leftovers #5 – the 2018 april newsletter (a final thought)

I was thinking a little bit about what I posted last week regarding my spending habits and I was struck by how bizarre it is now to think back to how I thought about money when I was out of work. For me, it just never made sense to spend money when I had no paycheck coming in. I felt this way despite knowing that I had my finances in such a strong position that I did not need to worry about spending money. To simplify, I knew not to worry and yet… I worried. I think this nagging worry – again, one not based on my reality – speaks to how an unemployed person can develop some serious anxieties while out of work.

I wonder now if everything I worried about while I was out of work was strictly due to being out of work. The strangest thing I worried about back then was how I always expected the worst-case scenario for everything I did. I never expected to get a job, I never expected anyone to keep their commitments, and I always assumed my phone or even email was broken anytime I went more than, like, five minutes without hearing from anyone. The most bizarre part of these anxieties was how nothing about my life had actually changed except my employment status; I’m realizing now that maybe this one change was the only relevant factor.

When it’s all going wrong in the head, the facts tend to matter less and less. I suppose the catch with mental or emotional health problems is that after a certain point you can’t just think or feel your way out of them. It works a lot like a physical health problem, I guess, in the way severity of a physical injury is defined to the extent that the injured part is able to actively participate in recovery. If you roll an ankle, you can walk it off – if you fracture an ankle, you can’t do anything about it except wait.

The hard part about waiting is that the process remains very painful. I think mental or emotional health problems have a similar built in feature where the severity of the problem is inversely related to how much your own thinking or feeling can participate in the solution. The worse the problem, the more important it is to wait, but waiting is so counter-intuitive to resolving such a problem that I think the problem can be made worse simply from the active effort to resolve the issue.

I’ve always found very difficult those times when I had no idea how to fix something I needed to repair. There would always be a period of time in these cases when the lack of knowledge was a source of great stress and anxiety for me. I can’t say for sure that this is related to the wider category of mental health problems, of course, but it does seem like a common thread among all the risk factors for major depression. Having experienced a few of these risk factors myself over the past handful of years – death in the family, sudden job loss, long-term unemployment, and even a handful of not quite major/chronic injuries – I can confirm that the worst moments I experienced during these times always came back to some version of this basic issue of not knowing how to solve a problem.

If the stress or anxiety lingered for long enough, it started to feel like I was being pulled into this relentless, powerful black hole that was opening up somewhere just beneath my feet. At the time, it felt bizarre that little things led to these moments – I was expecting despair to result from more significant shocks, failures, or losses. But I think it makes some sense because being on the precipice means being only a small nudge away from taking a big fall.

i read i wrote this book because i love you so you don't have to

I Wrote This Book Because I Love You by Tim Kreider (October 2018)

Tim Kreider describes his relationships with women (and his cat) in this collection of reflective personal essays. It’s an unusual premise for a book, especially for an author whose relationships probably aren’t of much interest to even his most loyal fans, but this is hardly a juicy tell-all account of who, what, and when from Kreider’s personal life. Rather, he uses these experiences to connect and expand on larger themes that any observer will enjoy reading and thinking about.

A good example is my favorite essay from the collection, ‘The Strange Situation’. It describes a childhood attachment study Kreider participated in and explores how those results may (or may not) have predicted his self-destructive behavior in certain adult relationships. It’s an interesting examination of how we all look for the balance of our free will and our ingrained characteristics in our actions, decisions, and thinking.

It also forced me to consider an intriguing question – to what extent are we responsible for fulfilling our own prophecies? I suppose that any prophecy can quickly become self-fulfilling because of how easy it is to blame instinct, upbringing, or circumstance for the various outcomes in our lives. However, I think we all retain a degree of agency over ourselves that we are not always wiling to acknowledge and that the most important quality of a good prophecy is how it points out where we need to make an extra effort to overcome an ingrained tendency toward a certain behavior, reaction, or thought pattern.

In addition to ‘The Strange Situation’, I also enjoyed reading ‘The Feast of Pain’ and ‘Our War On Terror’. The latter essay requires a caveat – I enjoyed it for how it illuminated another of his works, Twilight of the Assholes, a book of political cartoons he published during George W. Bush’s administration.

Footnotes / endnotes

I’ve always enjoyed Kreider’s writing and this time around I was actually prompted to note down a few quotes. One I liked in particular was about his easy childhood – the worst thing that ever happened to me was math – and another made reference to some difficult experiences from his early adult life – at the time I didn't think I took this too hard; I was just angry and depressed and drank too much for a couple of decades.

I also learned after I finished the first draft of this post that Kreider appeared on NPR's Fresh Air podcast to discuss this book. I haven't listened to it - yet - but here's the link to the podcast transcript for anyone interested.

ford shows us how the sausage fest is made

When I was in college, I remember how one of our biggest fears was showing up at a ‘sausage fest’. For those unfamiliar with this expression, a ‘sausage fest’ meant a party where men vastly outnumbered women. I don’t think I need to explain why this was important.

Looking back, I realize that the heightened wit of the term ‘sausage fest’ perhaps obscured the wisdom of my fellow young men. Outcomes are better when there is a good mix of men and women and what the academics have probably spent decades proving via studies and experiments was probably based on a drunken hypothesis generated ten minutes before arriving at a keg party. I’m struggling right now to come up with a situation where I would consider it a positive to learn that the men outnumbered the women in a given group, team, or organization responsible for achieving good outcomes.

This somewhat ridiculous line of thinking came to mind recently when I watched this Ford commercial. The premise is simple – the world is changing and we will therefore require something innovative and different to thrive in the new future. More importantly, Ford will build this future by leveraging the aggregated resources of its great company. We viewers are treated to a series of scenes in this commercial of just what these resources are: machines and labor, wisdom and creativity, men and... woman?

Yup, woman. Just one, by my count, at least among the ten or so people I can definitely see well enough to make a distinction. (Women will be applauding from the crowd, though, sometimes from the front row.)

Folks, Ford is going to build the future, and if this commercial tells us anything, the ratio of men to women involved in the effort would make even the most beer-thirsty college freshman roll his eyes and go home. The problem isn’t the fact of the ratio, it’s that we all know what leads to good outcomes. For some reason, the business bros at Ford forgot the first thing a lot of us learned in college - a good future is merely a matter of avoiding the sausage fest at the frat house next door.

i think i will read the tb-12 method, after all

I’ve been on the fence about reading Tom Brady’s somewhat ridiculously named book (1). The reasons in a favor are pretty basic. The TB12 Method, written in conjunction with Brady’s trainer and business partner Alex Guerrero, broadly covers fitness and nutrition, two topics I’m always interested in. Plus, as a Patriots fan who has followed his career closely, I’m intrigued to understand a little more about the methods behind his madness (yes, madness). Brady has definitely achieved good results of late – from watching helmet football games, I think Brady’s foot speed has noticeably increased in the last five years, which is bizarre or proof of PED use. That's only one example of the kind of thing I'm hoping to learn more about from reading this book.

The reasons against reading this, though, are just as basic. As I understand it, the book is filled with training regimens and detailed recipes, two subsets of fitness and nutrition that I am not interested in. Brady’s credentials as a nutritionist are equivalent to mine – I think we are both PhD candidates in nutrition at Search Engine University – while Guerrero’s history as a trainer is littered with allegations about the legitimacy of his efforts. Finally, Brady’s results have been excellent but they are hardly history-making performances. For one, there are plenty of other athletes that have performed at peak levels in their forties. Reader, Drew Brees is arguably playing better than Brady at the moment despite being just one year his junior. If the Drew Brees Fitness Bible is about to hit bookstores nationwide, I’m unaware of it.

Despite the good arguments on both sides, I think I am going to eventually read this book. The decisive reason is a simple one and has no direct relationship to Brady, Guerrero, or even Drew Brees. It’s a lesson I learned several years ago from reading Expecting Better, Emily Oster's examination of the many recommendations given to expecting women – books written by authors who've fully immersed themselves into their topic have a tendency to turn out pretty good. Over the years, I’ve found the rule applies to first-hand accounts about topics as varied as anorexia, managing Manchester United, or living in North Korea. Given what I know about Brady’s obsession with taking care of his body, I think this book will prove to be yet another example of my 'intense experience leads to good books' rule (2).

Footnotes / a passing thought / a metaphor no one asked for / Brady’s crazy

0. My official analogy for Brady’s routine based on my current near-zero understanding of its specifics…

Brady’s old-age performances have been undoubtedly impressive but I don’t think he or any of his books will shake the underlying science behind performance. It would be like if some guy was currently floating above the Grand Canyon – I might be impressed by the spectacle but I would expect him to eventually return to Earth unless I heard some very compelling science that forced me to rethink my convictions about gravity.

1. What I mean by ridiculously named…

Wouldn't it be funny if Brady had to change his jersey number? I think it would require he leave the Patriots for a team that already had retired the jersey number and this seems unlikely... very unlikely... but still, you never know, right?

