you lift from the bottom, part four

I think technology is too often confused with progress. As a country, we commonly point to the introduction of a top-line technology as evidence of progress. We consider something like NASA as validation for all the hard work we do to move forward as a nation. Reader, thanks to NASA, we can send a white dude to outer space – and back! – without having Ed Harris sitting around and reminding everyone that failure is not an option!

But improving the technology of transportation and extending a trip beyond the limits of any voyage ever made before shouldn’t be confused with progress. This is merely technology and technology isn’t progress. I first had this realization a couple of years ago while volunteering at a food bank. I was thinking about why we bother sending men to the moon when half the clients we were expecting that day were vulnerable to the unpredictable delays of the bus system. Neil Armstrong never would have made it into space if he'd taken the bus to the launchpad!

Maybe I just don’t know, reader, maybe I’m just not clever enough, not ambitious enough, not wise enough, not STEM enough, not you-decide-what enough, to do the math and figure it out. I guess. Maybe I don’t understand how all the stuff we did to get to the moon – and back, most of the time, anyway – led to all kinds of advancements at home. The moon mission gets credit for inventing a whole list of impressive stuff - check out this link for ten examples. All those things are major achievements in their own right (the water purifier really stands out) and the application of these space-age inventions has meant miracles for so many in the ensuing years. It's kind of surprising, really, when I look at all those advancements that the famous line isn't 'Houston, we have a solution.'

But it’s also been a half-century since we humans first stomped around on the moon and, well, we still seem to have a lot of the same basic problems to worry about on Earth that we worried about back then. One invention that didn't make that top ten list was the end of hunger - it's true, reader, no one has ever starved to death in space. And I think this is great, it's great that no one ever starved in space... so maybe we can apply that solution at home, too? It's only been, you know, fifty years? Plus, what good is a cordless vacuum cleaner if you don't have any cookie crumbs to hoover up? Maybe we’re supposed to wait another five decades for all the crumbs to trickle down, for everything we greedily suck up at the top to dribble its way down to the bottom. I can wait, I suppose, but for how long?

the running dynasties (parts I and II)

Running with a partner over a long distance always creates interesting opportunities for extended speeches. This is because inevitably one person or the other will get a little tired and need to focus on just keeping a breathing rhythm. When one person isn’t talking, this means the other person must take on the burden of generating interesting commentary in order to keep the conversation moving.

It was during such a run that I invented the notion of ‘the running dynasties’. What this nonsense means is that over the course of my life I could look back and pinpoint extended periods of time when I ran consistently.

As we trotted along the Charles that day, I came up with four such dynasties...

The First Running Dynasty: June 2008 – October 2008

Start reason: Trip to Japan
End reason: Start of basketball season

I think the reason I started talking about these ‘dynasties’ was because the first dynasty started thanks to the friend I was running with that day. A former teammate on my college basketball team, he prophesied in the spring of 2008 that I could be in the best shape of anyone on the team. If I managed to do this, he explained, I could eventually bounce back from my injury plagued sophomore season. I think this was just the encouragement I needed at the time. Up until then, my workout plan for the upcoming year was to work out a way to quit the team.

When I went to Japan that summer for a six-week trip, I focused on developing a running habit. I returned to the US twenty pounds or so lighter and just continued running right up until the start of the basketball season.

The Second Running Dynasty: September 2011 – October 2012

Start reason: Reading Born To Run
End reason: IT band injury

My first year out of college was definitely a ‘lost year’ from a running perspective. I definitely did run, that much I know, but I don't remember enjoying myself all that much while running. I also put on some weight that year so I know I couldn’t have been running all that seriously.

Everything changed when I read Born To Run. The book’s argument compelled me to investigate a new running style and its story inspired me to become the sort of runner who thinks rolling out of bed and running ten miles is a sensible activity. The result was a short, blissful time I look back on now as when I was in the most exuberant running form of my life. The dynasty culminated with what is my best performance to date – a 9.3-mile run completed in just over an hour on a hilly roadside course in the Adirondacks.

