This one isn’t a regular “let me explain a part of the world, as I see it” post either. It’s an essay that pretends to be about technological change and its consequences, but really it’s just about me, and what I think and do and feel. This is a genre I never really want to write, let alone publish. But I ended up finishing most of it in one sitting, and that hasn’t happened in a very, very long time. 

It also came out as more pessimistic than I really am. I should therefore clarify whole essay is an emotional reaction and should not be read as financial/life/epistemic advice.

Oh, there’s also a suggested reading soundtrack for it1.

I

“Professions” as you understand them will cease to exist in the medium term future 

- Manav Ponnekanti, 10 minutes ago.

I started writing this because I caught myself in a mood that I’d noticed thrice before. The lazy description is “existential”, a more literal one is “woah, alright, okay, steady now. I’m dizzy.”

The first time it happened was when the Dall-E 2 demos dropped, the second time was after they gave GPT eyes, the third happened when I saw it turn sketches into games. And the one that led to this essay was the video generation model that has somehow solved for rudimentary physics simulation and object permanence. 

I was three hours away from publishing, and it happened AGAIN. This time, it’s finally robots. 

These are “merely” impressive demos of capabilities I really thought would have some kind of hard limits. These are “just” high-dimensional predictions based off of an impressive (though incomplete) model of reality. These are “simply” a bunch of clever hacks and large matrices. A shiny demo isn’t everything.

It is still vertiginous.

The vertigo might just be because my beliefs about information and reality were proved very, very wrong. Everything that I thought was “incompressible” proved to be a matter of scale, it’s more than a little ridiculous.

There’s only so many reminders of how uncalibrated I am that I can absorb before feeling like I’m standing on ground that I shouldn’t trust. These days, my default assumption is “you can just compress good data enough, and it will spit out a good model”, which helps with the dizziness, but doesn’t change the fact (or the feeling) that the ground is shifting.

II

“So what do we do? I don’t want to be the guy training the models”

- Telegram message from Nihal in reaction to Gemini 1.5, 16th February.

Same, I don’t care enough about GPU code or training runs. Nihal is a lawyer who does research at a  legal policy and governance think-tank, he enjoys reading and thinking about legal policy and governance more than any reasonable person would. I wake up and design really simple software, and the occasional beautiful website. I write my HTML by hand, because I do this as art and not to create shareholder value. This is what I want to do, am blessed enough to sometimes get paid to do, and hope I can do it for a while longer. 

I have apps I want to make. They’re not particularly impressive ones, almost all of them are about putting text and images onto the internet. I feel rushed, because part of me still feels like there isn’t long before they become as trivial as three-digit multiplication. 

It’s not over, of course. It’s very far from over. We work in pure simulacrum: words and ideas. Of course we’re intimidated by the word-generator. All our friends are upper-middle class (as defined by having a college degree) and want to get jobs that keep them there. Of course we’re worried about white collar workers. We would both like to make undeserved amounts of money by just thinking about things. Of course we fear digital automation.

We were both overreacting, but it’s still a real reaction. You’re going to see a lot more of it soon enough. 

Most people don’t know how far along we are yet. I avoid telling them, it feels like asking for panic. And part of me believes that their panic will be unjustified, only I know how to panic properly. Only I have enough context, only I know just enough about how things work that I can see all the correct reasons to be the correct amounts of optimistic and worried. They wouldn’t get it.

III

“Why are they teaching us linear regression when we have computers that can talk?”

– A friend, after I showed him what GPT 3.5 could do.

The truth is, even I don’t know who really should be worried right now. The people who are most vocally concerned are the ones who spend their time creating things that live on screens: programmers, writers, graphic designers, and video editors. Everyone else can’t be bothered to care, they’re too busy studying for medical exams and building plumbing systems. Moravec hasn’t been proved wrong yet.

If you’re in college studying for a computer science degree, you’re going to be afraid. Part of me finds this beautiful, considering all the jokes that were made at the expense of humanities grads. Part of me is sad that we might lose one of the easiest, risk-free paths to wealth that the world has ever known. Who’s to say if economic mobility is worth trading for a chance to see the nerds fret a little?

Writers are also worried, but not really. We still don’t have AI that will go out and interview people. We don’t have AI that has a Twitter account and friends in the right places. Heck, we don’t even have AI that is capable of having a strong opinion. The competition for most jobs is still other people. 

If you’ve already graduated from “thing-doer” to coordinator/planner, congratulations! You’re probably making a lot of money, and will continue to do so. If you have a bullshit job, congratulations! Nobody knows why you’re here but they’ll probably keep you around as long as the economy keeps growing. If you have a job that involves being responsible for managing liability…good luck…? Computers cannot be held accountable yet, so just hope they don’t find a cheaper human to replace you.

But what if you like doing things? What if your ethic is Protestant, your dedication is to the craft, and you just can’t live without the need to be useful? 

What if you’re like the programmers who are not mad about the possibility of losing their jobs, as much as they are sad that they can’t spend the rest of their career typing ASCII characters onto a screen while thinking hard? They don’t care about “prompting” an opaque model into creating business value, that’s not why they got into this. 

You want problems. You want to feel smart about solving them, this is your jam. Some of you are actually sad that you cannot “grind” anymore, that things will be made too easy. (The grind is dead, long live the grind). I think this is as real a sadness as any other.

IV

“Yeah, but this has always happened. New technology comes along, people have to adapt.”

“True. I guess I could do more to use these tools.”

– My in-laws talking, during a belated New Years barbecue, 6th January.

They’re not wrong about the history, but there’s a chance that this is different, and they’re completely unprepared. I think a part of them knows this, because I also heard the words “little bit of Python” and “more skills”. Phrases that are associated with bootcamp advertisements and the rest of the industry of grift. There is doubt creeping in here, even if they want to believe otherwise.

I have no advice here, nothing that I want you to “take away” from this. If you want me to tell you how I think about the economy as a whole, and what you should do with your life, ask me to write a separate essay about that (don’t actually do this, I have nothing to say except “get good at doing things and convince people to pay you”). And that might just be outdated.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think we’re going to see a sudden instance of crazy job losses across the entire economy. I’m not yet worried about the end of economic mobility and the permanent cementing of the upper class. I’m mostly concerned with slow but steady shifts that some people are going to be hurt by. Some of this hurt is going to be due to questions of meaning, and uncomfortableness with uncertainty. Losing your job is pretty bad, but even anxiety is a pain as real as any other.

V

“I’ve spent most of the last two days lying on my bed staring at the ceiling.”

- Twitter DM (as I remember it), early 2022.

A few of you will remember that I tried running a small micro-grants program back when I was… 19. That’s crazy, I had no right to try doing something like that. I was supposed to write an update on the what and why of the whole thing when I shut it down, but that has stayed in my drafts too. Maybe I’ll get around to publishing it someday.

Anyway, I mention this because, near the end of the active part of this project, I sent out a small grant to a young artist in Indonesia. All she wanted was the money to buy an iPad (secondhand) so she could start doing commissions. This was around a month or so before Midjourney and Stable Diffusion made their announcements.

The quote above was how I remember the DM she sent me a week after those “tools” launched. 

I don’t think it’s the end of her life, but I understand how something like that can fuck you up.

This is my current phone wallpaper. It’s a screenshot of Simon Bailly’s Instagram feed. There’s nothing particularly technically difficult happening here, but I really like how she uses colours. They’re not particularly sophisticated or subtle, you could even describe them as “borderline garish”, but I think they’re really neat. So does the New Yorker, who has hired her in the past. Somehow, I don’t think Midjourney will stop them from doing it again in the future.

I could use this to make a point about how “art is about having a point of view”, and how large companies will probably always be hiring for bespoke services. But you already know this. I only brought this up so I could have a cool thumbnail image for this post.

I play the guitar (poorly). I already know we’ll have a model capable of turning “indie fingerstyle open E tuning instrumental” into an audio clip I can’t hope to match (at the moment). I don’t really care, playing an instrument and songwriting is cool as hell. Always will be. I might spend my next payment on a learner’s drum kit. 

VI

“…you should publish more, you have some bangers.”

– Jihad Esmail, on a video call where I was designing his new site. December 20th, 2023.

I have a writing voice and I don’t like it very much.

It’s too ‘internet’ — there is no weight to it and my sentences collapse into snappy, faux-honest confessionals far too often. There is a rhythm to it, I’ll admit; but it’s both predictable and not particularly musical. I have no doubt you could get GPT to imitate it, and write about the things I generally talk about (economics, ideas, the internet). 

But other people seem to like it. I’ve had half a dozen people tell me I should write copy, and more than a few compliments re. the essays I have here (y’all really say the nicest things).  Apparently “taste” is the differentiator and I don’t have to worry about GPT stealing my readers because what I do is one of a kind by definition. It’s nice to know this writing thing is still worth doing.

I can also boast of an $80 subscription from Substack’s patron saint, Marc Andreessen himself. Last year he read The Problem of Too Much Money and thought it was good enough to become my first (and only) subscriber. But it’s an annual subscription and he’s got almost nothing for it so far. 

So I’m writing a post for him. It’s about learned helplessness and insurance, the societal trend towards “shifting the blame” culture, and entire industries that are built on the backs of it. It’s called “Covering Your Ass-as-a-service” and I will try to complete it by the end of the month. Hopefully he sees it and decides his subscription was worth it. 

Maybe you can sign up too. Unlike a subscription, it won’t cost you anything. Yeah, this was a teaser and like + subscribe request. Sorry, couldn’t help it.

VII

“We are going to fuck up the internet and all that is true and beautiful.”

– Companies working on content generation and summarisation, probably.

I am now a self-appointed steward of the internet, by the way. I just decided one day that I can do this, I can do things that make the internet a better place to be on2. It’s kinda like being a good citizen, you keep the sidewalks clean and share meals with your neighbours. Except I make reading lists and maps and tools that help people publish things online.

So of course I have opinions on copyright and intellectual property. I wish every SEO-hacking content generator a very pleasant “rot in hell”. I’m going to go up against the search products that chew up pages to spit out summaries with my own solution for making webpage discovery easier. 

I have sympathy for people whose stuff was used as training data without consent, I think the copyright litigation is too little, too late, but a valid reaction. I’m especially sad about visual artists, they were the most fucked over.

I have sympathy for the people on Upwork. They don’t have the most enviable lives, but they had a brief moment where they could strike out on their own, free of the mess of their national job markets. I hope it doesn’t get too bad for them. 

Eventually, I imagine I will have sympathy for more and more people. The back office workers and customer service, the admins, the translators and ops teams, all the new grads who need a foot in the door. Maybe even truck drivers and service workers, someday. Funnily enough, I think the lawyers will stick around for a while.

And, perhaps foolishly, I believe that I’ll be alright.

VIII

“No, no plan really. The world is…changing so fast. I try not to think about it too much.”

“Very fast! I don’t know how you kids do this.”

– Me and my grandmother, early last year.

I think having lived through a bunch of major exponential curves might have given her some sort of perspective here. I had just graduated, and admitted I had no definite plan for what I wanted to do in 5 years from now. And I think she understood what I meant.

Much of the world is shaped by people plugging away on their dream despite change/uncertainty; bending the world to their will in a way that makes for an epic biography. But many of the great failures were failures to adapt to change, the world bent and they broke. So all I have is an anti-plan. Instead of charting out what I should/shouldn’t do over multi-year timelines, I just do the things and hope to not die. 

I was also lying to her. Of course I think too much. I have to, nobody else is going to do it for me. People keep telling me it’s enough to work on things you love. I believe them, but not completely; nobody knows where this goes. And nobody wants to admit that it might just be over. Everyone has their own reasoning for why things will go well, we’re stubbornly optimistic.

But it isn’t the end of the world. Yet. This is still “just” a factor that I must plug into my analysis of the world now, a caveat to all advice that I give, a rogue variable to keep a wary eye on. 

My career advice used to be “find something you like, and can spend lots of time on, people will pay for it once you get good enough”. I’ve now had to shorten it to “find something you like”.  I can no longer make promises of what the payoff will look like, or that a “career” or “profession” is worth having for most people. 

IX

“It’s always awkward to explain how I owe many of the good things in my life to Twitter”

- Me, when I’m trying to explain how I owe many of the good things in my life to Twitter.

Here’s a secret that isn’t a secret, just something of a rarely-mentioned fact:

I’m using my friends as insurance reassurance.

They are people who know how to work and think. They also have hearts of gold. This is really useful, sometimes in a “their help is what puts money in my bank account” way, as well as in the “if I lose both my hands I don’t have to worry about being homeless“ way. 

And now it’s in the “if I don’t make it, at least I’ll know people who have” way. I’m not sure if most people have this privilege, or explicitly acknowledge it when they do, but it’s a big part of how I think about life.

I try to be easy to help, I do what I can to be helpful so people know my intentions aren’t parasitic. Either I’m misreading everyone, or this is all it takes to make people be fond of you. 

Here’s another secret fact: It’s really hard to fall out of your socioeconomic class. There are hundreds of small ways in which you’re supported, cajoled, and bullied into sticking around through opportunities and systems that are part of the environment that you’re born into. This is an undeserved blessing, the kind that traps you within a very specific life trajectory. But it’s a blessing nonetheless.

X

“Pick a number between 6 and 10”

“10”

“ffs”

- Telegram conversation, me and Aarya. 17th February. 

I was typing this essay out on my phone at 5:50AM. I had 5 sections written out in under half an hour3, I wasn’t sure how many more I should try to add. Thank you Aarya for deciding for me.

I intended for this to be a really comprehensive compendium of everything I had to say on this topic. But it turns out 10 sections isn’t enough, there’s always more to say about everything. 

You will notice that I haven’t actually tried to give out actual object-level advice. I’m not going to tell you to “get in while there’s still time” because that’s not what I’m doing myself. I haven’t laid out my own optimistic scenarios (there are several), since I don’t trust my own estimates enough to thrust them onto other people.

I’ve also very conveniently skipped over what happens once we’re past the “AI can’t do X yet” phase, and enter a time where we can perfectly substitute our human labor with more compute. I had to, because that’s a whole other essay on its own. An essay that I am incapable of writing, because if/when that happens, all bets are off. 

What started out as a way to put text documents on the web, an effort based upon a marvellously simple maxim: all you need is links, has long outgrown that particular paradigm. Now full-blown apps run in your browser. Despite being sandboxed by it’s APIs and limited by the DOM, they’ve somehow become the dominant way to build applications in the 21st century. And how.

You can, in the next ten minutes, set up a place on the internet that is your own, and have it be instantly accessible to everybody who dares venture online (4 billion of us at last count). And there’s more. You could also add pixels to a global art board, patch together a mmm.page, or dump a bunch of your favourite photos onto the interwebs. 

I love the web enough to get slightly annoyed when people say they want to “fix” it (usually with a piece of technology that they have vested interests in), or complain how things suck so much now. 

I will grant that the tech is not as simple as it once was. But “once was” is referring about hypertext, forms and background colours. Now we run apps from a URL, that used to be bleeding-edge, experimental ideas during the Mother Of All Demos. Everything that was easy is hard again, but that’s how it goes when you build really complex software. Deal with it. 

I’m doubt that this is how Dylan ever imagined his song being played. And I’m sure that it wasn’t what the inventor of the electric guitar was imagining it would be used for. 

And like, nor was Tim-Berners Lee thinking about create-react-app when he literally invented the web. No matter how elegant his solution was, the we’ve had to patch on a million tiny hacks to get where we are now. There exists a theoretical model of this perfectly standardised, pristine web, and there’s the web that we use everyday. 

I might get heckled for this, but I think one of these “Hendrix moments” was when the “cloud” became a thing. Wikipedia is cool, but people were already thinking about collaborative, networked information when they were building the web. The idea that most of your information could live anywhere other than your personal computer was weird in a way that’s often understated (and hated on). 

In my post on good things and why we don’t have more of them, I mentioned that new stuff often seems weird enough to seem not worth trying in the first place. All things were once new.

Public libraries were probably seemed pretty stupid when they started out. What if people stole the books? Do you really think people who can’t afford books of their own are interested in literature? Don’t you want to have a scared bond of ownership with the books you read? Why are we letting the librarians control what books are on the shelves, isn’t that thought-policing?

The cloud has its tradeoffs, but it’s here to stay. Because it’s useful, and it works. Heck, Twitter happened because of the cloud, and is probably the reason you’re reading this now. I’m not sure what the next step-size change will look like for the web, but I don’t doubt that it will seem pretty weird too. But that’s not really what I’m thinking about today.

I also want to talk about the “hipster internet”.

“The Small Web is a reboot of the Internet as we know it. No, it’s not going to replace the Big Internet, but rather to create a niche for enthusiasts where people can freely express themselves, the tech stack is simple and transparent, where publishers have all the freedoms and consumers have a choice what to read. A place where time goes slowly and the content is created just for fun.”  - serge

Usually, this love stems from nostalgia, for the days when the web was text and links a marquee tags and glitter effects on myspace pages. I wasn’t around then. I only came online in like, 2019, and missed most of the big eras of the web before then. What I love is something slightly different, more akin to a hipster colony.

If the Small Web is the tech nerd side of things, the hipster internet is where the people carve out their own little corners of the web, with personal sites, and blogs, and independent apps. 

I love it because I love when people care about things. I love when their personal websites are unreasonably over-engineered, and beautiful. I love when they spend months building them, and/or try to make them as minimal as possible. I love clicking through all the carefully-crafted Jekyll sites. I love when they write about stuff they care about.

I’m not alone here, of course, some people have tried to collect this entire part of the web, in the hopes of keeping it alive in the current meta of corporate dominance.

It’s not a coincidence that the majority of people here are designers of some sort, or other connoisseurs of what could be called “auteur software”. They make things like read.cv and val.town and their own reader apps. They can’t be stopped, the internet is open, and they want to build. 

Here are a bunch of other things that seem to exist mostly because someone thought they’d be cool:

• special.fish: myspace? but basic?

• widget.json: send updates from the web to iPhone widgets

• micro.blog: blogging, but make it more social

• Careful Words: A thesaurus, but…nicer?

• tldraw: Open-source browser-based whiteboard

• window-swap: views through other people’s windows (not the creepy kind)

• Quartz: Backlink-based wiki sites

• nateparrott.com: Personal website that is also a game

• kognise’s webring: a webring for makers of technology, music, art, or writing

• Kern Type: A game where you practice spacing letters (kerning) 

None of this stuff is particularly “useful”. But for once, I don’t care about the impact on GDP, I want to know that people are having fun online. 

Yeah, I know this letter is 4 days late. This is how I live sometimes, okay?

Unfortunately enough, getting these cool things usually involves someone, somewhere, to…actually start doing them. That’s where good things come from, just some guys who choose to do them.

Some folk love to complain how actually, other people stopping them from doing stuff is the problem. This has some truth to it, the world has lots of stupid rules and   blankfaces working very hard to keep those rules alive and annoying. But that’s just how things are sometimes.

Even within the subset of things that are limited by laws and regulations, ¡getting them done is not impossible. Step 1 just looks like “get those rules changed”. This is difficult, but possible. Again, all it takes is people deciding to do something about it, and the side that does it better wins. It’s how we got rid of smallpox, slavery and, uh, the holes in the ozone layer.

So why don’t people do more good things?

1. New things are weird.

In some sense, all good things are new. “Good things” just means “things that are better than the current not-so-good things”, and this involves doing something else . This is not the easiest of choices to make, to bring a new thing into the world like that while being uncertain of how people will react.

At first, the thing doesn’t exist, and then it does. That’s weird as hell. It wrecks a bunch of equilibriums and turns most people’s expectations of how things work upside down. 

If that wasn’t daunting enough. Doing weird things is also just intrinsically hard. Risky. Foolish, even. There’s so much other (equally important!) stuff you could be doing instead. Like reading, or stamp-collecting. Or career-maxing or credential-stacking. Or just being a chill dude. 

2. Optimisation says “don’t do it”.

Thanks to the inherent risk and weirdness of doing new things, the payoffs are often ridiculously tiny compared to almost anything else you could be doing. This is especially true if you’re someone who’s able to really impressive stuff. The market will offer you much more to do the most directly profitable thing instead of whatever silly plan you dreamed up.

Taking this utility calculation too seriously leads to a way of living that only allows for things that fit within the easiest possible measure of good. Because outside this system, things get messy again, and payoffs fall off. There seems to be a general rule that new things are hard and risky, or don’t have much of a payoff for you personally (although they still might be great for the people you try to help).

3. Efficient markets fallacy.

It’s funny. Nobody I know actually believes things are as good as they can be. If you ask them, they can describe exactly the way in which they’re broken, and how the world would look like if they weren’t. And yet, somehow, this brokenness is talked about like an unavoidable reality instead of something that we let happen by choice. It’s surprising, and downright concerning, how far this view is taken.

Yeah, I know. TLP would say it’s used to justify inaction, not to actually think about why something doesn’t exist yet. It gives you permission to not try. It lets you pull out the “good enough” excuse whenever you feel like it. And that is often exactly how it’s used.

Despite being quite good at it, sometimes people really just can’t imagine that things could be better. 

4. No imagination.

The space of all possible good things is really, really large. And yet, the vast majority of people choose to…close their eyes and look away from it?? I’m not completely sure why this is, my current guess is that it’s some combination of inherent boringness, guilt, conditioning and fear.

Some people have what I call “childish imagination”, the ability to see into an alternate reality, but not care about how it would ever actually come to pass. This is by no means a bad skill to have, sheer variety of ideas is valuable in its own way. But when it comes to turning those ideas into good things, you need a slightly more grown-up, pragmatic sort of creativity. 

5. Things take a while.

Like, a long-ass time. By the same kind of logical utility calculations I mentioned in the second reason, this makes it not worth doing the thing if your personal discount rate is high enough.

A longer time period also means there’s more chances for things to go wrong. You get an immense advantage just from sticking around, because most people die out. But there’s also the chance that one of those people might just be you, and after years of trying. 

6. People fall off, things break.

One of the thing that most surprises me about the world (and my life), is that anything even works at all. At any moment, I could like, fall really, really sick. Or lose an arm, or my liver functions. Sure, my age and health stats say that this is unlikely, but if it did happen, none of those numbers matter. I’ll be broken anyway. 

It’s the same idea for computers, power grids, cars and anything else that’s even slightly complex. How many bit flips does it take for my Mac to just die on me? Why don’t power lines just give up and send entire cities into blackouts? Why aren’t people crashing their cars more often?

The fact that things still work despite everything that could go wrong? That’s crazy. 

Even without facing actual disaster, it’s still hard to stick to the long game, even when you really wanted to. Most of us are pretty flaky humans, and that means we’re not very good at getting the many past good reasons to give up.

7. Not everyone is good at doing things.

I like to pretend like I am good at doing stuff. It’s a useful bit of fiction, because it means I find it easier to actually start doing stuff because, hey, this is what I do. Sometimes, other people begin to believe this too, and that also helps keep the fiction going. 

But it still is mostly fiction, because at any given moment, I could stop. I could get bored, tired, disillusioned or side-tracked. If I’m stuck badly enough, there is no unshakable sense of discipline that exists to keep me going, even if I care about doing so. And lots of people don’t even care! They don’t have the force of “man, I love this thing” keeping them coming back to it. They can just leave, drop out, move on. It’s so easy to quit.

Assuming, of course, they’re the kind of person with the abilities that let them do good things in the first place. Earning those abilities is a while different process in itself. 

8. They don’t have other people helping them.

In the Problem of Too Much Money, I wrote about why money doesn’t really ensure that you get everything you want. What I’m trying to get at here is something like “the problem of too much drive”. That alone isn’t anywhere close to enough.

Some things are easier to do on your own than others, like writing on the internet, or baking, or going to the gym. But most large projects need to be tackled by a collective, there’s just too many different things to do for one person to know how to do, let alone actually getting it done. Having people with you is also good for longevity, sometimes all it takes is one person from the group to push the others to continue working on it, and to know you’ve got other people who care about it too. t

And even the former, simpler projects are still underratedly hard to do on your own. It’s kinda miserable to put out blog posts knowing that you don’t have dozens of friends ready to read them. Baking is more fun when you can share the output, and the gym is easier when you have a group chat full of people who are doing the same thing. 

The myth of the myth of the lone genius makes a lot of good points, especially around the kind of solitude that’s necessary for truly original intellectual work. But when it comes to doing things in the real world, and doing them in a way that matters, you’re going to need to find some sort of a team. 

9. Coordination is hard.

Even with like, yourself in two weeks from now. The amount of effort it takes to set things up for them to continue working, to come to an agreement about who should do what, to pick the best thing to do, is non-trivial. And that’s without making sure they actually following through on any of the plans. Now add other people and all their idiosyncratic preferences to the mix. Suddenly, you need someone to act as a manager for more than just themselves, and to be good at it too. 

10. It’s a Thing.

With a capital “T”. It’s a big separate object that takes up space in concept land. It has a name and face and it haunts your dreams and every waking hour. When you talk about it, you use a name that encapsulates it as “that thing”.

Being a Thing, it is possible to fail at it. It is also the case that you are afraid of failing at it, because it’s a Thing that has two endings: winning and losing. 

Having clear outcomes like that is great when it’s very important that you do win in a well-defined manner. Like when you’re running a company, or planning to qualify for the Olympics. But most good things are not like that, you’re allowed to just do them.

Imagine if more things were just something you did with less thought towards outcomes, projects with no start or end, no solid shape that could float into your vision. Things that you picked up and put down when you felt they should be.

I have a feeling like these kinds of things are the ones that stick around. 

P.S: The idea for this entire post came from me talking to Telt, who had some ideas around trying to grow the amount of high-quality writing online. Near the end of the conversation, he asked something like “why aren’t other people already doing this?.

My answer was “they’re employed, or find other things to do. It’s a rare kind of person who seriously considers projects that other people would see as frivolous”. It was only like, 5 minutes after the call that I realised that is probably incredibly rude thing to say to someone with a very real job. 

