Been a busy last few months and couldn’t update! Here are a few links I’ve read recently that I’ve liked or found thought-provoking:
It's possible that there's a large cohort of people who define themselves by what they do with their time, but who also have interests that aren't very lucrative. Of course these people will feel alienated! There are people right now who are miserable at work because they'd much rather be hiking, playing video games, getting into Wikipedia edit wars, etc. That doesn't make their jobs fake. It just makes them jobs, i.e. the kind of thing you have to do for money because the things that you enjoy doing get done for free. That's not some kind of social catastrophe, just a reflection of the fact that the modern economy has many goods and services that are more tempting than living a life of the mind while eating rice and beans in an apartment you share with roommates in a not-especially-great neighborhood. The way most people seem to resolve this is some combination of satisficing on money and then optimizing for meaning (i.e. find the most inspiring or least time-consuming job you can that hits some required income threshold) or optimize for income and expect consumption to offset the cost of not really enjoying the job. If you happen to genuinely enjoy something that pays very well, you don't have this problem, but most people are not so lucky.
. . .
And: some of these jobs may be fake, or fake-ish. Some may be the result of corporate empire-building, or might exist to help create and sell products that customers would be better-off not buying. That's always a valid suspicion! But it's also valid to ask: when you encounter other people's behavior, and find it surprising, is it more likely that you noticed something, with only a few moments of thought, they've missed for their entire career? Or that they've figured out something you don't understand after years of work? Do they happen to have preferences that you don't share? (There are plenty of products that I don't think people should consume, but the more products make you feel that way, the worse off you'd be in a system where all this stuff is up for a vote—put it up to a plebiscite, and history books will lose to sitcoms every time.)
More on money, with this awesome link to this 1996 paper about the evolution of friendship, which looks at “the problem of altruism” through an adaptationist lens.
Money is not about stuff. It’s about two things: status and coldness.
On status:
Once we recognize this fact, many of the puzzles disappear. Why is “poverty” relative to the people around us and not absolute? Because “status” is relative to the people around us and not absolute. Why does money make things win-lose? Because status is win-lose. Why is the desire for money insatiable and never-ending? Because the desire for status is insatiable and never-ending. Why is “greed” icky? Because overt status-seeking is icky. Why did poverty make poor countries feel bad in the 70s and 80s but not the 50s and 60s? Because in between, TV became a thing, and poorer countries could see on TV that they were lower status than richer countries. Why do liberals and conservatives have such inconsistent beliefs about who deserves money? Because they’ve formed political alliances with different groups, and they want to raise the status of their allies—and lower the status of their rivals—which is basically what politics is all about. Why do we want to redistribute wealth to poor Americans instead of poor Burundians? Because we’re more interested in giving status to our political allies than stuff to the people who need it most.
On coldness:
Once we recognize all this, more puzzles disappear. Why do we bring wine and not money to dinner parties? Because giving the host money implies “explicit contingent exchange” and signals you’re not the host’s friend. The wine, on the other hand, is interpreted as a gift or an accessory to the meal, which means you’re a friend. Why do we give people gift cards but not money? Because we’re lazy and want to avoid thinking about the gift, but we also don’t want to give cash and signal “explicit contingent exchange,” so we settle on gift cards as the laziest kind of non-frigid gift. Why do we see kids trading candy as good for both kids but Hershey selling candy as good for them and bad for you? Because kids who trade candy are usually friends, but Hershey is a cold, “greedy” profit-seeker who doesn’t truly care about you—so you must have got suckered. Why is it okay to have sex after enjoying a fancy meal but not after receiving a handful of cash? Because the person who buys you a fancy meal is warmly showing they care about you, whereas the person who hands you cash is coldly showing you’re a commodity. And hostility to people who have “casual” sex outside the context of warm, committed relationships—i.e., “promiscuous” people—lies at the heart of social conservatism (1, 2, 3).
A few pieces by Trung Phan:
On the history of GM and Jack Welch, and the takeover of tech by business people:
In all seriousness, the commonality between all of these people — Jack Welch, Sundar Pichai, Mira Murati, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and an alarming amount of CEOs inside and outside of tech — is that they, along with their companies, have escaped the human condition. They make their companies bigger for the sake of making them bigger, making more money to increase the value of the financial instrument attached to the company, abstracted away from any purpose, craft or creativity.
