If you want to destroy humanity, burn all their books**.
Humans differ from all the other animal species on Earth in one very distinct way, we build upon and pass down our knowledge from generation to generation. We started with simple stone tools and were able to eventually forge iron weapons, build steam engines, and cure previously incurable diseases. Knowledge is humanity's greatest weapon, but at the same time, it is also our greatest weakness.
After building so much knowledge, we've come to rely on them rather heavily. What do you think will happen if all our books and accumulated knowledge were to disappear one day? Imagine that they really disappeared, what will happen to a city if there was a power outage and no one was able to fix it because they don't have the manual or schematics? And what if doctors can't treat certain illnesses anymore because no one remembered how and all the reference books and research papers are all gone?
If humanity were to start from scratch, will we be able to survive? How many people do you think knows how to start a fire, or build basic hunting or farming tools when we are so used to having food delivered to us? How many people do you think can identify and avoid poisonous plants and insects without a reference book, or perform basic first aid without a first aid kit?
Unlike other animal species that rely on their innate abilities to fight and fend for themselves, humans have long evolved to rely on our cumulative knowledge to survive. Once we lose all our technological know-how, chances are, most of us won't survive for long. So if you want to destroy humanity, start by destroying all their recorded knowledge, because humanity's power doesn't lie in their fists or their fangs. It lies in their ability to pass down cumulative knowledge.
**In today's world, you would also need to burn all their hard disk, data centers, and digital backups.
For years, the trackpad on my laptop was configured to scroll down when I swipe down with two fingers. But these days, it seems like new laptops are configured to scroll up when the users swipe down instead. Why is that? It puzzled me for a while until I realized the reason.
Back in the days when computers were purely text-based, the only way to scroll down a page is press the down arrow key. So when the scroll wheel on the mouse was invented, it seems logical that scrolling the scroll wheel down should scroll down the page. And when the trackpad was invented, it followed the same convention.
But when the touchscreen was invented, it suddenly feels a lot more intuitive to swipe up when you want to scroll down. This is because we tend to view the things we can touch as physical objects, so when we want to scroll down, we touch it and move it up to reveal the bottom part. Apparently, this is called natural scrolling. So what do we call the other one where we swipe down to scroll down? Reverse scrolling, go figure.
So which one is a "better" user experience on the trackpad? I don't know, I've been using reverse scrolling all my life and I've just recently (today) switched to natural scrolling. And so far, my brain hurts whenever I try to scroll, but I think I'll get used to it soon enough. I already use natural scrolling when I'm on my phone, how hard can it be to switch on my trackpad?
Sometimes, it just goes to show that what feels correct or intuitive today can change tomorrow once we discover something new.
For any problems we are trying to solve, we tend to label the offenders as part of the problem while labeling ourselves as part of the solution. But what about everyone else? In most situations, the bystanders and the people who do nothing are probably the biggest obstacles we will ever face when trying to solve our problem.
If you are a teacher trying to stop bullying, you are definitely part of the solution because you actively advocate against it and you can stop it when you see it happen. The bullies are obviously part of the problem, they bully other students and cause them harm. What normally happens is that the bullies bully their victims in some secluded area where you're not there, so you can't stop it. But sometimes, a few random students happen to walk by and witness it, and chances are, they're just bystanders and won't do anything.
So here's the question. Those random students are not part of the solution since they're not doing anything, but are they part of the problem?
If everyone who witnessed bullying stayed silent and did nothing, the risk of bullies getting caught will go down significantly. And since they don't feel the consequences of their actions, it would just encourage them to bully more. Feel free to replace bullies with shoplifters, racists, people who practice open burning, or anything you like. So if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem, even if you think you aren't.
A new study says that despite a record drop in global carbon emissions in 2020, a pandemic-driven shift to remote work and more at-home entertainment still presents significant environmental impact due to how internet data is stored and transferred around the world.
Just one hour of videoconferencing or streaming, for example, emits 150-1,000 grams of carbon dioxide (a gallon of gasoline burned from a car emits about 8,887 grams), requires 2-12 liters of water and demands a land area adding up to about the size of an iPad Mini.
But leaving your camera off during a web call can reduce these footprints by 96%. Streaming content in standard definition rather than in high definition while using apps such as Netflix or Hulu also could bring an 86% reduction, the researchers estimated.
Everyone assumes that going digital is better for the environment, but it turns out, the internet isn't exactly eco-friendly, mainly because data centers use a lot of electricity to process and transmit data across the globe.
