—

“We both found each other obnoxious.“

That’s how Sergey Brin characterized the first time he met Larry Page.

Larry had just come to Stanford to start grad school, and Sergey was giving his group a tour of the campus. Right off the bat, the duo started bickering.

About everything.

Each of the two had strong opinions, and a stubborn will to emerge out on top.

However during those first few days in a new environment, deep down Larry was suffering from heavy doses of impostor syndrome:

“At first it was pretty scary. I kept complaining to my friends that I was going to get sent back home on the bus.“

Sergey is the joker, while Larry has always been the more serious, quiet type. Yet, their personalities complement each other perfectly. Their individual minds have a specific flair of genius which when brought together adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

When two minds meet, the results are never straightforward. It’s the only world where mathematical rules don’t apply. When Larry and Sergey put their brains together, 1+1 ended up equaling 3.

1 + 1 = 3

This 3 turned out being Google, internet juggernaut and one of the most powerful companies in the world at the moment.

Luckily, Sergey assures us that total world domination is still not in the cards.

“We are currently not planning on conquering the world.“

Too late. They already did.

—

Let’s screw with everyone

On the eve of their IPO, the Google founders decided to give an interview.

To “Playboy” magazine.

It caused a huge ruckus. Up to that point Google had been very vague when it came to handing out information on the inner workings of the company. Could the interview fill in the blanks?

Suddenly, all over Wall Street you saw guys in ties with a smutty magazine in hand. The financial analysts could finally pretend that they were reading “Playboy” for the articles.

However, instead of being happy they could tell their wives and girlfriends they were doing “research”, the entire financial industry was in uproar over the situation. Apparently, that’s not how you do things. You are not supposed to release new information so close to the date of the IPO.

Sergey and Larry did not give a f*%k. They just included a copy of the article in the official documents for the event. Minus the pictures of course.

Problem solved.

It was not the first time the two showed everyone who is the boss. And it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

—

I want to download the entire internet - Find a problem you want to solve

The idea for Google search came in a round about way. Page had been playing around with an early search engine when he discovered that it gave back not only a bunch of websites, but also information on links.

This caught his curiosity. What do these links mean? He knew that it could be important, but didn’t know how yet. At the time, Page was trying to decide on his research topic, and put this into the running.

Luckily, his advisor Terry Winograd picked it for him.

“Well, that one seems like a really good idea.“

That brought with it another conundrum. How to do this? How to analyze the meaning of the links?

No problem thought Page, I will just download the entire World Wide Web.

Putting the whole web on his computer was a wild scheme that only an impossible thinker of Larry Page’s caliber could come up with. Almost everyone else questioned the achievability of such a task. Not Page.

He liked the challenge, calling his approach a healthy disregard for the impossible.

“Having a healthy disregard for the impossible. That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that other people would not.“ - Larry Page

The key characteristic of Larry Page is that he sees reality differently. While most people think in terms of what is not possible, Larry looks at the world through brightly colored glasses. His eyes are instead open to the possibilities.

Faced with an impossible challenge, knowing full-well that he might fail, Page rolled up his sleeves and went to work. However, he also knew that he couldn’t do it alone. For this, he enlisted Brin.

His buddy Sergey had been working on a different project, one focused on data mining. Larry’s idea intrigued him. The web has lots of stuff to mine, so he agreed to join forces. With a tough task ahead, they rallied the full power of Stanford’s resources and got on it.

When the guys got back the data, they started to see patterns. With the structure of the entire WWW stretched out in front of their eyes, they were slowly discovering how it works. Some pages had a lot of links going to them, while others very few.

Then in a flash of brilliance, Page had an idea. The way the links to pages were structured reminded him of citations. In the academic world, the more important a paper is, the more citations it gets. Maybe webpages function in the same way? The more authoritative ones have more pages linking to them?

This was a genius insight, and the key to unravelling the mystery.

Ideas often arise in strange ways. Archimedes discovered his famous law when he was getting into the bathtub. While these types of moments appear to come out of nowhere, in reality they have been ruminating in your subconscious for a long time. Deep inside your brain there are processes being stirred, connecting things, until one day they come out to the surface.

One strength of Larry Page was his analogical thinking. His mind was able to notice the similarities between two totally disparate systems, academic citations and web pages.

This type of ability often sits at the core of history’s greatest innovations. Henry Ford’s car assembly line drew inspiration from a meat-packing factory. Steve Jobs’s genius lay in how he was able to draw analogies from the unlikeliest of places.

For Page and Brin, this analogy solved the problem of search.

—

Being unconventional means you will often be misunderstood

This insight formed the basis of Google’s search algorithm. With further research and Sergey’s math whiz skills, they perfected it. Now you could go on the web and find what you were looking for.

They decided to shop their search engine around. The duo were sure that takers would come knocking at their door. A few bucks in their pockets before continuing their research at university could come in handy. This should be a slam dunk.

Yet, the real world is often different from what one hopes it to be. Despite the brilliance of their invention, no one wanted to buy their baby! They would go demonstrate the power of their search engine by firing it up next to all its rivals. While the the other search engines had trouble even finding their own homepage, Google produced great results.

The executives just shook their heads. We don’t want it. It’s too good!

They said that if the users got results that they were looking for, they would quickly leave the site. The strategy of the big internet players was to keep people wandering their site for as long as possible. That’s why these sites were often big, flashy, and full of different features. The logic was that the more time they spend there, the more money will end in the site’s coffers.

The guys running the internet giants actually wanted their search engines to be deliberately bad!

In emoji talk that’s a Facepalm.

The Google guys were left baffled. Shouldn’t the purpose be to provide the user with what they are looking for? For them, it was relevance that should be the only thing that matters. How relevant are the search results to the thing that the user is actually searching for?

There was a huge disconnect between their philosophy and the one of the people running the big incumbents.

“Our mission was to organize global information and make it accessible and useful to everyone.“ - Larry Page

The mission of the other players on the market was to make money.

By being focused on trying to make a buck, the executives missed the forest for the trees. Sure, people would linger a bit longer on their sites. However, the lousy search results they were getting also meant that they were growing more frustrated.

This left the Google guys in a unique position. Their unconventional thinking made them try to figure out problems that no one else was working on.

“The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.“ - Peter Thiel

This problem orientated way of thinking has been the key to Google’s success. The fact that their primary drive is not making the most money possible also means that they are OK with making mistakes.

“We do lots of stuff. The only way you are going to have success is to have lots of failures first.“ - Sergey Brin

The Google guys have a mindset that encourages lots of failures. The only way you will find what works is by discovering what doesn’t work first. Their process pushes serendipity and exploring different paths. After all, originally they didn’t set out to create a search engine. The search engine was just a result of them trying to solve an interesting problem.

“We need to be the kind of company that is willing to make mistakes. Because if we’re not making mistakes, then we’re not taking risks. And if we’re not taking risks, we won’t get to the next level.“ - Larry Page

Google has a culture that encourages learning from mistakes. “Fortune” magazine writer Adam Lashinsky calls it controlled chaos.

