Developing Un-Network Thinking And Ideas.
Edition #124
The ContraMind Code
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Seeing Like A Network.
In this article, Rohit Krishnan writes about how our information networks have become much more dense. This profoundly impacts how information flows within a network and the transformation it can make in the society and culture in which we live.
Here are some ideas and thoughts from Rohit for us to think and reflect on:
Why cities have much higher rates of “cultural transmission” compared to rural areas. Or why in domains like fashion or ideas or innovation or language or even food, the speed of change and variety is much higher in cities.
Culture is the digital biosphere we create for ourselves. We can think of culture as the common interconnected web that underlay the beliefs that we all hold, which constantly changes and evolves as our beliefs spread.
The way we’re interconnected changes the way we see and process information that comes our way, which changes the culture.
Information spreads quickly and uniformly, leading to a more homogeneous knowledge distribution among all nodes.
The dense network of our modern information ecosystem has plenty of options but inadvertently fostered a homogenization of culture.
We need pockets of "cultural islanding" – protected spaces where ideas spread slower.
Read the entire article here.
AI’s Original Sin.
A NY Times Investigation Found That Tech Giants Altered Their Own Rules To Train Their Newest Artificial Intelligent Systems.
In this podcast, The New York Times investigation reveals how tech giants use vast amounts of existing historical data on the internet—user-generated content—to train their new AI systems.
Here are some key findings from this report:
How Open AI ran out of data by late 2021!—They had just about used all the English language words on the internet to build their models. Imagine, they used millions of words from Wikipedia and Reddit threads and millions of hours of YouTube content in addition to any available video and audio files on the web, which were transcribed. These were used to train the Open AI models.
Google was also using YouTube content to train their AI models. Google's terms of service allow them to use all the content for using all the data on YouTube and have a right to use this data. They used all of these to train their AI model.
Meta also decided to scrape the internet and gobble all the data available to train their AI models.
Many lawsuits are being filed for misuse of copyright materials by these big tech companies.
Licensing all digital data by these big tech companies is not commercially viable.
By 2026, all these companies will run out of digital data available on the internet.
Synthetic data( data generated by AI) will be used to build future versions of AI. The AI systems will start to make mistakes and create biases. This is the impending danger that is coming.
The question is whether this is a fair use of digital data.
Tennis Lessons: 2024 Commencement Address By Roger Federer At Dartmouth
On June 9th, 2024, Roger Federer gave a commencement address at Dartmouth and was honoured with a Doctor of Humane Letters degree at the ceremony.
Here are some incredible thoughts he shared, and you can reflect on some of these thoughts:
“I have to work very hard to make it look easy.”
“Believe in yourself has to be earned.” Beat the attackers by attacking them.
“Discipline is a talent, patience is a talent, process is a talent.”
“Perfection is impossible.”
“Remember, it’s only a point. I only won 54% of the points that I have ever played in my career.” So, focus hard on the point, but once it is over, put it behind you whether you have won or lost it. Because you are going to win some and lose some. Focus hard on the next one.
“Negative energy is wasted energy. The best in the world are not the best because they win every point, but they know they are going to lose again and again, and they know how to deal with it. ”
“Life is bigger than the court. A tennis court is 2106 square feet, to be exact. The world is a lot bigger than that.”
“I never abandoned my roots.”
“Find a mission larger than yourself.”
“Whatever game you choose, give it your best.”
You can click on the above link and watch the video.
Developing Un-Network Thinking And Ideas.
We live in an interconnected society, and the network is becoming denser and denser every day. Each one of us is a mere node in this network, and information flow in the network is easily accessible, fast, and seamless to anybody or any business in the network. The interconnected society is creating a fundamental shift from an era of information scarcity to information abundance. This comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.
The advantage of such a network is information transparency. Hence, this leads to ‘near real-time’ information availability, information sharing, and, of course, fair price discovery. This ‘vanishing middle’ - a delayering of various intermediate actors within the network is leading to the removal of non-value-adding constituents within a network. In the past, middlemen were the ‘information intermediaries’, and this is getting replaced fast by the power of the network.
However, a network's disadvantage is the homogenisation of thinking and ideas. Since information flows fast through the network, it spreads quickly across the entire network. This creates a ‘make-believe’ environment where every person in the network starts to think and act homogeneously. The reason is that every person in the network assumes and perceives that the majority of people in the network believe, behave and act in the same way.
With network behaviour, you must be able to separate the signal from the noise and the underlying cultural shifts that may or may not be happening in society. You must be able to delineate the network effects from the un-network effects.
Take a look at some data, for instance:
In 2024, about 2.1 billion users worldwide will use meal delivery apps. Compare that with the number of internet users worldwide, which is 5.35 billion, that is close to 40% of internet users. Contrast that with this data: By 2028, 2.5 billion users worldwide are expected to use meal delivery apps. Compare that with the total number of internet users growing worldwide in 2028, which is expected to reach 6.05 billion users, which means 41% of internet users will use meal delivery apps. Over the next four years, there is only an expected 1% increase in this meal-ordering behaviour.
In 2023, eCommerce accounted for only 19% of retail sales worldwide, and it is expected to rise to 22% by 2027. Imagine the power of network effects, reshaping of shopping behaviour and chatter over the web around e-commerce. A vast majority of global retail sales, close to 78%, will be outside the e-commerce ambit, which may present new exciting business opportunities or ideas for retail sales.
The wellness market worldwide stood at 5.61 trillion U.S. dollars in 2022. It is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.6 per cent, reaching an estimated 8.47 trillion U.S. dollars by 2027. The global digital health and wellness market was valued at USD 335.00 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach USD 1.103 trillion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 21.97%. The share of the digital health and wellness market is 12.5% of the overall wellness market.
Broad-basing culture, beliefs and values using broad brush strokes of behavioural cohorts may not hold true. Networks tend to push you to such perceptions and decisions. While networks have created incredible sources of information access and unprecedented interconnectedness but, loneliness, uncertainty and fluidity in modern life are more widespread now. In the past, companies needed enormous amounts of capital to build scale, but now scale can be built with relatively lower capital and labour. Networks tend to disrupt traditional and long-held assumptions, beliefs and ways of doing things.
Therefore, culture, which encompasses religion, food, attitude towards money, health and wellness, work, what people wear, how they wear it, language, marriage, music and technology usage, is bound to be different all over the world. Culture is a cohort of common patterns of behaviours and interactions, cognitive constructs and understanding that are learned through socialisation in a community. Thus, culture is nothing but a large cohort of group identities fostered by social patterns unique to the group. There could be striking similarities as well as dissimilarities between these groups. Networks can hide some of these nuances and underlying contradictions.
While people across countries and geographies will be increasingly interconnected, there will be ‘islands of unique but large social patterns’ that will not behave or work like the larger network but may represent large hyperlocal or global opportunities or even unseen emerging network opportunities. That’s where new playbooks can emerge to think, differentiate, and develop new ideas.
Networks may force ‘commodity model thinking’ while un-network principles will force ‘alternative model thinking.’
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
Culture change is driven by interconnectedness.
Synthetic data may not be as effective as real data sets when used to build AI models.
Champions develop the ability to handle losses more effectively than wins.
Un-network thinking can open up new opportunities and ideas.