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Hi friend,
It’s lonely out here in Colorado. I miss you. I hope you write soon.
We’ve talked about my “grasping quality” and it has stuck with me — because of how much I respect your life and the way you live — and also because so much of my identity has germinated from rock climbing, not as a sport, but as a lifestyle.
Climbing is largely defined by grasping at things – holds, yes – but in a larger sense, climbers are “conquistadors of the useless” – a philosophy from the alpinist Terray, and much referenced by Yvon Chouinard, founder of both Black Diamond and Patagonia.
Climbers, and adventure athletes in general, have a very strange sort of ambition. When viewed as a culture, one cannot definitively say that bigger, harder, or scarier climbs are “better” but just that they often have an aesthetic which draws us in, we are compelled to climb these things and the more obsessed we become, the more we tend to respect and admire the people who push limits – even though the thing itself is so much more complicated.
Climbing is more like a community of physical artists who make ethereal works by interpreting natural features. The climb, once completed, leaves nothing behind (maybe some bolts). For this reason, it is relatively difficult to understand and admire unless you, too, are a climber.
Or maybe climbing is more like Quakerism, more of a shared spirit, with deeply held beliefs, rather than a set of rules. It is a kinship forged by experiences, and tempered by the resulting feelings and psychological states. Grasping together?
Regardless, I am working on my grad school application and find myself struck with the realization that an outside person would likely see me as both ambitious and indecisive. The indecision part is generally considered, in society, as a “bad thing”. For me, it is a direct result of one of my deepest held philosophies, which is that it is better to do nothing than it is to cause harm.
Taking action implies a confidence in the value of that action, and I tend to be highly skeptical of convictions. I think they blind you to all sorts of unintended consequences.
I have only recently started thinking of this as an instinct to defer to the “null hypothesis” – the idea that an difference between observations is a fluke as opposed to a trend. In other words, we are fooling ourselves when we see value in something which actually doesn’t exist.
Examples of this abound, and in real life they are much more complicated than mere noise or error in data collection.
People seem to forget that just paying attention to something is in itself a value judgement.
For this reason I am very cautious about which things I choose to measure, and how I go about measuring them. My work in housing is a fantastic example.
I hope, someday, to convince MaineHousing to overhaul their entire data dashboard. They measure things because they are easy, because it is the way it has been done in the past, and then they turn the numbers into words which don’t actually represent what they are measuring. Then media and nonprofits and developers and the public somehow depend on that interpretation – a set of translations which are now effectively gibberish.
There is so much harm being done! There is so much room for improvement!
And I suppose no wonder people look at this, throw up their hands, and decide the best thing to rely on is their own intuition. It sometimes goes by “inner wisdom” or “inner nature” but it basically amounts to “go with your gut”. Who can blame them?
Unfortunately, I grew up indoctrinated to distrust authority, to question norms, to testing my own beliefs. I was raised to be skeptical. Once you have that worldview, there is so much evidence in support of skepticism, it becomes the dominant meme.
Honestly, it ruined my mental health for a long time until I got better at a lot of other important philosophies and lifestyles.
But none ever managed to completely replace my skepticism. To this day, I’m aware, as a sort of background noise, that my own life is itself worthy of question.
As much as I might love Mr. Rogers, I kind of reject the whole paradigm of “you are special” (from the lens of natural human rights and individuality) as equally as I reject the idea “you are not special” (from a lens of chemistry, biodiversity, economics or workforce).
It’s all a matter of perspective. The question itself “Am I special?” is a useless paradox. Kind of like “What is the meaning of life?” I grappled with (grasped at?) these questions for a long time before realizing life is better without them.
That of course, is its own bias. This is my point. From inside my own little worldview, I am obviously special, kind of by definition. “I think therefore I am.” But when you look at how unique the arrangement of my atoms are, they are certainly exceptional (living things sort of reverse entropy) but not really that amazing compared to any other living thing. The world will not shed a tear, if I was to disappear.
And from the other perspective, I am objectively bad news. I consume way more resources than the average human. I actively harm biodiversity every time I visit the supermarket. I promote ecosystem collapse each time I board a jet or drive my truck. I have hurt a lot of people’s feelings, and killed billions of life forms both directly and indirectly (bacteria and cows anyone?)
Generally I throw my hands up when it comes to things like recycling when I start thinking about how I might have just genocidally Lysoled the bacterial colony which would have led to a future of super-intelligent trans-galactic bacterium.
I am mostly joking, but recycling is one of those things seen as “easy” but in reality is very very difficult. Much of what goes in our recycling is dirty or mis-sorted and even the most rudimentary root cause analysis would show that we need a dramatic change in the way we package things.
Somehow though, we have designed social systems where such a root cause analysis would be done by a first-year engineering student on their summer internship and yet eludes the grasp of entire governments.
One of my little pet ideas is to start a “take a bag, leave a bag” where you get a really nice reusable grocery bag at the supermarket with a deposit, and you can return the bag or keep it, and return them in bulk when you have too many floating around and you do your spring cleaning.
Similarly, I’d like to design beautiful unbreakable jars (glass with the durability of a nalgene) and design a robot station to clean and sterilize them.