2. I used ‘method to his madness’ literally in the above post…

Years ago, a friend of mine pointed out how Brady was such a beloved figure that no one was noticing how he was insane. As always, my friend was ahead of the curve – these days, it seems like people are slowly coming around to acknowledge the fact.

tales of two cities - february giveaway

Last month – and yes, reader, I do mean last month, as in February 2019 – the bike share once known as Hubway ran a month-long promotion to encourage and reward winter riding. The promotion awarded increasingly more valuable prizes as riders met certain total ride thresholds for the month.

Here’s the full list of prizes:

1 ride – rider meetup invitation
5 rides – exclusive digital badge
10 rides – Bluebikes sunglasses
25 rides – Bluebikes hand warmers or touch-screen gloves
55 rides – One-month membership extension or Bluebikes helmet

The promotion sounded pretty cool to me but as always I found myself getting wrapped up in the details as soon as I gave greater consideration to the above list. What were they thinking at Hubway HQ – excuse me, Bluebikes – when they determined this setup? Let’s do a quick prize breakdown to make my point.

1 ride – rider meetup invitation

After completing my first ride, I was sent a free ticket for a rider meetup event. This is where I was supposed to go pick up my physical prize as well as ‘meet up’ with other frozen riders. At time of writing, this event is happening tomorrow.

I’m not sure what to expect and I have no idea about the cash value of showing up. However, it is a free ticket into a Harvard Square bar and sometimes such a thing costs a few dollars. The event starts at 5 PM which is early for a full bar cover, though, so let’s take that into consideration.

Value: $3

5 rides – exclusive digital badge

I actually don’t know what this means. Maybe I can tweet this?

Value: ???

10 rides – Bluebikes sunglasses

Sunglasses technically cost money but an enterprising city dweller can usually accumulate enough shades just from taking advantage of free handouts. My guess is that these giveaway glasses are at the cheapest end of the scale. The lowest price I’ve ever seen for sunglasses in Boston is around $5.

Value: $5

25 rides – Bluebikes hand warmers or touch-screen gloves

As we approach the summit of the prize distribution, we come to our first option. I understand hand warmers are pretty cheap these days – I’ve seen some in stores for as little as twenty-five cents per warmer. The touch-screen gloves sound expensive but like with sunglasses anyone willing to do a little shopping around can find a cheap pair – based on a quick internet search, it seems like these cost around five dollars.

Value: $5 (for ten hand warmers or touch-screen gloves)

55 rides – One-month membership extension or Bluebikes helmet

The grand prize is a FREE month of Hubway – excuse me, Bluebikes – or a protective billboard you can wear on your head advertising Blue Cross Blue Shield, a company that profits whenever you and I cannot pay for our healthcare. I’m somewhat controversially helmet free at the moment but it feels like this chapter of my life will come to an end tomorrow. It’s not like Hubway – er, sorry, Bluebikes – is making this a difficult choice, though. The last time I checked the annual membership runs at $100 so the one-month extension has a value of less than $10. I think I’ve seen the cheapest bike helmet at around $25 but my bet is the official company helmet is a little more valuable – Bluebikes is a bike share financed by a health insurance payer and my hunch is that such an organization would invest beyond the barebones in their helmet.

Value: $8.33 (membership extension) or $50 (helmet)

The inescapable fact of these prizes is that the values don’t always increase as a rider accumulates more trips. The membership extension, for example, is less valuable than the touch-screen gloves. Plus, I think it’s highly likely that most riders who reach the 55+ ride plateau in February already own a helmet – my hunch is that the popular choice among this group will be the relatively less valuable membership extension. The prize structure is a little odd from the value perspective and it makes me wonder how committed Bluebikes was to actually increasing rides across the system in February. Surely, no one was so motivated by the prospect of an $8 prize to take two trips per day during the coldest month of the year.

If I think about it from the perspective of Hubway HQ – whoops, I mean Bluebikes – a token attempt to increase rides that has no true effect probably isn’t a terrible thing. It’s not like biking gets any easier in the winter and I’m sure the last thing Bluebikes needs is an injury resulting from a rider’s attempt to win some kind of ride accumulation prize. More importantly, as we all were just reminded once more it’s still OK to hit and kill cyclists in Boston. February might be a good time to encourage people to take a break rather than organizing a promotion with a grand prize that appeases speeding, distracted, or reckless victim blamers who think checking blind spots is their mechanic’s job.

Or, maybe Bluebikes can just stop throwing parties for itself and instead invest their resources into helping its member cities improve their cycling infrastructures. A can of green paint would go a long way to improve safety in countless local intersections. Maybe next February, Bluebikes can offer to paint a new bike lane for every member who rides 55+ times. I’m all for it, at least – I’d much prefer to paint the street green today than paint a ghost bike white tomorrow.

i read britt-marie was here so you don't have to

Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman (November 2018)

This was the third and final Frederick Backman novel I read in 2018. I didn’t give much thought to the order I chose to read these books but in hindsight the order worked out very well for me. The reason was that the end of the second book I read, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, included a scene about the character Britt-Marie moving out of home. This scene turned out to flow smoothly into the start of Britt-Marie was Here, the novel dedicated to following and fleshing out the story of that character.

Britt-Marie's first chapter in her new life starts in Borg, a tiny Swedish town that has so little it wants for nothing. Here, she explores the fundamental question everyone should face at some point – how should I live my life? As Britt-Marie answers this question, she encounters the little nuggets of insight that seem to be Backman’s trademark – you can’t be alone if someone needs you, for example, or that most people can find strength for others despite being unable to do so for themselves.

The friend who recommended I read Backman’s first book, A Man Called Ove, asked me if this story was about the same Britt-Marie from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry. When I confirmed his suspicion, he mentioned he wasn’t excited about reading Britt-Marie was Here because he didn’t like her character very much in her prior appearance. It’s a fair concern but one that might miss the biggest lesson in this book – people do and can change at any stage in life. However, it always takes a lot of work. In Britt-Marie’s case, it really does take a village to change an adult. Borg’s unconditional acceptance of her is the catalyst for her transformation. As her initial irritation with others showing an interest in her gives way to something approaching affection, Britt-Marie finally faces the obstacle that has always stood in the way of her growth – herself.

leftovers – the asian supremacist (the toa asian supremacy test)

In a recent post, I wrote about how I took a certain implicit bias test that concluded I unconsciously associated 'Asian' and 'native'. Since I feel strongly that unconscious bias is a reflection of our accumulated experiences, I decided to come up with a new version of this test intended to assess personal experience and suggest in my rambling, roundabout way how it might contribute to unconscious bias.

Here’s an early version of the test – you can take it at home! It should take about five minutes.

The TOA Innocent Experience Leadership Bias Test

1) Set a timer for one minute and hit start

2) Think of as many examples of great American leaders as you can. These examples do not need to be political leaders or famous people – just write down the names you associate with leadership. If you accidentally name a foreign person, that’s OK, just keep going!

3) After the minute is over, note the race and gender of your leaders. If you aren’t entirely sure, you can guess. Mixed races can count as half, a third, etc – just use your best judgment.

4) Using whatever source you trust, find the demographics of the USA. If you trust me, use the numbers I pulled from this link: 73.3% white, 12.6% black, 5.2% Asian, 8.9% for all other races (including two or more). Let’s split men and women 50/50 within each demographic.

5) Compare your leaders by percentage to those demographics.

6) If your results are discrepant, ask yourself how long it would take for you to think of enough leaders so that your answers in #2 would match the national demographics as determined in #4. For example, if you named twelve white leaders, you probably should have named around two black leaders and one Asian leader. How long would it take to name those extra three leaders?

7) Before sending me an angry email, remind yourself that, like any test, this one is designed to trick you just a little bit...

OK – the results are in! I didn’t take the test myself, and probably could not honestly have done so given my role in its design, but here’s what I think I would have done – I would have named at least 73% white leaders, a result I expect of just about anyone else who dares to take the test.

What I expect my test to tell me is two things. First, the natural baseline in this country for what we consider an example of great leadership would skew heavily toward white people. Second, within each racial subgroup men would form the majority. This view likely surprises no one. I think that’s OK because this result isn’t destiny but merely a prophecy. Like all prophecies, we choose which ones are going to be self-fulfilling. If an analogy is required, my test is far from a disease diagnosis – it’s a lot more like a concerning vital sign such as high blood pressure or a history of eating processed foods. There is time to change the outcome but it will require a concerted effort built on an understanding of where the road leads and an acknowledgement of the pressures that keep us on the path.

How can someone apply the lessons from this kind of test? The answer is to be more conscious. The best opponent for our unconscious thinking is to become a more conscious thinker, and remain so, until we’ve taught ourselves to react the same way that we think. In other words, the only tutor we can hire for our unconscious is our conscious.

A good place to start is to acknowledge that we choose leaders based partly on how they match our existing mental models for leadership. A person who knows that his or her best examples of leadership all fit a certain demographic descriptor might take an extra moment to weigh a decision at the polls, assess candidates after a job interview, or consider if a student’s participation in school government is being weighed equally to peers of another race or gender. It doesn’t have to be a long pause, just a moment is OK, because a moment is all it takes for the conscious to acknowledge, dismiss, and eventually improve the impulses of the unconscious.

the country that ends poverty will win

One of my favorite podcast episodes in 2018 was a February More Or Less show about China’s bold plan to end poverty in the next five years. As usual, the show’s details were concerned with the plan’s use of measurements, metrics, and statistics. The main goal of the episode was to use these numbers to assess the plan’s feasibility and question whether the proposed time frame is realistic.