“Narrowly controlled chaos - or managed chaos, which is what they call it - is exactly what they are trying to do. They want to encourage zaniness. On the other hand, they want to figure out a way to control the zaniness.“ - Adam Lashinsky

The Google founders were not about the money at all costs. They made the unconventional choices, the ones that people told them would make them less money. It turns out, they made even more money.

—

Simple, yet elegant execution

The books you read are a window into your soul. Growing up, Larry was a voracious reader. One of his favorite books was the autobiography of Nikola Tesla. He loved how the whacky scientist went about making his discoveries. However, there was also one main lesson that he took out of it.

“Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.“ - Larry Page

There is a simple equation for success: idea + execution = result.

Tesla had great ideas, but failed at the execution. Larry was determined not to end up like his hero. This reminder has influenced his tremendous drive. He knows that it’s not enough to have lightbulbs constantly flashing in your head. You have to also roll those ideas out in the real world. Execution is what matters.

While Google’s idea was great, it was not completely original. Jon Kleinberg had come up with a similar algorithm while working in an IBM lab. More intriguingly, Robin Li, a Chinese software engineer working for Dow Jones in New Jersey even patented an algorithm called RankDex a year earlier. However, their companies didn’t see the value in these ideas, and so their inventions lay on the wayside.

What differentiated Google from earlier efforts was how they put everything into practice. When Page and Brin decided to go full speed ahead, they turned it on. Often working long hours deep into the night, their product started to take shape.

Their path was not straight-forward. As with any young start-up, they encountered many problems on the way. One was capacity. In order to get their search to work, they needed lots of computing power.

They resorted to begging, borrowing, even sometimes downright stealing computers for their project. They didn’t have the money to buy huge servers, so they came up with cheaper alternatives. Like real MacGyvers, Sergey and Larry basically made their search engine run on a soap on a rope, and some matches.

This has become known as the concept of pile-up computing. They would buy a bunch of cheap computers, strip them down to essential parts, and then connect them. Voila, you have a data center.

This type of resourcefulness made it much cheaper to run their infrastructure than what their competitors were doing. They also built in redundancy, meaning that if one computer fails, another one takes their place almost immediately.

They would fret over details, trying to make everything run faster and more efficiently. Larry realized that if you were going make their site sticky, it needed to be fast. People want everything now, and speed on the internet is king.

The Google homepage was kept simple. They didn’t have the talent to design something catchy, so they decided to leave it be. Unintentionally, they stumbled onto a gold mine.

Yup, because they sucked at something, they managed to make bank.

In the process, they came up with the way that Google rolls out their products to this day. They adhere to the philosophy of permanent beta. Google releases unfinished products and then tweaks them as they go along. Gmail was in this status for many, many years. Their strategy is to put stuff up in the air and see if it flies.

“Launch early, iterate often.“

However, what pushed them forward to execute is the fact that they enjoyed what they were doing. Albert Einstein, in a letter to his son wrote that the best way to learn almost anything is to do something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice the time pass:

“That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal.“ - Albert Einstein

Not just learning, this is also the best way to build a product. Reaching states of flow can keep you working at times when other types of motivation would give out.

“What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!“ - Larry Page

—

Building monorails, and going to the Moon

While Sergey and Larry will forever be remembered as the “search guys”, their breadth, and their scope are much wider. Before building the Google search engine, Sergey tried out several projects, and was involved in many activities, even trying trapeze.

Larry had about 10 different topics he was considering for his PhD thesis. At Michigan, he was especially interested in the problems of transportation, and was a member of a championship solar powered car racing team.

Sergey and Larry are expert-generalists, modern day Renaissance Men. They are constantly thinking about different things, and learning on the go. Due to the wide range of interests of its founders, Google has expanded into a variety of domains.

They have even established a division focused on what they call “Moonshot thinking”. Inspired by John F. Kennedy’s bold vision to go the Moon, “moonshots” are visionary projects that everyone else thinks are crazy. In many ways, they exemplify the traits that Google was founded upon: curiosity, imagination, and boldness.

They also are adept at using different types of thinking methods when needed. Larry Page has both used first principles thinking, and analogical thinking when building up his company.

In his foreword to the book “How Google Works”, Larry Page gives a short overview of his philosophy on first principles thinking:

“When I was younger and first started thinking about my future, I decided to either become a professor or start a company. Either option would give me the freedom to work from first principles. This autonomy of thought is behind almost everything we do at Google, behind our greatest successes and some of our impressive failures.”

This has been reflected in the way that Google is run. The idea is not just to improve things incrementally, but to try to think radically out of the box. Page calls it 10x thinking. Instead of improving something by 10%, just radically rethink something from scratch. It’s not about putting a lot of effort into working on old problems, instead it’s about changing the question itself.

However, first principles thinking isn’t the only thing that Google innovates by. Thinking by analogies has its place too. After all, the idea for Google search came from a brilliant analogy. The great thing about the Google guys is that they intuitively know when to use analogical thinking, and when to go for thinking in first principles instead.

——–
A shorter version of this article was originally published on “Medium” here. The version above is longer and covers more points.

Credit: 1;

You look around and can’t find this key anywhere. Luckily, you notice that there are some materials lying around which could help you in this endeavor. After all, you are Angus MacGyver and once managed to escape a burning room just by using a bar of soap on a rope and a paperclip. This should not be a problem.

What you have available is a candle, a match, and two steel rings about the size of the keyhole. First off, you try to find out whether you can put the two steel rings into the keyhole separately, but unfortunately, they do not hold and therefore don’t open the door. You immediately surmise that what you need to do is to join the steel rings together, so that they can open the door. However, how to do this?

The next thing that you try is to melt the wax on the candle and make the two steel rings stick together. Try as you want, this just doesn’t work. Panic sets in, the water is rising fast and you still haven’t managed to find a solution to your problem. However, you have been in these types of situations before. No reason to panic yet. You decide to take a step back and start thinking with a clear head.

Luckily, in your mind, you have an arsenal of problem-solving techniques and one of these is called the generic parts technique. This method helps you to break down a problem into its constituent parts and to start thinking using first principles. All you need to do is to ask yourself two simple questions:

1. Can it be broken down further?
2. Does my description of the object imply a use?

Using these two questions, you have another look at the objects that you have in front of you. Can they be broken down further? Yes, they can. For example, the candle is made up of wax and a wick.

This still doesn’t get you anywhere, so you proceed onto asking yourself the next question. Does my description of these objects imply a use? Yes, using the term “wick” gets you thinking back to candles. However, then you try to go more generic: in reality, a wick is just a string.

Heureka! You solved the problem. You take the wick out of the candle and tie the two steel rings together. They hold, which allows you to simulate a key, put it into the keyhole and open the door. MacGyver does it again! Granted this escape was not as spectacular as the time when you duck-taped your ass to a sled and used natural gas to power yourself up a hill, but it was cool nevertheless.

