After enjoying William Deresiewicz’s book, ‘Excellent Sheep’ (see this month’s SI ezine ‘Best Of’), I thought I’d continue the journey and go straight in to one of his earlier books, ‘A Jane Austen Education’.

It didn’t take me too long to make a connection to Deresiewicz’s connection that Austen’s six novels have something to say about ‘love, friendship and the things that really matter’. Austen tells us about life, Deresiewicz says. She tells us that it is a system is what I say.

TRIZ tells us, via the Law of System Completeness, that ‘a system’ must comprise six essential elements. Six Austen novels, six elements. Hmm.

Here goes…

Mansfield Park (COORDINATION) – being entertained is not the same as being happy. Perpetual amusement leads only to the perpetual threat of boredom. The keys to true happiness, purpose and meaning lie elsewhere. Il faut souffrir. We all need to find our direction and navigate accordingly.

Emma (TOOL) – pay attention to the everyday things – those little things that happen hour by hour to the people in your life: what your niece said, what your friend heard, what your neighbour did. This is what the fabric of our really consists of. This is what life is really about. The devil in the detail.

Persuasion (INTERFACE) – be honest with your friends. Unconditional acceptance is not real friendship. A true friend wants you to be happy, but being happy and feeling good about yourself are not the same thing. A true friend points out your mistakes – even at the risk of losing your friendship.

Northanger Abbey (ENGINE) – Stay awake; don’t take things for granted. By renouncing certainty and cynicism, by opening yourself to new experiences, you can turn your life into an adventure that will never end.

Pride & Prejudice (TRANSMISSION) – you aren’t born perfect. You are born with a whole novel’s worth of errors ahead of you. But making mistakes is the only way to grow up, the only way to connect your need for new experiences with the daily grind. Being right might get you a pat on the head, but being wrong is the only way to help you find out who you really are.

Sense & Sensibility (SENSOR) – Love is about growing up, not staying young. It means a never-ending clash of opinions and perspectives. A true lover is someone who is different from you and willing to challenge you. If your lover is already just like you, then neither one of you has anywhere to go. Being aware of (sensing) differences is essential.

It’s like a whole new world… “But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.”

More of those worried emails from people looking at breakthepatentstranglehold.com:
If the TRIZ Trends tell us all the future and prevents any future patentable inventions, what happens to my creativity? Why do we need creative people? What do the creative people do? Is there a point to our existence any more?

Sometimes, I wonder whether there ever was. I can be too sceptical sometimes.

I think creative people have a place in life. Albeit not the one most of them think it ought to be. If they don’t know TRIZ, frankly they’re not going to help anyone ‘be creative’. If they do know TRIZ, their creative value is in going beyond the Trends. It is in revealing the Trends we don’t know are Trends yet.

It is jumping off the intellectual cliff, finding the new ‘creativity S-Curve’.

It is about thinking harder and better than we currently do.

Perhaps the real problem with so-called creative people is they’re the ones – in my experience at least – who are least willing to get outside the ‘comfort zones’ they’re always accusing others of being stuck in.

It seems the least creative people I ever encounter are the people working in the creative professions. Most of them seem blind to the problem. All they seem to see is a world full of non-creative people that never listen to their ‘out of the box’ ideas. Never realising that the reason no-one listens is lack of ideas was never the problem. The real issue is lack of good problem definitions. Definitions like, ‘what happens when we go beyond this Trend pattern? Why does the Trend end here? What’s the contradiction between this Trend and that one?

Finding answers is easy. The true creatives are the ones who create better questions. That’s the new job. Same as the old job. Except now TRIZ confirms it for us.

Has something gone wrong recently in the milk bottling industry? Someone taken their SixSigma training too far? I don’t know what’s happened, but suddenly I find myself in need of sharp implements to open my milk when the convenient pull-tab on the seal is somehow no longer very convenient.

It’s a classic ‘if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’ issue I think. That plus the bigger issue of the way process engineers (and actually all of us) have been taught. When the process engineer is trying to get the seals to stick on the top of the bottle, there aren’t many process variables they can play around with. The main one in fact is how much glue to place between the rim of the bottle top and the seal. As soon as this becomes the case the only available hammer then becomes the Goldilocks and the Three Bears strategy: Not too much glue, not too little. And the desire to find ‘just the right amount’.

