Image: Donald Giannatti

A good airforce strategy is to stop planes from going down.

This is exactly what the allies aimed for in the second World War. They gathered as much data as they could; including the bullet-hole distribution on the planes that made it back. And that makes sense, right? If one is going to add armour (typically heavy) to a plane (typically weight-sensitive), one should lean towards frugality.

Image: Illustration of hypothetical damage pattern on a WW2 bomber, WikiMedia Commons

The obvious thing to do would be to add armour to the areas that are riddled with bullets holes. But, a Hungarian mathematician named Abraham Wald, doing that wouldn’t have made much of a difference.

He argued that the best place to put armour was where the bullets weren’t.

And his reasoning was brilliant: they could only study bullet holes in the planes because they made it back. Therefore, the critical areas to protect are those where bullet holes were not present — the planes that got hit there didn’t make it.

This is a great illustration of how the first and obvious answer is not necessarily the best one. It could be, sure, but that can only be established with a little more digging. Daniel Kahneman covers this phenomenon quite extensively in his book, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, an incredible read if you haven’t already.

He uses a simpler example though. Kahneman suggests thinking of the best sportsman of all time. The first answer that comes to mind is usually fairly good—popular mentions like Ali, Schumacher, or Woods. But if you give it a good think, better examples emerge. Like Jim Brown, who was among the best that ever lived in two sports; he entered the halls of fame for both lacrosse and football. Or Jim Thorpe, who won Olympic golds in the pentathlon and decathlon, played professions football, basketball, and baseball. Must be something in the name.

Or Ronaldo, Federer, Gretzky or Rhodes. The list goes on.

And that’s the point really. The first answer is the one that is top of mind, the most recent, or the most popular. But the second one allows for some time to make distinctions. What do we mean by “best”? Are we talking one sport or multi-sports? About world championships or Olympics? Team sports or individual sports?

This second-order thinking is far too scarce in our day and age. Yet it is critical. We live in a world where there is an abundance of information and not all of it is quality. In fact, due to the sheer magnitude, not all of it can be quality. This creates a burden on anyone consuming information to process it more thoroughly. But, because there is so much of it, we don’t have time to.

And it results in the exact issues we are facing as a society right now. Reasonable discourse is replaced with superficial debates. Arguments are based on their political value rather than their actual value.

I am not suggesting that an issue is not valid because it is political or popular, nor am I suggesting the same for the opposing arguments. But I am suggesting that we need to be able to consider either one based on their validity. If a view is controversial, it is often attacked without due consideration. Moreover, the person holding the view is personally targeted.

Considering the limitations of first-order thinking, and how common it is (as opposed to higher-order thinking), we are treading a very dangerous line.

Just like Wald, we need to consider beyond the obvious. Facts are only relevant if we know what they mean. It is that meaning that holds the key to real progression. That’s what we need to reinforce.

Otherwise, we risk our society going down.

Image: Shot

Sourdough is healthier than other bread.

Commercial bread has a similar amount of nutrients, but due to high levels of phytates —62% more than sourdough—that bind to them, they aren’t easily absorbed. And there is no point to nutrients if they can’t be used. Lactic acid neutralises them and increases their bioavailability.

Sourdough is also prebiotic. That means that it feeds the good bacteria in the gut. Commercial bread, on the other hand, isn’t very good for bacteria at all. Why? Well, preservatives exist to kill bacteria. They don’t care if it’s good or bad.

And then there is gluten—public enemy number one. The fermentation process sorts that out. It breaks down gluten making it far easier to digest. We only have one stomach after all.

All this and only from three ingredients: flour, water, and salt. Compared to commercial bread’s eleven (this is a picture from a common loaf I have at home), it’s quite the achievement.

Yet, commercial bread comes in way cheaper. Why? It has the same ingredients and more—one assumes that the other eight have price tags themselves—so how can it be cheaper?

The answer is time.

Sourdough takes time to make. In fact, by proportion, and employing a little imagination, time is the largest ingredient. By far.

It’s also the most important. Time is why lactic acid is produced and, in turn, why nutrients are accessible. Commercial bread has them artificially added. Time is why fermentation occurs and, in turn, why it’s digestible. Commercial bread is the reason that gluten is so hated. Time is the reason that sourdough is a prebiotic—bacteria and yeast need to flourish for bread to rise. Commercial bread uses instant yeast. And time is the reason that only three ingredients are needed.

We literally have to more than double the ingredients to reduce the manufacture time, in the process, we lose the good bits.

Essentially, the price of speed is substance.

But it’s not just bread. This same compromise happens over and over again. How often have you heard the phrase “they don’t make whatever like they used to”?

Just the other day I came across an entire thread of Kitchen Aid customers telling other Kitchen Aid customers not to buy the latest models. Rather they were sharing places to buy second-hand versions or places to repair them. One particularly vocal customer had even upgraded to a new one, used it a couple of times, and ended up pulling “old faithful” from storage.

Most telling was the evangelical pleas for bakers to use a second-hand model as opposed to buying new. Some with paragraphs of reasoning. This seems like an awful lot of effort going against what is meant to be an improved product.

If the reasons can be believed, cheaper, lower quality components are being used to drop costs and get more units out in a shorter period of time.

For me, most telling is how this manifests in the zeitgeist. Thinking itself is very much like sourdough; good ideas need to ferment. They need to be worked over and proofed. They need to rest. The outcome—a conclusion—is stronger when someone has mixed their ideas with time.

Conversely, we can substitute substance for cliche ideas. We can draw conclusions in record time. And often we do. We can patrol social media with a feverish hunger to defend ideas that we haven’t spent so much as an hour developing. We can manufacture opinions with ideas that are cheap imitations of the real thing. Rather than simple elegance, they are bloated with preservatives which result in a product that looks like the real thing, tastes okay, but lacks any sort of nutrition.

Bread is partly—if not wholly—responsible for the survival of man. Making bread allowed us to extract the nutrients that were embedded in grains without having to evolve a second or third stomach. In time, we managed to get through the impenetrable germ to the nutritious core. Yet, over time, we have resorted to sub standard loaves, over high-quality bread.

It’s no wonder our society is bloated, our ideas noxious, and our thinking stale. It’s time we rethink our recipe.

Image: Christopher Windus

Entropy, you might remember from high-school physics, is a very interesting term. In case you don’t, it refers to the dissipation of energy. That is, over time, energy dissipates in its environment until thermo-equilibrium is reached—until energy is uniformly dissipated.

What’s key to understanding entropy is grasping why it exists. And it’s actually relatively simple: probability. The probability that energy in a warm cup of coffee will spread across a room, as an example, is far higher than the probability that ambient energy will randomly concentrate to warm the coffee.

Entropy, then, is a force that tends to equilibrium.

Life, on the other hand, is a concentration of energy. Where entropy acts to create disorder, life acts to create order. What’s interesting, though, is that life evolved to seek homeostasis with its environment—it is a force that tends to equilibrium—an interesting correlation to say the least.

In his book The Strange Order of Things, Antonio Damasio argues that one of the primary drivers of evolution is this quest for equilibrium. And central to this argument is the idea of how feelings emerged.

Going all the way back to the Cambrian Explosion — the event that most scientists agree spawned complex life — and track the evolution of organisms to us complex, complicated, convoluted bunch of humans, an interesting idea emerges: organisms need to gain some kind of equilibrium with their environment in order to survive, or homeostasis.

To do this, they developed senses. The more data that can be extracted from the environment, the most likely any organism is to adapt. And the more able an organism is to adapt, the more likely they will survive. Following this reasoning leads us to Darwin and Natural Selection.

But where this idea got really interesting for me is when the nervous system is introduced. The nervous system is simply a more advanced way to gather data from the environment. But it also enables the gathering data from inside the organism. To be best geared for adaption, there are two sets of data that need to be compared. What is happening outside the organism and what is happening inside it. The nervous system was a step-change in terms of fulfilling both criteria.

Then, at least with humans, the mind came.

The mind, Damasio argues, is a complex imaging system. It is a mechanism that maps the environment in terms of images. These images can be stored, analyzed, manipulated, even created somewhat independently of data being extracted from the environment. But they still serve a very specific purpose: homeostasis.

The example he gives is with heatwaves. In a heatwave, there is an increased risk of both homicide and suicide, and, in particular, violent occurrences of both. While there are many potential explanations, Damasio believes that dehydration is a likely culprit. Thinking about my mood swings when I am short of a bit of water leads me to subjectively concur.