In hindsight, it will probably go down in history as my best running performance ever. A week later, my knee assassinated my ambition. This was the start of a long, repeating pattern of self-inflicted running injuries that would mar the rest of the decade.

fear

I heard back in February that our economy was once more approaching a record low for unemployment – 3.8%. This is the kind of accomplishment that merits a celebration! But before I baked a cake or bought a bottle of bubbly, I decided to run my own little experiment to see how the theory of the national economy compared with the reality of my personal economy.

My methodology was very simple. I opened the contact list on my phone and counted the number of people I knew who were currently or imminently out of work. I then divided by the number of total contacts to derive a new, powerful macroeconomic metric – The TOA Unemployment Rate. At the time of writing, this figure was 11.7%. I then went a little deeper and tallied up those who were underserved by their wages. Simply stated, in this group I included anyone who wasn’t able to achieve basic lifestyle goals (like living away from home) because of their income. This particular calculation resulted in a rate of 16.7%.

I went through this little exercise because my reaction to the ‘record unemployment’ number was the same as always – total skepticism. In the past month alone, I’ve talked to five different people about their current state of unemployment and what they might do about it. This is a capable group of five. They could form the foundation of a promising new company or ably serve a productive department within an existing organization. Among many highlights, this group boasts multiple advanced degrees and certifications, decades of experience, and work histories that demonstrate both the skills and career progressions that employers around the world claim they struggle to find for their open roles.

And yet, these talented and qualified people leave The TOA Unemployment Rate many percentage points higher than the current national average. And did I mention that these people live in areas of the country that allegedly have even lower unemployment rates than the national average? What gives? Why is my experience so different from the so-called national average? I suppose it’s possible I happen to associate with the inherently unemployable; I would argue vehemently against such a position. It could also be that the demographics of my social circle skew wildly away from those that comprise national averages; I’m open to this consideration, but based on my quick review I don’t think this is the case.

I think there’s something else at play here, something I see every day, and it explains why I routinely sense a discrepancy with my experience and with the national experience reported back to me in these aggregate statistics. I think the answer is fear. I think someone out there, whoever it is that is in charge of the unemployment rate, is afraid of stating a truth about the number – it’s 5%, it’s 7%, it’s 10% – and decided to find a way to calculate a lower rate. This methodology might include any number of entirely reasonable counting techniques that justifiably leave certain unemployed people out of the final calculation. My favorite such maneuver is not including people who have ‘given up’ on finding work – these people are so unemployable that they cannot be employed by a statistic! But regardless of the good explanations for these metrics, I believe at the heart of the matter is a fear about reporting certain truths about reality.

I think the fear involved runs both ways – it isn’t just the reporter who is afraid of stating a higher rate but also the consumer who is afraid of seeing the distressing figure. This fear is put to the test when we see the stories that report a national record low of 3.8%. We flunk this test each time we mindlessly nod along instead of simply saying ‘no, this 3.8% number is too low’. Again, for whatever reason there is a real fear of saying something that contradicts a widely accepted perception of reality – especially if such a perception is presented by a competent, experienced, and knowledgeable source.

***

I first started thinking about how fear prevents us from questioning perceptions of reality when I started meeting with aspiring hospice volunteers during their orientation period. My role in these meetings included describing the role, clarifying certain gray areas, and sharing some of my experiences. However, by far the most important responsibility was to answer questions from the new volunteers. After a few such sessions, I began noticing a pattern in the questions. The topics would cover varied ground – how to interact with staff, the best ways to direct visitors, the challenges of meeting residents. What I quickly realized was at the core of these questions was fear – fear of appearing incompetent in front of the staff, fear of making a visitor feel unwelcome, fear of saying the wrong thing to a resident.

My responses improved markedly as I learned to address the fear at the core of the question rather than merely responding literally to the question. I would do so by acknowledging the ambiguity or uncertainty involved in many aspects of the role and note the ways I had been upset or intimidated by certain experiences. The interesting result of including these details in my answers was how it tended to bring forward more openness or vulnerability in the follow up questions from the group. I might be asked by shy volunteers, for example, how to best introduce themselves to a disoriented resident. The bolder volunteers would directly challenge me to share how I’ve responded to emotionally difficult situations or conversations.