As I listened to the program, I had this stray thought – what would it mean if China does successfully end poverty? One thing I’m sure of is that if China succeeded, it would mark the first time in my lifetime that the USA was unquestionably outdone by a rival nation. Some of my worldly readers may protest – now Tim, hold on there, this isn’t the first time, remember World Event X? I could also see my patriotic readers make the opposite point – hold on there, Tim, America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, we never get outdone! And of course, I should tip my cap to the dismissive comedian – I’d rather be poor here than rich in China!

Well, my apologies, hypothetical readers, but though I would respect those protests and acknowledge the flimsy foundations upon which many of my opinions are often constructed, in general I think ending poverty should be The Number One Goal among all of our current world problems. This is a point I outlined in more detail in last week's post about inventing calculus. In my mind, every other noble crusade is either a subset of ending poverty or comes in among a group of important problems that are clear runners-up to getting the entire human race across the poverty line.

But regardless of where poverty falls on the priority list of world problems, as an American I’m simply disgusted by the idea that another country would outdo us in any way. We should be setting the example that China follows, not the other way around. But if they beat us to ending poverty then I would have no choice but to tip my hat to them and acknowledge an accomplishment that should have belonged to America.

I do not think others would share this reaction. I think many would learn of this and say something clever like “well, it’s easier to end poverty in China than in America”. For a lot of my fellow Americans, national superiority is taken for granted. Our place atop the world pecking order is not something to prove every day with our next great accomplishment but rather a position we are entitled to merely because of yesterday’s achievements. Our desire for greatness is simply too easily sated with trivial markers of relative superiority like Olympic gold medals, advancements in military technology, or complicated calculations of GDP. We’d rather release yet another blockbuster film about World War II and all the people we helped seven-plus decades ago instead of educating and empowering Americans to help people today. By allowing ourselves to become so easily distracted by today’s glittering objects, we fail to consider what we should be doing right now to win favorable reviews in tomorrow’s history books.

Well, have a listen to that podcast episode, reader, because here comes China. I suspect they’ve crunched the numbers and concluded that world power in a global capitalism means the country with superior ideas is eventually going to beat a country with a superior military. The math isn't complicated - China has three times as many people as the US, so if China can get each of their citizens up to the same idea generating capacity as an American, then China will be three times as likely as the US to come up with the next great idea. By aiming to end poverty, China is taking the first step toward unlocking their superior manpower and harnessing its full idea generation capacity.

China has studied the past and concluded that the surest way to get into a history book is to make history. They’ve concluded that the country with the idea that cures cancer, protects the environment, or feeds everyone will win the future. All they need to do is have one of their citizens come up with the ideas that they can sell to other countries. As I wrote a week ago, I think the best way to do this is to free people to spend as much time as possible thinking and creating. The first step to this goal is ending poverty.

Can America beat China to this goal? I don’t think so, at least not yet, because we don’t celebrate our leaders for reducing poverty with the same vigor we applaud their other accomplishments. Quick quiz – which President lifted the most people out of poverty during his tenure? Tough question, right? If you know the answer, you did the work on your own, scrappy reader, and I commend you, because I know you didn’t learn the answer in school. In school, they were too busy teaching us other things about our leaders, things having to do with landing on the moon or manifesting our destiny. These are important details, too, but maybe they should come after the students get the facts about how poverty changed under a given president’s leadership.

We were once the nation that showed the world how to apply the simple concepts of freedom and liberty to the world. Back when America was invented – a great idea that was envisioned, I should add, mostly by people who were not in poverty – a country writing down these ideas about freedom and committing to governing by these ideas was a big deal. The application wasn’t perfect – it mostly applied to white dudes, at least for a while – but slowly, the country has done better to make these concepts a daily reality for more and more people.

These days, though, the simple concepts are not enough. Most other countries have caught on to our little freedom tactic and we are now surrounded by nations whose citizens live with the same principles as us. Some of them – like China – are taking the next step and recognizing that no matter what the rhetoric, individuals who are mired in poverty do not enjoy the full fruits of freedom and liberty. The countries that are responding to this reality and aiming to end poverty are doing something as audacious in this 21st century as our Founding Fathers did in the 18th.

Will we let China beat us to this goal? It certainly looks that way. I don’t think we are even able to acknowledge that this is a goal. America is like a poorly trained weight lifter – given the choice, we always pull from the top rather than lift from the bottom. We’re just too accustomed to worrying about the result and unconcerned about proper technique. If America was a business, we would be really good at increasing revenue but not so good at controlling costs (1).

The way to beat China to this goal is two-fold. First, we must harness the uniquely American vigor, enthusiasm, and patriotism we’ve relied on in the past to accomplish far more difficult objectives. Compared to the Apollo program, getting everyone dinner should be a breeze. And yet, here we are in 2019 and the signs to the contrary are everywhere. Just have a stroll around Harvard University, one of the world’s smah-test places, and notice how it remains surrounded by homeless people. I know the wizards in academia are working on a lot of other more important projects but I think we'll have an easier time building up to new heights if we put everyone on a rock-solid foundation first.

The second step is a little trickier – we need to value the goal as a worthwhile ambition. It might be good enough to simply frame this in a nationalist way – don’t lose to China, end poverty first! – but I think deep down we as a citizenry must believe in the end of poverty before we can really achieve it. China has a plan and we don’t. China has a goal and we don’t. And although this plan and this goal might be a little out of reach, at least China has a start. But it’s important to remember that a plan and a goal imply an underlying idea that everyone believes in. I fear America doesn’t have this – or any – idea. I don’t think we in America even have a clue, quite frankly, about what it means to live up to our own ideals.

America has never been the home of the free and the land of the brave by sitting around and waiting for China’s example. But that’s where we are headed, it seems. I’ve heard a lot about how we’re bringing back Chinese jobs, one factory at a time, so that we can all fulfill the American Dream of working in a sweatshop. We've also been hearing for a couple years about how important it is to build a giant wall to keep who were born outside the country out. This is reminiscent of China’s foreign policy from hundreds of years ago – and their wall was much bigger, by the way. What can we copy next from China? Maybe its really complex writing system? How about giving communism a try? Or maybe being rubbish at basketball? Give me a break.

Hopefully, Beijing’s next great plan that we end up copying will do a little more good for the world and, more importantly, for America. This is why my fingers are crossed for China’s poverty initiative. It’s big, it’s ambitious, and it would be completely unfeasible for just about any other country to even consider. People once said the same about America’s plans. Let’s give the world reason to do so again.

Footnotes / imagined complaints

1. No, not a dig at the budget, or the deficit…

The analogy hinted at here breaks down when we consider what revenue really means in the context of the US government. I think it’s taxes and, well, when it’s considered that way…

But of course, as one of our presidents once put it, the business of America is business. So the analogy is there for anyone willing to do a little more work to iron out the rough edges. I’ll leave that task to you, motivated reader.

reading review - skin in the game (bad reasoning - the nth effect)

One of my favorite aspects of Skin in the Game was how Nassim Nicholas Taleb analyzes bad reasoning. For him, the problem most people have with reasoning is not a failure to understand basic cause and effect – the problem is understanding how the effect eventually becomes the cause for the next step. The typical error, he notes, is to calculate the effect of the first step correctly without accounting for how this step alters the calculations for subsequent steps.

To put it another way, almost everything in life has a ‘then what?’ element. Taleb describes this as the ‘nth order effect’ – the step that comes beyond the easily seen second, third, and even fourth step in any calculation. This explanation appealed to me because I’ve often described (though some would say oversimplified) economics in the same way – the subject is all about asking ‘then what?’ and understanding the ramifications of what happens after the initial event.

In the larger context of the book, Taleb relates the ‘then what?’ element to how a transfer of risk burden from the risk-taker to some other element of a complex system can (almost always) have negative consequences for the health of the system. One example he mentions is how carpenters were once liable for the death penalty if a house they built fell apart and caused the death of its residents. When society recognized that carpenters were always building houses as sturdily as possible, these penalties were (rightfully) repealed. From here, the ‘then what?’ line of reasoning that follows leads first to better ease of mind for carpenters – no need to worry anymore about fluke factors causing the house to fall over.

But then, with the penalty for bad work reduced, carpenters are free to build slightly riskier homes. As homes start falling over again, insurance policies become available to protect against financial liabilities. Eventually, the result of all this lets us look back and say that the change in punishment allowed carpenters the freedom to build slightly riskier homes – ironic given that the punishment was originally changed to reflect how carpenters never built risky homes.

leftovers #4.1 – the 2018 april newsletter (gut check)

I referenced a number of false starts in my follow up post just a few days ago that I want to briefly expand on today. One specific tactic I mentioned around a year ago in the original post centered around a theory about gut bacteria, or in my case a lack of it. The basic idea behind this (still in progress) science is that bacteria in the gut play a vital role in digestive health and we can influence the level of bacteria with our dieting decisions. Since this meant I only had to eat a cup or so of yogurt every night, I decided to try it and see how it went.