And, what do you know, suicide and homicide are both not conduce to survival.

So we invented ways of dealing with that. Air-conditioners, well-designed homes, breathable clothes, and so on. Each, lightly disguised as comfort, has actually played a non-trivial part in survival.

This all points to another conclusion, and one that really caught my attention: the role of the mind in relation to the body. If we look at the elements of humanity that truly differentiate us from other animals, we can loosely group them under “culture”. Art, music (to a degree), theatre, language, tradition, and so on. All of these cultural tenets have, among other things, served to create homeostasis between people and their environment.

Think about how many traditions have grown out of a need in a particular environment? Or recipes? Or, even music. They all serve to band people together. And if there is one thing that banded people do well, it’s survival.

More than that, however, it led me to realise that nervous systems are tools used by the organism, not the other way around. Or, put differently, the mind — our advanced environment, cultural, experience mapping machine — is something that is employed by our bodies.

While we tend to identify with our minds, we are not our minds. It’s easy to see why this has happened, though, why a self-image is created by the part of a person that deals with imaging, but it’s not so easy to understand what it means.

If we are not our minds? Who are we?

"The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am a relatively new dad. My son is just shy of 18 months old and he is one of the main reasons that I started this newsletter. You see, becoming a new dad does a lot of things to you but one of the most remarkable is the sheer dread that starts to smoulder under the cool, calm “I have this” exterior. Suddenly risk is a thing—a very real thing—and my mortality was no longer just mine. So I sat down and came up with a plan as to how I could share everything I have learned in the event something happened to me before he was old enough to understand that trying to eat a television is a bad idea.

Et voila.

The next step was figuring out where to start. It actually ended up being a relatively simple choice. When building a house, one starts with the foundation; when building character, one starts with principles. Principles are what we use to make decisions; how good those decisions are will depend on how good the principles are. Either way, these decisions end up creating our realities.

They’re a heuristic that helps us to navigate a capricious world, filled with far too many variables to make a handbook any good. And they can be used to ease the angst when assessing difficult situations. They can even, if crafted well, cut through the self-inflicted dross that typically surrounds those situations.

They serve as a framework for improvement. We can only improve what we measure, and we can only measure something when we have a reference. Principles are that reference; they can be used to assess the actions of both ourselves and others.

It is also much easier to resist peer pressure when you have decent principles, similar to how it's easier to resist eating junk food when you're training for something specific. They move your locus of control from external to internal, putting influence right where it should be. Bad decisions become blatantly obvious when you contrast them with guiding principles.

More than just character, they serve as a foundation for trust. If you have principles and one of those principles is keeping your word, people are more likely to trust you when you give it.

What's more, having principles makes teaching decent behaviour to your kids much easier. They form a basis for lessons and are useful examples.

Essentially, principles are how you govern who you are.

So, crafting the right principles is ultra important. But how?

Direction

"Alice: Which way should I go? Cat: That depends on where you are going. Alice: I don't know. Cat: Then it doesn't matter which way you go.”
— Lewis Carroll

You need to understand what kind of person you want to be. It's often helpful to start with people that you admire. Why do you admire them? What specific characteristics are attractive? What is it about them that draws you to them? Write those traits down. You need to be able to clearly describe the person you want to be, with as much detail as possible, so that you can form principles around those descriptions.

Thought

"Think lightly about yourself and deeply about the world."
— Miyamoto Musashi

Put time into thinking about the issues that you care about. Opinions are like dough, they only come together when you work through them properly. It's not an easy thing to do, but that is exactly why you should do it. Too many people have strong opinions about important topics without having put much effort into thinking about them.

A great exercise is blocking out two hours of your time in a week, going somewhere where you will not be disturbed or distracted—that means no devices, just a pen and a notebook–then, writing. Write about whatever comes to your mind without holding back. Run with the ideas that come up and explore them thoroughly, writing everything down as you go. Do this until you have nothing left to write. Then just sit and let your mind prove. The goal is to get to a place of boredom, which is precisely where the magic happens. Ideas and connections will start to come out of seemingly nowhere. Rinse and repeat weekly—it's a life-transforming habit.

Opinions

"Strong opinions, weakly held."
— Bob Johansen

Opinions are closely tied to principles. But opinions should not be static. Rather, they should be dynamic, almost alive. They should grow and evolve based on new information and experiences. Thinking deeply about things you care about is not a once-off thing because you are not a once-off person. Things change, you change, and that's fine.

Principles should be less prone to change, but that is not to say they shouldn't ever be changed. Only, with care and a lot of consideration.

Management

"What gets measured gets managed."
— Peter Drucker

Write down your principles. Record them somewhere so that you can revisit them and improve them if necessary.

A good time to revisit principles is whenever you do something that doesn't make you proud of yourself. Then, the question is: did you violate one of your principles, or is a principle bad? If your decision was bad, try harder. If your principle was bad, work through the corresponding principle again.

Part of being an effective person is having and maintaining principles. It is about taking the time to actively control the person you are and ensure that you are developing into someone that you're proud of. It’s a prerequisite for true confidence. When you combine principles and discipline, there is very little you won’t be able to achieve without compromising your integrity.

Jiang Zemin, the ex-president of the People’s Republic of China, once told a gathering of high ranking officials that if he could make one decree that would definitely be obeyed in China, it would be to “make Christianity the official religion of China.”

It’s not that he was a fan of Jesus — that’s for sure — his administration raided churches and confiscated bibles. And Chinese presidents aren’t known for their sarcasm. So what gives?

The answer lies with Protestants.

In his book Civilisation: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson covers the “Protestant Ethic.” It’s a term that was coined by the father of modern sociology, Max Weber, and boiled down to two elements: thrift and work ethic. They were very good at working hard and accumulating — rather than spending — capital. In fact, most wealthy industrialists working in Europe during the late nineteenth century were Protestant.

Whereas most Christian sects believed that the rich were less likely to get into heaven than a modern-day lawyer — the kind that is not my wife, of course — and tended to denounce material possessions altogether, Protestants believed that working to the bone was not only accepted by God, it’s what He expected. Many historians believe that Protestants gave birth to modern capitalism.

But a work ethic was not the only reason, maybe not even a reason, that Zemin believes Christianity should be the future of China. Nor was it something exclusive to Protestants while Weber was investigating this curious phenomenon. Despite Weber overlooking it at the time, Jewish communities thrived in America, Catholics in France and Belgium, along with multiple other religious communities across the globe. It was not a work ethic that bore economic advantages, but ethics itself.

Christianity is not just a religion, it’s a moral framework. It has very clear directives on what is, and what is not acceptable. Stealing, as an example, is forbidden. And, when you look at it closely, the sins that are important for trust in society are all a form of stealing. Murder is stealing a life, adultery is stealing a wife, and corruption is stealing money.

And that’s the key really. Trust. Economies thrive on the stuff. When businesses can trust their customers, and banks can trust businesses, credit becomes cheaper, capital is easier to come by, and bills are going to get paid. Christian societies don’t even need strict laws to achieve this — it’s just the right thing to do.

It’s not hard to grasp why either. Most people are more likely to lend money to a family member than they are to a stranger. Within families, there is often — not always — a shared moral framework and shared values. These are the elements that underpin trust.

It’s also the reason why minority communities often fare well economically or at least tend to do more business with each other. Their communities can be trusted. In an unpredictable world, shared value systems is a critical piece of fairly predictable information.

And I think that this is true for businesses too, especially when they’re viewed as micro-communities themselves. There is a reason that culture fit is so important and why businesses that have strong value systems tend to be more successful than those without.

Organisations of people start to break down when numbers reach more than 150. That’s the upper limit of populations that will remain cohesive without help. It’s at that point that decision-making protocols need to change, communication needs to increase, and values need to be addressed.

I’d argue that a large portion of the trouble is attributed to trust. Over 150 people, one is suddenly more likely to need something from a stranger or someone that one hasn’t worked with before. In smaller organisations, employees are likely to get to know each other and know whom they can trust. Bigger organisations don’t have this luxury.

But those companies that develop a culture underpinned by strong values tend to manage. Moreover, those that ensure that their values are closely tied to moral values manage very well. It’s not a revelation that flies in the face of diversity, per se, it’s more that diversity needs to be managed in order to be effective. America, one of the more diverse countries in the world, was very successful up until recently: people moved from all over the world, but they moved to becomeAmerican. They bought into the values that America espoused.