Such questions always came after I’d acknowledged that fear was a permanent reality of the hospice environment for even the most competent, experienced, and knowledgeable volunteers. I suspect this is partly the case because my acknowledgement validated the fear the new volunteers had intended to keep to themselves. By sharing my own trepidation, I had established the ‘Q&A’ as a safe space for these prospective volunteers to share similar feelings in front of strangers. However, I also think that my responses had the effect of challenging a perception of reality the new volunteers carried with them – the mistaken belief that an experienced volunteer didn’t share their same vulnerabilities. Every answer I gave to the group that demonstrated my self-doubt, unease, or fear was my way of shattering the myth that what any experienced volunteer feels is somehow different from the inner turmoil of their own experiences.

I’ve noted in the past how the most unexpected result of volunteering with a hospice has been the way my experiences have extended into my life outside the residence. The observation about how acknowledging my own internal experience to a group of prospective volunteers helped them validate their own trepidation has been among the most important of these extensions. I see fear underlying so much of what I used to naively ascribe to incompetence, malice, pettiness, or greed. Fear, I’ve realized, explains so much more about passivity than does indifference. When we collectively uphold a vision of reality that varies so wildly from our experience, I know now that the foundation on which such a vision is built is not misperception, but fear.

***

I look at the reports about the record setting unemployment rate and I wonder – what are we afraid of? It’s possible we fear admitting that the quicksand of unemployment is uncomfortably close, always so close that the foundations of our life can never feel fully secure. The unemployed face the obvious challenge of financial strain, of course, and many rightfully fear enduring this specific ordeal, but there is so much more to it than just a vanishing bank account. The unemployed generally lose the sense of meaning, purpose, or confidence that once was an unacknowledged consequence of steady employment. The loss of work also means the loss of the community many establish within the workplace and this partly contributes to the isolation of the unemployed. This isolation is further exacerbated by a decline in social life – the unemployed struggle to establish new relationships and often battle in vain against the relentless pressure unemployment places on their existing bonds. Many researchers discover that unemployment results in long-term trauma, a finding that may also be explained as an indirect but lasting consequence of the decline in mental, emotional, and physical health experienced by the unemployed.

Or perhaps, I should rewrite the above as ‘we’, having myself been out of work for an extended period that ended just over a year ago. I can confirm that there is much to fear, all of the above and perhaps a little more (oh, the small talk). It’s no wonder to me that we never talk about why there are so many long-term unemployed in such a healthy job market. If things are constantly presented to be ‘as good as it gets’, then there is little value in worrying much about it.

This attitude reminds me in a broader sense about our orientation toward death and what I perceive as the common position that as long as we don’t think we’ll die tomorrow, we should probably not worry about it today. Our collective longevity is better than ever, and therefore as good as it gets. So, why worry? I think the problem is that the fears we choose not to face today become the fears we cannot face tomorrow. Fear put aside for too long can fester and grow until we are no longer able to face it on our own. I believe this is the essence of what we do in hospice – we help people face debilitating fear so that they can get the most out of every day. We help face the fear of pain with medicine, the fear of isolation with companionship, and the fear of irrelevance by validating that all stages of life matter. We help families, friends, and visitors face their own fears so that they can acknowledge reality and support their loved one. As volunteers, we play a small but significant role in this mission. When death comes – as it always does – we try to face the fear of this undefeated opponent with courage, dignity, and unity.

I believe that if so much can be done to help others face the fear of death, then surely we can do more to face our fears of unemployment. We can build stronger communities at home and in the neighborhood so that the workplace becomes one of many places in which we belong and just one role among many in which we find purpose. We can strengthen our relationships so that they are better able to withstand the pressures placed on them from outside forces. We can support policy changes – such as eliminating the link of health insurance and full-time employers – so that the loss of a paycheck is just that and nothing more. In essence, we can decouple the loss of a job with the loss of the life enabled by that the job. We can reduce a large singular fear into smaller components that can be faced and overcome in turn. Most importantly, we’ll learn to notice when the world hides its fear from us and understand the inherent possibility in rejecting the fairytale of ‘as good as it gets’. It isn't until we turn away from this myth that we'll be ready to step forward and carry what we can of the shared burden of facing fear.

leftovers: you lift from the bottom, part three

In this post, I paused briefly to challenge you, clever reader, to ‘do the math’. And do the math you did, I’m sure, but just in case it was one of those days when time was short or you woke up and realized it was Monday or you just didn’t feel like it for whatever other silly reason, then lucky reader, I am here for you… and I will do the math!