But my point was that many things that fall into the realm of “frivolous” are things that are very much worth doing. They just happen to be slightly harder to justify than everything else. Why try to make something new, when you can just spend the extra hours doing something else? Like maximising expected earnings, or hanging out with the homies.

It takes something of an unusual psychology to be the person who gets around all of these problems and actually does the thing. I hope there are a lot of you out there.

Economics is about grand ideas, the economy itself is a bunch of people.

The field includes a bunch of theories for why things happen the way they do. Sometimes, these theories are really good ones and explain things like banking and the dollar’s dominance. Other times, they get things wrong and reality has to show them just how fake some of this stuff is. 

But people, and what they do (or don’t do), are very, very real.

Markets, which are simultaneously an abstract ideal and a real emergent phenomenon, are where those two come closest to meeting. Things that happen in markets seem to match the graphs that economists draw, and so they earn a reputation as the place where economics happens. Like how the troposphere is where rain “happens”.

And yet, markets do not exist as a kind of omnipotent coordinating force, or anything even close to that. They aren’t alive in the way that I like to claim that  ideas are. What we call “markets” is just three guys in a trench-coat who woke up today and decided to do something. 

It’s funny, you grow up thinking the world just sort of runs itself, but then you start to see everything around you being held up by specific people. People made them happen, and people choose to keep them there everyday. Sometimes, they happen to create things that look and behave like markets. And sometimes they don’t.

But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be made to exist. 

In certain cases, nobody is really selling what you want to buy. In which case, you can just go and ask them to start doing that. Like when the East India company turned China into the world’s biggest exporter of tea. Or you can invade them and force them to do it. Like the East India company when it used the Indian colonies as a poppy farm. Either way, they created an entire market for where there was none before. 

But maybe people might not want to buy what you’re selling, which means that part of the market-making is making them do it anyway. If all they want is faster horses, the market for cars is exactly as large as you work to make it. You can just go sell things. Like the East India company during the Opium War- okay, I’ll stop. Heck, you can sell a card game that is also a version of dodgeball for $25 if you really want to, markets be damned. 

II.

Even where it seems like there are market-like systems in place, they work far, far less efficiently than you’d imagine. 

Let’s say you’re looking for a job. You’ve heard of this huge job board that aggregates every single public job listing on the internet. That sounds cool, looks like they’re really cornered the market when it comes to sourcing jobs. And some of these look really good! You wouldn’t find jobs like these back in your hometown.

So you filter down to a hundred or so companies, and send in your application. Maybe five of them write back. Three of those five were clearly system-generated and ask you to send in another set of documents and more references. The other two, which happen to be two of the worst ones on the list of one hundred, want you to interview next week. 

There’s lots to be said here about the tragedy of the commons (a.k.a. online job boards) and the market for lemons (here’s a good post, if you want more on that), but the point is that this whole system kinda sucks. Yes, there are more jobs available to more people than there ever has been before. But there’s a ton of waste throughout the process and nobody really says they love it. 

But let’s say you have a friend, who happens to work at a fairly large company. He happens to tell you his boss is looking for an assistant to handle exactly the kind of tasks you’re pretty good at. The role is important enough that it pays really well, and small enough that the company’s hiring department can’t be bothered. Who wants to help find a fit for one manager’s specific set of tasks?

This is, quite frankly, fucking stupid. 

There was this huge market out there, with thousands of companies on one end, and it got you nowhere. But the guy who shared a room with you for one year in university ended up solving the whole thing, just by talking to you 3 years later. 

This is also exactly how most things work. 

The cost of finding the perfect candidate is too large. Searching for is difficult. Breaking into, or creating, a new market is really hard. These costs, what economics like to call “transaction costs”, mess with markets everywhere1. And the solutions, when they can be found, happen outside of where you’d expect them to be. 

Especially the market for ideas, which is as poorly-developed as any of the other examples I’ve discussed already. 

There are people out there who know things, and people who want to learn things. In the middle is this incredible network of connections that spans the globe, called the internet. And yet, compared to how unimaginably large the demand side of this market is, the trade almost never happens. This is a big deal, ideas are arguably one of the key economic inputs, alongside labour and capital .

Here’s what happens if you want to really know what it feels like to use something. Like, say, a certain brand of sleep medicine. You have to hope you stumble upon the one blog post written by a sleep science blogger. No wait, first you need to pray that they’ve even written it in the first place. Then you need to hope they aren’t lying through their teeth. Then you can worry about whether the product has changed meaningfully in the three years since they reviewed it. Shit.

It’s the same way for everything from wondering if a certain shoe fits large or tight, to knowing who’s in charge of Department X, to learning how to set up cache headers for one specific hosting provider so I can finally have my site’s fonts saved locally. 

Yeah, StackOverflow and Tegus  are billion-dollar companies, how did you guess? 

Everyday, experience and information is lost to the fact that nobody records it, or is buried beneath the pile of unreliable data that is the current information market. And competitors come and go, all trying different approaches (fact-checking, curation, Wikipedia for X, open protocols) to a stubbornly difficult problem. Heck, even most of science is stored in the fascia.

III.

So, are you saying markets aren’t even real?

Well. If you ask me, they’re about as real as turtles choking on plastic straws. 

You may have heard of turtles who had that happen to them. You may have seen a video of it happening. If you happen to be lucky enough to spend most of your life near a beach, you may even have seen a slayed-by-straw turtle wash up next to you. But it’s rare, negligible, and people were led to think it’s a bigger deal than it is. 

Similarly, if all you had access to was the neoliberal literature, you’d be forgiven for thinking of markets as infallible, omnipotent deities. Synthesising knowledge and intent through the price mechanism and serving up perfectly distributed goods. But alas.

Where working markets do exist, they look like something closer to grocery stores and courier systems. Or mTurk and Uber. Reducing the product down to a commodity, so as to make sourcing the only big problem. But still battling a million problems. It’s tough out there.

“Okay, but why is it this way?”

One answer is that people are evil and stupid and the system wants to grind us to dust rather than let us have good things. The other answer is that most people just don’t care very much about how things get done, and so structural incentives gird most actions. I see the appeal of the former view, but I’ve seen too many instances of the latter to assume it isn’t the case here too.

In this case, we have to deal with the fact that market-making is expensive. There’s just too many parts to it that need to be done well enough to make for a good one. Sourcing buyers and sellers is hard enough, there’s always new ones entering and leaving. But then you also have to run quality checks, or set up barriers to entry that fulfil the same purpose. Maybe even deal with adversarial parties who just want to mess up your system. 

If I’m a hiring manager at a tiny firm in a big city, I can’t be bothered to worry about the weaknesses of the entire hiring system. I can’t really do much about it, and it’s definitely above my pay-grade to even try. Ideally, I would have access to the tiniest detail of all my candidate’s skills, personality traits and work history. But getting that is costly enough that I have to do without it.

The market will stay inefficient because it’s not worth it to any one party to make it perfect. You could try to do it at a smaller, more manageable scale, but that usually means you’re only solving it for yourself, not doing it as a professional service. The easiest middle-man to squeeze out is the guy working between just a handful of static parties. Nobody wants to be that guy. 

And so, like most market-making, its usually only worth it at scale. If someone managed to put most of the world’s professionals into one room and get them to do simple things like list out their work history publicly and share data points like achievements and experiences, they’d make billions. That was LinkedIn, it was acquired by Microsoft for $26 billion back in 2016, and did $10B in revenue last year. And still, many people hate LinkedIn.

Another reason why nobody cares enough is that it doesn’t really matter, most of the time. Since it’s so expensive to do well, we just make do without. There isn’t any real need to always ensure the best match, and we’re very good at satisficing. 

IV.

But everyone still uses them. Surely that’s worth something?

It sure is. It’s worth approximately all-that-was-made-through-the-wonders-of-the-global-trade-system. Which is to say, nearly everything you see. And that’s cool and wonderful and yeah, I love iPads too.

But what it doesn’t include is everything that hasn’t happened yet. All that lies on the edge of possibility and current imaginations. The stuff within markets is what we’re used to working with, and we get better at this over time. But it’s still such a small, small part of what is and could be.

And yet, people will tell you to play within it, because it does provide certain guarantees that they find comforting. If you can play by its rules, and hold up the proper signals, it will do its best to give you a “fair price”. Being in the market is playing on easy mode .

“Easy Mode is easier. The reason to Play in Easy Mode is because it is the best known way to achieve your explicit measurable goal and get to the victory screen.”   - Zvi 

If I was TLP, I would say something like, “the applicant mindset lets people abdicate responsibility for their outcomes to the markets. And people love abdicating responsibility, because they’re cowardly pieces of shit. Just like you when you wake up every morning and fail to take control of your destiny.” 

But I’m not, so instead I’m just gonna say something clever-sounding like “information asymmetry”. It’s hard to see the alternate routes as real if you haven’t actually walked down them yourself. If you’ve been told that the market is the only way, everything else seems almost like cheating. 

It’s no wonder then, that people are surprised by things like the unreasonable efficacy of cold e-mails. Turns out you can get what you want if you ask people directly, and do it really well. Who would have thought? 

To most people, it looks like the market itself discourages this. “Apply through the proper channels please!” it seems to yell, after a long day of struggling to coordinate parties on either side of it. But that’s just like, it’s opinion, man. The pipelines were invented by pipeline maintainers to sell more pipe grease. And to keep their jobs programme running.

If you don’t really get this through your head, you’re often going to feel guilty for “cheating” the market. It doesn’t seem fair to get good things if it seems like the market is saying you don’t “deserve” them. But fairness is not how things ever worked. 

“It is pleasant to imagine that investment banking is the sort of business for which only a few people are qualified via innate intelligence and rigorous training, but fundamentally it - like a lot of businesses - is about convincing people to pay you money. Doing that with spreadsheets and PowerPoint is - well, one, it’s not that difficult, lots of people are qualified to do it, probably including the Stanford-educated scions in this Times article - but, two, it’s a distinctly second-best approach. Maybe seventh-best. The best way to convince people to pay you money is to, like, go to them and be all “hey, dad, could we have some money?” But also playing golf with them, or being a former NFL quarterback, or just general handshakefulness and bonhomie are probably more effective than spreadsheets. Qualified!”  -Matt Levine

Sure, in some sense, nepotism is really bad because it entrenches elite interests. But to the people involved, they’re just hiring the candidate who would be a better asset. Unfortunately, it happened to be something that wasn’t a skill you could be better at by knowing more about the yield curve. 

That example might seem extreme, but that’s how most transactions are done everyday. The bribes in the backrooms, the favour to your dorm mate, choosing a bank because you like how the teller smiles. It all happens, whether markets choose to measure it or not. The reason public markets have no alpha  left is not because they’re so wonderfully efficient, but because there’s barely anything happening there in the first place. 

Thankfully, you’re allowed to go around them.

Just because the current market for ideas is set up one way, doesn’t mean you can’t do something like create an independent journal with the goal of publishing research that is more…unorthodox. Like papers on the possibility of neural networks experiencing suffering. If all the other offerings seem stale, you can go create better ones. 

Applicant mindset has little to do with the applications themselves, it’s about letting those be your only shots. It’s deceptively easy to mutter “it’s all a numbers game” and go back to churning out applications. The numbers game doesn’t count for much if all the good numbers are given away before they reach the market. 

It’s harder to think very carefully about what you want and go find out how to get it. Sometimes, markets are a tool that help you do that; sometimes they’re a crutch that slows you down to a hobble. You get to choose how you use them. 

I spent like, one and a half years of my life wanting to apologise for the way my face looked. 

Quite obviously, this was far from ideal for the purposes of social interaction, confidence or like, baseline happiness (lol lmao). From among the few people who I’ve mentioned this to, the reactions ranged from “that’s fucked up” to “that’s really fucked up”. Which is fair, I guess. But I also think it was completely reasonable, if you look at it a certain way.

You’ve all seen the Ira Glass quote, but here it is again just in case. 

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.“

Personally, this is rather easy to accept, especially once it’s spelt out like that. If I’m going to suck for a while before I can do as well as I want to, that’s reasonable and I’ve just got to suck it up and keep at it. It’s a lesson you only need to learn a couple times before it gets easy to live with. Rather unfortunately, we’ve also got to live with other people. 

And while you can see the distance between your taste and output, and can see just how it changes over time, everyone else has almost no clue. They don’t know or care that your taste has been honed over years of esoteric djent and Stravinsky. They hear you play the wrong notes and see the clumsy hands. How do you let them know that you’re not like, tone deaf? How do you make sure that they know that you know that they know this isn’t acceptable and that you’re trying to do better?

The best way to do this would to…just be really good. If you do everything perfectly, that’s pretty undeniable proof that you care about being good, y’know? But that takes a while, so the second best way is to use a signal instead. You could just stop and go “hey, I know I’m not performing too well right now, but I’m not one of those tasteless barbarians who can’t tell the difference between mistakes and beauty and I will do better next time”. That would work, except for the fact that its far from subtle, not to mention being a bit of a mouthful. 

So we apologise instead. It makes for a very convenient shorthand for this kind of thing: it lets them know that you know something is wrong and that you didn’t intend for it to happen. This kind of replacement of explicit information for something that implies the same thing, this is what signals are for.

A signal isn’t proof, but that’s what makes it way cheaper to use. You can argue about some signals being wasteful, but compared to the alternative, they’re a bargain. Signalling is useful. Signalling is communication. And apologies are signals that you know and agree about what is good.

Communities, as much as they might claim to be welcoming, all have their own selection pressures. When you walk into a conversation, and begin with a polite apology, that’s you saying “before I say anything, I need you to know that I defer to the rules you guys have here. I might not be able to see them too clearly but at least now you know that I know that they’re there.” The mores of the community are acknowledged as something worth respecting over your personal idiosyncrasies. 

When you apologise for being dressed poorly, you’re acknowledging what the expected standard is. And making sure they know that your failure to live up to it is just a temporary lapse, not an intentional disobedience or a failure of taste. Ditto for your friend’s uncool behaviour (“Sorry, I’m not really with this guy”) or the local drunkard (“Don’t worry, he’s not really representative of our community, we’re better than that”).

II.

All these apologies, just to make sure they don’t forget you’re a person of culture.

As for my face, the primary thing I wanted to signal was something like, “hey, I’m sorry you’ve got to look at this thing while you talk to me, and I wish you didn’t have to because it’s far from the best one“. Yeah, you know what? That was kinda fucked up. But nonetheless, it was what I wanted to say at the time. It wasn’t some sort of traumatic response, I just had a point to state!

You could make the point that this intended apology would be a mistake, because there is no real standard to be deferred to here. But that would be a lie. You could also say that taste-related apologies are linked to insecurity. That wouldn’t be too far from the truth, but it doesn’t make them any less useful.

This piece is only supposed to look at at the between apologies and taste, but the apology in general is one of those endlessly fascinating meta-signals that means far too many things in different contexts. It could just be a simple attempt to defuse a heated situation. It could be a polite way to re-balance the scales of power by giving someone weaker the right to forgive you. There’s always a lot that can be read into them. 

And apologising too much? That reads as over-signalling.

It’s like wearing three Rolex’s, and a fourth one on your foot., nobody really likes how it looks. It’s uncultured, and it’s downright suspicious behaviour. Since how hard you signal is a measure of how hard you’re trying to say something, there’s a threshold past which people start asking just why it is that you want to say something so strongly. Don’t you trust your signal? Don’t you trust their ability to read it? Are you lying? 

III.

And this is where signalling starts to get pretty dysfunctional.

Because sending a signal is not the same thing as ensuring is has substance. The usefulness of signals comes in no small part from their separation from the part of reality they’re supposed to represent. This separation makes them cheap, the separation is also what makes them complicated; and so much depends on the ability of other people, and yourself, to parse these signals. 

How long does it take for “I’m sorry I was mean” to become “but I’m not really a mean person because I know how to apologise”? How long before abusing a signal becomes a strategy of its own? And if you’re dealing with relatively inexperienced signal-readers, it’s a really effective one!

This is exactly the dynamic that plays out when “but he went to Stanford” gets pulled out as a reason why a person couldn’t possibly have acted incredibly stupidly. What was at best a signal of intelligence becomes something closer to proof. Confusing the signifier for the signified, this is the map-territory issue all over again.

And it’s one thing to try to fool someone else, and quite another thing to let yourself be taken in by your own excessive signalling. Because in the former case, people will eventually cotton onto your strategy, and learn to discount the apologies if they prove to be hollow over time. But fooling yourself? That’s messy.

There is a point where an apology goes from frequent but possibly necessary declarations of  “I’m know I’m not good enough yet” to a constant drone of “I’m not good enough”. A point at which the signal corrupts the sender. 

They’re so busy apologising to themselves that they never actually get around to making anything. If you care too much about what is only supposed to be a signal (‘this isn’t great, I’ll do better”), it gets to the point where keeping up appearances becomes secondary to actually getting better.

“I’m just going to stop doing things that suck”. Surprise, almost everything you do sucks. Now what?

“Everybody lookin' at you crazy (crazy!)
What you gonna do? (what you gonna do?)
Lift up your head and keep moving (keep moving)
Or let the paranoia haunt you (haunt you)?”

- i, Kendrick Lamar

What started out as an innocent display of taste has transformed into the kind of desperate safety measure that is more prison than playpen. The display is now more important than the thing, and the apology is closer to being a way of life.

“… You've got taste, you've got taste.

What a waste that that's all that you have”

- Singer Songwriter, Okkervil River

There are many reasons why someone would want to signal “I am small and weak, please don’t hurt me that would be evil of you”. And one of them is a pathological fear of conflict. Everyone knows how self-deprecation is so often just a strategy for pre-empting criticism. Well, apologies can reach there too. Apologise too much, and it feels like you can get away with failure for longer than you should be comfortable with. 

Economists love simple models.

And of course, they get criticised for it. Smart people love nothing more than telling other smart people they’re wrong. And there are plenty of people on the other side of the walls of the world’s economics departments ready to hurl accusations of simple-mindedness. You’ll find a fair number of them going about their business on  everyone’s favourite bird app. 

But simple models are nonetheless useful tools for thinking. Even if it’s something like using hotdog buns to talk about the consequences of technology-enabled growth in supply.

“You can’t do serious economics unless you are willing to be playful. Economic theory is not a collection of dictums laid down by pompous authority figures. Mainly, it is a menagerie of thought experiments—parables, if you like—that are intended to capture the logic of economic processes in a simplified way. In the end, of course, ideas must be tested against the facts. But even to know what facts are relevant, you must play with those ideas in hypothetical settings. And I use the word “play” advisedly: Innovative thinkers, in economics and other disciplines, often have a pronounced whimsical streak.”   - Krugman

Sure, you could try to account for every little edge case and stubborn exception. You could try. You could just throw up your hands in despair and yell about how everything’s unknowable so we should just stop trying. There’s a whole school of economic thought that argues for exactly this. But either way, you’d end up the same way: empty-handed. 

Or you can join the dark side. Assume perfect knowledge, grab a few fixed rates of growth, pick your rational agent, and it’s off to the naive modelling races. The prize is a fake Nobel and the rules are based on how well can you sell a narrative. There are worse ways to live, y’know?

And it isn’t all that bad. There are still brilliant ideas that come out of the field. Utility functions, Schelling points, price signals, auction strategies, RCTs, growth theories, etc. etc. They might not be made up of sacred and universal truths; and their lists of assumptions is a long one. But you need these simplifications if you want a model that you’re able to work with. And they’re each insightful enough to be worth a few dozen papers, and maybe your attention too.  

When trying to express my scepticism around network states, I tried imagining the world in a decade from now, tried to see all the likely developments and possible branches. I visited all the relevant blogs and opened a few Metaculus page. I tried to factor in the impact of unknowns unknowns. And then I gave up. 

Balaji is a really smart guy, and I’m just some kid with a blog. When it comes to predicting the future, I think that puts as at pretty much equal. The future is just that hard. Even if you see all the strands that make up the current tapestry, the new patterns will have whole new colours, the material is changing all the time, and you haven’t even met the new weavers.

So instead I retreat to simple models, and analogy. A cheap trick, no doubt, but one that no writer should be ashamed of wielding (Balaji is a pretty liberal user himself). This piece will contain almost no facts, figures, irrefutable graphs, or other such weapons that usually make up the blogger’s MO. They’re not worth much anyway. All facts are cherry-picked; experienced readers can spot the omissions, inexperienced ones are fooled. And nobody’s the happier. 

So instead, I’m going assume a few spherical cows, and see where that goes.

II.

First, a quick intro to Balaji, who’s one of the few people who seems to spend more time on Twitter than me. 

He’s a vocal techno-optimist, trans-humanist, libertarian, ex-startup founder, crypto-billionaire. That’s a long list, but we don’t have to worry about all those things right now (pick up the Silicon Valley engineer starter pack at a tech party near you, and it will get you 90% of the way there). We really only care about one particular niche: his ideas for a future of decentralised nation-states.

This talk fromY-Combinator in 2013 does a pretty good job of explaining where he’s coming from. In it, he talks about Hirschman’s book Voice, Loyalty and Exit, the progression of software from local first to the cloud, the decentralising effects of crypto, and how America is going to shit. It’s a good talk, as far as talks usually go. The briefest possible TLDW is this:

1) Some places suck

2) Reform often fails 

3) Let’s leave, go to other places and do things better there instead.

Lots of people love these ideas. Everyone in tech hates bureaucracy. Everyone in tech hates paying $5k in rent every month. Everyone in tech hates that they’re not allowed to brew nootropic concoctions from eight different non-FDA-approved drugs in the comfort of their fusion-reactor powered flying car. 

And the idea of the network state, on a high-level at least, is pretty simple. You have a bunch of people across the world who share a strong-enough purpose to pool their resources together. Once they have enough money, they can buy real land, leave their old lives behind, and live in a brand-new country. Free of those silly zoning laws and FDA regulations. Or, in Balaji’s own words:

A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.

It’s an appealing idea. In the same way that planning to build and populate a village with your friends is appealing in college. Or the idea of squad wealth is appealing to a certain set of internet enjoyers. The glory of getting to be the founding fathers, the creators of your own little sovereign city. The us vs. the world dynamic is a powerful bit of psychological tooling. 

There are definitely some obvious benefits in being free of the overhand of state processes and regulation, one of which is the rate of experimentation and innovation that it could unlock. You can iterate faster when you don’t have to go through 5 layers of approvals and the bi-annual creation of yet another hoop to jump through.  You’d finally be free of the debt of legacy law and the consequences explored by public choice theory: the annoying fact that the default tendency is towards creating new rules and increased oversight and that it’s much harder to get rid of a useless law once it’s in place. 

Replace “state” with “startup”, and “America” with “FAANG”, and what you have is the classic call to leave the mothership and go build something new. Indeed, back in the day, much of what makes up the idea of network states fell under the more direct term “startup city”. But the idea goes beyond just building technological innovation and high-productivity zones, network states are an experiments at the level of social structure itself. 

You get to use your own selection effects. Defining your immigration policy, visa rules and ultimately the kind of people that make up your new country’s population. If done right, this could be an upgrade to the already powerful agglomeration effects of large cities. Getting a bunch of people with similar goals together in one place has huge positive effects on growth, and this collection is usually left to free market forces like earnings and demand from local employers. Running your own country would mean that, instead of selection pressures based on income and education, you could intentionally set the KPIs for your future citizens based on the state’s shared values. 

This seems like the kind of thing that could result in a lot of cool weirdness. A possible antidote to the end of history that’s creeping up on us. Which is all well and good, just as the economy always needs new, nimble market entrants to raise the bar for innovation, society can do with some weirder outliers. 

But Coase had something to say about this.

Okay, that’s not true, but he did have something to say about companies, In perhaps his most famous piece of writing, he asked a simple question:

"Outside the firm, price movements direct production, which is co-ordinated through a series of exchange transactions on the market. Within a firm, these market transactions are eliminated and in place of the complicated market structure with exchange transactions is substituted the entrepreneur-co-ordinator, who directs production. It is clear that these are alternative methods of coordinating production. Yet, having regard to the fact that if production is regulated by price movements, production could be carried on without any organisation at all, well might we ask, why is there any organisation?"

Why does the economy need people to come together in groups, usually under the supervision of one or more managers, to produce things as an entity instead of as individuals? Why doesn’t the price mechanism, the invisible hand of all that is good and true in free market economies, coordinate things perfectly on its own?

Okay, yeah, you already know the answer to this one if you’ve tried to hire a freelancer before. Or if you’ve had to switch barbers, buy a new coffee table, or find a new job. You already know about the price that you pay, whether in time, effort and comfort. Economists lump those, and other similar costs, under the term “switching costs”. But there’s also the cost of going looking for a new hairdresser, table or employer, and judging their suitability. Those go by the equally creative name of “search costs”, and they’re usually included under switching costs. 

And then they put all of those (plus some other things like “enforcement costs”, which is exactly what it sounds like) under the giant label “transaction costs”, and set those to work explaining why the free market often fails in the ways it does. According to them, these costs are just the price of things break ing down in the absence of the handy duo of perfect knowledge and perfect competition. 

But the firm can do things differently, Instead of going out looking for specialised labour, and drawing up individual contracts each time it needs to get something done, it hires them as permanent employees. Instead of checking the market to find the best prices each time it needs to buy raw materials, it sets up contracts to purchase them in bulk. Instead of sending the goods through multiple craftsmen to get to the finished product, it builds its own production processes. 

In the absence of these, firms would just be…people. The invisible hand could do its thing, and markets would work perfectly fine. Everyone would find what they need, at just the right quality and price, and the libertarian future would have arrived. Instead, firms have an imperfect substitute in the form of  the “entrepreneur“, who directs production and allocates resources without having to pay the transaction costs that the open market would experience. 

Simply put, the harder it is to get things done efficiently in the free market, the more of an advantage it is to run production within a firm-like organisation. Putting groups of people together in these alternative structures has a huge effect on coordination outcomes and the resulting output, just by freeing them from certain transaction costs and market demands. 