And it is why businesses make up weird names to group their employees. It fosters group identity and, in turn, trust. Employees are no longer Spanish, or Danish, or South African, they are “Whatever-the-business-is-called-ian”. It seems stupid, but it works.

It’s not just a modern thing either. Communities are what ensured survival back in the hunter-gatherer days. If someone was alone, they were going to battle to hunt, gather, and find shelter. And, as it were, options for reproduction were slim to none. Humans had to band together to increase their chances of survival. Unfortunately, that also brought about hostility between those bands. When one identifies with a group, one alienates oneself from another.

Religion went a long way to solving this. Suddenly there was a common framework that people could adhere to. There was no longer a chief or a king amongst the people that ruled, but a ‘King of kings’ that was greater than all people, uniting them in their inferiority (relative to God). Suddenly, people could work together at scale within a clear moral framework. Religion scaled trust.

But recently, that has started to break down. Atheism is more common than religion in a lot of countries. And, while some would argue that Atheism is a tribe in itself, it has no agreed framework for ethical behaviour. It’s possible to establish one, sure, but there has to be a wide consensus. And, as is the way with humans, if doing good is just for the sake of doing good, incentives will prevail. At least with religion, there was a clear incentive to doing good — you’re going to go to heaven and not burn for all eternity.

I don’t think Christianity is the answer. Or religion even. But I no longer discount them either. And I am not suggesting that we should lie to ourselves, and each other, just to get along — although, that would be preferable to our current predicament. I am simply saying we need something to believe in.

Almost anything.

Because, the way things are going, we’re going to burn anyway.

This article was first published here.

There is a reason that free will is one of the most debated concepts in philosophy. All evidence points to its absence. Every part of science, save fringe studies, have found that the natural world is deterministic. Causes have effects. The past dictates the future. Yet, we can’t help but feel its existence.

The argument against free will takes many forms, but it essentially boils down to one: we do not choose our genes or our environments. Yet, our decisions are influenced by one or the other, or both.

Isolated studies have shown that we make decisions in our unconscious rather than conscious minds. And the implications are interesting. If our unconscious minds make decisions, and we use our reasoning facilities to retroactively justify them—rather than deliberated as we have always thought—then free will suffers yet another blow to its credibility.

But it’s a little more complicated than it looks on the surface. In an example penned by Kurt Keefner in an essay responding to Sam Harris’ Free Will, he describes a young man trying to choose a college. There are orders of conscious deductions happening to settle upon the right college. How far is the college from home? What is its academic reputation? Proximity to cultural resources? The list goes on.

These kinds of deliberations happen in the conscious mind. Thoughts may spring from the unconscious, but ultimately they are consciously deliberated. In such a case, free will seems to definitively exist.

But if one examines how these types of decisions actually occur —thoughts popping from the unconscious — it gets a little messy. Are these thoughts weighted with bias from the start? Do we not all already know—deep down—what we want before we “decide"? Or, from the perspective of the young student, is a college attractive based on an impression safely tucked away in the unconscious?

Cognitive biases are not something to overlook. There are 124 of them and that’s only decision-making, belief and behavioural biases. There are still social biases and memory biases to add to the list. It’s almost as if humans are not meant to be rational.

The real question is whether being slaves to our unconscious is proof of the absence of a free will. I would argue not. All it shows is how tortuous humans are.

As Keefner argues in his essay, abstractions, like "the mind", are exactly that: abstractions. Fabrications created to help us discuss various subjects. In reality, there is no true separation. The mind cannot be separated from the brain, nor the brain from the body. It is one organism. Indeed, conscious and unconscious thoughts are only separated in language and awareness.

Further, arguments for or against free will rarely cover degrees of it. Instead, it’s almost always a binary toss-up existence or not. In reality, things are never as clear cut. The world exists on a spectrum, betraying the simplicity that humans have arbitrarily prescribed to it.

A great way to illustrate degrees of free will is with the development of a human. Would one say that an infant of 9 months has free will? Sure, it can decide to crawl to one side of a cot or reach out lovingly to its mother. But even those actions are hard-wired to a degree. They are natural impulses that have evolved over millions of years to ensure survival.

Consider then, a 2-year old infant. It could decide to climb up on a shelf, in defiance of those same survival instincts, or throw a tantrum when a basic — or desired — need is not met. It chooses to respond but is it free to? One would be quick to use leniency in both situations. After all, the child has not yet developed its neocortex and, with it, the ability to reason. It is, in the truest sense of the word, unreasonable.

And what about a teenager? The complexity of choice, and the decisions they lead to, increase by orders of magnitude with age. But the teen’s mind is still very much a slave to the limbic systems: the parts of the brain that control emotions and reactions. It’s no wonder that teenagers feel so removed from the rest of us—they exist in the twilight between reason and emotion.

What of free will then? How does the ability to choose fit into this arduous development of the self?

Well, it fits very nicely. It is also neatly mapped to the development of a person’s mind as they move into adulthood as described by Maslow.

Image: Wikimedia | U3155259 / CC BY-SA

As one moves up the hierarchy, the ability to use free will increases. Or, rather, the awareness of that free will increases. One could even say that free will expands proportionately.

Take a homeless man, for example. “Why doesn’t he collect bottles and make money that way?” or “surely, he can get some kind of job,” we would often hear people say. But it’s easy to be creative when your basic needs are being met.

It’s a simple matter of priority. In their situation, the overarching priority is physiological needs: food, water, and shelter. Basic survival. The reptilian brain's realm, which is not responsible for reasoning, deduction, innovation or consciousness.

As one moves beyond these needs, and through the various levels of the brain, one develops a greater awareness for one’s ability to choose. It’s no surprise that the limbic systems, responsible for emotions, correspond with the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy, or love and belonging.

Through this lens, it doesn’t matter whether free will does exist or not. It matters how aware we are of it. Because it is only through awareness that we can truly use it.

I know I have a lot more reading to do. One of the consequences of free will being such a hot debate amongst philosophers is an extraordinary amount of literature on the topic. But, in the limited amount of research I have done, I haven’t found anything that has approached free will with degrees of awareness.

Likely, I am just unaware of it.

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists to assure them that their freedom to practice their faith would be safeguarded under the First Amendment. He was responding to a letter they had sent, stating that their religious preferences were favours granted, instead of the inalienable rights of free men. Interestingly, the phrase “the separation of church and state” was born out of that same correspondence.

The First Amendment is simple in concept, powerful in effect, and nothing short of essential. It exists, in part, to ensure that the church does not rule the state and that the state does not rule the church. Further, it sanctifies freedom of speech and the right to protest, essential tenets of liberty.

The Christian church, on the other hand, subscribes to its own kind of separation: The Biblical Chain of Command. In the New Testament, the Bible declares that taking another believer to be judged in front of non-believers is contemptible. Given the implications of the First Amendment, the court—a state-run entity—can easily be classified as a group of non-believers, and no place for the disagreements of good Christians.

Almost 200 years later, in 1979, Linda Hoskinson, a married elementary teacher, had her contract at Davey Christian School ended because she was pregnant. The school suggested, under their employment contract and in an official letter, that she had skewed her priorities. “As a school, we see the importance of the mother in the home during the early years of child growth” the letter stated. Ending her contract was, in their view, in her children’s best interests.

Linda, however, wanted to work—she possibly needed to. She consulted an attorney who threatened the school with litigation if it did not agree to rehire her. The attorney cited state and federal sex discrimination laws which would likely regard the termination of a pregnant woman, because she was pregnant, as a violation. The school responded by rescinding their initial letter and firing her on the spot.

This time, the school cited the Biblical Chain of Command as their reason, partly because it was written in her contract, but definitely because it was written in the Bible. In terms of the contract, teachers must bring any grievance to their supervisor and acquiesce in the final decision of Dayton's board of directors, rather than resort to civil court. The contract read: “The teacher agrees to follow the Biblical pattern of Matthew 18:15-17 and Galatians 6 and always give a good report. All differences are to be resolved by utilising Biblical principles—always presenting a united front.”

For someone in Linda’s position, no matter how strong their faith, escalating the dispute seems an obvious next step, and she subsequently approached the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. She claimed that the non-renewal — an effective termination — was sexual discrimination, and the subsequent outright termination was based on unlawful employment qualifications.