Initially, the yogurt seemed to help. It’s even possible that it did help, I suppose, but I can’t be sure about that (and it certainly didn’t solve the problem like chugging glasses of water did). As I mentioned at the end of my leftovers post, the idea to drink more water didn’t just help the problem, it solved the problem, so whatever little bit of help the yogurt did doesn’t seem very relevant to me in hindsight.

Of course, the yogurt experiment was hardly a waste of time. Again, its easy implementation made it a winning idea from the start. I think it’s always a good idea to try new things if they are easy to implement because it gives me a low cost way to have fresh experiences and positions me to learn from the unexpected things that occur in the process.

The big result of the yogurt experiment was the way it changed my end of the day meal. In the past, I’d almost always eaten a meal resembling a proper dinner when I returned home for the night. This sometimes meant my bedtime got pushed back due to the associated admin of dinner – cooking, cleaning, and so on. It also meant I ate more in general because dinner tended to be my largest meal of the day. When I started eating yogurt at the end of the day, there were occasional nights when I would return home and realize I wasn’t particularly hungry and on these nights I would eat only a cup of yogurt. I guess these occasions introduced the idea of eating just a cup of yogurt into my mind because I soon found myself seeing how I would do if I ate yogurt for dinner instead of preparing a larger meal. To my surprise, this wasn’t a problem at all, so I made the switch sometime in the late summer and to this day I continue eating just a cup of yogurt for dinner on those nights when I used to eat a full dinner.

This change has necessitated some associated adjustments, of course, and these are important – it’s not about actions but interactions, right? One adjustment was to increase my lunch by a small degree, maybe twenty percent or so, to help make up for some of what I’d stopped eating at night. I also started eating lunch later in the day because it’s easier for me to avoid eating until mid afternoon than it is for me to ignore being hungry when I get home. It seems like I’m eating less in general, which I think is good (though I admit I’m not keeping close track). The biggest change is something I’ve highlighted in an earlier leftover within this series – since I now skip the process of preparing and cleaning up after dinner, I have less to do before bedtime and can therefore meet my sleep goals.

reading review - skin in the game (upside downside)

A simple concept best summarizes the main idea of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game – if there is upside, there must also be downside. Taleb builds on the basic foundation of this principle throughout the book and highlights many examples of its applications to a wide range of topics including complex systems, analysis, and ethics.

Let’s take a brief look at how this principle applies to complex systems. If every upside opportunity comes with a proportional downside risk, it means that no one within the system can win without bearing a fair share of downside in the event of a loss. This works just fine in theory if people who can afford the downside take the risks because the losers in this setup will not be ruined in the event of a bad outcome and will not burden innocent others with an undue share of the downside.

In the best systems, people pool their risk together and share the burden so that, collectively, upside risks can be taken without putting the safety of the system in jeopardy. This is the general setup of close-knit communities, fair insurance policies, and equitable access to affordable credit. Over time, the system collectively advances as members and groups benefit from upside without any single component of the system being ruined by downside.

The problems arise when the mechanism of risk transfer loses its inherent symmetry. Stated simply, this means a risk taker who would benefit from a win does not suffer from a loss. There are some easy high profile examples for this point. My personal favorite is the executive who pockets megabucks year-end bonuses despite the company having laid off hundreds. If the big shots can benefit even as their (former) employees suffer, how can the company expect to attract or retain top employees in the coming year? The obvious answer is that it can’t (and perhaps this explains why big companies are often dragged under by smaller, newer competitors).

Another good example that I’ve highlighted on TOA in the past is how municipalities tend to invest far more in automobile infrastructure than they do in cycling or pedestrian equivalents (in this ancient post, I cited Happy City, a book that put this ratio as high as thirty-to-one). What do we expect to happen in cities where it is far easier (and safer) to drive than it is to bike or walk? My guess: the city becomes a place where people drive more than they bike or walk. Part of the explanation is the safety benefit, of course, but a more theoretical approach suggests driving is cheaper in the sense of ‘buying upside’ - a driver gets somewhere faster and, in the event of a collision, stands a much better chance of being unharmed than a biker or walker. Over time, these places lose their sense of community and togetherness as people isolate themselves in their cars and go weeks at a time without ever interacting with a stranger.

Taleb’s overall point is that a system is in danger of crashing anytime the mechanism of risk transfer starts to lose its symmetry. The somewhat ridiculous example he cites is in commercial aviation. In the early days, a bad pilot would remove himself from the system by crashing the plane. This meant that inexperienced pilots bore all the risk while training to become a pilot. Over time, training tools such as the flight simulator meant pilots who would once have been, er, ‘ruled out’ of a job could now ‘crash’ their plane without weeding themselves out of the system. If it weren’t for the major advances in flight technology that made it easier for pilots to fly (and therefore made it possible for lesser pilots to fly without transferring risk to passengers), it is entirely possible that the flight industry would have crumbled under the weight of the accidents caused by its inexperienced pilots.

The most conversational way Taleb makes this point is when he talks about having something described as ‘good for you’. No doubt about it, many things are good for you and it would be unwise to dismiss every such opportunity out of hand. However, a good test is to make sure the person selling the idea can explain why any idea that is good for you is also good for me. If such an explanation is not forthcoming, it suggests that though you may benefit from the opportunity if things work out, you might also be on the hook for a greater share of the downside risk if things were to go wrong.

the 2019 toa awards - podcasts, part 4 (the final three)

OK folks,

It’s finally time – without further ado, the top three from the 2019 TOA Podcast Awards. Or should it be the 2018 awards?

I'm never sure.

Let's just go.

Third Place – 'GM Street' (The Ringer NFL Show)

This two-man show lives within The Ringer NFL Show, a podcast feed that rotates three or four helmet football programs. 'GM Street', the program featuring longtime NFL executive Michael Lombardi alongside host Tate Frazier, is the one I look forward to all week. Lombardi powers the show with his frank, clear, and occasionally zany analysis while Frazier keeps the show on track by steering Lombardi’s football mind (and rambling analogies) to the big topics at hand during the week.

As I find is the case with most of the podcast personalities I gravitate to, Lombardi has a knack for telling the truth in clear, concise, and entertaining language. Who could ever forget his declaration years ago that Arizona was never ‘the land of the free or the home of the brave, at least in terms of winning’? Not me. We need more people like him (though perhaps in other fields) who take it personally when the public starts believing the bullshit peddled by coaches, players, and the media.

Perhaps the best testament to this show is how quickly I went out to get Lombardi’s book, Gridiron Genius, when it was released this fall. The book was a delight, written in the same voice I’ve come to enjoy on this podcast, and I recommend it to anyone with even the slightest interest in helmet football, building organizations, or cultivating leadership.

Second Place – More Or Less

This BBC show cracks open the numbers presented by the media and digs into the underlying calculations to determine if we, the math(s)-phobic public, are being misled or outright lied to. As I noted above regarding Lombardi, More Or Less takes it personally when a media outlet deceives the public and I’ve always appreciated their simple approach to understanding the facts and figures of modern life.

One thing I realized this year about More Or Less is that its consistent omission from the annual ‘best podcast’ lists is all the proof I need of foreign bias in American media. It seems like all anyone does around here is complain about fake news and yet this show that’s been sniffing it out for years goes completely ignored when we talk about the best pods. An omission isn’t the end of the world, of course, but when the shows we end up with atop the best-of lists are all basically two or three years old and have shown no evidence of being able to serve their loyal listeners with the same decades-plus consistency of More Or Less...

But ANYWAY, I guess it’s either US-bias, or perhaps these ‘best-of’ lists reward new shows solely for being new. I can take solace knowing no one is ever going to accuse TOA of rewarding something just for being new… I hope.

2018 TOA Podcast of the Year – The Football Ramble

Yes, right on cue, longtime readers can safely go do something else before I commence with my annual love-fest for this show…

One thing I realized about the show this year is that its lack of popularity in the US – reader, I haven’t managed to get even one soccer-watching friend to listen to this show in five years – reveals the massive difference between watching the sport here and watching the sport in Europe (or at least, England). I suspect the tough part for my fellow Americans is relating to folks who openly love the game at all times. This is a big challenge in the states because there is always someone out there, usually clutching a PIGSKIN, who seems content doing a weekly Christopher Columbus impression as he or she (but almost always he) credits himself with discovering long-existing facts about something a continent away – sometimes guys flop, sometimes the score is 0-0, sometimes the games are slow, and so on.

I think being surrounded by all this negativity makes it difficult to relate to a show where four guys turn on the mikes twice a week and have themselves a fantastic time – episodes often contain important moments like singing and chanting about a recent England draw, dissecting the ridiculous team names in Scotland’s national cup tournament, or reading out puns teams where everyone’s name is altered slightly to make a reference to something ridiculous (like an egg). American soccer fans are trained to be defensive about their sport of choice and the sheer enthusiasm on display during episodes of The Football Ramble probably does feel foreign to those who try listening to this show. It’s a shame, I think, because to me the best parts of soccer go much deeper than the games from the top club leagues or the quadrennial drama from the World Cup – it’s the stories that spring up from the grassroots all around the world that make the sport and these guys have a knack for digging up all the joy and absurdity that comes with those stories.

