Simon Sheridan – Page 53

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

Humans have a cognitive bias for linear functions. One of the ways in which this manifests is that we expect the magnitude of the cause and the magnitude of the effect to be equal. This expectation works well in everyday situations. If you throw a rock, the more effort you put into the throw, the further the rock will travel. The larger the rock, the heavier you expect it to weigh etc. Linear functions, or at least what we perceive us as linear functions, form the basis for everyday life. Much of science education involves teaching the student to overcome this bias and understand alternative functions.

As the corona event unfolded earlier this year, various experts, and even the Chancellor of Germany, who is, after all, a scientist by training, took to the media to remind us that pandemics need to be understood as exponential functions. We heard all about the R0, the doubling time of cases and the possibly explosive growth of infections.

Nevertheless, most of the media presented the corona statistics as cumulative graphs rather than as log graphs. The cumulative graph, of course, looks linear thus satisfying our non-scientific preferences. It also looks scarier. A feature that appeals to the modern media.

So, we like linear functions. We expect the punishment to fit the crime. We demand an eye for an eye. We want a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. And when the government takes an extreme measure like locking down civil society, we expect that this must be in response to a genuine, highly dangerous threat. Only the most dire situation could justify such an unprecedented measure, we think to ourselves.

It was this expectation that formed my initial confusion about the corona event back when it was still mostly taking place in China. China had shut down an entire city on hours’ notice. We heard stories about people being welded in their apartments and other extreme measures. The assumption would be that this new virus must be super deadly.

But even in the early days of the pandemic, this didn’t make sense. The statistics didn’t look that bad. The case fatality rate seemed to be between 1-2% and the deaths were mostly among the elderly. It looked like a bad flu virus.

I started to look for other explanations. I started to wonder whether there wasn’t some political crisis going on in China. Perhaps it was a political thing. Maybe a civil war was breaking out in Wuhan. Maybe it was the latest move in the US-China trade war. Or maybe the Chinese government was trying to cover up what was really a health emergency and the official statistics were wrong.

Slowly, like green slime dripping down a wall, the virus leaked into our lives in the West.

By mid-March, it still didn’t look that bad. Epidemiological reports based on the evidence available at that time were estimating around a 1% case fatality rate that would likely fall by an order of magnitude because that’s what always happens with respiratory viral pandemics. It was going to be bad but not astronomically bad. Probably a little worse than the influenza pandemic in 2017 that was estimated to have killed 1.25 million people worldwide.

Western governments at the time seemed to agree with this diagnosis of the situation. Our leaders pushed back against a rising tide of fear that was being fed by an increasingly voracious media. They tried to reassure the public that the situation could be handled without the extreme measures seen in China.

The PR battle lasted about two weeks. Then, seemingly in unison, western governments rolled over and we went into preparations for the lockdown. Neil Ferguson’s doomsday model was splattered all over the media and other models were found that predicted all kinds of awful outcomes. From that point right up until now there was nothing but wall-to-wall fear mongering in the media. The cool, calm, objective voices of the epidemiologists were drowned out by a growing tide of hysteria.

Around that time I decided to spend what I thought was going to be ten minutes investigating how we test for the corona virus. I am a trained linguist and worked briefly in that capacity before switching to a job testing software. So, I was professionally curious to see how the medical profession does its testing for something that was becoming a potentially world-changing event.

That ten minutes turned into several hours. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The tests used to detect corona virus were much much weaker than I had expected. As I delved deeper, I learned that much of the testing around viruses in general was weak and flimsy. This eventually led me all the way back to the germ theory of disease. To Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp. It seemed to me that the victory of the germ theory of disease, something I had learned in school and forgotten about since, was nowhere near conclusive. At best, viruses were an edge case in that theory. But more to the point for the current crisis, the test techniques just didn’t seem strong enough to justify shutting down society.

To get from the virus to the thing we actually care about – illness – requires a chain of inference and at each step in the chain there is ambiguity and doubt. The PCR test that we use to determine an ‘infection’ (like seemingly all of the testing around viruses, it doesn’t conclusively prove an infection) matches your sample against a somewhat arbitrary genetic sequence that a virologist thinks identifies a virus. The evidence that that genetic sequence actually identifies the virus is not conclusive and the evidence that the virus actually causes an illness is also not conclusive. Because of this, there is a chance that the whole chain is invalid.