The Ohio Civil Rights Commission agreed. Well, they found “sufficient probable cause” to believe that the school had discriminated against Linda — about as definite as a commission will get about messy matters. The school, not to be outdone, shot back claiming that the First Amendment — the wall between the church and state — prevented the Commission from having jurisdiction. And won. The Court ruled that the Commission’s investigation contravened the school’s First Amendment rights.

There was so much controversy around the decision that it even the divided the American Civil Liberties Union. “There are those on the [ACLU] board who think that, even if this is a matter of religious doctrine, the interest in equality is too great and the state ought to have a right to enforce its civil rights laws.” said Lawrence Herman, a general counsel for ACLU at the time, “Others think that if this really is a matter of church doctrine, then that is paramount to any interest the state has in prohibiting discrimination.”

The division was not unfounded either. Each of the constitutional principles concerned—equal protection of the law and freedom of religion—are themselves foundational. One is a mechanism of the state, a framework used to challenge chaos and entropy. The other, a pivotal pillar in an individual's sovereignty and democracy itself.

Eventually, the national American Civil Liberties Union supported an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. They argued that while the First Amendment applies, the Commission should be able to ascertain whether the “biblical chain of command” was a disguise for discrimination. And the Supreme Court agreed: “the Commission violates no constitutional rights by merely investigating the circumstances of the discharge in this case.” The Supreme Court then reversed the lower courts ruling.

Christian fundamentalists—which the school considers itself to be—are devoted to the ideal of freedom just as much as liberals are. Their economic policies always state the importance of free markets, members are free to come and go, and even individual churches are free to reject ecclesiastical structures. Freedom also underlines an individual’s relationship to God, as described by Calvinists: “The godly individual is one who obeys God’s commands of his own free will. Fundamentalists believe, as Calvin did, that true freedom is voluntary submission to the will of God.”

Yet, in this case, freedom didn’t extend to support a working mother, even if it meant that the children, that the school was trying to protect in the first place, were worse off. And one hopes that is why Davey Christian School—which considers itself to be “nondenominational”—ended up making amendments of their own, but it isn't likely.

Sources:

• Find Law - Archive
• Wikipedia - Ohio Civil Rights Commission v. Dayton Christian Schools Inc.
• American Civil Liberties Union Ohio - Archive
• Time - The Real Meaning of the Separation of Church and State
• Library of Congress - Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists
• Wikipedia - First Amendment

I think a lot about the feeling one gets after being productive. It's a distinct feeling; familiar and palpable. It elevates the mood like nothing else, yet it is as mysterious as it is elusive.

It's easy to assume that it's reliably generated from vocational productivity. But how often has an unusually busy day, with regards to production, still resulted in an empty feeling? Pretty often.

Maybe, then, it comes from doing something meaningful? But how often has fulfilment come from putting in a particularly gruelling couple of hours cleaning our homes? Again, pretty often.

Maybe it is effort that creates fulfilment? But, anyone who's had a corporate job, in a dull industry, will know that it's not effort either. Hours of effort can result in nothing but stiff necks and dark rings around the eyes.

So what gives? If fulfilment isn't a product of productivity, a friend of meaning, or the result of effort, what is it? And, importantly, what causes it?

Honestly, I've been kept up at night and occupied while brushing my teeth—which, for some reason, is the time when I do some of my most heavy mental liftings—mulling over this very question.

Then it struck me. Fulfilment is about pride. Sounds a bit superficial, doesn't it?

But think about it. When you're productive and proud of what you've produced, or produce something personally meaningful, or proudly complete an undesirable task, you create fulfilment.

So if fulfilment and pride are intrinsically connected, why do so many people struggle to achieve it? I think it's split between the assessment process and how we go about doing things.

Often, we assess our actions with external feedback. We strive for affirmations from people we love or respect, or anyone, to tick the "this is great" box. Yet, rarely do we establish standards for ourselves and work from there.

But people don't have consistent standards. If someone has had a bad day, or an insufficient amount of sleep, or is a little dehydrated, your assessment is going to be affected.

That's not to say that we don't suffer from these biases, but, with awareness, we have a better chance of managing them. Most importantly, we can create standards based on our own realistic expectations—whether they be higher or lower than other people.

Secondly, the way we go about a task—any task—is critical to creating fulfilment. And that appraisal needs to be relative to our own standards.

Thinking about fulfilment in this way shines a little light onto the cryptic teachings of Eastern philosophies and modern spiritual paradigms. Specifically, those that preach about being present and engaging in activities impeccably. Both emphasize a complete focus on what you're doing when you're doing it. If you're truly concentrating on what you're doing, you can't be assessing it. Ironically, this leads to far better quality.

And quality is a keyword here. When you put effort into doing something impeccably, no matter what it is, you're invariably going to be proud of it. It applies from essential duties like meetings to menial tasks like brushing teeth.

So it turns out that a happy, fulfilling life is quite simple. Take pride in whatever you do.

We are on day 6 of a 21-day Cornavirus-induced lockdown. Businesses are closed, as are shops, and people are meant to stay at home. This kind of pervasive action has far-reaching implications. From the ban of alcohol, to disputes about co-parenting, none are quite as debated as jogging.

As expected, there has been a mixed response from the 'social mediaratti'. But, more and more, I've seen people defend those that have decided to jog regardless by arguing that it should never have been disallowed.

And I agree to an extent, I think that jogging should be allowed; it's hard to get too close to someone hurtling down a sidewalk at whatever speed joggers jog at, not to mention that a little time outdoors can mitigate some of the psychological impacts of 'cabin fever'. But while I stand in the corner of liberty, I also understand that this is a rule, whether I agree with it or not. And since it is a rule, there are consequences for breaking it.

Those that are jogging, or defending those jogging, believe that then being arrested is unjust. Whereas, others believe it's hard to get arrested if you don't jog in the first place. It's a debate that will never be settled because, while one side is arguing whether something should be a rule, the other is arguing whether the rule should be adhered to.

Furthermore, it seems that most people can't grasp that one can agree that jogging shouldn't be banned, and that one shouldn't jog because it is banned, at the same time.

Typically, the argument, in favour of liberty, leads to an extreme example of historical law that was unjust and eventually overturned but only because people acted against it. Part of taking a stand like that, though, is dealing with the consequences that come with it. Anyone can decide to jog during the lockdown, but then shouldn't complain when they are arrested—we know full well what the consequences are.

Besides, if laws are unjust, there are ways to change it. Democracies come pre-fitted with processes for exactly that. And people will argue that those processes are arduous. Yes, because it's important to work through these changes fastidiously, and ensure they continue to maintain order.

In fact, the whole reason the state exists is to maintain this order. And the price of such security is a portion of our liberty.

When humans started farming, the return on violence dramatically increased. Criminals would be able to get a whole lot more in return for their robbing a farm than robbing a hunter, with only the capacity to carry a few items.

So, to feel secure, those farming communities agreed to rules with designated people to enforce them. Those rules turned into laws and those enforcers turned into the state. And to make sure that those laws were fair, constitutions were eventually created.

These consitutions include provisions that deal with dire circumstances, like war or a pandemic, where the state restricts our liberties a little more for the benefit of everyone. It's a trade-off, once again, for increased security. Here it is explained in section 36 of our (South Africa's) constitution:

(1) The rights in the Bill of Rights may be limited only in terms of law of general application to the extent that the limitation is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom, taking into account all relevant factors, including—
(a) the nature of the right;
(b) the importance of the purpose of the limitation;
(c) the nature and extent of the limitation;
(d) the relation between the limitation and its purpose; and
(e) less restrictive means to achieve the purpose.

(2) Except as provided in subsection (1) or in any other provision of the Constitution, no law may limit any right entrenched in the Bill of Rights.

Sure, it can be abused. But is the ban of jogging, when there is a highly contagious pandemic on the loose, really an abuse?

At the end of the day, this is all very simple. We have rules so that there isn't chaos. We have consequences so people follow those rules. And from there, we can decide whether we abide by them or not. But if we don't, we should accept the consequences without complaint.

So if you want to jog, by all means, jog, but be prepared to be arrested. Or, you can just stay home. There's always yoga.