Or maybe people move on from this show because they don't understand the accents… who knows?

In any event, congratulations to The Football Ramble for topping the list and taking home its most useless prize yet, The TOA Podcast of the Year Award. Keep up the good work!

leftovers #4 – the 2018 april newsletter (digestive health)

The biggest immediate problem I had when I returned to work was how my stomach seemed to hurt. This would happen only at work and the pain usually started sometime around the early afternoon. It’s hard for me to put the pain into context because I never had regular stomachaches during the first three decades of my life. On a good day I would merely feel bloated while on a bad day I would actually have a hard time sitting down because of the way it put pressure on my stomach. Let’s say, overall, it wasn’t quite as bad as the flu but that there would have been dire consequences for anyone who had hit me in the gut.

Anyway, I did what a responsible adult does in this situation and visited Professor Google over at Internet University. Google immediately consulted his longtime associate, Web MD, and we were off and running on a wild goose chase to figure out what was going on. There were a number of good early candidates that seemed to fit about 75% of my situation – IBS, appendicitis, maybe an allergy (peanut, soy, gluten, full-time employment). Each new possibility I looked into was a good reminder of what diagnostic medicine is like on the Good Ol’ Interwebs – a moment of pattern recognition followed by some surface similarities before a series of specific symptoms that don’t really apply to you rule out the condition. It was like the internet was testing my willingness to suspend disbelief – you think you’re gluten intolerant even though you have a slice of pizza every week at Haymarket?

The breakthrough moment came one morning after I’d drank a few too many beers the night before. I realized during the day that my stomach hurt the same way it did while I was at work. The only thing I knew about hangovers was that they indicated dehydration so I decided the next time my stomach hurt I would try to set a world record for water consumption and pay attention to what ensued. Sure enough, the water did the trick, and I’ve generally felt pretty good about my gut health since that day.

It’s hard to look back on this time today and think I learned anything significant. I obviously learned that I should drink more water but that hardly qualifies as a lesson – I’ve been applying that solution to problems for my entire life. I suppose maybe the important result to focus on here is that anytime I have a problem related to food or consumption I should make sure to rule out more water as a solution before trying anything else.

Footnotes / endnote / prediction?

0. Coming up...

I wrote most of this post last summer and it shows - I think I actually figured out the cause of all this and I intend to share it (eventually) in an upcoming proper admin post.

the calculus of idea generation

One of my favorite stories from the history of math is about Madhava of Sangamagrama. Know who he is, reader? Of course you do, for you are like all my readers, full of worldly knowledge, insight and wit! But just in case you’d like a brief refresher, Madhava is among those who invented calculus.

Now, I know what you may be thinking, reader – hold up, smart ass, that isn’t true, calculus was invented by Newton! And I concede the point because this is true, or maybe also true, for you may have insisted Leibniz invented calculus. Again, I acknowledge the rebuttals but emphasize that it is also true that Leibniz invented calculus. The point is that they all invented calculus, them and possibly a few other folks, each contributing in some way or the other to humanity's accumulating knowledge about what we know today as everyone's least favorite high school subject.

The big difference between Madhava and his European counterparts was their backgrounds. Newton and Leibniz were born in Europe to well-off families. They attended prestigious schools from young ages and eventually became educated enough to regularly collaborate with the world’s leading scholars on all the important subject matters of the day. Their lifetimes of study led to the insights and inspirations into big ideas that changed the world. All of this investment in these two men over the course of their lifetimes led to their crowning achievement – the invention of calculus, a title that remains in dispute in the present day.

On the other hand, Madhava likely came from distinctly humbler origins. I'm guessing he was born to a relatively poorer family than Newton's or Leibniz's for three reasons. First, he was born hundreds of years earlier than either man. Second, I assume the average Indian of the time was almost always materially worse off than a European counterpart. Finally, since I couldn't dig up anything about his background, upbringing, or adult life, I assumed that the lack of detailed records about him suggested the circumstances into which he was born were not as materially secure as those of Newton or Leibniz. Although I cannot definitely say for sure that my guesswork is reliable, I'm confident that the investment in his educational upbringing and the resulting resources and contacts that became available to him during his working years were nowhere near the level enjoyed by Newton or Leibniz.

All of this leads me to one big question - what does it take to prepare someone to come up with a great idea? The story of Madhava leaves me with some hunches about the relative value of natural ability and education in the context of idea generation but I'll leave calculating the exact proportion to smarter folks than me. Instead, I'll focus on something I know for sure after learning about the backgrounds of calculus's many inventors - a great idea can come from anyone, living anywhere, doing anything. It reminds me that no matter what we think we know about coming up with a great idea, there is always someone out there just waiting to prove everyone wrong.

Why is it important to understand where great ideas come from? Well, coming up with great ideas is how people create value. If the process of generating great ideas was perfectly understood, we would essentially be able to generate value on-demand and humanity would make massive strides forward. I’m not sure we are quite ready for this today but we can still do pretty well by seeking to understand the next best thing – how to reduce the time we spend waiting for the next person to generate the next great idea.

There are a lot of very well established beliefs about idea generation. Most suggest that great ideas come from great thinkers. These thinkers combine their brilliance with some mix of education and resources to maximize their natural intellect. But such beliefs don’t account much for the case of Madhava or for many others like him whose accomplishments rival those of the far better educated and connected. If Madhava could come up with his ideas despite lacking some of the advantages enjoyed by Newton or Leibniz, then surely education and resources aren't as important as some believe. At the very least, Madhava suggests the attempt to predict who will come up with a great idea based on education and resources alone is a fruitless exercise.

If we can’t predict the next person who is going to come up with a great idea, then what should we do? My humble suggestion is that we maximize the number of people who potentially might come up with the next great idea. I think a lot of folks share this idea and I see the manifestation of their beliefs every time society finds a way to extend or expand access to education. However, I look at this challenge from the other side because I believe people are perfectly capable of coming up with good ideas regardless of their background, education, or resources. So, I think we should consider what might have stopped someone like Madhava from inventing calculus.

Death, I think, is an obvious first choice. If Madhava had died at the age of twelve from an airborne infection or malnutrition or starvation, then he probably wouldn’t have made it into this post. Time wasting is another good candidate – if Madhava had walked six hours everyday to get water, for example, he probably would not have had enough time left in the day to invent calculus (though I suppose I can’t be fully sure - long walks are considered by some who voluntarily take them to be invaluable thinking time).

I’ll cut my speculations off here, reader, because I think the point is clear – the only thing that could have stopped Madhava from inventing calculus was the thing that probably should have stopped him in the first place – poverty. Now, Madhava might not have been impoverished in the relative terms of his day and perhaps that is all that he needed to power his intellectual accomplishments. However, this leads me to wonder how many other people just like him lived during his time that did not maximize their intellectual potential due to the restraints of poverty.

This detail is never pointed out in stories about improbable accomplishments. For every 'so and so' who overcomes the odds, how many others fell by the wayside just because they lacked some basic essential that many others take for granted? I shudder to think of all the great ideas that have probably disappeared into history’s black hole of irrelevance and obscurity thanks to solvable problems of resource distribution. Is the name of the person with the cure to cancer already etched onto a gravestone? Or perhaps crawling around in a junkyard somewhere, applying his or her considerable brainpower to identifying value in what others have tossed aside? Could the person with the potential to invent a solution for global warming be spending his or her day pulling scraps together for dinner? There’s no way to know the answer to such questions but I’m confident at the very least that we’ve wasted the potential of countless lives over the years by so casually accepting poverty as a poor person's problem.

It brings me to the lesson I draw every time I hear about someone who changes the world despite being born into poverty – allowing people to remain in poverty limits the potential for the entire human race. We currently have somewhere north of seven billion people on our little blue planet. In theory, any one of us could come up with the next great idea and move our entire species forward another step. In practice, though, with so many still shackled to needless poverty, the number of potential idea generators is far less than seven billion. When people in malaria-infested regions spend all day thinking about mosquitoes or people in the richest country in human history spend a couple hours a week standing in line at the food bank, we are asking some subset of our seven billion idea generators to spend their time coming up with solutions for problems like sleeping safely or affording dinner. This, of course, means a subset of our seven billion is not able to contribute to solving problems that we haven’t already solved.

There are far better arguments out there for why ending poverty is humanity’s most important collective goal. These arguments approach the goal from moral, ethical, or pacifist grounds. I’ll leave these arguments to those who can make the case with the passion, energy, or commitment that I feel such arguments deserve. I’ll instead conclude with my own relatively subdued point of view – since the next great idea can come from anywhere, we should make sure as many people as possible are secure enough to spend their time working on ideas. When we allow so many to remain in poverty, we reduce the number of people who are able to work on ideas, make it much less likely for great ideas to emerge, and ultimately limit the potential of the human race.

the asian supremacist

On a night at the end of last fall, I sat down in a Harvard Square bar with a couple of friends and learned an important truth about myself: I’m an Asian supremacist.