How you can use the generic parts technique to solve your own problems

What happens when a person with a hammer treats everything as a nail, is that they are hamstrung by the Einstellung effect. They apply the same method to solve all the different problems, even if there are better ways of solving them. Sometimes, this effect even hampers people from seeing a solution that is in plain sight.

This is when the generic parts technique can come in handy. It can help you to solve problems when traditional solutions failed. Using this technique, you can disentangle your usual definition of a hammer as something that beats up nails. Go ahead, think about it.

What other ways can you use a hammer? Can it be broken down further and does your description of it imply a use? Well, for starters, a hammer is just a heavy thing, so you can use it as a paperweight! A hammer is a sharp object, so you can use it as a weapon. A hammer is a regular object, so you can use it to measure things. Heck, when needed, you can even use it to scratch your back!

First-principles thinking

The generic parts technique is one way of getting around your brain’s traditional way of thinking in order to be able to apply the first principles thinking method of Elon Musk. It can be useful when you want to MacGyver your way out of a tight spot, but also when you want to change the world with a new product. The key to its use is to know when to use it, and when not to, and as always that comes with practice.

First principles thinking was used when someone completely changed the way things were done. For example, why not use steam in order to power your vehicles? This not only changed the way people transported things from one place to another, but also changed the way society functioned completely, starting off the Industrial Revolution.

However, most of the time you don’t need to come up with a new way of doing things. Often, the old way of doing things is much more efficient. That’s why your brain is set up in such a way as to promote old and tested ways of doing things. A lot of times reuse of old techniques, thinking by analogies, will be the best way to solve a problem.

Problem-solving and innovation are often accompanied by a process of trial and error, where you try one way of doing things, only to fail, but get back up again, learn from this setback, and then try a new way of doing things. It is important to not be phased when things are not working out, but instead to continue on your path. Through practice, you will become much better, even at knowing when to apply which method.

Note: This article appeared first on the Startup publication on Medium: here.

Images: 1, 2,

Yet, all this was about to change just a short time later. Mt. Vesuvius erupted in one of the biggest eruptions in recorded European history and buried the city of Pompeii, as well as many of the surrounding cities, below tons of ashes, rocks, and lava. This event was unprecedented in the human memory of the people who were living in the area, but it happened. They had judged things using a scale that encompassed only the worst case events that they had experienced up until now. Then the unexpected happened.

Nassim Taleb in his book “The Black Swan” calls this a “black swan event”, something so unthinkable or even unpredictable, that it doesn’t enter people’s minds or that they dismiss outright. The problem is that these events do happen sometimes, and usually cannot be predicted.

“A Black Swan is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.“

People usually judge things based on their experience and passed events. They don’t take into account that this might not always predict the entire span of possible outcomes. To further quote Nassim Taleb:

“In Pharaonic Egypt, scribes tracked the high-water mark of the Nile and used it as an estimate for a future worst-case scenario. The same can be seen in the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which experienced a catastrophic failure in 2011 when a tsunami struck. It had been built to withstand the worst past historical earthquake, with the builders not imagining much worse – and not thinking that the worst past event had to be a surprise, as it had no precedent.“

This type of thinking is summed up in the famous Rumsfeld Matrix, based on an iconic phrase that the then US Secretary of Defense uttered and that subsequently passed into wisdom lore. He said that there are known knowns, known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. The category of unknown unknowns is precisely where events like the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius fit into.

Most of the time, whatever you do, you will not be able to predict that these things will happen: they are unknown unknowns and thereby hard to predict. However, what you should do when trying to foresee the future is to keep in mind that these things can and will happen and adjust your models accordingly.

Apparently for the Chinese, being on guard against black swan events, and fending off grey rhino events (which are highly obvious, but ignored threats) is part of the national strategy.

“China must be on guard against “black swan” risks while fending off “gray rhino” events, President Xi Jinping said on Monday, adding that the economy faces deep and complicated changes.“

Just like the Chinese are doing, everyone should keep the possibility of something unexpected happening in mind. Even simple systems can go wild. And more complex systems can get wilder still. Even small changes can lead to huge outcomes down the line. When Edward Lorenz was doing weather simulations on his clunky computer back in 1961, he didn’t expect that cutting off a few decimal points would lead to such wildly different outcomes. These experiments showed how unpredictable the world can get, since even a slight change can matter a whole lot.

This also brings us back to the role of luck, and how much it really matters in how things turn out. Daniel Kahneman, the world leading psychologist and Nobel Prize winner, reflected upon the role of luck in his life:

“I mean, you know, some talent was really needed. And – but luck – you know, I can see so many points in my life where luck made all the difference. And mainly, the luck is with the people you meet and the friendships you make. There is a large element of luck in that. And my life was transformed by sheer luck in, you know, finding a partner, an intellectual partner, with whom we got along very well and we got a lot done.“

The lesson in all this is that no matter how much you plan or try, some things are outside your control. Some events are unpredictable and will happen no matter how hard you try to foresee the future. You need to keep this in mind.

Read More:
Survivorship Bias.

In history, it is usually not the individual actors who are important, but instead the processes themselves. This is because similar processes can lead to similar outcomes. In these types of situations, analogies can be quite illuminating. They can help us to recognize the problems and pick potential solutions.

Mapping Step

When coming up with analogies, the first thing you always do is to map the source system to the target system. This means you take concepts from the initial phenomenon that you know well, and then fit them to the things you are trying to analyze. While doing this, you always need to be careful about what you are comparing. When people make historical comparisons, they usually head down the road of comparing individuals that appear similar in these different eras. While mapping the different individuals from the ancient era to the modern era (is Trump the modern Clodius or Crassus?) might be fun, it does not really tell us much about the current world. Instead, it is mapping the underlying processes at play in the two eras that is interesting. This can enlighten us on what is happening in our society today.

When taking lessons from the past, there are certain key things that you should look for. When examining the modern era and Roman times, there are some apparent similarities. Certain actions and conditions lead to certain paths. These are processes that are linked to the conditions in society, and include the widening gap between the segments of society, certain segments of society getting relatively poorer, the process of anger creation, and similar things.

• I described them in more detail in the article on lessons from the ancient commentators that I wrote previously.

The fall of the Republic happened when Rome became the hegemon in its part of the world. The Roman society became richer than ever, with the level of material goods skyrocketing. However, a gap between the richest and the poorest members of society widened, with many of the people on the lower rungs feelings as if their situation was worsening. The state of affairs today is similar, we are living in an era of overall prosperity, however wide sections of the population are feeling as if they are losing out.

When working with historical analogies, what you can map are different behaviors. While culture and technology influence how these behaviors are displayed, the mental processes behind these behaviors are very similar. In one of his iconic statements on the basic nature of the world, Cicero stated that while the Egyptians might worship cats and dogs, the fundamental processes of superstition are the same in all nations. The particulars don’t matter, it is the underlying process that does.