When you see a doctor or a surgeon, you would ideally want them to be passionate about what they do instead of complaining about their hours or their boss. And you definitely don't want them to say, "I'm just doing this for a few years to save some money, then I'll quit and go do something else." So how did we get here? How does someone survive and graduate from medical school when they have little desire to work in medicine?
I think for a lot of students, their passion probably died once they started working. Imagine what it's like being an engineering student in university, you get to study all sorts of cool engineering stuff in lecture and play around with a bunch of "toys" in your lab sessions. You also get to skip lectures with little to no consequences if you find them boring or if you overslept, you just need to catch up and submit your assignments on time. Even if you struggle, you can always get help from your friends or lecturers during open office hours. And most importantly, you can do the things you are passionate about whenever you feel like it, on your own schedule.
But everything changed after graduation. All of a sudden, you're entrusted to handle million-dollar equipment where one wrong move might cause something to blow up, or worse. And no, you are most definitely not allowed to play with it. You can no longer sleep in or skip work, even if you can catch up the next day. At work, not many people will be able to help you as everyone's working on their own thing and there are no correct answers, unlike university, and there's also the potential office politics you may or may not be forced to participate in. And most importantly, you are now forced to the things you are passionate about on someone else's schedule. A critical machine broke down at 3AM? Well, guess who's going back to work.
How many people hate their university life? Almost none. But how many people hate their working life? Probably a lot. Even if you are someone who loves computer science and programming, the moment you are forced to do it all the time on a schedule you can't control, that's when you will begin hating it. And that is how you kill passion.
The biggest risk is often the things we don't see coming, or the things we didn't expect. A few days ago, I wrote a bit on The Risks You Can’t Foresee, and towards the end, I started drawing a parallel to our current pandemic and how lucky we were that the death rate isn't much higher.
Here's another thing we should be extremely grateful for, the internet. We were very lucky because in 2020, most of the world had high-speed internet and remote work made it possible for society to continue functioning when most people were trapped indoors. Imagine if Covid happened 20 years ago in the year 2000, do you think the world can survive a lockdown when not many people had an internet connection and Google was just 2 years old?
But the internet is not indestructible. What most people don't realize is that the global internet is still mostly powered by vast undersea cables. We can escape the pandemic in the physical world by isolating ourselves and moving into the digital world, but what happens when our digital infrastructure collapses at the same time? We're lucky it didn't happen this time, but imagine a future when the next pandemic hits and everyone is forced to go into lockdown, only for the internet to suddenly fail. What do you think will happen?
Back in university, I was a big fish in a small pond. Well, what can I say? I was rejected by the more prestigious universities. Sometimes, I do wonder how differently my life would have turned out had I made it into the big pond.
In boxing, boxers can only compete in their assigned weight class, because if you weigh 80kg, you're going to have a huge advantage when you fight against someone who only weighs 60kg. It's a simple matter of physics, the bigger and heavier you are, the harder it is to move you or make you fall. When you're a big fish in a small pond, it feels a bit like that.
Sometimes, the key to winning isn't to try and win while being a small fish in a big pond. It's to be the big fish, even if it means going to a smaller pond. Find somewhere where you have an unfair advantage, or where competition is sparse. The world is big, but you don't have to fight for the top. Just find your own little patch of land and fight there instead. You don't have to be number one in the world, just be number one in your local area or community.
I'm sure you've experienced this at some point. You're deciding between two choices, they both have their own pros and cons, and you just can't seem to decide between them. So you spent hours overthinking things, asking others for their opinion, and trying to find that one decisive factor to help you decide.
Well, what if you didn't have a choice? Instead of having the freedom to choose between A and B, what if only option A was available. Would you be okay with that? And what if only option B was available, would you be happy if you were forced to choose B? If you answered yes to both questions, that means both A and B are equally acceptable. So, just go flip a coin or something.
Sometimes, the luxury of choice feels more like a curse. When you can't decide what to choose, it's helpful to consider a hypothetical situation where you don't have a choice. Would you be okay if the decision was forced upon you? If so, why not do exactly that?
Take the case of a small fire in a Philips semiconductor plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in March 2000. Triggered by a lightning strike, it was extinguished by the local fire department within minutes. The plant manager dutifully reported the fire to the plant’s customers, telling them that it had caused only minor damage and that production would resume in a week. The purchasing manager at Ericsson, a major customer, checked that his on-hand inventory of the plant’s semiconductors would meet production needs over the next couple of weeks and didn’t escalate the issue.