Let’s say one of every five coaches is considered ‘good’. A good player responds to either kind of coach while a bad player only responds to a good coach.

A good player...

1/5 chance of a good coach
4/5 chance of a bad coach

Improves under all coaches

Odds of improvement are 5/5

A bad player...

1/5 chance of a good coach
4/5 chance of a bad coach

Improves only under a 'good coach'

Odds of improvement are 1/5

This roughly approaches my experience from high school. It just seemed like an unwritten rule that one out of every five teams was always tough to play. I assume now that these teams just had good coaches who elevated the performance of their worst players. The other four out of five teams were sometimes good and sometimes bad – it just came down to whether they had star players at the time.

A good way to see if a high school has a good coach is to see how reliant a good team is on teachable skills. At the high school level, most of the kids are either good athletes or they are not. Therefore, a good team with a superior level of athleticism might not necessarily be led by a good coach. However, if a good team is highly skilled in the sport, it is almost always a sign of good coaching (and at minimum a better sign of it than a team full of great athletes).

A similar logic should be used to assess any form of leadership. The surest way to identify the best leadership is to look at the teams or organizations under their command and determine how closely success is linked to the skills presumably taught or cultivated by the leader.

reading review - we were eight years in power (riff-offs)

Let’s wrap up my series about We Were Eight Years in Power with a riff-off using some leftovers thoughts.

An essay differs from a feature in terms of how the writer interacts with the narrative. In an essay the writer imposes the narrative on the work whereas in a feature the writer simply follows the narrative through the subject.

I think having these definitions stated in such simple terms will prove valuable for me at some point in the future. For now, it gives me a working idea for what makes a poor essay – the author failed to impose a narrative on the piece. I suppose a similar thought could apply to a poor feature, but I don’t read features all that much these days and therefore cannot speak to whether most subjects fail to lead the writer along a clear narrative.

Though mass appeals to conscience are often compelling, they rarely lead to any kind of response. Groups of people are in general mostly self-interested.

The first statement here is a little misleading because it suggests groups make decisions in the same way individuals make decisions. It also oversimplifies the idea by subordinating collective considerations to conscience, an individual concept. The barrier to group action is rarely the lack of a compelling reason – if I needed to guess, I would suggest it is some combination of poor coordination, unclear information, and lack of immediate social proof.

Getting involved in a community and trying to help others solve problems allows us to connect our ideas and aspirations to universal causes.

I like this idea but I like the reverse even more – getting involved in helping others also gives people the chance to connect their ideas to smaller-scale, grassroots initiatives.

One way to calculate a figure for black reparations would be to find the difference in per capita wealth or income between white and black people, then multiply the difference by the number of black people.

A part of me appreciated using simple math to answer what is otherwise a very complicated question. Of course, the ever-present danger of using math is the threat of oversimplification. It’s not just the calculation that I am referring to – a neat result suggests that the major obstacle all along was just figuring out the math and, the math now figured out, everyone can shake hands and move forward. Life is rarely so simple. When real hurt was involved, the drawback of calculations is revealed in their inability to factor hurt into its equations.

Trump’s support was, in short, white, and his dominance among whites cut across every measurable age, gender, or educational demographic.

Oh, here we go, the Trump section… not today, folks.

Maybe I'll go research how many white people in Boston voted for Trump -

It isn’t hard to imagine a more ‘effective’ demagogue in the future who will do far more damage than Trump.

Gee, I can't wait to meet this person. Or maybe...

Has Ta-Nehisi Coates met The Business Bro?

The city looks pretty when you’ve been indoors.

Yes, good call, it is nice out, sunny, and I have been here for what feels like days, hammering out these TOAs, and do I really want to go on about politics right now? Maybe I should just go out…

...huh?

So... what?

Fine...

That last thought isn't from Ta Ne-Hisi Coates, it’s from Courtney Barnett’s ‘City Looks Pretty’. But who better to end a riff-off?