III.

If you screw on your economist hat tightly enough, countries are just really big firms.

And they have all the benefits and weaknesses that come with agglomeration and scale. For example, you can build larger portions of the supply chain and human capital in-house instead of being dependent on imports (or slave labor). You can work the internal propaganda machine (patriotism) to inspire effort the way a company ethos is supposed to. You can get people in charge of important sectors to live closer to each other in the hopes of fostering more cooperation. 

You also have to be more careful about harming people, the effects of getting something wrong has a larger fallout.  Bureaucracy becomes a necessity. As headcount grows, you’ve got to manage your own version of the free-rider problem. 

But if Coase is right, the main benefit of having a large firm instead a bunch of tiny ones is the ability to sidestep the variety of transaction costs. And I think this is also the case when we’re talking about countries instead, the costs just look a little different. The parallels between large countries and huge firms might look a bit blurry, but some things are similar enough to be worth thinking about. There’s stuff that all countries need to do that happens to be rather inefficient, and that could just be enough of a cost to prevent people starting new ones. 

Laws:

The inconvenience of drawing up of individual labour contracts has a handy analogy when it comes to nation-states: the legislative system. 

If the whole point of a new country is being able to change the rules, it kind sucks that this happens to be a really hard problem in practice. There’s a reason most countries let the central government define the rules instead of re-drafting them at the level of each small town: these contracts are expensive things. 

It's fairly easy to say "okay, we'll all let people drive after 16". But how do you do that with something like military spending, drug regulation or privacy laws? Each of these things takes a committee to draft, an army of paralegals to interpret, and a national legislature to enforce. The current judicial system doesn’t have many fans. But it got to this point after a long evolutionary process and whole libraries worth of debate. Would you want to go through that each time you draft draft your own laws?

Those fond of repeating “code is law”, would do well to remember that this means nothing when the compilers are human. Heck we haven’t even figured out automation yet. Even if you set up things really well, software and simple rules only gets you most of the way there. The last few detail take exponentially more work, and start to negate the advantages that code provides. 

I was going to write a few hundred words more on the under-appreciated difference Law the Platonic Idea and law in practice. But Nihal did it for me, so you can just read his excellent post instead. The upshot of it all is that hard part is not  framing the laws (and  that’s pretty hard already!), it’s dealing with the messy bits in the aftermath.

Even if you have simple laws, and the greatest implementation processes ever devised, you’d still have to interface with others who don't. And since you’re a tiny state that’s highly dependent on your trade partners, you’d have to do this for lots of things. Now imagine that, multiplied across every new state. That’s a lot of messy law!

Even search costs have an analogue in the legal system. Much of navigating said system is knowing how things works, whom to bribe, when to sue, what you can get away with and what you definitely won’t be allowed to do. The discovery process for these implicit structures map directly to the act off going through a market looking for the best deal. If network states create new systems each time, it makes it the much harder for practitioners to get up and running. 

Governance:

How many people want to be involved in governance? How many should be? How many even want to be? Balaji likes to talk about the fakeness of democracy, how a 49-51 vote silences half the population. This sounds really unfair, in theory, until you look and find that no population has ever been split right down the middle like that. And if the injustice is truly big enough, 49% is usually more than enough people to attempt more direct methods, like a revolution or something. If you ask another notorious Twitter intellectual, it’s often the intolerant minority that wins. 

And if your country is made up of high-functioning entrepreneurs trying to run their own world-changing companies, it’s not very efficient to ask them to do the oft-boring work of running a country at the same time. So maybe direct involvement isn’t very practical. But if you bring in other people to handle things, how do you know that the same old story of bureaucratic growth and scope creep won’t play out all over again? Governance is hard, and its institutions have historically chosen to extend the reach of their powers. 

Firms, especially small ones, have the advantage of dedicating their resources to the head entrepreneur. Per Coase, this is the advantage that a firm has over the free market. The entrepreneur’s decisions are what get rid of the transaction costs between its members and their different functions. So should network states pick dictators, in the name of efficiency? Singapore did that for a while and they turned out great, half a dozen African countries tried it too and they did…not so great.  The free market equivalent of governance probably looks like libertarianism, but that has its own costs, just like markets do. 

Longevity:

The brutal efficiency of markets limits what their members are allowed to do. For larger entities, the ability to stand firm (sorry, had to) against the whims of supply and demand lets them do things like survive longer at times when it seems like they shouldn’t. 

This feels weird. Perhaps because anti-fragility is usually associated with small, nimble organisms that adapt quickly to the kinds of changes that kill the slower, more ossified ones. But on the meta-level, the most anti-fragile thing you can do is to diversify, staying alive really is the primary goal here. A highly-specialised network state would be the exact opposite of this ethos. It’s a bunch of like-minded, and probably similarly-skilled, people who happen to be clustered together geographically. 

“In the 1920s, it was commonly believed that American banks were too big, and so regulations were passed limiting their size, most of all by restricting interstate banking… When the Great Depression started, however, a large number of these small banks failed, as they were insufficiently diversified and had a hard time raising capital or otherwise protecting against sudden losses. In Canada there also was a severe depression, but the banking sector was much more concentrated, and so Canada did not see any bank failures at all.” - The Virtues of Big Business in America

Central banks get a lot of hate. But I would also not want to live in a country without them. It’s all well and good to live in a financial system that’s close to reality to keep you humble through natural correction mechanisms. But very often, the price of those corrections are too high! Not having built the things necessary to tackle a pandemic looks stupid in hindsight, and we should have been completely helpless in the face of it. Instead, we could just choose pour billions into vaccine production and stimulus checks to avoid that.  Governments are able break the rules when they feel like they need to, and this can be a good thing. 

One underrated effect of being the large, incumbent country (other than the fact that you’ll still be around in the case of like, a hurricane or something) is the trust that it creates, for both your citizens and everyone else. Things like welfare programmes, lender insurance and an army might seem like fairly unproductive investments, but the payoff during an emergency is huge. Size justifies wasteful measures that occasionally ensure survival. 

This trust makes it easier for investors to get involved, but more importantly, most people can only really dedicate their lives to a living in a particular country if they know it plans to stay around. Which leads into yet another feature of large organisations…

Mega-projects:

The benefit of being able to choose exit is that you can leave and go somewhere better. The downside of easy exit is that now there’s one less reason for people to stick around. Why were we able to build cathedrals over 1000 year timespans? One answer is that we had completely different societies and coordination technology then, and getting people to work on things together was way easier. The other answer is that they just had really low opportunity costs. If you, your grand-parents and grand-children were going to live in the same town for your entire lives, it makes it a bit of a no-brainer to continue building the thing they started out with. 

There’s a version of the prisoner’s dilemma that creeps into all collaborative projects with long-term payoffs. There’s always the temptation a larger short-term reward available somewhere else, and if enough people choose that, the probability of the long-term one succeeding falls too. So it’s only worth getting started if you trust other people not to defect. And it would be naive to think that making it easier to leave wouldn’t affect their choice. States themselves are the largest of all mega-projects, ones that span multiple generations. How do network states intend to last the whole mile?

Huge projects are also expensive. So much so that they’re often downright wasteful. Markets hate waste, but firms can be more forgiving. This ability to explore outside of the constraints of efficiency gives them access to completely different strategies. 

Large countries can do things like put together space programmes and huge research projects, funded by taxpayer dollars that don’t have to answer to the forces of short-term profit-maximisation. Google can fund research that your local SaaS company can’t because they just have that much more cash and brainpower to burn. Amazon could afford to pull off a loss-making product like Prime for the same reason. Facebook too, can dare to sink billions into a project like the metaverse. Reliance created the greatest telecom network in the world through fixed cost investments that look a lot like public sector budgets. 

Maybe tech increases productivity to the point that tiny teams can pull off miracles of engineering. Maybe software eats enough of the world that we don’t need a spin up a web of complex physical relationships to get things done. Everything becomes an API call, everything is cheap. Superabundance kills the firm. 

But those are big “maybe”s, and to me, it seems that both these concerns limit the size and ambition of the projects that smaller organisations can consider working on. 

IV.

Regardless, network states could still work out.

Like I said, I have no idea how the future will pan out in a few decades from now. This entire piece was just a (perhaps) silly thought-experiment in drawing parallels between network states and free markets, large countries and firms. The question being “if you start a new country of your own, you’ve got to deal with things your old country took care of by default, is this worth it?”

But it might just happen that network states become hotbeds of innovation because of these constraints. The difficulties with laws, coordination and incentives might birth new ways of attacking those problems. Having dragons around helps drive progress.

Even if all they accomplish is making countries take immigration seriously, that’s a huge net good right there. The current system just isn’t it man, “sub-optimal” would be an understatement. They don’t even have to actually succeed in bringing in the best, experiments in policies and selection mechanisms will have their own value. 

In this case, they’re playing the role that their startup-counterparts often do. Creating a new approach to a problem, and inspiring subsequent adoption among the incumbents. Either because of the fear of getting left behind, or through outright acquisition. (What will it look like for a country to buy a network state?)

Or it might work the other way around. As countries slip into a managed decline, with demographic crisis looming and their infrastructure fading fast, the new nations could be the places to push forward the kind of risky innovation that extends healthspans and holds up global TFP levels. If regulation arbitrage is a big enough advantage, legacy nations could fall far enough behind that network states become invaluable partners in their development plans. 

If you run the founding experiment enough times, maybe it converges to an optimal constitution. Maybe the point of network states isn’t to build massive multiple-generation-spanning nations, but just to let some fairly weird people live together with their own rules. Maybe we’ll have specialised nation-as-a-service firms up and running to handle legislation and other thorny problems their clients don’t want to solve for themselves. Maybe de-regulation experiments act as inspiration for other countries to follow upon without having to play with the risks themselves. Maybe. I don’t know how this will go. Nobody does.

But it might just be really fun. 

Some things in macroeconomics are not what they sound like.

For example, when people hear that America is a few trillion dollars in debt, they assume that this is a terrible thing and that the American government and that its citizens must be very worried about this large hole in their wallet. I mean, if they had that much debt, they’d be pretty worried too. It seems like the kind of thing people should be more worried about. Why do they let it keep growing? Don’t they have to worry about paying it back?

But America isn’t a person, it’s the largest empire in the modern world, and people love giving it money. Why? I’ll get to that in a bit. 

People might also have heard of the trade deficit (also called a negative balance of payments), which is what happens when a country imports more goods than it exports. Intuitively, this feels kinda bad as well. If you’re buying more than you’re selling, you’re bleeding money. Surely you’ll run out someday. Back in the day, this used to concern economists so much they came up with the entire theory of mercantilism to try and get countries to stop doing this, and to build up a stockpile of money by selling more stuff to other countries.  

But they were wrong too. When America imports things, it does so because importing is cheaper than making them at home. And also because they want those things. Luckily enough, there are plenty of other countries who are ready to make stuff for them. So America keeps buying because they’re getting a great deal: exchanging pieces of paper for useful things, at the cheaper prices that specialisation and trade unlock.

And the countries that are exporting more than they import? They’re doing about as well as an Employee of the Month, the guy who performs far above his pay grade, and takes home a small bonus each month. Sure, the bosses love him, but how much is that worth? Money is just the potential to buy things, and while it isn’t being spent, it’s about as useful as your “gifted kid” status from middle school. One way to look at a growing bank account is as a sign that you don’t know what that money should be doing, or can’t use it to get what you want. 

The net importer is buying things they need and want, the net exporter is piling up IOUs, literal pieces of paper.

II.

And there’s a lot of cash out there.

What happens to it? People give it to banks. Or to investors, who give it to banks. Or to trust funds, who give it to banks. Or to insurance companies, who give it to banks. 

You see, nobody really wants to hold on to the money. They have more than they need, or they’d be using it. And having it laying around is stupid because inflation renders it a few percentage points less valuable each year, and because there’s only so many dollar-stuffed mattresses you can use, even in a 12-bedroom mansion. Even just preserving your status year-over-year gets more expensive, and just preserving status sucks. People need to feel like they’re moving upwards.

So it all goes to banks, because they promise to give it back, and give you a little more for the trouble. The banks took it, and created the most complex system of exchanges known to man: finance. 

There’s a lot of useful things that they do with it. People want money to buy houses, cars, hospital rooms, employees, and the odd vacation to Malibu. This is great, because money gets exchanged for things people want instead of just laying around as paper, or bits. Middlemen are socially valuable nodes when they do their jobs well. You can read In Defence Of Finance for a longer case on why banks are good, actually.

But even banks run out useful places to give money to. There’s only so many people who can afford to buy houses, even with mortgages. And if banks keep trying to create more mortgages to sell, they’re going to be selling to people who can’t pay them back. That didn’t stop them of course, and for their trouble, we got 2008.

So now banks have the same problem: too much money, and nowhere to plant it. But that won’t do, their customers put the money in expecting to get more back, and they’ve got to keep their customers if they want to stay in business. The money has to go somewhere, and so it does. 

It goes into billion-dollar gambling tables a.k.a. trading desks. It goes into companies building the future of trade-able JPEGs. It goes to people who give it to other people, who give it to other people, in the hopes of finding someone who knows what to do with it. It even gets loaned to failing governments, who are very likely to not pay it back. 

III.

This seems extraordinarily wasteful to most people watching. 

Hayek thought so too. He wrote a whole book about it, called Prices and Production, the thesis of which was succinctly summarised by an extremely underrated amateur American economist: The Notorious B.I.G. When interest rates go down, people give less of their money to banks, and more of it goes to other people who promise them better returns. Often, those other people are mistaken (or lying), about their plans to create those returns and we end up with economy-wide “malinvestments”. Too much money chasing too few projects, ending in a gargoyle-caused economy-wide crash. You could blame the investors, but what else were they supposed to do?

Here’s an example to show just how inescapable this problem really is, no mater how much you care about good investments. Constellation Software is a really large company that buys other companies, specifically small-ish software companies that build industry-specific software in a low-competition vertical niche. These types of company are incredibly profitable, thanks to near-monopoly-like markets and the favourable unit economics of software. And Constellation Software has done a great job at picking good targets. They own more than 500 companies, which generate annual revenues of over $4 billion for the mother company. They’re doing great, the stock’s up 30 times since IPO. 

They’ve done so well, their reward is to be worse at their job. 

Thanks to the constant stream of cash from their portfolio companies, they’re sitting on a capital reserve of over a billion dollars. They hate sitting on this money as much as anyone else, so they’ve been forced to change their own rules to continue deploying capital. They don’t have much room to pour it back into their own companies; being vertically-integrated businesses means they stay within their niche, limiting their market size (and future growth) almost by definition. 

But once you’ve made all the best investments, there’s really only two ways to keep going. You lower the bar for future investments, so you can buy more. This usually means you buy companies whose returns aren’t the most lucrative ones out there, compared to the rest of your portfolio. Or you buy bigger companies, spending a few hundred million at a time instead of tens of millions.  The former strategy reduces the “R” part of your ROI equation and the latter raises the “I”.

From CEO Mark Leonard’s annual letter: 

“One of our directors has been calling me irresponsible for years. His thesis goes like this: CSI can invest capital more effectively than the vast majority of CSI’s shareholders, hence we should stop paying dividends and invest all of the cash that we produce, even if it means lowering our hurdle rates.

I used to argue that we needed to maintain our hurdle rates because dropping them for a few marginal capital deployments would cause the returns on our entire portfolio to drop.”

You see this price of success across the economy. With the best players ending up with more spoils than they know what to do with. Berkshire Hathaway has over $100 billion in cash reserves. Apple has $202 billion. A total of a trillion dollars in cash is held between 13 similarly successful tech firms. What do they do with it? Berkshire Hathaway buys t-bills, which is a fancy word for “lends it to the US government”. And Apple buys securities. Which is a fancy word for “gives it to banks”. Always the banks. 

I kind of see why people get mad at bankers, but I’m also not sure how much of a choice they have. Someone has to manage all this money, and if it isn’t Morgan Stanley, it’d be one of their competitors. The sheer volumes of money unlock business models that are kind of mind-boggling to think about. If a banker convinces a large client to give them their money in exchange for a few basis points of interest, they also get to charge a management fee. All they need to do is set this fee at 1%, put the money into a few solid bonds, and make a few million each year from your 1% cut of the few hundred million. You’d be kinda stupid to say no to that kind of job. 

This is also why they give their money to the US government too. Imagine you had a bank that could give you as much money as it wanted to, because it was the most productive entity in the world, and also happened to control the supply of money. That sounds like a pretty safe banks, all things considered. All the other banks live within this entity, for all practical purposes. As long as you believe the United States of America aren’t going anywhere soon, buying a call option on it’s future is a pretty good bet. The fact that it will outlast most other institutions definitely adds a few million points to its credit score. The future in general is going to be much, much richer anyway, if this graph is anything to go by.

But it’s only a good bet in comparison to all the others you could make. Very few companies last for more than a few decades. The vast majority barely make it through one. Other countries have recession that they never come out of, or governments that say “borrowers keepers, debtors weepers” when politely requested to pay up. Once you’ve dealt with your first local revolution, a few sure basis points over a decade-long timeline looks pretty sweet. And so the US continues to sell its bonds, trillion dollars of “debt” be damned. 

If, at this point, you’ve started to think “this money thing doesn’t seem very real”, you’re pretty close to getting the point. It isn’t. Not without things. 

IV.

Money is plentiful, good things are scarce.

Money is scarily real to real people. But to the economy, it’s just flowing water. The destinations and sources matter, but what it does in between is as consequential as what water does in pipes, and is about as intrinsically meaningful. We should care very much about where it ends up, but it seems like nobody really does. Surely we can do better. 

If your model of rich people prominently features the words “boring”, “selfish” and “insecure”, well, you’re not that far off, simply because most people are those things. The population average doesn’t change much among the wealthier group. And it certainly doesn’t help that their wealth makes them the targets of some of the most powerful memetic traps and marketing plays ever devised. (And yet, I can’t find a good dollar-stuffed mattress company1. I sense an opportunity here.)

Once they’ve run out of good investments, they could try patronage or philanthropy. But even there, the returns diminish pretty quickly. For anything that matters, the marginal unit of effort spent to get stuff done is pretty high. Sure, there’s a certain amount of low-hanging fruit, but finding it is tricky enough that EA built a whole religion out of doing just that. And they’ve started to butt up against the money problem themselves. There comes a point at which the number of grants available outstrips the number of capable applicants, and we get things like the Blog Prize. Oh well, so it goes.

And at some point, throwing money at the problem starts pushing things backwards. Here’s (yet another) naive model to show you what I mean. You live in a town with a hundred people, and are worth a few million dollars. You’re also a big fan of libraries, Porsches and fountains. Not necessarily in that order, but you do prefer libraries to Porsche’s, because you’re a cool guy like that. 

You notice your town doesn’t have any really good libraries, so you look at your growing bank accounts and say “hey, I could build a couple of these”. So you ask around and find a few people willing to work on the project, then you go looking for some people to manage those people. You’ll need some architects and stonemasons and logistics people, and a bunch of other people for roles you haven’t thought of yet. 

Then they start building, and it takes a while. Some people quit, you hire new ones who aren’t as good. Things move slower. One of your chief architects dies, now you need a new guy. You can’t find one within your town so you send people to look outside of it. A few more of your workers quit because they want more pay. You offer more money, now your recruiters have to deal with 2x the volume of applicants.

The work moves slowly. And then one day a government official walks up saying he’s planning on pushing out a new local law that restricts the size to 2:1 ratio of parking lot areas. Obviously he has no idea how deep your pockets are, and would never dream of making you consider bribery. It’s just a friendly heads-up.

This is the last straw. You’re tired, frustrated and a few million dollars poorer, so you go back to buying Porsches (you heard they’re bringing the Brewstergreen 911 back this year).

The point here is not “oh no, poor millionaires! It's so hard to spend all that money”2 , it’s that doing things is hard. Money can fix some of your problems, but it isn’t a direct substitute for labour, ideas, and giving a shit. At least, not yet; maybe it will be once we get the robot and benevolent AGI utopia. 

Of course, rich people do accomplish things anyway. Because the really rich ones are ridiculously driven people in the first place, that’s how they made their money. Rockefeller wanted to build stuff, so it got built. And now we have the Rockefeller Centre, UChicago and the General Education Board. The Tatas spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build half of India’s good things, including their only orchestra. It might be harder to build things today, but at least patronage is making a comeback, money still goes towards cool people. Sometimes.

But if the world gets stale, it gets harder and harder to keep doing this. If you’ve ever tried to hire people, you know how incredibly hard it is to find the right person for the job. This is how it is with most things. The median worker is fairly unimpressive, the median restaurant is passable, the median NGO is terribly inefficient. The average thing is, by definition, kinda mid. People and projects who are worth investing in are rare. So money just continues floating around. 

Imagination is rarer still. Cool ideas are risky, there’s always a change that they might fail, and take your investment with them. Bankers spend a lot of time convincing people that they’re infallible, so they get to take home a lot of money. They accomplish some amount of good with it, but eventually they hit their limit too, and then they invent things like CDOs and repo markets just to have something to do.

But that’s just how things are. If finance seems like too big a percentage of GDP, it’s because GDP itself is a bit too big. And the returns to managing parts of it grow as it grows. “Are these returns even real?” is a question for another time.

But there are a few that I end up sharing quite often, and there’s a non-exhaustive list of them here. Among them, there is one that I’ve posted to Twitter on at least half a dozen different occasions. It’s by Roger’s Bacon, and it’s called Ideas are Alive and You are Dead. 

It’s a great essay, with a simple premise: ideas are living creatures, and we are their hosts. In some ways, I believe this is literally true. Or at least, it explains a lot. The idea (heh) that ideas want to inhabit minds that make for good habitats could make for a book’s worth of writing on it’s own. But Roger’s essay goes beyond Dawkins’ idea of the meme, which concerns itself primarily with replication. 

In the meme framework, what ideas want is pretty simple. They want to survive and spread, and will do whatever it takes to make that happen. Like bacteria. But if they were truly alive, with consciousness, personalities and agency, why then, they’d want to do a lot more than just exist. 

This is a post about ideas and their personalities, what they want, how they’re used, and how they use you. 

ideas that are pretty

They’re usually really simple, and fit perfectly into a couple sentences. They use the right words, cute inversions, elegant frame shifts. Anything to get the idea to fit the mould of conventional intellectual beauty.

Sometimes this is fair because they are truly deeply beautiful ideas. Other times, they’re just…pretty ideas. You can spot them from afar, by their aura of unashamed reductionism and the whispers of “beautiful in it’s simplicity” that follow their arrival.

There should be a word for this particular rhetorical trick. A way of getting seduced by frameworks that *sounds* great. It’s the seduction of cadence and symmetry. It’s like poetry overtook logic, and rhythm replaced thought. -Rohit Krishnan

Over time, I’ve learnt to be suspicious of them, but I don’t particularly recommend doing this. You have a right to let pretty things take over your reason. 

Example: All good tweets. 

ideas that explain the world without even trying

They start out being a polite guest, seemingly basic and unassuming. But then you start to find parts of them everywhere. The more you see, the easier it gets to keep seeing them pop up time and time again. 

It’s hard to tell people about these ideas, because they don’t seem like much when looked at directly, the details would take too much work to make legible. They just seem like the unassuming notions that they were when they arrived. And so they remain quiet friends, that you grow to know over decades, and they’ll probably accompany you to your grave.  

Once in a while, someone manages to pin them down for long enough to give them a name, maybe even write a book or two about them. And then the world gets a whole new lens to share. 

Example: Whatever Scott Alexander writes about. 

ideas that have learnt to use makeup

They’re trying very hard to be pretty, and they certainly fool a bunch of folk. They aren’t truly beautiful though, because the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies are too obvious to hide. And so the people who do get taken in are the ones who spend all their time around these ideas, really intelligent folk, who have gotten used to ignoring the cracks in the mask. 

Sometimes this leads to what Visa calls “advanced stupid”. Where the people with the ideas proceed to pile on more makeup in the attempt to get everyone else to fall for them. It's all rather amusing to watch, to be honest. Until someone gets hurt.  

Example: I wanted to use macroeconomics here, but that’s overdone. So I’m going to say “journalism” instead. But really it’s anyone who has to help dress up ideas to get them sold. 

ideas that want you to stop thinking

There’s a kind of idea that doesn’t want you letting in new members once they’re here. All they have to be is a convincing enough screen to make anything else feel not worth inviting, because they’ve solved everything and therefore cannot be improved. 

But really, they’re the middle of the bell curve, the valley that you have to cross before being free. Not that it matters that you know this, they’ll still make you feel like you’ve reached the end of the line. They’re really good at good at doing that. 

Example: Everything is relative.

ideas that want your life

The kind that pushes out every other concern that should be a part of your collection. They can’t help themselves, they’re just too big to leave room with any others. Ironically enough, people let them in because they had too much space to spare.  

Example: X-risk. 

ideas that want you to lose

These are the assholes of the noosphere. The blackest of the blackpills, the stuff of abject hopelessness. They seem to take a perverse pleasure in stripping people of their agency and optimism, and they do it while seeming like the most sensible notions out there. If you like losing, you’ll love these guys.

They’re painfully difficult to get rid of, because they have the best arguments too. And they love inviting their buddies over, bad ideas work together really well. You can’t win when your axioms themselves belong to this class of mind virus, you’ll need completely new foundations. Uprooting things is hard.

Example: Nihilism, misandry and misanthropy. 

ideas that help you win

They are friends. They help you get what you want. 

Example: Make friends.

Here’s another idea that helps you (me) to win (get readers): you sharing this post.

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Nerd-bait. Insight porn. Whatever you call it. It’s great, it entertains and delights, leads you into novel thought-experiments and fun rabbit-holes. But surely, there’s a more productive outcome than just that? Does it do anything out in the real world other than change a few indivdual trajectories here and there?

