Whatever happened to the spirit of American pragmatism?
The Chinese expression 四分五裂 (sì fēn wǔ liè) traces back millennia and means something like “divided into four, split into five.” It captures how the disunity of a society or organization begets disintegration, that cracks tend to shatter without early repair. A cracked vase is more susceptible to future cracks than one that is unblemished. Our own Josh Wolfe in our Lux quarterly LP letters occasionally brings up the Japanese art of kintsugi, which uses gold flaking to transform cracks in pottery from jagged lines of weakness to shimming rivers of strength. It’s a gorgeous metaphor, and one that applies well to the material world.
For societies and even small organizations though, cracks are not so easily repaired. Dissensus and disunity exacerbate tensions, scratching away at a sore wound that continues to fester. Alienation and acrimony accelerate, as one finds ever more reasons for paranoia and revenge.
While there’s an obvious political parallel I’ll get to in a moment, I’ll zoom in a little closer to home with the example of the unity and disintegration of the founding teams of startups. All startups begin with a dream, one that is generally shared by a company’s founders and early employees (otherwise, why would they be there?). Change the world, build something people want, make a lot of money — bold maxims of agency that anyone can get behind. And so it goes: building, shipping, growing, fundraising, profiting, exiting.
Many startups stay unified on their journey of course, but disunity often comes to the startups which find success the earliest. A sudden surge of attention or the signing of a critical revenue-generating contract transforms a budding ethereal enterprise into a vehicle that can profitably transform everyone’s lives. The dream becomes real, such that every decision is now weighted by its effect on the future. Issues of strategy and culture that were once piled aside in the rush to launch suddenly become those four cracks that can lead to disintegration.
Some founding teams never recover — the annals of Silicon Valley are littered with the departed founders who lost the Machiavellian travails of startup life. What holds some teams together then while others tear themselves apart? In a word, flexibility. Building a business is high pressure and high stress, all conducted under torrents of contradictory information. What the best startup teams do is a pragmatic pirouette, orchestrating a careful dance between dozens of competing goals and strategies and yet, finding a path that maintains balance while progressing toward the future. It’s a constant negotiation, and one where participants understand that victory is shared, and personal success or failure is irrelevant.
Notice the metaphorical transition here. Pottery and most materials are unyielding, cracking once sufficient force is applied past their tensile strength. What we are seeking is elasticity: not pottery glued together with a sheen of gold, but rather a rubber band capable of supple transitions to different states without its permanent deformation.
Turning toward politics: one of the most striking facts of the “year of democracy” (a majority of humanity voted this year) is the fate of incumbent parties. As John Burn-Murdoch analyzed in The Financial Times, incumbent parties have lost electoral ground pretty much everywhere this year. The latest casualty is Germany, which is now heading for elections in February after its governing coalition collapsed.
These incumbent parties are — rightly or wrongly — taking the blame for the widening cracks underlying their societies. Late-stage industrialized nations are facing a situation not so dissimilar from early-stage startups. There’s incredible pressure on them to grow and succeed, and yet, there’s a mountain of problems that need solving with limited capital to do so. Think about the docket of complex systemic problems facing America: yawning inequality, continued deindustrialization, intensifying climate disruption, aging infrastructure, overstretched health services, intensifying anomie and teen mental health, and more. Each of these isn’t just a crack, but rather a desiccated earth riven by the fissures of decay.
Last week, I wrote in “What’s Next” about the potential opportunities for a second-term Trump administration on economic policies. More expansively though is a generational challenge, one that includes but ultimately transcends the returning president. Are we capable as a nation of rebuilding the flexible pragmatism and nuance that is so crucial for solving problems? How do we rebuild a form of civil empathy of disagreeing and committing when the time is right?
I launched the Riskgaming newsletter (back when it was named “Securities”) with “American Civil War 2.0,” a book review of Stephen Marche’s The Next Civil War. As I wrote then:
Marche ends not with optimism, but with an anti-hope. “There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times. It won’t. Americans have believed their country is an exception, a necessary nation. If history has shown us anything, it’s that the world doesn’t have any necessary nations.”
I still believe America is a necessary nation, but we must necessarily resolve our own internal dissensus if we are hoping to lead the world with our own vision for the future. John Winthrop’s sermon of America as a “city on a hill” (derived from Matthew 5:14, “You are the light of the world. A city located on a hill can't be hidden.”) was meant to inspire a rough colony to see itself as a lighthouse for the world. It’s not enough to preach, but rather one needs to embody his or her behavior as a model for others. Do, don’t say.
The same is true for the Enlightenment, that intellectual advance that powers all of our wondrous discoveries. Do, don’t say. Rhetoric and pathos don’t drive the advances we rely on; instead, it’s the collected and aggregated wisdom developed under the crucible of vociferous debate underpinned by empirical experimentation. One heals the tears of society by coming to terms with the reality each of us witnesses and negotiating a solution.
Unfortunately, our era is characterized by a reversal: say, don’t do. The solipsism of social media is to pose our best selves, without ever becoming them. Politicians of all stripes lob promise after promise with the conceit that nothing said will ever come to fruition. PR-mediated CEOs promise spectacular results, and then disappoint pretty much everyone. This represents perhaps the nihilistic asymptote of flexibility — say anything to anyone, and mean none of it.