I don’t think you have to be part of the banking industry to have a fairly good idea of what they’re struggling with when it comes to servicing customers. While I am usually a huge fan of nuance, I think that on some level, it can be explained simply: Fintech’s are better at digital financial services than banks are.

When one digs into the meat of it, however, one inevitably finds that there are layers of complexity. On the top line, it looks simple, but the bottom line is that life is rarely as simple as it looks.

Fintechs have the luxury of focus. They can afford to do one thing and do that one thing very well. It’s not a new strategy in technology; Google, Facebook, Amazon all started with a relatively clear purpose and then expanded from there. Fintechs can afford to employ the same device. But the secret to their success is not doing one thing well, but rather focusing on one clear problem. Each of the aforementioned tech giants focused on one clear problem and became obsessed with solving it.

Banks, on the other hand, are generalists. They do a whole bunch of things and, at least for the last 300 years, they have done them fairly well. But presently, banks have been distracted by one major problem: margins. After the 2007/8 financial crisis, where the subsequent decade has seen their capital reserve requirements increase, interest rates drop below zero, and regulation after regulation add pressure to the already mounting operational costs, they have been forced to seek higher margins. Fundamentally, there are two ways of doing this: spend less money, or make more. One requires value and the other requires value creation.

The sharp amongst you will notice that both Fintechs and Banks are focusing on one problem, but the problem with problems is that you need to be focusing on the right one. Fintechs are focusing on problems for their customers, whereas banks are focusing on their own.

That is not to say that banks are out of the race. They know, better than us I might add, that they need to make some drastic changes to survive. They know that they need to be more digital (whatever that actually means), they know that they need to adapt faster, they know that they need to innovate, and they know that they need to do it all very, very quickly. Yes, they are constrained but contrary to popular belief, while the problem is with their technology, it is not a technological problem. It’s a people problem.

There are three fundamental misconceptions that make solutions difficult in general, specifically that:

1. technology will solve all of banks challenges;
2. the risk of change is higher than the risk of standing still; and
3. Fintechs and Banks are mutually exclusive.

I’ll address the first two together because they are so intrinsically connected.

Systems are tools; they reflect the culture of an organisation rather than dictate it. Banks aren’t struggling to keep up because they have old technology, they have old technology because they are struggling to keep up. The difference is subtle but powerful.

Firstly, banks have an organisational challenge. If they don’t manage their hierarchy properly, the gap between decision making and operational data grows. While it seems obvious that the goal is to close that gap, it’s not easy.

Secondly, banks have an operational challenge. They are built to be stable, reliable, and secure. What does each of those adjectives have in common? Certainty. And what is the opposite of certainty? Risk.

Is it any surprise, then, that institutions that are literally designed to avoid risk and celebrate certainty, are bad at innovation? What’s more is that while there are a lot of institutional risks, it's not what’s preventing banks from changing. It is personal risk that throws the proverbial stick in the spokes. As a banking executive, if you make a bold decision, like changing the bank’s core banking system, and it fails, it’s your ass on the line. And given how far some of those decision-makers are from the data they need to make good decisions, risk increases exponentially. So they leave it for the next generation of executives. Why risk a golden handshake when they retire in 5 to 10, when the younger, more technical generation can solve the problem?

Thirdly, they have a cultural challenge. Because of the first two challenges, banks have a culture that doesn’t tolerate mistakes. Yet innovation requires learning and learning invariably involves some mistakes. Innovation is not something that just happens on its own, it is a complex process and a lot of hard work. The first answer is seldomly the right answer. But the first answer is a critical catalyst for eventually getting the right one.

Fintechs, on the other hand, are designed to be especially good at innovating. Sure they have the modern technology that allows them to adapt quickly, get products to market in record time, and do all of it at a fraction of the cost of their incumbent counterparts, but that’s not why they are doing it. Their decision-makers are close, often knee-deep, in operational data, they are designed to handle risk or at least have a higher risk appetite, and they are passionate about solving a problem for their customers. And their culture reflects it.

Initially, this mindset may have worked against them a little at first. Consumers were happy to test new products in other industries, but when it came to financial services, they preferred to rely on the institutions they trusted. But Fintechs iterated and got better. Their “risky” solutions became more stable over time and, eventually, they were simply too good to ignore. They started to win the trust of consumers, at least partly.

This dynamic is reflected clearly in the state of retail banking today. We have large incumbents spending millions trying to get their products digital, competent challenger banks (read: alternatives) spinning up everywhere, and we have consumers with one foot in both worlds: for the most part, they don’t trust challengers with their salaried accounts, but they don’t enjoy the experience of incumbent banking enough to use them on a day to day basis either. So consumers end up moving spending money from their salaried bank account at the incumbent to their spending account at their challenger.

This isn’t sustainable for either side: challengers are struggling to make a profit because credit is easier to give when you have access to a customer’s salary and, let’s face it, credit is what puts bread on the table. Incumbents, on the other hand, are struggling with customer satisfaction and access to transactional data.

Which brings me to the last misconception. It’s easy to pit Fintech and Incumbent banks into this winner-takes-all fight to the death, but that is usually not how reality works. Reality is far messier than we make it out to be—I wrote about this at length here—and it’s definitely not as binary.

Fintech and banks can work together, indeed, they should. There is a huge amount of opportunity there. And in the last couple of years, we have seen this start to happen. Larger banks are starting to see the value of working with innovative startups and those startups are seeing the value of having access to a large customer base.

But it’s not happening enough. Fintechs, for the most part, struggle to integrate with the legacy systems (and mindsets) at incumbent banks. And they generally do not have the time or the resources to wade through that mess. Even Open Banking and PSDII is not doing what it intended yet. In Europe, 40% of banks missed the deadline and those that made it are dealing with slightly different standards in Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

So what is the answer? If we look at other industries, it’s actually pretty clear: platform banking. But what does that mean? Well, it’s difficult to say because it doesn’t really exist properly yet. But I think however it manifests, it should follow some principles. Principles are great because they define a goal without constraining how to achieve it. That being said, I’ll add some suggestions.

Customers

Customers should be at the center of product decisions. Solving their problems is the key to generating value. What is critical, though, is understanding that those problems will shift and evolve. It’s a process. One that is simple in theory but far from it in practice.

Data is the key to solving problems. Not only does this mean listening to what customers want, but examining what they do. Do you know how you often find that people don’t really know what they want in life? Yeah, it’s the same with banking. Focusing on what people say will take you as far as solving obvious problems, but it’s not a one-way ticket to innovation land. Trial and error, on the other hand, is.

This platform should make managing customer feedback data, as well as customer behaviour data, easy and accessible (to the authorised persons). The data should be used to generate hypotheses that can be tested. It, therefore, needs to be flexible enough to enable rapid testing of products.

Connection

Platform banking should facilitate, enhance, and coordinate the connection between incumbent banks and Fintech. Banks should be able to choose from a market of solutions provided by Fintechs, and “plug” them into their stack instantly. Fintechs, should be able to do the same with banking products.

This creates an environment where the barrier to solutions is lowered while managing the loss of movement. Here, a Fintech that has focused on a single customer problem (and has gotten really good at solving it) can simply be plugged into an incumbent bank with active customers. The bank wins because it is providing its customers with innovative solutions, the Fintech wins because their customer base increases significantly, and the customer wins because they are getting the best of both worlds.

Additionally, this model will drive up competition between Fintechs, and banks themselves, which would drive up the rate of innovation. Suddenly, a developer with a good idea can have a ticket to play without needing to raise huge amounts of capital.

Complexity

Platform banking should absorb complexity as much as possible. I don’t just mean complexity on the consumer’s end, but also on the operational side. Regulation should not be so costly to manage or change and it shouldn’t be so difficult to comply with in any event.

Having regulation and compliance embedded in the system in such a way that an institution could simply select a territory from a dropdown list is a great "true north". That’s it. Something so simple that an intern could manage it. I go into a lot more detail about what financial institutions and regulators can start doing about regulation and compliance here.

The platform should also handle commercial relationships between the Fintechs and the incumbent banks. There should be no contracts but rather a policy managed by the platform that both parties agree to at the beginning. Commercial activities should then be automated. The producer sets the price for other institutions, and the institutions consuming the product set the price for their customers.

