In Episode 6 of the Traction Heroes podcast, Harry and I explored Chesterton’s fence — a simple yet profound idea that has important implications for leaders navigating complex, high-stakes changes. The gist: when change is needed, don’t start by destroying what you don’t understand. Assume things are the way they are because of reasons. Once you understand the reasons, you’re more likely to avoid unintended consequences when making changes. Here’s the passage I read from Chesterton’s The Thing: In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. Catastrophic outcomes happen for many reasons. One of the worst is what Harry called stupidity: “a result of a series of actions that lead to an outcome that’s the opposite of what you say you want, under conditions of self-deception.” Perhaps if more people knew about Chesterton’s fence there would be less suffering caused by stupidity. As always, I learned a lot from bouncing these ideas off Harry. Among other things, he responded with an intriguing followup book. Perhaps that will be the subject of a future episode. Stay tuned for more!

Louis Rosenfeld interviewed Harry Max and me for his Rosenfeld Review podcast. The subject? Harry and my podcast, Traction Heroes. We recorded this conversation late in 2024, before we’d shared the first episode. This interview lays out Traction Heroes’s backstory. It’s fitting that we shared it in Lou’s show, since he published Harry’s book Managing Priorities and my Living in Information and Duly Noted. The Rosenfeld Review Podcast (Rosenfeld Media) · Traction Heroes with Harry Max & Jorge Arango Listen on SoundCloud

It’s hard to believe, but we’re almost at the first quarter mark for the humanities crash course. Up this week: Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars. I doubled down on the Republic’s fall by watching a classic movie set in this time. Readings The Twelve Caesars is a collection of gossipy biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven emperors of Rome: Julius Caesar: declared dictator for life, ending the Republic. He expanded Rome’s territory and centralized power. Alarmed at his concentration of power, a group of senators assassinated him. Augustus: first emperor; stabilized and reformed the empire and initiated the Pax Romana. Tiberius: capable but reluctant and paranoid. Caligula: mad, capricious, cruel – the caricature of everything that can go wrong when one individual gains unlimited power. Claudius: competent but weak and manipulable. Nero: another monster, tyrannous and decadent. Had artistic pretensions and behaved brutally toward people who didn’t appreciate his “art.” Suetonius blames him for the Great Fire that destroyed much of the city. Galba: elderly and austere; severe and unpopular. Otho: ruled briefly during the Year of the Four Emperors. Decadent and ineffectual; killed himself rather than continue fostering strife. Vitellius: ruled during the same year; also a short and brutal reign. Gluttonous, indulgent, weak-willed. Vespasian: restored order after the civil war. Practical, frugal, and funny. Titus: popular and generous, completed the Colosseum. Ruled well but died young. Domitian: another tyrant. Cruel and megalomaniac. Most of these weren’t good men. As Suetonius makes clear, their depravities were outrageous even for the standards of the time. But their excesses didn’t make them happy: eight were assassinated and two died by suicide. Reading these harrowing biographies raises an obvious question: why would a republic opt to concentrate all authority on one individual given the possibilities for abuse and the inevitable corruption that comes with absolute power? One senses elites understood the risks and expected to pull back. But authoritarianism is a one-way street: [Augustus] twice thought of restoring the republic; first immediately after the overthrow of Antony, remembering that his rival had often made the charge that it was his fault that it was not restored; and again in the weariness of a lingering illness, when he went so far as to summon the magistrates and the senate to his house, and submit an account of the general condition of the empire. Reflecting, however, that as he himself would not be free from danger if he should retire, so too it would be hazardous to trust the State to the control of more than one, he continued to keep it in his hands; and it is not easy to say whether his intentions or their results were the