Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People

November 5, 2014 By

There is an idea that I have been guilty of uncritically parroting and promoting in the past: surround yourself with smarter people. Another popular version is never be the smartest guy in the room. 

Beneath the humblebragging  in both versions (your cut-off for smart is a de facto declaration of “look how smart I am; only Einsteins are worthy of surrounding me, and I understand the things they say!”), there is a basic logical issue: If the smarter people are dumb enough to surround themselves with the likes of you, they are dumber than you, which means they’re smart and you’re dumb. Wait. What?

This is not just a cute paradox, it’s a fatal Godel-level error that crashes the whole smarmy idea. The only way to make it work is hypocrisy: adopt at least a double standard (and preferably an n-standard, where n is the number of people) for “smart.” You’re street-smarter than me. But I’m book-smarter than you. And our friend over there is potato-smarter than both of us. This is the juvenile stuff of folk tales, caper movies and self-consciously different band-of-misfits superhero coalitions.

Yet, there seems to be a germ of truth to the idea.  My alternative to the heuristic, which many of you have heard in off-blog conversations, is that I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop long-term relationships are the ones I surprise regularly. The ones who find me predictable don’t stick around. We’re not talking any old kind of surprise, but non sequiturs. Surprises that you can’t really relate to anything else, and don’t know what to do with. Mind-expanding surprises rather than gap-closing surprises.

Huh?! rather than aha! or ooh!

So smarter isn’t the word here (even though there’s one definition of smart that’s close to “unpredictable”). Neither is different. I can often predict the behavior of smarter and/or different people of both unconventional and conventional types. The trick is to surround yourself with people who are free in ways you’re not. In other words, don’t surround yourself with smarter people. Surround yourself with differently free people.

That’s going to take a bit of work to unpack.

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Geopolitics for Individuals

September 9, 2014 By

Kartik is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home turf at akkartik.name.

I recently spent a month playing a board game called Diplomacy, and it turned out to be a surprisingly mind-broadening experience. Pretending to be the German Empire before the First World War, exchanging missives all day with the other “great powers” of that time, finalizing troop dispositions before the daily deadline, and then seeing everybody’s moves revealed at once, finding out who lied, who was betrayed, it’s all very dramatic and addictive. It took me a while to realize (rationalize?) why its hold over me was so persistent: it was because it was getting me to grow intellectually as only a few other games have done in my life. Chess taught me to think “a few moves ahead” past the immediate exigencies of any situation. Poker taught me to manage risk when the future is uncertain. Diplomacy is starting to teach me to extend these ideas past the “kiddie pool” of games where you’re playing against coherent opponents. It repeatedly exposes one, like a school of hard knocks, to stable situations that are rendered unstable by the entrance of a new player.

There’s a faint echo of this effect in the chess-like two-player game of Go.

Go position

“Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.” — Trevanian

Learning Go, you repeatedly find yourself in situations that seemed stable, where you were holding your own, that are thrown into disarray by distant parts of the board.

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The Creation and Destruction of Habits

August 26, 2014 By

Just for fun, I decided to try and weave a tweetstorm-style chain of thoughts through a chunk of my writing over the last few years. As you might expect, it isn’t exactly short, but at 42 tweet-sized chunks, it’s a decent feat of compression. I’ll spare my twitter followers the actual storm though.

1/ There are two kinds of stories: about forming habits, and about preserving them. Superhero movies and Christmas movies.

2/ While you have room to grow in your life, forming habits is much easier than breaking habits. Neither is easy, however.

3/ A habit, once formed, demands use. This is because it exists as a sunk cost. Disuse would imply depreciating value.

4/ A living habit generates returns and grows more complex over time. This is growth. Growing habits occupy more room over time.

5/ A dying habit generates losses and grows  simpler over time. This is decay. Dying habits decay to occupy less room over time.

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The Veil of Scale

August 20, 2014 By

There’s an old Soviet-era joke about communist notions of sharing. Two party workers, let’s call them Boris and Ivan, are chatting:

Boris: If you had two houses, would you give one to your comrade?
Ivan: Of course!
Boris: If you had two cars, would you give one to your comrade?
Ivan: Without a doubt!
Boris: If you had two shirts, would you give one to your comrade?
Ivan: You’re crazy, I couldn’t do that!
Boris: Why not?
Ivan: I have two shirts!

There are two things going on here. One is of course, the skin-in-the-game effect. The other is what I call the veil of scale: we choose small-and-local behaviors differently depending on how we think those behaviors will have emergent scaled consequences. The joke here depends on going from large-scale to small-scale questions, surprising Ivan with a question that’s real for him.

The veil of scale is about thought experiments of the form: how would you act in a situation if you didn’t know the extent to which your actions were going to be scaled?

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The Economics of Pricelessness

August 12, 2014 By

The digital economy has taught us a lot about one extreme of pricing: zero. The price-point of zero is a place where weird things happen. We now know what it is to have our attention productized in three-way attention markets. We understand what it means to  devalue to a zero price, things which required nonzero effort to produce. Perhaps most importantly, we know what it is like to constantly be inundated by advertising, the sine qua non of zero-point economics. The zero-point economy has of course always existed, but it has only recently gained a great deal of economic mass.

But we aren’t talking as much about the other end of the spectrum, the price point we poetically call priceless, as in the Mastercard tagline, “there are some things money can’t buy, for everything else, there’s Mastercard.” I think the two are connected (mathematically, via division by zero, and philosophically via “the best things in life are free”), so it is impossible to construct a proper theory of the zero price point without also creating a theory of the infinity price point.