In the next post in this series, I will go into more detail about the PCR test and how it has been the decisive feature of the corona event. This test became ubiquitous in the last two decades. The shift to it as the main method of viral detection coincided with the setting up of a worldwide influenza surveillance program run out of the WHO. It is this infrastructure and this bureaucratic system that sprang into life at the very beginning of the corona event to produce the ‘infection’ statistics that have become an everyday part of our lives.

Imagine installing a fire alarm in a theatre when you knew it would go off sometimes even if there was no fire. Is that a smart thing to do? No, it’s not. It might cause a panic and people would be injured or killed as a result. But that’s what happened in the last couple of decades. We constructed an alarm system of questionable reliability and accuracy. It has been waiting to go off for twenty years and this year it finally went off.

I have been in a state of denial about all this. Surely, I couldn’t be right. Surely, somewhere there were people doing proper testing that conclusively proved these things. I’m still hoping somebody can show me the light and restore my faith in the system.

However, as the corona event has panned out, I have realised that what I learned was true. I’ve seen experts on television admit they have no gold standard test for the corona virus. Leading health bureaucrats have openly admitted in the media that they don’t have any firm data on the proportion of false positives or false negatives (because they don’t have a gold standard test by which they could establish those rates).

The truly strange thing to my mind that is that nobody seems to be trying to hide these facts. In the minds of these public health officials, shutting down entire societies is apparently not a problem and the fact that the accuracy of the tests is unknown doesn’t even matter. It’s better to be safe than sorry. (Really? Does anybody feel safe at the moment? And I have a feeling we are going to be sorry about what we’ve done).

Even by the sketchy veracity of all this test data, the corona pandemic has not proven to be anywhere near the doomsday predictions given to us in March. In fact, it has panned out exactly as the epidemiologists said it would. The case fatality rate looks like it will end up about 0.1%. It looks like global fatalities will be less than influenza in 2017. Despite this now overwhelming evidence base, as of the start of July we are still in hysteria-mode. Particularly here in Australia (and especially where I live in Melbourne) where efforts to eliminate the virus are starting to fray.

Because I came to understand how the testing works very early on, my perspective on the pandemic has been very different to most people. For that reason, it might be that things I have noticed will be of interest. Or maybe the reader will think I am a crank. Either way, better to be interesting than boring.

I start from the proposition that the corona event is a kind of mass hysteria. It’s the kind of thing you see in groups of people quite regularly and the internet has made us all one big group now and allowed the hysteria to spread around the globe instantaneously. I assume the testing is weak and that the test data has never shown any evidence that corona was something to be overly worried about. Where evidence was shown, it was cherry picked edge cases that were never a threat to the general public but which were published time and again in the media and on social media with the effect of spreading fear and panic.

Starting from these assumptions, I draw some very different conclusions about what has happened this year. I’ll expand on these ideas in subsequent posts but here is an overview of what I see as the main points.