To illustrate this statement with another example, we can look at vanity, a behavior that many humans engage in. In his work, Late Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus described how people were infatuated with creating statues of themselves in ancient Rome. This behavior we can map to the modern trend of people posting selfies of themselves. While, the way the process is implemented is different (statues vs. selfies), the mental behaviors that lead to this stem from the same place.

Moving on, let’s take the process of anger creation as an example for continuing the mapping. What I am mapping here is not particular circumstances of how anger was created, but instead the general patterns. In ancient Rome, the initial process that led to anger, then outrage, and then political violence is the one between the Optimates and the Populares, as the positions between these two factions drifted apart. The similar process today is the battle between the alt-right (and other far right elements), and the alt-left (sometimes joined by other far left elements).

While the ancient process was based more on economic conditions, and the modern one is more about ideas, there are many parallels. What drove both these processes in the background was a perceived fall in status, perceived relative gains and loses, as well as similar structural elements.

Both these processes led to increased polarization in society, with the likelihood of compromise drifting further and further away. These situations also have parallels in how certain individuals are using them to gain power for themselves. Populism was on the rise then, and it is on the rise now.

The reason why these processes can wreak havoc on the political institutions of the countries of the northern hemisphere (like the US, but also the EU), is that the institutions of the Roman Republic have striking similarities to our modern institutions. Whether this was by design (as in the US) or by heritage and evolution (mostly in other countries), the way the state is set up today is close to the way it was set up in the Roman Republic.

Basically, here we are mapping the old Roman institutions to the modern political institutions. The people, the Senate, the executive, the division of powers, all these have parallels in both systems. This means that the processes are quite likely to have similar effects in both cases.

Application Step

With the last statement, we are already moving to the Application Step. With this step, we are applying the mappings to learn something about the system we want to study. And the system we want to study in this case is the current political situation.

However, to be able to apply the mappings correctly, we also need to keep in mind the main differences between the two situations we are studying. These differences will determine which things from the analogy are relevant and which aren’t.

The first factor to keep in mind is the difference in the level of technology in the two societies. This had a huge impact not only on how people lived, on transportation between places, but also on the spread of information. There were also many cultural differences, with one huge difference being that in ancient Rome people had a fundamentally different view of the set up of society. There was the institution of slavery, and women had much less rights than they do now.

One significant element was that the Roman Republic was a libertarian paradise. Everything was provided by private contractors and many things we take for granted now (like a police force or a fire squad) were not there. For example, Crassus used this hole in the market by making his own private fire squad and sometimes using it for nefarious purposes. Some of these things were corrected under the Empire. When he consolidated his rule, Augustus set up a sort of police squad, as well as a fire squad, which were under the control of the state.

There were also differences in the work structure. The population outside of the city of Rome consisted mostly of agrarian farmers, and the presence of slaves was also significant in all aspects of society. Today, the places of work are either in the industry, but more importantly in offices, where people sit all day in front of the computer screen.

While these differences are significant, in my opinion, they do not negate the main point of the argument that the Roman Republic could be used as an analogy for current times. The key to this is that different processes can produce the same mental effects. This means the same outcomes.

People might argue that the institutions of Roman Republic and today are not the same. This might be true, but only on a physical level. On a more conceptual level, the institutions are incredibly similar.

Here we can use concepts from computer science to illustrate. Data modeling in computer science divides data models into conceptual, logical and physical levels. The conceptual level is all about the concepts and ideas, while the lower levels are about how these are implemented in practice. The logical and physical levels are where the actual set-up of the institutions shows up.

For the political system, the conceptual level has things like the people, legislative power (even though in theory the people made the laws, in reality it was the Senate), or the executive power (consuls). The system in the Roman Republic was set up as a way to check the powers of the different institutions and make sure that no one person becomes too powerful. This resulted in a division of powers, which inspired the way modern governments (such as in the US) are set up. While, in ancient Rome, there were consuls, and the US has a president, this does not really matter. On the conceptual level, these institutions are quite similar, as they are the executive powers in the state.

Another interesting parallel is powerful individuals hiding their business dealings behind front men (and making policy to benefit their business dealings). How this process worked was described in some of Cicero’s letters. Reading these writings, it is almost eerie to realize how similar corruption of yesteryear was to that of today. Powerful business interests are often tied to politicians and have quite a big influence on policy.

One important lesson that has parallels in both eras is norm breaking. Since the institutions are similar, the breaking of norms by politicians can destroy the institutions in similar ways. There is an interesting parallel in the strategy used in ancient Rome and the UK a few years: going to the people to decide. Gracchus and other Populares started going around the Senate and implemented people’s plebiscites on many issues. This is quite similar with what happened with the Brexit Referendum in the UK. These processes were easily manipulated.

There is one further point which I would like to map, and which in many ways is a quite abstract analogy. However, it could give clues to why a system that weathers numerous storms for hundreds of years, suddenly falters. There was one fundamental difference between the Rome of 100 BC when things were beginning to unravel, and the Rome of 300 BC or even 200 BC, when things seemed to be functioning.

In 100 BC, Rome was no longer a city-state, but ruled a vast empire, becoming the hegemon of the Mediterranean world. While even in earlier times, it had ruled territories outside the city, even outside of Italy, the scale and circumstances became fundamentally new and different.

These circumstances changed the rules of the game. Rome becoming an imperial power was something so fundamentally new, that the institutions that worked well in the old times were not able to adapt fast enough. A paradigm shift was occurring in the ways the world worked and the Republic collapsed under the strains. The Romans were not able to handle all the different things that were suddenly thrown at them. Chaos was the result.

A similar type of paradigm shift in how the institutions work is happening in today’s world. This is due the changes of technology, with the rise of the internet. Even more radical changes like artificial intelligence are just a stone’s throw away. Systems that are designed to work well in predictable circumstances, can get strained and cease to function properly when a curve ball is thrown at them. For the Roman Republic, this curve ball was empire, for us this curve ball is technology.

Learning Step

In the Learning Step, we come up with a generalization of what this all means for the evolution of human societies. What can we learn from history? There is a common saying that you never step in the same river twice. This is true. The water and everything floating in in is not the same. However, the underlying processes of how the rivers flows, how it deposits sediments, as well as other things are pretty much the same.

So yes, the way the sediments look after they are deposited will not be the same, but you need to look at processes. You examine one spot of the river at one time and then come back a year later. It will look a bit different. While you might not know the specificities, you can describe what general processes made it look different. You won’t be able to predict the precise way that spot will look one year from now, but you can guess what processes will affect it (sediment deposits, wind, water erosion…etc.). Of course, we also need to keep in mind the possibility of big unpredictable events, which can mess all this up. Maybe a major storm might hit and destroy everything. As history often reminds us, “black swan” events can often out of nowhere and totally change the course of history.

There is also the question of the inevitability of outcomes. What we need to distinguish here are the role of trends versus human agency. Here you can use counterfactuals to judge what if scenarios. What would have happened if Sulla had not taken his army to Rome? It is likely that at some point some other general would have done it. This is because there were strong trends in place, which made this quite inevitable. With armies in the field after the Social War and these armies becoming more loyal to their commanders than the state after the reforms of Marius, it was just a matter of time before one or the other ambitious general used them for his own interests.