Pricelessness is at the heart of what I call saint-saint transactions, a weird economic regime where people who abide by the guardian moral syndrome, in the sense of Jane Jacobs, are forced to play by the commerce moral syndrome. This means somehow trading things, which are culturally assumed to be priceless, via indirection. Depending on who you ask, the category of nominally priceless products and services includes life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, nature, human dignity, religious values and the welfare of children.

Such priceless things trap us between a rock and a hard place. If we admit that we do in fact price these things indirectly, and get rid of the indirection, we might manage the economy better, but will likely stress our sanity. If we continue, as we do today, to pretend that priceless things are literally rather than poetically priceless, we will continue with our grand display of possibly unsustainable species-level honor and nobility.

An economics of pricelessness might help find a way to get out of this bind. The fact that the phrase itself likely sounds like a profane contradiction in terms suggests it is the right direction to explore. Let’s take a stab at it.

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A Koan is not a Riddle

July 9, 2014 By

The following is a break from my Marginally Acceptable series. Venkatesh asked for a review of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition. This is what he got instead.

Philosophy has long had two distinct approaches, embodied in the approaches of ancient Mediterranean, China, and India. The first, and most commonly recognized, is that of positing answers to elusive questions, an approach that has given birth to religions and the sciences. The second, however, is oriented towards the transformation of the disciple, sometimes radically so. In many cases the two are conjoined: Socrates’ questions about the order of the world were entwined with questions about how to live; Buddha’s wheel of becoming was implicated in his guide to right living; the metaphysics of the Stoics grounded their prescriptions.

In later centuries, these two functions were less closely coupled. The success of the sciences after the Baconian revolution and Boyle’s experimentalism led to frantic, productive activities in the former philosophical method. The latter wasn’t simply left to the moralists, however, but was intellectualized. Kant’s writings on deontological ethics were intended primarily to persuade, rather than form. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that a philosopher explicitly privileged formation over intellectualization: Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” was communicated in aphorisms and parables in part to make the reader complicit in the idea’s expression.

In the late twentieth century, Deleuze’s concerns and methods are likewise complicit; his method the embodiment of the ideas he hoped to make manifest.

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Portals and Flags

June 25, 2014 By

The point of complex debates is not to prove your side right and the other wrong. Smart people make this mistake most often, and end up losing before they ever get started. The point of complex debate is always seduction: winning-over rather than winning. You do this not through logic or even novel insight, but by demonstrating a more fertile way of thinking. One that promises to throw up an indefinitely extended stream of surprises within an ever-widening scope. 

Such intellectual seduction settles the original issue not by establishing an unassailable position around it, but by turning it into a portal to a hidden universe of thought. You cannot win over everybody, only the adventurous. But winning over an adventurous minority that joins you in passing through a portal, on a journey of discovery is enough. It allows you to eventually overwhelm those who prefer to plant a flag on a conquered hill of browbeaten minds, and sit around by it awarding each other medals of honor. Because adventures tend to yield riches that make whatever was originally being contested seem worthless by comparison.

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The Physics of Stamp Collecting

June 18, 2014 By

Ernest Rutherford’s famous line, “all science is either physics or stamp collecting,” has bothered me ever since I first heard it. I’ve used it to make fun of biologists, and I’ve used it as a critical perspective on physics.

Rutherford almost certainly meant it as an insult to non-physicists, but there is a deeper and non-prejudiced philosophical thought underneath the dichotomy. To get there you have to ask: is there such a thing as a physics of stamp collecting?

I’ve discussed the quote once before, in my extended post on foxes and hedgehogs (short version: foxes are stamp collectors, hedgehogs are faux-physicists), but let’s dig a little deeper.

Turns out, the distinction between sustaining and disruptive variants of deliberate practice, which I discussed last week, is a consequence of the distinction between physics and stamp collecting.

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A Life with a View

April 16, 2014 By

There is a memorable exchange in the Seinfeld episode The Keys, between Kramer and George on the theme of yearning. Unlike much of the show’s humor, which seems dated in the digital era, this little existential joke has improved with age:

Kramer: Do you ever yearn?
George: Yearn? Do I yearn?
Kramer: I yearn.
George: You yearn.
Kramer: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I…I sit…and yearn. Have you yearned?
George: Well, not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving…but I haven’t yearned.

You can imagine a more poignant version of this conversation over an iPad showing a Facebook feed. The Internet, with its constant parade of lives-that-might-have-been-yours and classmates-not-dated, is a jungle of yearnings. Yearnings that were once confined to fading and static memories of childhood, occasionally awakened by petrichor, now sneak into your life as a steady, colorful stream of living confusion, via windows in present realities. There was no equivalent in the past to being a silent spectator of other lives by default. You either had active, evolving relationships of mutual influence, or mutual invisibility. Like passengers on subways, we only saw people on other routes at stations. There were no relationships of continuous mutual spectatorship.

There was no such thing as a life with a view. 

***

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The Legibility Tradeoff

April 9, 2014 By

Kartik is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home turf at akkartik.name.

I am fascinated by organizations as a technology for agency transfer — getting people to follow some plan outside of their selves. We’re not yet very good at building such agency transformers; our organizations get gamed, taken over, taken advantage of, treated as externalities, captured by minority interests, ground down to gridlock, etc. But we’ve been getting better at it, finding better ways to influence others than the coercion and threat of violence that we started out with. In this post I want to survey the progress we’ve made, and suggest that there’s still wisdom to be milked from the old saw of “don’t micromanage, delegate.”

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