Category: Mental Models

Thursday, 8.12pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. – Charles Mingus

If you could write a letter to anyone in the world, who would it be? And how would you feel if they responded?

On an tangential note I’m looking at my new copy of The Go Programming Language written by Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan. I’d write to one of them.

In the preface, the authors write, “Only through simplicity of design can a system remain stable, secure and coherent as it grows.”

And I think this is a useful lesson for the rest of life as well.

Take your profession, for instance. How simple is the design for your job, for what you do day to day? Do you things that are necessary, that add value or do you spend most of your time trying to sort out problems?

Sorting out problems looks just like work but it’s really a waste product, like heat. If a machine gets hot that is often a sign that it’s inefficient. When you feel under pressure, is the same thing going on

The difficulty for most of us is twofold. First we have to figure out what’s the way to do what we need to do in the simplest and most effective way possible. Then we have to stop other people from making our lives harder.

And this is not easy.

Not because it’s done intentionally but because of entropy. Everything decays. Everything gets worse over time. Whatever is done becomes encrusted with changes that often make things worse.

It’s like having a house or a car or a briefcase – the longer you use these things the more rubbish accumulates in them and the harder it becomes to sort things out.

The way to keep on top of this is to be ruthless – to keep out anything and everything that does not help move you closer to the objective you’ve set yourself.

For example, I want to write better. So I draw simple pictures that help me think more clearly and I use short words to say what I want to say. And I practice that day after day.

It turns out that I still have much work to do. 36% of my sentences are passive and nearly all of them can be improved.

There is tremendous value in simplicity.

Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to do.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.57pm

Sheffield, U.K.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well. – Jeff Bezos

If you’re trying to come up with an idea for an application that will make you rich how should you go about thinking about the problem? What kind of strategy will help you select an approach that has a good chance of working?

The simple answer is to try and give people what they need or want. To make it simpler for them to get what they want done.

When you think in this way you come up with ideas to make life easy – better todo lists, easier document creation, simpler interfaces, and so on.

But when you really think about it when was the last time you used anything other than Word to create a document? How much simpler can you get than the interface on an iPhone?

When you think of some of the applications out there – Google for search, YouTube for video, LinkedIn for business networking – is there really a choice other than the ones we can all think of? Is there any competition in these spaces or are these companies effective monopolies, even though they probably aren’t trying to be?

I think there are two things here and the underlying logic is summed up in a quote from an old newsgroup that says that graphical user interfaces (GUIs) make simple things simple and complex things impossible.

Let me explain.

If you want to go anywhere these days you’ll probably go onto airbnb and have a look. We used this for the first time recently and it was good – we got a room where we needed and life was fine.

Now, the simple thing, from my point of view, was looking for a place to stay. It might have been a hotel in the past, or I might have run an agent. The user interface, in this case, whether a human agent, a hotel website or a rooms aggregator all solve the same problem – which is to find a space for me to stay the night. The interface helped me solve my simple problem.

You may counter that the problem airbnb solves is not simple – it essentially uses clever software to match supply with demand. To which I say that problem was solved a long time back and it’s called a market. Airbnb simply implements a market in its own way. It’s successful because it’s well known like the other big players in this space.

Some years back we wanted to take a trip to Slovakia and decided to go by train. That was a difficult problem. It required taking six trains and booking on a number of websites in different countries and arranging hotel stays in multiple cities on the way back.

This problem is not something that airbnb appears to solve. At the time there was a website that set out the steps to follow and the websites of the train companies with booking instructions. We followed that and it all went fine.

If you can solve really hard problems that the simple solutions people are currently using can’t address then you may have a market for your offering.

The point I’m trying to make is that an application that is designed to make it simple for you to do one thing usually makes it hard for you to do anything else.

If you do make it simple and you are the best known application then you are onto a winner. But everyone else trails far behind – the winner-take-all network economy means that all the simple stuff gets dominated by the company that happens to get the most attention.

But there are still hard problems out there that need to be solved. The Internet addresses a hard problem – the ability to create, curate and share knowledge.

What’s the takeaway here?

You can solve a simple problem with your application – but if you want to win you are going to have to be the best known product in the world.

Or you can solve a hard problem and be useful.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 7.33pm

Sheffield, U.K.

When you look at people who are successful, you will find that they aren’t the people who are motivated, but have consistency in their motivation. – Arsene Wenger

When I’m not sure what to think I go back to the words of people that have been consistent in their approach to their field.

