Nerd Notes, December

Nerds -

It’s been a bit over two weeks since I got back from Singapore (a bit under as I’m writing this, a bit over as you’re receiving it)…and I’m still trying to wrap my head around everything. I suspect the write up is going to turn into 2 installments of the newsletter; maybe one epically long one? I’m not sure that I can make everything I’m thinking about cohere into a single controlling idea.

If you want to see the mess of everything, I took all of the things that I wrote in my notebook while I was there and dropped them into this Milanote board.

A little bit of the behind the scenes and some high level thoughts:

• After a few introductions and reactivating connections that I already had there, I had a few conversations and then made the decision that instead of trying to build an agenda around meeting people for conversations, I was going to try to immerse myself in physical environments. With the benefit of hindsight, this was absolutely the correct decision; it left me a lot more flexibility to spend as much or as little time in a place as I thought it merited once I was in it, and it afforded me the luxury of meandering and popping into places I hadn’t planned on when I came across them. There’s maybe a version of this where I’d balance this open-ended exploration with something more like a walk & talk or a co-immersion with local Singaporeans, but I don’t think I had a good enough lay of the land to come up with that beforehand.
• What started with a focus on the Creative Thinking PISA evolved pretty quickly in my early research to consider a bit more broadly the idea of civic infrastructure to support creativity. I had a conversation with a friend from Singapore, and she said something that led to that redirection: “If by creativity, they mean solving pragmatic problems, then I’m not surprised Singapore did well - that’s something that Singaporeans have always excelled at. If they mean big vision, Western-style creativity, then that’s a different story.” PISA does indeed focus on the former, but in the same conversation we discussed how she’s seen the approach to schooling shift as Singapore has taken on this idea of becoming more creative and how it has legitimately evolved away from cramming for tests and towards more holistic development. So beyond just schools, I wanted to see a more complete picture of how the country is nurturing that holistic approach.
• I ended up spending A LOT of time in libraries. More time than I had anticipated. I found their library system wonderful and incredible…but it also made me start to consider whether Singapore as a city-state should be compared more to other nation-states or other cities. In terms of the ability to replicate or adopt some of what they are doing, I increasingly think the city is the right basis for comparison - which also opens up a whole area of inquiry for me, because it’s much easier to find cities that are doing similar things…many of which don’t require a 13 hour flight to reach. I had a professor in grad school - Martin Carnoy - who had a persistent bug up his ass about how everyone was always singing the praises of Finland’s education system, but if you segmented out Massachusetts from the American PISA results and just compared Massachusetts and Finland, the results were pretty much the same for a similar sized population - even though Massachusetts was socioeconomically more diverse. It didn’t occur to me at the time how funny it was that I was listening to him rant about this in a classroom that was directly above a research center focused on Finnish education, because it wasn’t until the following term that I made that connection. I bet there were some fun faculty meetings back in the day.
• All of this to say, Singapore is full of these tensions - there are some things they do that could be replicated within another municipality (a lot of things actually), but there are some things particularly around their cultivation of a national identity that wouldn’t be nearly as effective in anything other than pretty small nation-states.

In the aftermath, I both feel like I could have spent another week or two and like I got exactly as much as my current capacity/preparation/budget would allow for. I’m looking forward to pulling this all together…even though I don’t know exactly what the big benefit of this on the ground research will be.

Nascent New Ideas

One side effect, though, is that when I step away from my normal life like that, I feel a lot of new ideas starting to form. I have 3 new game ideas that I’m going to play around with next year - 2 of them are very closely related to Read Me Like A Book, and the other of them is something else altogether. The quick hits:

• I’ve got a pared down version of RMLAB that I’m calling Draw 5, Take 2. It uses the same cards as RMLAB, but it’s something I can do with random individuals at a library or bookstore instead of organizing a big event. It’s also something that could work for a group that is playing at a party rather than in a specific location. The game itself is in the name: the player draws 5 of the cards, takes 2 of them and then chooses the book and tells the story.
• A little farther afield of the current game, I want to organize an activity that’s focused on pairing. This idea has been marinating in the back of my mind since Sarah & I went out for our anniversary dinner, and for dessert she ordered the cheese course. The restaurant’s cheese specialist wheeled over a cart that had at least 30 different cheeses on it, and they talked about what Sarah liked, the woman made a few recommendations, and they built a plate of 5 different cheeses. There’s an art to that…so I’m interested in something where people submit a book that they’ve enjoyed and get back a personalized recommendation from another person of another piece of media - a book, an album, a film or TV series, or even a video game - that pairs well with that book.

• The last idea is related to tabletop roleplaying. For the last few years as I’ve been looking more into civic initiatives and spending more time in the way that governments and nonprofit organizations develop projects, I’ve been shocked by how rarely they explore a variety of possibilities before settling into one way of doing things. I’ve been wondering and considering if there’s a way to use games and simulations to create a timebound opportunity that is low stakes and maybe not even directly related to a real world project, but to use it to open up that sense of possibility. A few weeks ago I was talking to my friend Mehdi about a campaign that he was developing for a TTRPG that has a deliberate mechanic around luck that means that for every move a player makes, they might succeed with good luck, succeed with bad luck, fail with good luck, or fail with bad luck. Something about that elevated this idea of simulation in my mind, so now I’m hoping to explore a way of using the format of TTRPG as a simulation tool. I am simultaneously interested in whether playing a TTRPG in person with a work team might help to create better conditions for cooperation and collaboration - maybe especially fdor executive teams? If at some point in 2026, I am sitting around a table with the C Suite of some company DMing them through a campaign, that would be the most wonderful and most absurd version of the world.
  • BTW, last month I mentioned the 3 books in my bag on my way to Singapore...and I'm here to tell you: if you haven't read How Big Things Get Done, you should rocket it up your reading list. It's surprisingly short, and its ratio of deep insights/page is very high. Flyvbjerg is pretty risk averse, but he loudly promotes the idea of playful exploration in the early stages of megaproject planning.

Oh man…I was going to get into a few random topics, but this is already starting to run long so let me give you two big thoughts with a promise to expound more in the future:

• The basketball debate over who is the GOAT between MJ and Lebron at the end of the day isn’t about statistics or achievements. It’s about culture and values. The two players, despite both being American, represent two different eras of an American ideal - one that prioritizes hard-nosed competition and another that prioritized collaboration.
• When we think of education as a private good, we’re thinking about it wrong. Education - particularly early childhood to secondary - is a public good where the benefit of it accrues both to the individual and to the broader society. We educate citizens in order for them to support and uphold our shared interests in the future, both as economic actors and as stewards of the common good.

With that, let’s call it a year shall we? But please send me your pairing request, and I’ll get back to you - even if it’s something I haven’t personally read (this is actually one of the dynamics of the activity that I’m most interested in: how well can you make a recommendation if you haven’t personally experienced the book. I think there are ways…)