My answer: it provides the best discussion material. With the intent of pushing the boundaries of regular discourse, to enable more playful, exploratory avenues for conversation. Thinking for the sake of thinking. Debate for the sake of moving the local Overton window.

And so, if there’s anything to be gained from the handful of facetious ideas that follow, it is the possibility of a lively discussion. The kind that is most definitely not a serious conversation, and therefore all the more worth engaging in.

Here, I present four suggestions, recommendations and policy ideas that lie on the edge between defensible and downright ridiculous. Like most things on this site, they’re not meant to be taken too seriously, but they’re engaging enough to merit actual conversation. Or so I hope.

1. We should set limits to video uploads.

Video is a dangerous hyper-stimulus. This is something that is not talked about enough.

There are two things that are near impossible for humans to ignore: faces and stories. There’s probably an evo-psych explanation for why this is true, but you can take my word for it for now. Or just look how popular cat videos are, they’d be far less entertaining without their ridiculous faces.

Video combines both these factors into a medium that make for the most potent consumption good ever. Moving pixels with stories, stories with people, people with faces, how are we supposed to resist?

Apart from that though, I also believe that the visual nature of the medium makes it intrinsically harder to simply “snap yourself out of it”. More than 50 percent of the pre-frontal cortex is used for visual processing. We don’t know exactly how much of that brain space is normally used for active thinking or impulse control, but this paper claims the pre-frontal cortex is, in fact, the man region involved with decision-making. Make of that what you will.

So that’s my naive neurological justification for how video might make those activities harder. And subjective experience tells me it’s harder to think while distracted, so this isn’t that silly an idea. But this means that it’s not just a simple matter of mind over matter if the mind is only working at half capacity. Video actively supresses impulse control.

You don’t need a degree in behavioural psychology to spot the evidence: TikTok (and its imitators), Netflix and [[insert your evil video streaming app of choice here]]. YouTube also had an “exceptional” first quarter in 2021 for direct-response advertising, and is investing heavily in its Shorts feature (which is exactly what it sounds like).

TikTok is near unstoppable because it combined the most effective technical aspects (amazing recommendation algorithms and remix features) with a format (seconds-long video) that incentives the most engaging content possible. It is o powerful, in fact, that a non-trivial number of its users can feel just how addictive it is. And even so, fail to change their viewing habits, short of permanently deleting the app.

Netflix, on the other hand, is an endless experiment to find the maximum successful long story. How long can you keep people interested within a low-consumption-effort medium? Both platforms are tremendously successful in doing what they need to: keep viewers watching.

This is why buffering is such a big deal when it comes to video. By far the most likely time time for a viewer to skip past a video is while they aren’t completely involved in watching it. Every scene can be made more engaging, but a pause creates a moment of clarity, and is enough time to reconsider one’s choice.

But perhaps this is the future. Maybe better stories are the highest good, and ways of telling them will get even more effective at agency-hijacking their viewers. The world keeps getting faster, you can but hang on for the ride.

But if you’d like it to stop the rise of hyper-media; and many people do; we need to begin with some speed limits.

2. We should strap GoPros onto the best performers.

Tacit knowledge is one of the most annoyingly difficult-to-tackle problems of our time. There’s some really good writing on the topic from both Rohit’s blog and the truly excellent Cedric Chen. But here’s quick definition from the Nintil post on the same:

What tacit knowledge means differs by whom you ask, but in general the definition refers to knowledge that is very hard to acquire (In the broadest definition) or knowledge that is embodied in a person (or group) and that they can’t make fully explicit. Of importance here is that talking to an expert wouldn’t get you that knowledge, in this second definition. An obvious example is riding a bike; one could read books about cycling or talk to Tour de France winners for months and not have much idea how to skillfully ride a bike on a first trial.

Experts across every domain have compressed knowledge into habit, experience into heuristics. There’s too much detail to convey in a linear fashion, which is how most courses are set up. You can’t teach what you don’t notice anymore.

And most education solutions are geared toward the start of the road, which always has the most people. As learner’s niche down and go deeper, the pool of learning resources shrinks further and further. In some cases, it might be just a dozen people across the whole world who are actively involved . This sucks for everyone who doesn’t live in close proximity to those people, because they’re often responsible for some truly amazing outcomes.

But there are still things we can do to get closer to scaling tacit knowledge. Like letting people see through the eyes of the best. Literally. Let’s get some cameras strapped onto these people.

I can’t put a number on the value that we’d get from watching Byrne Hobart write, or seeing exactly how Donald Knuth crafts code, but I’m pretty sure it’s much higher than zero. Eye-ball tracking could help even more; just knowing what the experts look for is extremely useful. It takes decades of trial-and-error to learn those details on your own.

The myriad of ways in which scenius arises, and how exactly it helps all its members is still an open discussion. But it isn’t a stretch to imagine that simply watching someone more experienced do their thing could prove to be an incredibly valuable experience.

If you really want to democratise learning, you’ll need to make the edges of the fields (the areas that the less privileged are furthest from) more accessible. Pushing up the average is great on it’s own, but lengthening the tails is amazing, and is where most of the payoff lies. One of the reasons the internet didn’t lead to a gigantic increase in global expertise is because it couldn’t replicate people, only data. Until now.

3. Raising your children in isolation from societal norms could be amazing.

I still haven’t decided whether it is a blessing or misfortune when you find someone to make your point better than you. Maybe, like all things, it’s a bit of both. But here’s Scott Alexander, speaking from a decade-old LW comment, saying it for me:

On any task more complicated than sheer physical strength, there is no such thing as inborn talent or practice effects. Any non-retarded human could easily do as well as the top performers in every field, from golf to violin to theoretical physics. All supposed “talent differential” is unconscious social signalling of one’s proper social status, linked to self-esteem.

A young child sees how much respect a great violinist gets, knows she’s not entitled to as much respect as that violinist, and so does badly at violin to signal cooperation with the social structure. After practicing for many years, she thinks she’s signalled enough dedication to earn some more respect, and so plays the violin better.

“Child prodigies” are autistic types who don’t understand the unspoken rules of society and so naively use their full powers right away. They end out as social outcasts not by coincidence but as unconscious social punishment for this defection.

It is beautiful, perhaps even delusional, to imagine this being true. And yet, it is the best kind of speculation, for it has a whiff of the truth about it. Enough to hopefully get people thinking about (and maybe even attempting) it. There could be ways to reduce the social costs of this kind of isolation from norms. Few people have thought about this, and there might be low-hanging fruit for anyone taking it seriously enough.

Of course, there still will be some costs, everything has tradeoffs. Outlier outputs only come with equally unreasonable inputs. But this is not the case of breaking your child’s spirit for them to make the Olympic ice skating team; quite the opposite. It is seeing what’s possible when that spirit remains whole.

It will be really hard to do well, but it might just be worth it.

4. Governments ought to incentivise exercise.

The positive effects of exercise are widely-accepted enough for me to not have to bother listing them all out. But here’s a few links anyway.  And it isn’t just about the long-term benefits either, I mentioned those because everyone already knows that squats make you hotter. Which is good for, um, population maintenance reasons. (Have you seen those TFR graphs lately?)

But for health, especially in ageing populations, there are very few instances of fruit hanging this low. It seems downright foolish to not be going after them. The current numbers say only one in five adults or teens meet the fairly low bar of 2.5 hours of “heart-pumping physical activity” per week.

There is an argument to be made that some of the benefits from exercise are more correlation than causation (especially the third link, which I added mainly for its clickbait title, sorry). Possible confounding variables include economic status, access to healthcare, grit (and its impact on life outcomes), and other personality traits, culture, etc.

But that has more to do with trying to use a specific measure of fitness of a predictor, and doesn’t negate the physiological effects. With a field this old, “studies show that” is actually a valid defence, since there’s been more time to run more robust studies that prove/disprove the current consensus.

Most people I know will, or are, facing a sort of health debt trap. Shouldering the responsibility of funding healthcare for an ever-increasing number of family members, majorly the elderly. Physiological functioning becomes ever more use-it-or-lose-it as time goes by. Dying slowly sucks enough that we should care about any method that helps crate longer healthspans.

And with those TFRs falling all over the world, we’re gonna need the adults in the labour force for as long as possible. Because population health is a vital national resource, the government can count any resources spent supporting that outcome as national investment, albeit on a longer timescale. The second-order effects of a healthier population will be huge. But what exactly should the state do?

Subsidising gym memberships is not a new idea, and there are many examples of public projects that encourage more active lifestyles for the citizenry. But that’s not going far enough, it’s time to force the horse to drink.

The most direct (as well as most unreasonable) method of doing so would be to have some sort of law in place, mandating a certain number of hours of exercise per month. We already have a few examples of this in Korea and Singapore’s compulsory military service, and even worse: annual taxes. So another mandatory action is just…another mandatory action. But there are subtler ways to do it.

You could mandate reduced health insurance premiums for those who can provide evidence of sufficient physical activity. Employer schemes, direct cash incentives1 and better propaganda are the other possible methods. I’m sure economists could come up with better ones if they really tried.

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It is the prerogative of every notable intellectual to formulate their own Grand Theory of Everything.

Usually, this theory is wrong or, more often, vague enough to be unfalsifiable. But this, I’ve argued before, can be a good thing. We’d run out of space for ideas if we required all of them to be true, and correctness is not the best measure for usefulness. There’s a large market for these kinds of ideas, and BeWrong is merely one among many attempts to eschew the right for the interesting.

But I figure that Grand Theories usually start off with a bunch of smaller Big Ideas: equally ambitious, oft-wrong theories that coalesce over the decades to build the narrative that makes up one’s magnum opus. And since one can never start too early, I set out to craft my one of the Big Ideas in what could become my Grand Theory of problems; culminating in the following post.

Note: If, like me, you’re fascinated why the sheer variety and complexity of problems, here’s a great thread that explores a bunch of ideas about the relationships between problems and their solutions, with links to some excellent blog posts included. But onwards!

We begin with a classic move, crafting our own categories. Impressive, absolute statements such as “I’ve decided that there are three, and only three, types of problems” are extremely effective tools of Grand Theorists everywhere because they promise to reshape reality with just a handful of conceptual principles. With those three types are the following:

1) Problems of scarcity: We don’t have enough of a physical resource to go around, which usually leads to deprivation, and violent conflict at worst. The housing shortage, the energy crisis and climate change are all examples of problems that would be solved if just had, or had the ability to make, more of what we needed and distribute it. In absence of such technological improvements or resource discovery…well, we used to die. A lot. Nowadays, we’re well off enough that we can usually make do with something like redistribution or welfare. People still die though.

2) Problems of co-ordination: You can clump these problems under the banner of Moloch, i.e. undesirable equilibriums that arise due to the absence of trust. They’re usually solvable in principle, because they have a clear goal and involve having everyone follow a fairly simple rule (drive on the left side, pay your taxes, etc.). The hard part is getting them to comply instead of defecting. Usually, we use these handy little tools called incentives. Or language. But sometimes these problems get big enough (crime, economies, public infrastructure maintenance) that we call in external authorities (like governments) to enforce coordination, while the libertarians cope and seethe.

3) Human-complete problems: The third class of problem, and the whole point of this essay, is of a more messy sort. The kind of problem whose form shifts and transforms, enough for there to exist no stable solutions, no one simple trick or easy answer. Often, they’re tangled up with questions of meaning and purpose that only make things rougher on would-be solvers.

They should not be confused with the idea that these are problems that only humans can solve. While it is true that the best solutions in this space require human effort, most of the difficult HC problems remain unsolved, even by the smartest, most capable of individuals. Even if computers can’t do things like writing code- oh, um, driving cars, dang it! Making art- shit! Okay, turns out they can’t fix your plumbing or do your nails yet. But my point is that none of those are any more human-complete a problem than eating is. It takes more than just physical dexterity and audio-visual processing to solve truly human-complete problems.

Of course, “human-complete” is too perfect a phrase for it to have been my own invention. It owes its origins to a RibbonFarm post of the same title, in which VGR expounds on the idea in characteristically impenetrable fashion. He uses the concept to explore the connection between being human and the ability to solve infinite game problems. These are games that do not end, because the point is to keep playing, by constantly changing the rules and winning conditions.

Making a living is an infinite game, almost by definition, but I do not consider it a human-complete problem. Because it’s solvable through the relatively simple act of scarcity reduction. It might still continue to be an infinite game (give someone a million dollars and they’ll often just end up working for more) but in the end, it’s still a problem of scarcity. Picking a meaningful career, on the other hand, requires many more steps1 and is human-complete.

Obviously, none of these categories exist independently of each other. Coordination helps us solve problems of scarcity, like when people agree to trade goods instead of growing their own sustenance crops. (Don’t you just love division of labour?). And lower scarcity makes it so that we’re not living on the edge of death, which makes it so much more convenient to cooperate.

It is therefore more accurate to look at all problems as containing aspects of each of the types mentioned above. Solving homelessness would be easier if we could build really tall skyscrapers in all our cities, except…we’re already capable of building them. Huh.

Turns out that it’s the coordination part of the problem that’s hard; some people simply do not want skyscrapers messing up their backyards. And some cities still have to wait till they can do much smaller things like build housing that’s taller than 40 feet. There’s always bits of each category involved.

But solving an HC (human-complete) problem is weirder, because there’s intangibles at play that vary between each case. And solving even both the scarcity and coordination aspects only gets you part of the way towards a complete solution. Heck, one definition of an HC problem could be “unsolvable through regular means”.

However, the definition I prefer to use goes something like this: Human-complete problems are the ones where the optimal solution requires them be re-solved by each individual.

I’ve played around with the definition enough to know that this one doesn’t capture all the required detail, but it will have to do for now.

II.

How do you spot them in the wild?

I like to joke about how the easiest to way to know if a problem is human-complete is when “do better” is the most popular proposed solution.

And, well…it isn’t wrong! Ideally, everyone involved would decide to up their game and we would be rid of these problems pretty quickly. But the real reason for this (often desperate) appeal is the fact that we’ve gone too long without an easy solution, and people got tired of waiting.

So one way of identifying HC problem is by checking if they’re a Lindy problem, i.e. have they been around a fairly long time? Have people accepted (sub-optimal solutions) in the particular case to use generalisable fixes instead? Do you see a general dissatisfaction with the current solutions (like with school), and outliers that absolutely hate them (also like with school)?

HC problems might sometimes look like scarcity problems (“we don’t have enough teachers”) or coordination issues (“bad management is due to poor coordination”), but they all have irreducible human components at their core. You can’t just mass-produce good teachers, let alone effective managers. More knowledge helps, but is not sufficient. Knowing what works/has worked is useful, but not enough. This stuff is hard.

When you see a problem that has multiple competing solutions, you might make the mistake of assuming that the problem is therefore a solved one. Instead, it’s more often the case that they all suck. Because behind those different approaches lies the fact that HC problems don’t have a fixed, single-best solution.

Examples abound, whether they be dating apps, note-taking tools, management courses, and psychological theories. Each of the solutions in the space tries to solve what they think the real problem is, whether that’s “human-friendly algorithms“ or “representations of networked thought“. Alas, tools in these domains are only as powerful as their users. Eventually, the users have to face down the hard parts of the problems themselves.

III.

The sheer variety of places where they show up could fill an entire book.

I managed to limit this list to half-a-dozen examples, which should be enough to get a feel for the shape of an HC problem. But you could probably round out the dozen with a few minutes of thinking.

Education: We put all the word’s books online, and we got 5% MOOC completion rates. We built universities, but they are are rarely places of learning. This absence of positive learning outcomes was the main argument Erik Hoel uses to make his case for aristocratic tutoring. While people have made points both for and against his thesis, I believe he gets one thing right: education is a difficult HC problem. By asking “what is missing from the world of modern education?“, he rightly observes that it goes beyond mere information.

And even if I disagree with most “decline of genius” arguments, my belief is that aristocratic tutoring, or whatever term you use to describe the idea of a 1-to-1 learning process, works. Simply because it is a human solution for an HC problem. Tutors now matter more for how they make their students feel, than how much they can teach them.

To emphasise the human factor at play here even more strongly, I venture to suggest that Hoel, Scott, and even Bloom with his two-sigma phenomenon, are quite possibly mistaking correlation for causation when it comes to achieving impressive learning outcomes. The fact that geniuses had the advantage of tutoring is to the fact that they were embedded in communities of intellectual achievement, with families and/or friends that cared deeply about knowledge and thinking deeply. And that might be replicable through other, less direct, means.

There’s an example from the world of chess: the vast majority of grandmasters began their careers while they were children. So much so that it’s accepted wisdom that it’s hopeless to begin after crossing into adulthood. Without diving too far into my own theory of the tenuous link between neuro-plasticity and age, I suggest that the possibility of early advantage remains incredibly underrated.

Childhood is the only time that most people get to spend unreasonable amounts of time on things that aren’t directly related to staying alive, and starting out in a culture that rewards success in a particular domain is probably the most powerful competitive advantage out there. Whether you call them genius clusters or scenius is besides the point. We need scenes that are built for humans if we’re going to produce excellence, intellectual or otherwise.

The real solution isn’t about having a personalised, perfectly taught curriculum enabled through democratised AI tech, or a programme like Head Start. Those are just a further reduction in the information scarcity problem. AI is not inspiring2, extra classes are not community. Humans need both those things, from the people they live among.

Healthcare: We already know quite a lot about the human body. Not even close to everything we would like to, but enough to know what usually works to keep people healthy. In the case of accident, we can patch you up pretty well too. And most of it is ridiculously low-hanging fruit. Exercise decreases all-cause mortality, air pollution is really bad, supplement your deficiencies, get your grandparents to lift, you know the drill.

In the exact same universe, we also have the obesity crisis, hormonal disruptions and dropping fertility rates, as well as healthcare systems that are more graveyard than solution. Why? Because the existing system-level solutions can only be a bandaid at best. For the most part, health is personal. Apps are great, but they won’t do the fixing for us.

And you can’t mandate the required actions. It’s a free country, and people have the constitutional right to run their bodies into the ground. The most effective thing you’d be allowed to do is fix your air, the people are in charge of the rest. P.S: This is a good idea even if you only care about national productivity.

Testing and matchmaking: I talked about this back in my post on inverted U-shaped curves and testing, but the upshot of it is that devising and implementing accurate tests is…pretty hard. The best tests are more expensive than their less accurate but more automate-able counterparts, because they require people with experience to be part of the entire process. A classic sign of a human-complete domain. Little wonder then, that the matchmaking industry (~$7B), and the hiring market (~$27B) are huge, and growing rapidly. Oh, and those were the numbers for *just* the online versions of those markets.

The solution once again, requires everyone involved to get a lot better at doing things themselves. In this case, they need to improve at signalling, honing both the ability to broadcast accurate and honest signals and the skill of reading them well. Taking the time to know what people are looking for, and being able to make good choices are all human-level improvements that could get us out of the mess that is the hiring/dating/literally anything market.

And if that wasn’t hard enough, signals (like all strategies) fade with time. And making it easier for markets to clear requires a constant application of cross-party effort. The competitive relationship between genuine signallers and deceptive ones is as messy as the adversarial one between signallers and their intended recipients. Once again, no easy fixes.

Community: Infrastructure is important, but if that was all, Facebook would would have been the communal utopia we’ve dreamed of. And well, I don’t think we even got close. Keeping a community functioning is equivalent to a full-time job, no really, “community manages” is now a (well-paid) position at most internet marketing departments.

Everyone wants a community, ain’t nobody want to cook meals for their friends.

Organisational sclerosis: There are many failure modes for large organisations, all leading to institutions that operate more and more inefficiently, and at lower rates of innovation. The most common cause is the onset of the bureaucratic system, whether in structure or spirit.

Bureaucracy is a coordination solution applied to the HC problem of mission dilution. Once a firm crosses from “friends in a garage” to “hiring thousands of paid employees”, the average levels of trust and buy-in to the group mission inevitably drops, and you’ve got to work with things like fixed accountability structures and incentives.

It remains an imperfect solution because it works by abstracting away the individual. This simplifies the process of hiring and management (the human solutions), but it comes at the cost of dynamism.

Discovery: No, your NLP tool doesn’t really work for knowledge creation. Real discovery involves active involvement on the edges of fast-moving scenes, lest you turn into graph garbage.

“You cannot access this information by using the Internet in read-only mode. You have to be in read/write mode and making connections to people, not just information.” - Venkatesh Rao

Being far from the action means that you receive information in polished, pre-packaged chunks, with all the alpha drained out of it. Here, “action” refers to (you guessed it) the people who are also part of thee networks. Algorithms for discovery are deterministic by definition. They can be gamed, subverted or terribly designed. And they leave no place for true serendipity. Real discovery is a recommendation from a friend (or stranger) that happens to match your oh-so-illegible, personal requirements.

These examples are by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope they were representative of the class as a whole. The common threads that run through them include a variety of different desired outcomes, complexity and subjective tradeoffs.

IV.

And that’s what makes solving them so difficult.

Not only do you have to find an optimum for for every person involved, but you’re also got to solve each part of the problem from scratch. The annoying thing about human-complete problems is that there is no standing on the shoulders of giants, you’ve go to do the climbing yourself.

But “inefficient” would be the wrong way to describe them. It would be like calling a skyscraper tall, that’s the whole point of their existence! The only reason these things are still problems is because they’re so perniciously tricky to fix with our regular approaches.

Of course, that doesn't stop people from trying. And there are entire classes of failure modes that occur when approaching these issues from a naively optimistic Of which, tech brain is probably the most popular one, thanks to the not-so-subtle bias in media coverage of the industry. But it isn’t an unfounded accusation, you can see traces of reductionism in the places like ed-tech, “tools for thought”, and other attempts to throw a software solution at anything that moves.

Womb tanks were ridiculed because they seem to imply that the only thing responsible for plummeting TFRs is the pain of pregnancy. I mean, sure, we could breed humans like to fill up the slots in our economic machine, but last time I checked, Brave New World was still stocked within the dystopian fiction section.

We’ve also got “spreadsheet brain” for naive self-optimisers, and “powerpoint monkey”as a knock on management consultants with a predilection for silver bullet solutions that came out of a near-arbitrary case study. Dating has the PUA red-pill and astrological compatibility, both on opposite ends of the spectrum of “inadequate solutions” that remain popular in absence of easier options.

Lately, it’s been the crypto scene that’s promised solutions to some of these issues. You see it in the visions for a DAO as a corporate panacea. Alas, we still work with people. You can design your org structure in any way you’d like, and they’d make certain functions easier. But operating at the abstraction of “organization” instead of people is a recipe for failure.

There’s also a certain kind of epistemic trap I like to call the “game theory fallacy” that overstates the impact of incentives, while underestimating the sheer power of irrationally bad/good actors. While incentives are often the ideal solution to coordination problems, they fall short in the case of HC problems like, say, “saving science” or “a madman is in control”. Mutually assured destruction worked pretty well as a deterrent, but all it takes is one slightly deranged dictator to wake up in a bloodthirsty mood and oops, we get to see what nuclear winter looks like.

It certainly doesn’t help that the strongest incentives are overcome by the worst actors. It’s hard for payoff matrices to account for being irrationally evil, foolishly optimistic, or just plain dumb.

Everywhere that human-complete problems rear their head, is a place that incentives won’t solve everything. Nudges do make a difference, but only as much as the people being nudged care.

V.

This, I think, is the crux of the entire affair.

Human-complete problems are matters of human agency, and solutions fail when they try to get around this unavoidable reality.

As with most complex systems, it’s impossible to know ad hoc what a global solution looks like. Instead, it’s individuals that build them from the bottom up, in their own particular ways.

“Instead, I believe that the most promising way to achieve large-scale improvement in the way basic scientific research is organized is to start small, help individual scientists, and to take small steps towards a much better world.” - Alexey Guzey

Since the failures of central planning, capitalism is accepted to be the best economic coordinative mechanism we have, but it would be a lie to claim that it had no discontents. Definite optimism as human capital sees the problem of growth for what it really is, a function of irreducible human factors like, y’know, thinking the future can be worth living in.

In Form is Fake, I lambasted the idea of perfect form, arguing that it was a concept so abstract as to be virtually meaningless in practice. And it makes for the perfect example of a top-down, universal bandaid that ends up being consistently inferior to a personal solution. The blackpill that comes with spotting a human-complete problem is that you become default dismissive of an attempts at universal solutions.

Working with better people is the only real way to avoid getting Goodhart-ed. Trying to change people’s incentives effectively is far harder than just getting them to like you.

A particularly apt term comes from Rohit over at Strangeloop Canon, that of the Idle Kantian. He uses it to describe an ethical stance that goes like this: “if everyone did as I think it would be moral.” For those who’ve solved their personal versions of human-complete problems, the temptation to generalise the solution is strong. And doing so involves a near-total rejection of the idea that problems can be human-complete.

For those with enough experience, the solutions seem simple enough to be summarised as personal heuristics, but that rarely scales beyond ones personal context. This is why most advice in these spaces (dating, education, health) is so bad so often. They try to impart heuristic knowledge without the work done to earn them, with less-than-impressive outcomes.

But perhaps the worst thing we can do, is to double down as Idle Kantians, and claim that a sub-optimal solution (schools, job boards, management school) is the best we can do. In absence of a global solution, what we need is as much variety as we can sustain.

There does seem to be a general distaste for trying to solve problems of meaning with naive abundance (Nozick’s experience machine) or crude incentives (pushback to the concept of homo economicus). But we need to be more suspicious of the very idea of “good enough”. The ceiling for the perfect solutions in these domains is as high as we’re willing to push.

Having to watch people go over the same messy steps that seem so obvious in retrospect is frustrating, but havign the freedom to do so ensures that we can achieve outlier outcomes that go beyond mere efficiency. Individual exploration might seem illegible to everyone who’s outside of it’s specific context, but that’s where the alpha is, especially when you’re dealing with human-complete problems.