This is classic optimization territory. But it is also bad news from the customers point of view because it leads the designers to do dumb things. Not putting enough glue on the bottle is worse news than putting too much on. If the milk leaks, everyone complains, but if the seal needs a knife or fingernail to get it off, the customer is probably frustrated but not sufficiently to actually write an email (or blog article!) to complain about it. Consequently, ‘just the right amount’ of glue tend to err on the side of too much.

Then, of course, the process engineer knows there is variation in the glue dispensing system. So that gets cunningly compensated for too. More glue. Not so good from a cost perspective, but definitely better than those troublesome customer complaints about leaking bottles. Just more annoying seal-removal frustration.

What’s so idiotic about this whole scenario is that the designer thinks they’ve done a good job. They used maths. They did their Design of Experiments. They drew a distribution curve. They worked out their safety margin. They ‘proved’ they’d done the best they could possibly do. They were taught – SickStigma Black Belt-style – how to optimize a situation that wasn’t actually an optimization problem.

When you find yourself playing Goldilocks, it ought to be a pretty good indicator that you’re working on the wrong problem. Goldilocks was an optimizer. Smart people recognise there’s no such thing as ‘just right’ and instead look to solve the contradiction. Which in this case is ‘we want more glue AND we want less glue’. Something like this:

Now at least we’re working on the right problem. The ‘best of both worlds’, solve-the-contradiction problem. Now we have some chance of making progress. And not have to have thousands of customers spend time fishing out fragments of broken seal and excess glue from their milk.

Here’s another reason the global patent system doesn’t make any sense. One of the main criteria against which an inventor’s application will be assessed is the ‘obviousness’ of the solution being proposed. If it’s deemed to be obvious, it can’t be granted.

The ‘obviousness’ test is one of those lovely grey areas that helps reinforce the only real rule in the patent system: the lawyers get rich and the inventors don’t.

The real stupidity in play, however, is that ‘obviousness’ is one of the best tests of whether a solution is a good one or not. If it’s a good solution it should – in retrospect – look obvious. The ‘why didn’t I think of that before’, palm-clasped-on-to-forehead’ moment.

There are multiple tricks patent lawyers can deploy to resolve this problem (we wrote about several in Issue 116 of the SI ezine), but the simplest is effectively the murder-mystery novel technique. A good murder mystery writer successfully obscures the identity of the murderer until a big exciting final reveal. We the readers hadn’t guessed who it was going to be, but when he or she is revealed, we should rapidly realise it had been obvious all along. The butler did it.

Fortunately for the patent lawyers most inventions are rubbish and so they don’t have to be too smart in terms of playing this novelist trick. If its actually a good solution, however, then its likely you’ll see evidence of the trick being played. If it’s a lazy lawyer, you’ll see it used most frequently with words like ‘surprisingly’ or ‘unexpectedly’. As in, ‘we mixed the two combustible chemicals together and when we tried to burn them, unexpectedly, they now completely refused to combust.’

So here’s the real problem. It’s one that comes from TRIZ. And specifically the Trends of Evolution part of the toolkit. Here’s the part that gives inventors and (if they chose to listen) Patent Examiners a clear road map defining successful solution directions. We’ve found 38 of them so far. Here’s one of the more simple ones:

This is known within the TRIZ World as ‘Space Segmentation’. It’s the Trend that basically says all physical objects, for as long as they still exist, will have an advantage if they add progressively more and more holes, that in turn get smaller and smaller, and eventually, get some kind of ‘active’ element added to them. It’s a classic ‘doing more with less’ trend. There are multiple different reasons for adding the holes – making things lighter, for example, or increasing surface area, or improving material transfer. Lots of reasons. But the point from a patent ‘obviousness’ perspective is that any inventor that becomess the first to realise that adding a hole to, say, a semiconductor ball grid array is a good thing can’t be allowed to have that holey-solution patented, because even though it’s the first time in a semiconductor, the TRIZ Space Segmentation Trend tells me that adding holes is totally obvious because that’s precisely how tens of thousands of prior-art inventions have been successful.

Now, for some reason, the patent lawyers don’t seem to want to know about these 38 Trends. I’ll leave you to work out why that might be. From my perspective, I’ve stopped worrying why they will or won’t listen, because what we’re doing is publishing all of the ‘obvious’ evolution jump ideas that the TRIZ Trends tell us will happen at some point in the future.