The methodology for my discovery was through the 'Asian IAT' test on Project Implicit. The test measured my bias by asking me to identify a white, Asian, native, or foreign choice from a pair of flashed images. After I completed the test, the scores were aggregated and the result presented – I learned that I was one of around five percent of test takers who strongly associated 'Asian' and 'native'. So, in other words, the test revealed that I was... yup, that rare breed of bigot, an Asian supremacist?

I thought this was a fairly amusing result. The best part was that my result technically cannot be true – anyone with a basic grasp of American history knows Asians are as native to America as Oreo cookies are integral to a healthy diet. Perhaps the test should have recommended remedial history coursework instead of making a declarative statement about my biased worldview (1).

This experience makes me wonder what these tests really measure and whether those measurements have any relevant insight into my nature. The stated purpose of the test is to examine my unconscious bias. It does so by asking that I rapidly associate one image or another to one of the aforementioned categories. After doing this over and over, the test has a good sense of what goes on beneath my deliberate thinking. On the surface, the test conditions replicate an environment where my unconscious bias would guide my associations by stripping my conscious (and overriding) mind of its only advantage - time. I think the design of the test is more or less OK on paper. However, a good thesis never guaranteed a strong conclusion and I suspect something along those lines is what happens in many cases when these kinds of tests are used to measure bias.

I think the trickiest problem to untangle with this test is that a lot of what I do unconsciously is the result of prior thinking, training, and action. It's like how I type these sentences - I've deliberately practiced so much that I can go entire paragraphs without thinking at all about how to hit the keys and punch out nonsense like this very post. It’s hard to know if my preference for Asian associations on this test was due to something untapped in my unconscious or if it merely reflects a worldview I’ve deliberately cultivated over years of absorbing and thinking about the evidence. Consider for example how in the month prior to my flunking this exam Harvard University came under significant public scrutiny for admissions practices that allegedly disadvantaged Asian applicants. The eventual lawsuit suggested that if given two otherwise identical applicants, Harvard systematically chose the white student ahead of the Asian one. I knew this story as I walked in the shadow of the same university on my way to the bar that night. I knew the story had a ring of truth based on my own experiences. Most importantly, I knew this was just another story in a long line of similar tales.

My test results suggest I’m no better than Harvard - we stand accused of sharing an underlying bias when we make decisions and our biases become obvious anytime we are systemically presented with a choice of one option or another. However, given that this test suggested I'm biased, I'd say my version is the preferred one. In a country where no one ever accuses anyone of favoring Asians, I don't think it's crazy at all that someone might have learned over time to correct a bit for society's misplaced biases. The world would undoubtedly be a better place if we all became capable of overcoming our biases and seeing each other as equals before making our decisions. However, we can also come close enough to that ideal by acknowledging our hidden biases and making outward corrections until our inner preferences match the deliberate decisions we make in front of the watching world. Until then, I'll accept my ridiculous test results and comfort myself knowing that at the very least I wouldn't get sued if I were the one picking Harvard's next incoming class.

Footnotes / more inflammatory remarks

1. 'Native' in the way Christopher Columbus would describe it...

I understand that the opposite of my results is true – white people (or at least, some subset of white people) are native to the USA. Therefore, my results are likely being framed as the 'opposite' of those who strongly associate white and native. I don't think imposing a continuum on the results is a great excuse for coming up with the historically false association of Asian and native, though.

reading review – skin in the game (riff offs)

Hi all,

Today, I'll riff off a couple more stand-alone ideas from Skin in the Game that I did not get to in my first post.

Animosity towards wealth often ties back to the zero-sum nature of wealth accumulation in the country in question. When wealth is created (or gained after destruction) the view is a little different. A good rule of thumb is that inequality is almost always zero-sum (because it is measured relatively) and therefore any policies that increase inequality will always be seen with suspicion.

People tend to use numbers as a substitute for solid logical arguments.

There seem to be two ways people tend to look at inequality. One method is to take the difference between top earner and the bottom earner. The other method is to ignore the top and consider what is happening at the bottom.

I think there is a good argument for the former approach but ultimately its usefulness fails when compared to the latter. One problem is that the former is prone to creative thinking about what ‘policy’ means. Our default ‘policy’ of allowing e-commerce means we all buy packages from Amazon, benefit from its superior delivery experience, and then complain when inequality goes up after the revenues accumulate with one of the world’s richest CEOs.

The approach I favor is to allow endless inequality so long as everyone at the bottom has 1) enough to live on without my being asked to help via charity, panhandling, tax breaks, and etc, and 2) everyone has the same opportunity to move up if they so choose. In other words, I think income inequality is a distraction for those who want to come up with good social policy because it allows someone to cut income inequality in half without actually helping the poor, the sick, or the hungry. When I’m hungry, I don’t care if some new policy takes away half of Warren Buffet's money, I care about getting a sandwich, and to me a good policy would bring me a sandwich regardless of how that changed some calculation of inequality. If everyone has enough, who could complain if some people ended up with a lot? I think if we lifted the bottom of the income distribution up above a humanely defined sustenance line, we can all consider ourselves free to become whatever form of capitalist a-hole we want to become.

Social friends require balance in contribution and hierarchy. A conversation is a good place to see this – if the contributions are equal, the relationship is likely to last.

This sharp insight reminds me of the lesson I drew from the otherwise forgettable Working Together – fifty-fifty, or it won’t work.

Whether formally stated or otherwise, there is an underlying expectation of equal contribution in any relationship that, if left unacknowledged for too long, can suddenly expose itself as a fatal crack in the foundation.

Relationships between countries are often conflated with relationships between governments.

I thought this was an intelligent observation yet also one that probably cannot be helped. A relationship between governments makes some sense because the groups are small enough to interact regularly if they so desire. But the concept of a relationship ‘between countries’ is essentially meaningless.

In fairness to the author, I think the main point here is that the way an ordinary citizen of one country views a counterpart of another country is often far from how that citizen’s head of state views his or her counterpart. It makes me wonder how many people around the world would assume prior to meeting me in person that I was a Trump-like (or Trump-liking) personality, just based on my citizenship.

Change for change’s sake often causes us to lose the benefits of previous changes. Evolution requires slow and steady change – any faster rate means progress is being traded for the equivalent of mutations.

Taleb’s comment exposes a relationship I’d never given much thought to previously – that between evolution and mutation. I think many of us have been involved at one time or another in a sudden change whose purpose seemed to have no point beyond the feeling that a change was needed. As I think back to my own such experiences, I can’t say these changes always worked out one way or the other.

However, there was almost always something I lost in each instance, something positive that depended on the prior condition in order for me to make anything out of it. Although in some cases perhaps the new positives outweighed the loss, I can’t look back and say this needed to be the case – with a little more care, the new could have been gained without requiring the trade-in of the old.

leftovers #3 – the 2018 april newsletter (money, money, money)

I was asked quite a bit about how my spending habits changed when I resumed working. I figured the best way to answer the question was to keep track of the changes so that I could eventually respond by presenting the basic facts instead of my intuition and guesswork.

Here are the notable results:

-More likely to go to a bar and watch soccer games
-More likely to use the ‘T’ on a cold or wet day

Those changes all unambiguously raised my daily costs. But in terms of the dollar amounts, the impact isn't very relevant:

-Soccer games mean maybe two to three beers once or twice a month ($20-$40 total)
-The ‘T’ is kind of hard to say ($20 total)

So in terms of total spending, I’m looking at around a $50 increase per month. I'm not going to sneeze at that but it wasn't like NOT spending those $50 per month was critical to staying solvent while I was unemployed.

Here were a few things I thought might happen when I started working again:

-More likely to spend money on takeout
-More likely to buy pre-prepared grocery store items
-More likely to buy wine
-More likely to arrive early at a bar or restaurant and have a beer on my own

And here were my projections for how those could change spending:

-Takeout means maybe three to four times a month ($60 total)
-Grocery store items means maybe three to four times a month ($20 total)
-Wine means maybe two to three times a month ($30 total)
-Early beer means maybe once or twice a month ($20 total)

However, these haven’t really happened since I started working again. Going back to work was a big change but it wasn’t really a big deal and I think for the most part my frugal habits remained unaffected. The broader story here is that since I didn’t really change my spending habits at all while I was out of work, I should never have expected to change those habits when I did return to work.

running into the dark

One of the great delights of last spring was Liverpool’s return to the knockout rounds of the Champions League. In these matches, the sport’s best teams go head-to-head in playoff series until only one club remains. Liverpool’s presence at this stage of the tournament was a given back when I first started following the team in 2006 but in the past ten years the team just hasn’t been good enough to regularly qualify for the knockout rounds. Their return to prominence after a barren decade was a delight for us fans; for me, it brought back a lot of memories from those days when I regularly watched them play important matches against Europe’s biggest clubs.

One of my strongest memories isn’t tied to any one specific moment. Rather, it is a composite recollection of how Anfield – Liverpool’s home ground – always underwent a dramatic transformation during evening matches. The change was due to how the sun set over the course of the match. By the game’s end, the bright sunlight that bathed the pitch at kickoff had given way to full darkness, leaving the field completely illuminated under floodlights. The contrast between the sun-soaked scenes at kickoff and the intense glare of the lights at the end of the match always seemed to ratchet the pressure of the knockout rounds up to an unbearable level. Someone was about to go home, perhaps undeservingly, and the darkness lurking just beyond the reach of the Anfield lights always felt like a reminder - in this cruel tournament, teams were forever just one mistake away from going home (1).