And we’ll have to keep solving those, for as long as humans are around.

Not in the classical sense of the term, at least. I just don’t take philosophy seriously enough. I do not face many ethical dilemmas, and utility functions seem un-intuitive and more trouble than they’re worth. The Repugnant Conclusion never made sense to me, nobody I know cares about the welfare of unborn people. Torture vs. dust specks felt equally ridiculous, distributing suffering among innumerable people to the point of near-zero harm per person is an easy decision to make1, considering that we ask people to go through more than just a dusty eye everyday.

However, I do believe that people’s welfare is an outcome worth enhancing. Call me a commie but better outcomes for everyone sounds pretty sweet. It might just be because my personal utility function maxes out really fast, and helping people is the best way to continue improving things, regardless of arguments to the contrary. Not that I’m particularly attached to the political characteristics of the idea. If free markets and GDP growth are what gets us a better world, I’ll gladly put on the neoliberal hat.

Even so, I don’t particularly care for maximising human happiness; not it the short run, at least. Encouraging it? Yes. Enabling it? Hell yeah. But I’m no hedonist. I’m more of a freedom and opportunities guy, with the occasional penchant for localism2. So utility paradoxes or unpleasant extrapolations are rarely something I can take seriously. In fact, “You’re allowed to ignore philosophy” is an essay that’s lain in my drafts for a while now. It has potential, but would take more work than I’m ready to put in right now.

On the other hand, writing a listicle (like this one) is easier, but has always felt a little icky. Sure, it’s conveniently browsable, and makes for an easy read. And I save hours3 that would normally be spent deciding how to order the ideas in an essay. But it seems like a sloppy format nonetheless, so the least I could do was make it amusing.

I.

Befriend the lonely.

I’m not going to pull out any charts to prove my point, because social science charts are dumb. But I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of selection effect in play at the top of the socialisation pyramid. The most friendly people have the most friendly friends, and the most popular people are part of networks of similarly popular people.

And at the bottom, there are a bunch of lonely folk that are virtually invisible. You don’t see them because, well, they were never the popular ones to begin with. But they exist nonetheless. Like social dark matter, they’re part of the social universe, but live lives of quiet, unnoticed isolation.

As for why you should befriend them, it’s a simple calculation to make. The fewer friends someone has, the more valuable each additional friend is to them. Econ 101: marginal utility, but for homies. In fact, the difference between zero and one good friend is high enough that absolute loneliness is probably infinitely worse than having even one companion. And utilitarians love low-hanging infinities.

Will this mean that your personal happiness takes a hit? Perhaps, lonely people are not the most fun folk to be around (that’s often why they’re lonely in the first place). You could be hanging out with your cooler friends instead, and you’d all be slightly happier in that scenario. But being the supercilious saintly soul that I am, I recommend completely disregarding personal utility from any calculations that you do. Personal negative utility isn’t real if you choose to ignore it, y’know?

The more pleasant (and indeed, most common) outcome is that they are, in fact, pretty cool people themselves. Most people are capable of infinite depth, given a place to grow. Only a narcissist would believe otherwise. A utilitarian would embrace the possibility for upside.

P.S: I’ve realised that, despite me setting this list up to be (mostly) a joke, some people might think I’m being completely serious here. So in anticipation or the inevitable “saviour complex” and “you can’t fix them” rebukes, I should confirm that I….actually mean it. There’s a bunch of nuance and involved, but I stand by the main idea.

You’re not supposed to fix them, just walk with them for a bit.

II.

Do crime.

Yes, most crime is bad. We made those laws to prevent just the sort of negative outcomes that any good utility maximiser would hate. But many of them are often constitutional dinosaurs, kept alive just because they’re hard to get rid of.

Effective altruists have a pretty simple framework used to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular course of action, called the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework (ITN for short). Importance (how much positive impact will this have?) and tractability (what is the possibility of this working?) are just an application of the expected value formula (possibility of success x reward) to altruistic interventions. It’s the third factor, neglectedness, that really puts the “effective” in EA.

It considers how much money and effort is already going into a particular cause. Ceteris paribus, areas that are already receiving a bunch of attention and resources will see less marginal improvement from additional donations than the ones that are comparatively unpopular. In a sentence: when looking for ways to do good, pick the things that no one else is doing.

Now, consider a set of things you can do to make the world a better place. Then split that set of actions into two subsets based on whether they are currently legal acts, or if they involve breaking the law. Some (okay, most) of the actions will be completely legal, maybe even encouraged by a bunch of social and governmental bodies. These will also be really effective, like buying mosquito nets and direct cash transfers, or funding potentially world-changing technology.

But some of them will be downright illegal. Stuff that would undoubtedly make the world a better place, but get you prosecuted, fined, maybe even jailed, if you were caught. Stuff that nobody with anything to lose would ever seriously consider doing.

And you can probably have a much greater impact if you did exactly those things. Why? Because neglectedness. Many really hard-working, smart and concerned people are out there working on building scalable, effective solutions that are easily fundable. It’s the ethos of EA (and ideally, any altruistic organisation) to translate money into the greatest good possible, but it’s kinda difficult to ask people for money to, y’know, commit crimes.

But that’s exactly what you should be doing. Because everyone else is of doing everything that’s legally permissible, there’s a bunch of low-hanging fruit for anyone brave enough to disregard the fences.

Maybe it looks like Sci-hub (all hail Elbakyan!) or Wikileaks. Maybe it’s building shelters for the homeless without permission. Maybe it involves rug pulling thousands of crypto users just to fund a school in Africa. Okay, that hasn’t happened yet, but you could be the first! Either way, the market for illicit altruism4 is immensely under-explored.

If orange jumpsuits aren’t your thing, you can still do things that are aren’t strictly illegal in the legislative sense of the word, but break a few (arguably more pernicious) social laws. Like taking out loans (or over-leveraged options trading) to fund altruists today, being an effective politician, marrying outside your social class/caste, or homeschooling your kids. There’s probably weirder rules worth breaking, and maybe you’ll be the one to spot them.

III.

Start a company.

If you buy the “number go up” case for human flourishing, it’s pretty obvious that the one of the best things you can do is go create your own value-creating (and hopefully profitable) business venture that adds a positive bump to the global gross domestic product.

There are many ways in which this is a great utilitarian choice to make. For one, you avoid creating negative utility by denying someone else a job. Doing your bit to grow the pie and rejecting the dominance of zero-sum games is already an excellent utilitarian action.

Of course, the ideal outcome is that you make a lot of money. Maybe even become a billionaire, giving you heretofore undreamt of power and influence over the course of history, and the millions of lives that are swept up in it. But even just the money itself would be a big deal, (more is better when you have a plan to spend it well.

If you’re the the kind of person who cares very much about lifting people out of poverty, even a small-ish business is probably a great way to do it. The current best way of doing that, direct cash transfers, is a great idea in principle, but there’s some evidence that they don’t make much of a difference in the long-run. The argument being that any improvements in the economy are “demand-led (consumption spending) rather than investment-led (productivity spending).

But if you run your own company, there’s nobody stopping you from hiring people in countries where people most need the jobs. Infusing entire communities with earned wealth and, more importantly, connections they’d otherwise never have access to. And those are only the first-order effects, businesses usually capture just a fraction of the value they create.

"Only a minuscule fraction--about 2.2%--of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers." - William D. Nordhaus, via @pmarca

There’s a definite element of neglectedness here too. Only a small percentage of people can afford to quit their jobs, which makes it all the more important that more of them should do so. At best, you deploy billionaire levels of capital into doing good better. At worst, you distribute some VC money to the working class. Win-win, if you ask me,

IV.

Buy someone a gym membership.

I believe that the benefits to exercise remain hugely underrated5. I don’t just mean as a bandaid for the obesity crisis or as a way to counter the dysfunction caused by modern lifestyles. There’s the hormonal benefits and psycho-social upside, the improved sleep and robust joints. The ability to actively resist entropy and acquire greater functional prowess. In more than one way, it’s the cheapest anti-aging measure we have. Seriously, go pick up a heavy thing.

But this stuff goes far beyond the gym and a larger deadlift. I believe that most people also underestimate the effect of making regular progress on a clearly defined goal, especially when you’ve got nothing else going for you. Maybe it’s hard to believe how big a deal it is if you haven’t watched it happen. But from what I’ve seen, it’s huge. Others agree, and express it better than I could.

“But surely”, you say, “a gym membership isn’t particularly expensive, people can do this for themselves.” Why on earth would they need someone else to buy them something that is a non-essential, a mere nice-to-have?

And just like that, dear reader, you’ve given me the perfect opening to insert my own sob story. You can’t really blame me for doing it, it’s a really good one, as far as those stories go. I will resist the urge to go into agonising detail, but it involves me throwing rocks around and doing pull-ups on a tree. You know, classic inspiring biography stuff. All because I couldn’t pay for access to the local gymnasium.

It was not impossible, just hard to justify. There’s a dozen different ways to use a hundred dollars, and most of them sound less selfish than “let me go lift heavy things four times a week”. And there really are many such cases. Like most things, the marginal utility of money is incredibly high just above the zero mark, and far too many good things lie just beyond it.

Granted, this isn’t the most efficient way to spend your money, especially if you’re strictly thinking in WALYs. There will always be a cause that promises more effectiveness, but this is not about guaranteed return. This is about small bets that can have unpredictably large impacts (including incredible second-order effects), or go nowhere. But because they’re so cheap, they’re always worth making.

V.

Destroy Netflix.

Streaming is an incredible industry, and Netflix is it’s godfather. 222 million people currently pay for the service, and millions more pirate/borrow/share its content. Every week, users burn a collective total of a billion hours on the app. It is, quite simply, the largest waste of human potential since string theory.

I might even be able to argue that the incredibly high quality of visual content in general is as bad as nicotine. Were we supposed to be overdosing on narratives this gripping? Watching characters this charismatic? Were the actors ever meant to be this hot?! These are unnatural forces we’re dealing with, you can’t blame the consumers for losing control.

The upshot being that the average user spends 3 hours a day on the platform. How many of those hours could be spent with family or friends, building communities that are the bed-rock of a successful civilisation? How many authors kept from their writing? How many poets distracted from their angst? How much utility are we missing out on just because we’ve optimised the entertainment networks past the point of reasonableness?

But you can fix it. All it takes is a few well-placed explosives at the heart of Netflix HQ. Hit the servers, take out the engineering leads, and a corporation comes crashing down.

People will be free again. TV companies will regain power, allowing them to employ more newscasters. Likewise for theatres and their staff. The Oscars will take movies seriously again. David Lynch will have the last laugh. Families will unite. Grass will be touched.

Creative destruction at its finest. Netflix must go.

While diverse, this list is by no means an exhaustive one. There’s other fun stuff you could be doing to utility-max, like writing inspiring science fiction or banning the wasteful production of new art. Or building a crack team of global assassins, ready to take down threats to human survival and freedom. The weirder the better, what we need are ideas that have never been considered before. Don’t worry too much about rigour, for utility is in the eye of the beholder.

It's amazing how popular the idea of "good form" is.

Every new lifter gets this advice drilled into them the first time they walk into a gym, and it continues for years. It might just be the only truly universal piece of gym instruction1, which is a pretty impressive achievement in itself. The sheer variety in any other genre of advice (be it diet, programming, volume, recovery, supplements) is incredible in comparison. 

There's a bunch of reasons why good form is preached, and we'll get into some of them later, but the main one is injury prevention. This might just be because negative consequences are usually the most effective way to get people to remember something. Most people aren't worrying about the optimal angles for unilateral force production, they just want to be sure they won't blow their back out.

Except...form won't save them. Here’s a list of ways you can get injured that have nothing to do with how good your form is:

1. You’re training under fatigue and a muscle that was playing an important supporting role gives up and the load goes to another muscle that isn’t ready for it.

2. You fail to brace your core tightly enough.

3. You fight for perfect form long enough for fatigue to build up, causing 1.

4. It’s cold and you move a muscle a bit faster than it was ready for. 

5. You trip over a hole in the ground and twist an ankle.

Okay, the last one isn't a fair example, but it adds up to a non-trivial number of injuries2. And it's the prototypical example of how injuries *usually* happen.

You see, there is only one real cause of injury: overload. Pushing your muscles past what they can physically take. That's it, that's all that matters. It might seem like a tautology, but it's surprising how little attention it gets for something so obvious. Instead we have debates about what really constitutes "good form", and whether or not people are achieving it.

A common anatomical analogy is imagining muscles as rubber bands. These break when they're stretched past a certain limit, it doesn’t really matter how you reach that limit. You could pull it carefully past the breaking point, or yank it to pieces, it breaks anyway. And so it is with overload, you can go tear something in any number of ways.

Another consequence that’s oft discussed when talking about poor form is the potential for long-term dysfunction, your muscles working in a way they aren’t “supposed” to. In my (admittedly amateur) opinion, this perspective is incredibly naïve because it ignores the human body's capacity for near-infinite adaptability. We do thousands of things our muscles weren't “supposed” to do, and get along just fine. We weren’t supposed to be painting with our feet (or mouths), typing with our thumbs, or flipping a surfboard, yet here we are.

This adaptability is what lets people lift without poor form for years without any signs of injury. It isn't "just a matter of time", it's a matter of overload, and that might never happen. Sure, they've trained the "wrong" muscles, but now those muscles are really, really strong, allowing them to keep training that way without any real problems. Form is overrated.

At this point, switching to a pattern that's better would raise the chances of injury more than continuing with the "wrong" one would, simply because they aren't ready for it. And if injuries do happen to be correlated with poor movement, it might just be because people who don't care too much about their form are also predisposed to imprudent loading. 

Injury prevention is mostly fake too. Because the factors that cause injury are, almost by definition, outside of our control. Plain old recovery and responsible loading go further than any number of fancy ankle strengthening drills. But people don't like being told that they're not in control, so we have a million-dollar-a-year industry in pretending to protect against injury.

As for imbalance, that's simply inevitable, and maybe even preferable. If you have a favored jump foot, a dominant hand or a stronger arm, you’ve already lost symmetry. There’s a reason track atheltes run a counter-clockwise curve. Specialization is a trade-off that we make everyday, and one that usually leads to favorable outcomes. You don’t see many people learning to write with both their hands. The extra work required to develop a perfectly balanced body is just not worth it. 

Then why care about form at all? Well, for one, there is in fact an optimal way to perform a movement. That is, optimal for a particular body shape, size, technical maturity and musculoskeletal development3. And this changes for different uses of “optimal”. Do we want to lift as heavy as possible, as fast as possible, or as many times as possible? Are we targeting specific muscles or a particular range of motion?

The definition of good form therefore changes according to the desired outcome. And most of the time, there are other ways to get that outcome. Don't want to get injured? Just avoid lifting anything that's really heavy. Want a smoother sprinting technique? Make sure you meet the strength requirements to actually move your body the way the pros do. 

Physics is real, but lifting a few hundred pounds isn't exactly testing it's limits. And you can always ignore it if you really want to. Because it certainly doesn’t pay attention to you. Have the prettiest running form ever seen? Physics doesn't care. Michael Johnson was a world record holder and De 3Grasse has a bunch of Olympic medals to his name, weird arm action notwithstanding. And let’s not talk about Bolt in the gym. 

Musicians, especially those with classical training, are taught to play a certain way, often in an attempt to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome, trigger finger, cubital tunnel syndrome, De Quervain’s tenosynovitis, and a bunch of other equally scary-sounding dysfunctions. In this case, good form can be defined as “whatever allows you to play without pain for the longest possible time”.

Which is an admirable goal, but is just one of the outcomes one could want. The true range of possible playing styles is larger than anything an academy might teach. Which is what allows us to have the virtuoso two-fingered guitarist Django Reinhardt, and Jimi Hendrix fretting strings with his thumb, along with a bunch of crazy ways to play the piano. 

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II.

Things work how they work.

But thanks to the popularity of the "good form" meme, there's now a whole bunch of armchair critics who jump at the chance to point out the atrocious form of certain elite athletes. One of the more popular refrains goes along the lines of "Yeah, he's amazing, but imagine how good he'd be if he fixed his form". Fixing their arm mechanics, or landing technique, or squat form, is the obvious fix that their coaches, therapists and the athlete themselves are too dumb to notice. 

What are the odds that, decades of training and dozens of victories later, a simple change in technique would create a step-size improvement in a professional athlete's performance? Any economist would laugh while waving the efficient market hypothesis in your face. Only the most naïve of audiences would consider such critique valid, yet we see it being made all the time.

It might be hard to accept that being a freak means that they get to play by completely different rules, but that doesn't make it any less true. In fact, there's a case to be made that their "imperfect" idiosyncrasies are what makes them the best in the first place. A case that's supported by the fact that...they're really freakin’ successful.

I'm using these examples to highlight a certain class of epistemic error (I'm not sure what to call it yet), where people are told that X solves Y, and refuse to believe that it doesn’t, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Y might not even be a problem worth solving!

As another instance of the idea, there’s a school of thought that believes the solution to the reproducibility crisis is open data. A change that would require researchers to publish all the raw numbers and specific methodological choices along with the finished paper, leaving no room for deception. Alas, honesty and transparency are not enough. Bad science finds a way to slip through, through poor design and the fact that statistics won’t save you. Or through surveys.

Sometimes this error is simply a result of starting with a tautology and extending it to a principle. “Unnecessary motion is wasted effort” is true by definition, but it doesn’t really ~mean~ anything. Who defines what “unnecessary” means? Does the “wasted effort” even affect outcomes in any meaningful way? If it doesn’t, should we even care? This sort of argument isn’t wrong per se, it’s just not worth making.

But most of the time, it's a consequence of underrating the irreducible complexity of the domain. You'd expect that having honest politicians would be enough to solve a bunch of political problems, because that’s just a painfully obvious idea, right? Except there’s a whole field of economics dedicated to explaining why that usually doesn’t work, thanks to the complicated interplay of conflicting incentives and diverse utility functions.

An unhealthy obsession with good form is what happens when reality's surprising amount of detail meets lazy choices. At the heart of which lies the desire for an optimal solution that is both simple and universally prescriptive. One of the features of cocktail party ideas is this disposition towards simple, often meta-level, solutions. "Why don't they just do the right thing?" 

Well, maybe it's because the “right thing” is almost meaningless.

III.

And this has consequences beyond just the futile chasing a non-existent panacea.

In The Case for Discontinuous Curricula, I argued for a pedagogical change that goes against...the very idea of a curriculum. Of course, I could never expect such a suggestion to be taken seriously by anyone but the fringe autodidacts. For one, it’s too uncomfortable to consider the possibility that we’ve been doing things badly all this time. But more importantly, nobody wants to risk being seen as incompetent.

Teachers, for example, cannot risk trying this alternate method. There's too much downside involved. Risking getting it wrong is no longer excusable once a popularly accepted general strategy is available. And their clients are fine with, and often even desirous of, going down a long, well-trodden path. Their value as teachers stems from their ability to guide people down this path. 

This adherence to a local optimum is obviously self-limiting, but it also leads to the proliferation of a complementary class of error: the mistaken assumption that an agent operating without X is obviously incompetent. Instead of seeing the absence of X as a sign that X might be unnecessary, it’s seen as negligence on the part of the involved parties. 

This is ultimately limiting on a societal-level, and makes it much harder for anyone to achieve legitimacy outside of established practices. It’s why interviewing practices are stuck in a bad place with almost nobody willing to do it better, why dress codes still matter so much, and the reason academic papers has a monopoly on intellectual authority. Attempting to ignore the accepted set of best practices is deemed too unprofessional for any sane person to risk.

Here’s a few examples where doing something without also doing “obviously good” X is frowned upon:

1. Good entrepreneur’s should tell the truth: I mean, yeah. But also no. It’s complicated, okay?

2. A good investor does their due diligence: Well yes, but how much? The bare minimum probably works best.

3. Rigor in intellectual thinking: We expect there to be a detached, professional approach to serious idea generation, but the most exciting work often comes from amateurish, interdisciplinary exploration.

4. Going to therapy: Not to abuse the meme, but we’ve reached the point where not seeing a professional is judged negligent. Maybe because it’s hard to accept the possibility that some people just do not want to be happy. 

The truth is, of course, that wrongness in general is determined in comparison to the desired outcome. If you can get what you want without needing to jump through an arbitrary hoop, go ahead and walk right past it. There are always going to be people who believe a particular hoop is unavoidable, whether in self-interest or naivety. 

“The prejudice that the scientist, as a seeker of the truth, is immune from the passions of the world and is capable of doing no wrong, a prejudice propagated for over a century by bigoted biographers, has done harm. One shudders to guess how many talented young minds have been discouraged from a career in science by reading such unrealistic portrayals of the scientist as a saint. Moreover the presumption that “good” behavior is a prerequisite for success in science betrays a lack of faith in science.” -Gian-Carlo Rota

There’s hundreds of coaches that think good form is a solution in itself. Even if it was, having the best technique is a function of enough independent variables that it becomes a goal instead of a solution. And one that takes a lot of chasing. But this is how it should be, good form should be emergent from winning. Instead we have it the other way around. 

This progression from observed success to established ideal is obvious if we think about how any set of best practices are discovered: not through planning, but years of collective trial and error. Moreover, the dominant paradigm is established by the demographic with the most influence over a particular field, and is tailored to their own goals and specifications. Why does your coach have the basketball team run suicides at the end of practice? Probably because his coach did too.

There is immense alpha in knowing that there exist better personal optimums that lie outside of the beaten path. Sticking to good form often ends with you starving in the motte. There are far too many roads leading to a particular destination, and even more destinations to be visited, to limit our choice to the usual handful. But like any sticky meme, the idea of good form requires active effort to subvert. It takes a lot of pushing to move out of a socially-sanctioned local optimum. But knowing that it isn’t the final solution is a useful starting point. 

IV.

You are not owed a solution.

No matter how much you systemize and formalize, you've also got to learn to live with the edge cases. In fact, you ought to embrace them. Learn all the ways to skin the cat. Relying on a simple, fixed plan is the classic case of drawing your own maps and blaming the territory for not conforming. There’s no extra points for effort if you’re driving into a brick wall. 

Rationality likes to define itself as a philosophy that cares about being successful. As they say on the site: “rationality means winning!” Except, they haven't won in a long time. This isn’t for lack of trying, they have some of the most rigorous thinkers out there, and they positively invented the idea of cognitive biases. With the best form in the game, why aren't they winning?

For I do fear that a "rationalist" will clutch to themselves the ritual of cognition they have been taught, as loss after loss piles up, consoling themselves: I have behaved virtuously, I have been so reasonable, it's just this awful unfair universe that doesn't give me what I deserve.  The others are cheating by not doing it the rational way, that's how they got ahead of me. - Eliezer Yudkowsky

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Cedric Chen thinks it might be because they focus too much on epistemic rationality (how do you know that your beliefs are true?), and not enough on instrumental rationality (how do you make better decisions to achieve your goals?). 

“...if you’re instrumentally rational, you don’t need to optimize for correct and true beliefs to succeed. You merely need a small set of true beliefs, related to your field; these beliefs can be determined from trial and error itself.” - Cedric Chen

This sounds an awful lot like the idea I’ve spent the entire essay trying to justify: good form doesn’t exist. The more accurate maps in the world won’t help you when you’re hunting for unmarked buried treasure, you just have to do a lot of digging. 

Screwing on my internet writer hat, which allows me to make broad, dramatic statements while conveniently ignoring the burden of proof, I will make the claim that this example is indicative of a broader social phenomenon. A disappointing outcome where people neurotic about good form limit both themselves and the entire space of alternate possibilities. 

People want to be able to say they did the right thing, nobody wants to worry about actually doing the right thing. Looking for a proxy for "doing their best'', when in fact, there is none. What you’ve done is all there is. 

This tendency towards shame-avoidance and zero-blame is ultimately far less useful, and far, far less fun than choosing to be wrong. There’s a multitude of choices before you, and any regret after deciding is self-inflicted. Most rules are chosen to allow people to say “But I did the right thing” after the fact.

I often joke about the desire that smart people seem to have for being *ahem*…intellectually dommed. That is, having someone they respect/trust make their choices for them. A particularly amusing instance of this is the popularity of the 80,000 Hours career advice sessions, which need to be booked months in advance due to the unceasing demand. Why? Because smart young people really want to know what the best thing to do is.

This could be viewed as the classic case of save-the-world syndrome, but I choose to see it as yet another example of form neuroticism. Where the outcome is supposed to be “whatever lets me have the greatest impact”, but they want the way to get there to be a sure path. Wanting to do great things is an admirable goal, no doubt, but they could perhaps start with not letting someone else define it for them. 

Games lose their point when we get caught up in the rules. Go do a sloppy push-up or something, I won’t judge.

This newsletter started out with the promise of bold, foolish and often mistaken takes, but the last few issues have been disappointingly clear-headed. I'm seeing signs of praise, agreement and shared sentiment1, and not enough people telling me I'm wrong. This needs to change. And what better place to start with than my old whipping-horse: school.

I originally planned to spend these introductory paragraphs waxing lyrical on the horrors of that archaic institution. Just to make sure I wouldn't be mistaken as a school defender by the end of this piece. But I realized that I had too little to complain about.

Don't get me wrong, there's still a bunch of things to hate about school. Countless books, essays and threads have gone over them in detail over the centuries. But for me personally, school was not the most torturous experience I've been through, it was just something that had to be borne. You sacrificed 6 hours a day to the education gods and came back to real life in the afternoon. It's hard to see the water when you've always lived in it.

I hated school when I was a kid. No, that’s a lie. I tolerated and endured school when I was a kid like the minimum security warehousing operation that it was, and it’s only in subsequent years that the hatred has fomented as I reflect on what a monumental waste of time it represented. - Thomas Bevan

But it still sucks at what it's supposed to do. It's a generally accepted fact that school's purpose is not that of effective teaching. It can't even be defended on the grounds of efficient teaching, considering how wasteful it is in the aggregate. It might have started out that way, back when literacy and knowledge stores were scarce resources, but that isn't the case anymore. And so it's "true" purpose, if any, is the subject of much discussion. Maybe even too much.