Costs

Resources that all institutions use should be shared. Now before you start throwing things at your screen, hear me out. Let’s use the Word Processor as an example. At first, we all got our own copy of the tools that helped us write. Each copy had the same tools, sure, but it was copied over and over again. In fact, the only thing that was unique was the license. But then the model evolved and we got shared online documentation applications like Google Docs. At first, there were concerns around privacy and utility but, eventually, it became normalised. And it was far more efficient — one framework upon which many people could privately create documents.

This has happened over and over again across industries. The introduction of the Software as a Service model has given rise to massive global products like Netflix and Spotify. All of these products leverage technology to share the elements that everyone uses while ensuring the uniqueness of the elements that differ from customer to customer. Not only does this mean that the business can release innovations across the customer base easily, the operational costs are also reduced significantly.

Once regulation allows it, this model would create an unprecedented progression in the banking industry. This makes me wonder if banks are more afraid of big tech's access to customers or their data, or are they actually afraid of their immense experience with scalable business models.

I am the first to admit that these principles are somewhat idealistic and maybe even naive. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive for them. Surely there is value in identifying the best-case scenario and working towards that adjusting as we go?

As an industry, we need to focus on the process of getting better, because being better will inevitably follow.

“A man cannot understand the art he is studying if he only looks for the end result without taking the time to delve deeply into the reasoning of the study.”
― Miyamoto Musashi

When I was in high-school, rowing was my 'thing'. I was border-line obsessed and anyone that has ever been in a boat on glass-like water just as the sun is rising will know why. Furthermore, anyone who has managed to make a boat "sing" in those conditions will never stop seeking the same high. It's a truly incredible feeling; even though the boat's 'song' is actually audible, it's the vibration that reverberates through the entire body. That sensation, combined with the intense concentration required to hold those notes, creates a complete and utter sense of presence. I am yet to experience anything quite like it.

I loved rowing enough to get relatively good at it. I have an entire box filled with medals at home, some of them South African Championship golds. I had the privilege of traveling to the United States to compete in the Head of the Charles in Boston – the biggest regatta in the world – where we placed 27th in our age category up against schools and universities from around the globe. Rather than trying to blow my own horn here, I am trying to get to a specific point: to get to that level requires a lot of hard work. It requires hours and hours of rowing up and down strips of water, sitting on Ergos (rowing machines), and endless sacrifices. Moreover, it requires discipline–pushing through the endless stream of noise created by a mind begging for the pain to stop during intense training.

And I am thankful for that. It's allowed me to push myself in many other areas in my life. It's enabled me to make exercising a non-negotiable part of my routine into my thirties which has resulted in keeping in relatively good shape. But it has also turned exercise into a task to be done, rather than something to be enjoyed. Rather, it's shifted the enjoyment to the feeling that comes after working out, from the process to achievement.

I am not suggesting that achievement isn't important, rather that it should be a byproduct of the process, not its purpose.

I came to this realisation in Zurich recently when a friend suggested that we go for a run. After a couple of weeks without any exercise–an anomaly in of itself–and copious amounts of chocolate, it was the last thing that I felt like doing. But, I put on my running shoes and focused on the feeling that I would inevitably get after the workout. I knew that if I just got through the pain of the run, I would be happy that I went and, more importantly, get stuck into some treats later that evening.

Ten minutes into the run, my friend stopped running. Apparently, he wanted to take a picture of graffiti on a pillar in the river. I, however, continued. For me, stopping, for any reason was akin to giving up. Stopping went against everything I thought I had learned; it simply wasn’t an option. Twenty meters later, I got stopped by a traffic light. My friend caught up with me and, in some weird display of guilt, I quipped about how I didn’t want to stop, and ended having to stop anyway. He simply responded with: why?

I am sure that he meant his question as a passing comment in response to my less-than-obvious dig at him wanting to stop, but it rang through my head like church bells in London: far more times than expected and at seemingly random points in time. Why was I so against stopping? Sure, I could feed myself the same drivel I had been for the last thirteen years, but I knew it was all bullshit. I wasn’t training for the biggest regatta in the world, or for SA rowing championships. Hell, I wasn’t  training for any event whatsoever. Yet, my focus was on the end, the outcome. I realised that I had been arbitrarily manufacturing outcomes to strive towards every time I trained; in this case, a guilt-free glass of wine.

Upon further reflection, I found that I was applying the same warped logic to my entire life. Everything I did was a task to get through, a hurdle to overcome, or an end to get to. I would frantically wash dishes so that I could sit on the couch and enjoy the feeling of having been productive. I would invent menial rewards just to spur myself through a piece of work, whether I enjoyed it or not. And I would lower my eyes as I ran to get to the end, and miss everything that made the end worthwhile.

I had been trading sustained pleasure for fleeting moments and, what’s worse, I thought I was getting a deal.

The rest of the run was slow and enjoyable, erratic and unpredictable. I took in a warm day in Zurich, sat on a random bench, and even took note of wildflowers growing in the forest. Not only was it the most enjoyable run I ever had, but I  didn’t want it to end.

For the last thirteen years, I have occasionally wondered why I stopped rowing after high-school but I had never been able to settle on an honest answer. I had preconfigured answers for anyone that asked–sports politics, access, etc.– but nothing that felt anything like the truth. But during that run in Zurich, I got my answer. I realised that the reason I had gotten so good at rowing was the enjoyment that morning rows brought, not the never-give-up mentality.

And the reason I had stopped was that I focused on results instead of rowing.

I remember hearing Dr. Jordan Peterson say something like "the mind is the interface between consciousness and experience (or reality), between order and chaos".

Think about that quote for a moment. Our minds sit in between our consciousness, which Jordan believes is order, and our reality, which he believes is chaos. The first time I heard him say it—and he said it with the casualness of someone who has thought through an extraordinary idea enough for it to be casual—I literally sat in awe. The idea itself is so simple, but it is layered with a cascading complexity that is only revealed the more you interrogate it. It makes sense too: reality does seem chaotic and the mind does seem to be ordered. In fact, that is exactly what the mind has afforded us as a species since we differentiated ourselves from animals; we carved order out of a chaotic world.

Chaos and risk, as terms, are actually very related. Regardless of what our individual or collective connotations are, they’re both actually describing uncertainty which, itself, is an attempt at describing the unknown. And the unknown is really at the crux of it all. It is the uncertainty of reality that creates risk, and our objective as humans has always been to demystify it. We have spent thousands of years tackling the unknown head on in an attempt to dissolve it with knowledge. We venture into the unknown, or take risks, in order to make new discoverues, or get return. That is what science is really: a method to at least attempt to describe the unknown in order to leverage it for its benefits.

The process of knowledge working upon the unknown is so that we can make sense of, or create order in, the natural Universe. And, so far, we’ve been really good at it. If we look at the world around us–the systems and organisations, religions and paradigms, even scientific methodology itself–it is all a function of that attempt. But it’s also completely made up. Now I am not suggesting that the observations that science describe are made up, or that society doesn’t actually exist, but rather that our understanding and descriptions of those observations, and society itself, are inventions with various goals; all of which culminate into one: making sense of the unknown in some way.

This led me to consider deterministic and probabilistic models in general, and once I had started, I saw them everywhere I looked. Deterministic models have repeatable determined outcomes. That is, if you do x in the same manner every time, you will get y. Probabilistic models, however, are not determined, if you do x you might get y, but you might get z, or b or c, with differing levels of probability. That is to say that the outcome is not absolutely known before hand.

Gambling is a great example of a probabilistic model. If there is a football match between Arsenal and Manchester City, judging by Arsenal’s less than stellar form, the odds are that Man City will come out on top, but there is no guarantee—no one knows for sure who is going to win; the outcome is not determined. This is represented with odds. By way of example, if it is 2 to 1 Man City will win, and 6 to 1 Arsenal will, hat means that if I put down a tenner on Man City, I will get 20 if they win. But if I put it on Arsenal, because the probability of them winning is so much lower, I will get a better return: 60. Furthermore, if I put Arsenal and Man City up against each other over and over, I will likely get different outcomes but with a relatively high probability of Man City taking the majority of the wins.

Deterministic models are found in concrete subjects like mathematics. If I add 1 and 1 together, no matter what, I am sure that I will get 2. It is a repeatable process with a determined outcome. This very powerful difference allows us to do a whole bunch of cool things. It allows us to make 200 tons of metal fly consistently over oceans or bake a cake over and over again with the same result; provided we meet some base requirements. This consistency enables us to can cure diseases, build software, make telephones, and so on. It gives us the power to carve out order from a chaotic world.