Last spring, I was in the midst of a break from running when this decade-old memory about Anfield’s in-game transformation came back to me. For the most part, I hadn’t missed running at all up to that point during my break. But when I thought about Anfield’s transformation, I was reminded of how much I enjoy running into a sunset and this led me to suddenly recognize how much I missed running.

The ideal time for me to start running is similar to the conditions at kickoff on a big ‘European night’ at Anfield – the sun should be high enough in the sky that it would not cross any driver's mind to turn on the headlights. The direction of the run doesn’t matter as much as the timing. The key is to set it up so that I can turn west just as the sky starts to change color. Sometimes this is possible by just running along the Charles River – ‘chasing the sun’, so to speak. Another good approach is to run north into Somerville until the appropriate moment comes – then, I turn west and follow the fading light into Cambridge. Once the sharp colors of sunset start giving way to the dull shades of purple and blue, I angle toward home, following the just-flickering streetlights all the way.

The thing I like most about these runs is how it feels so dramatic to set out in the daylight and return home in darkness. But what is the drama of running a couple hours just to get back to where I was? It’s not the light or the sunset or the darkness, I’m sure, because I've walked home after watching a sunset without ever once considering it dramatic. No, I think by ‘drama’ I mean the familiar mixture of anxiety, fear, and pressure that comes anytime I sense the safety net that’s always waited below me has been temporarily pulled away. It’s the safety net that comes from being young and fit and confident, ready to run any distance over any terrain, ready to run on forever, and this safety net always feels missing when I run alone outside at night. For some reason, as the darkness closes in everything I've ever relied upon all my life to make it home seems insufficient. Even though it’s been ages since I’ve pulled up injured on a run, the sunset and the ensuing darkness slowly raise the unavoidable, inevitable question – if something goes wrong, how will I make it home?

I don’t have a great sense for why I like this feeling. It’s not just on these ‘sunset runs’ that I enjoy the feeling – this ‘drama’ is the same reason I enjoy running at the start of a snowstorm. The changing conditions of the coming storm serve as a subtle reminder of how I have no choice but to rise to the challenge of the workout. And if I don't have what it takes? I guess I’ll just suffer the consequences that simply do not exist when I run on perfectly sunny afternoons. I’m content with the arrangement and I always give it my all but... I don’t really know why I like it.

Maybe the drama comes from something else entirely – it isn’t the question of whether I’ll rise to the challenge but rather the knowledge that one day, I won’t. One day, no matter how well I’ve prepared, no matter how unfair it is, no matter how much I’ll regret it, I know I simply won’t be able to make it to where I want to go. It’s the same thing that makes the Champions League so dramatic. In this tournament, it’s not so much that a team eventually lifts the trophy, but more like it just avoids being swallowed up by the darkness, round after round after round, until no other team remains. There’s no recipe for success when almost every team gets knocked out. I do know one thing, though – a team unwilling to stare back into the darkness and fight with everything it has will always regret the night it never gave itself a chance.

Footnotes / Rafa, the magician…

1. Liverpool 1, Chelsea 0 (Liverpool advanced, 4-1, on penalties)

The best specific example of this would be the 2007 semifinal against Chelsea. Hosts Liverpool entered the second leg of the two-game series needing one goal to draw level. This goal came early in the match courtesy of Daniel Agger – when the ball hit the net, everyone celebrated wildly in the bright late afternoon sun. At that point, it felt like we were going to win 3-0. By the end of the match, though, the floodlights were on and it just felt like the tiniest misstep would lead to the Chelsea goal that would send Liverpool crashing out of the tournament.

I’d imagine Benitez, Liverpool’s great manager, aged about three years during this game. His response when the game went to a shootout is legendary – he sat on the ground, resembling a tired tourist waiting for his entire family to emerge from a fast food restaurant’s plastic restrooms, and waited patiently for fate to summon him once more to his weary feet.

leftovers - tribe (extensions on leadership)

I heard some of you didn’t have time to read this post about leadership so I wrote a quick summary for you.

1. We glorify visible and easily understood leadership styles ahead of the less visible and difficult to understand styles.

2. The way we define leadership rewards leaders who prefer competition ahead of those who exemplify cooperation.

3. The collective understanding of what makes a leader biases us toward largely physical features – height, voice, presence – and this in turn means we dismiss potential leaders who do not possess these characteristics.

So that’s what happened in this post. You might be thinking, reader – that’s great, Tim, and thanks for the summary, but what does this mean for my weekend?

Reader, my response is – nothing. Go enjoy your weekend! You’ve earned it…

I do want to remind you, though, that just a couple of years ago half the country felt it had no better option than to vote for a guy who was most well known until then for yelling “YOU’RE FIRED” at his employees on national television. A lot of people back then, regardless of who they voted for a decade later, thought this was a fine example of the kind of confidence and assertion required in any great leader, and I suspect a lot of people today, regardless of who they voted for two years ago, still think this is what a leader should do on a daily basis.

But that’s not important, reader, neither here nor there, so go enjoy the weekend. Yup, well deserved, the weekend…

I do ask, though, for one last thing, which is to remember that when society makes a bad decision, it doesn't matter if a certain subset of the society would have made a better decision. It doesn't matter because in the end a society bears only the fruits of what it collectively sows. In the context of finding leaders, a seed is planted anytime we collectively decide what is or is not good leadership. We have a chance to plant a seed, for example, when we watch a head chef dump a plate of food before berating the cook. We have a chance to plant a seed when a helmet football coach blames a player for performing poorly. We have a chance to plant a seed when your manager disseminates what your teammate told him or her in confidence.

In these moments, our reactions can make all the difference. If we dumbly nod along, acknowledging these moments as good leadership, then we simply replant the same fields from which we've just harvested the newest crop of poor leadership. If we take a moment instead to ask difficult questions of our leaders, however, and maybe challenge our own perceptions of what truly defines great leadership, then maybe things can start to change.

the 2019 toa awards - podcasts, part 3 (lifetime achievement award)

Hi folks,

Before we resume TOA awards season and determine the best podcast of 2018, let’s take a moment to acknowledge Common Sense, a podcast that was a fixture atop my podcast rankings over the past few years.

Lifetime Achievement Award – Common Sense

We here in the TOA Award Committee are at the point now of perhaps considering Dan Carlin’s current events program retired from my podcast lineup. There has been no official announcement about the show being over but since Carlin has stopped releasing new episodes in 2018 (save for one show in May) the general mood is that another good thing in my life has ended. It’s kind of like that old riddle – if a podcast exists on iTunes but doesn’t release any new episodes, can it win a TOA Podcast Award? I’m not sure about that one - what I do know is that my common sense tells me the show is, without officially being declared over, over.

The end of the show is an unfortunate development given how valuable some of his centrist perspective might be in our current political landscape. He’s a clear thinker whose agenda is, if not nonexistent, at least balanced by perspective, and I’ve found his podcast a great way to sort through the distracted, shortsighted, and polarized rubbish I feel bombarded by in our breaking news culture. Of course, on the other hand maybe his year of silence was its own commentary about the value of talk in 2018. What is the point of discussion when most people seem a trigger word or two away from turning into a frothing idiot, ranting and raving against the politician, policy, or party that most incites their outrage?

Returning briefly to the much less relevant matter of my own podcast rankings, I think if Carlin gets the show rolling again in 2019, I’m sure Common Sense will challenge once more for a place among my top three. Until that happy day, though, I will reluctantly acknowledge that a podcast with one episode a year is a lot like a podcast with no episodes a year, and settle for the uncertain closure of a TOA Podcast Lifetime Achievement Award.

leftovers - the real reason I’m not running (data edition, part 2)

There were a couple of technical thoughts I cut out of this leftover that I want to share today.

First, an important note about a lifetime of running is that this is an activity with a long tail. A long tail means that the period of decline is more gradual and much longer than the ascent. In the context of running, this means that a runner improves much faster in his or her twenties than he or she declines over the next forty years. Given the reality that for most people this decline begins somewhere between the late twenties and early thirties, I thought it was an ideal time for me as a runner to start making decisions with the next forty years in mind (instead of the next forty miles).

To put it another way, I should avoid overdoing it now because I might feel the consequences for the next forty years. This is a heavy consideration to make as I cruise down the Charles River or jog through Somerville and it was difficult at first for me to put it into practice. I’ve managed a good compromise to get myself to cut short any run where I start to feel pain or discomfort – I always bring my Hubway bike pass with me so that I can switch over from running to biking whenever I decide to give up. This trick has helped me gradually learn to control myself whenever I get that urge to run through the pain, a vestigial survival tactic from my competitive past that is now the biggest threat to my goal of running a marathon in my seventies.

Footnotes / endnote… wait, what’s gonna happen in forty years?