You've already heard how it's actually just a state-sponsored daycare. A much-needed public service that shifts the burden of responsibility away from parents for half a day. Or that it's the beginning of a lifelong social indoctrination programme, exposing children to the currently dominant culture and mores. Turning them into good little unquestioning robo-slaves ready to slot into the capitalist machine.

Or the one about it being the place where children get their first real dose of socialization. Ensuring that they understand the existence of social hierarchies and public expectations, even if they soon forget how to calculate square roots. And by doing so, it teaches them how to navigate the impersonal, oft-disappointing, Kafka-esque mess that is the real world.

if youre so smart why couldnt you figure out a way to learn what you want while assuaging teachers and administration in public school  - alth0u

Probably the best defense I've seem so far is that school is a warm, safe, healthy place where children can spend half a day around adults who (probably) won't kill them. This alone would make them worth keeping around.

But these are the boring ideas, the old ideas, the welfare ideas. If I'm going play Chesterton’s' fence card, I might as well try to make it a good one. So most of this post is going to talk about how schools real value is as a disconnected, independent environment, separate from the family and neighborhood. And why this is often a good thing.

Because in many ways, school is a completely different world. And even if it's a pretty terrible one, it's very existence allows for some pretty weird stuff to happen. Stuff that's taken for granted but is only possible thanks to the combination of sandbox and adversarial structure that school provides.

Something I worry about is that bullshit beliefs and trash institutions may in fact be load-bearing and whatever replaces them could be worse. - A Literal Banana

I.

It’s a bare minimum.

Here's a tradeoff that crops up all over the place: give up your agency, and receive security. Surrender control and receive a guaranteed outcome. It's the basis for the social contract and the maintenance of law and order. As well as a bunch of other things like regulation, courts, lockdowns and signing your soul over to a corpora- ahem, employment.

Like any good trade-off, both sides make a tempting offer. In our case, skipping school allows for unfettered agency and no obligations, and school...well, school offers you an increasingly worthless degree for which you give up a certain number of hours for more than a decade of your life.

I prefer the latter. It's not the bravest stance to take, but I choose it because I like minimums.

Minimums are the non-negotiable baselines that I use to make sure I never fall off completely. It's the weekly number of workouts, the three Substack posts a month expectation, the 9.0 GPA maintenance. The stuff that must get done no matter what.

As much as I resent the over-optimizing mindset, and strive for the purposeful creation for slack, there's a certain amount of coercion that's necessary to lay the foundation for that freedom. Slipping into unproductive catatonia is a real failure mode when you're relying on self-directed effort, and one that having fixed minimums helps avoid. Even if I did absolutely nothing else, the minimums ensure that I keep moving towards what I want.

School provides one of the best minimums in the business. In little more than a decade, you walk out of there with a degree. It doesn't take much, unless you choose to give it more than is strictly necessary. Even if you have zero accomplishments outside of graduating, you've fulfilled your duty as a perfectly average member of the modern populace.

It might not be the freest outcome (that's why it's a trade-off), but it's liberating in ways other than agency. After getting into a school, you no longer have to face the responsibility for moving things along yourself. Now there's this (relatively cheap) background process that runs for a few years and gives you a degree at the end of it, leaving you free to spend your remaining resources wherever you please. This is the main thing minimums achieve, they set you free to explore without the nagging guilt, or the feeling of falling behind.

The point of a minimum is, of course, to be minimal. If you try to maximize a process that's supposed to run cheaply, you’re missing the point. The more power you let school have over you, the less useful it is as a minimum.

II.

You're not in charge.

I like to think I know what's good for me. I assume most other people do too. And I like to think I do a better job at choosing things to do than a school does. But my maps are limited, there are parts of the territory that I avoid by default. And they'd stay dark to me for as long as I was in charge of my decisions.

So once again, there's upside to relinquishing control. You're put into situations you'd have never chosen yourself, hoping for outcomes you'd never get to see otherwise2. What school does is push around a bunch of kids into doing things they might hate, in the off-chance that it's good for them. And sometimes, it is.

Some parents might have arbitrary rules that rival the school's mandates, but they're still limited to their own maps. They're also more likely to bend to resistance, since they serve just the one individual and aren't held to a path by unshakeable rules. Their relationship with their children (thankfully) isn’t impersonal enough to allow for truly arbitrary coercion.

I'm not going to try to guess what weird things school pushed you into that ended up being a useful experience, but I'm willing to bet that there were at least a couple of them. It might have been your first fist-fight, or something as mundane as drama club, but they did happen.

One experience that's fairly universal is being forced into a classroom with people you'd normally never get to see, let alone interact with. "Heterogeneity good" might seem like a weak argument, but I can't deny the fact that school contained a variety I haven't seen in the years since3.

III.

It rewards the unpleasant.

There might not be a way to measure the payoff of memorizing your times-tables, but I'm pretty sure it isn't zero. Likewise for being forced to learn a second language, writing terrible essays, and mostly-pointless projects.

"But this stuff is useless." Yes, that's the point. You'd have never done them yourself, given the choice. Lucky for you, school takes away your choice the moment you walk in. My fellow libertarian souls will resent this, and learn an important lesson in half-assing things. But somewhere in that largely worthless pile of mandatory practice, there are a couple things that will matter in the long run.

school gives you a proximal utility payoff for doing seemingly useless practice - roon

Outside of school, you've got to deal with trade-offs all on your lonesome. Trying to model personal utility, efficiency and dozen other variables in the hope of picking the projects that are worth doing. Even then, most of that work will never be worth anything except the skills learned from them, and you have to continually resist the temptation to give up. A temptation that's made harder to resist by the fact that there's no downside to dropping out. It's enough to make a man wish for structured curricula again.

IV.

Love and other drugs.

Maybe there's a point at which too many suitors becomes a problem ahem Tinder ahem but for the most part, more is better in the marketplace of teenage crushes. And nothing comes close to providing the sheer number of peers that high school gives you regular contact with. Most relationships are (often completely) dependent on proximity to keep them going. I've lamented this fact before, but it happens anyway.

The more optimistic among you will point out that clubs and playgroups exist to fill this gap. But unlike school, attendance in those institutions isn't mandatory. So they’re much smaller and you aren't guaranteed a collection of your entire age-cohort in one place the way you are with large educational institutes.

Does the internet solve this? I don't know. If these early years are any indication, the answer seems like a definite "no". It's making a difference on the margin, but most couples still go to the same school.

As for the other drugs, I meant actual drugs. Like, narcotics. Marijuana. Maybe half a tab of acid. Sold-in-an-alley, pulled-out-at-parties-with-a-wink-and-smile, probably-diluted-to-oblivion drugs. Maybe alcohol too, if your definition of drug stretches that far. This is the relatively harmless stuff, of course. Unless you happen to own a penthouse or two, your kids (thankfully) cannot afford cocaine.

If you're going to do it someday, I think it's a good thing to have your first brush with this stuff when you're young. For one, you can take it. You're not an adult yet, so you aren't expected to act like one too often. You won't lose your job or be sued for child-neglect on a week-long bender because...well, you don't have either of those two things yet. A teenage delinquent is a danger to themselves, an adult is responsible for other people.

Secondly, it's probably easier to put your body through this stuff when you're young. Long-term brain effects aside, your body just heals faster in your teens. And if you ask for it, you'll also get a lot more sympathy and assistance as a helpless teen trying to kick the habit than you would as grown-up.

If you choose to abstain, you also get to see how it works out for the people who don't. Instead of hearing horror stories from your obviously-biased familial relations, you can watch your peers disintegrate before you in real time. Fun!

V.

Rebellion and lies.

Kids grow up real fast, and sooner than later, they need someone to rebel against. If you're lucky, school fills that role. Sorry, they'll never stop grumbling about your curfews and other barely-enforced rules, it's just how this works. But any real subversion, based on genuine hate, remains limited to schools.

It's fine for a child to dislike (or even resent) a teacher. It isn't ideal, but it's fallout is fairly limited. Teachers are explicit agents of coercion, and as such, they deal with disrespect and dissidence everyday. But having a parent-child relationship based on regular insubordination and consequent punishment does not end well.

Sure, every parent's going to have to roll up their sleeves and wield some coercion every once in a while. But I promise you, you do not want to have to do it everyday. And you really don't want to do it out of a sense of fear, because that's where it gets really ugly.

Because if there's one thing the education system deals in, it's fear. It takes a rare kind of parent to resist the ever-present worry that their kid is falling behind, and that this is their fault. You'd think someone who chose to homeschool in the first place would be robust enough to ignore the doubting voice, but no such luck. Parents worry, parents fear, and then they do dumb things that they have to double down on to maintain authority.

This sucks for the kid, even more than a demanding teacher in school would. School ends, teachers leave and there's always the option to switch institutions if things turn messy. You get none of that with family.

Homeschooling also might rob kids of the opportunity to rebel without the knowledge that they’re safe. It’s family- either your rebellion is a mere game or it’s so severe it’ll impact your relationship till death - marsienne

They've also got to learn to lie. And while this does usually begin at home, it's better for everyone involved that they get to practice it elsewhere. It's both harder and less rewarding to lie to people you've grown up around. The fact that you're all stuck playing the long game makes it even more so.

School, on the other hand, makes dishonesty a very convenient strategy. Mainly because lies are used most often against structures that have rules which invite the most disobedience, and school has lots of those. There's also a wider range of people against which to develop you fib-telling ability, this ensuring that it's generalizable. Don't want to get stuck with an over-fitted deception skillset, do we?

School also happens to be the perfect place for prank-playing. Either on your clueless fellows or in defiance of the Death-eaters teachers. Mean neighbors used to a preferred target for pranks4, but:

1. They know you did it, which takes some of the fun out of a stealthy execution.

2. They can threaten to sue. Also not fun.

But waging a gag war against agents of faceless system? That hits the sweet spot between playful malice and plausible deniability. You can actually get away with stuff for once, because the suspect pool is so large. Not so with family or local acquaintances.

VI.

It’s a nemesis-sourcing platform.

Not only does school give kids a structure to rebel against, it gives them the opportunity to form rivalries and create sworn enemies. It doesn't necessarily have to be in the form of bullies and physical violence either. Just being around a bunch of peers is enough to get the competitive juices flowing.

And kids need someone to compete against. A rival to overthrow, an adversary to chase down. Someone to envy and someone to crush in battle. You might not like, but this is what peak performance is fueled by.

And this too, is best kept outside of the house. Sibling rivalries are fun, until they aren't. There's only so much glory to go around the house, and it can lead to some ugly dynamics if there's no other place to spread the competition out.

Again, the separate nature of school lets you keep particularly vicious conflict confined to school. You can hate a bully/rival in class, and then forget about them completely once you're home. This separation isn't perfect, but it's nice to have. And infinitely preferable to resenting your brother.

I suppose it’s obvious that I don’t intend to convince any real anarchists with this post. There's a particular kind of kid for whom school is literal hell and I wish them well in their attempts to quit. But I do think that the "free the children" crowd ought to know what they're getting into when they call for abolishment. School is...quite the institution.

[school provides] structure for those who need it and structure for those who need to defy it - marsienne

There’s no other place that fills the role of unconnected sandbox and faceless adversary as well as these bastions of formal education. Burn them down at your own peril.

Good thought experiments are rare.

A couple years ago, as I was trawling through the PG archives for the first time, I found a post called The Island Test. In it, Paul proposed a test that was supposed to help you discover what you’re addicted to. It involved a rather simple process, easily summarized as follows:

1. Imagine you’re visiting a new house, on an island that has no shops or courier service.

2. Make a list of things (other than the bare necessities) you would make sure to take with you.

3. That list is the list of stuff you’re addicted to.

If it feels like a particularly insipid thought experiment, you’re right, it kinda is. At least for me, the exercise didn't surface the stuff that was really addicting. Heck, Paul (using this test on himself) ends up concluding that he’s addicted to, um…notebooks and earplugs. How decadently sinful.

And two years later, I’m convinced that really is a terrible test.

For one, it doesn’t perform any better than the far simpler question “What are you addicted to?”. Mostly because the simpler question is just more direct, and surfaces most of the real answers pretty well on it’s own. And I, for one, doubt that addictions are the subtle, hazy things that they’re made out to be. Most people can tell when the dependency gets strong enough, so an honest answer to the direct query is usually all it takes.

Sure, sometimes the most pernicious addictions blend into the background of your life, becoming difficult to tease out through mere introspective questioning. This sort of overlooked dependency is what the question is *supposed* to help with, but it…doesn’t.

Because background details are, by definition, the things that are taken for granted. Not the stuff you’d consciously think of. Who would add “nail-biting” to a travel list?

And even if people are really good at lying to themselves, the setting in this test doesn’t change that. If anything, it encourages it. Because the trip to the island acts almost exactly the way the new year does, providing the possibility of a fresh start, new choices, a Schelling point for self-transformation. A chance to leave behind the stuff you normally can’t live without. And so all it ends up doing is showing you what you want, or what you want to want. Not what you desperately need and depend on.

This isn’t critique for critique’s sake though. I mention this particularly disappointing essay not to disparage it, but to repurpose the idea it started out with. Rejoice, for sometimes even the meh-est of ideas can be inspiration for even meh-er newsletter posts.

In this case, into a way to counter that most devious driver of behaviour: mimetic desire. A way to answer the eternal question: what is it you *really* want?

II.

But first, a short refresher on Girard.

If you’ve spent enough time on a particular part of the internet, you’ve probably heard enough about this guy. About how he thinks humans learn to desire things by imitating other people, creating oppurtunities for largely pointless competition and intense conflict amongst the closest of peers. You’ve heard it all before, perhaps to the point where he really does seem just a tad overrated.

After all, what’s so new about his big idea anyway? Noticing that people want things because other people want things is hardly a novel idea1. Where Girard differs is in taking it to delightful extremes. As befits all ambitious philosophers, he attempts to explain everything he possibly can through this lens of mimesis.

Why do people adopt desires that are clearly orthogonal to their flourishing? Why do professionals vie to outdo each other over ultimately meaningless metrics? How did “keeping up with the Joneses?” become a thing? What creates the narcissism of small differences? Girard claims to have the answer.

“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.”

At first glance, this seems obviously wrong. There are things we're born wanting, even without seeing someone else choose them. Is it not natural to want food that simply tastes better? That doesn't seem like a very mimetically influenced desire.

But what if we lived in an environment that glorified asceticism? Where “delicious” was a slur, seasoning was illegal, and chefs were branded as social outcasts. Would our "natural preferences" change to reflect this? Would nurture trump nature and transform our wants, like it so often does? Going so far as to override our physiological predilections. Who knows?

But where even his critics agree is that a fairly large majority or human desires are based on imitation. How could it not be? Shared culture is what gave us the pyramids, astrology and Michael Jackson. It’s definitely powerful enough to influence us in a myriad of weird yet compelling ways. The hype around “mirror neurons” only added further credence to Girard’s arguments.

III.

Which brings me to the test.

It's a fairly simple one, combining both Paul’s island test and the classic “What do you think you’d need to survive on a desert island?” question into a two-step process:

1. Imagine you’re marooned on an island.

2. Make an exhaustive list of everything you wish you could have with you.

You can wish for absolutely anything, except people and intangibles, of course. The bare essentials (food, water, electricity, etc.) are provided by…um, the local colony of technologically advanced bonobos. Or Santa. It doesn’t really matter, just don’t worry about the bare necessities.

You can pick the type of house (or many houses, as long as you’re fine with maintaining them yourself), clothes, and any variety of consumer goods. No internet, but you can get an annual full-archive download if you ask nicely. Add them all onto the list, and make it as long as you’d like. Go crazy, your Pinterest boards are the limit.

How is this whole set-up supposed to work? It gets rid of what’s supposed to be the root of memetic desire: other people. And with that, all the status games that come with living in a society hopefully fade away too.

I say “hopefully”, because some of them are really persistent bastards. It might take some fairly intense imagining before the straight-A grad student realises he never really wanted his PhD. Or before you decide you never really cared about writing that blog, it just seemed like an impressive thing to do.

But once that’s done, you’ll have a list that’s formed by pure intrinsic desire, none of those distracting mimetic forces. Does it look exactly like the list of things you wished for when you were 12 years old? No? Just me then.

You can now spend the rest of your life chasing the things on that list, because is it’s far more likely that you’ll actually achieve them, as opposed to ticking items of the unending list of “envy desires”. And this time, you’ll actually enjoy them once you’ve got them, because they’re what you *really* want.

Or not.

IV.

Rather inconveniently, no man is an island.

And so this test is kinda dumb too.

For one, it has the same weakness that all philosophical thought experiments do: they’re thought experiments. And rather ridiculous ones at that. If physicists ask you to imagine a spherical cow, philosophers ask for a frictionless rail, a perfect utility function, and an unstoppable force crashing into five perfectly substitutable humans.

More annoyingly, it won’t solve your existential angst. If anything, it makes it all the more salient by reminding you that in the real world, there’s no end to this game of wanting. And if an essay can’t get rid of the hole in your heart, what on earth is the point of reading it?

Sure, this particular set-up helps you clear your lens of externally mediated desire by getting rid of everyone that might influence your choices. That’s all well and good, and maybe it gets some people to see that Yeezys are just another ugly shoe, which is a clear win. But you also…have no people, which would kinda suck. Like it or not, they are a locus of meaning you just can’t ignore. Not unless you choose an actual desert island.

You see, the really tricky thing isn’t that our desires are mimetic, it’s that they’re also embedded into social contexts. Like the saying goes, we live in a society. And living here involves buying into what I call the “minimum necessary mimesis”. Dipping into the societal desire pool just enough to stay in touch with the broader collective.

The PhD that seems so hollow on the desert island might just be what you need to get to work with the team you really want. Sure, it’s a silly piece of paper that you sacrifice half a decade to get, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

So even if this isn’t a panacea, I still find it a useful exercise. Especially if you can use it to think deeply about what you’re chasing if there was nobody around to watch you. Knowing what things you want is pretty useful, even if how you get them involves letting yourself be taken up into the world’s collective desire nexus.

And despite the fact that most of our meaning comes from being around people, it was interesting to realize that things really did matter. Even I, an austere soul if there ever was one, would much prefer a massive two-storied, library-containing, zipline-equipped, beachside cottagecore mansion to like, a hut or something. It’s just better to have things that you like, y’know?

V.

And so I encourage you to play around with it.

You can experiment with adding in a bunch of different factors and seeing what changes. For example, you can add in a partner or significant other, and see how your wants transform. From there, you can move onto adding family, close friends, professional and acquaintances, in that order. How does the list change with each addition? When does it cross over to “this=isnot-what-I-really-want” territory?

Maybe try imagining different kinds of weather and see how they affect your desires. Different topography and scenery too, if that makes a difference.

Age is an especially interesting parameter. While you can’t really imagine what you’d want at different ages, it’s still fun to try. Personally, the only change in desires that I can imagine is like, a dishwasher or something. Unless I get a bit more paranoid about it, and try to account for physical degradation: a weaker body and slowing mind. Would a comfortable mattress make it into the top quartile of my list?

If you want to get really neurotic, try working with a variety of lifespan limits. What would change if I had, say, 10 years of life left vs. 50. What about a mere two years?

What’s that? This seems like just another reminder to “think deeply about what you want, and stay the course”? Yes, of course it is. Here’s another, and another. We’re going to need as many as we can get if we plan to swim against the current of mimetic impulse. Better men than us have been swept along by that relentless river.

But then I decided to publish it anyway, not every post needs to be the most useful piece ever. It was worth writing it, even if all it does is exist as a reminder to myself of what to seek, and what to avoid.

College is a ridiculous time, huh? A time of luxuriously empty days and packed weeks. Of unpredictable romance and incredible foolishness. They weren't lying when they told you it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But then again, most things are, y'know? There’s only one of this particular moment in all of history and all that.

In particular though, never again will you be surrounded by this wide a variety of hormone-fueled peers in an environment of such freedom. It makes for interesting times, to say the least.

Yet one thing is constant, as it always is within groups of humans: despite the extremeness of some individual outcomes, the group variance as a whole remains oh-so-low.

Some of you will go through incredible transformation and joy, trials and times of intense sorrow. Stuff that changes you and molds you, etc. etc. -you know how that whole spiel goes. It's still true though, the early years are the messiest and young souls are the most moldable. As they should be.

But on the whole, this entire class will be just another X— cohort.

Another year of graduating youngins, proud-but-anxious freshers. Near-indistinguishable from those the year before and the one after, and they seem to be getting more similar with time. You'll have your reunions and sacred memories, just like every other year will too.

So if this speech is anything, it's a challenge, nay an entreaty, to prove this claim wrong. To raise the variance of outcomes high enough to surprise me. And everyone else who's watching. I ask this because now and always, we need more people out there at the frontier of things.

But I'm speaking to you specifically, because in many ways, you already are there.

I wouldn't like this to sound like a discussion about privilege. None of you chose your births, you took what you were handed. But here's an undeniable fact: You are, by definition of being in this classroom, the 1% of the 1%. Across the country, a mere 8% of your age cohort will attend and graduate from college. Any college, let alone one as prestigious as this. Chances are, more than 8% of this class will have two degrees in a couple years from now.

So yeah, we're extremely lucky, and none more so than I. Think about it, I just so happened to be born at the time when the internet really got big. In just the right conditions to let me access it. With just the right background to actually make use of it. I don't know how many of you believe in God, but to say I'm grateful to Him is putting it mildly.

So if you happen to be sad you weren't born in a different place, or a different body, what is it exactly that you bemoan?

The desire to have a "better" life? There lies a never-ending path, there will always be improvements you will wish for. And you can never escape the tyranny of trade-offs. Some people have a significant part of their personality attached to their desire to live in New York, that shining beacon of the have-made-its. I guess I can understand that, it's a magical place. Or so I've heard. But this speech is for them too, if they want it to be.

The ability to do great work? You have more of what's necessary for that than most other people do. It won't be enough, but the missing bits are not the things that could be handed to you anyway.

I don't deny that the world might be messed up in many ways for a lot of you. Your families, environment and bodies might place upon you limitations that you can barely tolerate. There's things around you so broken, survival is all you ask for.

But I will still tell you; straight up, in complete seriousness and sincerity; that we still need you to be the people who fix it.

No, I won't tell you it's your duty as "good citizens", or any of that nonsense. Or that your talents mean that you owe some kind of a debt to the world. I ask it of you only because you’re the ones who can.

I repeat, you have no obligations. To put it crudely: you owe nothing to nobody. But there is also no limit to the duties that you can assign yourself. Like the venerable Simon Sarris says "everything is your responsibility". If, and only if, you take them upon you willingly.

To quote another one of my internet friends: "You’ve been given the honor of the unique ability to bring about more blessings, to be a hand of God—to run from that is to abdicate everything you’ve both taken and given."

Make no mistake, this honor is a voluntary mantle. Abdication is well within your rights, even if it will be a squandering of your abilities.

One of the funny things about being human, and getting to live just the one life, is that we end up giving others the advice we wish we'd heard. So I have to remind myself that I do not want you to do what I think you should do. I must remember just how limited my own imagination is. "Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world." That's Schopenhauer reminding me that sometimes, I cannot rely my own judgement.

But I do need you to build your own, ignoring the lenses that were foisted upon you. I implore you to use your imagination, but to not be limited by it. Surprise me, and yourself. Now is not the time to think in the ways that school asked you to think.

Because school sucks in a variety of ways. Scott has a graduation speech that tells you exactly how much it sucks. If, for some reason, you want to hear of even more ways it sucks, ask me out for coffee sometime. Or subscribe to my substack. Formal education is a popular whipping horse there.

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No, it isn't literal hell. I'd choose school every time over the other options. Most of them aren't pretty. But today I'm mad at school not because it's an inefficient, outdated system, but because of the subtle ways in which it ruins the future. Ways that hard to measure, and therefore easy to ignore.

So I will not tell you today what your work should be. Neither I, not anybody else, has the right to. At best, I can warn you of what the opposite looks like.

I shouldn't have to tell you how hollow academia often is. You can see that for yourselves, if you're paying attention. Remember when they told you high school was the most important time of your life? Remember when they said it was university entrance exams? Of course, this is college, and it's supposed to be different. This is the last one, the big one. Even if they've lied before, surely, nothing else is more important than these years of stud- I beg you, do not fall prey to this particularly insidious form of Gellman amnesia.

And as much as you can, avoid the little leagues. I'd much prefer that you simply hung out with your friends; in cafes, libraries or the street. Went on a hike. Formed a band. Anything but the soul-sucking minutiae of college clubs, honors courses, and silly, silly undergrad publications.

One, because they don't matter, at all. All across the world, thousands of college magazines and "entrepreneurship clubs" could shut down, and nobody would be the poorer for it. At most, it will mean a few crushed egos and the end of some Whatsapp groupchats. Like I said, net positive.

But secondly, because they're ambition traps, teaching kids that this is as good as it gets. And that they'll still be treated as a child, no matter how they handle themselves. Toy project and mandatory hand-holding. "University policy lad, no exceptions". And unfortunately enough, that lesson stays with people for far, far longer than it should.

Ambition was never about climbing the highest hill you can see. Or winning a place on the editorial board of your most prestigious journal. Or clawing your way into another internship. You know it isn’t, I know it isn’t. Yet we fall for it each time.

Ambition is about giving a shit. It's about seeing beyond the hills. Beyond what is asked of you. It involves that which Kierkegaard called the "Infinite", the part of you that yearns to transcend the current order of things. To bring into existence all that doesn’t necessarily exist but could possibly be.

And all I wish to do today is fulfill my Cowen-ist duty of raising those ambitions.

Neither you, nor I, have any clue of what the future holds, or your place in it. It's an unknown unknown of the most powerful sort. All do I know is that if you're sure of what it should be, you're wrong.