. . .
And it fits. It perfectly fits. Shareholder Supremacy is the force currently driving the tech ecosystem, one that, as I’ve noted, currently lacks any remaining hyper-growth markets, funding and proliferating technologies that exist not to provide a truly innovative service, but create more growth, a phony sense of progress that allows companies like MIcrosoft, Meta, Google and Amazon to create something that sort of looks innovative, even if their models are all extremely similar, as they’re all trained on the same quickly-dwindling amount of training data. Already, we’ve seen AI developers become less discerning with the training data they use, with these models slurping up unverified social media posts (a Reddit post seemingly led to Google recommending adding wood glue to pizza sauce), satirical news sites like The Onion (which led to Google recommending users eat one small rock each day as part of a balanced diet), or other AI-generated content, which leads to a fun little phenomenon called Habsburg AI.
Joseph Heath (who wrote the above piece, and who also has a background in political science)uses the phrase “self-control aristocracy” to describe those who really do benefit from maximal freedom.These are people who can make better choices for themselves thananyauthority could make on their behalf. When the state or large corporates boss them (us) around, they (we) get really bloody annoyed. They (we) know better!
Heath’s phrase is simply a layman’s term for the personality trait various formal tests measure, and which overlaps with executive function to a considerable but as yet unknown degree.
. . .
That is, the ideology serves the inherited personality traits of those who promote it. “You only support that because it’s in your self-interest to do so” always struck me as a genuinely mean criticism of people who were involved in politics and policy (I may have been one of those people, natch). The problem—as I’ve been forced to accept—is that it’s true.
One ideology where it’s as true as it is for libertarianism is feminism. Feminism was led by (and greatly improved the life chances of) women like me. It was great for smart, disagreeable, career-focussed women who don’t like or want kids. And yes, just like getting banged up for a bit of weed while harming precisely no-one seriously annoys the kind of smart, self-controlled person who can formulate a (libertarian) policy response to the War on Drugs, so too with women who were uninterested in home and family (or who were same-sex attracted) and found that being circumscribed professionally and romantically really, really rankled.
Some deep dives into a bunch of data by Cremieux, in arguing against fairly widespread beliefs:
Are superbabies actually possible? The tldr; is not with current technology, but this was a fascinating new development late last year:
In December 2023, Sergiy Velychko (postdoc at the Church Lab at Harvard) found that a variant of one of the Yamanaka factors, dubbed SuperSOX, could transform cell lines into naive pluripotent stem cells, whether they were human, pig, cow, monkey, or mouse. These cells were even able to produce live mouse pups in one of the mouse lines where iPSCs normally can’t produce viable embryos.
. . .
You can take somatic cells from two (genetic) males or females, induce meiosis on them, fuse them together, and then turn that cell into a naive induced pluripotent stem cell and grow it into an embryo. In other words, gay couples could have children that are biologically “both of theirs.”
And, as previously mentioned, you can use iterative meiosis to create an “ideal” haploid cell, fuse it with another haploid cell, and then “superSOX” the result to get an embryo with a desired, extreme polygenic score.
Adam Tooze on the start of a series on power:
You see the products of the factory in the literal and metaphorical sense, mass-produced people and things. You see the discipline of political power – party and state merged. But you also see something else, something not captured by either of these notions of power.
What kind of power built this forest of giant buildings, these mountains of steel and concrete? What animates the millions moving through those myriad streets? What organizes the giant flows of money and resources necessary to sustain such huge concentrations of human activity?
. . .
The history of capitalist accumulation is a history of projects. That is what the skyscrapers of a megacity so vividly testify.
The history of state power and hegemony is a history of project-power.
Of course, the exercise of hegemony has involved both production and discipline. It is constrained and shaped by geopolitical givens. But US hegemony, the only version that has ever operated at a truly global scale, is best understood as a project.
Some interesting factoids:
Women (compared to men) are 27.4% less likely to apply for early-career promotions
Women already in leadership are not less likely to apply for subsequent promotions.