Where this dichotomy gets a little tenuous is with freewill. There are many people, really smart people I might add, that argue that freewill doesn’t exist because of determinism. Their argument is that given the exact same set of circumstances, all the way down to a chemical level, a person will make the same choice over and over.  What makes it difficult to prove is the high amount of variables wrapped up in even the simplest of decisions. How could we ever recreate exact circumstances of a decision considering a lifetime of experience that converges to the moment of choice? It’s very near impossible.

The other side of the camp argues that freewill does exist because humans are not guaranteed to make the same decision even if the circumstances are the same. That our consciousness is dynamic and capable of deciding something different even if all the relevant circumstances are the same; that we are independent sentient beings. This is an argument that is hard to deny because we are so close to the topic. We instinctively feel like we can choose differently, and therefore believe that we can.

The first thing I do when faced with a seemingly binary choice—in this case: freewill existing or not—is to take a step back and represent the choice on a spectrum. How does the nature of the choice change when gradients are introduced? What if freewill is something that occurs in degrees? It led me to realise that representing freewill on a spectrum actually reconciles both arguments quite nicely. We do have freewill, relative to our conscious capacity. As our awareness grows, so does our capacity for free will within that awareness. It is a dynamic state rather than static one. It’s a probabilistic model, rather than a deterministic one.

Of course this is only true relative to our own consciousness though. We experience this dynamic state of freewill within the capacity of our own awareness, but in reality, that is, outside of our own awareness, it looks deterministic. If we could get outside of our own awareness in order to be able to see all the variables that are involved in any decision, we will likely see the deterministic pattern that governs it. But we can’t. Does freewill then exist? The only real answer is that it depends on which perspective you’re examining it from.

The dichotomy between these two models can be found everywhere. Emotions are probabilistic—they are unpredictable and chaotic. Whereas reason is deterministic—it is bound by certain laws and has a definite structure. Individuals are deterministic, but groups are probabilistic. Which explains the irrationality of some of the collectivism arguments we are experiencing at the moment.

This even applies to creativity. Creativity is probabilistic; its very nature is rooted in probability. Think about how the creative process works: many options fly through the brain before an idea pops up, seemingly out of nowhere. Versus the execution of that idea. There is an order to execution, repeatable steps that exist—whether we know them or not—that will allow us to execute something in order to get a desired outcome. One could say that the process of deciding what to do is probabilistic, and the process of doing it is deterministic.

What really interested me about both arguments, and indeed the underlying friction between them, is the relationship between them. What’s more, if we take another step back and view consciousness and the Universe from a broader perspective, we see that the Universe is quite clearly deterministic. There are immutable laws that underpin everything and create order in nature. It’s all about execution. This is why life has mandatory criteria, why mathematics is reliable, why physics can be studied, and why humans can build societies.

And consciousness is probabilistic. It is all about creativity. Our minds are constantly processing the information we get from the outside world in different ways, creating new links between them and forming new ideas. There are hundreds of thousands of different thoughts that could potentially come up and, at least from our own perspectives, there is no real way knowing which will come when.

It is consciousness that creates endless possibilities of things to do, and the mind collapses those probabilities into something that is done. When something is an idea, it can probably change, but when something is done, it can’t be undone. And while quantum physics is argued to be probabilistic, is could just be a deterministic model that we don’t fully understand yet.

This is very similar (if not exactly) to how some quantum scientist believe reality works. They argue that reality is actually made up a waves of probability that collapse into reality when consciousness acts upon it. That no event is a sure thing until a force, in this case consciousness, acts upon it in order to produce something tangible.

Maybe this is what the ancient Eastern Yin Yang symbol is referring to. Maybe reality is Yin and consciousness is Yang. There are even clues that point towards this conclusion in literature written about the symbol. It is said that Yin is the space that enables Yang to work. If a house is Yang, then the space it creates is Yin. The house is determined, and the possibilities that reside within the space it creates are probabilistic. It is the space that a house creates that gives it its function. And it is consciousness that gives reality meaning. Reality could be the darkness that holds possibility until it is brought into the light of consciousness.

So when we look back at Jordan’s quote, we begin to see that it’s actually the other way around. From this perspective, it is actually the universe that is order and consciousness that is chaos.

Recently I did something stupid.

On Twitter (I think you can see where this is going) I came across an open-ended tweet: what's the worst interview question that you've even been asked?

Benign right? And to be fair, strangely interesting. So I delved into the commentary expecting to find egregious questions from evil interviewers. There were some awful examples to be sure, but then I came across one where the interviewer asked about interests outside of work that I didn't think was that bad. Without much thought I naively replied:

Disagree here actually, this is to determine culture fit which is arguably one of the most relevant determinations to make.

— Kyle Hauptfleisch (@Kylefrankwhite) March 1, 2020

Now, let me reiterate: I didn't think it through much before posting. Had I taken the time, I would have seen that interests outside of work are not necessarily a good indication of culture fit. Sure, that question can indicate other skills and attributes that may be beneficial to determining how suited someone is for a particular job but, for individuals that are more private, it can be intrusive. I would never, however, have anticipated the hostility that came from those disagreeing with my opinion, many of which were pushing tolerance and inclusion–go figure.

My point was that businesses are people and that those people need to get along in order to create value. The example I used to illustrate this point was a hunter applying for a job in a team of vegans. Now, regardless of whether they should get along or not–that is a whole other debate–I believe that sort of dynamic is unlikely to be sustainable. And as a business owner, that likelihood is something you would want to navigate.

Apparently, I was wrong:

They didn't miss your point Kyle. You're missing a very fundamental basis of diversity. You should take some time to read and reflect on what others are saying, and challenge your assumptions. Start with https://t.co/jX9x62LtZ5

— Zachary Iles (@zackisland) March 1, 2020

Very wrong:

You are one of the main problems with the tech industry. That’s it. If you can’t see that you need to talk to more people who aren’t like you.

— Aspen James (@queer_coder) March 2, 2020

I eventually conceded the 'outside interests' part, but maintained that culture fit was and is an important element to company success.

To give more context to those that are not willing to wade through the debate on Twitter, the general argument against me comprised:

1. asking about interests outside of work can introduce biases, has nothing to do with the job, and is inappropriate;
2. hiring for culture fit propagates homogenous teams which don't perform as well as diverse teams; and
3. culture fit itself is an affront against diversity and is laced with inherent and unconscious biases.

And this excludes the countless personal comments about my inherent biases.

I like to assume I am wrong, however, I don't act like that in a debate because, of course, I am in a debate; I am arguing a point and in doing so, I am digging into my understanding of, and gathering more information about, my and my opposition's position. Afterwards, though, I will go and examine the studies that were so fervently hoist upon me, read more, think more, discuss it with people (from both sides of the debate), and update my position accordingly. This is what I did over the days that followed, with some interesting results.

Definitions

The first–and most obvious–realisation I had was the differing (read: assumed) definitions of what "culture fit" actually is. The best definition I found is:

Culture fit means that employees' beliefs and behaviors are in alignment with their employer's core values and company culture.

But most of the definitions I found were similar to this sentiment in some way.

What I also noticed is that many of the people arguing against culture fit–and this includes some studies–seem to assume that its definition is closer to "hiring people that are like you." Yet, I couldn't find one 'official' definition that even broadly insinuated that message.

This, in itself, can explain a lot of the miscommunication happening in the debates about culture fit and diversity, of which there are a lot.

Nuance

The second thing I noticed is that there was a severe lack of nuance. Statements seemed to be generally applied and with a lot of confidence. Moreover, there is almost an incessant effort to avoid being pulled into the big picture. Examples are attacked based on their own acute application rather than the underlying point that they are trying to make. I'll give two examples:

1. The initial question. Asking about someone's interests outside of work can be intrusive and it can introduce more biases. But that depends on who is being interviewed and who is conducting the interview. Just because it can be the case doesn't mean it is the case. Some people might feel like the question is an intrusion, and in some cases it could be, but sometimes the interviewer just wants to see if there are additional skills that might be applicable. Someone that plays a musical instrument will have needed to cultivate some discipline, as an example.
2. My example of a hunter taking a job at a company of vegans. Again, it was an extreme, acute example to illustrate an underlying point: businesses are people and people need to get a long in order to work together. I was not saying that all vegans are unhappy working with hunters, or that all hunters are intolerant of ethical animal treatment. I was merely saying that humans sometimes do not get along, that people need to get along at least to some degree in a business, and that knowing their interests might be part of avoiding potential conflict. Yet some responded that they were vegan and were quite happy to work with hunters, as if a one-man sample size is conclusive evidence.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to completely segregate who you are in general from who you are at work. Personal after-hour things shouldn't matter at work, but sometimes they just do. Hiring to avoid potential conflicts makes sense because the alternative is costly. An employer is required to identify and mitigate risk of interpersonal conflict and often this leaves them with an impossible choice of tactics:

1. open communication (which might be intrusive);
2. making a decision without open communication (which might be discriminatory); or
3. risking the conflict (which might be costly).

