourself, you can modify the code here).

Things get significantly better if you were born in the United States and this is probably a better model. Life expectancy rises to 67.39:

This leaves 6,468 days left or 17.72 years.

But, Mars approaches Earth every ~2 years:

Which means there’s about 8 potential transits left.

If we assume we can send 2 starships at the next transit and double from there then there will be flights {2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256} which sum to 510 total voyages in the next ~17 years. That means within that timeframe we needs to be producing ~5 starships a week, which is something like two orders of magnitude faster than they’re produced today. They’ll be launching every day or two.

These estimates are reasonable but perhaps low.

The model builds in the assumption that efforts will cease when Elon passes away. This possibility seems entirely reasonable given the last two major space programs basically stopped for lack of interest.

Therefore we need to scale the program and there appear to be two basic ways to do that:

• Moar Elons: Bezos and Blue Origin will probably contribute within the timeframes we discussed.

• Moar/Bigger starships: If we add Blue Origin and assume China will do something, we can probably get to ~4x and assume ~2,000 missions with the next couple of decades.

To get to ~10x or ~100x we need another leap. A much bigger starship or a space elevator. Perhaps a lot more automation.

Therefore, the reason he works so hard is that there’s really very little time left. It must be frustrating waiting for the FAA to sign off on things, as those delays will multiply out over the next 8 transit windows. If the little delays add up to a two-year delay, it essentially halves the number of possible missions.

Given that we’ve theoretically been able to make starships for a long time, this means our only real way out is moar Elons. How to do that?

I propose AutoCapital. Auto in the Greek sense, meaning themselves, but also in the sense of automatic: We find a way to give money to anyone willing to risk their life savings (so long as those savings are non-trivial, I suppose) at least at par with the investment capital. Much like how Musk bet everything on Christmas Eve, 2008.

As far as the media are reporting, Andreas Lubitz decided it would be a great idea to fly a fully functional A320 in to the side of a mountain and kill 150 people a few days ago.

Six months ago a fully functioning 777 was flown in to the sea wall at SFO.

A year ago a fully functioning 777 made some interesting maneuvers and disappeared in the South Indian Ocean with 239 people on board.

Aircraft are an interesting set of examples because they’re so well studied and corrected. We don’t spend time correcting hospital mistakes with nearly the speed and detail we do aircraft accidents, for example.

It used to be that airliners broke up in the sky because of small cracks in the window frames. So we fixed that. It used to be that aircraft crashed because of outward opening doors. So we fixed that. Aircraft used to fall out of the sky from urine corrosion, so we fixed that with encapsulated plastic lavatories. The list goes on and on. And we fixed them all.

So what are we left with?

As we find more rules to fix more things we are encountering tail events. We fixed all the main reasons aircraft crash a long time ago. Sometimes a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less probable events.

We invented the checklist. That alone probably fixed 80% of fatalities in aircraft. We’ve been hammering away at the remaining 20% for 50 years or so by creating more and more rules.

We’ve reached the end of the useful life of that strategy and have hit severely diminishing returns. As illustration, we created rules to make sure people can’t get in to cockpits to kill the pilots and fly the plane in to buildings. That looked like a good rule. But, it’s created the downside that pilots can now lock out their colleagues and fly it in to a mountain instead.

It used to be that rules really helped. Checklists on average were extremely helpful and have saved possibly millions of lives. But with aircraft we’ve reached the point where rules may backfire, like locking cockpit doors. We don’t know how many people have been saved without locking doors since we can’t go back in time and run the experiment again. But we do know we’ve lost 150 people with them.

And so we add more rules, like requiring two people in the cockpit from now on. Who knows what the mental capacity is of the flight attendant that’s now allowed in there with one pilot, or what their motives are. At some point, if we wait long enough, a flight attendant is going to take over an airplane having only to incapacitate one, not two, pilots. And so we’ll add more rules about the type of flight attendant allowed in the cockpit and on and on.

Why, why, why, why, why

There’s a wonderful story of the five whys.

The Lincoln Memorial stonework was being damaged. Why? By cleaning spray eroding it. Why? Because it’s used to clean bird poop. So they tried killing the birds. Didn’t work. Why are the birds there? To eat insects. Let’s kill the insects! Didn’t work. Why are the insects there? Because the lights are on after dusk. So let’s just turn the lights off. That works.

This is a clean and understandable example of why adding more layers, and more rules, to a problem doesn’t always work. If you stop at some level then you’re missing out on the ultimate solution.

If we’d stopped at killing insects, we’d spend more money and still have the same problems. If you keep asking why, then you get to solve problems.

Similarly the US Constitution, as a set of rules, fixed most problems with government. That document alone probably fixed 80%+ of governmental problems and now we’re reduced to rules making it illegal to be a hairdresser without a government license, or whatever.

Weirder

And so, with more rules we have solved most of the problems in the world. That just leaves the weird events left like disappearing 777’s, freak storms and ISIS. It used to be that even minor storms would be a problem but we have building codes now (rules). Free of rules, we’d probably have dealt with ISIS by now too.

Ultimately, this is why the world is getting weirder, and will continue to do so. Now with global media you get to hear about it all.

What to do?

The primary way we as a society deal with this mess is by creating rule-free zones. Free trade zones for economics. Black budgets for military. The internet for intellectual property. Testing areas for drones. Then after all the objectors have died off, integrate the new things in to society.

The worry should be we end up with so many rules we become sclerotic like Italy or France. We effectively end up with some kind of Napoleonic law – everything is illegal unless specifically made legal. Luckily we’re far from that in the US.

On a personal level we should probably work in areas where there are few rules.

To paraphrase Peter Thiel, new technology is probably so fertile and productive simply because there are so few rules. It’s essentially illegal for you to build anything physical these days from a toothbrush (FDA regulates that) to a skyscraper, but there’s zero restriction on creating a website. Hence, that’s where all the value is today.

If we can measure economic value as a function of transactional volume (the velocity of money for example), which appears reasonable, then fewer rules will mean more volume, which means better economics for everyone. So it used to be very hard to create an airline, now it’s easy, we have more choice and more flights and so on.

Rules stop you making transactions (monetary or otherwise). With fewer transactions we have a lower flow of value from where it is, to where it’s best usable.

Speed

And thus we arrive at speed. As everything is getting weirder, it’s also getting faster. In film, Christopher Nolan has explored a lot of this across his movies.

Almost literally, everything that has ever happened has happened in the last decade or less.

Nick Bostrom nails it in his book:

Nothing happened from the beginning of time up until something like 1980. Maybe the industrial revolution. You get to pick. The explosion in transactions came from a feedback loop of an explosion of population and ideas.

It’s going to take a lot of rules to slow that down, but it is possible.