There’s a reason that the philosophical school of pragmatism was developed in America and not Europe. Truth is not some absolute, but neither is it uselessly relative. Rather, as William James put it, it’s “what works in the way of belief.” It’s about what’s useful, and leaving the rest.
In their own context, the best startup founders are some of the most pragmatic people I’ve ever met. They can do that pirouette, and find the path through some of the most challenging environments imaginable. We need to unearth the buried pragmatism still resting in American society. Finding problems, and solving them using the widest toolset available to us. Disunity is not a destiny without recourse. Four tears can be mended.
Podcast: The future of defense manufacturing with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf
Anduril has become one of the most-watched companies in Silicon Valley, and for good reason. Its vertiginous rise from small hardware laboratory to next-generation defense prime has entranced engineers and investors alike, and it has also garnered an increasingly long record of success in Washington DC, including its victory in securing the U.S. Air Force’s flagship Collaborative Combat Aircraft contract earlier this year.
Yet for co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf, the real magic of Anduril has been its ability to scale design, manufacturing and its culture from a dozen early employees to more than 4,000 today. Brian’s maniacal focus has been on ensuring that Anduril never becomes a legacy defense prime ploddingly delivering half-baked products to the disappointed faces of warfighters. Instead, he and his team have tenaciously strategized on business models, contract negotiations, tuck-in M&A, engineering culture and manufacturing centralization and decentralization to ensure that Anduril always offers the highest-quality and most cost-effective products in the marketplace.
Alongside Lux’s own Josh Wolfe, Brian talks about his own founding journey at Anduril, the company’s burgeoning portfolio of products, and how it’s rebuilding the arsenal of democracy in the years ahead through clever and strategic leadership.
🔊 Listen to “The future of defense manufacturing with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf”
The Orthogonal Bet: Embracing Second Acts
In this episode, Lux’s scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman speaks with the writer Henry Oliver. Henry is the author of the fantastic new book Second Act, on late bloomers and professional success later in life, and more broadly how to think about one’s career. Sam recently reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal. Sam really enjoyed this book and wanted to have a chance to discuss it with Henry.
Henry and Sam had a chance to talk about a lot of topics, beginning with how to actually define late bloomers and what makes a successful second act possible, from experimentation to being ready when one’s moment arrives. They also explored why society doesn’t really accept late bloomers as much as one might want it to, how to think about the complexity of cognitive decline, what the future of retirement might look like, along with many examples of late bloomers — from Margaret Thatcher to Ray Kroc.
🔊 Listen to “Embracing Second Acts”
Lux Recommends
- Ed Caesar in The New Yorker wrote a beautifully complex fractal of a story on how the Syrian government is using expansive drug dealing across the Middle East to fuel its regional ambitions and its war at home. “Part of captagon’s allure is that it can be used invisibly in societies that mete out harsh punishments for intoxication. There are no documented instances of fatal overdoses. Many Saudis use the drug regularly, and some fall prey to addiction, but the streets of Riyadh are not strewn with captagon junkies. It’s as if an entire region had developed a secret penchant for Adderall.”
- Laurence Pevsner highlights an interview with Tetris-creator Alexey Pajitnov, on the melancholy of having never built a successor as popular as the original. “Reaching the heights of a global hit like Tetris is improbable for anyone, even the creator of Tetris. But that has not stopped Pajitnov from trying. He has spent nearly 20 years designing and producing free-to-play smartphone games with a small Russian studio called WildSnake Software. Some have glimmers of brilliance but are brutally difficult, like the color-matching tap-to-clear Dwice. Others feel less original, like a pair of games that borrow mechanics from the touch-screen puzzler 2048. All of them have modest production values.”
- Grace Isford enjoyed a new research paper (and the accompanying thread on X) from Tanishq Kumar and colleagues on how to analyze scaling precision in AI systems. “For training, our scaling laws allow us to predict the loss of a model with different parts in different precisions, and suggest that training larger models in lower precision may be compute optimal.”
- Sam loved a conversation between Tim Chartier and Edmund Harriss on the intersections between mathematics and art. “I have been fortunate enough to work on many different sorts of projects. One of the most surprising was to make two coloring books of mathematical images, created with Alex Bellos. These have sold over 100,000 copies worldwide, revealing the beauty of mathematics to people who may not think to engage with math otherwise.”
- Finally, we’re big fans of the ambitions of our portfolio company Physical Intelligence (PI or π). Wired’s Will Knight wrote a deep profile into the company’s goals and development, complete with videos of what the future of robotics will look like. “Certain tasks, such as folding clothes, are especially useful for training robots, [PI’s CEO Karol Hausman] says, because the chore involves dealing with a large variety of items that are often distorted and crumbled and which bend and flex while you are trying to manipulate them. ‘It's a good task, because to truly solve it you need to generalize,’ he says. ‘Even if you collect a lot of data, you wouldn't be able to collect it in every single situation that any item of clothing could be in.’”
That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.