Even better, I have a piece of software that will do it automatically for me: Take the Space Segmentation Trend. All I need to do is read through all the Claims in all the patents of the world looking for nouns that describe physical objects – scalpel, pill, shoe, compressor blade, toothbrush, you name it – and write a new set of Claims that add ‘at least one hole’ to each of them.

Repeat for the other 37 Trends, for all the patents, and we’ve just defined the future evolution path of every component, process and system on the planet. Now each one is undisputably ‘obvious’ so even the blindest rent-seeking leach of a Patent Lawyer has no choice but to acknowledge the fact. And in the process of making that happen, I firmly believe we will end the patent stranglehold the large enterprises of the world have on the rest of us.

I’m still thinking this one through. A way of measuring a person’s thinking maturity. A brain analogue to what ‘RealAge’ does for a person’s medical age. RealAge is a way of letting people know how healthily they live. Having a RealAge lower than your calendar age is a way of saying you’re living healthily. And vice versa. I’m imagining a similar thing for your brain. Or rather how effectively we do or don’t make use of it.

I think I’ve got several of the necessary components of a ‘Mastery Age’ measure in place. One definite is the Malcolm Gladwell ’10,000 hours to achieve mastery’ meme. Not so much the 10,000 hour number per se because, as I’ve written elsewhere, it seems possible to me to achieve ‘mastery’ of something in a lot less than 10,000 hours if a person works smartly enough. And similarly – as with my guitar-playing efforts – it is very possible to devote 10,000 hours to a subject and quite clearly not achieve mastery. The difference is about how many discontinuous learning experiences you’re able to put yourself through. When I’m playing guitar, I find it too easy to stay in my comfort zone, noodling my way through the same things time and time again. On the other hand, when it came to getting up to speed with some of my innovation-adjacent domains of expertise, I deliberately put myself in contradictory situations to stimulate faster learning.

If the 10,000 hour number means anything, it is perhaps a datum. Like the number of calendar years a person has lived. If we assume a 40 hour-week devoted to mastering a subject, ‘mastery’ of that subject should – assuming a 10,000 hour average – be achieved in around five years. Then, assuming we say the first 20 years of life are about mastering the mechanics of being a sort-of-functioning adult, that leaves, on average, fifty years of adult life in which we could – on average – envisage mastering ten subjects.

In this way, the average person who lives an average actively life to the age of 70 and has used this time to master ten things, they might be said to have achieved a Mastery Age of 70.

A person mastering fewer things could then be said to have a lower Mastery Age. And, conversely, the person that sets out on a journey of pro-active contradiction-chasing mastery could conceivably achieve a Mastery Age considerably beyond their 70 calendar years.

So far so good. But not quite. Because I also think another piece in the jigsaw needs to be some of the #-shaped people model I’ve talked about in this blog and elsewhere (https://triz-journal.com/shaped-people/). The underlying idea of #-shaped is the need to combine both ‘vertical’ domain specialist mastery and ‘horizontal’ domain-bridging generalist knowledge mastery. Somehow the Mastery Age measure needs to account for this parallel need and how well a balance has been achieved. A person that masters 10 domain subjects ought to have a lower Mastery Age than a person that masters five vertical and five horizontal subjects. Now the calculation gets complicated. To the point, I think, where it needs to be done as some kind of automated survey. That’s what we’re working on right now in PanSensic Land.

Meanwhile, I’m figuring, guitar-non-prowess notwithstanding, Mastery-wise, I’m batting below average. My calendar age is 56. My ‘RealAge’, last time I did the assessment, was 48. Which I’m pretty happy with. My Mastery Age, though, seems to be hovering around the 35 mark. Which doesn’t sound so good at all.

Must try harder.

Or re-calibrate the model.

Not so long ago, just as I was about to set off on a cross-country drive, a friend emailed me to warn me to drive carefully. Unfortunately, the email arrived just as I was shutting down the computer so I never got to ask what the problem was.

Anyway, I somehow made it safely to my destination and got to ask what the issue was in person. Turns out the problem was in the heavens. Venus and Jupiter were both in the same house. Something like that. Two of the planets that shouldn’t have been where they were.

The scariest part was that she believed it. That the convergence of the two planets was going to cause gridlock on the roads of Britain. And I assume everywhere else.