Cargo-Cult Science: As a society, we are now in an era of cargo-cult science. The level of scientific and mathematical understanding among the general public appears to be woefully inadequate to make sense of a viral pandemic and the institutions of science, in particular in the biomedical sciences, have been corrupted by money and power. Even otherwise intelligent people failed to question the statistics they were being fed. It turns out that not a single statistic about the corona event can be taken on face value. “Infection rates”, “death rates”, “excess mortality”. All of them need quotation marks around them because they do not mean what they might mean at first glance. You have to take the time to understand how they are being measured. Then you have to put them into a historical context so that you can properly interpret what they signify about the health risk in question. The great Richard Feynman once said “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” As a society, we have swallowed whatever the experts told us and convinced ourselves it was science. That is not science. (Note: there were, of course, experts who got it right but we didn’t listen to them).
The decline of traditional media: most people don’t have the time to spend understanding complex scientific concepts. That is where the media might have been able to help. But the traditional media has completely failed in what should be its main role of helping the public to make sense of what was happening. When we needed cool, calm, trusted voices we got hysterical fear mongering. The traditional media, now nothing more than a clickbait generator, completely failed in its ostensible job. Or, maybe it never was that way. Maybe the media was always just an extension of government. Maybe the media’s primary job here was simply to justify the government’s position. If so, they did a fantastic job. Scary good.
The rise of social media: social media, which has been a big driver behind the demise of traditional media, allowed the lightning dissemination of fear and panic around the globe. I don’t believe politicians wanted to go to lockdown. I think they were forced into it by the growing hysteria. They knew they would be held politically accountable for each and every death which would spread via social media posts. Imagine being a politician and suddenly the public was blaming you for every death from influenza or rhinovirus? It would be absurd, but there wouldn’t be much you could do about it. The lockdown was politically necessary because it shifted the politics away from people blaming politicians to politicians being able to take all the credit for “preventing deaths”. In actual fact, there is prima facie evidence that the lockdowns caused more deaths than they saved.
Economic decline: the pandemic represents a natural consequence of decades of economic decline. This is most obvious in the US where that decline has had significant political ramifications. In Australia, our economy has been running on real estate, immigration and higher education bubbles for a long time now. We deluded ourselves into thinking we had avoided the fate of other countries in the west. There is a story to be told about how that economic decline made us more susceptible to illness.
Folk language vs the language of science: the question of whether the virus and the illness are “new” is of personal interest to me because it is a classic example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that I studied in my linguistics degree. That hypothesis is that language influences thought. In the case of the “novel” corona virus it certainly did that. It turns out that the whole idea of a new virus or a new illness is scientifically questionable but was extremely important in shaping the public discourse and the subsequent hysteria.
The denial of death: our response to the corona event has been massively out of proportion to the actual risk. In that sense, it is a mass hysteria. Like all hysteria, it is driven by deep seated cultural and emotional issues. One of most important of those I believe to be a fear of death and actually a denial of death in Western culture. I’ll discuss this in more detail.
Germaphobia, biophobia and divorce from nature: somehow humans survived for hundreds of thousands of years without even knowing that viruses existed. Ever since the discovery of viruses, it was noted that people projected onto them deep seated and irrational fears. Germaphobia is tied in with the denial of death (and therefore the denial of life).
A Kafkaesque nightmare: if the corona event was a work of fiction, the author would be Kafka. It is in large part a bureaucratic nightmare driven by the influenza surveillance programs instituted by the WHO and the public health bureaucrats in various countries. Those programs set up the testing infrastructure and it is that testing infrastructure which has driven the hysteria. The corona event represents the ascendancy of virologists and public health bureaucrats at the expense of doctors and epidemiologists. I will explain this further.
An epidemic of testing: In past pandemic alerts (SARS 1, swine flu etc), all the infrastructure was in place but the missing ingredient was the test. For the corona event we had a test far earlier than in past pandemics and that test drove the whole shebang. I’ll talk about that in the next post of the series.
The age of abstraction: we all have an innate aversion to visible, tangible illness that is biologically hardwired. But the corona test and other statistics are all abstractions. The corona event was an abstraction layer on top of our biological aversion to disease. This is part of a broader tendency in modern society where abstractions rule. We care about GDP and inflation instead of actual wealth. We trade futures and ‘financial instruments’ instead of actual products. Now we worry about “infections” instead of actual illness.

One thing I will not cover in these posts, although I think it is arguably the most important thing anybody can do to educate themselves about the corona event, is the test techniques themselves. The best resource I have found on this is David Crowe’s website – https://theinfectiousmyth.com/

David passed away recently from cancer so I am not sure how long his site will stay up but the articles and the podcasts give a comprehensive look at all elements of testing for viruses including the establishment (or lack thereof) of an actual cause between a virus and an illness. His paper on the corona event is a great place to get an overview of his position – https://theinfectiousmyth.com/book/CoronavirusPanic.pdf

Another person who has done an excellent job explaining the testing is Andrew Kaufmann who has some great material up on youtube. This one in particular is a great starting point on the PCR tests – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XST-nOgX-0

Note that both David and Andrew have some very alternative views on the subject of viruses. If you can’t get past that you’re probably not going to enjoy this series of posts. Having multiple explanatory frameworks is the norm in science. The fact that the germ theory exponents have out muscled the terrain theorists has less to do with science and more to do with politics as far as I can tell.

If you want to place eternal faith in the germ theory of disease that is fine by me but please don’t tell me that your position is “scientific” while mine is not. Science is about questioning assumptions, asking questions and challenging explanations. I hope you will challenge the explanations I give here and I welcome and encourage all constructive discussion in the comments.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 2: An Epidemic of Testing

The Coronapocalypse Part 3: The Panic Principle

The Coronapocalypse Part 4: The Denial of Death

The Coronapocalypse Part 5: Cargo Cult Science

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy

The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!

