The Lean City
Fancy Lifeboats, Self-Experiments & Bullshit Asymmetry
🧠 Thoughts & Readings
Decision making is hard. Just think of the last time you ordered food. But decision making is particularly hard if you’ve got no data at hand to base your decision upon.
We use data in most areas of our life in an attempt to make better decisions. And when there is no data available, the next best thing to do is to gather data i.e. to test things.
Like in pre-internet ages when people couldn’t rely on star ratings and just had to test out restaurants themselves. It’s the very same idea that the lean startup model of build - measure - learn is based upon. If you have an idea and no data available that helps you decide whether its a good idea or not, you go, build a prototype, test, gather data and make an informed decision.
So why aren’t we doing the same thing for policies?
With regards to new policy ideas there is usually very little data available. So, maybe cities could be prototypes.
Turn Detroit into Drone Valley
But policymakers shouldn’t be trying to copy Silicon Valley. Instead, they should be figuring out what domain is (or could be) specific to their region—and then removing the regulatory hurdles for that particular domain.
Imagine a Bitcoin Valley, for instance, where some country fully legalizes cryptocurrencies for all financial functions. Or a Drone Valley, where a particular region removes all legal barriers to flying unmanned aerial vehicles locally. A Driverless Car Valley in a city that allows experimentation with different autonomous car designs, redesigned roadways and safety laws. A Stem Cell Valley. And so on.
However, this doesn’t only go for innovation-related policies. [1] There could be towns with universal basic income. Or Creator Towns. Or 15min cities.
Preliminary Conclusions:
Bottom-Up local initiatives should actively be invited by national governments and receive support in collecting data throughout their ‘experiment’
Experiment more on a personal level - like 30-Day self-experiments.
Naturally, experiment cities would allow people to opt-in/opt-out of certain policies - essentially creating a market where policies/cities are competing.
🤓 Learnings
Currently learning about: Effective Altruism - Ideals & Criticism 🤝
Civilization is a fancy lifeboat.
For me this quote summarizes pretty bluntly what the main ideas behind effective altruism are about. It’s about the fact that me and you and everyone around us belong to the most privileged people worldwide. And it’s about the logic that if we decide to donate money, we should do it in a way that maximizes our impact. Or to continue the analogy:
Doing Good
“There are people drowning. They are obviously drowning and we are saving some of them. The boat is not as crowded as it might be but we do have finite resources in any moment. And the truth is, because it’s a fancy lifeboat we are spending some of these resources on things other than reaching over and pulling in the next drowning person.”
✨ Random
Have you heard of Brandolini’s law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle?
Advertisers have increasingly focused on producing lofty, serious ads throughout the past ten years - but the majority of people prefers funny ads.
Can the use of more robots in a firm lead to job creation?
[1] The very origin of this idea goes back to nobel prize winner Paul Romer and his idea of charter cities - more info here. However, there is also quite some criticism towards his ideas.