I checked the papers the following morning, but it seemed like the forewarning had paid off. That was her thinking anyway. To my mind she was in a Popperian ‘no lose’ situation  If there had been carnage on the roads, her prediction was right; if there wasn’t it was because the forewarnings paid off. Heads astrology won, tails I lost.

In my mind, bringing matters back to Earth for a second, the ‘drive safely’ warning was a bit like safety legislation. Which for the most part these days has exactly the opposite of its intended effect. Telling people to hold onto the handrails when they go down a flight of stairs, it turns out, is a great way to ensure that more people fall down flights of stairs. Telling people to pull over to the side of the road if they feel sleepy is a great way to ensure more drivers end up snoozing their way into a car-wreck.

Investigators and legislators, sadly, find themselves in rock-and-hard place positions when these kinds of thing go wrong in society. They’re under pressure to do something whenever they investigate an accident or an incident. Usually, the easiest thing they can do is to add more legislation or instruct that warning signs are put in place. Or more labelling on packaging. And so on until we’re all of us completely surrounded by cotton wool exhortations to be more careful.

The first problem with this strategy is the investigation team, as far as I can tell, have little or no understanding of the difference between special and common cause problems. Nor the idea that if we mix the two up any response we design will have the opposite impact to what we intended. Treat a special cause problem as common cause and you make the system worse. Treat a common cause problem as special and you fail to change a dysfunctional system. Either way, irrespective of whether the legislators understand common and special causes or not, the population at large almost definitely don’t. Which means that the legislators have to be seen to be doing something irrespective of whether the situation is special or common.

That ends up being a recipe for a great downward spiral for society because the even bigger problem is that what happens when we’re bombarded with safety information all the time is that we become collectively more anxious. And if there’s one thing to guarantee more accidents and unwanted incidents it’s a population full of anxious people. The downward spiral looks something like this:

Astrology, meanwhile, is yet more anxiety-causing bunkum. The reason deluded friends continue to believe our future is written in the heavens is predominantly about confirmation bias. The actual reason Pisceans (or whichever Sign it is – I can’t be bothered to look up the statistics) are more ‘accident-prone’, for example, is because they’re more anxious than other star signs. And the reason they’re more anxious is because they continually get told by other astrology-delusionals that they’re more accident-prone.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh here. Maybe the position of Venus in the sky really does have a genuine impact on our lives like the Moon actually does. I’m open to the possibility. Or at least I am if I can be shown an experiment where all of the other related effects – confirmation bias, etc – are properly controlled for.

If I had to assemble a theory based on what we know so far prior to such experiments, if I wanted to be generous to astrology I might hypothesise that the position of Venus has a 0.000001% effect on me crashing my car this afternoon. The likelihood of me crashing my car because a friend tells me to be careful, meanwhile, based on actual scientific evidence relating to the effect of anxiety on errors, will increase by around 5000 times that amount. The anxiety caused by being told to drive carefully, in other words, is about 5000 times more potent as a cause of accidents than the orbital position of Venus.

Which, all in all means, maybe the legislators might start decreasing the rate of harm they’re currently causing if they spent more time reading horoscopes and less time designing counter-productive signs. Or something like that.

We stand sideways.
We work in corridors and abandoned spaces.
We get up early and go to sleep late.
We’ve been mocked.
We’ve been turned away by people that won’t have us.
We are relentless.
We dream it, we make it, we break it, we fix it.
We create.
We destroy.
We wreck ourselves day in and day out and yet we stomp that one breakthrough or find that one line that keeps us coming back.
We progress.

These words, with one or two small modifications, come direct from the mission statement of an innovator. A disruptive innovator. Jake Burton, one of the pioneers of the snowboarding world.

I know a lot of skiers and I know quite a few snowboarders. For the most part, they don’t get along so well. For me, the antagonism between the two communities says a lot about the difference between Innovation World (the underdog snowboarders), and Operation Excellence World (the elitist, have-all-the-right-equipment-follow-the-rules skiers).

The world needs both types. And both need to get along.

Snowboarding is now an industry. It is also entering Operational Excellence world. The antagonism with the skiers dissipates…

…And leaves a growing vacuum for the dis-affected, the under-resourced and the unpopular. The next mutiny of sideways-standing rule-breakers.