I have made the mistake, perhaps, of reopening the social media floodgates. And stuff pours in, stuff that sounds good but which I’m not sure is worth remembering.

For example, one set of posts was all about how sales are important. Another talked about returns on invested capital. A third, well written piece, essentially said that of business was a game you’d have to keep all the pieces of the game in play.

So then I wonder, should I be trying to write like these writers. Is a short, punchy piece that is a list of short sentences the way to go? Or is it a longer piece that tells a story? Is there a “right” way to do this.

The obvious answer is that there isn’t. Warren Buffett, for example, writes a single letter a year to his sisters about what’s happened in the business. Others write powerful passages that tell a story and aim to provide “actionable” and “proven” approaches to the kinds of problems you will face. However they approach the topic, they show consistency in their approach.

One of the things I’m trying to do is figure out what my kind of consistency looks like. It’s not in the graphics and the look – given my interest in hand-drawn images and a forty-year old approach to text processing. It’s not in a persuasive story or emotive message. It’s a sense-making approach that uses models a lot.

For example, I’ve been working on building knowledge graphs recently and the extract below is from one of the papers I’ve been reading.

This gets across the dilemma I’ve hinted at so far. If you want to acquire knowledge you have to understand that knowledge can range from natural science to storytelling. Knowledge in the natural sciences has to meet the test of public repeatability so it meets a high standard of truth. Stories, at the other extreme, may only be plausible. And plausibility is a weak thing – it’s not enough to rely on. If you rely on things that are plausible you end up joining mobs storming buildings. Not always, but that seems to be the end result all too often.

Life’s too short to believe in stories. But if you’re going to tell one for your business, make sure it’s one that you can live.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 7.44pm

Sheffield, U.K.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. – Friedrich Nietzsche

“Why?” is a powerful question. Maybe that’s why children use it so much. They know instinctively that they shouldn’t accept things at face value, that they should question what they see and hear. It’s a survival mechanism – to be wary of everything. To only accept that which you are sure won’t hurt you.

As I read papers and books I look at statements and note which ones have references. And then I wonder about the nature of references. If you slow down and really read what is on the page, are you sure that what you’ve written accurately reflects what you read?

Words are slippery things. They come loaded with assumptions and contexts and unspoken ideas. It doesn’t help to use more words – that often confuses things even more. A mission statement that you write, one that you think is crystal clear may thoroughly confuse someone else. A statement by itself is rarely enough to make sense of a particular situation.

But you can’t always check everything, can you? Or perhaps you can – that’s Wikipedia’s policy. Nothing in there that’s not referenced, where you haven’t got a published source. That’s the idea of an authoritative source. Your own opinion doesn’t count.

But how do you know that your authoritative source has got things right? Well, that’s the idea of peer review – that what’s being said has been looked at by someone else who’s said it’s all ok.

But what if the thing that’s being looked at is a few levels of abstraction away from the real thing? How do you compare the abstract idea with the real-world data that’s been collected unless you can see what happened?

That’s the idea of recoverable research, your ability to show what you did rather than just the results of your work. It’s the recoverability, or at least the ability to go through what was done that adds some credibility to the process.

Now, all this seems like hard work but it’s not really. It was solved a long time back using ideas like literate programming. You think stuff and you do stuff. People see what you do and that’s good. But it’s better if they can also see why you did what you did and why you thought what you thought.

Better for the world of knowledge anyway.

But perhaps the most important thing is this.

It’s easy to fool yourself.

It’s easy to assume that you know more than you do.

But if you sit down and try to write down why you have done things the way you’ve done them you’ll have a record of your thinking.

One that will be of use to others.

Or, more importantly perhaps, useful one day to yourself.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.08pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The future influences the present just as much as the past. – Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ve been thinking about valuations and how they work. And it’s not that easy to get your head around the kinds of things you need to value these days.

Take “traditional” businesses, for example. Ones that absorb capital – like building houses or setting up a factory.

There are only a few numbers that really matter. The price at which you sell. The rate at which you borrow. The margins you make. And the risk-free rate.

For example, let’s say you want to invest in a rental property. You have an income from the market rental value and an increase in value over time due to property price inflation. You need to put in a deposit and borrow some money and your return will depend on how these factors interact.

The important thing is that the yield you make, the total return over the investment in capital assets, is greater than your cost of capital under a stressed scenario. In that case, you’re in the black and will make money. Whether you’re happy with the final return you’re getting when it’s compared to the risk-free rate – long-term treasury yields, for example. The US 30 year treasury bond, for example, is at around 2% right now, so if you make 3% that’s good and if you make 1%, that’s not so good.