What role can you attribute to humans in the course of events? Some events are likely to happen no matter which person actually triggers it, but some are highly dependent on the person. For example World War I. was triggered after the assassination of archduke Ferdinand, but even if that had not happened, something else would have triggered it. The conditions were ripe. Once the tipping point is reached, almost anything can set off the spark to start the conflict.

However the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander were highly dependent on Alexander, since he was the one who came up with the idea (or rather his father Philip). If Alexander had not been in charge of Macedonia, it is quite unlikely that another person would have attempted to conquer the Persian Empire.

Another important thing to keep in mind is the question of causes versus symptoms. What is the cause of an event and what is its symptom? This can be quite hard to distinguish, but causes are usually large processes, fed by feedback loops, while symptoms are specific manifestations of these processes. For example, Trump is a symptom of the current malaise. This means that even if he didn’t show up, someone else like him would likely have come along and taken advantage of the situation. There are different brands of populists across the world today, but they are all using similar underlying processes that carry them to power.

However, the arrival of someone like Trump further destabilizes the situation, which then creates greater chaos. This is because the different feedback loops working in the background are reflexive, meaning that they reinforce each other. Both the causes and effects affect each other, with no one being able to tell which is the cause and which is the effect after a while.

What is the answer to all these problems? For the ancients it was using reason (using system 2 in the words of modern psychology researchers). However the questions remains, can we beat out the pitfalls of human nature by using the brain?

There are specific conditions in our modern societies today, that are giving rise to specific behaviors. This is quite similar to what was happening in the ancient Roman Republic. People argue whether nature or nurture is more influential in human behavior. The bell curve model that I explained is agnostic to whether character comes from nature, individual willpower, or nurture.

I believe that all these have an effect on how a human behaves. Nature gives each individual human certain predispositions for behavior and certain traits, however individual willpower and nurture can push these to the background and sometimes even change them.

I am a big believer that as an individual you are not just a slave to your genetic predispositions, but through your own willpower can rise above them to a certain extent. Virtuous character and acting right for the right reasons can be maintained under any circumstances. Yes, it can be shaken, and you will sometimes have to make some moral concessions, but overall there is never a need to descent to the pits of evil.

What is key is to build a resilient system, one that can withstand the swings of human nature. History has cycles, but with certain measures it should be possible to stop these cycles or at least diminish them. According to Polybius, the mixed form of government of Rome was able to diminish the functioning of these cycles, and prevented wanna-be kings from arising.

Turns out that this wasn’t enough. Even the most resilient systems can succumb to powerful forces. The separation of powers in the US has been able to keep the country stable for a long time, however as can be seen from things like the Civil War, certain processes can overwhelm even the best of systems.

Things don’t have to only go from bad to worse. There is precedence for societies changing for the better. One example is the lessening of corruption in Sweden. Sweden went from one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, one where everything was for sale, to one of the least corrupt ones.

On the other hand, the Roman Republic entered a vicious cycle, where it went from one of the least corrupt societies in the Mediterranean, one based on honor, to a corrupt, hedonistic cesspool. Decadence took over, which had a negative effect on how people behaved in society.

This brings us to the concept of a behavioral sink. The environment around you has a huge influence on how people act, which can be seen from some pretty unusual experiments that were undertaken in the 1950s and 60s. Researchers built a series of rat and mouse paradises, habitats which were meant to provide all the food and housing needs of its inhabitants and keep them free from predators. Then they introduced a small number of rats (in some experiments it was mice) into these habitats and watched what happened.

After a time of exploration, the rats settled in and started reproducing. Since all their needs were provided for, their populations exploded rapidly. However, after a time, weird things started happening. Dominant males built their harems, which consisted of a lot of females and a small number of select males who completely withdrew from doing anything productive and just ended up spending the entire day grooming themselves. The rest of the rejected males started congregating in some sections of the habitats. Some of them withdrew from society entirely, while others became violent and attacked anything that moved.

Decadence set in and rat society started disintegrating. The differences between the males were huge. Some had access to harems of females, while the majority did not have access to even one. With many of the rats congregating around a select number of feeding stations, social interactions became stressful.

After a while, all out war erupted, and even the alpha males had trouble defending their harems and territories. In these chaotic times, the females stopped building nests and even threw out their babies. At one point, no more babies survived into adulthood. Society disintegrated and collapsed.

Yet, there was no problem with food, predators, or shelter. These habitats provided for all of them, creating a prosperous society. Instead of calming everyone down, stress pervaded everywhere. The same rats that acted normally before, started behaving in abnormal ways.

The Roman Republic also underwent its behavioral sink. After the Punic Wars, it became a prosperous society overall, and its outside threats were eliminated. The population increased exponentially. Yet the social divisions grew worse too. The rich hoarded all the money and resources, while the poor got poorer. The select number of alpha rats monopolized most of the females and the best locations, while most of the other male rats ended up with nothing. The elites in Rome monopolized the farmlands and other resources, while many sections of the populations were kicked off their lands and couldn’t even find work.

The fact that the population skyrocketed and the space was limited, meant that the population had to battle over limited space and resources. The historians who came up with the theory of cliodynamics proposed that elite competition was an important factor in the downfall of the Republic. The population of the nobles grew, yet the number of places at the top was as limited as ever. There were still only a limited number of senators, and a small number of magistrate positions, including two consuls every year. While in the past, many of these nobles would be able to satisfy their ambitions in rising up the hierarchy, in a situation where there are a lot of them, this was no longer guaranteed. Battles for positions started.

We might be experiencing a behavioral sink now. While, there are significant differences between humans and rats, what happened in the rat utopias can serve as a warning sign. Certain conditions changed the behavior of the inhabitants, which led to a collapse of the society. Even though the utopias had all the resources needed for their inhabitants and protected them from outside predators, decadence set in and social interactions helped start a vicious circle, which spiraled down until society was destroyed.

We live in societies which are the most prosperous in history, yet the conditions seem to be stuck in a vicious cycle which is spiraling down. Social interactions are stressful, causing many people to withdraw from society, while others become more aggressive. The differences between the haves and have-nots are getting wider and wider, not just in terms of money, but also in social dynamics for many guys (a small percentage has harems of women, while others struggle to even get a date). City life is further adding to the every day stresses of large parts of the population, and the rise of social media is taking over social interactions.

This all leads to more and more frustration, which can lead to anger, and the rise of dark forces like populism, which further polarize society, leading it down to potentially bad places.

Read More:
This is Part 2 of a series on using historical analogies to describe current events. Read Part 1 here:
Why the fall of the Roman Republic is a good analogy for today’s chaotic time – Part 1.

Further articles to read:

Article 1:
The dangerous trends that are shaking up the world today.

Article 2:
11 lessons from the fall of the Roman Republic. It is disturbing how relevant they are for today.