better. His good intentions he not only expressed from time to time, but put them on record as well in an edict in the following words: “May it be my privilege to establish the State in a firm and secure position, and reap from that act the fruit that I desire; but only if I may be called the author of the best possible government, and bear with me the hope when I die that the foundations which I have laid for the State will remain unshaken.” And he realized his hope by making every effort to prevent any dissatisfaction with the new regime. Since the city was not adorned as the dignity of the empire demanded, and was exposed to flood and fire, he so beautified it that he could justly boast that he had found it built of brick and left it in marble. He made it safe too for the future, so far as human foresight could provide for this. I.e., like other tyrants, the Caesars promised to “make the trains run on time” – and people paid for the privilege with their freedom, dignity, values, and in many cases, their lives. Audiovisual Music: Mozart’s Symphonies 39-41. These are extremely familiar works (especially no. 40,) but I still revisited all three. Art: Botticelli and Caravaggio. Again, I was familiar with both painters. Still, I spent some time revisiting their works and lives. Caravaggio was a maladjusted ruffian; had he lived in the 1970s, he probably would’ve been a punk rocker. Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus, via Wikimedia Cinema: given this week’s reading, I took in a classic film that had long been in my to-watch list: Stanley Kubrick’s SPARTACUS, a fictionalized account of a major slave revolt during the last years of the Roman Republic. This isn’t Kubrick’s best. I found Alex North’s score and Kirk Douglas’s performance overbearing. That said, the film is worth watching for its cinematography and the other actors’ performances – especially Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov, who won an Oscar for his role. Reflections As with THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, I approached SPARTACUS not as a historical source but as a way to add texture to the readings. Still, it proved surprisingly relevant. The film offers an answer to the question of why a republic would hand itself over to tyranny: because the previous governance structure had become ineffectual. The Roman Republic had grown too big, rich, complacent, and dysfunctional on the back of gross inequities. The senators – even the “good” ones – had become opportunistic, depraved, and unresponsive to real problems at the core of the system. Against this background, the slave Spartacus unleashed a rampaging rebellion – an agent of chaos that was both symptom and cause. Both the authors of the screenplay and the source novel were communists, and the movie portrays the slaves sympathetically as they upend the social order. (The movie’s most famous scene is an iconic show of solidarity; an obvious response to McCarthyism.) But Spartacus doesn’t offer a path to stability either. All he wants for his people is a way out of a desperate and unjust situation. Which is to say, neither the elites nor “the people” offer a coherent way forward. Meanwhile, the country descends into chaos. Into this vacuum steps a dictator offering order and security. The price? Absolute, unopposed rule. And as always, unchecked power leads to tyranny. Notes on Note-taking I started a note in Obsidian for The Twelve Caesars and used ChatGPT to refine my understanding of the text. For example, I asked for brief summaries of these lives and comparisons between them. The answers helped me recover the big picture after reading twelve biographies back-to-back. Looking for answers to this week’s key question, I asked the LLM, “Why did the Republic end? Why would they hand over unlimited power to these tyrants?” Among other helpful observations, it offered the following, which I share without further comment: Why They Handed Over Unlimited Power Because the cost of not doing so seemed worse. When the Republic failed to deliver peace, justice, or prosperity, people turned to strongmen who could promise them those things—at the price of their freedom. The pattern is sadly familiar in other times and places as well. Up Next Gioia recommends selections from Rumi and the Koran. I’ve read bits of the former but none of the latter, so this will be mostly new to me. Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!

