High-level thoughts on having the most impact with a company

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I decided over December that at some point during my life, I want to start a company.

How should I think about “return on investment” from an EA perspective when starting a company? Here is my thinking, very quickly sketched out.

  • What matters is how much “good” the company achieves achieved per “input”

  • The main sources of “good achieved” are:

    • direct impact on customers and suppliers

    • potential for profits of company to be donated

    • contributing to economic development via

      • job creation

      • skill building of employees

      • ecosystem development (e.g., building a startup ecosystem in a place like Kenya, building expertise in chip manufacturing in a place like the US)

      • bringing in foreign exchange

    • potentially other externalities (e.g., a green company having positive environmental impact)

  • The main “inputs” are:

    • My own time and energy relative to whatever else I could be doing

    • time and energy of my coworkers

      • → not too worried about this. The supply of talent is elastic

    • any capital the company takes

      • → supply of capital is elastic too. so don’t worry about this

My conclusion: Go for the company that does the absolute most good possible. Don’t worry hogging talent or capital because those are elastic, and more will be generated.

This means one of two things:

  • If your main source of impact will be making money that you donate, then your goal should be maximizing shareholder value (2)

  • Otherwise, your goal should be to make the biggest company you can (3), so you positively effect the most customers/employees/partners

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  1. both very squishy but useful concepts for the purpose of this exercise

  2. this also applies if you are taking a profit for good approach

  3. with the caveat that you don’t drift away from whatever it is that is driving the impact

How I use ChatGPT

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I came across a couple of studies on Twitter recently about the effects that AI chatbots have on productivity.

This matches with my personal experience using ChatGPT (which I’ve been doing increasingly over the past week or so).

ChatGPT does not make me great at the things I am good at. It makes me ok at the things I am bad at.

I basically use ChatGPT to teach me about things that I don’t know much about. It’s a much faster version and personalized version of Google. Here are some examples:

  • Explain to me what a fiber bodied truck is

  • Explain how instant coffee is made

    • Google could have gotten me the first-level answer here, but ChatGPT was great because I had lots of specific follow up questions that it could answer

  • Explain how a contextual bandit algorithm works from first principles, how it is distinct from other types of recommendation algorithms, and why it is called “contextual banditry”

  • Are personalized recommendation algorithms more relevant in developed countries vs developing countries? If so, why?

  • Analyze the macro-economic risk of investing into a company in Pakistan. How do the risks differ vs investing in Kenya? Vs Nigeria?

All of these are things I don’t know that much about. ChatGPT is great at getting me to an ok level of knowledge. But it is not useful for helping me at the core parts of my job - creating a sales pitch for Kapu agents, or understanding the issues that Kapu customers face.

I personally find this very enriching - I’m able to learn random things much more quickly and in a personalized way. It’s like having a generally knowledgeable person I can just constantly ask random questions and get informed (though not perfectly accurate) answers.

If there is a more general trend I draw from this, it is that tools like ChatGPT are enabling a lot of people to become passable at a wide variety of things. This is very exciting!

Going to the beach while the sales team is working

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Last weekend while my sales team was working I was flying to the beach.

On Saturday morning while they were in the market, walking from agent to agent, convincing them to register more customers for Kapu, I was jumping around in the waves, playing cards with my friends, and going to a fancy beach-side restaurant.

A typical sales team member in Kenya makes about $500 per month. My round-trip flight from Nairobi to Diani - leave Saturday come back Sunday - cost over $100.

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There’s no good reason why I should get to fly to the beach while the people on my sales team don’t. I am just incredibly, unfairly, undeservedly lucky.

What do I do in the face of this unfairness? There are different voices in my head that tell me different things:

Voice #1: “You deserve this. You work really hard, you have cultivated the right virtues in yourself, and you have taken advantage of the opportunities you have. So you deserve to fly to the beach when others can’t.” Despite the best efforts of voice #1, he hasn’t yet been able to convince me that I deserve the incredible luck I’ve had.

Voice #2: “Just forget about it. Don’t worry about people who have such different lives than you. Ignore it.” Voice #2 was much more compelling before I had never moved to Kenya - now that I live here and am confronted with how hard people work for such little pay, he’s quieted down a bit.

Voice #3: “You are so self-indulgent. You have so much when others have so little. Didn’t Jesus tell you to sell all that you have and give to the poor? There are some people within the Effective Altruism movement who live on like $10,000 a year and give everything else away. Why don’t you do that?” For right now at least, I’m principled enough to follow this advice.

Voice #4: “It’s good to go to the beach. But it is sad that not everyone can do it. So in your leisure, be grateful for what you have. Don’t let your spending on luxuries get out of hand. And in your work, work hard to help other people in the world have the same material abundance you enjoy.”

I try not to listen to voice #1 and voice #2. I’m not strong enough to do what voice #3 tells me. So I’m left trying to follow the advice of voice #4 as best I can.

I get stressed about my job sometimes. But I don’t work weekends, I have job security, and I fly to the beach. What do I have to be worried about?

A restaurant in Lahore teaches me the importance of names

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Once I was in Lahore. I was jonesin’ for some Qawwali.

I had heard there was a part of town with one or two hopping Qawwali joints. My lovely lady friend and I stumbled into one place called 89 Taste. They had a swinging Qawwali ensemble. But the place was nearly empty.

Ah, well, I thought. What a pity that the young people don’t appreciate the fine arts any more.

We got the menu and were overwhelmed! There were indeed 89 different dishes. More options than any one man or woman could process. Paralyzed with choice, my lady love and I ordered a simple chai and sat back to enjoy the melding of voice, harmonium, and tablain praise of the Lord.

Having had our fill of chai and Qawwali (and having sampled none of the other 87 tastes on offer), we ventured over next door and saw another joint called simply: “Chai Qawwali”.

We chanced a look inside - and Lo! - immediately our faith in the current age was restored. For here were women and men of all ages joined together in enjoying fine chai and music performed by another fine Qawwali group.

Clearly the proprieter of this establishment had keenly seen that folks out and about Lahore at night would have exactly two things on their minds: chai and Qawwali. After acting on this insight, the wise proprietor had reaped their due reward: “Chai Qawwali” had 10 times as many customers as the unfortunately named “89 Taste”.

It was thus that I learned the importance of names.

It was thus that I learned the importance of core competencies.

Improving my traveling skills

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These are the kinds of sites I used to prioritize when traveling. I had a lot of room to improve

I foolishly used to think that traveling was kind of boring. “Places are all the same” I thought. “They all have people, and trees, McDonalds.”

But actually I just sucked at traveling.

In my defense, I was a child and had no money and no power to make the decisions myself when I traveled. But also there is a skill in traveling well. Now I am a man and developed this skill a bit. So I have put childish things like disliking travel and having no money behind me.

These are reminders for myself of what I have learned, so I can refer back to it next time I go to a new country.

Let me know if you have any additions from what has worked well for you!

Preparation:

  • Learn some history and culture: Start with general history to get a foundation, and then focus on whatever is interesting about that country (famous people, industry, trade, religion, art)

    • Follow up by watching YouTube videos on the most interesting bits

  • Listen to music of the country beforehand: especially traditional, pop, indie

  • Find books / movies from the country

  • Browse the country’s subreddit: Interesting to see how people talk about themselves!

  • Prepare lists of:

    • At least 3 places of historical / economic / cultural interest to visit

    • At least 3 foods to try

    • 1 interesting church to go to

    • Topics I want to learn more about by talking to people in the country (1)

While there:

Now I see things that are very interesting to me, like 500-year-old ruins and trees

  • Accept invitations (2)

  • Ask people what they think of history, world events. Cross-interrogating a topic like “Do the police help people?” across different countries can be super interesting

  • Ask people how they get along with other peoples. E.g., asking Somali-Kenyan driver if he feels discriminated by other Kenyans

    • Remember not to take answers at face-value

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1. As an example, here’s how I’ve prepared for a trip to Istanbul in late April:

  • Learn some history and culture: Read a general history of the Ottoman empire, a book on the Ottoman’s maritime power (related to another book I had read about the Portuguese empire), and a book on current events. Of particular interest to me are the whirling dervishes, Ottoman architecture, trade throughout the empire, and the interaction between Islam and Christianity (especially the Armenian Catholic church)

  • Listen to music: Their “traditional” music (not sure how authentic it is) weirdly reminds me a lot of progressive rock. Also found a few cool indie bands

  • Find books / movies: Read half of The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

  • Browse the country’s subreddit: Lots of it was in Turk so I coulnd’t understand, but a few jokes about Turks and Greeks not getting along

  • Prepare lists: I’m unusually prepared and have a whole notion document of things to do and foods to eat. Especially excited to go to an Armenian Catholic church.

    • I’m particularly interested to ask any Turks who will talk to me about if they have a sense of connection to the Ottoman empire, how they feel about joining the EU, what they think of Erdogan, if the police help people, and their views on religion

2. One fun example of this: In Lamu town in Kenya, some guys invited us to eat barbeque on the street. We joined them, and got to participate in the chill night neighbourhood streetlife of Lamu - a lot of old men just sitting aorund, talking, heckling each other.

One of the old men told us about the history and mythology of Chinese sailors who got stranded on Pate island nearby, 500 years ago. He gave us a book recommendation on the topic, and said 20 years ago he had given a tour to a New York Times writer working on a story (presumably when working on this article)

I'm working on high-skill immigration; or, being a doer, not an opinion-haver (at least trying)

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I recently switched from working in consulting to working at a startup (1).

This has forced a general mindset shift from “I want to sound smart about the stuff I’m talking about” to “do things”, that affects how I think about political issues.

It’s easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking I should have smart political opinions so I can have intelligent conversations about nuclear energy, police reform, or zoning laws. But a lot of this is just posturing. I look smart, my friends look smart, we pat ourselves on the back, nothing changes.

I want to focus on being a good citizen by actually achieving things.

In politics though? There are so many problems though! And they are so big and complicated and difficult! It seems hopeless.

So I’m trying out a new rule for civic engagement: Everyone should have one political cause of choice.

There are lots of important political problems. You can’t work on all of them. Pick one that is important, that you care about, and that you think you can reasonably make progress on (2).

I have decided that my political cause is: The US should allow many more highly-skilled people to immigrate.

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Why high-skill immigration?

I have a strong belief in the importance of immigrants to the US, both as a matter of fact (economically/ culturally/ scientifically) and as a matter of what the US should aspire to be.

Living in Kenya makes this especially salient - it was so easy for me to move here and I think I am doing good. There are so many people here who can’t move to the US, and I think that they would do good.

I think allowing immigration of skilled workers is pretty indisputably good for the US, those individuals, and (more disputably) for the world. This article captures arguments for high-skill immigration quite well.

There are lots of arguments I could make, but I find this Tweet to be the most concise and emotionally effective argument:

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Smart hardworking people from all over the world (3) want to come to the US to build things, and we should let them (4).

What do I actually want to do?

Turns out it’s hard to find actual productive things to do on big political issues. It makes sense that it’s easier to just have opinions.

At root what needs to happen is that congress or the executive branch needs to change the law or the enforcement of the law to make high-skill immigration easier. This means that the avenues to affect change are:

  • Convincing / bothering my representatives or people in the state department to change things

  • Growing my blog to hundreds of thousands of readers and then using it as a soap box (5)

  • Getting involved with activist organizations that know how to be effective much more than I do

A pre-requisite to this is knowing exactly what things I want changed. So the first step is learning a ton about how immigration to the US actually works, and where potential avenues for change are. Get ready for a blog post on that soon!

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It’s been a fun journey so far, trying to transform from an opinion-haver to a doer (6).

Let me know what political cause you are working on, and if you disagree with me or if you have any suggestions on how to make an impact through activism.

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  1. Stealth mode, can’t talk about it, going to change the world

  2. For those of the Effective Altruism persuasion, I think it should pass a gut check on Importance, Neglectedness, and Tractability. Don’t need to be too rigorous because a) it’s pretty hard to really quantify on-the-margin effects of activism, and b) intrinsic excitement is more important for hobbies than for jobs - the fact that you are doing this activism in your spare time (as opposed to a career) means you really need to be motivated on a weekly basis to work on it

  3. You know, people like Albert Einstein

  4. The issue is important and I’m excited about it. It may be the case that I find it is impossible for me to take any useful action, outside of becoming a senator, but I’m optimistic.
    I personally would be much more in favor of lots more immigration of all kinds - low-skill and refugee as well. But I’m focusing on high-skill immigration since those are politically much tougher issues, high-skill immigration is more important from a scientific / economic progress perspective, and the fact that it seems likely that increased high-skill immigration makes countries more receptive to immigration of all kinds.
    A further clarification that I’m saying “immigration” here for simplicity, but I am including temporary residence status that enables people to work (e.g., H1B visas) in the scope of what I am working on.

  5. I could pretty well believe that long-term my best shot at having impact is being a top-level executive at a super successful company and then lobbying from a position of power

  6. Though I haven’t actually accomplished anything yet

Reading can hijack your interests

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“What topics do I want to get more excited about?” This is a factor that goes into choosing books to read (1) that I used to not give much thought to.

When I was in college I read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It’s a rip-roaring 1000 page sci-fi book flashing back and forth between near-future entrepreneurs creating an online financial system and WWII codebreakers. 

It’s an awesome book and it got me excited about the technical topics it explored. I decided to write a program that would unbreakably  encrypt audio (2). It didn’t quite work (3), but was a lot of fun. It amplified my interest in how computers work, which was probably a significant subconscious influence on my decision to take a computation class my next year in college. And I bet its depiction of startup founders has contributed to my excitement about joining a startup for my next job.

Reading this book changed me into a person who was more interested in cryptography, electrical engineering, and startups. I was already generally nerdy and interested in those topics - otherwise I wouldn’t have read the book. But it amplified interests I already had, and channeled general interest in “secret codes” to a more specific interest in “One Time Pads”.

This interest-amplification-and-channeling effect of good writing is something I’ve started considering more when deciding what books to read. Should my next book be Half of a Yellow Sun or Mansfield Park? Well, I’d rather be excited about the Biafra war than Victorian England, so that’s a point in favor of Half of a Yellow Sun. I’m interested in this biography of Ramanujan, but I know if I read it I’m going to want to learn a bunch about theoretical math and Indian history, so maybe I should prioritize something that will get me excited about block chains or African history which will likely be more useful to me in my life (4).

Maybe this is part of the reason so many people read business books that don’t seem to teach very much. If spending 4 hours reading keeps you excited about your job, that might be a valuable use of time even if you learn very little else (5) (6).

Motivation and excitement are powerful forces. And reading is a great tool for hijacking your own interests to harness these forces.

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1. Or movies/shows to watch, podcasts to listen to, etc,

2. It was essentially a One Time Pad for audio, which I’m sure is not an original idea

3. I also only spent like 4 hours on it

4. Of course, it can be valuable to learn things outside your direct interests. With all of this you shouldn’t try to optimally engineer your reading habits, but I do think general rules can be helpful

5. Ditto for self-help books

6. I think also of Neil Gaiman’s story about how the Chinese Communist Party started to promote science fiction after realizing how impactful it could be on inventors

Non-diverse diversity: The NPR and Sgt. Pepper Problem

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What happens when you expose yourself to the same diverse voices as everyone else? I think of this as the NPR/Sgt. Pepper problem.

National Public Radio in the US has programs that are great for exposing listeners to perspectives that are diverse along a lot of dimensions: income, education, race, occupation, family background, etc. That’s like most of the dimensions that people normally care about when looking for diversity of voices in media (1). 

But if you got all of your media exposure from NPR, your media would not be that diverse in the sense that all of it would have come from NPR (2). And lots of people listen to NPR, so you don’t have any different perspective than any of them.

A similar example from the art world: Reading the Wikipedia page for the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band can send you to artists like Ravi Shankar, Yoko Ono, The Beach Boys, and Little Richard. In a lot of senses this is a super diverse group of artists in terms of their backgrounds and the type of music (or visual art) they make. But they all were huge and well-known influences on the Beatles

If you listen to artists who influence the Beatles you will find music that is incredibly diverse sonically. But you will be exposed to the same type of diversity as everyone else who also uses the Beatles to find new music.

If we’re interested in being exposed to diverse media and art, should we worry about this “lack of diversity in diversity”?

It depends why you value diversity. Despite drawing on very diverse sources themselves, using NPR and Sgt. Pepper as core sources for exposing yourself to new voices does not help you achieve diversity in your own media/art consumption. Because they are both very popular. So if lots of your media/art is NPR/Sgt. Pepper-adjacent, you’ll be similar to a lot of other people who like NPR/Sgt. Pepper." If your goal is to hear stories from people living in different circumstances than you (3), and explore music that is sonically different from what you’re used to, then NPR and Sgt. Pepper are great guides.

But if your goal in diversity is to expose yourself to things that other people like you are not exposed to, you have to do more (4).

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1. For example, the last episode of This American Life I listened to featured interviews from a COVID research scientist living in New York City, an Olympic boxing champion who was at one time homeless, and the daughter of Palestinian immigrants who was trying to get married, as well as a segment on Ahmaud Arbery

2. The existence of NPR adds another dimension along which different sources can be cluster (non diverse) or spread out (diverse)

3. Note that NPR will never let you hear from the most marginalized groups though: Because of NPR’s huge audience, the moment a group gets featured on a This American Life or Fresh Air story, they cease to be one of the most marginalized groups in the world. ADDENDUM: it’s possible for groups covered by NPR to still be marginalized economically or within their local communities. But they will not be the most marginalized groups in terms of US public awareness. Thanks to a friend for pointing this out.

4. Related point: There are more ways to be bad than good, and more ways to be wrong than right. So if maximizing diversity is something you care about, you’ll want to expose yourself to a lot of bad art, and to a lot of incorrect perspectives.

On being more idealistic

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I don’t want to work in global health or global development. I want global poverty to end.

I’ve noticed over the past few years a bunch of ways in which people have subtly encouraged not to give voice to big dreams. I think the cumulative effect of all this is bad for me, and probably also bad for other people who are in similar circles to me. 

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For the most part, the people I work with in consulting are either people fresh out of college who don’t know what they want to do with their lives, or people fresh out of MBAs/PhDs who are doing a mid-career pivot. Neither of these groups of people are (broadly speaking) full of individuals who are single-mindedly pursuing a dream. They’re people who want to figure out what kind of career they want to have.

Friends, both from work and not from work, don’t love their jobs but continue at them because they think they will lead to something better, or because they’re fine spending a large amount of their time working for something they don’t love.

Partially as a result of not liking their jobs, they put a heavy importance on work-life balance. This encourages me to think “this time that I’m not being productive is good for me, and actually I shouldn’t want to work so hard.” It’s understood that you have to sacrifice if you want to achieve something great. But because many of us at our core aren’t driven to actually achieve whatever it is we’re working for (in my case, bringing value to the client), we don’t want to sacrifice too much.

Lots of people I talk to speak about entertainment as a passion. They get extremely excited when talking about a great restaurant they’ve been to or a great weekend trip they’ve taken. There’s an assumption that everyone is binging Netflix during quarantine, and people say things like “Ah I haven’t seen ‘Westworld’ yet — I should really watch it,” as if they’re missing out on life by having not seen it.

People apply to MBA programs because it’s the next step, buy a Peloton with their bonus, and refine their wine palates because they want to expand the horizons of the pleasures they can experience (1). 

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Each of these things are fine and maybe even good in themselves! It’s fine to not know what your life’s work is, work life balance is important (especially if you don’t love your job), and I love watching movies. But the cumulative effect of all of this, combined with a lack of most people in my circles truly pursuing passions, discourages me from being idealistic about what I live and work, and work hard, for. And so I say things like “I’d like to try working in global development or global health” because that makes it sound like the next logical career step. 

Phrasing my goals this way makes sense. Maybe that’s the kind of work that I will find satisfying or impactful, so that I will like my job. Maybe development work will help me build some skills that will serve me well later in my career. Or maybe living in a foreign country will expose me to great natural beauty, and what non-American lives and cultures are like, which will be an enriching experience.

And honestly, all those things will be nice. But at my core — or at least what I hope and act like is my core — I really don’t care about what experiences or skills I have, and my goal isn’t to feel that my career is satisfying or impactful.

What I care about is that 600+ million people in the world live on less than $1.90 / day and that 5 million children per year die before the age of 5. And my goal is for that to stop. 

That’s ~8% of people and ~4% of births. Based on UN projections, by the time I die at the ripe old age of 103, the extreme poverty rate could be far below 5%, and the under-five mortality rate could be 1%. My life’s work is to accelerate the downward slope of those lines as much as I can. I hope I am willing to work hard and sacrifice to make that happen.

I think this kind of idealism is important in order to get things done that matter. We should be excited at the opportunity we have in living to make a difference, both because it makes life more enjoyable, and because it will make you better at what you do.

I want to move closer to Neal Stephenson’s ideal of the business founder: “After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and foregoing all of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz. appended resumes) will move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the central Gobi Desert...On a daily ration consisting of a handful of uncooked rice and a ladleful of water, we will [begin to do stuff].”

I probably won’t be able to work as hard as I should, or be willing to sacrifice as much as is demanded of me. But I’m at least going to stop pretending that the main thing driving me is to have a nice career when there is real stuff to do in the world — real problems that I can devote myself to solving.

1. Sorry for the super bougie examples — there are definitely less expensive ways to make the next step or broaden the horizons of pleasure you can experience. But I find it especially demoralizing when people spend a lot of money on these things.

Some Suggestions for Myself about How to Read

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A person who wants to have a well-informed view of the world faces the trouble that there are a LOT of sources of information and ideas out there. Some of those sources are good (i.e., will help your opinion get closer to something truth or useful), and some are bad. In this post I want to offer some suggestions about how to decide what to read to get exposed to new information and ideas.

This problem of a deluge of content is not new. The British philosopher John Stuart Mill observed in the 1800s: “When there were few books... A book of sterling merit, when it came out, was sure to be heard of, and might hope to be read, by the whole reading class...But when almost every person who can spell, can and will write, what is to be done? It is difficult to know what to read, except by reading everything” (1).We may take issue with Mill’s ideas of what qualifies a book to be “of sterling merit” (2), but his general point is truer today than it was then: People don’t have time to read all the best books, articles, blog posts, etc. that exist.

So how should we decide what to read, or to consume more generally? I’m going to make a couple of assumptions about the reader in answering this question:

  1. We are talking about a topic on which you want to have a well-formed opinion. As I talked about in a previous blog post, there are probably lots of topics on which you don’t have time to become well-informed. On those topics you should not have a strong opinion (3)

  2. The purpose of your reading is to become more knowledgeable or to have better ideas. You might also read for entertainment, aesthetic pleasure, or social purposes, but in those cases your approach to reading will probably be different (4). Also I’m going to use the verb “to read” but my points also apply to other ways of learning (e.g., podcasts, videos)

For this kind of reader I have two suggestions (5):

#1: Find trustworthy experts and rely on them as a starting point. By “experts” I mean people who are knowledgeable and ideally thoughtful about the thing you want to learn about. It might seem obvious to rely on these people, but there is a tendency in the US now to be suspicious of those called “ experts” for one of two reasons: 

  1. They’re an elite group who live in ivory towers and don’t actually understand the real problems of the world.

  2. They are too condescending/self-interested to use their expertise to actually help people. 

I think that the people who are referred to in and deferred to by society as “experts” often are fair targets of both of these critiques. But:

  1. The person is not really an expert if they don’t understand what they’re talking about, academic titles or societal position notwithstanding.

  2. An intelligent reader can read past condescension and self-interest if the claims being made are backed up with actual knowledge. Every person you read is biased, and you’re not going to agree with everything they say. But if someone has knowledge and experiences relevant to what you want to learn about, you can benefit from their expertise as long as you understand the biases they are likely to have.

Depending on what it is you want to learn about, the people society calls experts may or may not be reliable. For example, when it comes to questions “is this food from the store safe to eat?” I don’t even think to fact-check the FDA — I trust that those experts are doing what’s right. But when it’s a question of “what is the most effective way to fight global poverty” I might think that academic experts don’t have the full story, so I need to also seek out perspectives from the poorest individuals in the world who are experts about their own lives.

On the importance of seeking out multiple perspectives...

#2: Read and engage with a diversity of views. Diversity of views means really meaningfully engaging with ideas from people unlike you, ideas you don’t even know that you don’t know, or ideas you find instinctively repulsive (6). Here are some ideas about how to do that practically do that:

  1. Rely less on recommendations from your friends. Your friends are probably like you. And even if they aren’t, you get to hear their views when you talk to them. If you want to obtain a new insight, you need to read perspectives that you aren’t already exposed to via your friends.

  2. Rely less on algorithms. If you want to be surprised by a new insight, you probably need to read something that an algorithm would find surprising based on your past reading history.

  3. Read more old things. People in olden times had a lot of the same general problems that we do. But they lived in a totally different time, so they automatically have a different perspective on them than we do.

  4. Read more things originally written in other languages. You’re automatically an outsider when reading something written in a foreign language. The author was not writing for you. This makes it more likely that they will express different ideas, or express the same ideas differently, than would the authors out there who are writing for people like you.

  5. Read things that aren’t designed to be entertaining or fun. By restricting yourself only to ideas that are expressed in light and easy-to-swallow writing, you’re erecting a barrier between yourself and all those who have great ideas but aren’t great communicators. Plus your idea of what’s entertaining may exclude ideas that challenge you. And finally, reading something difficult forces you to recreate the author’s argument and think harder about what you actually believe, rather than just quickly reading, nodding your head, and moving along.

You probably don’t want to go to the extreme on all these dimensions at once. I don’t mean to say that you should go read a dry analysis of French waterways from the 1700s. But if your goal is to be more informed on some topic, particularly a contentious social or political topic, it might be helpful to try to push yourself in some of these ways to read things that you wouldn’t naturally come across.

I’ll end with another quote from Mill, who I find incredibly inspiring on the topic of arriving at the truth by comparing conflicting ideas. People tend to, he says,

 place the same unbounded reliance only on such of their opinions as are shared by all who surround them, or to whom they habitually defer: for in proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of "the world" in general. And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society

We have a higher ability than anyone who lived before us to expand our “world” beyond those who live near, live like, or believe the same things as us. We have also greater access to the knowledge of experts, both those recognized as such by society and those not. Let’s avail ourselves of as much of humanity’s experience as we can rather than remaining inert in our current beliefs and perspectives.

1. The Mill experts that roam my blog will know that Mill was here curmudgeonedly making the point that people just read too darn quickly in his day, and that the quality of books wasn’t what it used to be. To which I say that there are probably more bad books now than there were in his day, but also more good books because there are just more books. And also get off my lawn.

2. E.g., J.S. Mill had a very positive view of his father’s A History of British India in which he wrote things like “under the glosing exterior of the Hindu, lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy” and dismissed out of hand claims that ancient Indian scholars made the advances in astronomy and that they did in fact make. 

3. Here’s a rough equation showing how strongly I should be allowed to have an opinion (I’m saying “I” but I really mean “you”):

opinion.jpg

For example, without great factual knowledge and only a vague understanding of why someone would oppose my view, I would be comfortable having the strong but rather vague opinion that “the government should do more to fight climate change.” My general beliefs about the role of government and the importance of the environment (i.e., my ideology) are enough to bring me to this opinion.

But if I want to be more specific about my opinion (say I believe strongly that “the federal government should fight climate change by mandating that all new cars must meet XX emission thresholds”), I should have a strong understanding of what exactly the economic and political effects of such a policy are likely to be, what the alternative policy options are, and what the arguments for those alternative policy options are. Ideology itself isn’t enough when you get down to brass tacks.

4. Though my points probably do apply if your goal is to experience and appreciate a variety artistic expressions (e.g., expand your taste in music or novels or movies).

5. I say “this kind of reader” but I really mean “me.” This post is largely a way for me to answer these questions for myself.

6. A lot of times when people say “I want to read more diverse books” they mean “I want to read more woke books”. That’s not what I’m suggesting here (though I’m also not discouraging it). I’m talking about diversity of ideas. Diversity along the dimensions of race, gender, and sexual orientation is valuable, but by focusing on these dimensions it’s easy to limit your consumption of ideas about racial and gender dynamics to a particular worldview that’s very popular on coastal college campuses. Diversity of ideology, temperament, historical period, etc. are also important as far as arriving at good ideas is concerned.

Have high expectations for yourself!

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In this post I want to explore how the standards we hold ourselves to affect the way we view other people. So I’m going to write about the standards that I hold myself to because I have better insight into my own standards and viewpoints than I do into anyone else’s. The particular standards I mention may not be right, but I am pretty confident that there is a universal obligation to push ourselves out of our comfort zones in order to do good.

Also, I believe there is such a thing that there is objective goodness in the world. Bu if you don’t I think my reasoning will be applicable to you as long you have some standards that you wish everybody would follow (e.g., if you believe that “setting aside 30 minutes every afternoon for tea and biscuits” is a standard that everyone in your life should follow, then replace the words “do good” in the rest of this post with “set aside 30 minutes every day for tea and biscuits”).

Claim #1: We should all strive all our lives to do good more perfectly, and doing that requires holding ourselves to high standards

Holding myself to high standards means being kind of nitpicky with myself — being vigilant about times when I may not be doing as much good as I could be, and pushing myself to do better. I’m causing animals to be tortured by eating meat, so I’ll be vegetarian. I’ve been quiet about how the way we live our lives contributes to systemic racism, so I’m trying to speak out more. I waste too much time on YouTube so I should stop watching Jake Gyllenhaal interviews — I haven’t been as successful on this front (my favorite).

Once I’ve identified a standard I want to hold myself to, I can motivate myself by thinking about how this standard really ought to be followed by everyone and isn’t just some arbitrary rule I’ve decided to follow — this isn’t the case with all the standards I try to hold myself too, but it is with a lot of them. If I’m at a restaurant and there’s a great-looking steak on the menu, I can convince myself to not order it because I think it would be wrong for anyone in my position to contribute to cows being tortured, and would be disappointed in myself if I did something I thought was wrong.

Claim #2: It’s not reasonable nor good to expect others to be perfectly good all the time, and other people will often fail to meet the high standards we try to hold ourselves to

This leads to a problem: If I’m disappointed in myself when I don’t meet my own standards, and I believe the standards I hold myself too are common standards (i.e., they’re not just unique to me; other people should follow them too), then there’s danger in me constantly being disappointed in other people when they don’t meet these common standards.

So what do I do when other people don’t meet these standards that I set for myself? If I know that I would look down on myself if I ordered a meat dish, does that mean I should look down on other people when they order meat dishes?

Basically, in trying to improve myself, I’m in danger of slipping into judgement of others. I propose five rules of thumb to help keep this at bay:

  • Hold yourself to high standards

    • Consistently push yourself out of your comfort zone to be a better person

  • Recognize that not every standard you hold yourself to is a common standard

    • e.g., I limit the amount of TV I watch because I generally don’t get very much out of it for the time I put in, but that’s not the case for everyone

  • Recognize that other people have life struggles that you don’t, which may make it harder for them to meet even those standards that are common

    • e.g., I think that everyone should do as much as they can to help other people, and that I and many others struggle with not being selfless enough. But I know that there are also people who struggle with making sure to take care of themselves enough (not to imply that being selfless and self-care are opposites, but they can appear to be in conflict sometimes). So I shouldn’t tell someone “be more selfless” unless I was reasonably sure that self-care wasn't something they struggled with (and even so I probably wouldn’t phrase it like that)

    • It helps to remember that you don’t always meet the ideal standards either

  • If you are in the appropriate position to do so, encourage others as best you can to act better

    • What the most effective way of  “encouraging others to be better” looks like varies depending on the situation and your relationship to the other people:

      • It may mean saying nothing and leading by example

      • It may mean having a conversation with them about their actions and/or motivations and really listening to them

      • It may mean encouraging them to do better

      • It may mean calling people out explicitly and telling them to be better (especially if behavior is particularly egregious or you are in a position of authority like a teacher or a boss or a parent)

    • You also need to be open to others encouraging you to be better

  • Be open about your beliefs, but focus your attention on where your attention can make the largest positive impact

    • Here’s an example of me trying to live this out: I think that both looting and the perpetuation of systemic racism are evil acts. But when I have conversations with people recently I always tried to focus on systemic racism, because that is the bigger problem, and the one that I’m more likely to be able to contribute to progress on. If I were in the position of the people who had the opportunity to loot during recent protests, I would hope I would hold myself to the standard of “don’t steal”. But I was not in that position, and as it is it would be wrong to focus on the fact that people looting weren’t meeting the moral standard of not stealing while ignoring the way society fails to meet the moral standard of not being racist

Articulating these rules of thumb has helped me resolve the cognitive dissonance I hold myself to higher standards than others (though I’m sure there are areas where I hold others to higher standards than I hold myself, which is wrong to do). Maybe it will help you too! Or maybe this cognitive dissonance was just a problem for me and all I’ve done is climbed out of a hole I dug myself in the first place.

The value of virtue signalling

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Terminology alert: “Virtue signalling” is a phrase which here means “demonstrations that you hold values or behave in ways that people should approve of”

“Your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds” - Matthew 5:16

“Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them” - Matthew 6:1

Virtue signalling gets a bad reputation. It’s easy to look around cynically and have a view like “the people on Facebook who are posting about how black lives matter are doing that mostly to show off to their friends that they are good people, not because they really care about black lives.”

I think this is sometimes a fair critique. But virtue signaling can also be useful because it helps set communal norms. Speaking out about your values and talking about the good things that you do is good if it inspires others to be better, but is reduced to “mere virtue signaling” if all it accomplishes is convincing others that you are a good person.

So when discussing honorable views that we have or actions we’ve taken, we want to make sure we’re helping to change people’s minds, and not just yelling about how good we are. I think there are two criteria that together make virtue signalling valuable from a norm-setting perspective:

  1. The view you are signalling is at least somewhat contentious in your community. Sending out signals like, “people shouldn’t use racial slurs”, or “police shouldn’t kill people in custody”, or “I once had the opportunity to steal this thing but then I didn’t” is not useful. Nearly everyone agrees that explicit racism, police killings, and theft are bad, so by signalling your agreement you aren’t changing anyone’s mind, just demonstrating that you eat the recommended daily dose of moral fiber.

    And this contentiousness is context-specific. The extent to which signalling “I think people ought to do something about climate change” is useful from a norm-setting perspective depends on whether the people around you already think it’s obvious that we should do something about climate change. If they all agree, then it’s useful. If they don’t, it’s not. 

    Similarly, “I think de jure racial segregation is wrong” would have been a useful thing to signal in 1940s America, when this was not the prevailing view. But if you said that now, people would do things like roll their eyes, or call you names like “Sherlock,” or suspect that you might have some pretty alarming views if you think that the evil of government-supported explicit segregation needs to be stated as if it’s up for discussion.

  2. You seek the ear of those who don’t already agree with you rather than the approbation of those who do. This means understanding where the people within range of your signal are coming from, and framing your view in a way that will make sense to those who don’t already agree with you. 

    If I were to tell people “I wear a mask in public because I believe in science and am not selfish”, I won’t convince anyone to wear a mask who is not already inclined to do so. All I’m doing is showing to the people that agree with me that I’m a good person. Posting political memes that make me and my friends laugh at the stupidity/lack of moral fiber/sheep-like following of those who disagree with us doesn’t do anything to set better communal norms.

    (Note that while as a speaker you should always try to frame your views in a manner that your interlocutors will be receptive to, as a listener you should not disregard an argument because you don’t like the way it’s presented. Hold yourself to a higher standard than others, both as a speaker and a listener)

There’s certainly a lot of non-useful virtue signalling out there. But what looks like virtue signalling may actually just be an expression of values in a good-faith attempt to change people’s views or make them consider perspectives that they wouldn’t have otherwise. We often go along with the crowd and do things that are wrong. Let’s speak up in the few instances where we’re able to do what’s right, so that we might inspire others to do the same.

The Proper Use of Ideology

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Terminology alert: Political ideology — a system of belief about how the institutions of society (like governments, economies, companies, families) work at a high level, and how they ought to work

In this post I’m going to explore the value of political ideology and will suggest that the purpose of ideology is to give you answers to political questions that you haven’t had time to ponder in detail.

What would it mean to not have a political ideology? It would mean forming my political opinions on an issue-by-issue basis (assuming you have political opinions at all). At face-value this might sound like a very even-handed position to hold. Without having an overarching narrative about society to believe in, I might be able to interpret the facts of any issue in an unbiased manner. For example, if I’m not predisposed to seeing companies as evil, and I’m also not predisposed to seeing the government as evil, then I can proceed to think rationally about an issue like the minimum wage, and come up with an “unbiased viewpoint”.

Now you should question anyone who has political opinions but claims to have no ideology. Almost everyone has some high-level views about how society ought to be structured (e.g. the government should be doing more, people ought to have more liberty than they do right now). And even if you didn’t have any ideological bias, there are other factors that will cause your thinking to be biased (how you were raised, self-centeredness, loss aversion etc.).

But in general, it’s better to think hard about an issue than to have an opinion based mostly on ideology. The more you  attempt to be informed, thoughtful, and objective in analyzing a particular issue, the more likely you are to be correct.

So if we could all be totally informed, thoughtful, and objective about analyzing every problem in the world, then we’d have no need for ideology. But of course we can’t. I can only know so much, think so much, and overcome my biases to a certain extent. The proper function of ideology is to give me opinions on issues where I haven’t had time to delve deeper. 

Ideology is a useful heuristic for forming rough opinions on a bundle of complex issues. It’s important to understand that ideology will not give me the right answer in many situations. It gives me a starting point, but I need to refine my opinions as I learn more about specific issues. Only by being open to changing my mind can I hope to get closer to understanding how the world works, and how we might make it better.

To Live Would Be An Awfully Big Adventure

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Things are not great. This has all the appearances of a great adventure.

The world is facing a deadly threat. Everyone’s lives has changed in a matter of weeks. Nobody knows what to do. There are enormous stakes.

The future is uncertain. The fate of our families, communities, nations, world hang in the balance. There’s great opportunity for each of us to have an impact on what life is like in a month, in a year, in a decade. Our actions matter.

You have to grow up fast, to overcome obstacles, to change your life. You to focus on what’s important. You pull close to the people you love. You feel a connection with everyone you see. Everyone’s mind is on the same thing.

This is serious, as true adventures always are. People die during adventures. There is loss. There is true misery.

But there is beauty, if you can find it, in the unexpectedness. In the new ways of living we have to adopt. In the feeling of solidarity with everyone else on the planet who is dealing with this in one way or another.

I never used to understand when people valorized war as a great vehicle for heroism and purpose and unity. But I’m starting to.