Article 3:
At what point of the fall of the Roman Republic are we?

Article on forming analogies:
The method to create good analogies.

Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

In August 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, the then US Secretary of Defense, drew a parallel between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler. This is the type of thinking that drove the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, with colossal consequences.

A bad historical analogy can blind the thinking of the decision makers and put them on a path for disaster. Comparing Hussein and Hitler gave the leaders a set path to follow. Either bring down Hussein or be faced with a genocidal world war in the future.

Turns out, Saddam, the homicidal maniac that he was, was no Hitler. He had no weapons of mass destruction and barely controlled his own country. However, the fact that the decision makers in the US administration thought of him as Hitler, gave them tunnel vision. It was certainly a huge factor for the fatal decision to invade Iraq.

Leaders, whether in the government or business, are often faced with tough decisions. A strategy that they frequently employ to get out of this conundrum is the use of historical analogies. This can be a flash of brilliance or a complete disaster. The success of the decision these leaders make is very dependent on the analogy picked.

Some analogies are very close matches, while other analogies might seem very enticing, but in reality are far from similar. Under the surface, there could be many crucial, underlying differences. It is deciding which analogy is a close match, and which is just a mirage, that will determine whether you succeed or fail.

The historical analogies that are often thrown around when describing certain situations are vast. In the US, the most common ones are Vietnam (and being stuck in an unwinnable war), the Marshall Plan (giving aid to countries to rebuild them after a catastrophe), or even the Thucydides Trap (to describe the power relationships between countries).

Especially the Thucydides Trap has been getting a lot of traction lately to describe the current relationship between China and the US. This analogy is based on this quote from ancient Greek historian Thucydides when writing about what caused the Peloponnesian War.

“What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”
from “History of the Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides

The danger here is that this type of thinking can drive US policy on a collision course with China. Whether it applies in this case or not is up for debate.

However, in today’s world we are faced with many other problems. One of these is the increasing polarization of societies, and the rise of populism, which could spell danger for democracy.

Here, I have tried to use the fall of the Roman Republic analogy in order to inform us on the situation of today. Sometimes, people use the analogy of the fall of the Western Roman Empire for this, but for me, there are some distinctions between the two cases that don’t make it a perfect analogy (although some things are relevant for today as well). The fall of the Roman Republic is a much better analogy to use.

So far, I have written three articles that use the analogy of the fall of the Roman Republic as the basis.

The first article, of over 20 thousand words, has a more direct comparison and a detailed description of today’s situation, with lessons learnt.
The dangerous trends that are shaking up the world today.

The second article, of over 40 thousand words, goes back to the ancient sources themselves, and tries to look at the fall through their eyes, drawing lessons from their insights. Here I have gone through many of the writings of the authors that survived from Antiquity and gather their wisdom, so that we can benefit from it even today. It is worth the read.
11 lessons from the fall of the Roman Republic. It is disturbing how relevant they are for today.

The third article, is a short and fun one, where I try to situate the current events on a timeline of the fall of the Roman Republic.
At what point of the fall of the Roman Republic are we?

Why is the fall of the Roman Republic an incredibly relevant analogy for today?

In an article on how to solve problems using analogies, I described the different steps needed to form a good analogy in order to solve a problem. Most people do this subconsciously in their heads, but you can sometimes do these steps overtly as well.

When you do this more overt deliberate reasoning, it is easier to determine whether the analogy you are using is the right one or not. However, before doing that, let’s take a step back and look at the initial assumptions that are key to this. These assumptions are very important in judging whether the analogy makes sense or not. You always have to keep in mind the assumptions that you are making when drawing up your model.

My first assumption is that humans are not rational actors. This can be proven quite easily by the fact that we still buy lottery tickets (despite the fact that the probability of winning the jackpot is miniscule), we still gamble (despite the fact that the game is rigged in the casino’s favor), and we still fall for bubbles (despite the fact that in the past few decades we have been burned by real estate bubbles, Dot.Com bubbles, and financial stock bubbles).

My second assumption is that human nature is the same as it was 2000 years ago. Sure, technology and society has changed, but the underlying processes in the brain haven’t. Sure, culture does have an effect on how you act, but the underlying processes of human nature still have a much stronger, determining pull.

Even if some aspects of culture are different in the different eras, the way humans work is still fundamentally the same. As Cicero stated, it does not matter that the Egyptians worship cats and dogs, and the Romans something else, the underlying process of superstition is the same in both nations.

The third assumption I am making is that due to the fact that human nature is quite irrational, and that there is a heavy negativity bias in the actions of most humans, there is a tendency for conditions in society to degenerate.

The way this works can be shown using game theory. When you have two people, they have two options either to cheat or not to cheat. In the first round of the game, one person cheats, and the other doesn’t. The person who cheats wins. This then pushes the other person to cheat in the next round of the game as well, since by staying honest, he would lose.

Another example of this type of process is the so-called tragedy of the commons. As Aristotle already noted millennia ago:

“What is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest.”
from “Politics” by Aristotle

In each of these examples, a race to the bottom starts and negative forces keep on gaining momentum. At some point, there is so much cheating in the system that the system collapses and resets itself. However, that takes a long time.

Human nature doesn’t change, just different traits and behaviors get activated based on specific situations. Similar types of processes can also be used to model the rise of altruistic behavior. Unfortunately as this type of behavior rises, cheaters will start popping up, which once again will start a race to the bottom. History is just a continuous cycle of these ebbs and flows.

Another model that we can use to show what happens in society during a fall is the bell curve. Let’s imagine that the different traits of human nature are spread out in a normal distribution, with a small number of selfish psychopaths on the total extreme right of the curve, and the selfless altruists on the extreme right of the curve. Most people would tend to be spread around the middle, neither too selfish or too altruistic.

The conditions in society at this time are normal, and so they don’t activate the more extreme behaviors among most people. Recent research on epigenetics has shown that even if you have a gene that gives you a certain tendency, it doesn’t mean that this tendency will arise. Usually an outside push from the environment around you is needed to trigger it.

Then, something in the outside environment changes, which awakens these traits among certain people in the population, which pushes the bell curve to the right. The result is more people in the population with more extreme traits and behaviors, which can have unforeseen negative consequences on society. If you apply the principles of chaos theory to this situation, you can see that a slight shift can have a huge effect in what happens next.

Let’s use the analogy of climate change to get a better picture of what can happen. You start off with a bell curve where you have a certain number of very cold days, and a certain number of very hot days, but most days tend to fall into the middle range. However, noxious gases and pollution in the environment changes things and pushes the bell curve to shift to the right.

Now you have a larger number of really hot days, the number of really cold days goes down, and the average is slightly more overall. However, this change can have a huge impact on the environment. Rivers can dry up, fields can yield less crops, which all then has an effect on nature and the humans living in that area. These changes then further accelerate the negative environment around, and degrade everything even more.