For as long as we’ve had computers, they’ve produced predictable outputs. But AI – in the form of large language models – represents a new kind of unpredictable computing. The key to implementing useful AI solutions is making the most of both paradigms. One of the oldest known computers is the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient device for calculating astronomical events. Given certain inputs, it computed positions based on logic hard-coded in its gears. Traditional software is kind of like that: it determines what to do based on pre-defined conditions. You give the computer input and get predictable outcomes. If a program produces unexpected results, it’s either because the programmer introduced randomness or because there are bugs. Both can be replicated by mirroring the exact conditions that led to the outcome. Because of this, traditional computation is deterministic. Modern AI, such as large language models, represents a new computing paradigm. If you’ve used ChatGPT or Claude, you know you seldom get the same results given the same input. Unlike traditional programs, LLMs don’t follow explicit instructions. Instead, they generate responses by weighting probabilities across a vast network of linguistic relationships. There can be many paths to possible likely responses. This is a new kind of probabilistic computing. Much of what we value about computers is due to their predictability. That’s one reason why so many people find LLMs baffling or objectionable: probabilistic behavior breaks our mental models for how computers work. Probabilistic computing is good for some tasks but not others. Brainstorming is a good use case since you’re explicitly asking for divergent thinking. On the flip side, math requires deterministic approaches. LLMs can do it by offloading computations to deterministic systems like Wolfram Alpha. Prompt engineering is an attempt to constrain probabilistic processing to make LLMs behave more predictably. But it only goes so far: you can’t force LLMs to behave like traditional programs. A better approach is building deterministic software that uses AI at particular junctures for specific tasks. An example is my approach to re-categorizing blog posts: a deterministic program iterates through files, offloading pattern matching to an LLM. The LLM is used only for stuff probabilistic systems do well – the inverse of the Wolfram Alpha approach. This new paradigm offers unprecedented opportunities. But taking advantage of probabilistic systems requires adding some determinism to the mix. You can’t ask ChatGPT to re-organize a website, but you can build scaffolding using traditional approaches that take advantage of what each does best. If you work with content, it behooves you to learn how to combine AI’s probabilistic approach with the traditional deterministic approach. That’s what I’ll be teaching in my hands-on workshop at the IA Conference in Philadelphia in late April. Join me there to learn how to do it.

In week 11 of the humanities crash course, I revisited one of the most influential philosophies of the ancient world: Stoicism. I was already familiar with this material, so I also took the opportunity to revisit another text: the Book of Job. Heavy stuff – and I paired it with an even heavier movie: a modern classic which I’d not yet seen but has become a new favorite. Readings Gioia recommended two readings: Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Epictetus’s Enchiridion, a short manual of advice. I’d read Meditations twice before and was familiar with several of Epictetus’s aphorisms. Both are central works of Stoicism, an ancient philosophy that remains highly relevant. Because I was familiar with the material, I chose to also go beyond the bounds of Gioia’s syllabus by revisiting one of my favorite books of the Bible, the Book of Job. Not only did I read Job itself, but also Mark Larrimore’s The Book of Job: A Biography. The selection wasn’t accidental. Job deals with similar questions as the Stoics, but arrives at different answers. In this section, I’ll provide an overview of the readings, and will get into the parallels and differences in the reflections below. Meditations was written between 161 and 180 CE by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. The book wasn’t meant for publication. Instead, it’s a series of notes-to-self: Marcus is nudging himself to stay on the path of virtue. It’s the same path Epictetus (who was at one point a slave – a very different status from emperor!) lays out in the Enchiridion. Namely, we’re responsible for our experiences of reality. Some things we can control, either fully or partially, and some we can’t control. Trying to control things that are out of our control leads to unhappiness. The Stoics saw the universe as rationally ordered; they aspired to alignment with nature. We must embrace things as they come. This can be very painful – e.g., the death of a loved one. The Stoics saw challenges as opportunities to refine our character, and prescribed exercises such as negative visualization, journaling and reflection, and voluntary discomfort. The Book of Job also focuses on suffering. Job is a rich man blessed with a great life and a thriving family. He worships God. But Satan suggests that God test him: perhaps Job is a fair weather friend. God allows Satan to take everything from Job: his wealth, his family, and ultimately, his health. Three friends come to comfort him, but instead default to the traditional interpretation of suffering: that it must be divine punishment. They insist Job must’ve done something wrong to merit such treatment. Job denies it; they argue in a long poem that forms the bulk of the book. A fourth friend suggests another take: perhaps the suffering is a means for instruction. Eventually, God