The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale

The Man in the Mask

The spy was there. Johnson spotted him immediately while walking out of the hotel foyer. Same guy as before. Couldn’t those idiots have sent somebody different or at least given this one a disguise? Amateurs. He’d have to lose him again.

He had the quick-change outfit on beneath his suit jacket. Record time for a change was thirty-one seconds. He did it in forty. Suit jacket, fake shirt, fake glasses off. Flat cap, sunglasses and earphones on. The mask had to stay. There was no inconspicuous way to pull your face off in the middle of a busy city street.

Johnson weaved through the lunchtime crowds until he reached the edge of the CBD and crossed over to the park where he would meet the informant. He glanced over his shoulder. The spy was gone.

He smiled.

He’d become very good at his job. The mask and disguises were important. But it was the little things. How you walked, how you talked, how you stood. That was his skill. His expertise. They had given him an old man’s mask but he could make himself look any age. That’s why the spy would never catch him.

He sat down on the park bench and signaled for the informant to approach by placing the brown leather bag with silver hardware beside him.

The early spring sunshine felt warm on his face. Well, not his face. His mask. He’d forgotten about the mask again.

He reached up and touched it. It felt so real. Wonderful piece of technology. He remembered when they were introduced. He was one of the first employees to get one. At first, he wished they hadn’t given him an old man’s mask but he learned the part quickly. He excelled at it.

He checked his watch. The informant was late. He scanned the area. Then a knot in his stomach almost bent him in two. The spy had walked out from behind the fountain straight ahead and was striding towards him. Johnson looked around for an escape but there was nothing to do. Nowhere to go. He’d finally been caught.

Best to play it cool. He pretended not to look as the spy sat down.

“I’m your informant.”

“Don’t lie. You’ve been following me for months. Years.”

“There’s something you need to know.”

Johnson turned to look as the spy reached inside his jacket and pulled out a hand mirror. He held the mirror up then flipped it around to point at Johnson.

Johnson reeled backwards and inspected his face. The mask had degraded. Badly. Great crevasses ran this way and that weaving their way through lesser wrinkles. He would have to get a new one. The agency would see to it.

He gathered himself and sat up straight. This spy was not going to get the better of him.

“And just what do I need to know?” he asked in his authoritative old man’s voice.

The spy looked at him sadly.

“You’re not wearing a mask.”

The Lockdown

[Note: this story was originally written for twitter and is broken into tweet size chunks].

The year is 2030. Melbourne has just come out of its 3rd lockdown of the year due to the great Rhinovirus pandemic. You put on your mask, grab the car keys and head out the front door. You close the car door, sit for a while and reminisce.

Coming out of lockdown is not how it used to be you think to yourself. Once upon a time, it meant going back to the local cafe or restaurant. But those don’t exist anymore. The last small business closed its doors in 2027 due to the great Adenovirus pandemic.

You do miss those small businesses. What’s left of the Australian economy now consists of about a dozen mega-corporations. You’re on your way to one now to pick up something for the house. You park the car and stop off to grab a sausage on your way into the store.

While you’re standing the queue a nurse in a hazmat suit walks past and your phone beeps signalling that you’re due for your weekly vaccine shot.

“How many new this week?” you ask.

“Thirty,” she replies meaning there’s been thirty new sub-strains added to the vaccine since last week.

She jabs the needle in your arm. You’ve had so many of these that you barely notice the little prick of pain any more. The vaccine covers 14,397 different sub-strains of the hundred major respiratory virus groups. Well, make that 14,427 different sub-strains.

The vaccine used to be a yearly shot but the government made them weekly in 2028 following the great Enterovirus pandemic. Despite the increased frequency of the vaccines, the number of lockdowns has also increased. There’s now usually at least six per year.

With lockdowns so common, the government needed to make enforcement easier. In 2026, following the great Respiratory Syncytial Virus pandemic, the government installed automated locking for every residence. The locks are controlled from the pandemic response centre.

After your trip to the store you walk back in your front door and take off your mask. A pressure builds in your nose. You grab it and try to hold your breath but you can’t stop it. You sneeze loudly. A simultaneous click can be heard from the doors and windows of your house as the locks snap into place.