Slight shifts in the bell curve of normal human behavior can have huge impacts on what happens in society. Just like a slight shift of the temperature bell curve produces big changes in the environment, so can slight shifts of the way humans behave in society have a big impact on the course of events in a country.

Some series on TV explore this really well. In “The Walking Dead”, the series starts off in the normal world. The main characters have normal jobs as accountants, lawyers, policemen, or storekeepers. However, when the zombie apocalypse hits, they are forced to trigger some traits that in a normal situation would never get triggered. So a quiet accountant in normal society ends up being a sadistic dictator in a zombie infested world.

Experiments on human psychology, especially on social influence, have demonstrated how things like this can happen. In the Milgram experiment, the subject was told to push buttons to give electric shocks to people. Just because an authority was telling them to do that, many people complied. Even more striking is the Stanford prison experiment, which divided up students into groups of guards and prisoners. These roles ended up triggering many latent traits and encouraging some despicable behaviors among the different participants, including some of the guards turning quite sadistic.

There have been more recent experiments, which have looked at the impact of corruption. A group of researchers conducted a game of dice in 23 countries in order to measure the propensity to cheat among different societies. There was a strong correlation between the propensity to stretch the truth and the level of corruption in the country where the player comes from. The conclusion was that it was likely that the pervasive corruption in a society had an influence on how people viewed it and on their behavior.

All these studies and experiments show that it is not just the normal every day personality that defines how a person acts, but the situation and the environment have a huge effect as well. This is quite important for further developments in a society. Even if overall, some people might have a strong character, and despite situational and environmental pressures manage to keep it, other people might falter under these pressures.

Even if the number of additional people who succumb to these influences is small, this can have a huge effect on the overall state of affairs in society. This is due to the fact that numerous feedback loops create themselves, further reinforcing the effect, piling on top of each other, just like a snowball piles on more snow as it rolls downhill.

When you are looking at the fall of the Roman Republic, or the current state of affairs in politics in the modern world, you are looking at systems. Numerous factors and players are interacting in different ways, causing changes. The feedback loop is an important concept to keep in mind. A positive feedback loop amplifies the changes in a system, while a negative feedback loop tries to keep the status quo.

Let’s take an example from ecology in order to illustrate these two concepts. Imagine a population of rabbits is introduced into a territory where it didn’t exist before. They find the environment promising, with plenty of food and good weather. The rabbits start breeding, the kids grow up, and produce more rabbits. The more adults you have, the more kids you will have, which then creates a loop that keeps reproducing itself and reinforcing the exponential growth of the population. This is a positive feedback loop.

However, at one point the population outgrows the food supply, which causes mass starvation among the rabbits. Furthermore, the rabbits are easy food for predators, which attracts plenty of them to the area. These factors then start working on lowering the population of the rabbits. This is a negative feedback loop.

What you need to remember about feedback loops is that the causal relationships between the different parts of the system are often hard to determine. One part of the system reinforces another part of the system, which then reinforces a third one, which then ends up augmenting the first one. In this way, the different factors work together to create a final effect.

Positive feedback loops can create vicious circles, which make bad things even worse. Humans have often been compared to herds, since they frequently behave like one. Just like in any herd, one small thing can be the start of a massive panic. In a cattle herd, a small number of cows can get freaked out and start running, seeing this, other cows start running. The more cows are running, the more of an effect this will have on the other cows, who will start running as well. All this works on reinforcing the panic.

Just like in the environment, feedback loops are behind what happens in human societies. Some of these feedback loops work to keep the status quo, while other ones cause massive changes to the society. With positive feedback loops, different factors come together to magnify the shifts. These feedback loops are the mechanisms which move the bell curve to the left or right, or keep it stable.

This is how we can explain what happened in Roman society at the time that led to the fall of the Republic. In previous times of Roman history, human traits like greed, envy, ambition, but also altruism were all there. They still drove how people behaved, but the bell curve was shifted to the left, so the overall environment tended to trigger more positive behaviors. The situation in Rome after the Punic Wars shifted the bell curve to the right, which ended up triggering negative behaviors much more, with the resultant chaos bringing about the fall of the Republic.

This analogy of the Roman Republic has an incredible demonstration power for what is happening in the world today. In the past decades, the bell curve has shifted to the right, which has triggered more negative traits among large sections of the population. The bone-headedness was always there, but now it is just more prominent. This could spell trouble for the future.

What is interesting for us to observe, is how things in Roman society degenerated and led to the rise of one man rule. It was not a quick process, but took over a hundred years of gradual change, with small changes, such as the breaking of norms, piling up on top of each other, until at one point the country ended up in civil war. In no way does this mean that we are heading to a civil war as well, instead we should look at the events of that era as a warning sign and adjust course so that history does not repeat itself.

This is Part 1 of the series on using historical analogies for current events. Read Part 2 here:
Analogy fall of Roman Republic and current events – Part 2.

Read More:
Article 1:
The dangerous trends that are shaking up the world today.

Article 2:
11 lessons from the fall of the Roman Republic. It is disturbing how relevant they are for today.

Article 3:
At what point of the fall of the Roman Republic are we?

Article on forming analogies:
The method to create good analogies.

Images: 1, 2

1) Mapping Step
2) Application Step (Inference Step)
3) Learning Step

How does this work? You have a problem and you figured out that using an analogy would be a good way to solve it. What you start off with is a source system that you know well and that you want to apply to solve the problem (target).

First, in the Mapping Step, you take the source of the analogy and map it to the system (target) that you are trying to find out more about. Second, in the Application Step, you apply this new mapping in order to solve the problem that you are facing. The Application Step can also be called the Inference Step, since you infer or form an opinion on the matter based on the information that you have, which then helps you to come up with a solution. Third, in the Learning Step, you can come up with a generalization of the principles, which you then potentially reuse to solve different types of similar problems.

Let’s illustrate this on a familiar example. How did the process for the mass production of cars in Ford’s factories come about? When William Klann (a worker in Ford’s car factory) was visiting a Chicago meat-packing factory, he was inspired by what he saw. There were conveyor belts that were pulling animal carcasses along, and at certain points these carcasses would arrive at the station of a person who would then strip it of a certain part of meat. So this person would specialize in just that little task.

In his mind, Klann did the Mapping Step. The carcasses are akin to the cars in his own factory. The workers in the meat-packing factory are akin to the workers in the car plant. Once he did these initial mappings, he moved onto the Application or Inference Step.

If the products and workers in both types of factories are equivalent, then you can probably use the same process you use in the meat-packing factory to mass manufacture cars. You can move the cars along the conveyor belt and have people specialize in only one task, putting in one small part of the car again and again. This would then solve the problem of the mass production of cars.

Once you successfully apply the mappings and start to mass manufacture cars using this process, then you can move onto the Learning Step. This is when a generalization comes in. The conveyor belts and specialization can be used in many different industries in order to do a similar process for many different products.

The key to forming a successful analogy, like in the case of animal carcasses and cars, is what some researchers call the systematicity principle. This is to see beyond the surface and try to find connections which might not be apparent at first look. What you have to realize is that independent facts themselves don’t matter that much. What is important is the connected knowledge.