There seem to be a lot of people in and around the TRIZ community with the mistaken impression that the 40 Inventive Principles are some kind of a magic shortcut to innovation.

Anyone that checks out the ‘Not So Funny’ section in our monthly e-zine will have noticed a theme over the years. The 40 Inventive Principles map just as well to really bad solutions as they do to the 2% of good ones that will end up being called ‘innovation’.

To be clear: there is absolutely no correlation between evidence of an Inventive Principle having been (explicitly or implicitly) used to generate a solution and the future commercial or value-delivering success of that solution. The driver in the above photograph could be said to have exploited Inventive Principle 17 to solve his contradiction, but its unlikely that anyone else would necessarily see it as a ‘good’ solution.

The 40 Principles are merely a collection of ‘provocations’ that enable problem solvers to break out of their current ways of thinking to hopefully derive ‘better’ solutions. The fact that the list is a comprehensive one – i.e. we haven’t been able to add anything meaningful to the list since the 1970s – is one of its main attributes over other solution-triggering taxonomies. If we haven’t generated solutions we like from any of the 40, it’s either because we haven’t thought hard enough, or that there aren’t any.

Some people, when they realise that the Principles will just as likely deliver bad solutions as good ones tend to then make the incorrect follow-on conclusion that ‘TRIZ is no good’.

This is a big mistake. Sadly, it is also a common one.
On some level, I find it difficult to motivate myself to argue against such people these days. The more people that don’t use TRIZ, the bigger the playing-field of breakthrough opportunities for those of us that do. On the other hand, I don’t think rectifying the erroneous thinking demands too much effort.

Here goes:

1) The 40 Inventive Principles offer a comprehensive suite of solution directions that point just as much to ‘bad’ solutions as ‘good’ ones.

2) The Ideal Final Result tool within TRIZ offers a clear compass heading describing what ‘good’ looks like for any given situation.

3) The Contradiction Matrix provides a ranked list of Inventive Principles that specifically do point in the direction of the ‘good’ solution directions for any given conflict situation.

4) There is strong causal evidence to show solutions derived from the use of two of the Matrix-recommended Principles are more likely to be successful than those using one. Similarly, solutions derived from three will do better than those derived from two. And so on, at least up to five.

5) For those that don’t wish to take advantage of the Matrix, it is perfectly sensible to use ‘all’ the 40 Principles to help provoke new ideas and directions, provided that solvers bring to bear a clear idea of the IFR compass-heading when evaluating and combining those ideas and directions into the eventual solution

For some reason I’ve had a flurry of conversations lately with organisations thinking about setting up some kind of sexy innovation ‘centre’ or ‘lab’ or ‘hot-house’. The conversation quickly devolves into ‘it depends’ territory. Sometimes it’s a good idea; sometimes it’s not. The answer depends on the Level of Innovation Capability Maturity of the enterprise. At Level 1, it’s usually a really bad idea; Level 2 and it potentially becomes a good idea; Level 3 and it’s probably a bad idea again.

The usual model for these kinds of innovation early learning centre is the Lockheed Skunk Works.

When it was set up, in the late 1930s, Lockheed was a Level 2 Capability innovator. Actually, they probably still are. The aerospace industry has some particular innovation challenges to overcome that make it very difficult to evolve past Level 2, not least of which is the need to be able to re-assure customers that you’re the safest industry on the planet (no-one likes it when aeroplanes fall out of the sky), and that you’re simultaneously able to do exciting new things.

Skunk Works solves the contradiction by physically separating production and development activities. Different rules, different protocols, different procedures, different reward systems. Different pretty much everything. Operations World and Innovation World are literally two separate worlds.

What’s often lost on Level 2 ICMM enterprises contemplating their own Skunk Works is the significance of the name chosen by Lockheed.

First up, ‘Skunk’. Which is deliberately a very non-aspirational kind of creature. When someone calls you a skunk, they’re probably not being complimentary. Very few people want to be tarred with such a non-attractive label. Which turns out to be a terrific way of separating the innovators and the operational excellence people in an organisation. Innovators know that they’re looked down on by the rest of the enterprise, and they don’t care. They’re people with a different perspective on why they come to work each day. Ego means nothing; doing exciting stuff means everything.