A red light starts flashing and a siren goes off. Following the great Parainfluenza pandemic of 2029, the government introduced cough and sneeze sensors in every residence. Once the sensor goes off you are locked in your house until a test team visits and takes a sample.

You sit and wait.

The test team, dressed in hazmat suits, arrive within thirty minutes.

Thankfully, you test negative to the 26,399 viral strains in the database. However, you will have to spend fourteen days in mandatory quarantine.

Your lockdown isn’t over yet.

Is agile software development a living design process?

I recently wrote a post outlining some principles for doing Living Design Process, a concept developed by permaculturist, Dan Palmer. These were inspired by my experience with a house renovation and permaculture-inspired garden project.

As I was reading back over the post, I realised that these principles were familiar to me from my work in agile software development.

In theory, agile software development should be an example of a living design process. In practice, it’s not. I’ll use the 7 principles from my blog post to explain why.

Principle 1: Embed yourself in the context

We do this pretty well in agile software development. We have co-located, cross-functional teams that share knowledge. Teams usually struggle on two points.

Firstly, we often don’t have the high level business context i.e. why is our company spending money in this area. This is usually because the company itself doesn’t have a coherent strategy. It’s exacerbated by the fact that (upper) management is not part of the cross functional team and therefore we don’t have direct contact with them.

Secondly, we often don’t have the customer or user context. Sometimes this is because the customer doesn’t exist yet. Sometimes it’s because we simply don’t have access to them. The most fulfilling projects I have worked on were when we had direct access to the customer.

Principle 2: Have high level goals, not specific ones

A high level goal might be something like “provide customers with an easy way to sign up for electricity connection”. Building software to achieve that goal is already a solution. A very expensive solution.

I have been on a couple of projects where a non-IT solution would have been preferable but we’d already assembled a software development team and couldn’t change tack.

Some companies are spending more time on product validation before the IT build begins. But most companies just start writing software. They move straight into specific goals and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Principle 3: Start small and iterate

We are getting better at this. There’s movement away from monolithic systems and product development is experimenting with ideas around MVP and build, measure, learn.

However, iterating implies starting with a functional first attempt and then re-visiting it to tweak, strengthen and harden it based on feedback. This re-visiting happens very rarely. It is perceived as “re-work” and seen as waste. As a result, there is a stigma attached to it.

Most agile projects have way too many features in the pipeline and not enough time to deliver them. We are too busy churning out new features to properly iterate on the solution.

Principle 4: Go Slow

This whole concept is anathema to most software delivery teams. We have “delivery managers”. We track velocity and cycle time. We use kanban boards to make sure that we are maximising flow. Everybody wants to know how we can go faster, not slower.

This is built into the DNA of corporations. Budgets are drawn up and expenditure is fixed in advance. Each project has a fixed amount of time and money before it even begins. You simply don’t have the luxury of releasing something, taking feedback and then reacting.

Principle 5: Maximise Optionality

Despite some good steps towards reducing complexity such as having “2 pizza teams”, the average software development project is still too complex. As a result, we are constantly bombarded by events that threaten delivery of the project. These include technical considerations but also internal organisational issues.

This results in a defensive mindset. There’s no room for keeping an eye out for opportunities. There’s no time to learn.

Principle 6: Embrace Randomness

Organisations have their own political structures. People have to lobby and compete for resources to get a project underway. In order to do that they have to tell a compelling story.

Randomness changes that story. This causes a political headache for whoever is advocating the story. Good middle managers quickly learn how to spin these changes and adjust the narrative. But this takes time and energy and you only get a couple of chances to change the story. After that, you appear as wishy-washy or incompetent.

Randomness also becomes harder to incorporate the more code you have written. If you change your mind and force people to throw away their work and start again, you burn some goodwill.

As a result of these dynamics, teams are averse to randomness.

Principle 7: Find the right people

In most organisations, teams are put together on an ad hoc basis. (Note: there are a few organisations that have experimented with allowing employees to self select onto a team.)

As team size is still too big and turnover is quite high due to holidays and people leaving the company, the odds of putting together a genuinely high performing team are very low.

The reason our teams are bigger than they need to be is to hedge against the possibility that two or three people quit the company at the same time and thus threaten the delivery of the project. Companies prioritise stability and predictability over high performance.