Besides, culture fit or questions about interests outside of work, are not the only criteria in an interview. It is part of a series of assessments that help the company representative determine if this person is likely to do well in that specific environment. Hiring on culture fit alone is obviously a really risky move.

Biases

While biases are an unfortunate reality, avoiding situations in case biases come up doesn't seem like a good way of dealing with them. Communication and awareness seem a far better route. And if an interviewer is being unconsciously bias, mature conversation can be an effective method of bringing their attention to it. Usually, anger, condescension, and attack are not the stand-out options.

If an interviewer is unfairly bias, the responsibility sits with the interviewer not the question. Avoiding situations where more biases can be introduced is treating the symptoms not the cause. The goal should be being fair, not avoiding any situation where a bias could pop up.

Diversity

Almost every study I read (and was told to read) showed that diversity is a beneficial element for companies. The research states that companies that have more ethnic, racial, and gender diversity perform better, are more productive, more innovative, and even more profitable.

Companies that have more homogenous teams feel more productive and innovative because it's easier for people to get along with people that are like them, but the numbers don't show that. Why? Well they say that:

• diverse teams focus more on facts and remain objective because there is less chance of being blinded by assumptions common to homogenous groups;
• diverse teams process facts more closely because they are more self-conscious about decisions around outsiders; and
• diverse teams are more innovative because of exposure to new ideas.

These points, however, assume true diversity. Differences in upbringing, culture, and ways of thinking. Which can be the case with ethnic, gender-based, and racial diversity, but is not necessarily the case. Dr Thomas Sowell makes an interesting point in an interview in 2008:

Places like Harvard and Stanford and Cornell, what you have is the black son of the black doctor, who lived in the same neighbourhood as the white son of the white doctor...the racial thing is being used as a proxy for something that it is not a proxy for because the vast majority of blacks that go to places like Harvard, and Cornell, and Stanford, are not blacks from the ghetto. Those are blacks...from Malibu, you know, they're from Pacific Palisades, they're from Winnetka and so forth, they're from the very same neighbourhoods that the whites are from, so now you call it diversity because you see something with the naked eye.

To avoid arguments against the example, let's focus on his point: ethnicity, gender, and race can be indicative of diverse thinking, insight, etc, but are not necessarily that. Diversity is more than the superficial indicators that are so often used.

Besides that, the above benefits only get realised if there is a consensus to work together. There are nuanced mandatory criteria that need to be in place for diversity to be beneficial, otherwise you can end up with a spiralling conflict.

Culture Fit

Which brings me to culture fit and why it is important. The culture in 'culture fit' is not referencing the individual's culture or background, or even social culture at all. It is referencing the business's culture. That is, the business's value system and manner of working. It is a framework to achieve the goals of the business. Because, and my friends this is going to be controversial, the objective of a business is solving whatever problem it exists to solve for profit, not diversity.

Culture fit, then, is a common way of working that employees agree to in order to work well together. In fact, it is the necessary component to activate diversity in the first place. It is the common value system that people from diverse backgrounds can agree to in order to make use of their diverse experience and insight.

Examining it like this, we easily see that not only are culture fit and diversity not mutually exclusive, they are mutually inclusive.

Topics like diversity, culture fit, and biases are notoriously difficult to discuss because they are sensitive, subjective topics. They are also complex and nuanced, just like humans. There is no easy, straight forward answer. No blanket answer that fits all situations. No north start that will ensure everyone is happy and no one is offended. Which is why discussion is so important, and why avoiding them is so dangerous.

And it's why trying Twitter debates are unlikely to solve anything.

One would be hard pressed to find an industry that is more regulated than Finance. There’s a reason for that too: people like money. And why shouldn’t they? It is the great enabler — with enough of the stuff, you can do just about anything. So it makes sense that where there is a high density of money, there are going to be people that try and abuse systems to get their hands on it. Any way they can.

Which is why regulation came about in the first place. It isn’t something that happened because regulators sat around a mahogany table, sipping on expensive cognac, discussing how to actively stifle innovation and throttle profits. In reality, there is no table big enough to accommodate all the stake holders, there is no cognac (not during business hours at least, although lunch is often pretty good) and the discussion is usually centred around three things:

1. Law: people shouldn’t break or circumvent it, nor fund either of the two.
2. Consumers: people shouldn’t take advantage of other unwitting people, especially if the law doesn’t protect them (yet).
3. Economy: how can it be grown and developed, while ensuring systemic stability.

The fact that regulation often ends up screwing with 2 (hamstringing needed innovations) and 3 (high barriers to market entry) is usually an unintended byproduct of 1 (laws that are no longer relevant).

What must be emphasised is that regulators have a vested interest in a growing economy, which means they have a vested interest in successful businesses, which means that they are most definitely not trying to stifle innovation nor profits. They’re just trying to make sure that innovations are safe and that profits are above board.

So why not just change regulation when it is no longer relevant? Well, my dear friends, it’s a lot more complicated than that. First, regulation is based on law and laws are not easy to change for a reason. Second, because of the first, it is easier to add regulation than it is to change or take it away and that inevitably results in an increase in administration burdens and a need for more resources (that’s fancy talk for tax). Third, all consequences need to be assessed and discussed, usually with existing and potential stakeholders. And lastly, risk needs to be managed; a regulator simply cannot afford to make mistakes.

What has been happening recently, is a move from rules-based to principle-based regulation, specifically to try and accommodate for innovation in the financial industry. Regulators are also trying to leverage technology to reduce the administration burden for themselves, but also the administration costs of the market participants. Lower costs means lower barriers to market entry, and that leads to bigger economic potential.

Unfortunately, there is a catch 22: technology implementations are far easier for rules-based regulation because principle-based regulation requires intelligent discernment.

So what is the way forward?

Iterative improvements. It isn’t feasible to solve all problems straight away, but there are many that can be tackled now, even with principle-based regulation.

Data transfer. A big part of regulation is reporting. And reporting is essentially just a succinct word for “relevant data exchange”. Many banks and regulators still rely on file-based solutions for reports. Not only does this require a lot of work to produce, it also means that the burden is at least partly proportional to the frequency of reports. And that frequency can vary depending on multiple variables, like the needs of regulators, the health of the market participant in question, or the types of transactions.

Moving from file-based reports to an API driven data exchange is an excellent first step. Not only does it reduce the burden of creating the reports, it also ensures that regulators have real time access to the exact data they need, when they need it. Some banks, however, are hesitant about giving regulators carte blanche access to their data and would prefer to batch it, but either way, it reduces the overall burden dramatically.

Data management. Once regulators have data from market participants, technology can go a long way to reducing the burden of processing it. While full automation might be difficult, categorising and storing the data in a user friendly manner could reduce the burden for regulators substantially.

This is a solution that can be as simple as a dashboard with great UX, but can also manifest in better categorised storage and data access, effectively reducing the time required to find relevant data.

Machine Learning. With a little more time and resources, regulators can move into the arena of Artificial Intelligence. For all intents and purposes, this is technology’s answer to principle-based regulation and intelligent discernment.

But it will not be perfect at first and will require time and enough data to improve. It will also require some human involvement in the short to medium term and, initially, it might require even more than now. There is a going to be a teething phase where regulators have to check decisions, and market participants are going to have to deal with the burden of incorrect calls. But many would argue that it is an inevitable solution. One step back, two steps forward, as they say.

Regulation is something that is not going to go anywhere anytime soon, likely never. While society (and the systems comprising it) has evolved dramatically over the last 100 years, humans have arguably not evolved much in the last 200,000. Our behaviour has changed, sure, but that is more a function of societal structures and stories than core drivers; those are still the same. And that means there will always be those that will try and take advantage.