Unfortunately, the fire’s smoke and soot and the extensive hosing of the facility had contaminated the clean rooms where highly sensitive electronic wafers were fabricated, and production didn’t restart for several months. By the time the Ericsson purchasing manager learned about the delay, all alternative suppliers of several of the plant’s wafers had already been committed to other companies. The component shortages cost Ericsson $400 million in lost revenues from the delayed launch of its next-generation mobile phone and contributed to its exit from this market the following year.
[…]
At Nokia, another large customer of the Philips Albuquerque semiconductor plant, information about any unusual event in a supply chain had to be reported to a senior vice president of operations, logistics, and sourcing. This executive, who had few day-to-day operational responsibilities, served as the company’s top troubleshooter, or—as we like to say—its “chief worry officer.”
This role differs from that of a traditional chief risk officer, whose priorities are to improve the management of known routine risks and to identify new risks that can then be transformed into manageable routine risks. By contrast, the worry officer has to quickly recognize the emergence of any novel risk and mobilize a process for addressing it in real time.
When Nokia’s purchasing manager received the call about the plant fire, he checked that existing inventory levels were adequate and logged it as a routine event, just as his Ericsson counterpart had done. But following protocol, he reported it to the senior VP as a supply chain anomaly. The VP investigated further and learned that parts shortages from the plant could potentially disrupt more than 5% of the company’s annual production.
The VP mobilized a 30-person multifunction team to manage the potential threat. Engineers redesigned some chips so that they could be obtained from alternative sources, and the team quickly purchased most of the remaining chips from other suppliers. But there were two types of chips for which Philips was the only supplier. The VP called the Nokia CEO, reaching him on the corporate plane, briefed him about the situation, and got him to reroute the plane to land in the Netherlands and go meet with Philips’s CEO at Philips headquarters.
After the meeting the two companies agreed that “Philips and Nokia would operate as one company regarding those components,” according to an interview the troubleshooter gave the Wall Street Journal. In effect, Nokia could now use Philips as its captive supplier for the two scarce chips. The relationship allowed Nokia to maintain production of existing phones, launch its next generation of phones on time, and benefit when Ericsson exited the mobile phone market.
Tackling potential threats is something not many people would bother doing. If you were a customer of Philips and heard they had to stop production for a week due to a minor fire incident, you would probably just check your inventory and make sure there's enough at hand. Aren't you lucky that it was only a minor fire and it'll only take Philips a week to get back into production? Suppose there's a parallel universe where the plant manager at Philips reported a major fire incident and it will take them half a year to resume production. What would you do then?
And here's the thing, have you ever considered the possibility of Philips stopping production and the impact it will have? Probably not, and there's probably no one in your team or organization who is supposed to look into it either. It might only be a week but what if it happened again next year? Why isn't there a strategy for addressing it when it happens next time?
Take Nokia, for example, they have a "chief worry officer" who is supposed to look into exactly these types of risks. In this case, the "chief worry officer" launched an investigation and found out that if there was a parts shortage issue, it could potentially disrupt more than 5% of their company's annual production. So they addressed the risk, and sure enough, it paid off handsomely.
As we are currently in the middle of a pandemic, have we ever considered what we will do when the next pandemic hits? Think of Covid as the minor fire incident that was supposed to be fixed in a week but ended up taking months due to the unforeseen risk where the fire's smoke contaminating the clean rooms containing highly sensitive equipment. Aren't we lucky that Covid had such a low death rate compared to the Spanish flu? Suppose there's a parallel universe where Covid is a lot deadlier and kills half or a third of everyone who contacted it. What would we do then?
What the world needs are more "chief worry officers," people who will look seriously into these risks and plan accordingly so that we will be better prepared the next time these risks occur. A pandemic isn't a one-time event, it is something that happens every few years or decades throughout history. After the 2014 Ebola outbreak, Bill Gates has already been warning us that we’re not ready for the next pandemic. And sure enough, we're not ready for Covid. Do we really want to repeat this again when the next pandemic hits?
Just because Usain Bolt can run 100 meters in 9.58 seconds, it doesn't mean he can run 100 meters in 9.58 seconds all the time.
It's a lot more meaningful, and impactful, to look at your personal average instead of your personal best. Nobody can perform at their best all the time, that's what it means to have a personal best.
But everybody can perform better than their personal average at least half of the time, mainly because that's the definition of average. If you can consistently beat your average, or beat it more than half the time, your average will improve. And that is a lot more impactful than simply breaking your personal best.
The next time you measure your performance, take some time to create a rolling average for your last 10 or 100 or 1000 attempts. It will give you a much clearer sense of how you are improving.