Thanks for reading.

reading review - skin in the game (intolerance changes the world)

In my most recent post about Skin in the Game, I described an idea about how intolerant minorities can change a society’s preferences. Astute readers may recall that I made this point by adapting an example from the book into a strange cross between an extended metaphor and a parable. Let’s look a little more closely at this idea today without the aid of my assured hypothetical scenario.

Taleb’s main point is that small minorities can force the majority to accept their preferences provided the presence of two factors. The first factor is that the cost of changing preferences is not too high. There are lots of examples out there (that have nothing to do with melons) that illustrate the point. The basic way to identify these instances is to think about widespread behaviors that started with just a few early adopters and became increasingly popular as the cost of joining these pioneers reduced. When I think about the commonness of once-fringe ideas like recycling, text messaging, or online shopping, I note that they became ubiquitous as the cost of adopting these behaviors decreased.

Not all minority preferences are destined to become tomorrow’s norms. I don't think gender-neutral single restroom units, for example, will replace all segregated restrooms anytime soon. And it is true that cost is probably a factor here - I imagine the spending on plumbing infrastructure required to convert all restrooms to single-room units would sink most building budgets. But the long-term reason why I think this preference is unlikely to become ubiquitous brings me to the second factor – a minority must also be sufficiently intolerant for their preference to take hold. In this example, I suspect it is very difficult for the minority to be intolerant enough – the risk of permanent health problems is simply too high for the minority to refuse to use almost all restrooms on the grounds that the omnipresent setup is discriminatory (1).

Of the two factors, I found the ideas about intolerance much more interesting than the insights about cost. I suppose this makes some sense – as a former economics major, I’ve had plenty of experience thinking about the role of costs in everyday decisions. Quite frankly, these days I find myself a little bored by the topic (usually, it just comes down to how someone else estimated a few numbers, then picking the smaller/larger one as appropriate). Intolerance, on the other hand, is a topic I know little about despite seeming to hear about it every ten minutes these days. Based on what I hear and combining it with some of my basic assumptions, I would have guessed tolerance drives societal change while intolerance was the force that kept the status quo humming along. But the most interesting aspect of Taleb’s comments is how it reverses my intuition about tolerance and intolerance – to change the world, be intolerant.

Footnotes / justifying nonsense

1. Just giving it my best shot here, folks…

I admittedly don’t have a great grasp of all the details as it relates to gender-neutral restrooms and I don't want to give off a false impression of expertise on the matter. I just want to keep focused on the idea that minority preferences can become the majority’s norm given a low switching cost and a sufficient level of intolerance from the minority. If the costs of building these restrooms became sufficiently low, I could see this moving closer to the norm because anyone willing to use a segregated restroom should also be happy to use a sufficiently private alternative.

When I thought more about what I wrote here, I realized that this is a function of the law that I never heard articulated before – to codify a minority preference that would benefit all of society yet lacks the required criteria of low cost and sufficient intolerance as outlined by Taleb.

tales of two cities - the gorilla on the bike

I’m sure you’ve read about or perhaps even seen the famous experiment conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons involving a bunch of people passing a basketball and a person in a gorilla suit. The short version is this – the subject is told to count the number of passes while the researcher waits to see if the subject notices that a man in a gorilla suit walks through the group about halfway into the experiment. (Here's the video for those interested.)

What this experiment tells me about my life was never a major concern of mine, or at least it wasn’t until the start of one recent ride through Cambridge. I started in Kendall and pedaled my carefree self into Inman. This intersection has undergone a number of changes since I started riding in 2015. The most significant change was the banning of left turns from Hampshire Street onto Cambridge Street. This change happened ages ago but drivers still ignore the signs that hang over the intersection and make the illegal left turn anyway.

One day, my point of view changed. I watched as a car rolled into the intersection, a giveaway hint of an impending left turn, but instead of putting my head down and pedaling through as I always did I slowed down and kept my eyes on the driver’s face. Surprisingly, he didn’t look up at all – he just had his eyes on the road the entire time, waiting patiently for the cars and bikes to pass. Eventually, I too passed him, leaving him behind as he waited to commit his oblivious traffic violation. I assume he never saw the sign.