Anyway, the model itself is not important – because so many investments these days are not about capital but about potential.

Take yourself, for example. Is your value the salary you make or have made? Is a company’s value the money it has made?

When we look at past performance using easy to measure attributes like money we can write people and companies off because they don’t look good on paper. But perhaps that’s because we’re measuring the wrong things.

Let’s focus on companies for a second. Let’s say you want to build a venture capital portfolio, investing your own money in a set of early stage companies. What should you look for?

It’s tempting to ask for profits, for stability, for evidence of growth in the past. But a company that shows good profits may have helped to manage those numbers because they knew that was what you wanted. It’s easy to increase profits in the short term by raising prices and cutting costs to look good now – but that weakens your future, with customers and employees moving away when your changes bite.

Sometimes companies without profits are actually investing in their future, bringing in people and creating the capacity to do better work. In that case, despite the low profits now, you have a better foundation for future growth.

Which one would you prefer – a good looking now at the expense of the future or a less good now with a bright future?

Being able to recognize value comes down to being able to see your own beliefs and assumptions for what they are and ask the right questions. And have a framework where you can make mistakes without losing everything.

When you’re asked to look at the future and think about what needs to happen for a business to succeed – you can quite quickly come up with factors that matter. Are they working on something that customers are going to want – that solves a real pain? Does it grab your attention? What do they plan to do with the money they are asking for? And so on.

The point is that the past is priced in. The future is what you make of it.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 8.20pm

Sheffield, U.K.

We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds. – Aristotle Onassis

I’ve been reading the same paper again and again for the last week, trying to figure out how I should read. You would think I would know how to do that by now, but it’s harder than you think.

There is a passage in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance where the main character, Phaedrus, is wrestling with the writing of Kant, the great German philosopher. Phadreus approaches each sentence like a chess move, testing, probing, looking for flaws, looking for a weakness he can thrust through. Trying to see if what is said is true, if it is worth knowing.

The difficulty with words is that there are so many of them out there. And not all of them are good. If you are serious about the work you have to get better at telling the good ones from the bad. But why would you do that?

It turns out that high performing individuals are rare, and so are high performing organizations. And this is because the way we learn new things and apply them vary in how effective they are.

Most of the time we try and do what we’re doing better. This is called single-loop learning. If you make an omelette day after day then you’ll get better at making an omelette. That’s the same with form filling or doing a task at your work – you get better over time.

Getting even better starts with taking a step back and asking if the task you are doing is the right thing to do. Is it helping you achieve your goals? For example, a lot of people spend up working on tasks that customers don’t really care about. You might send out detailed emails that they don’t read, for example. If you find out what customers actually want and then send them that instead you’re starting to engage in double-loop learning – going from a task focus to figuring out the right thing to do.

From there, it gets harder to improve. Higher order thinking, or triple-loop learning is something that high performing individuals and high performing organizations do but it’s not easy to get your head around.

The model that starts this post is one way to think about it.

It starts with being open to learning new stuff, from books and other resources and from others in your network who know more than you might. How much new knowledge have you gained since your last degree?

You need to be able to take that knowledge and move it into your own space – whether it’s to help you work better or to help your organization work better. And you often start with figuring out where the gaps are when it comes to doing the best job you can.

Getting to that working better part is a little like evolving, hopefully to something that adapts better to the situation you’re in. The variation-selection-retention cycle explains how this happens. Now that you’ve learned something new you pick something to try, a kind of experiment. Then you learn from that, and keep what works, what is best for you. It sounds simple, but it’s not easy to do, for a couple of reasons.

The first has to do with taking the time to think about and reflect on what’s going on. What are you trying to achieve, how well did your experiment work and what did you learn. What would you change? What would you keep?

This kind of reflection on what went well, what went badly and what you are going to do next is important if you want to be able to make a sustained improvements in your practice.

But there is always a problem, especially when you work with others. People don’t like change, especially change that they haven’t asked for. This will make them unhappy. It’s called adaptive tension, and you need to manage that. If you don’t then people will go back to the old ways of doing things as soon as they can because all your new ideas are simply a pain in the rear for them.

This is a big reason why large change projects fail, because consultants or leaders bring in new stuff without thinking through how the people affected will think and feel and react.