Especially with your ridiculous models of reality. What do you even know, children that you are? You think you know yourself, yet you spend half your day wrestling your shadow. You're worried about the job market, but you have no clue what it really is like. You see the narrow end of a cone, and spend your energies trying to fit through.

Thanks to the paternalism of schools, and the insulating effects of your environment at large, you know next to nothing of the world as it is. Or of what it can be. Perhaps even worse, you underestimate yourself. Yes, that's a cliché. But I've found that growing up is just the process of realizing all the clichés are true. Sue me.

Of course, they’ve already told you that you underestimate yourself, they tell you all the time. With the result that you're living in the guilt of the you you're supposed to be. The one you could be if only you applied yourself. But the more impressive version, the "possible-you" is the underestimate.

Because, as I keep repeating, our ideas of what's possible are so, so flawed. This is unavoidable, Amara’s Law rules everything around me. I'm not advising you to ignore reality, but I do implore you to see beyond it's worst parts. Especially when it tells a story that denies you hope.

Y'know, they love reminding you that your teens are the time for rebellion. They do it so that you know you're expected to stop eventually. And most people do stop, as soon as the novelty fades. You grow tired of raging, tired of fighting, maybe even tired of feeling. And that's when the Machine wins.

"The Machine wants conformity, efficiency, and productivity above all else. It wants you to bend the knee, to sell your soul, to sacrifice all that you hold dear in the name of faster and faster and more and more. It wants you to forget that bad incentives can and should be resisted, that rules are meant to be broken, that at all times you have the right to say fuck this shit, I’m out."

All the really important things change slowly, painfully slowly. So the Machine counts on you burning yourself out quickly. It needs to break your spirit when you're young and fairly powerless. Leave you thinking that this is, in fact, just a phase. But the truth is that you don't have to get boring or cynical, though you'll be forgiven if you occasionally do. The Machine does it's best to wear us down.

This is why any successful rebellion needs to be consciously maintained. Carefully planned. Intentionally followed through on. The eager young revolutionary must be replaced by a determined solider. The brash attempts at immediate transformation supplanted by a slow, thoughtful push-back that comes of a firm conviction in the kind of world you want to see.

I'm not asking you to drop-out, lead protests, start a cult or a world-changing company (those last two are often the same thing). It would be pretty incredible if you did, but nothing that difficult is strictly necessary. Listen to people who tell you to embrace foolhardy ventures the same way you would listen to a newly-minted lottery winner. And look at the ones that say those are the only ways to make a difference with pure skepticism.

For example, economists have a good, if self-serving, argument for what makes the world better: economic development. They're right, insofar as it's hard to have a good world in the absence of growth. But the argument is incorrect if it claims that everything else rounds down to zero.

Because I've found, despite all my personal cynicism (and there’s a lot of it), that people really do matter. That the things that don’t scale count in ways that transcend estimation, and that the only efforts that go in vain are those which are not sustained. I do not want you as mere excited comrades in the small battles, but as determined allies throughout a long war.

To maintain this cheerful optimism, calls for you to be brave. A call that I hope is made to the right place; you're some of the few people that can actually afford to be courageous. Not the brashness of activism or self-righteous yelling, but the quiet courage of enduring optimism. Not the foolish interfering of professional do-gooders, but the unwavering willingness to do whatever you can.

The will to actively avoid the averages, to go beyond good enough. That's all there is to do, y'know? Doing what you can, and then just a little bit better. Do not rely on your neighbor to fill the gap. That’s how we got here in the first place.

I'll be honest. There are many days, when I look out into the world and all I see are immovable walls. A world with all the alpha priced out and absolutely nowhere where my chisel can make a dent. Even if comparitive advantage says it ain't so, it bloody well feels that way.

I f-ckin hate those days.

But this is the default state, for we’ve never been taught to see the gaps in the world. Maybe it’s because it’s an unteachable skill, and is something that has to be earned. But the step that must come before that, that makes the process of earning possible, is left out: you aren’t ever taught to embrace the possibility of being wrong. Not in any way that really matters.

Sure, there are the token encouragements to dream, to think different, to go against the grain. But one glance at the revealed preferences puts the lie to those statements. In almost all ways that matter, our society is chronically bad at producing and nurturing true elites, the individuals who are capable of creating and sustaining frontiers.”

So you’ll have to do it yourself, looking directly to the people you find admirable and impressive for inspiration. I promise you, when they started out, most of them were just some guy. They just happened to care very, very much. They cared enough that seeming like an idiot for a decade or so was nothing to be discouraged by.

And so I ask, nay I beg of you, do not let the big picture suffocate you. Do not let the seeming tininess of your effort be swallowed up by the specter of an unchanging enormity. Do not let hopelessness be your response to stifled progress. Again, and forever, I ask you to brave.

I've found that there will be people who belittle this kind of soft courage. Who call it the prerogative of privilege (like that's a dirty word), or deride it as a naïve foolishness. I do forgive those folk, but I also wish they'd shut up.

But simply telling you that you have nothing to lose will never be enough. You’re responsible of feeling out the bars of your own cage, and finding them more yielding than you could ever have hoped. And there will still be the possibility of loss, as there should be with anything that involves sacrifice. Yours will be the responsibility of judging when that price is worth paying.

From a few among you, I will ask for everything you can spare. These are the ones who might even be willing to offer it all. Who echo the sentiments of Jay Parthasarthy: “I don't care about my career at all. I don't want to be a VC or lecture at Stanford or have my name on some hospital. If I worked on five failed climate startups in a row, I’d be totally happy with that, as long as they were “good failures.” So I don't care about killing my career, it never mattered to me.” You who can give the most, can create the bulk of the improvements.

Some of you (lucky bastards!), know exactly what you want to do after this. And I commend you for it. But if you can find the time to go through those plans again, see if you can find the means to be a tiny bit more generous, a little more pragmatic, slightly more thoughtful.

I ask the same thing from the rest of, in whatever way you can provide it. Whether it be the simple act of loving your neighbor, or fixing your community. Do whatever it takes to be the human in the system. A multitude of oft-invisible people will thank you for it.

When I was halfway through writing this, I had my doubts. The main one being: is this entire speech too optimistic? Does it skip over all the reasons you should instead go out there and live a completely normal, comfortable life? Is it irresponsible of me to paint a picture that is idealistic instead of honest? Maybe. Possibly. Quite likely. Who knows?

Heck, I'll go ahead admit that the futures I envision are probably impossible. And that we'll be doomed to mimetic conflict, masquerading as Malthusian, simply by nature of being human. Fighting for status, thinking it to be survival. Stamping on our own faces for all eternity. Living in cages of our own making.

But I also believe that avoiding that cruel future is much more possible than it usually seems. For this, we do not need the world to change in unimaginable ways, for every man to be swept up in transformation. All it takes is a determined handful to build the sort of place that encourages a shared and growing prosperity.

But the beautiful thing is that each addition to that small group does not lead to diminishing returns, but the exact opposite. Every new comrade acts as a multiplier on the efforts of his tribe, as well as on the likelihood of the future they want. We need all the volunteers we can get, because that future cannot come fast enough.

And maybe this dream is, in fact, too pessimistic. Maybe my lack of imagination keeps me from seeing just how good things can really get. Who can really tell, either way? As a species, predictions are not our strong suit. If I am to make one, I might as well make it hopeful.

Y'know, speeches like these normally start (or end) with a congratulations. On your impending graduation, for making it this far. But in case it wasn't already obvious, I care far less for what you've achieved in these years than for what you can do from here on out. The frontier is as large as you believe it to be.

Good luck, everyone.

If you think about it, motivation is kinda fake.

It's a bit ridiculous just how flaky an emotion it is. Canonically, it's meant to inspire effort; but in practice it often works the other way around, with action itself begetting further action. Grudging workouts are way easier to grind through once you're halfway through. Writing an introduction is the slowest part of the essay1. Getting out of bed is a particularly annoying example. Actually doing it is way easier than the indolent feeling of under-the-sheets-reluctance would suggest.

Nonetheless, there does seem to be a need for the initial jumpstart, a will to action that precedes the first step. And one could be forgiven for thinking that there currently exists a society-wide desire for foolproof motivation. With exhibit A being the entire genre of self-help. And the front page of z-library being another sign.

Pulling up a thesaurus, the first few results for "motivation" provides the following list: drive, excite, inspire, encouragement, incentivize, move, stimulate. All words with markedly positive connotations. Which is seems in line with the popular line of thinking, i.e. that good motives work best.

This popular advice makes a strong case too. Experience and example both show that intrinsic motivation is a pretty strong driver of action. And it seems to lasts a hell of a lot longer too. The extreme negative cases; broken families, worn-out souls, hollow purpose and investment bankers (oh wait, I'm repeating myself); all provide strong warnings against letting the mimetic forces of envy et al. guide one's actions.

Being inspired by an appropriately inspiring figure, driven by filial piety and blood-ties, being led on by the unnering instinct of your heart's true desire or the urge to be a better you, are the more positive (and dare I say, marketable?) motivations that make for heart-warming stories and eventually, movies. Surely, we would all be better off if we did our best to utilise fuel from just these felicitous sources.

Nah, I don't think so.

II.

I say use whatever it takes.

I don't intend for this to be a debate about means vs. ends. I prefer to leave such theoretical pedantry to the professional philosophers. Nobody is out there building the rails for a real life trolley problem. If they are, the easy answer is just, y'know, stopping them. For anyone in the real world, the means are virtually inseperable from their ends.

All I know is that, in their daily war against inertia, some of the most impressive people I know are motivated far less by their grandiose visions of utopia-building or personal ambition than they are by a dozen other,...less than ideal inspirations. They do hope for good outcomes, but the means that get them there aren't particularly praiseworthy.

Of course, this isn't a new idea. Way back in 1776, Adam Smith pointed out (in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations2) how human self-interest could, in fact, be a good thing. So it shouldn't be particularly surprising that the more undesirable of incentives are able to produce preffered outcomes. Self-interest is pretty boring too, it’s what everyone does most of the time anyway. But apart from that particular incentive, the sheer variety of alternate motivations never ceases to fascinate me.

Take, for example, my favourite teenage economist. As much as he both loves and enjoys the subject now, the origin story is less than rosy. Not so much an example of a boy-intrigued-by-the-depth-and-history-of-the-field as it was kid-who-failed-an-econ-test-amd-decided-to-git-gud-as-vengeance. And did he ever get good. No seriously, his podcast is the only one I’ve listened to all year.

Being fueled by ridicule from leftists? Works for Slava. Going into grad school hell3 and emerging with a PhD just for internet clout? That's how we get a Noah Smith. Needing to be slighted in order to perform historic feats of sporting dominance? That's Michael Jordan for you.

The scholars aren’t extempt from petty glory-chasing either. Even a mathematician as distinguished as Hardy admits that's his earliest efforts at excellence were motivated by the relatively narcissistic desire for victory:

“I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most decisively.” - G.H. Hardy

Being afraid works pretty well too, as long as you do an FDR (“The only thing we have to fear itself”) and end up digging yourself out of the initial paralysis. As long as you hate being afraid more than you do the thing you're afraid of, you’ll be okay.

The reason self-coercion rarely works is not because threats are ineffective motivations, but because they're not scary enough. As inconvenient as it is in this case, you just can’t scare yourself. There's nothing you can do to change that, and so it devolves into a hopeless shouting match between the parts of you that are opposed to the thing and the bully trying to get stuff done.

Contrary to popular belief, the main value-add from teachers is not pedagogical expertise, but as a spur to action. It’s easier to get moving when there’s even that tiny minimum of external expectation. So it is with schools too. There’s a bunch of grunt work that school enables that is near impossible to find a good-enough justification for otherwise.

We need external drivers to step in whenever personal desire stops short. It's why being in the military will fix your sleep schedule faster than warm milk and reading mode can.

On first glance, the feeling of falling behind seems like a net negative, one that's responsible for uncountable abandoned starts and discouragements. But if you can be more intentional about it, it’s also fuel to make sure you keep up. Scenius is more rivalry than anything else. Being surrounded by unreasonably high-achievers is good because then at least you know you’re trying. Provided, of course, that you really want to keep up, and aren’t falling into another one of those Girardian hellscapes.

A helpful way of looking at these less-than-pure motivations it is that if you're not using them, they're using you. And you hate being used, right? Right?

If motivation is a scarce resource, we might as well make the most of what we’ve got. Choose worthy ends, and use whatever you must.

A more extreme example is that of the link between traumatic childhoods and genius. Or even the more general cliche of the tortured genius, of coked up songwriters and bipolar philosophers. The romantic idea of suffering for your art is a popular one. While I don't have much personal conviction that such a causal link exists, it's possibility alone makes it a factor worth considering.

III.

Is it sustainable? Perhaps not.

But it doesn't have to be. All it needs to be is good enough. Good enough to get me moving when I'd rather not. Good enough to fill in when the other frameworks fail. Good enough to make a difference on the margin. And a bunch of stuff that gets frowned upon, reproached, or otherwise discouraged is nonetheless extremely effective.

The chip on your shoulder will take you further than most people born into complacency. But isn’t embarrassing to always have something to prove? Only if you let it rule your entire life. Otherwise it’s just a stronger-than-average reminder of what you want.

Being motivated by other people? Lindy. And just plain...nice. One of my favourite example of this is Andre Agassi’s need to play for other people instead of himself. Not so much because being motivated by other people is a particularly unique thing, most people work like that. But because playing for himself just didn't work.

“Agassi isn’t self-motivated. In fact, when he’s only playing for himself, he plays terribly; he only plays well when he is playing for something he cares about: either he’s playing for his staff, who double as his posse of best friends; or he’s playing with the goal of raising his status and wealth so that he has more capital to put towards the school he started for under-privileged children.” - Priya Ghose

Do Things For Yourself gave us the millenials and cat-mom culture. Probably falling fertility rates too, if you care about that kind of stuff. But imagine it as a selfless duty, and you can keep your personal benefits while being motivated by the greater good. Even body-sculpting, that famously narcissistic pursuit, is granted a more charitable interpretation under the frame of uselfish duty.

Doing things you hate just to get them over with works so well it's ironic. Sure, there's the argument that we should be lighting fires instead of filling buckets. But I work pretty fast when I want to never see the bucket again. And a cool thing about buckets is that you can see them filling up as you work.

Jeremy Nixon has a cool list of ways to get yourself immersed into something. The upshot of which is that you need almost irrational levels of motivations to do so, not all of them virtuous. Point #7 (Have an enemy who’s growing faster than you are) is a personal favourite and reminds me of this post by Sasha. If you can’t find/imagine a good enemy to do battle with, Moloch is always a worthy adversary.

I'm also all for harnessing anger, and sheer hatred for the status quo. Harnessing, that is, not giving in to. Do entrepreneurs pick their careers because they love business, or because they really, really hate writing resumes? Few things are more cringe than angry yelling as a reaction, and few forces are as effective as a cold, focused rage. Rage, rage against the rise of Moloch.

IV.

This isn't really meant to be prescriptive.

The only reason I chose to defend this stuff at all is because it hurts no one else. Heck, it doesn't even hurt you unless it’s turning you into what you definitely do not want to be. Notably absent from the previous examples were any mention of the Girardian twins: jealousy and envy, because that’s where I personally draw the line. Not that they aren’t effective motivators in themselves, I just don’t think the trade-offs are worth it in that particular case. Humans are only too suscpetible to be drawn into zero-sum status conpetitions, and I am but human.

Not that mimesis is all bad. Getting good at working with it wisely is extremely useful skill to have.

“I submit that the key to success is to be aware of one’s tendencies, either to be very mimetic or not at all. Then one can harness these tendencies to maximize learning, and not spend all one’s time indulging solitary whims or be governed by mimetic contagion. It’s possible that the greatest amount of learning comes as a result of fluctuating between these extremes.” - Dan Wang

What I do hope to do however, is shift the Overton window of effective motivations. It currently seems to lie somewhere between self-driven and passion, ignoring their less-pleasant counterparts. And hearing that those other motivations aren't worth entertaining is untrue enough that it made me to write a whole essay celebrating the other options. Now there’s motivation for ya.

Raging against false dichotomies is passè now, but it’s still true that most things are never either/or. The choice isn’t passion or apathy, it’s everything in between as well. Doing what you don’t really care about is good, if it gets you the outcomes you want. And adding literally anything else in place of that lack of caring is helpful when you’re grinding through it.

To prove I’m not a complete misanthrope4, I will point out that arguments that blame happiness for complancency are pretty terrible too. Yeah, perfect happiness would be paralysing. Maybe. But we don't have that yet. And we won't ever, unless we build the experience machine or something. Until then, there’s no reason to confuse happiness with catatonia, the most complacent people I know are pretty f-ing sad.

Even with these additional drives, motivation will remain as flaky as ever. Moods are weird things. Attempting to game them for the purposes of productivity or otherwise almost never works. Most people have accepted this. But it can’t hurt to have more tools in the toolbox, as long as you know how to use them.

But they're a gift to the lazy reader too. A listicle asks for nothing but a linear read-through. No need for any active context-maintainance or those pesky Straussian readings, no sir! A 100% pure word-to-brain interface for half the attention cost. You know you can't resist!

Last week, the venerable Sirsfurther confidently declared that there is no art to tweeting. He is right, as always. But in my experience, there is a definite skill. The greatest poasters have mastered the art of the information dress-and-serving, 240 character nuggets delivered with practiced ease.

I had a hard time remembering when I crossed over from struggling-to-shape-thoughts-into-words to writing-a-dozen-drafts-a-month until I realised the only difference was the thousand-or-so tweets I’d written during that time. And other people agree. There’s something about the medium that trains the skill of effortless thought-to-text like nothing else does. Maybe it’s just the magical combination of a low bar and high frequency.

Be okay with the idea that not everything you produce has to be an impressive thought which will stun the entirety of humanity - Sasha Chapin

Apart from posting though, there's a bunch of other skills that seperate the experience Twitter user from a rookie. This list is an attempt to distill those factors into JBP-esque insights.

This isn’t meant to be an argument for Twitter. If you want to convince a friend to get on the bird site, you can show them this, or this.

But if you want to teach them how to use the site, then this post is what you nee- oh right, Priya has another guide. As does Visa. And they're both pretty good.

So why am I writing this one? Because I think I have at least a few new points to make, particularly for people that are complete newbies. (So do them a favour and share this with them, hmm?). It definitely is not because I have a weekly post obligation to meet and had no time to write a proper essay. Anyway…here we go.

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I] Know what Twitter is. And what it can be.

You may have heard that it's a hellsite; the cursed source of identity politics and creator of dangerous bubbles. I get it, the world is burning and folks want something to blame. But even if it is the home of the shouting class, Twitter is no irredeemable cesspool. At it's heart, Twitter is just an infinite database of text, with the occasional image thrown in.

But like most things, the bird site is what you make of it. And the possibilities are near-endless. To various extents, Twitter is a public commons, the world’s bar, a tool for (networked) thought, TGSCITIC, open journal, micro-blogging platform, political arena, performance art arena, dating site, informal job market, internet microcosm, marketting funnel, and the most accesible version of a global glass bead game. 

2] Know why you're here.

Which makes it all the more important that you decide what you want to get out of it, and work towards that. Twitter works marvellously as a journal. And I will (grudgingly) admit that it also works pretty well as professional networking platform. But those two don’t usually go together very well.

Which is why I recommend picking a small handful of goals to work towards. For example, journal + dating site is surprisingly popular, though I prefer micro-blogging + glass bead game myself. Just so you can ignore the other options and avoid slipping into stuff like political activism or worse, horny-posting. You don’t have to make it easy for people to guess what you’re about, but it does help them to know.

Within those roles however, you have complete freedom to jump from topic to topic. Don’t let those stick-in-the-mud followers rain on your illegibility parade!

3] You're in charge. If you want to be.

It’s usually the case that complaints about toxicity and poor quality almost always come from people who haven't put in any effort to maintain their environs. This is true of Twitter and of life in general. Don’t be one of them.

Curation is a fairly simple process. If you’re following boring/angry people, you’re going see a lot of boring/angry tweets. If you want to see cool shit, you’ll have to go looking for it. Luckily, one interesting account often leads to others, but it’s still your job to follow the path.

Use lists if you want your timeline to be less crowded. You can have seperate ones for different topics, or different kinds of people. Here, for example, is my fairly popular joke twitter list, full of pun crimes and snarky takes. Admittedly, I don't open it much anymore, but other people find it cool.

I also recommend turning off notifications if you're using the mobile app. It's 2021 and no one (except your mum) should have the power to interrupt you without explicit permission.

4] Work with the algorithm.

An unavoidable part of being in charge is working with the things you can't directly control. But that doesn't mean you're powerless. As hard as it is to believe sometimes, the algo is training itself on your behaviour. If you show it that you want to get into a bunch of p*litical debates, it will do it's best to ensure you see more of them.

Liking, retweeting and replying are all signals that you want to see more of a user's tweets. Even tapping on a tweet to view the replies counts as positive interaction, although less strongly. Ignoring a tweet or reply works the other way. Hitting the “not interested in this tweet” button is the most unambiguous a hint to the algorithm can get.

In my amateur opinion, profiling people by their timeline would work much better than Myers-Briggs or *ugh* the DSM-V.

5] Learn to use the tools.

Twitter search is broken in a new way every month. But that doesn't mean it isn't incredibly useful. Advanced search has some especially useful features. But there are two simple methods that give you nearly all the functionality you’ll need.

First, from:@username. Follow that with a few search words and it will return any tweets by @username that contain those words. I usually use this to find one of my older tweets to riff off of, or someone else’s particularly good tweet whose phrasing I only roughly remember and want to reference somewhere else.

Second, and even more powerful, is filter:follows, add that before a normal word-search and it will fetch tweets that match those words, but only from the people you follow. This is incredibly useful if you want to see what those people have said about…literally anything. I nearly always run this kind of search before I get down to writing one of these posts.

6] If you think about blocking someone, go ahead and do it.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to everybody. You could be one of the thick-skinned folk that loves confrontation, or have a weird kink for epistemic humiliation. In which case, go right ahead and wrestle other people's brainworms. But know that there's a better way.

All it takes is a couple clicks, and you'll never have to see them again. Blocking is wielding a pair of pruning shears in your digital garden, a harsh but oft necessary step. FOMO is fake, you're not likely to miss anything important from one particular account. Especially not one who's tiresome enough to deserve a block.

Sometimes though, they might be a friend who’s tweets happen to be the worst part of them. In which case, Twitter has very kindly provided a mute option.

7] It's bad on purpose to make you click.

Remember the terrible take on climate change? Or the article that recommended emasculating yourself with estrogen supplements in the hopes of beating COVID-19?1 The dumbest-idea-you've-ever-heard-of? The one you can't believe they knew what they were doing when they hit "publish" on? Yeah, they knew what they were doing.

Maybe (and it’s a big maybe) the writer sincerely believed what they were writing, and deserves to be told why they’re wrong. But you can bet their editor knew precisely what reaction the article would get, and eagerly sent it out into the web. There's no such thing as bad press. Especially when you literally are the press.

Experienced tweeters know that controversy can be depended upon to rack up the numbers. Engagement is engagement, and every angry retweet, outraged reply and empathetic like is proof of the strategy's success.

8] It's about the people.

No veteran tracks their progress in numbers. After a while, they all fade into the underlying trend. Likes and follower counts may seem like a big deal, because on most other platforms, they are. But Twitter is the open townsquare. There's no barrier to stop you posting in public, or replying to the best of tweetes.

Heck, after a point, numbers are the opposite of having a good time. There's probably no alpha left in following an account with more than 50k followers. God forbid I ever cross a thousand myself. This seems to be an common rule: the bigger the account, the more accurately their tweets can be reproduced by GPT-3.

Instead of just seeing one lonely tweet, you'll see conversations...these can be far more interesting and insightful than a 280-character tweet. - Priya Ghose

Numbers are numbers, but people matter. You know you’re doing it right when you care more about the tweeters than the tweets themselves. Reply to their tweets. DM them. Offer help. You’re a person, you matter too :)

9] Create your own filters.

What sort of people do you want to hang around? How can you let them know you're cool in the same ways they are?

Filters come in an infinite variety of forms. Robin Hanson may annoy people with his "everything is signalling" bit, but that doesn't mean he isn't right. Everything about you signals your taste and abilities in some way or another.

The first big one is the bio and profile picture. Are the two lines of text sufficiently witty/impressive? Does your profile picture display exactly the right amount of taste/nonchalance?

Your tweets are secondary. Because for most accounts, the tweets can be predicted fairly well from the bio. For the few people who do scroll through your latest tweets, here’s a rough idea of what they’re looking for:

• Are you someone who tweets often, or sticks to retweets?

• Are your tweets playful or sincere?

• What does the pinned tweet say about you?

• Are you human? Are you dancer?

You don't have to overthink it, but it's good to recognise how much this stuff matters. If the point is to attract who you want to hang out with, and these filters are big part of that.

10] Don't be a dick.

No really, even if being rude is something you enjoy. You'll be losing out on most of Twitter's benefits by being a ornery hater. The most thoughtful, helpful and all-round interesting people don't particularly enjoy rudeness. You can be slightly evil if you want to. But if you're only looking for a place to rant and rage, there's always room on HN.

You don't have to bend over backwards to let people know you're nice. Even respectful disagreement and simple courtesy will be a pleasant surprise. Attacking ideas is okay, even encouraged. Attacking people is cringe.

11] Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street timeline.

Yeah, I stole this one. Because I promised you 12 rules, and I ran out at 11. Sue me. Even if I haven’t actually read the book, this seemed like the best one to steal.

It applies more when you’re a slightly bigger account, but anyone can be kind. It’s the interent, giving a compliment takes two seconds and requires none of the anxiety of real life interaction. I think most people fail to appreciate the disproportionate effects of being kind, especially online where the cost is near-zero.