At coffee shops and supermarkets people would need to pay a deposit to get a fresh container. You could use the container as long as you like, either returning it after your cup of coffee and getting the deposit back, or even taking it home because it’s so satisfying to use.
Yes, these things would probably cost $30 each to manufacture at first, and tens of thousands of dollars for a station, and ideally this would all be subsidized by the government on recognition that it is an investment in sustainability.
But I digress. My point, friend, is that complex systems dominate our lives, and even my brilliant father failed to equip me with the tools of decision making in complex systems. Quite frankly, I don’t see how we can survive unless a significant minority of people learn to make sound decisions based on big-picture thinking.
Neil Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer blew my mind and gave me hope because it basically gives us a path mixing humanity with technology and giving opportunity to billions of people. Minerva is, in effect, trying to plant a seed which could grow into something like the Primer I wanted so desperately to work on when I was in my early 20’s.
It seemed so simple in 2009: Start developing a system to teach people core skills in critical thinking, language, programming, decision-making. Teach them how and why the system was designed. Let them evolve it, and build in feedback mechanisms to actively respond to new needs. It is way more Meta than Zuck’s Meta will ever be, and gosh it does kind of seem like Minerva is doing this.
I never found anyone else actively working toward such an ambitious goal, although I paid close attention to things like DIY.org and Instructables.
The core philosophy which was missing from these is actually best represented in GitHub (pre-Microsoft), Mozilla and other projects whose express purpose is to improve the project itself. When this is your goal, you naturally start paying attention to how you can help others level up faster.
This is kind of Adam Grant’s premise in Give & Take. A culture of collaboration allows societies and companies to thrive and mature so much faster.
Back to my grasping quality, and why I am ambitious and yet indecisive. I was able to analyze complex systems, but lacking the tools to make decisions, namely, how to measure something complicated.
I am using the word “measure” broadly here to mean any sort of input to one’s own experience (like Kevin Systrom).
CBT was better than any philosophy degree at drilling me on the concept that change must begin within: I can only control my own thoughts and actions and hope they have the desired effect on my feelings, my situation or other people’s behaviors.
Craving ice cream is a form of expected value, as is thinking about how much it will upset your digestion. Balancing all of that is a decision based on expected value: am I better off buying and eating ice cream, or not?
You can even take this one step further and you’ll understand a bit more about my rigorously lazy life’s philosophy: you’re better off making inaction the default, because making good decisions is exhausting. If you decide not to decide, it leaves you a lot of extra energy for other things. I think a lot of folks intuitively decide most of the things in their lives are “somebody else’s problem” (Douglas Adams, H2G2).
For whatever reason, I think everything is my problem.
I’ll be curious to see how much psychology is in the Minerva program, especially with the concept that every decision is emotionally driven. Every. Single One.
People who have struggled with depression will grasp this immediately, I think. Do you understand?
If you remove desire, if your remove pleasure and pain, nobody would care about anything. There’s no such thing as objective rationality. Everything is based on our emotional states.
A quick thought experiment: The will to survive and produce offspring, is it rational? From the perspective of a gene, or a living creature, it generally is right?
If you make no effort to survive, you probably won’t.
But this means only that the animals with a will to survive are more likely to do so. When a resistant strain of bacteria emerges we generally view that as a bad thing, so there’s no universal law here, just a selfish judgement which happens to be shard by most of humanity.
Now if you put a bunch of people on a small island, and they’re all willing to fight for survival, and they’re all trying to have the biggest families, you will have a problem. Suddenly our rational strategy isn’t so rational anymore, even for humans.
Manifest destiny made a lot of sense for certain types of settlers and powerful government and business-types. If your goal is to existentially protect the United States, it makes a lot of sense. If you wish to existentially protect indigenous lives and cultures, it is suddenly a very bad idea.
I could go on and on.
And then we have my own experience in business, with the many deeply flawed people (we all are, let’s be honest) who had flawless resumes. There is no evidence that traditional hiring processes actually produce results, and yet you have to be such a radical to reject the status quo that even innovative tech companies seem to depend on things like resumes.
Personally, my idea hiring process involves a ritual of communication. A play in 1 act:
Company: We think we need______________.
Applicant: This is what I think you need and how I help you get there.
Company: OK, here is the project we want you to work on. We can pay you $_______, our expected value of your proposal. The project scope and your compensation based on our uncertainty of the value of the project times our uncertainty of your ability and fit with our organization. As our certainty increases, your compensation and the length of your employment will increase.
Basically, most people do this with dating. You say hi to someone, maybe get a little info on them from mutual friends, maybe go to dinner if your super excited or coffee or a drink or even just texting if you’re feeling things out. Then you hang out together, spend time with friends, go on dates. The longer the relationship, the more committed you become.
So this is my justification, I think, for my spotty and convoluted resume. I’d rather slowly start to understand the impacts of my actions, than to move fast and break things. I’d also rather someone have a good explanation of why an idea or an action is important, not just to themselves, but to me and to some greater cause as well.
Unfortunately, I’m still figuring out the bringing-together of community around this, which is why I keep thinking about moving back to New York and living in the city for a time. Maine is a difficult place to have the sort of impact I’m seeking, especially when I can only tolerate so much time at a computer before I go nuts.
Hope you & yours are well.
Love,
Brad