addresses Job from a whirlwind. His message: as a mere man, Job can’t grok the mysteries of divine will. God is all-powerful; his ways unknowable. So there is no point in asking why. Job takes back his complaining and questioning in one of the book’s most famous passages: Then Job answered the LORD and said: After this follows an awkward prose epilogue where God restores Job’s riches and even gives him a new family. I say ‘awkward’ because it feels different in tone and intent from the rest of the book. (Isn’t this a regression to the ‘divine punishment’ view?) In the Biography, I learned that Job might be the work of several authors. Whether that’s true or not, the prose frames certainly feel different to the rest of the book. Audiovisual Music: Three Haydn symphonies: 45 (Farewell), 94 (Surprise), and 104 (London). I’d heard 94 and 104 before, but 45 was new to me. Of all the major classical composers, Haydn is one I’ve not paid much attention to; these listenings were an invitation to dig deeper. Art: Gioia suggested looking at ancient Roman art and architecture. During my architectural studies, I spent two semesters in Rome and spent time living among these works, so I didn’t dwell much on this subject now. That said, I watched this episode of Rick Steve’s Europe, which is a short and engaging overview: Cinema: I asked Perplexity for movies inspired by the Book of Job. First on its list was Terence Mallick’s THE TREE OF LIFE. I’d never seen a Mallick movie, and this was already on my to-watch list. But what pushed me over the top was seeing it mentioned in The Book of Job: A Biography as a movie that explored these themes. THE TREE OF LIFE is a slow, poetic, and impressionistic meditation on suffering via a portrait of a small-town American family in the 1950s. The movie is relatively recent, so I won’t spoil it. Suffice it to say, family members experience joy and suffering – and like Job, wonder about the meaning of the latter. The intimate documentary style and gorgeous cinematography make for a highly emotional experience – especially for parents. I felt strong echoes of one of my favorite movies, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which is also a slow, poetic, and impressionistic meditation on philosophical themes. There are scenes of astronomical events in THE TREE OF LIFE that could’ve easily been in 2001. Still, I was surprised to learn that Douglas Trumbull (SFX lead for 2001) also worked on THE TREE OF LIFE. Both films also feature transcendent classical music soundtracks. Reflections This week’s works focused on one of the central questions of the human experience: how do we deal with suffering? This isn’t the first time we grapple with this question; suffering is central in Buddhism, and we’ve already read the Dhammapada. The Stoics and Job provide answers from a Western perspective. In many ways, Stoic teachings parallel Buddhism: Both aspire to a clear understanding of reality by accepting what is happening without judgment. Both aim to alleviate suffering by transcending it. Both identify suffering with desire: yearning for things to be different than they are. Both emphasize the dynamic nature of reality – we can’t hold on to things, since everything is in flux. Both advocate dealing with events (either positive or adverse) with equanimity, composure, and dignity. One major difference: Stoicism places more emphasis on becoming the best possible version of oneself, whereas Buddhism emphasizes reducing suffering for all beings. The Book of Job also explores these ideas. But while Stoicism and Buddhism advocate developing tolerance for suffering, Job emphasizes its unknowability. To put it crudely: shit happens; the Stoics and Buddhists prescribe personal development whereas Job prescribes surrender to divine will – i.e., transcending the ego. Mallick’s film is saturated with the latter. The film opens with a quote from Job: Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation… while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Its two central characters – the parents – have different approaches: the father is driven by nature/will and the mother is driven by grace. Left unchecked, both cause suffering; balance seems the best path. But neither provides definitive answers to the question “Why do we suffer?” Rather, the answer seems to be: suffering and joy come with the package. As Job puts it when he learns of the death of his children, Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD  gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. It’s pointless to ask why. A better question is: how do we deal with suffering? These works provide important answers. Notes on Note-taking As with previous weeks, I took notes in Obsidian. Since this was my third reading of Job and Meditations, I expanded already-existing notes for both books. I also started a separate note for Stoicism itself, since this philosophy has ideas that relate to many other works. In all cases, I used GPT-4o (both via the chat interface and through the Text Generator plugin) to expand on my understanding. I asked the LLM for feedback on my summaries, comparisons between these works and each other, and between the ideas in these works and the Buddhist tradition. The results were often pithy and clarifying. Here’s an example: While both Stoicism and Buddhism offer paths to transcend suffering through acceptance and detachment, their ultimate goals differ: Stoicism emphasizes personal virtue and rationality, whereas Buddhism focuses on universal compassion and enlightenment. Up Next Gioia recommended Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars for week 12; standard Ebooks has a beautiful free edition. Check out Gioia’s post for the full syllabus. Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!