Chaotic balance; grammar movie; LibGen ripoff: Newsletter 26 March 2025
Newsletter 87. While life is an unending battle against chaos, chaos is where all creativity comes from. Plus, Meta rips off every author on the planet, AI “insights” are anything but, three people to follow and three books to read.
Chaos in perspective
Do you love chaos?
Of course not. No one wants to be at the mercy of unpredictable forces from random directions. In fact, you can frame everything civilization has accomplished as attempts to create order from chaos.
- Agriculture. Control where your food is coming from.
- Marriage. Impose order on mating practices.
- Religion. Organize our relationship with the spiritual.
- Printing. Transmit knowledge in repeatable and uniform ways.
- Computers. Manage data efficiently.
Your home is an attempt to create a bubble of order safe from a chaotic outdoor environment. Roads keep people and goods moving in predictable ways. Corporations organize productive work. Weather forecasts allow us to prepare for otherwise unpredictable conditions. Governments organize brute power, manage resources for the common good, and enforce rules to prevent random murders, deter financial deception, and manage a thousand other prohibited forms of chaos.
The pursuit of health is an attempt to manage the chaos that is disease and injury.
In our personal lives, each of us is engaged in an ongoing quest to manage chaos. We pursue money to assert more control over our time and resources. We buy insurance to attempt some measure of control over potential disaster. And in our professional lives, we do the same work. We manage things. We seek efficiency. We attempt to measure “key performance indicators” and improve them to generate more profit, and just as important, more predictable profit.
And yet. And yet.
A completely controlled environment is sterile and boring.
No one watches a television drama or sporting event when the outcome is determined. We revel in the unexpected twists.
We seek adventure in our personal lives: strange new places to visit, dangerous treks, novel experiences.
Business leaders know that true growth comes from doing what’s unpredictable. We attempt to incubate innovation — an exercise in bringing order to the chaotic work of creativity and novelty. We conduct research to find an edge in the unknown. And we celebrate disruptive innovation, a discipline firmly rooted in breaking established rules and pursuing unexpected — and often conventionally prohibited — pathways.
And of course the most rewarding thing that many of experience personally is to have children and raise them, an experience that maximizes terror and chaos. If you can’t tolerate chaos, you’re going to have a lot of trouble loving a child.
Every adult has learned the hard way that in volatility lies opportunity.
But not too much, of course. We’re happy to invest in chaos that makes money at the expense of other people, but not so happy to embrace chaos that upsets the order we’ve carefully created.
Where is your balance point?
How much of your time is spent creating order, and how much finding joy in a little chaos?
By all means, invest in your personal and professional order. Be productive. Be predictable. Manage things. That’s as human as it gets. It’s the mature thing to do.
But seek out a little chaos, and don’t be afraid to greet it when it arrives on your doorstep. Because if you can’t embrace some chaos — or even profit from it — what’s the point of living?
News for writers and others who think
A new movie, “Rebel with a Clause,” celebrates grammar (New York Times gift link). It’s a book, too. How many of us get to promote our nerdy books with a movie? (If you want to make a film out of Writing Without Bullshit, let’s do lunch.)
Harvard Writing Center director Jane Rosenzweig questions the value of AI-generated “insights” as a feature of news sites. If you need AI to tell you what to think, you’re not actually thinking (and neither is the AI).
The Atlantic reveals that Large Language Models including Meta LLaMa were trained on a massive and comprehensive database of pirated books. The Atlantic also published an interactive tool so you can check if your favorite author’s books are there. (The database, LibGen, includes my first four books and many of my friends have found their books in there as well.) Why did they rip off all this content? Because it was easier and faster than asking permission — and all the other tools were doing it.
Alison Schwartz is interviewing business book strategist Carolyn Monaco for Gotham Ghostwriters. Authors who want to get smart in a hurry should definitely tune it. It’s next Wednesday April 2 at noon ET. Register here.
Phil Simon writes on why authors should consider writing their books with the creation and collaboration tool Notion, on Jane Friedman‘s blog.
On Bookriot, musings on how to identify accurate information online, which is much harder than it used to be.
Three people to follow
Bob Arciniaga , cofounder of Boardology, a company and a tool dedicated to increasing the impact of corporate boards.
Brendan Witcher , Forrester analyst. When it comes to digital and consumers, whatever the question is, he’s probably thought about it more deeply than just about anybody else.
Paul Pember , CX expert. If your customer experience is messed up, he’ll figure out why.
Three books to read
Stakeholder Whispering: Uncover What People Need Before Doing What They Ask by Bill Shander (Wiley, 2025) The discipline of uncovering the motivations of the people you do work for.
Differential Privacy by Simson Garfinkel (MIT Press, 2025). Exploring the tech behind systems that fuzz up data to preserve your privacy.
Atlas of Dark Destinations: Explore the World of Dark Tourism by Peter Hohenhaus (Laurence King, 2021). Three hundred creepy and fraught places that you really ought to visit.