In summary, agile software development falls short of being a living design process on the following grounds:-

We don’t have a holistic approach. Even when teams are told about the business goals, they are not actively involved in shaping those goals. You are there to deliver software, not to develop a business. The business still thinks of IT as a delivery function. In Jeff Patton’s words, this is the vendor-client anti-pattern.
We don’t have the high level goal in mind. By the time a team is formed, somebody else has determined both the business focus and the high level technical implementation. Individual team members are not encouraged to think about these things.
We don’t iterate properly. The focus is on getting as many features in before you run out of time and money. This is called a Feature Factory.
We often have fixed dates which prevent an open-ended exploration of the problem space.
Teams are still too big and are randomly put together.

Many of these issues reinforce each other. For example, because teams are too big there’s more complexity and more expense. Because it’s complex, you are always on the back foot and in a defensive mindset. Because it’s expensive, you run out of time and money quicker. Because you’re running out of time and money, you can’t take the time to explore the problem space. Therefore, you can’t capitalise on opportunities. Therefore, you can’t pivot properly in the face of new information etc.

Some of these problems are hardwired into the organisation. The corporate governance structure imposes specific limitations on how funding is granted, who is to be held responsible for decisions etc. The most interesting companies in this space such as Gore and Semco have addressed this issue by changing their governance structures.

At one of my earlier jobs, the CIO got up in front of the IT department and told us that “the business would never become agile”. Many years later it’s increasingly obvious to me that this is where the problem lies. We have pushed as much as possible from the bottom up. The final steps towards a “true agile” are now at the organisational level.

Living Design Process Part 2

Following on from Part 1 of this blog, in this post I’ll attempt to extract some of the principles I (think I) followed in my house and garden project in Werribee based on Dan Palmer’s Living Design Process workshop.

Principle 1: Embed Yourself in the Context

I lived in the house in Werribee for six months before undertaking the renovation. I got to know the climate, the prevailing winds, the house’s orientation to the sun, where were the nice places to sit at different times and seasons, which rooms I liked best for certain activities, which parts of the house were in good condition and which weren’t etc. This understanding was invaluable when it came to making decisions on the renovation such as placement of windows, type of cladding, type of insulation etc.

In the garden, I came to see which areas were sunny, shady, exposed to the wind, how the soil was in different parts of the garden (much more variety than I would have thought), what sort of trees grew in the area (based on observing neighbouring yards) etc. While playing around with vegetable patches, I found the areas of the garden where things grew best. For example, on the west fence there was a space where the previous owner had kept birds in a large birdcage. Anything I planted there grew very strongly which I can only guess is because the soil had years and years of manure to fertilise it. By contrast, there were rocky areas at the back fence where things struggled to grow at all.

The knowledge gained from being in the place allows you to create something truly in tune with its surroundings. This is part of the reason that the cookie cutter housing estates we build these days seem so wrong. They are not in harmony with their environment. They are centrally planned designs that are inserted into an environment without attunement to local conditions.

Principle 2: Have High Level Goals, Not Specific Ones

This enables you to change your mind based on new information. When I first moved into the house at Werribee, I knew I wanted to get some gardening experience and to experiment with energy efficiency measures on the house. Originally, I thought this meant growing annual vegetables and retrofitting the house. But as I got to know more about the context, including my preferences and desires, the way I achieved these goals changed. I ended up renovating instead of retrofitting and I planted an Edible Forest Garden instead of raised vegetable beds. I still achieved the same high level goals, but in a very different way. The result was something that I was much happier with.

Principle 3: Start Small and Iterate

With the garden, I started with a few raised beds and then gradually added more. As I got sick of watering I explored irrigation options such as Ollas and drip lines. Then I moved to wicking beds. Eventually I transitioned to the edible forest garden idea, but I planted only a few guilds at a time over about a two year period.

I (accidentally) pursued the same strategy with the house improvements. Starting by renovating the front of the house, waiting a year or so and then gradually finishing it off.

Starting small and iterating helps to reduce risk because you’re breaking everything up into small chunks. This spreads the cost out over time and allows you to maximise your learning. You keep the things that work and ditch the things that don’t.

Things that I kept: using IBC totes as water tanks, planting olive and apple trees (which seemed to grow best), cold composting (low labor but longer lead times), building onto existing frames, my builder (he was great), the plasterer, the second plumber I used and planting local native species in the garden.