But if you can do these things then you’re engaging in higher order thinking, and you have the pieces in place to be a high performing individual or build a high performing team.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 6.10pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn’t think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential. – Steve Ballmer

I came across the idea of graphs a few days ago and have been quite interested in their possibilities since then.

Graphs in mathematics and graph theory give you a rather stark definition – a graph has nodes that are connected by edges. That’s it really. Nodes and edges.

Except there’s more to it than that.

One of the biggest issues we have when we think about things is that we’ve been trained to think in parts, to look at pieces of things.

For example, if you want to study a paper you start by reading all the sentences and taking notes – breaking the paper down into the points that are important, that you think you need to remember.

If you need to analyse a problem you start by breaking it into parts, and looking at how you can solve each of those parts.

We’re not really taught systematically about how to put things together again – you’re expected to pick that up with experience. And some people get it and some of us struggle and time passes on.

A knowledge graph is an application of graph theory to the problem of understanding and developing knowledge. The thing about learning something is that it usually only makes sense when it’s put in the context of something else. It’s hardly ever useful just by itself.

When I started reading my first paper for my research I started to get stuck at the point where I was thinking about what kind of notes I should take – what did I need to understand and remember.

The problem really wasn’t one of remembering – no one is going to have to take an exam on this stuff. It’s more a problem of relating, of figuring out what goes where.

I’ve been playing with developing my own knowledge graph for the research I’m reading. It’s still a work in progress but when you visualise the concepts you might come up with something like this.

Now this is a little hard to understand but you can start to filter the graph and try to understand relationships – like the different names writers use for things that are really the same thing. Like this.

Now, you might ask yourself whether all this isn’t just making things more complicated.

And it sort of is, because when you look at the image it’s complicated and needs some work.

But, the important thing is that nothing makes sense without its connections – it’s the relationships that help you work out what’s going on and they are the way you build an understanding of what’s really there.

And if you have a sound graph that underpins your understanding then the work you create as a result will have solid foundations as well – whether it’s a strategy or a business plan or a book.

In theory anyway.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 6.44pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise – Benjamin Franklin

I grew up with this poem rolling around in my head. We were early risers – a cultural imperative for the community I grew up in.

I saw a post recently that talked about how people who ride bicycles are bad for the economy – because they’re healthy and don’t buy junk food and spend less on medicines. It’s better to have a nation of consumers who go out and spend a lot because that’s what keeps economies going.

I don’t quite know what to make of this. On the one hand, it’s more complicated than that. Some of the cyclists I know spend a lot of money on their machines. It’s a big business, the one that helps you move around.

There’s something in here about capitalism and consumerism and the fact that these approaches have very successfully helped to improve the standards of living of millions of people. Innovation in this space has changed all our lives, possibly for the better.

Then again, consumerism exists because many of the products in the world are made in a country that has a problematic relationship with freedom. But it’s doing well unlike the other well known union that fell apart.

I think it’s hard to know what the right thing to do is these days.

Should you work hard and save and try and live within your means?

When you do, people who stretch themselves and buy a bigger house will end up having a much larger asset than you have.

The website Monevator has covered this several times in the last decade or so and it really all does come down to mental models.

Let’s take money for example. How much do you have.

If you bought a house twenty years ago that’s now appreciated in value by several hundred thousand pounds – you don’t have any more money in your pocket. But you do have something.

If you sold up, you’d have cash to spend but the cash is also not worth very much – there’s too much of it around.

What does this mean in practice? The excess returns you make in property get eaten away by low interest rates if you make the switch to cash. If you never sell your property or borrow against it, however, you don’t get the benefit of the cash. You don’t have any more than you did at the start because the house itself doesn’t get any bigger.

The wise thing to do is to have a mix of options – some property, some shares, some cash. But if you’ve got cash you’re looking enviously at the returns on property. If you’ve got property you’re looking at crypto and wondering what you’d have if things had increased 119,000% for you. There’s always someone who has it better.

Knowing what you know now, would you have done anything differently?

I don’t know. The thing is that things change and it’s really hard to be right about anything.

Buffett talks about how it’s only when the tide goes out that you can see who’s been swimming naked.

These days the government rushes up to hand out towels and swimsuits which kind of makes it irrelevant what you’re actually doing. If you’re part of their gang, of course, everyone else is left to fend for themselves.

I think someone worked out that it was better to let the good times roll and then pay a little to pick up the mess rather than try and manage things sensibly from the start when it came to the economy.

Many of us have learned instinctively that we have to be careful, to hoard our resources in the event of a famine.