Second comes ‘Works’. This is slightly more subtle than ‘Skunk’, but it is nevertheless a critical part of Lockheed’s success. Skunk Works is a place where work is done. It’s not a ‘lab’ or an ‘incubator’ or a ‘centre’ or any other pretty name for a physical space full of bean-bags and motivational creativity posters. A Works produce real aircraft that are going to fly in the real sky. It is an innovation factory.

The two words form an important contradiction that prospective innovators need to embrace and work through:

I was fortunate enough to spend the first fifteen years of my career in the aerospace industry, and even more fortunate to visit Skunk Works at a time close to its peak days. At the time it was quite literally a place where people with real grit consistently delivered the impossible, impossibly quickly and at impossibly low cost. Not a bean-bag  or delicate managerial ego in sight.

The previous Facebook Mission Statement, “Making the world more open and connected” had one fundamental flaw: it didn’t push for any specific positive outcome from more connection. Technically, it could encompass digital voyeurism via the News Feed, trading in-person friendship for online acquaintanceship or the filter bubbles and echospheres that have further polarized the United States.

So last year, as Facebook approached 2 billion monthly users, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed a new mission statement, to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

Zuckerberg announced the change at the Facebook Communities Summit for top Group Admins where it announced new Group management tools. “For the last decade or so we’ve been focusing on making the world more open and connected. But I used to think that if we just give people a voice and help some people connect that that would make the world a whole lot better by itself,” Zuckerberg admits. “Look around and our society is still so divided. We have a responsibility to do more, not just to connect the world but to bring the world closer together.”

Rather than have the new mission be just a philosophy, Zuckerberg says Facebook is turning it into a goal. “We want to help 1 billion people join meaningful communities. If we can do this it will not only reverse the whole decline in community membership we’ve seen around the world… but it will also strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.”

It all sounds so great. Until you actually think about it. Until you bring some actual knowledge to bear. But then, isn’t that the problem of so much of the Silicon Valley story these days. A fatal Ignorance-Arrogance delusion. Naïve good intentions ending up in horrendously harmful and damaging consequences for everyone else. (Although not necessarily for the Facebook share price. Hmm.)

Let’s look at a quick example. I happen to be a fan of anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, most famous these days for the Dunbar Number: the maximum number of people we are able to maintain relationships with. Which turns out to be around 150. Plus or minus, depending on the way your brain works.

Now, for me, if Dunbar is anything close to right, the Dunbar Number alone tells us there is no such thing as a world-size community (see also my blog, ‘The Plural Of Community?’). And that as soon as we create a 150-strong community of ‘us’, we, by definition, create another much bigger community of ‘thems’.

As if to prove my point, I knew I wouldn’t have to look very hard in order to find a community of people who didn’t believe in the Dunbar Number. ‘The Fallacy Of Dunbar’s Number’ popped up at the top of my search (https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/maintaining-relationships/). A better example of exception-proving-the-rule I’d be hard pushed to find. Brad McCarty is the author of that blog. He has a ‘solution’ to the Dunbar number that involves building a personal taxonomy of contacts for all the different topics he’s interested in. Funnily enough, each of these topic-communities seems to end up containing around 150 contacts, but hey, once some people have made their mind up that something is wrong, they’re not going to change no matter how much evidence they’re given. Now, if I imagine that every person on the planet follows Mr McCarty’s advice, and, let’s say each of us is capable of juggling a dozen or so of these topic communities in our fragile, overloaded little heads, then what we’ve also contributed to are a dozen topic communities with the opposite view to our own.

If we reduce everything down to first principles, the human brain has thus far evolved to categorise three types of people: me, us and them. For every ‘us’ we create or participate in, one of the things that unites ‘us’ is our rejection of the nearest ‘them’. Zuckerberg’s naïve desire to create ‘meaningful communities’, laudible as it might be, is utterly – utterly – inconsistent with ‘bringing the world closer together’. Point one, there is no plural of community. Point two, every meaningful community that gets built sparks the creation of its opposite. It’s very possible to create ‘communities’, but when you do that, you don’t bring the world together, you create lots and lots of polarised views that make it progressively less likely that people are able to talk to each other any more.

Unless you know how to recognise and solve the contradictions you’re creating. Which delusional, ivory-tower-based social media oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, sadly, appears to be heading further and further away from. Good intentions often create terrible outcomes. Good intentions that fail to understand the first principles of human behaviour, simply create terrible outcomes faster.