Tell that kid their painting is cool. Answer the question in the tweet with no likes. Tell that poet that the second line in the first stanza is particularly lovely. As a bonus, they’ll probably follow you back. ;)

12] When in doubt, send tweet.

Anything fun or interesting is on the edge of weird and TMI. Like Sasha says, if you have writer's block, stop lying. All the comfortable takes have been priced in and the people demand quirky freshness.

everyone should strive to contribute to the absurdity of our timeline - @ashishgpt2

If you're really worried about your tweets affecting you, go anon. Everyone loves a poaster with a cool profile picture and an air of mystery around them. In my opinion, self-censoring too much is a worse failure mode than filtering too little.

All writing is metaphor creation.

Heck, as far as I can tell, all thought is metaphor creation. This is like that and that is like this. And recently, I accepted a friendly challenge to write about financial metaphors. More specifically, how they apply to friendships. And whether they should even be brought into this sacred arena.

However, the fact that there are useful metaphors in finance is a widely accepted one. Byrne Hobart, one of the best metaphor-wielders in the business, explains why: Markets are laboratories for the study of human behaviour, and as such they provide a great arsenal of vocabulary for explaining the non-financial world.

So it can be done. Whether or not it should be done is something I'll get into soon enough. But first, I want to point out that the erosion of friendship by financialization is not something that I fear. The very definition of such a process is directly counter to the idea of friendship.

To make that clear, here's a definition from a Vitalik blog post: Finance can be viewed as a set of patterns that naturally emerge in many kinds of systems that do not attempt to prevent collusion.

But what is friendship if not the purest, most fun form of collusion? Where common knowledge as a comparitive advantage is both invited and encouraged. To the dismay of autists everywhere, there is no free market in pals.

Even finance in the real world usually operates with a few relationships thrown in. Wall Street is still, despite Jane Street’s best efforts, run by people. People who’ve known each other for years, and wouldn’t let a few anti-trust laws spoil a good dinner party. (“My, what a large web of connections you have.” “All the better to screw you with.”)

So no, your friends are not going to be funged away, not even by rentafriend.com. You don’t have to live in the pod if you don’t want to y’know?

It is also true that financialized systems are much more stable if their incentives are anchored around a system that is ultimately non-financial. - Vitalik

The important life lessons are not about how to imitate finance, but about how to find real life scenarios that resist financialization and still allow for outsized returns. -Applied Divinity Studies

The relatively harmless application of metaphor, on the other hand, is simply the stock-and-trade of any internet writer. Few methods of achieving insight are as easy and direct than slapping together a couple of similar ideas and seeing what sticks. Sometimes the results aren't entirely pure and true. But it makes for entertaining reading all the same. The real point is to highlight similarity in a sea of difference.

we cut the world into pieces with words, distinctions, categories. analogy and metaphor sews things back together, reminds us of the inherent sameness of everything - Amir

"But muh pure friendships and fun. Surely, even viewing people as economic entities is hyper-utilitarian and bad.”

I'm not so sure about that. Most dichotomies are false, why would this one be unquestionably true? I think there's a healthy degree of economic comparision to be applied here. Maybe some of them will seem like cliches or tautology, but I hope that at least a few will help me make my points better.

II.

So let's financialize some friendships, shall we?

To begin with, we need to find the metaphors that apply best. Are friendships a product or service? A fund or cooperative? A security or company?

The popular metaphor seems to be of friendship as a product, and friends as home economicus, as selfish agents engaging in mutually beneficial iterated games. But this the boring perspective, one that's trundled out every time some old geezer wants to lambast the "shallowness of modern relationships". The criticism levied at social butterflies, try-hards and other people seemingly optimizing purely for the largest networks.

But that gets stale pretty fast. And doesn't really say anything, y'know, nice. It is funny, though. VC investing (holding a broad portfolio of small bets) is praised as an innovative paradigm shift in start-up funding. But if you try to do that for your friend-making, you're branded a shallow oppurtunist? Seems fair.

I joke, of course. There are probably other reasons such a strategy doesn't work for relationships. Maybe it's because the comparision is foundationally flawed. Unlike purely financial investments (where writing a check is an act that can be scaled infinitely), friendships usually require an intentional tending, a ritual of rhythm and taming. Making them impossible to greedily optimize past a certain scale. Sure, everyone has different Dunbar numbers, but the inane and ordinary seem to be a necessary and unavoidable rite in the process of trust-building.

Sure, you can be more intentional about it. In fact, I recommend that you do. The older you get, the less time you have to feel out a new acquaintance. You both need to rush past the initial wait-and-watch phase as quickly as possible. But trust is still hard to build, not matter how effectively you work, some things take time.

But enough with the product metaphor. The decidedly better perspective is thinking of yourselves as a company. Look, if Byrne could get away with comparing your life to a call option, I'm allowed to equate friendships to companies, at the very least.

In the 1990s, Japan experienced the Lost Decade, a period of painfully slow growth lasting all the way through to the 2000s. During this time, a series of...ahem, sub-optimal decisions by their central bankers led to what are called zombie companies. These are companies that remain in business but are so deeply in debt that they’ll never have enough post-tax earnings to be profitable. They're dependent on new loans to pay back their old ones. Able to stay in business and pay interest on said loans, but never breaking free of their reliance on debt financing.

And if I'm being honest, the vast majority of friendships work like these companies. Limping on purely on the backs of shared environment and circumstance. Never really striving to be more, or attempting to consolidate a promising relationship.

To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . . - The Little Prince

You'll have to excuse the sappiness, but he makes a good point. The deliberate nature of friendship maintenance is oft-ignored in favour of the easy, effortless bonding of extrinsic circumstance. How many people rely simply on the “organic” way in which friendships are acquired? Through chance rendezvous and random invitations to forced conversations or (perhaps the worst possible strategy) depending on one’s “mood”?

I'm not entirely sure why this is. There does seem to be a norm about trying to have "easy friendships", the effortless vibing that comes with years of familiarity. Which, admittedly, is one of the best things about knowing people1.

Even zombie companies aren't the worst thing in the world. Heck, my Marxist heart, quite unashamedly, celebrates the fact that they kept thousands of people employed during the recession. And circumstance that brings folk together is a good thing, for the most part. Regardless of whether of not they consolidate that connection.

But on the other hand, it does seem like a tremendous waste of capital. Social capital, that is. Years of trust, familiarity and mutual comfort that never lead anywhere amazing.

I'm mostly curious about the odd deadly purgatory between acquaintance and friendship, where two people are making more than occasional time for each other, but not progressing towards anything deeper. Perhaps there's an opportunity for these to blossom into deeper purpose, collaboration, and meaning. - Nadia Eghbal

I think it's ridiculous how much slack is available to people just from having friends they can trust vs. friends that just...exist. Think about it, you can take a year of from life to go do...literally whatever you want. As long as you're sure you've got people to look out for you if you need it.

But most people will never take advantage of this cushion!2 Partly because, again, social norms are against it, but also because they're not sure if they can/should.

So let me say this: Your friends; if they're any good; want to help you. Unless you give them really strong reasons not to. The fact that you refuse to allow this to happen is downright negligent. If you were a company, your shareholders would sue for mismanagement. And deservedly so, you're implicitly shorting your own stock.

Individuals and friends groups are way underinvested in themselves. If they were a company we’d be horrified in the lack of long term investment. - Kevin Kwok

Except, you're also the shareholders. So if you aren't all in, you're decidedly short. For all your sakes, get your capital working! For once, I am in support of unashamed maximisation of returns. Because these are the best kind of profits. The squad economy primarily yields non-monetary forms of value.

III.

It's hard for us humans to understand serendipity.

It's even harder to imagine hypotheticals. And so it gets a bit messy when we try to dig into the returns to just...having friends.

EV of knowing people is literally higher than any reasonable bet. It’s not even close. - Guillermo Angeris

Consider the following possibility. You spend a couple of hours a day in bars, hoping to run into a millionaire. Upon meeting one, you do your best to impress them/save their life or do whatever else it takes to befriend them. The probability of this happening depends on the location and clientele of said bar, but is probably higher than you think.

They don't have to literally give you a slice of their money. All it takes is a great recommendation/offer/helping hand and suddenly, your life is like, 3x better than it would be.

now you know why i’m crazy all the time - Visa

What's the alternative? You work your ass off for a decade. Make partner in your late 30s but continue working 80 hour weeks because the competition is getting more intense. Sounds pretty brutal. When a man goes up against the world alone, he usually gets crushed.

Let’s run the cost-beneifit analysis vs. the first scenario. Sure, you've got no garuntees of being that lucky. So the benefit for the millionaire-rendevous is lowered by the randomness, but the cost is laughably low. Especially compared to the other path, where a surer reward comes at a proportionately higher cost. There’s no alpha in slaving away. You get nearly exactly what you put in.

On the other hand, simply knowing people allows near infinite variance in outcomes. All it takes is a few hours at a bar (or other publically-sanctioned friend-making place). And Twitter is the world's bar.

Seriously though, nobody is really going to follow through on this suggestion. Not even me, mostly because I don't really like bars. The meet-a-millionaire outcome it seems just a tad too unlikely.

But you don't need to meet a millionaire. It's probably enough to meet the millionaire's friend. Or y'know, literally anybody that would bring a step-change improvement in your life. Non-monetary benefits are often bigger improvements than a pure cash payout.

The fact that this idea seemed so silly at first read seems to be part of a broader societal conspiracy to obfuscate the role of serendipity. On par with the moon landing and Epstein, the Deep State simply do not want you to imagine what luck can do. I'm exaggerating, but not by very much.

You see this aversion everywhere. From naive attempts to simplify causality (*ahem* linear regression *ahem*) to selection processes that ignore variance.

I get why it's done. You can have simpler, more manageable models of reality if you ignore that annoying noisy component: luck. Linear extrapolations and medians are easy to calculate. Unpredictable exponentials are annoying.

But you do so at your own peril. Because sometimes, all it really takes is having the right roommate at Harvard.

It isn't even that hard to make friends. Sure, nerds are cowards, but that just means you can be the bold one. “But It's difficult to tell who you can trust”- nah, it isn't. The vast majority of people are leaky, you can spot the lies (if any) within days at most. It's stastically unlikely that you'll run into just the few good liars.

Selection effects make that even more improbable. I'm well aware of who my audience is: the 1%. If you've got what most people in the world don't: access to the internet and a Substack account; you no longer have much need to lie. And neither do most of the people you interact with. The nice thing about post-scarcity is that it makes positive sum games more desirable to everyone.

And if there's one theme that I will keep harping on about. It's that what the world really needs, is more positive sum games. Now please go create some with people you love.

IV.

But let's get back to finance metaphors.

To be honest, this was a fun post to write. Even the cliché parts work better when I can hide them behind a pretense of this-is-official-business-stuff seriousness. But there’s still a few (mosltly playful) analogies I wanted to point out, just not enough to warrant a detailed explanation for each. So I’ll go over them quickly to end this post here:

Capital Expenditure (CAPEX): Active friend-making does take time and energy. As does maintainance and cultivation of your current ones. And while the optimal amount of cultivation is probably higher than most people think, few endevours are as easy to bear. Spending your capital is a pleasureable experience for once.

Multiple On Invested Capital (MOIC): A friend halves our sorrows and doubles our joys. That’s a line (inconclusively) attributed to Francis Bacon. And it gives me an excuse to break out LaTeX to provide you with this handy formula:

Lifetime Value (LTV): This is equivalent to calculating the expected value. And so we can be sure that, in the long run, there’s going to be some incredibly high variance. Almost purely in the positive direction. But there's also the more Adam Smith benefit of specialised labour. The value each friend provides is a complement more often than it is a substitute.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Again, you've got to put in the effort to go out looking for people. Luckily though, each friend usually introduces you to a whole host of others. (Network effects or something.) It still isn't the easiest thing to do, especially if the people you want to find are the reluctant sort. So get working on your marketting funnel, godammit!

I like simple graphs.

Because I think the best graphs are the ones that get the point across quickly. Exponentials (number go up) and logarithmic curves (diminishing returns) being the quintessential examples. Simple, shareable and ideally slightly sensational. Anything more complicated than that and it usually needs an accompanying blog post.

P.S: If you want to lie to a large audience, the best way to do it is probably with graphs. Painfully few people are on the lookout for graph crimes.

lies, damned lies, and badly scaled graphs - every internet user

But just because they can be wielded poorly, doesn't mean they aren't a versatile way to explain phenomenon. Take for example, the humble inverted-U graph.

It shows up in a lot of places. For example, an economic theory called the Laffer curve, which tries to show the existence of an optimal tax rate.

The basic idea is that if you tax your citizens too much, some of them may stop working. Others may leave the country or decide that committing tax fraud is cheaper than paying up. So you end up with lower tax revenue overall.

Obviously, if you tax too little, you're gonna end up with less than optimal tax revenue by definition. There's a sweet spot that is "just right". And the challenge is finding it.

There's also the Yerkes-Dodson law which graphs the relationship between stress and performance. Too little stress, and the performer isn't actively engaged. Too much, and their composure breaks.

The point being, most things have a relationship like the above phenomenon. There's an ideal degree of use, past which you get lower returns. And with too little, you miss out on maximimal benefit.

II.

And this is how most tests work too.

Look at the field of physical performance, for example. Where they have a bunch of really simple tests. There's sprint tests over varying distances, medicine ball tosses, squat maxes, vertical jump tests, etc. Any basic movement you can think of can be used as a test.

That’s because it’s costly to assess the sport directly. Both in terms of replicating the competitive environment as well as fatigue. We need ways to measure often and it’s infeasible to do that if your test is expensive. Like it usually is due to the complexity and detail inherent to specific tests.

Furthermore, most events involve a bunch of co-ordinated sub-routines where isolating a clear data point is difficult, to say the least.

If a long jumper wants to test lower limb explosive strength, they're better off measuring their standing vertical vs. an entire long jump trial (which involves an accurate run-up, take-off and landing sequence, each made up of even smaller parts). A larger surface area allows more noise to creep in.

So what if you wanted to pick the athletes with the best potential for high-power events like the sprints and jumps? You choose a simple test, say, standing broad jump. You put people through it, and it seems to give you clear, unbiased results. And you pick the ones who are obviously incredible at the simple movements being tested. They’re the best, right?

Well, not quite.

In the case of the broad jump test, factors like optimal shin angles, arm swing and landing mechanics play a fairly big role in determining the final distance jumped. Somebody who's practiced this before, even if it's just for fun, would have a pretty significant advantage. Even simple tests have technique-based advantages.

This isn't actually a problem though, you do want to select for people who are athletic enough to have jumped before in their lives. In general too, you don't really want to test for purely inate talent. It's important to select people who have previous experience with specific-but-not-too-specific tests, it’s often a signal of an independent interest in the field. Jumping for fun is to athletics what the ability to touchtype is to programmers.

Something like a isometric mid-thigh pull is an easy test to administer, but it tells you virtually nothing about specific strengths. A world class sprinter and a 300lb powerlifter would give you similar numbers. Too general is as bad as too specific when it comes to providing useful data.

III.

What about the degree of difficulty?

Obviously, a test that's too easy doesn't help much (on it's own). But what it does do is shore up the bottom. Even a small filter gets you pretty efficient benefits. Just like how going from free to a penny can cause a huge drop in demand, a non-zero difficulty in entry usually gets rid of the most undesirable candidates.

Something like the SAT, where perfect scores are common, doesn’t work as a signal for genius. But at least it filters out the slackers. Which is all a test should aim for, in my opinion.

Too difficult, and you start to select for test-takers. Folks who are willing to spend time optimising for your examinations. This works pretty well if you're an employer who needs nothing more than people willing to work 100 hour weeks. If they're going to work with/for you, at least you’re sure they’re the folks willing to put in the work.

But this only selects for a specific type of raw work ethic1. If you want to find people who are doing cooler things than test-prep, you shouldn’t go searching with a really tough test as your only filter.

The other problem with too-difficult assesments is that at the extreme right tail of the distribution, the differences between candidates is often pure luck. Which can lead a significantly less-than-ideal outcomes for the test takers.

IV.

Finally, allow me to present the Time-Effectiveness graph.

Usually, a completely new test works very well for finding raw talent. The true, hardcore enthusiasts will be most ready for it. The downside is you'll only select the ones that are the very best at that particular moment. Leaving out the merely-good-but-with-potential folks that you need to fill the ranks.

Some tests require a period of acclimatisation, during which they’re stuck in the Point of Unavoidable Noise. It might take months before an athlete's power clean technique allows them to express their true limb strength. During that learning period, any data gathered from the movement will be extremely noisy.

But if a test's been around too long, it gets gamed. This seems to be an inexorable law, as far as I can tell. Really difficult tests gatekeep the most desirable outcomes. Outcomes, in turn, are judged desirable by their historic ROI.

So as a general rule, the older the test => the harder the test => the more the benefit of gaming it will be.

Most people do not want to lie on their college admission essays. At least, I hope they don’t. But college is a big deal, and essays have been around long enough for them to learn what they admissions office is looking for. I don’t blame students for giving them what they want to hear.

The optimal point is therefore the place where most people have enough experience with the test that they stop seeing large improvements from test/technique specific inprovements. And talent has a chance to come through again.

V.

The solution? I don't have one.

As far as I can tell, large scale effective testing is a human compete problem as well as an adverserial system. A messy domain, where being complacent about the methods you use just doesn't cut it.

Which is why organisations have evolved a bunch of different testing mechanisms, ranging from the standardised multiple-choice test to multiple rounds of personal interviews. And even these have started to fail with time.

Workarounds like referalls only work on a small scale. Letting people who've already done the testing tell you how good a candidate is useful, no doubt. But they're subjective and domain specific, making them hard to scale up or generalize. So the problem still exists in the newbie phase (which is where most testing happens anyway) and for people who want to hop across domains.

That being said, here's a few suggestions:

• You can try switching up your tests often to make them harder to game, but that's expensive. And there's still the initial Point of Unavoidable Noise that comes with introducing a new method of testing.

• You could use multiple tests hoping for more predictice power, but that's also inefficient and costly. Plus people who game a particular test are usually good at gaming tests in general. So you might just end up selecting for the ultimate test-taker.

• Another method involves letting candidates provide their own alternatives to testing, usually involving some sort of proof of work. While this does mean that it's harder to gauge weaknesses, knowing what they consider thier strengths is valuable information. Not every domain is suited to this......

• If you've got relatively little to lose, you can afford to operate with close to no testing. You can choose to trust random chance, using lotteries to make your choices. (I'm serious, there is often significant alpha to be found in random bets.)

Lotteries are especially effective if you're picking from the top percentiles of a group2. Where success is determined relatively heavily by test-taking ability vs. actual ability. In that case, what you're looking for isn't really the 99th percentile (people optimised for test-taking), but more around the 95th (decidedly smart, but optimising for more relevant stuff).

Like any tool that relies on dimension reduction, the problems with testing are the loss of detail. The price for legibility and efficiency is variance. It seems like the meta solution here is to ensure that there are viable alternatives to traditional testing processes. This should shift incentives away from already overcrowded funnels, and encourage competition along multiple axes. More playgrounds = more fun for everyone involved.

I've heard a number of arguments for why more people should start a blog.

And this week, Scott Alexander published an essay on The Philosophical and Psychological Basis for Internet Poasting. Except he didn't call it that.

Which is a shame. Because the "Epistemic Minor Leagues" is a misleading (and kinda insulting) moniker for the services provided by all the lovely folk behind our favourite newsletters and blogs. Implying that they are somehow a lesser form of the "Big Leagues" of academia or Science™. A description I think is plain wrong.

Because this a completely different game. With new rules and different players. With larger audiences and no referees. You don’t have to compete as hard to stay alive, nobody’s going to drop you from the team. It’s more like a playground, than a competitive league.

The barrier to entry is near-zero. But the moats of discovery and engagement are significant. Oft due to the pesky twosome of network effects and power laws.

Some players are fighting against megacorps and brainworms for people's attention. Some seek fame and glory. Some write for a handful of acquaintances. Others are doing it for kicks.

The rules are domain-specific. Which is to say, there are none. You're allowed to do everything that the readers will forgive. Your audience is global (to the extent that the English language is global) and the lurkers are everywhere.

If you’re a QAnon theorist, outlandish hypotheses and far-out conclusions are what your readers come for. If you’re a rationalist blogger with a massive audience of intelligent- well, you can do that too, actually. No longer confined to the etiquette of peer review or replicability, the incentives for writing online are geared towards sensationalism and novelty.

And this is good.

The more heterogenous the contributions to the GSCITC (Global Social Computer In The Cloud) get, the more fun it is for everyone involved.

There’s also a variety of roles one can fill. Akin to the different positions on a soccer team. For example, the hedgehogs stick to their own corner of the playground, the foxes are rather indiscriminate when it comes to picking their mode of amusement.

Some players are more like maintainance workers, walking around pointing out flaws in the equipment. But this is important work too, even if it brings no glory. There’s also a class of people who take on the responsibility of teaching others the ropes. And acting as both introducer and inspiration.

Fiction vs. Non-fiction. Personal vs. Professional. Explorer vs. Consolidator. Thesis-antithesis. You can draw classification axes aplenty in this space.

II.

Make no mistake, this is the Glass Bead Game in one of it's purest forms.

Nevertheless, there's a lot of overlap between "impressive in the real world" and "impressive in the blogosphere". Verbal intelligence, conscientousness and creativity are all heavily selected for by the act of churning out relatively novel (and entertaining) insights in blog form.

And I can personally attest to the fact that most of the great shitpoasters I know have proven to be very cool people.

Yeah, the epistemic playground is a bunch of nerds. With a bunch of weird interests that may or may not have an audience. But though they may not be aiming for publication or lofty goals of scientific progress, their impact on the real world is still significant.

Because ideas are ridiculously powerful things. I’ve seen perspectives that reduced people to tears. Fact-checking that turned accepted wisdom on it’s head. Opinions that launched a thousand quotetweets.

Someone can just go and tell you something one day. Anyone can do this. It is an awesome power available to every person. And if their message is compelling and it hits you at a moment of suggestibility, they can instantly alter your trajectory. - Sasha Chapin

The internet poasters stand in the gaps where academia cannot afford to go. The smartest people aren’t the ones providing us with these ideas, they’re too busy chasing down dark matter and inventing new forms of math. So it’s left to regular folk to populate the public playgrounds of content-land.

If I wanted to be dramatic, I would describe epistemic playfulness as a form of revolt. A revolt against the expert class and the jornalist bluechecks. And being a public intellectual demands a form of self-confidence and contrarianism that is rather in-your-face.

III.

And so it selects for a particular brand of people.

I love making generalizations. They’re such useful little things, regardless of what anyone tells you. So here’s a list of traits I’ve observed among the players I follow most closely 1:

• A slight (or not so slight) anti-authoritarian streak.

• Playfulness

• High openness

• Neurodivergent

• Boldness

• Earnestness

The sort of person you would call a “good sport”. Or insane. Why is this?

Well, some of it is definitely selection effects. Assholes are less likely to be popular because, well, nobody really likes them. And you didn’t have the loose playfulness that shitpoasters have in abundance, you’d take yourself too seriously to bother being entertaining.

But if you believe, like I do, that ideas are alive and inhabit the most suitable minds, it makes sense that many people in the epistemic playground would have the above traits.

Even on YouTube, many of the geniuses in the visual medium display the same characterics. As do most good musicians and poets. A sterotype perhaps, but one that fits.

But what is is that makes them all choose to play?

IV.

Let's run the utility calculations, shall we?

As always, there's an oppurtunity cost. These people could be doing other things with their time. Especially since most of them are already fairly succesful folk with no shortage of interesting options. With the price of creating and sharing your work plummeting, time is by far the biggest sacrifice.

There’s also the cost of being publically wrong. But as I’ve argued before, it’s a negligible one.

As for the rewards, a small percentage of players can make a living off of this. If you get a big enough audience, there’s dozens of ways to convert them into cash. Ranging from advertising to subscriptions to getting yourself hired through poasting.

For a people with an evagelical bent, the internet provides a fertile recruiting field. If your arguments are convincing enough, and poasting schedule relentless enough, people will be drawn in by the sheer inertia. Cults of personality are very rewarding for the founders, I would assume.

For reasons mentioned in the beginning, players in this game self-select for certain desirable traits. Which makes the mere act of writing online a perfect form of signalling. This is usually done in good faith (e.g. trying to attract like-minded folks, creating discussion), but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people trying to game this system too.

So there's definitely a prize for winning. But like all good games, there's also rewards for playing. And for the majority of players, this is what keeps them coming back.

Scott mentions the discovery drive (a desire for novelty) and status-seeking in his essay, but that’s only a small part of what motivates these players.

You see, most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people. The point being, many of these people would do it for nothing.

Sure, somebody like Gwern will build up a carefully-tended intellectual garden. But others will fire off blog posts into empty internet space in the vague hope of snagging a wandering lurker. The internet makes it easy to leave a mark, so why not make a bunch of them?

But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower. It’s more that I  can’t stop even if I want to . Part of that is probably that when I write, I feel really good about having expressed exactly what it was I meant to say. Lots of people read it, they comment, they praise me, I feel good, I’m encouraged to keep writing. - Scott Alexander

I like that he touches upon the social aspect of it here. Because it’s a pretty big deal. You can compare writing online to making music, which is often more fun when you're doing it with friends 2. The blogosphere may not be a perfect substitute for a coffee shop, but it comes pretty close.

A bunch of other reasons people participate:

1. Practicing the craft: People writing because they want to be better Writers™

2. Worldview clarifiers: Folks trying to put their beliefs into writing.

3. Someone told them to: There are very good arguments for it.

4. Naive youngins with something to say: I love them. I am them.

You might object that these motivations seem very…amateurish. But that’s my point! Like any playground, winning isn’t what everyone’s playing for.

There’s room for all types here.