Things that I ditched after they didn’t work: the first plumber I used (an asshole), solar air heaters (good idea but not practical in this context), raised garden beds (more work than I really wanted), hot composting (a lot of work that isn’t really necessary when you can get the same results from “cold” composting).

Principle 4: Go “slow”

So much of what we do in the modern world seems to have unnecessary haste built in. I see this all the time in my work. Because everything needs to be done yesterday we put together large teams to try and get it done. That adds massive complexity and risk which is why many projects outright fail to deliver.

For the house renovation, I was in a position to take a slow approach. We had a very small team of myself, the builder and a couple of extra tradesmen. This allowed a very low stress approach the be taken. Low stress is exactly what you want when you’re dealing with complex things like house construction and gardening. The higher the stress, the more likely you will make a decision you regret.

Going slow allows you time to reflect on what you’ve done. To observe it and understand how it changes things. As you add things to a context you open up new possibilities and close off others. We think we can imagine these possibilities in advance, but the reality is we’ll always miss something. It’s not until you’ve done something that you can fully appreciate what it means, digest it and incorporate it into the next round of decisions.

Principle 5: Maximise Optionality

There is a basic equation which states that the longer you wait to make a decision, the more information you have. Thus, it’s good to put off decisions as long as possible. When you have the most information, you can make the best choice.

This is known as increasing optionality. As you put certain things into place, new options open up for consideration. From my house renovation, this was best captured by the french door episode. Installing the french doors led to a series of options opening up which would not have been possible if we had simply installed a standard window like I had originally planned.

Similarly, by starting my gardening efforts with only a few raised garden beds I was able to keep my options for the rest of the garden open. This allowed me to pivot once I knew that the edible forest garden concept was the right one for me.

Principle 6: Embrace Randomness

In our culture we have this idea that randomness is bad. But randomness is only bad because we orientate ourselves to it incorrectly.

Let’s take a house build. Most houses are built via a big upfront planning process. You have the architectural drawings and layout, all the supporting diagrams, you get together a big schedule of materials and buy them all upfront, you line up the different trades as best you can to minimise downtime. You plan for the most optimal sequence of events.

As a result of this way of working, any randomness, anything that happens that you didn’t expect is a negative. It throws your plans out. Maybe it rained on the building site and some materials were damaged. Now you have to buy more. Maybe you ordered the wrong size door (then someone like me gets to buy it really cheap). All kinds of things can happen and they inevitably cause delays and put your perfectly ordered sequence of events out of whack. We didn’t get the wiring done in time so now the plasterer can’t come in and we have to push back the plumber etc etc.

But if you embed yourself in the context, go “slow”, start small and iterate, break things up into small chunks and maximise information you position yourself to adapt to change. This means you can benefit from randomness.

When people began to visit the house after the renovation was complete, many complimented me on the french doors. “Good decision” they would say. “Those look great”. But I didn’t choose the french doors. The french doors chose me. If they hadn’t come up for sale, I probably would have bought standard lounge room windows. So, I can’t really take credit for the decision.

What I can take credit for is being open to possibility. When the french doors presented themselves to me, I was able to capitalise because I hadn’t made the decision upfront. I was free to imagine what they could do for the house. Picking up brand new doors for a fraction of the price is what we would call “good luck”. What it really is, is being able to turn randomness to your own advantage.

When you have a big upfront plan, you have no “good luck”. You only have “bad luck”. In fact, you’re almost guaranteed to have bad luck. That’s why almost all large projects with big upfront design run over time and budget. We don’t usually like to hold people responsible for these overruns. After all, it’s just “bad luck”. In reality, the process is the problem. Big upfront design causes you to suffer from randomness. Small, iterative, ongoing design allows you to benefit from randomness.

Principle 7: Find the right people

The builder I used for the renovation was recommended to me by a friend. This gave us a personal connection alongside the business relationship that we were developing. We met several times before starting and I got to know and like his approach. He had done this kind of thing before and I could tell that he enjoyed his job and wasn’t just in it to maximise his revenue. He was an active partner throughout the renovation and made many important design decisions.

Long and complex projects inevitably have ups and downs and you want people alongside you who can ride it out. Living Design implies the creation of something that is deeply meaningful. If all parties aren’t able to find meaning in the project, the project itself will suffer. You need to have people who find meaning in their work. You also need to be willing to allow them the freedom and space to contribute their own meaning. That means giving up some control and putting your faith in others.