‘conditional on applying for a promotion, women in lower-level positions are 23.4% MORE likely to be INTERVIEWED and 45.1% more likely to be HIRED relative to the outcome mean’.
women are still less likely to apply even in female-leaning sectors, with female supervisors
Even women who do not have children and are not married (which the author uses as a proxy for fertility planning) are still less likely to apply for promotions, and are less willing to take on team leadership.
When asked why they did not apply for a team leadership position, 42% of respondents named the inherent position features of team leadership as the key reason (Panel A of Figure 5). This reason was named twice as often as any other, such as not feeling qualified (23%).
Men are doubly likely to apply for early career promotions that mean team leadership. This is not true for women.
Lower-level women’s perceptions of team leadership are more negative and inaccurate.
It seems to me that there are two types of courage: high potential upside courage and low potential upside courage. Going to war or taking part in any form of physical confrontation, at least for the nobility, was a high potential upside endeavour: one would be showered in glory if they succeeded. Yes, there was a lot of risk involved, but also, much to gain. And what was to be gained was tangible and widely reinforced by society: status, something we all crave. It was not some subjective thing dependent on deep conviction. I think we still have that type of courage in our society. It’s rare, indeed, but not impossible to find. And while it does not manifest itself in people going to war, it shows up in those who take risks to pursue ideas with low probability of success but huge upside in terms of status. If you follow me, you probably recognize that I am talking about the world of start-up founders. Quitting your cushy job to pursue the life of a founder requires a lot of courage, with a lot of comfort to lose, but also with the promise of very tangible rewards for success. Our start-up founders are the warriors and kings of old.
What we do lack though is courage that has low potential upside: that is, not much to be gained from it. And I am increasingly convinced this type of courage has always been even more rare than the high potential upside type. It requires one to not only have high risk tolerance, but also ignore one’s self-interest — two traits that are already rare to begin with, and even rarer together. It requires one to be a sort of Joan of Arc of intellectual life.
Detailed review on an interesting book:
So does this mean that firefighters systematically implement the first thing that comes into their heads? No. They evaluate the feasibility and the chances of success of the first option that comes to mind. If these two parameters appear too weak, they then reject this first option and evaluate a second one, and so on, without comparing two possibilities at the same time. This is what the researchers call singular evaluation approach, to differentiate it from the comparative approach.
These are not easy to differentiate: when you are ordering a meal, you are probably going to compare all the dishes on offer to find the one you like the best. If you are in an unknown city and you are almost out of gas, you are going to look for gas stations and stop at the first decent one, without comparing all of the city’s gas stations in order to find the best value for money.
Singular evaluation approach is therefore a strategy that makes you opt for a satisfactory decision. It is very different from making an optimized decision: in order to be satisfied, you only need to make the first decision you deem suitable, in order to optimize you need to consider a large number of choices and only select the best one. This satisfying decision strategy obviously makes sense in an emergency situation such as those firefighters encounter.
Did you know that stress was invented by one obsessive Canadian endocrinologist named Hans Selye in 1936? Unfortunately, it
What they've discovered is that both Selye's work and much of the work around Type A personality were profoundly influenced by cigarette manufacturers. They were interested in promoting the concept of stress because it allowed them to argue that it was stress — not cigarettes — that was to blame for heart disease and cancer.
. . .
Petticrew says that though early studies, some of which were funded by tobacco companies, showed a connection between Type A and heart attacks, as more studies have piled up the original findings of Friedman and Rosenman have been undermined.
"There have been very few studies which have actually shown that Type A behavior is a risk factor for illness, certainly for coronary heart disease," Petticrew says. "Of the studies that do show that, and there are only four, in three of them the researchers had some contact or money from the tobacco industry. That's not to say, and absolutely shouldn't be said, that all Type A behavior research is tainted by tobacco money. But it has had a major skewing effect on the field which I think has been completely unrecognized."
The typical English person in 2021 has higher living standards than the typical English person of 1921, who in turn was better off than the typical English person of 1821, who was probably better off than the typical English person of 1721 (though this last one is a little less clear). The 2021 > 1921 fact is even true for the typical resident of the world. But note that on a global scale, there’s no real sign of sustained progress until the second half of the twentieth century.
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My main takeaway from looking at the really big picture is that we should be less certain about a few things.