0. What’s the world record for a seventy-year old running a marathon?

That last line isn’t a joke, readers (though it isn’t a plan, either). I recall reading that a seventy-year old runner can do just as well as a seventeen-year old provided the elderly runner managed to avoid major injury in those intervening fifty-three years. It’s quite a qualifier, I admit, but given the recent changes I’ve made to my lifestyle I feel slightly better about my chances. See you at the finish line!

reading review - tribe (extensions on leadership)

Hi folks,

I thought my most recent post about Sebastian Junger’s Tribe was all I required to wrap up my thoughts about his work. As I reviewed my notes, however, I realized that I'd left a lot out about Junger's views on leadership. In particular, I thought there was a lot to learn from how Junger described the two types of leaders that emerge in the aftermath of a disaster. These different models of leadership have importance consequences for the way we collectively define leadership and help shed light on the way I hope this definition changes in the future.

The first type of leaders Junger describes are those who takes urgent and immediate action whenever it is required to achieve a goal. They tend to dismiss the opinions of others if it interferes with the goal and often seem to lack empathy as a result. Their singular focus often proves essential when the situation demands a group pool its collective resources to bring a dangerous or volatile situation under control.

As the crisis passes, a second type of leader emerges. This type is better suited for longer-term challenges that do not benefit from urgency or a bias for action. These leaders consider factors such as morale and understand how to maintain a group’s positive mood. Whereas the first type excels at harnessing a group’s collective resources to meet urgent needs, the second type thrives at cultivating the cooperative ethos required to conserve resources in preparation for meeting long-term challenges.

Junger notes that leaders tend to be one type or the other (1). I agreed with this comment based on my own experiences with leaders and my own attempts at leadership. At the risk of oversimplifying this complicated topic, it seems to me that leaders who thrive in competitive situations struggle in cooperative environments while those who excel at fostering togetherness are not as effective when the situation demands a full commitment to defeat a clear opponent.

One thing I hope changes in the future is the way we glorify the first type of leadership at the expense of acknowledging the importance of the second type. I think this is a natural result of our collective bias for action and also speaks to how we elevate the importance of the direct impact we can observe over the indirect influence that is never obvious on the surface. When most people think about leadership, I suspect they are envisioning a commander, someone who is seen and heard organizing and dictating the action in fast-paced environments. They think of leaders who announce decisions with certainty and authority. If these leaders are uncertain, their outward confidence obscures the fact. They think, in short, of the first type described by Junger, and I think they do so because the characteristics these leaders demonstrate is the highly visible and easily understood form of leadership.

This working model of leadership dismisses the contributions of the second type and puts us at risk of devaluing the importance of long-term thinking and planning. By collectively agreeing that easily observed leadership styles are the only true form of leadership, we absolve ourselves of the responsibility to develop a deep understanding of the role leadership plays in confronting and resolving the chronic problems in our communities. This lack of understanding leads directly to our repeated failures to identify the right characteristics required in the leaders we appoint to address these problems.

I hope this collective view to leadership changes for a couple of reasons. First, I think the USA is at a crucial point in its history where the problems facing the country are the same problems our allies and neighbors are facing. We cannot defeat shared global problems with our favorite tactic - going at it alone. Whether the specific issue is climate change, human rights, or curtailing the actions of destructive dictators, the solutions require less and less of the competitive style of leadership Junger describes as the first type and instead demands the cooperative mentality demonstrated by the second type. If the USA is to remain the global leader it has always been, it must do so not by racing others to the top of the mountain but by instead becoming the trusted Sherpa that other nations rely on so that all of humanity can one day share space together at the summit.

The second reason is more of a grassroots idea but one that I think is far more important. The glorification of Junger’s first type leads us to think of leaders as having certain characteristics – presence, confidence, and assertiveness. These are characteristics that link closely to physical features and this results in the exclusion of many types of people from meeting a definition of leadership. When we systemically reject candidates for a position based on characteristics that are unrelated to success in the position, we systemically lower the chances that we find the best person for the job. I think for us to meet the challenge of finding today's leaders that can solve tomorrow’s problems, we must first closely examine our definitions of leadership and decide if we feel that these definitions position our society for bigger and better things in the days ahead.

Footnotes / previously on TOA…

1. I suppose all truths can be contorted into a false duality…

Longtime readers may recall similar thoughts from other books I’ve highlighted in this space. In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz notes that CEOs tend to be Type One or Type Two – a ‘One’ is better suited to run an organization mired in a fight for its corporate life while a ‘Two’ is able to maximize an organization’s opportunities during periods of stability. And in Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, the chess grandmaster commented that players tend to be better suited to be challengers or champions – a challenger must focus on dethroning an opponent and learn to compete against a specific set of strengths and weaknesses while a champion must find ways to maximize his or her own skills in order to be best prepared for a fight against any future opponent.

leftovers #2 – the 2018 april newsletter (a good day usually gets off to a good start)

I realized when I started my new job that the best way to start a day is to do something that makes you feel really good. It might be going for a run, eating a great breakfast, or even reading this blog. Whatever it is, everyone should do something they really enjoy in the morning.

I've learned this year that taking the time to write in the morning almost guarantees I’ll have a good day. I think this speaks to some kind of truth or wisdom about how to have a good time doing anything – what starts well ends well. For me, getting some writing done early means the next fourteen to eighteen hours are essentially ‘house money’ because of how well the day started.

My target wakeup time of six AM leaves me with between one and two hours each morning for writing. This is a long time to do almost anything – let alone write – and certainly plenty for the demands of this blog. I had to make some basic adjustments to allow myself to have all this time at the start of the day (rather than it being spread across the afternoon and evening). The biggest change is how I now include anything ‘writing related’ in this morning writing period. In the past, I never proofread or typed up book notes in the morning. These days, though, it is a little different thanks to the reality of committing a big chunk of weekday time to a full-time gig.

I suppose this mentality speaks well to my personal growth over the past three to four years. It’s not only because of writing that I’ve become more resilient to trivial setbacks and better able to focus on the best part of a long day. But I know writing in the morning really helps regulate my mood. To put the previous point more bluntly, a shitty day rolls right off my back now if it comes after a couple hours of writing. The past few months aren’t the first time I’ve ever rolled with the punches, of course, but in the past I was more likely to stew on problems overnight or even through the weekend. These days, I don’t get down about anything work related if I had managed to write that morning.

The other half of this personal growth is the ease of my self-expression. If I break down what I’m really doing when I write, I see how writing is a way to express how I feel or work out what my thinking is about a topic. Practicing these skills every morning has naturally bled over into the other parts of my life. When people ask me how work is going these days, I'm able to tell them because I've practiced in a way through writing. This is a big change from the past when I would simply announce that things were ‘fine’ or ‘good’ without giving it much thought. It’s been a small change but an important one.

i read skin in the game so you don't have to

Hello reader,

Today’s post is the first in a series about Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s newest book, Skin in the Game. Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll take a closer look at some of the themes in this work – nth order effects, intolerant minorities, the importance of public perception, and so on.

Like was the case for most of his other books (except, I suppose, his first) Skin in the Game expands on a small portion of his prior book, Antifragile. The main idea Taleb explores in the book is risk asymmetry. This is when a person or persons who stand to benefit from the upside of an outcome do not bear a proportionate level of downside risk. I’ll look more closely at his ideas in those upcoming posts.

For today, I thought I would riff a little bit on some of his more interesting one-off ideas that did not fit neatly into any of the themes I identified.

Thanks for reading.

Tim

Employees are expensive because they must be paid during non-work hours in order to increase their availability during regular work hours.

This ties back to a concept from his prior works – the difference between a contractor and an employee. Though a well-organized system of contracted work tends to produce better results for the organization and the worker, the need of having a certain level of workers available during traditional ‘work hours’ forces the hiring of salaried employees.

To put it another way, employees tend to be grossly underpaid for the work they complete for an employer but significantly overpaid for the time they commit to the employer. This is reflected in how employees-turned-contractors often experience a significant boost in per-hour compensation when compared to their former salaried position. However, a contractor is paid fairly when not working – $0 per hour – whereas an employee’s pay rate while not working – such as during a coffee break – remains exactly the same as it does while working.

Most fail to see how increasing wealth leads to declining utility because constructed preferences emerge as financial means increases.

This was a good point about how increased means allows access to previously inaccessible goods, entertainments, or services that seem like good ideas mostly for their novelty but have very little lasting effect on well-being. It might be fun to go out for an expensive steak dinner, for example, but I’d prefer going to Sapporo Ramen ten times with the same money.

Although my exact example might not hold for all of my readers, I’m sure everyone can think of their own versions of this phenomenon.

Work that encourages you to cut corners, become more efficient, or optimize will eventually become work you dislike.

This is my favorite stand-alone insight from the book. As I think back over my various experiences, I see this pattern emerge time and again. Though there is a degree of skill development involved in optimization and mastery is often required of anyone who can improve process efficiency, work that focuses on these goals is trading quality of output for quantity of output.

My belief is that the work people find most meaningful emphasizes the latter over the former. When a person produces the highest quality work he or she is capable of, the resulting sense of satisfaction runs far deeper than is produced when increased efficiencies allow output of widgets to rise 3% when compared to the prior workday’s total.