How to make a good analogy

The thing is that good analogies can often be quite abstract. What you need to pay attention to are the similarities in the relations of the different actors and elements in a system. One example that can be used to illustrate this is comparing the flow of electrons in an electrical circuit to the flow of people in a crowded subway tunnel. Here the electrons themselves do not resemble people at all on the surface, however if you take a closer look, then the higher-order relations between these things will become apparent.

Once you grasp these relations between relations, you can apply the analogy to create some interesting solutions to problems. How can you use the analogy of people going through a subway passage to inform you on electron flows?

Imagine a crowded subway tunnel with huge crowds of people going through it on their way to catch their subway train. If you add a very narrow gate in a subway tunnel, then this will act as an obstacle for the people to pass through. They will have to line up and start passing one by one, which means that the rate at which the people pass through there decreases. You can apply this as an analogy to electrons. If you add a resistor to a circuit, this will cause the rate of flow of electrons to decrease.

By thinking in terms of these higher-order relations, you can see the linkages on a deeper level. One of these deeper level analogies that ended up revolutionizing how we work in the world was comparing what is on a computer screen to a physical desktop. If you start to think of your screen as akin to a desktop, then it can give you ideas on how to organize things. This is a deeper connection that Alan Kay came up with at the Xerox PARC Laboratories, and one that Steve Jobs saw great potential in.

Another example are the connections between water and economics. In 1949, Bill Phillips, an economist from New Zealand, tried to simulate the flow of the economy by using the flow of water as an analogy. In order to do this, he constructed an analog computer called the MONIAC, which regulated this flow of water.

This was possible because he used the analogy of money as a liquid that was flowing through the economic system, and the economic system itself as a form of plumbing. This type of analogy came to be called hydraulic macroeconomics.

A similar concept had been used previously in the Soviet Union. In 1936, Vladimir Lukyanov built the Water Integrator, an early analog computer. This idea came to him after he became familiar with several different theoretical frameworks on analogies. One of these was the work of Nikolai Pavlovsky who surmised the possibility of replacing one physical process with another. This can be done if these two things are described by the same mathematical equation and has been called the principle of analogy in modeling.

Lukyanov was stuck trying to find a solution to one incredibly important problem. He had been working as an engineer on the construction of a railroad, but was facing the issue of the concrete cracking quite frequently, which slowed down the construction work quite significantly and caused many issues with its quality.

What Lukyanov did was to use the flow of water as an analogy for the thermal processes that were behind the cracking of the concrete. In order to put this analogy into practice, he built the Water Integrator, which was a complex machine using the flow of water to calculate differential equations. Once this proved successful in this specific case, this type of machine was then applied to other problems in a variety of fields, in the Soviet Union and abroad.

Here, you can quite clearly see the 3 steps in practice. Lukyanov combined different types of knowledge on analogical thinking (such as the work done by Pavlovsky), which then gave him the idea to use the analogy of water flows to model thermal processes. This was the Mapping Step and the Application Step. Later, this analogy was generalized, and applied in many other domains. This was the Learning Step.

Analogies can be abstract

The examples I described show how more and more abstract analogies can arrive at pretty good solutions to many types of problems. These can then sometimes be generalized in order to be applied to solve a variety of challenges in different fields. The key to forming good analogies between things that at first glance seem unrelated is to strip away the factors that are irrelevant and see it all on a more abstract, conceptual level.

For example, think of the analogy of the flow of electric current in a wire, and how in many ways it is physically similar to the flow of fluid in a pipe. This is because heat and fluid follow similar physical laws. These similarities then have been applied in the study of many types of things that have been termed transport phenomena.

Transport phenomena concern the exchange of such things as mass, charge or momentum in different systems. The basic insight for their study is that you can determine the properties of one of the systems studied by modeling it through a different type of system (electricity and water for example).

You can sometimes get even more abstract, such as with the analogy between the flow of people in a subway tunnel and the flow of electrons on a circuit. However, the more abstract the model gets (the more abstract the analogies are), the less it will most likely be able to explain and the less applicability there will be to create new solutions. The ones that have more observable shared features are usually the things, which have the closest parallels (but not always, and also the parallels which are more high-level can also be significant).

When trying to apply analogies you need to keep some things in mind. You have to be realistic about the model you are using and decide what it can and cannot explain. Which things are really good analogies for this problem and which aren’t? There is a spectrum of analogies, ranging from perfect ones, to ones that are wholly misleading.

What is a good analogy? There are always two things at play here: how well you know the source system and how representative it is. There is a trade-off between these two things. Some things you know well might not be that representative of the problem you are trying to solve and vice versa.

One thing is clear: in order for the source analogy to be a good one, you need to know a lot about it. If you are applying an analogy, which you don’t know much about, you risk missing some essential elements of it, which could really skew the results.

Is this a good analogy or a bad one?

So when you are going through the process of deciding whether to apply this or that analogy, you have to go through two steps. These are done in parallel to the three steps of forming an analogy (Mapping, Applying, Learning):

1) Decide
2) Adapt

How to decide whether the analogy fits? Let’s say that we want to use the people in a crowded subway tunnel analogy in order to improve the way we manage the flow of electrons in an electrical circuit. How do we decrease the flow of people in a subway tunnel? By adding a gate. Can this be applied to the flow of electrons? Yes, you can. What can you use as a gate for this? A resistor.

The important thing here is not whether a resistor is structurally the same as a gate, or a person is somehow the same as an electron, but instead the similarity of the relationship between a subway tunnel, people, and a gate, to that of electric circuits, electrons, and resistors. If those relationships are indeed similar, then the analogy has the potential to be applied successfully. Here, both the Decide and Adapt steps are good to go.

Now let’s try to see whether we can do something interesting with another analogy, one between the postal system and the internet analogy. With this analogy, people compare the internet to the postal system, where letters are akin to the packets of data that are used to send information on the internet.

In the process of examining this analogy, you determine that at the moment you don’t find any applicability. Maybe this particular analogy can be used only for its descriptive power, but has no practical purposes. Remember the two main functions of analogies: understanding and problem solving. Maybe the postal system/internet analogy is only good for understanding, while the subway/electric circuit analogy also had applications for problem solving.

This means that the first analogy helped you to solve a particular problem, while the second one could only be used to help you understand how the target system works. You decided to use the first one, but discarded the other one for problem solving. However, even the analogy you did take on board, you needed to adapt in order to make it fit for your purpose.

Always keep in mind that you should be careful with what types of analogies you use and when you use them. This will be looked at in a future post.

Read More:
Go back and read the first installment in the series on thinking in analogies like Steve Jobs:
How to think in analogies.

How to use the first principle thinking method of Elon Musk:
A short introduction to first principles thinking.

Note: Some of these ideas are based on more theoretical work of researchers such as Philip Johnson-Laird, Keith Holyak or Dedre Gertner.

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