I used to be totally dismissive of the idea that automation could lead to bad economic outcomes because my view was people “always” had this fear about new technological developments, and it was “always” wrong. But it wasn’t actually always wrong. The Neolithic Revolution set average living standards on a downward trajectory for a few thousand years, and they stayed at a low level for a long time. Is it likely that we happen to be living on the precipice of an event like that? Probably not, but it’s not impossible. You shouldn’t make categorical statements about human history based on observations from a 150-year period.
. . .
There is a sense in which our modern, prosperous technological era represents the steady accretion of knowledge over a long period of time as part of an upward ascent of humankind. But there is also a pretty profound sense in which this is not true. The hundreds of thousands of years of human bands wandering the earth and not changing very much dramatically outlast the story of human progress. Then for the majority of recorded history, most people were living worse than the paleolithic hunter-gatherers. If everything collapsed tomorrow and we entered a 50,000-year span of global impoverishment, that wouldn’t necessarily be outside the observed norm. But it’s also conceivable that today’s human children will be the creators of a cohort of self-replicating and self-improving AI robots that colonize the galaxy.
A pretty unique explainer of one man’s entire worldview:
This framework is an attempt to organise a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) examination of human existence. This is, of course, an impossible task to complete because of the infinite variety of experiences that can occur, but that does not mean we should not begin to set down many important elements of a belief system for guidance and consideration. Over the years, this will surely grow, change, and adapt based on new scientific findings and better logical analysis. In other words, this will evolve. Where science has the most to say, I will simplify my statement and merely point to the science where more information can be found. Where philosophy is required, I have tried harder to fill in the gaps.
Adam Mastraoianni against behaviorism:
Here’s the usual take on bad incentives:
Humans do stuff in exchange for rewards—money, power, prestige, etc. Unfortunately, bad behavior often pays more of those rewards than good behavior does. “Fixing the incentives” means trying to make doing the right thing more lucrative, broadly defined.
Call this the jukebox theory of human behavior: you get people to do what you want by inserting coins and pushing buttons.
I’m skeptical of jukebox theory because it seems to be an explanation for how other people work. “I care about more than just my bank account,” jukebox theorists imply, “But other people? You can take a giant dollar sign, hook ‘em by the nostrils, and yank ‘em around.”
The problem with cynical theories of human behavior is that they do work, kind of, but in a stupid way.
When you rejigger incentives in the hopes of changing behavior, you attract the people who are most motivated by the incentives themselves, and these are the people you want to attract the least. Incentive-hunters are bent on Goodharting you, that is, doing exactly what it takes to extract the reward, even at the expense of what you actually wanted them to do.
His recommendation? Harness the power of selection effects, and find the people who genuinely care and help them succeed:
So yes, the incentives are often bad, but they’re bad because they’re built on bad theories of motivation. A better theory would start with the fact that other humans are just like us: they care about money and prestige, sure, but they also care about a bunch of other things, and they’ll work really hard to get those things.
And I mean really hard. Witness the infinite energy that a teenager will expend on figuring out whether their crush likes them back, or the weekends people will sink into pruning their rose bushes, or the hundreds of hours that fans will pour into making cosplay costumes. Behold this 170 page guide on how to identify locations in Mongolia so you can get better at GeoGuessr, a game where you see one random screenshot from Google Street View and you have to figure out where you are.5 Tremble at the man who, after losing his wife because it took too long for help to arrive after an accident, spent the rest of his life hewing a faster path to the hospital through a mountain.6
. . . When I was training research assistants in graduate school, I used to think I wanted the students who already knew the most, or the ones who could learn the fastest. Eventually I realized, no, what I really want are the students who give a hoot. Unmotivated students would show up like, “I hit a roadblock, what should I do?” while the motivated students would be like, “I hit a roadblock so I tried a million different things to get unstuck, and now I have a completely new set of problems to discuss with you.” It’s not that hard to give people skills. It’s way harder to give them interests.
So yes, you can get people to do stuff by dangling carrots and shaking sticks. But you need some big honkin’ carrots and some awfully pointy sticks to get people to do things they don’t want to do. Trying to substitute external incentives for internal incentives is like trying to power your country with whale blubber when everybody is walking around with a hydrogen cell battery inside them.
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