2021-07-11

Articles

• Nabeel Qureshi’s Notes on Popper
• Noah Smith on the Hispanic shift to the right. Come for the political drama, stay for the economic and social mobility charts. I hadn’t realized the degree to which Hispanics were moving up in the US.
• I want to send this other Noah Smith explainer newsletter on why economics isn’t just a way for rich folks to excuse themselves from social responsibility to everyone who has ever asked me what I think about stocks when they learn I studied economics. This is the number one most annoying stereotype of economists and Noah does a great job of explaining where it came from and why it’s wrong. He also had the best response to the tweet that put all of econ twitter on the defensive.
• More than a billion seashore animals may have cooked to death in B.C. heat wave, says UBC researcher. We live two blocks from the water and the smell of rotting shoreline over the two hottest days of the heatwave was intense.

Podcasts

• Philosophize this on Plotinus and St Augustine
• Sean Carrol’s Mindscape episode with Liam Kofi Bright on truth, knowledge, science and how we know what we know. Highly recommended.

Thoughts

If (as Paul Graham and Ted Gioia claim) thirteen is the age when we decide to get serious about life, what does that mean for those of us who were cast out into the wilderness at that age. For me, this was when I first became self aware and it was devastating. Nobody in sixth grade was wearing teal cooled sweatpants but me. And who I was and what I looked just disintegrated more and more as I stumbled my way through middle school and high school. I renounced nearly everything I had once loved (and taken quite seriously for that matter). One by one I quit all of the sports and extracurricular academic activities I participated in. Friends groups changed and I chose activities based on what I thought others would think. I grew more and more socially anxious and eventually discovered I could at least temporarily escape the discomfort of all this change by doing strange things to my body. Friends introduced me to whip-its, we learned to pass each other out by hyperventilating and restricting the boys flow to our brains. My parents’ marriage fell apart and eventually learned that my dad was having an affair with a long time family friends that took parenting classes with my mom (and also happened to be my best friend’s mother).

Eventually I found a wonderful group of misfits who were smart and strange and - importantly I realize in hindsight - completely outside of my daily humiliations. I dropped out of high school to smoke weed and rock climb and travel the Western US with these guys, funding my adventures by working at bakery that was full of equally strange and wonderful people.

Clearly I am not Paul Graham or Ted Gioia. Chances are I’m you’re not either. The problem with these essays (and myriad others in the how to be successful like me genre) is that they are written from the perspective of someone who has achieved a degree of success and is retroactively imposing a narrative that makes sense to them. All you have to do to be great is do what I did. This doesn’t mean they are wrong but it also doesn’t mean that you too will achieve greatness if you follow their plan. Even worse, it leaves someone like me, who did not follow a conventional path through prestigious (or even unpretentious for that matter) life events, with little to relate to and plenty to envy.

Eventually I wended my way through a loosely connected set of experiences into the nondescript, milk toast, domestic bliss that I currently find myself in. I don’t smoke, drink moderately and spend much of my time chasing around a naked toddler or cleaning poop off a giggly Goodyear blimp of a baby. It’s a wonderful and modest life, but at least some of the ambition I had as a seventh grader hustling up and down the basketball court and satisfying my flashcards for Knowledge bowl didn’t disappear into cloud of weed smoke. So I am interested in what smart, successful and interesting people have to say. I want to know their secrets. But when the secret is get serious young and you’re already seeing the white hairs creep in to your beard, this advice rings hollow.

Of course this isn’t the entirety of the lesson from either of these essays, and there are numerous ways to read them such that I can take away something to apply to my life. From Graham, the obvious lesson is find something you are good at and find interesting, grab it and don’t let go. From Gioia, it’s be engaged, stoke your children’s curiosity and go deep (with a light touch). This is all well and good (really!) But I also think that there is an uncomfortable truth that it pushes someone like me up against. And that’s the simple fact that life is finite and if there is something you haven’t yet done in your life, the window of opportunity in which to do it is ever dwindling¹.

A secondary truth that is mostly true in relation to Graham’s essay is that there are trade-offs everywhere. If I don’t want to work very hard and consistently at something I may never be great on the order of affecting thousands or millions of people’s lives, but I may be “great” in other ways. I can be there for my kids in a way that wouldn’t be possible if all my time was spent on work. I can get to know my wife better, understanding and communicating more effectively. I can indulge my dilletantism because it feels good, writing scraps of songs and spending a month studying epistemology and the philosophy of science because I’m curious about it.

It’s possible that taking life seriously for some just might not entail enormous change. Maybe being serious about what I do and living a successful life doesn’t mean founding a start-up or getting a PhD or sending my kids to Harvard. It seems obvious when I write it down, but reading Graham and Gioia (and countless others), it’s all too easy to lose sight of. When the conversations are dominated by Ivy League graduates, “normal folks” lose their voice. If you’re not careful, you start measuring yourself by the yardstick of those whose values include running the world.

Furthermore, I wonder if it’s actually socially optimal for more of us to be focused on mundane, run of the mill activities. If there are enough people who makes small positive contributions, the sum impact they have on the world might outweight that of the biggest high status names.