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I got some feedback on my mission statement in my CV. Here’s the statement:
To speed the exponential proliferation of positive change. Minimize pain and maximize pleasure on a global scale by creating, synthesizing, testing, and disseminating ideas and experiences.
Here’s the new tweaked version:
To speed the exponential proliferation of positive change. Maximize well being on a global scale by creating, synthesizing, testing, and disseminating ideas and experiences.
I think the feedback was generally very good, although my brother-in-law did suggest removing the first line, which I’m resistant to doing. Even though he is quite good with numbers, and I haven’t done hard math in a long time, I think I have picked up an innate numeracy from hanging out with scientists and engineers through so much of my development.
I have known my sister much longer than he has, and she taught me basic algebra when I was maybe 6 years old. I of course forgot it and struggled to focus enough when it came up again in school finally.
My father and I also argued about exponential growth, and it turned out he was right. Investors, who later wrestled control of our company away from us, were hounding us to achieve “exponential growth”. I thought this merely meant we must grow by a certain percentage over time as opposed to by a certain amount.
I was wrong. They apparently meant 10x growth, which works for unicorn tech companies and pump and dump stock schemes but is exceedingly unlikely when you’re talking about a real value creation in a medical device company. They were full of shit.
In my mind, exponential growth of positive change means compounding, just like with interest, but with value to humanity. It means creating change significant enough that it is beyond noise, beyond regression to the mean.
I believe in Kaizen, the idea of continual improvement, and I believe in meta-cognition, thinking about thinking. When you combine the two you focus on improving how you improve.
Improving how we improve is incredibly challenging, but I think it is the most worthwhile thing to do. When you’re successful at sustaining this, you reap enormous benefit. I wish I had time to graph this with real numbers for you.
Another key to this is to borrow from biology – if we can spread good ideas as quickly as we seem to spread bad ones, and if we can do it on purpose as opposed to by accident, civilization will thrive.
You might be familiar now with R, the reproduction rate epidemiologists use to track a virus, or with r, the epidemic growth rate of the virus in a population – either way, viruses and bacteria are very good biological examples of true exponential growth.
Either way, the idea is that total cases will increase with any R number greater than one. It is a way of measuring virulence, the ability of a virus to carry through a population.
Now, imagine there are healthy viruses which help us, and harmful ones which hurt us. We need to track the growth of each of these to know if we are making progress. So it is with modeling positive change.
Of course, this doesn’t even begin to address the unintended consequences of positive change, and the mutation of ideas. This is a very hard problem, but that doesn’t make it any less worthwhile.
I finally feel like I’m equipped to learn the hard math without losing my purpose or fooling myself through a veil of tools. We can asses the risks of ideas mutating, we can measure their spread, we can see what ideas tend to gain traction and why. This will all be in the crudest possible sense, but even that level of clarity could be transcendent. We think of our ideas as our own, but mostly they are not, they are an infection from our culture which may be of value or not, depending on situation and perspective.
Ok friend, time to do my stretches and get ready for work. Remind me tomorrow to send you a draft of a Letter To The Editor about ratepayer-owned electricity. I promise you, it’s an exciting topic, full of twists and turns!
In the meantime, here’s part of my CV which my brother in law, surprisingly, enjoyed and suggested keeping!
2004 Refused to return to Monroe Woodbury Senior High
- Following a riot on the last day of Junior year, which was quelled by police. The fundamental failure of that institution to respect their students and the continual disenfranchisement of youth has still yet to be rectified as of 2021, at great harm to thousands of young people. Ref 1, Ref 2, Ref 3, Ref 4.
Love,
– Brad