Is this the wrong approach to grow an economy? Is it better to consume and use as many resources as we can?

That seems wrong.

I am left with more questions than answers, I fear.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 8.40pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order. – Eric Morecambe

One of the problems with reading Terry Pratchett is that certain phrases roll around in your mind, mocking you with their unblinking gaze.

Take, for example, that you have to learn to believe the little lies – the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, wishing wells, and others that we do not speak of in front of children – so that you can believe the big ones: truth, justice, mercy.

“Stop!” you say, of course truth and justice and mercy exist. But they don’t. Grind up the universe, say Pratchett’s characters, sieve all that is in existence and you will not find a molecule of mercy, a grain of truth, a drop of justice. These are entirely human concepts that exist entirely in our heads and we choose to believe them.

So, if you need to do something is there a right way to do it and a wrong way? For example, if you want to achieve your goal should you go straight for it in the most direct way possible, even if there is a good chance you’ll stumble? Should you take the path that has the least risk? Or should you go big, swing for the fences and hope to hit a home run.

Take working life, for example, A direct approach might be to go for what you always wanted to be – a cellist, an actor – even though there is a chance that you might not make the cut. Or you could take a low risk route – apprentice to a trade, become a professional. Or you could strike our on your own, start a company, live the startup life and get rich quickly. Or fail fast and try something else.

And then of course you could just wander about and fall into something – maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t – but quite a few people end up decades later wondering how they got there and whether it could have worked out differently.

The point is that there is no “right” way. If you don’t mind the stress of the ups and downs you can make certain decisions. If you can live with skating on the edge of what is legal and what isn’t – you might find an edge. It’s a personality thing – I’m conservative, perhaps too much. But I can live with that.

In the end if there is no truth, there is only the truth according to you.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.06pm

Sheffield, U.K.

My journey is where I’m at right? It’s the monopoly board of my life, and I’m making my rounds. – Saint Jhn

We used to go to France every summer for a camping holiday.

Before the pandemic hit, of course.

Before one of those summers, the winter before, we went to a farm for a Christmas market. As we wandered around the stalls we came across one that had handmade armour – a helmet, mail chain and a sword. So the small people started trying these out and I looked around the stall and noticed some game boards with a strange pattern I hadn’t seen before.

These were handmade by the stall owner, I think, and were an old style of board with locations where pieces could stop and lines along which they could move. I thought this was a very interesting idea but I didn’t buy one at the time. I should have. We spent much of the summer in France creating boards on the lines of the one we saw with cardboard and pens. By the way, one of the reasons you had lines on the boards rather than squares like a chessboard or passages like a maze is that these games were often carved into tables and it’s easier to just make a line with a knife.

Okay, it’s now three or four years later and I’m reading research and thinking about how to remember this stuff I’m reading. A few days ago I wrote about coming across the work of Vera F. Birkenbihl and thinking this was new and cool. As a reminder an ABC list is when you write down the letters of the alphabet vertically on a page and then write down words that capture the essence of what you’re reading.

Something like this.

The idea is that writing down these words will help you remember what you read better when you look back at the words. I still need to get my head around the theory behind that but if it’s a memory thing I thought why not create “123 lists”. This is for numbers and you put down figures that you want to remember. I have a 123 list that I’ll come back to in a few weeks to see if this works.

But, if you have ABC lists, then what happens if you connect related words – draw a word, circle it, draw a related word and connect the two? Something like the image above. I thought I could call that an “ABC Connect”. Pretty cool, yes?

Now, we can draw these diagrams but when they get bigger it’s probably easier to use software and my go to software for drawing words and connections is Graphviz. If I use that to create this kind of connection you’ll get something like this.

I was on the Graphviz website and idly browsing through the theory of graphs when I came across a paper titled A Short Note on the History of Graph Drawing so of course I had to read that. The paper has a definition:

“A mathematical graph consists of a set of nodes and a set of edges. An edge connects to a pair of nodes.”

So… this is my “ABC Connect”. Ah well, it sounds good anyway and is a little less confusing than the word “graph” might be.

But, even better, the paper starts by talking about how nodes and edges can be seen in Morris gameboards from the thirteenth century.

If you drew one out, it might look like this.

And these are the same boards we stumbled across in that market stall all those years ago.

Anyway, mathematical graphs help you see patterns in data – family trees in genealogy is one of the best known examples of applying these techniques. My own work uses these extensively but now I have a few names for what I do – old ones and new ones.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh