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

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

I donated $35 to offset my carbon footprint for this year

I want to start donating annually to offset my carbon footprint. I don’t really think of this as a charitable cost - instead it’s internalizing my externalities.

This is the first time I am systematically deciding to make an annual donation - I wanted to walk through my thinking in case it’s useful for anyone else! This post also serves as pro-Effective Altruism propaganda.

• How much carbon do I need to offset?

  • The average American seems to emit about 15-20T of CO2 per year (source, source, source). I’ll assume 20T.

  • But I travel a lot. A round-trip flight from London to New York emits ~1T of CO2. This year I took 5 international flights - most had multiple legs, so I’ll assume I emitted 15T more than the average American.

  • So let’s say I have to offset 35T of CO2 each year.

• Where should I donate?

  • I trust Vox’s Future Perfect on stuff like this. They recommend donating to a climate change fund such as the Climate Change Fund from Founder’s Pledge

• How much should I donate?

  • I’ll use the top recommended climate charity from Vox’s Future Perfect as a benchmark. As of December 2023, this is the Clean Air Task Force

  • Founder’s Pledge estimates that a donation to CATF can avert 1T of CO2 emissions for $0.1-$1

  • So that would put the amount I have to donate to offset all my emissions at $3.50-$35 per year

  • I’ll be on the safe side and assume I should donate $35

Conclusion: I just donated $35 to the Climate Fund from Founder’s Pledge to offset my yearly carbon footprint. I intend to make this donation annually going forward, and encourage you to as well!

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Effective Altruism has been under some heat lately - with the collapse of FTX, and the drama around the OpenAI board ousting Sam Altman.

EA is both a philosophy and a community. I think the above exercise illustrates why both are really good, despite recent drama.

• The philosophy of Effective Altruism gave me the intellectual motivation to donate in the first place. And it informs my decision about where to donate: I should not just donate to what feels the best - I should donate where my dollar will have the highest impact in terms of tons of CO2-eq averted.

• The community of EA has created institutions (in this case Vox’s Future Perfect, and Founder’s Pledge) that help me quickly (1) identify a good donation opportunity, and direct my funds effectively. Also, a post on the the EA Forum provided extra social motivation to make this donation

Is this system perfect? No. Perhaps I could have spent more time finding a better charity to donate to. Perhaps I should be doing more in my lifestyle or in political activism to be addressing the problem of climate change.

But I think my actions here are a lot better than they would be if Effective Altruism did not exist (2). So overall I remain proud of Effective Altruism - both the philosophy and the community.

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1. It only took 1 hour to do the research and decide to donate!

2. For what it’s worth, the philosophy and community of EA were also key motivators in my decision to become vegetarian

How to be cool and impress your girl in Nairobi: Ride a matatu

Daniel (while reversing up the ~50M driveway of my apartment complex): “I love driving in reverse more than anything.”

Luke: “Really? Why?”

Daniel: “I used to drive matatus in CBD (1), and that driving is so crazy. Driving in reverse is so easy.”

Matatus make up the bus system in Nairobi. Ranging from nondescript white minivans to school-bus-sized machines painted with marijuana leaves and blasting reggae, matatus are the probably most common means of commuting for Nairobians.

Standard-issue Biggie ganya

I’ve always been fascinated by how the matatu system works - people often talk vaguely about them being connected to organized crime - so I had to pick Daniels’ brain for the 20-minute duration of our Uber ride together.

Some ganyas are more saintly, like this hardcore St. Michael the Archangel

The most fun matatus are the “posh” matatus as Daniel called them - the ones with paintings of rappers or movies or saints or Squid Game characters. 

• These Matatus are called ganya, and Daniel assured me I would instantly be cool if I told my girl we were taking a ganya around town (3)

• The hottest ganya that Daniel drove was the Vybz Kartel matatu (video example here), which blasts reggae music and required him to continuously hit the airhorn button on his sound effect switchboard 

• A government regulatory agency has to approve the paintings on ganya, and - as an example Daniel gave me - they likely wouldn’t approve one with naked ladies because “school children might be riding this” 

It was alarming and a little upsetting to see this bus protesting police violence with a picture of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck

The basics of the business work like this: A matatu owner pays for the right to drive on a particular route (4). Every day the owner hires a driver, and the driver’s job is to return the matatu at the end of the day with a full tank of gas and with ~10,000 Kenyan shillings (around $90). 

The driver collects fees all day from passengers (5), and pays for his (6) day-to-day costs himself (fuel, paying a guy who hangs out the door on the side of the matatu and stirs up business, and bribes for cops (7)).

Economically, the business set up of matatus has a few interesting results:

• Drivers are incentivized to get as many customers as possible - your pay as a driver is directly proportional to the number of customers

• The driver has no guaranteed minimum income. If he only makes 10K in a day, he doesn’t make any money. If he doesn’t make enough to pay the owner, he has to convince the owner that there were riots that day, or crazy traffic or some other excuse. “Matatu drivers are very clever” says Daniel

  • Daniel said the reason he drove Uber now was because Uber guaranteed a minimum income - predictability is often more important than high average pay

• Matatu drivers are “in the same company as the police” so can break traffic laws. Because of standing arrangements with cops, matatu drivers pay way less in bribes than a typical traffic driver who breaks traffic laws, and they drive with relative impunity

  • Cops look out for the matatu drivers. As Daniel kept saying, the cops and the matatu drivers are “all the same company.” Sometimes, to cajole the policemen, matatu drivers even wear blue uniforms, similar colors to the cops, and say “look, we wear the same uniform we’re the same.” 

  • If you can make the cops laugh, they let you off easier (8) 

There’s a lot more to learn about the matatu world - most specifically how exactly organized crime, politicians, and SACCOs fit together, but I’m happy to at least have learned a day in the life of a matatu driver.

As my friend from Maryland said “Kenyans have good taste”

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1. Central Business District - downtown Nairobi

2. From my understanding, the matatu cartels (3) keep competition off their routes. I’m not sure if this is through legal or illegal means, but in any case it’s corrupt.

3. Note that I have not yet actually ridden a matatu, so I am not cool and have not impressed my girl

4. These cartels are connected somehow to SACCOs. Generally a SACCO is Savings and Credit Cooperative Organisation, a sort of community bank but they seem serve a variety of different purposes in different industries. Matatu SACCOs are openly known to be corrupt and connected to organised crime, though exactly how the crime part of things works it works is still unclear to me.

5. It seems like matatu fares are set by the owner or the SACCO

6. I have never seen a female matatu driver

7. Bribes for cops are an unavoidable cost of doing business, and break down into two main categories:

   1. In the mornings, cops will stand near the roundabouts and stop matatus who each pay them around 100 shillings (~$0.90)

   2. Later in the day if you get stopped for driving around traffic you pay around 100-200 shillings (~$0.90-$1.80)

8. Daniel claimed that even now that he was an Uber driver, if he got pulled over he would be able to talk his way out of a fine because the cops would tell he used to be a matatu driver

—

Source: Daniel The Matatu Guy

Thanks to J for convincing me that readers probably weren’t as interested in the financial side of things as I was

Sometimes companies want to stay blind

In Seeing Like a State, James C Scott says that for a government administrator there are virtually no other facts than those that are in standardized documents and data sets. The accumulation of data allows a state to “see” better and effect more sweeping changes in society.

This ability to “see” through data can be used for good or for ill. When the Nazis occupied Amsterdam, they were able to identify, round up, and deport 65,000 Jews because the Netherlands kept registries of all their citizens. This kind of record-keeping

“merely amplifies the capacity of the state for discriminating interventions. A capacity that in principle could as easily have been deployed to feed the Jews as to deport them.”

It struck me that the fact that data can enable either good or evil leads to opposite responses in the US vs. Kenya with regards to issues of racial/tribal equity.

In 2020 in the US, something I heard often from businesspeople interested in addressing racial equity was something like “if you aren’t disaggregating your hiring, promotion, and retention statistics by race, you’re never going to know if you have problems.” The assumption being that a lot of companies want to have better representation of e.g., black and Latino employees, so tracking will help them achieve that goal.

In Kenya, as far as I know, most companies do not officially track the tribe of their employees (1). There is a high degree of economic and social inequality between different tribal groups within Kenya, so you might think that Kenyan companies interested in addressing this inequalities would want to track the relevant data, as is done in the US. But by my understanding, officially tracking your employees’ tribe in Kenya is just totally out of the question. Everyone would assume you wanted to show favoritism to one of the most powerful tribes and discriminate against the rest (2).

Standardized data sets allow companies to see better and make more informed decisions, for good or ill. And if you are in an environment where people assume you will use your data for ill, it’s better to stay blind and just not collect that data at all.

—

1. Disclaimer that even in writing this sentence I’m entering a world of Kenyan tribal representation and politics where I’m way over my head

2. This type of favoritism is common in politics. Kenyan presidents have blatantly given administrative jobs to those of their own tribes: in the two last terms of President Moi (of the Kalenjin tribe), “two of Kenya’s largest ethnic groups (the Kikuyu and the Luo) were virtually absent from his administration” (page 28). The title of Michela Wrong’s book It’s Our Turn to Eat about corruption in President Kibaki’s administration comes from a phrase used by members of Kibaki’s tribe in anticipation extracting benefits for themselves from the presidential administration

"These Indians are dying like flies"

Before moving to Kenya part of me, a subconscious part of me that I’m not proud of, thought that sympathy for people in other countries was the luxury of the privileged. “Of course in the US we feel bad for poor people in poor countries who are dying of starvation and disease. We are so much better off than them and sympathize.” I sort of assumed without ever explicitly considering it that a lot of less privileged people are too worried about their own problems to think much of people suffering in other countries.

In February or March of 2021, a month or two after I moved to Nairobi, the delta variant was ravaging India. I was living in an apartment that was just 1km from my office (1), and often on my way home would stop at a fruit/vegetable stall.

The fruit/vegetable stand. 9 cent bananas, 45 cent large avocados. (Google Street View link)

One day I stopped to pick up some produce and had a short conversation with a guy, Josh, who ran a nearby street food kibanda (2). We had a short exchange while I was buying my mangoes and carrots.

Josh: “Have you seen about this delta?”

Me: “Yeah it’s bad.”

Josh: “Have you seen these Indians? They’re dying like flies. It’s terrible.”

It shouldn’t have been, but it was surprising to me that the Indian delta spike and resultant suffering would be top of mind for Josh. It certainly wasn’t taking up enough of my headspace that I would bring it up in a 30-second fruit-stall interaction.

Of course, anyone anywhere in the world feels bad for people dying of starvation and disease. We sympathize because we’re human.

—

1. Even closer as the crow flies, but you know those Nairobi streets can be wily and winding

2. He was just kind of hanging out at the fruit/vegetable stand on break I guess

A Complete Taxonomy of Expats in Kenya

Abstract: It’s said there are three types of expats in Nairobi (1): Missionaries, Mercenaries, and Misfits. This widely used framework, however, is incomplete. In this post I propose a rigorous and complete taxonomy (2). Every under-35-year-old expat that you will meet in Nairobi can be easily sorted into one of 24 buckets based on four dimensions. There are no edge cases.

Methods: The Taxonomy was created using extremely rigorous methods based on anecdotal data of my  friends in Kenya. Who are of course, totally and completely representative of all under-35 foreigners living in Kenya.

Overview: Each expat can be assigned an letter from each of four categories:

• Purpose for being in Kenya: Impact (I) / market (M) / good time (G)

• B-school-adjacence: In-program (P) / no plans (N)

• Degree of entrapment in expat bubble: Practically local (L) / stuck (S)

• Weekend behavior: City (C) / travel (T)

For example, an impact-driven person on internship from business school who is not trapped in the expat bubble and generally stays in Nairobi would be an IPLC.

Detail on the Four Categories

Purpose for being in Kenya:

• I: Impact-driven (~”missionaries”)

• M: Interested in the market or political environment (~”mercenaries”)

• G: Just here for a good time man (~”misfits”)

• Discussion: The most obvious of the 4 dimensions, purpose, is captured in the pop wisdom “missionary/mercenary/misfit” trichotomy. This trichotomy is obviously stylized for humorous effect - not all M’s are motivated solely by money, and many G’s aren’t misfits at all in their home countries. But it captures a general truth about expats that is more precisely articulated in the I/M/G dimension.

B-school-adjacence (3): 

• P: In a master’s program or planning to apply next cycle (often business school)

• N: No plans for grad school (includes those who are post-grad school)

• Discussion: For the most part, someone’s adjacency to graduate school determines whether they plan to stay in Kenya longer than 6 months. No master’s plans = no concrete plans to leave Kenya.

Degree of entrapment in the expat bubble:

• L: Basically local

• S: Stuck in the bubble

• Discussion: L’s tend to go to Kenyan clubs, listen to afrobeats, and not exclusively hang out with fellow expats. S’s tend to plan trips to the coast with each other and avoid taking matatus at all costs. If a S is the clubbing type, Alchemist is their favorite club. As a show of dominance over S’s, L’s will often slip the odd Swahili word into conversation. 

Weekend behavior:

• C: Prioritize city life in Nairobi 

• T: View traveling as the primary purpose of weekends

• Discussion: Typical interests of T’s are kite surfing, climbing, gathering “content” for “the gram”, hiking, applying sunscreen, and safaris. T’s tend to be “doers”, as in “We did Mt. Kenya last weekend”, “I’ve done Lamu 3 or 4 times”, and “Ah, I’ve been meaning to do Samburu again”. C’s, either out of fear of the outdoors, desire to build up a community in Nairobi, or revulsion to planning tend to enjoy taking advantage of all the restaurants, markets, and house parties that Nairobi city life has to offer.

Further work: None required. This topic is now closed (4).

Acknowledgements: Thanks to K and J1 for comments on this manuscript, and to A and J2 for fruitful discussions. Expats par excellence all.

—

1. As we all know, if you move from a poorer to a richer country, you’re an immigrant and if you move from a richer to a poorer country you’re an expat. This is right and just and no further interrogation of this fact is needed

2. Hence “The Taxonomy”

3. For brevity I have titled this dimension “B-school-adjacence”, although “Grad-school-adjacence” would be technically more accurate as there are P’s (particularly those from Europe) who are planning to go to grad school that is not business school

4. Tag urself. I’m an INSC

Reading can hijack your interests

“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.

—

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

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).

—

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.

How Do You Live? - a 1930s Japanese YA book about progress

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino is a novel aimed at young people released in Japan in 1937 (1). I read it over the past week, and was struck by how many themes in it relate directly to Progress Studies (2). I’d recommend it for people interested in how fiction can be used to inspire big-picture thinking about human progress, especially for ~8-14-year olds.

The vastness and importance of progress: The book explicitly deals with the “vast and marvelous prospect” of human progress across thousands of years. A major moment of growth for the main character is realizing how much he is dependent on the thousands and millions of other people in the world to bring him as simple of things as wool clothes and milk. He is encouraged by his uncle to be a producer, not just a consumer, and is taught by his uncle that the ancient Japanese learned from Greek, Persian, and Indian cultures, and then “the Japanese people, too, advanced the progress of the human race in their Japanese way.”

The difficulty of progress: There is an extended scene where his uncle explains to the main character that the inspiration Newton had in watching an apple fall was not enough - he then had to do the hard work of actually understanding what a falling apple has to do with planetary movement, and formalize it in math. “[T]he things that we call obvious are tricky. When you think about a thing as if it were self-evident and follow it wherever it may lead, soon enough you run into a thing that you can no longer call self-evident.”

The importance of using greatness to improve humanity: Human progress is visualized as a great river. Some people help push that river forward either on purpose or accident. But “there are more than a few who may be called great or heroic, but instead of advancing the flow, they work instead to try to reverse it.” Napoleon is given as an example of someone who, despite his brilliance and determination, “transformed into something harmful to the proper advancement of society.” The main character is admonished to become someone who is both able to achieve greatness, and then willing to channel that greatness into the advancement of humanity.

The beauty of science: The main character thinks of the all the people in the world as a molecules in a vast sea. Schoolkids have debates about the nature of electricity then look up the truth in their textbooks. Scientists like Newton and Copernicus are used as instructive examples for finding out about the world. Throughout, the book stresses the importance of building your own mental models  about how the world works, and then checking those models against reality and work already done by others (though Yoshino doesn’t use this language),

This book is great for understanding how people 90 years ago, in a different culture conceived of progress and communicated it to young people. I could imagine this book being great for American kids to think about progress (as well as character, ethics, and for exposure to literature from other cultures). And I think it serves as a good model for the type of communication that people involved in Progress Studies now could be engaged in (3).

—

1. I was introduced to the book because Hayao Miyazaki is currently making a movie of the same name, which is either an adaptation of this book, or features this book as a plot point

2. Progress Studies is a great, recently started intellectual movement aiming, in the words of Jason Crawford, “to understand the causes of human progress, so that we can keep it going and even accelerate it.”

3. Historical aside: The historical backdrop of Japan at the time is fascinating and important to understanding both the story itself and the context in which it was written. As the translator’s note at the end says:

During this time Japan was becoming increasingly militaristic and authoritarian. In 1925, Japan passed the Public Security Preservation Law, making it illegal for anyone to say or write things that were critical of the government. A special branch of the police was created—the Tokko, also known as the “Thought Police.” They spied on political groups and arrested thousands of people for their progressive ideas, especially those interested in socialism and communism.”

The characters in the book push back against this restriction of thought, and the book itself teaches to think for yourself and stand up for what you believe in.

What I’ve learned about different kinds of African music

tldr my recommendations are Zamrock, Zimbabwean mbira music, Afrobeat, and Sauti Sol. Of those, Sauti Sol is the catchiest and most approachable

—

My New Year’s Resolution for 2021 was to make it so that 1/3 of the music I listened to (as measured by last.fm which tracks Spotify listens) should be by African artists. It’s now mid-December, I’m on track to hit my goal, and I thought it would be interesting to track what I’ve learned so far.

Instead of having like a full coherent narrative for this post, I’ve decided to just slice up some of my learnings and opinions in different sections.

High level observations about music in Africa:

• Kenyans (and most Africans, from what I gather) tend to listen to a lot of music from all over Africa, most of which is in languages they don’t know. As one Kenyan guy said when a group of Kenyans were singing a Lingala (DRC) song “We know all the words and don’t know what a damn thing means”

• There are a few countries that seem to be musically closed off though. From what I’ve heard, specifically Angola and Ethiopia tend to be happy with their own music and listen to relatively little foreign music (African or otherwise)

• Reggae is super popular, so much so that I decided to expand my New Year’s Resolution to be that 1/3 of the music I listen to should be African or Jamaican (since the goal was to immerse myself in African art, and reggae is such an important art in Africa)

• Everyone loves ABBA. The same Kenyan guy as above said “you can play ABBA in any club in the world and people will start dancing”

Luke’s Top 10 favorite artists

1. Stella Chiweshe - my favorite performer of Zimbabwean mbira music, which is my favorite genre I’ve discovered this year. The mbira sounds a little like a glockenspiel or a marimba, and sounds incredibly soothing. And when you have a bunch of mbiras going at once, it creates super interesting rhythms and melody lines. Huvhimi (YouTube) and Uchiseka (YouTube) are both great songs. I’m hoping to go to Zimbabwe sometime in the next year to see this kind of music performed live.

2. Sauti Sol - the biggest and best band from Kenya. Everyone knows them. They just make great pop songs, lots of them sung largely in English, so very approachable. Start with Suzanna (YouTube) and Melanin (YouTube)

3. Fela Kuti - maybe the most famous African musician of all time, he’s just really good. Basically invented Afrobeat in the 70s (sort of Nigerian jazz/funk), very influential on people like Talking Heads and Brian Eno. I love Water Get No Enemy (YouTube) and Everything Scatter (YouTube) but you can’t go wrong with him.

4. Msafiri Zawose - Tanzanian bandleader makes largely instrumental music that mixes Gogo instruments with electronic production. Really cool textures. Kind of stereotypically what I would have imagined “arty African music” to sound like before coming here. Uhamiaji is one of my favorite African albums (Spotify) (YouTube). Have not met anyone here who listens to him - recommended by a friend from Iowa

5. Soliman Gamil - traditional Egyptian instrumental musician. Great melody and great textures. If the opening notes of Melody Of Nile (YouTube) don’t get you excited then I can’t help you. Sufi Dialogue (YouTube) mixes Arab and Indian instruments and rules. Don’t know anyone who listens to him

6. Francis Bebey - psychedelic and electronic music from 70s and 80s Cameroon. He makes two main kinds of music I like: The hypnotic rhythm of Psychedelic Sanza using electric bass, and the mbira-like sansa. And there’s the fun, almost corny electronic side of African Electronic Music (it’s nice how straightforward his album names are). He has way more music that I haven’t touched yet. Haven’t met anyone who knows of him except Win Butler. For songs try Sanza nocturne (YouTube) and The Coffee Cola Song (YouTube)

7. Maia & the Big Sky - Kenyan funk/rock/R&B band. Very approachable from an American perspective - lots is sung in English. Pawa (YouTube music video) is great and Lola (YouTube music video) is my favorite.

8. Bonga - one of the biggest musicians in Angola, recommended by my Angolan friend. Very Portuguese influenced - to me it sounds a lot like Bossa Nova. Mona Ki Ngi Xica (YouTube) and Kubangela (YouTube) are good

9. Ike Slimster - Nigerian musician living in New York who makes ambient music. Reminds me a lot of Four Tet. Good background music for working (don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment - I love furniture music). MAASAI (YouTube) is a cool song (remixed traditional Maasai music. Also has a similar remix of Somali aunties singing), and EVERYTHING IS FINE is a fine album

10. Toure Kunda - Senegalese band, have a cool mix of funk and more “traditional”-sounding music. Amadou Tilo (YouTube) sounds like the desert. Samala (YouTube) is more reggae-inspired. I just found them online, don’t know anyone else who listens to them

Honorable mention for Zamrock, an artist not a genre. Kids in Zambia in the 70s listened to Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and the Rolling Stones, combined it with traditional rhythms and made fuzzy psychedelic rock and roll. A few songs are I’ve Been Losing by Chrissy Zebby Tembo and Ngozi Family (YouTube), Poverty by Cosmos Zani (YouTube), Sheebeen Queen by Musi-O-Tunya (YouTube)

Afrobeats and Congolese Rhumba (two genres the kids actually listen to):

If you want to know some African music that might be socially relevant in the US, Afrobeats is the place to go. It’s somewhat of a catchall term for “Nigerian-inspired African pop music” but most typically refers to chill, sparse, rhythmic hip hop (as far as I can tell). (Not to be confused with Afrobeat - older funkier Fela Kuti-style Nigerian music.) The biggest artists here are some of the biggest African artists generally: WizKid, Burna Boy, Omah Lay. WizKid and Burna Boy have both collaborated with huge Western artists (Drake and Beyonce for Wizkid, Chris Martin and Ed Sheeran for Burna Boy, Justin Bieber for both). You’ve probably heard Afrobeats inspired music in Drake’s One Dance which features WizKid.

Congolese Rhumba, usually called just Rhumba or Lingala in Kenya is super popular, guitar-driven dancing music from the Congo. Seems to be really popular all over Africa. I don’t listen that much, but Ultimatum (YouTube) is a pretty typical song, and Waah! (YouTube) is very popular.

Church music:

Even in English-language Catholic Masses, the songs are sill almost always in Swahili. Drum machines feature prominently - after the priest finishes saying a prayer, you’ll hear the “dum, ch, du-dum” of the drum machine kick in and know it’s about time for you to sing. There’s almost always a full choir, lots of clapping and swaying, an electric organ, and sometimes other percussion as well

—

1. Or don’t

Understanding why Kenyan Uber is different from US Uber

As a follow up to my post from a few weeks ago, I want to examine in detail what factors make taking an Uber in Kenya more frustrating than it is in the US.

I’m devoting two posts to this not because this affects my life very much, but because I find it an interesting case study in how behavior that seems driven by incompetence is actually driven by poorly designed systems and incentives that are hard to see at first.

More bluntly, understanding how this all works helps move me from bad stereotypes like “Agh! These Kenyan Uber drivers are so bad at their job!” to “Uber doesn’t work the way it does in the US because drivers face different pressures than US drivers like capital constraints and less reliable maps.

And of course, sometimes people are just bad at their jobs.

Pain points

1. Driver calls the customer to ask where their pickup and drop-off locations are

Drivers call about where you are, which can be annoying because you want to yell “I’m at the PIN - that’s the whole reason Uber has a map.” As far as I can tell there are three main reasons for this 1) Sometimes the drivers aren’t good at reason the map. As one Uber driver who was kind enough to let me interrogate him about this told me “some of these old guys aren’t used to reading these maps.” 2) sometimes the Uber map display is actually wrong (1) so the drivers don’t trust it.

Calling to ask the drop-off location is more understandable. Towards the end of a shift, a driver wants a ride that will take them close to home, so will cancel if you’re heading the opposite direction. This is especially prominent when there is a curfew that the driver needs to beat to get home.

2. Driver asks customer to cancel the ride rather than doing it themselves

If a driver cancels over 15% of their rides, they are in danger of being kicked of Uber. There is no penalty for a rider to cancel a ride though, so the driver asks the rider to cancel.

This issue is totally Uber’s fault. The company doesn’t seem to realize that having the 15% limit doesn’t mean that drivers pick up customers more often - it just means that drivers ask riders to cancel instead which is more frustrating.

3. On Uber’s map, sometimes it appears that car is idling rather than coming closer

It could be that the driver has actually stopped - either for gas or to get food or for other reasons that I don’t understand. I think part of this is also due to Kenya having a “flexible-time” culture, where - according to Erin Meyer in The Culture Map: “Many things are dealt with at once and interruptions accepted”, as opposed to the US where interruptions like a driver stopping before picking you up without explanation would be seen as less acceptable.

Sometimes it’s also because the Uber map is malfunctioning, or because the driver has turned off data on their phone to save their limited data bundle.

4. Driver does not follow the map route and either asks customer, or takes another route which sometimes adds time

Sometimes the maps are wrong, sometimes the suggested route actually takes you through a bunch of traffic. So the drivers, rightfully, are less likely to trust the map than drivers do in the US. And just like people everywhere, sometimes the driver thinks he knows a shortcut that actually takes you through 3 back alleys, 2 dead ends, and a 5-minute total standstill on Waiyaki Way (2).

5. Driver sometimes stops for gas during the trip

Drivers don’t typically have the working capital to fill up their car to the max at the start of the day, so have to fill up in small increments throughout the day as they make money. If they’re doing trips back to back to back, they don’t really have an option other than to fill up while a rider is in the car.

It’s also likely driven by the “flexible-time” culture of Kenya, as explained in 3 above.

6. Drivers give lower ratings than drivers in the US

Uber riders from the US generally get lower ratings from their drivers in Kenya than they do in the US. Part of this is driven by payment type: If you pay by card rather than cash, you may get a lower rating as a rider. Drivers prefer getting paid by cash because they don’t have much working capital, and payments by card are only disbursed to them at the end of the week (3).

It also seems like Uber drivers in Kenya just give lower ratings in general in the US: In the US 5 stars means “good” and anything lower means “bad”. Kenyan drivers seem to think that 4 stars isn’t quite so bad. This is Uber’s fault for not having clear ratings standards worldwide (4).

Takeaways

• It’s easy to assume people are incompetent when in fact they face pressures that you don’t realize

• It’s your responsibility as a company (like Uber) to design your system in a way that takes into account the difficulties faced by your contractors (drivers) and customers (riders) so that you don’t put undue pressure on your contractors and have a bad experience for your customers

• People sometimes complain about technology and the modern American world making all of our interactions transactional rather than personal. I’ve realized that often I want interactions to be transactional and technology-mediated. Calling an Uber in Nairobi involved more personal interaction than in the US, but this is not good, life-affirming personal interaction. I would much rather the act of reserving a car and giving directions be done by technology

Conclusion

All that said, I went to Rwanda recently which doesn’t have Uber and where my friends and I had to find taxis, negotiate prices, navigate a language barrier, and try to give directions using Google maps.

Comparatively, getting around Nairobi is a piece of cake.

Endnotes

1. For example, when I drop a pin for my favorite kibanda, the location shows as “Safaricom office” which is 400 meters away across the highway. Roads are also often labelled incorrectly

2. In my 10 months in Nairobi, taking probably on average ~8 ubers a week, I have had <5 women drivers

3. I think it’s weekly - could be monthly. In any case, it’s not immediate. As one driver, Harrison, told me: “sometimes you don’t have any food in the house in the morning, so you do a few rides, and then send money home so they can get breakfast.” You can’t do that if your first few riders only paid by card

4. Anecdotally, this is a problem when you go back to the US (probably other countries too) because drivers see you have a low score by American standards and then don’t want to give you rides

Tenet rules

There’s a scene in the movie Tenet, where a scientist is explaining the (ridiculous) premise of the movie - reverse entropy. To demonstrate how it works, she plays a video of a reverse-entropy bullet (a bullet moving “backwards through time”) in reverse. In the reversed video, the reversed bullet looks normal.

In my freshman year college electromagnetism class the professor went a little outside the curriculum to teach us Noether’s Theorem (One of The Deepest and Most Beautiful Theorems in All of Physics) (1). I won’t bore you with the depth and beauty of the theorem here. All that’s relevant is this: He used the idea of a video playing backwards and forwards as a way to help us build our intuition about this deep and important physics theorem (2).

So I get excited when Christopher Nolan uses that same imagery to explain the silly rules of the world in Tenet.

For me this is an example of Nolan infusing the rules of the universe with emotional resonance. I think his movies often work better at achieving emotional impact with their rules than with their inter-character relationships.

The rules of a movie govern what the characters are and are not allowed to do. Sometimes these rules can be the same as laws of nature (relativity in Interstellar) but more often they are fun ideas for rules that are only loosely based on real-life (short-term memory loss in Memento, dream rules in Inception, reverse entropy in Tenet) (3).

Nolan uses the form of his movies to put us in the same position as his characters with respect to the rules of the movie. We are dropped into scenes in Inception without knowing how we got there, then learn they are dreams at the same time as the characters. If you see Interstellar on a big screen you are dwarfed by the enormity and silence of space. We watch Memento backwards, so we feel what it’s like to have to re-orient to each new scene. 

All of this means that when you watch a spinning top, or a spaceship takeoff delayed by 10 minutes, or someone taking all the pens and paper in a room, it hits you on an emotional level (4).

Nolan’s movies can sometimes be cold. But the rules we are governed by in real life - the strict passionless - laws of nature, are also cold (5). But those laws can still inspire strong feelings. And my guess is that the more you care about rules in real life - the more you get excited or awed by things like physics, math, and logic - the more Nolan’s movies work for you.

Or it could be just that I like videos playing backwards and forwards.


—

1. I have never heard a professor introduce Noether’s Theorem without immediately afterwards making sure we understand that it is One of The Deepest and Most Beautiful Theorems in All of Physics

2. The intuitive way to tell whether a system is losing energy is to think: “If I watched a video of this playing backwards, would I be able to tell if it was going backwards or forwards?” If the answer is “no” (as in a pendulum that swings back and forth without losing amplitude) then the system is not losing energy. If the answer is “yes” (as in a pendulum that swings back and forth with smaller and smaller arcs until it stops swinging) then you know the system is losing energy and contributing to entropy

   Also this professor, Alan Adams, was one of the coolest guys I’ve ever met and if you’ve ever been interested in quantum mechanics and have 74 minutes to kill you should watch his lecture here

3. Dunkirk isn’t quite as rules-focused, but is still about the cruelty of time marching ever forwards. The Prestige follows the not-quite-so-hard-and-fast rules of magic tricks. Following, Insomnia, and the Batman movies aren’t really so rules-focused and don’t really fit the pattern I’m talking about here

4. “You” being a word which here means “me, and anyone else who feels similarly to how I do when watching these movies”

5. They can’t be reasoned or bargained with

—

Addendum (6 December 2021): The Author Cixin Liu also excels at imbuing natural laws with emotional resonance (from The New Yorker via Applied Divinity Studies):

“Liu had an epiphany about the concept of a light-year—the “terrifying distance” and “bone-chilling vastness” it implied. Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional.””

While I’m quoting, I ran across an essay on science fiction films by Susan Sontag. This part jumped out to me in relation to what I wrote above. She is talking here about the morality of technology rather than of “laws of the universe”. But the interest in focusing the emotional weight of the story as outside the characters is common with Nolan and Liu. And maybe the fact that Nolan and Liu shift the focus from technology to the very fabric of reality itself is what makes them interesting within the realm of sci-fi and sci-fi-adjacent narrative.

“Science fiction films invite a dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violence—a technological view. Things, objects, machinery play a major role in these films. A greater range of ethical values is embodied in the décor of these films than in the people. Things, rather than the helpless humans, are the locus of values because we experience them, rather than people, as the sources of power. According to science fiction films, man is naked without his artifacts. They stand for different values, they are potent, they are what gets destroyed, and they are the indispensable tools for the repulse of the alien invaders or the repair of the damaged environment.”

Learning from frustrating Uber trips in Nairobi

In this post I’ll talk about how Ubering in Nairobi taught me to get off my high horse and be a little more understanding of stereotyping and complaining.

I tend to be very suspicious when anyone makes general statements about groups of people, especially negative statements like “people from Iowa don’t believe in COVID”.

I also tend to dislike when people complain about first world problems like “ugh, it’s such a hassle to ship Amazon to Nairobi”.

So it has been very humbling on both of those fronts to move to Nairobi and be very frustrated by interacting with drivers on Uber.

Here’s an example of a typical interaction with an Uber driver on a Friday night in Nairobi (during the period of time when we had a 10pm curfew):

• 9:20pm: Summon an Uber at 9:20, get matched with a car

• 9:25pm: Get a call from the Uber driver

  • You: “Hi, how are you?”

  • Uber driver: “I’m good. Where are you?”

  • You: “I’m at Jambo Mzungu restaurant in Westlands.”

  • Uber driver: “Westlands ok. Where are you going?”

  • You: “Junction Mall.”

  • Uber driver: “Ah that’s too far, I’m going in the other direction. Can you cancel?”

  • You: “Can you please come? I need to get home?”

  • Uber driver: “I can’t come, can you cancel please?”

  • You: “Fine. Why don’t you cancel since you can’t come?”

  • Uber driver: “I can’t cancel and I can’t come. Can you please cancel?”

• 9:27: Depending on how stubborn you are, a back and forth ensues regarding who should cancel the ride. You never end up winning the argument, so eventually you cancel and summon an Uber again.

• 9:29: Get a call from the second Uber driver

  • You: “Hi, I’m at  Jambo Mzungu restaurant in Westlands, can you come?

  • Uber driver: “Where are you?”

  • You: “It’s in Westlands, on Muthithi street. Can you follow the pin on the map?”

  • Uber driver: “Where?”

  • You: “It’s near Shell on Muthithi street.”

  • Uber driver: “What are you nearby?”

  • You: “It’s near Westpark towers. It’s right at the pin on the map.”

  • Uber driver: “Ok. Where are you going?”

  • You: “An apartment near Junction Mall.”

  • Uber driver: “Ok I’m coming.”

• 9:34: The car on the map has not moved at all in the last 5 minutes. You call the Uber driver again but get no answer.

• 9:35: You cancel that ride and call another. You call the third Uber driver directly, worried that you won’t make it home before curfew

  • Uber driver: “Hi how are you?”

  • You: “I’m good how are you?”

  • Uber driver: “I’m fine. Where are you?”

  • You (having learned your lesson about what the most relevant landmark near you is): “I’m at Jambo Mzungu restaurant in Westlands, near Westpark towers. I’m going to Junction Mall. Can you please come?”

  • Uber driver: “Ah I am very far away.”

  • You: “I think your the closest car or else Uber wouldn’t have matched us. Can you come?”

  • Uber driver: “I’m 2 kilometeres away.”

  • You: “That’s okay I can wait. Can you come?”

  • Uber driver: “That’s fine, I’m coming.”

• 9:40: Uber driver arrives. You get in the car.

  • You: “Hi, thanks for coming. How are you?”

  • Uber driver: “I’m fine. Where are you going?”

  • You (looking at the map and seeing that the pin for your destination shows up): “I’m going to Ziana Springs Apartment on Riara Road near Junction Mall. It’s the pin on the map.”

  • Uber driver: “Ok thank you.”

  • (You arrive at an intersection)

  • Uber driver: “Which route should I take?”

  • You (depending on your level of trust in the driver): “Just follow the map please.” or “Whichever way you think is fastest.”

• Depending on the night, the driver may stop for gas during your trip home, but eventually make it home just before or a bit after curfew

Throughout this process, I try to keep in mind that I’m incredibly lucky to be in the position to call Ubers, that it’s a miracle that the technology enabling Uber exists, etc. etc.

But the fact remains that it’s all frustrating. I think it’s particularly frustrating because I know how seamless Uber is to use in the US, where you almost never have talk to your driver before they arrive, can just expect the driver will show up and follows the map, and don’t have to worry about the driver stopping for gas during the ride.

Having frustrating experiences like this has made me appreciate two things:

1. I understand how it would be easy to form potentially harmful stereotypes about Kenyans if you regularly had annoying experiences like this without interrogating their systemic causes. Without considering factors that make life different for Kenyan Uber drivers vs US Uber drivers (e.g., drivers don’t always have mobile data, they are super cash constrained), it’s easy to think “Wow, Kenyans are just really bad at using Uber”. Or maybe the even more harmful and racist “Kenyans don’t seem that smart”

2. If you’re used to a particular level of service (e.g., Uber in the US), it’s very frustrating to expect that same level of service and not get it. The Uber app looks the same in Kenya as in the US, so I expect the process to be as seamless. Those expectations aren’t met, which leads to frustration.

I should say that I’ve been able to adjust my expectations for Uber now, and don’t often get very frustrated anymore. I’ll probably do a follow up post where I look more deeply at the pain points in a Nairobi Uber trip.

Nuclear power and cross-disciplinarity

Here’s an excerpt from the book Why Nuclear Power Has Been A Flop by Jack Devaney:

When we tried to make the argument for balanced limits to a group of Indonesian nuclear regulators, one member of the group had the honesty to stand up and say ‘I don't care what the problems with coal are. I'm a nuclear regulator. My job is to make nuclear as safe as possible.’ And under the instructions and incentives that he has been given, he's right. Unless these instructions and incentives are changed, horribly unbalanced regulation will continue to be the norm.

This crystalized an insight for me about the importance of thinking at a system level, and cross-disciplinarity.

• If your job incentivizes you to focus on a certain domain (in this case, safety of nuclear energy), then you will focus on doing that thing. 

• You will not focus on how, in the big picture, to achieve the theoretical goal of your work (in this case, safe and reliable electricity production). 

• But your work and theoretical goal are closely connected to work in other domains (in this case, making it difficult to build nuclear plants makes it relatively easier to build coal plants, which kills people)

• Unless someone is explicitly given the job of making trade-offs across domains, nobody will spend much time on it and we will not make the right trade-offs to achieve our goals (they also of course need the authority to ensure their evaluations enact change)

Here’s a running list of examples of where this sort of cross-domain thinking is missing. I’ll add more as I come across them. Let me know if you have additions!

• Energy regulation: tradeoffs between nuclear, coal, solar, etc.

• Pandemic response: Spending resources procuring vaccines vs. enforcing costly lockdowns

• Carbon emissions (management consulting): In management consulting, tradeoffs between doing projects helping oil companies extract oil more efficiently, and spending money on carbon offsets

We can debate what the right tradeoff is on all these issues. But my point is that it doesn’t even seem like anyone in a position of power is responsible for thinking at a system level about how actions in one area affect the other.

Who is responsible and has the authority for making these trade-offs across different highly technical domains of knowledge and expertise? Who is John Galt?

What I learned biking from the equator to Ethiopia

Last week, I went on a group bike ride from Nanyuki Kenya to Moyale Ethiopia. The route was ~590 km over 5 days, on highway A2 the entire way. Here are the biggest things I learned!

The group was mostly Kenyan, and I was only slightly more a tourist than some of they were in the north of Kenya and at the Ethiopian border. Most had never been to the area,

Relatedly, the group seemed just as affected by the extreme poverty of the areas we were in as I was. And at one point, one of the Kenyans mentioned that people in rural areas often drink unsensitized river water, but they never get sick from it (in reality people get cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, etc. from unsanitary water all the time). Living in a poor country does not mean you understand the effects of poverty, but I still have an instinctive expectation that the average middle-class Kenyan is familiar with and understands extreme poverty way better than me. I don’t think this is true.

I want to be able to flit between languages the way they did someday. It’s mesmerizing to hear people switch back and forth between English and Swahili, sometimes speaking English but throwing in a Swahili word for emphasis or comedic effect (or vice versa) (1). Everyone was very charitable to my constant asking “what does that word mean”. But I was not the only one learning, because they were constantly teaching each other words in their respective tribal languages. Some of my favorite things I heard / learned:

• “I wasn’t finya-ing” = “I wasn’t trying too hard” (“finya” means “press” in Swahili)

• “Subhanallah” = literally “Praise be to God” in Arabic, said in the presence of great wonder and beauty. We all learned this one together from an Arabic-speaker, and overused it

• “Riswa” is what you say to a dust storm to banish the devil within it, in the Luhya tribal language

• “Supu hii ni nani?” literally means “this soup is who?” which was described to me as a “very broken swahili” way of asking “what kind of soup is this?”

In the north of Kenya their milk is mostly from camels. They cook it by smoking (I think to disinfect it), and the smokey flavor makes it impossible for me to tell if camel milk itself tastes different from cow milk.

For anyone doubting, I can confirm that riding in a peloton is indeed, way more efficient.

There was a really cool cosmopolitanism among the group, that’s unlike anything I’ve seen in the US. The knowledge of many languages is part of it, but there was also a level of knowledge about world affairs, regional politics, many cultures, and a curiosity to learn more. And all of this without any sense of pretension.

Large avocados were described as “they looked as if they’d been to private school”

Anecdotally heard from a fellow biker: Kenya is known throughout the world as the home of many great marathon runners. Nowadays most of these runners come from the Kalenjin tribe. But this was not always so! It used to be that the Kikuyu tribe produced better runners. But the Kalenjin established a system where champion Kalenjin runners would return home to train the next batch of runners. And now the Kalenjins dominate the Kenyan marathon scene (2016 and 2020 men’s Olympic marathon champion, Eliud Kipchoge, is Kalenjin). Which illustrates that genetic predisposition and hard work are not enough: Building a culture of excellence is needed to achieve world-class results consistently on an institutional level.

This power line followed us for 100km, looming on the horizon and stretching out to infinity:

1. This is different from “sheng” (the Nairobi street slang) in my understanding. Sheng is more than just mixing English and Swahili

A boy and girl transcend reality by falling with style

I’ve noticed a trope that shows up in a few anime movies that I haven’t heard people talk about much. I’ve tried to find writing online about it, but haven’t found much (1). So despite knowing relatively little about anime or Japanese culture generally, I figured I would give a shot at documenting this.

The trope is falling as a representation of transcending reality.

In its strong version the trope takes the following form: Towards the end of a movie, the a shift is made into a suspension of physical reality as a boy and girl fall/fly through the air and have a moment of emotional catharsis. This happens in the following four movies (sorry for the poor quality video links):

• Spirited Away

• The Tale of Princess Kaguya

• Mirai

• Weathering with You

I find it curious that all four of these movies have such visually similar scenes, serving fairly similar functions in their movies (a boy and a girl are forging some connection while falling/flying, romantic or otherwise) (2).

What accounts for it?

One potential explanation: These scenes in Tale of Princess Kaguya, Mirai, and Weathering with You are all paying homage to Spirited Away, which was made first, is extremely influential, and has probably the most memorable falling-as-catharsis scene.

Another factor could be that there tendency in Japanese anime to depict characters crossing a bridge into non-reality in order to achieve an emotional effect. Perhaps falling is just a very visually striking and emotionally-resonant way of showing this transcendence (3). It’s possible that the reason this seems to show up more in anime than in American animation is because of a sense in Japanese culture that the barrier between the physical and spiritual world is pretty permeable. I’m really talking out of my depth here, but this would match with what the Japanese author Haruki Murakami says about leaving the physical world:

“I can’t always see the borderline between the unreal world and the realistic world…In Japan, I think that other world is very close to our real life, and if we decide to go to the other side it’s not so difficult. I get the impression that in the Western world it isn’t so easy to go to the other side; you have to go through some trials to get to the other world. But, in Japan, if you want to go there, you go there.”

If I think of American animated movies that have falling-through-the-sky scenes, the only one that has a similar sort of scene as the above four movies is Toy Story, where Buzz and Woody fall with style in a huge emotional payoff, but without the same sense of moving into an unreal world (4).

I don’t have the stats to prove that this type of thing happens more often in Japanese animated movies than others, but I do think it’s a very interesting pattern that at least these four movies share. There may some combination of Japanese culture and the medium of animation that leads to boys and girls falling being a recurring image. Or maybe they’re all just ripping of Pixar.

—

1. There are YouTube compilations of anime characters falling (mostly in TV shows - an area I am totally ignorant of), but they don’t give explanations for why this is a thing. It’s possible the reason for this being a trope is just super common knowledge among anime fans and I’m just out of the loop

2. A more general type of transcendent flying happens in a lot of Hayao Miyazaki movies: Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Howl’s Moving Castle, The Wind Rises, and the Miyazaki-written Whisper of the Heart all have important falling/flying scenes. But they don’t exactly fit the model described above, and it’s hard to count a bunch of movies by one creator as evidence for a general trend in anime: Miyazaki just likes flying.

3. Credit to a friend from whom I largely copied this explanation

4. I mean we don’t move into any more of an unreal world than the one we’ve been in all movie where toys are alive and immortal and children are cruel gods

Which occupations should we hold in higher prestige?

As I’ve been thinking about what job I might want to do next, I’ve been thinking about the different levels of prestige that society (1) gives to different occupations. What will my friends / enemies / society think of me if I take this job? Will I seem like I am achieving below my potential? Or will they think “wow he must be important if he has that job!”?

Maybe if we were ideal people we wouldn’t care about prestige. But as it is, prestige can be useful. It’s one of the ways that society conveys to us what societal roles are important. But sometimes a given role (public school teacher) doesn’t have the appropriate prestige given how important we think the role is in society (very).

This matters because jobs that have high prestige are more likely to attract more highly-motivated and highly-skilled people - all other things equal. Why do lots of people want to become professors at elite schools? It’s not the pay, or the work-life balance. Prestige plays a large part in it.

So as a society (2) we should constantly evaluate how much prestige we give to certain jobs. If we see that talented and hardworking  people are going into jobs in numbers that are too high relative to how important that job is for society, that’s an indication that the job likely has too much prestige, and we should lower it (3).

So! Here are my off-the-cuff thoughts on which positions in society have too much, too little, or the right amount of prestige (4). Of course prestige is different among different groups of people, but I’m trying to generalize across “American society.” I’m shooting from the hip here, so if you think differently on any of these, let me know and I apologize for any stray bullets

Positions where the level of prestige should be lowered:

• Consultants

• Investment bankers

• Lawyers (excluding public defenders)

• Most jobs at most large NGOs

• Working at a startup in Africa founded by ex-Consultants

• Startup founder (in Silicon Valley)

• Anyone who has any of the following words in their job title: “quantum”, “partner”

Positions where the level of prestige should be raised:

• Public school teacher: Despite lots of people saying teachers should be valued more, most people don’t actually value them highly enough. Including the people who say they should be valued more. Probably including me

• Startup founder (outside Silicon Valley)

• Non-academic basic research position (e.g., at national labs)

• Inventors

• Stay-at-home parents

• Anyone who has any of the following words in their job title: “nuclear”, “social”, “child”

Positions with roughly the right amount of prestige

• Medical professionals

• University professors

• PhD students in STEM

• Parents (in general)

• Engineers

• Magicians of course. They live their act

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Addendums from 9 August 2021: Based on input from others, I’ve added a clarifier to “lawyers”, added “inventors”, and removed “journalists” from “Positions where the level of prestige should be raised”. Thanks for everyone’s thoughtful input!

Journalism I think is an interesting one: While I do think it’s the case that better quality journalism would be valuable, raising the prestige of journalists is probably not the best way to do that. Too many people don’t think critically about the news they consume, so raising the prestige of journalists would likely lead people to out more blind faith in the news, which would be bad

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1. “Society” being a word which here means “the people broadly in my circles or whom I want to impress,  including but is not limited to my high school friends from Iowa, my college friends from MIT, that one Uber driver I had last year, my family, the professors I’ve had that I admire, the median person in Chicago, and that one guy who never seemed to like me so much.”

2. “Society” in this case being a word that means “the people broadly of the United States of America”

3. There are other factors here too of course, the biggest one being pay. But “society” (a word which here means See Footnote 2) doesn’t have as much say over pay - so let’s focus for now on what we can control

4. To be clear, I’m not saying that the jobs where prestige should be lowered are worthless (or that the jobs where prestige should be raised are the most important jobs). Just that society should hold these occupations in in lower (or higher) esteem than we currently do

Iowan corn and Kenyan corn

I was back home in Iowa a few weeks ago and was struck by how thickly and greenly the corn grew:

It’s hard to go for a bike ride in West Des Moines without running into at least a little corn

Compare this to Kenyan corn (we call it “maize” here):

Left: Small patch of maize parked between two buildings. Centre: Close up of maize field. Right: Part of field is devoted to other crops like soybeans

My pictures aren’t great, but I still think this visually illustrates lessons about the US vs. the Kenyan economy:

• Crop variety and risk exposure: Iowan corn is monocropped (i.e., only one crop is grown on large tracts of land), while Kenyan farmers always grow many different crops. A major factor in these decisions is ability to mitigate risk: Iowan farmers can buy insurance and sign advance sales contracts to protect themselves in the case of bad yields or price fluctuations. Kenyan farmers don’t have access to those financial instruments, and so rely to a much greater extent on hedging by planting multiple crops. If maize isn’t selling well, then maybe avocados are.

• Scale / farm size: Kenyan farms (average size: <6 acres, with most farmers having ~1 acre) are much smaller than Iowan farms (average size: 355 acres). This means Iowan farmers have more market power, are more easily able to find buyers, and pay less in unit prices for transportation, seeds, fertilizer, etc.

• Access to inputs driving yield: See how big, closely planted, and green that Iowa corn is (1)? It is GMO corn, nourished with lots of environmentally-harmful fertilizer, to be used mostly in animal feed, ethanol, and manufacturing. Kenyan corn is non-GMO (almost all GMO crops are illegal), and farmers don’t have access to as much fertilizer. US annual corn yields are ~4,000 kg/acre, while Kenyan yields are 5x lower at 800 kg / acre (2).

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1. Okay it is a little hard to tell scale in these pictures, and it is later in the season for Kenya than Iowa, but in real life the Iowa corn plants look much larger and healthier to the untrained eye (and I think to the trained eye as well)

2. Kenya bans the importation and growing GMO crops other than cotton. The policy is pretty popular among Kenyan people.

The ban leads to some frustrating situations. Kenyan manufacturers of animal feed are not able to import the cheaper, GMO-grown maize and beans that they process into feed. However, Kenyan farmers are able to import feed from other countries that was made from GMO ingredients. So it is difficult for Kenyan feed manufacturers to compete with imported feed.

Another interesting bit of collateral damage: The lack of access to GMO ingredients makes it difficult for Kenyan feed manufacturers to use futures to hedge their exposure to fluctuations in the prices of their inputs. Feed manufacturers are exposed to risk in non-GMO crop prices, while international futures markets are traded based on GMO crop prices. The GMO and non-GMO prices are not well correlated.

This is not to say that Kenya should allow for GMO crop inputs, just that the ban has unexpected ramifications.

A Trip to the Market with Stan the Mboga Man

Outdoor food stalls are one of my favorite things about Nairobi. They are my favorite places to eat and to buy groceries. There are two main types that I love:

• Kibandas: Street food restaurants, typically set up under tarps, where people cook food all day (1)

• Vegetable / fruit stands: Similarly set up under tarps, where you can buy very cheap fruit and vegetables, most commonly bananas, carrots, sukuma wiki (a kale-like leaf), mangoes (2)

I’ve gotten very curious about how these shops work from a business perspective because they are everywhere, the fresh food seems impossibly cheap (I spend probably $10 a week at the kiosks and it makes up over half of the food I eat), and because agriculture and outdoor markets are so important to Kenyan economic life (agriculture is ~25% of Kenyan GDP and employs ~40% of people).

So yesterday I asked the guy who runs my favorite vegetable stand if I could go with him to the wholesale market where he buys his food. He (let’s call him Stan) was happy to take me along, partly because he’s friendly and partly because he wants me to buy him a pickup truck and hoped that seeing how the market worked might make me more likely to do so.

I met him at 8am today (a Sunday morning) and we drove to Marikiti Market (also called Wakulima Market), a huge outdoor food market near Nairobi’s Central Business District. Here’s what I saw and learned (3):

Marikiti / Wakulimu market

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The reason Stan wants me to buy him a pickup truck is because it’s illegal for him to transport large amounts of produce in his car (a small Toyota passenger vehicle). I learned this when he told me to roll up my window on the way back from the market, so that the cops wouldn’t see the 400 pounds of vegetables in the backseat and trunk. I guess there’s some kind of rule against using a passenger vehicle for commercial purposes, but it seems like tons of shop-owners do this anyways.

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The market was full of carriers - guys who would swing enormous bags of polypropylene sacks on their backs and hustle them through the market. Stan hired a carrier who followed him around all morning, making trips back and forth to the car as Stan bought stuff. I saw this carrier - probably 5’6” and not super built - hoist 90kg (200 lbs) of watermelons onto his back and march away.

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When brokers pick up produce from farms in Kenya, or arrange for crops to be shipped in from other countries like Uganda, Tanzania, or South Africa, their first stop in Nairobi is Marikiti. So even though there are several large outdoor food markets in Nairobi (e.g., Ngara market), sellers at those markets are buying from Marikiti.

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The market was so big that there was an ecosystem of people selling just to the wholesalers: People were walking around hawking tea, snacks, bags, and sanitary wipes.

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A lot of people were pretty amused to see a white person there. I kept hearing shouts of “muzungu!” (means white person, or more generally a non-black foreign person), one guy asked me why the US has white supremacists and asked if I had seen the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery videos, and another couple guys taught me to say “A muzungu has a white stomach” in Massai, which I have unfortunately forgotten.

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A little bit on the finances of a vegetable stand

Stan’s typical markup seems to be ~20-30% on what he pays for his produce wholesale, and his daily revenue has dropped by ~60% due to COVID. He said that before the pandemic, on a typical day he would sell ~$180 of produce, for which he paid ~$150. But he’s located in a business area, so has seen way less business due to people working from home, and now he only makes ~$80 in net revenue a day.

Stan also pays ~$50 a year to the government for a license to run his shop.

Footnote 5 has additional finance and food quantity information for the curious (5).

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Overall this was super interesting, and I’m going to start asking people if I can tag along as they go about their work more often. I got to see and understand a part of Nairobi and the Kenyan economy I never would have gotten to see otherwise.

Feat. the intransigent avocado seller

1. You can buy chapatis (an Indian flatbread), ugali (a maize-meal dish found all over Africa but called different things in each place), mandazi (basically fried dough), nyama choma (grilled meat), stir-fried beans and vegetables, etc (1). A meal usually costs around $1.50, but I did get food poisoning once from the stir-fried sukuma-wiki, so you have to be careful!

Apparently other Africans make fun of Kenyan cuisine for being pretty bland and unoriginal: Their three biggest foods are, respectively, from India (chapati), not unique to Kenya (ugali), and just cooked chicken or lamb (nyama choma)

2. Women who run these stands are called “Mama Mbogas” (mboga = vegetable)

There are other types of outdoor food options too that aren’t quite as fun but are still cool:

• Food carts: Mostly selling sausages

• Kiosks: Huts that have doors and counters, often sponsored by wireless networks (Safaricom or Airtel) where you can buy bottled water, processed snacks, and extra cellular data

• Other small tables on the roadside selling packaged peanuts, crackers, and small toys

3. The source for most of these facts is Stan, and neither his English nor my Swahili is perfect (4) so some things may have been lost in translation

4. My Swahili is practically nonexistent

5. Here’s what Stan bought, including quantity, wholesale price he paid at Marikiti, and what the price he plans to re-sell at (where I was able to get the info). All the prices were in Kenyan shillings, but I translated to USD (it’s about 1 shilling to US $0.01)

• Peas: Bought 1 grocery bag full

• Beets: Bought ~10, for $0.40 each, will sell for $0.50 

• Avocados: Bought 60 large for $0.50 each, will sell for $0.60

  • normally he buys for $0.40 and sells for $0.50 but the wholesaler was stubborn and the avocados were big so Stan thinks he can get away with selling them for $0.60 this week

• Watermelons: Bought 91kg

• Passionfruit: Bought one grocery bag full for $1.40 per kg

• Limes: Bought one grocery bag full for $1.20 per kg

• Pineapples: Bought ~20 large for $1.50 each, will sell for $1.80-$2.00 each

• Papaya (this is where things get wild):

  • Bought 10 Ugandan papayas for ~$1.50 each

  • Bought ~8 Kenyan papayas for ~$2-3 each

  • Apparently Kenyan papayas are sweeter and better than Ugandan papayas

  • He doesn’t directly sell papayas - instead he slices them up and sells them along with watermelon, avocado, pineapple, passionfruit, bananas, and beets in plastic mixed-fruit containers that are really good and $1 each

• He also bought potatoes, mangoes, ginger, and some coconut

• He didn’t buy any oranges but apparently those are flown in by airplane from South Africa

How Many Lives Could You Save by Fixing Potholes in Zanzibar?

Last weekend I was in Zanzibar, riding in a taxi through a rural part of the island, and noticed that there were a lot of potholes. I remembered a study overview I had read that showed that reducing the number of cars idling on a road has significant positive health impacts on the people who live nearby (1).

This made me think: Paving over these potholes would allow cars to travel faster on this road, which would reduce the pollution exposure of people living nearby. I wondered if it would be cost-effective for a charity to pave these potholes, in order to improve the health of people living nearby (not even counting the other benefits of having well-functioning roads).

I decided to do a back-of-the-envelop calculation to answer the question: Would it be cost-effective, purely from the standpoint of reducing low-birth-weight births via pollution reduction, for a charity to take on the task of paving these potholes?

In short, the answer is probably no - it would not be cost-effective. I think it’s still worth sharing my process, because I think this practice of doing these types of calculations is a good habit, and because knowledge about what health interventions don’t work can still be valuable (2).

Here’s an overview of my calculation (detailed calculation at the Google Sheets worksheet here if you’re super interested):

• $500 to fix 1km of road’s potholes, based on cost to fix a pothole in the US and assuming 10 potholes per km

• 1 low birth weight eliminated per 10km of road patched, based on the birth rate and population density of Zanzibar, plus some wild assumptions about the equivalence of Zanzibarian Potholes to Pennsylvanian EZ Pass systems

• 7 years of life saved per low birth weight eliminated based on a study from Mozambique

So if we count a “life saved” if we save 57 years of life (57 being the life expectancy in Zanzibar), that gives us an estimated cost per life saved of ~$40k ($50k = $500 x 10 x 57 / 7).

This is not great compared to  the most effective charities (charity evaluator GiveWell estimates it costs $2k-$3k to save a life by distributing anti-malarial bednets). But my estimate was very rough - maybe fixing potholes is way cheaper in Zanzibar than in the US. And I only estimated lives saved due to low birth weight deaths - reducing pollution also has health benefits to people other than newborns that I’m not taking into account. On the other hand, maybe there’s way less traffic in Zanzibar than in Pennsylvania, so that pollution reduction effect is way lower than I estimated.

Another consideration is that maybe fixing potholes isn’t the kind of thing a charitable organization should get into - local governments should fix potholes and if a charity came in it would create a harmful cycle of dependency.

In any case, the potholes should probably be filled, even if the cost can’t be justified purely on the terms of reducing low-weight births. And the case isn’t totally closed against fixing potholes as a charitable opportunity. It may be worth a deeper dive more if you run an asphalt company and are interested in social impact, or if you’re just someone else who is bored some weeknight.

1. The study overview is only three pages and worth reading if you don’t often think about how harmful pollution is. The main takeaway is this: EZ-pass toll booths were installed on expressways in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. This meant that cars did not slow down and idle near the toll station. This reduced the amount of exhaust pollution that pregnant mothers who lived within 1km of the toll station were exposed to, which improved their health and caused the number of low-weight births to fall by 9%.

2. We all know what Edison said about lightbulbs or something