I thought about this a little longer before I realized – this was what the gorilla experiment was all about. There could have been a gorilla hanging from the traffic light, waving a sign that said ‘NO LEFT TURNS’, but some drivers are always going to see an intersection that looks like it allows left turns and just assume they can make a left turn. In other words, they would know exactly how many times the basketball got passed.

There is, I fear, a larger point about city cycling embedded in this realization. A driver focused on certain parts of driving risks not seeing other things – this is a truth I believe everyone accepts. But the scary part is that some of these unsighted things could be right in front of the driver. On certain streets, a cyclist is the proverbial man in the gorilla suit – in plain sight yet completely unsighted. There are the blind spots we can see when we look and the blind spots we can’t see until we look - unfortunately for me, I fear there are also the blind spots we’ll never see, no matter where we look.

leftovers #3 - the 2019 toa podcast awards

Today is the final installment of the 2018 TOA Podcast Awards series. I figured, what could be a better way to end it than to highlight a few memorable episodes from the past year?

One of the great podcast-related moments of 2018 was when I attended a live taping of the Men In Blazers at The Sinclair in Harvard Square – here’s a link to the episode.

I mentioned the end of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense as a low point in 2018 but he has continued to produce fascinating shows for his Hardcore History podcast. I thought the best one was this show, part one of a series about colonial Japan. One downside of a history program is how rarely I feel a connection to the subject matter but in this case the period discussed is one my grandparents lived through – the reader should note that this might bias my opinion about the episode before diving into the four and a half hour program.

A significant feature of EconTalk is the way interesting episodes double as book recommendations (host Russ Roberts will often center an episode around an interview with an author). The final episode of 2018 was the reverse for me as he interviewed an author about a book I’d already read – Sebastian Junger came on to talk about Tribe. I found the book deeply insightful when I’d read it just a few months prior to this episode and I recommend listening to this interview to anyone who has yet to check out the book – you might be convinced to give Tribe a shot after hearing this excellent conversation.

Finally, the year would not be complete without highlighting my own moment of podcast glory from 2018. On this episode of longtime favorite The Football Ramble… well, just block out about three minutes in your day, go to the 20:30 mark of the show, and discover the first ever TOA Easter egg for yourself, loyal reader.

Footnotes / back to the future...

0a. Honorable mentions from 2017...

The first two episodes are from Cousin Sal’s Against All Odds. Although the podcast is technically about sports gambling, the consistent humor of the show is what I find most enjoyable. This show when Sal and guest host Bill Simmons interview their longtime friend Brad was probably the funniest single podcast episode I heard all year. And for those who want more, check out this interview from the end of 2017 when the same pair talked with the late Super Dave Osborne – I had to lie down on my bed for the last fifteen minutes of this episode because I was laughing so hard).

0b. ...and a look into the bright future of 2019!

This one starts at the 22:40 mark.

For the record, I'm three for four lifetime getting emails read out.

reading review - we were eight years in power (comparisons)

One thing I concluded about Ta Ne-Haisi Coates as I looked over my notes from We Were Eight Years in Power was that he did not have much patience for comparisons. Longtime readers will understand why this is a notable observation given my own distaste for comparisons because I feel they often act as a substitute for deep and rigorous critical thinking.

The note that made me first consider this was Coates’s comment about ratios. He notes that the problem with a ratio is how although it requires understanding two components, they are commonly manipulated to state truisms about just one component. He cites a 2012 study from the Manhattan Group to make this point – in this study, the group suggested that segregation had declined since the 1960s. Great, Coates comments, but comparing two eras fails to account for why African-Americans still remain the most segregated group in the country and does nothing to determine what must be done to remedy the ongoing injustice.

I view Coates’s thought as an example of a larger problem with comparisons. If we become too accustomed to using comparisons against the past as a marker for progress, we risk complacency before all of our work is completed. Instead, we should understand what the ideal is that we are working toward and resolve not to finish working until the ideal has been reached.

you lift from the bottom, part three

I started weightlifting for the first time in high school. When I think back to this time, what strikes me the most about the experience is how my strong teammates became stronger during the four years while most of the weak players barely seemed to benefit from the strength program (1). The progression in the weight room mirrored progression in other skill areas - a good player often improved under the watchful eyes of the coaches while a poor player remained poor despite being trained by the same coaches as those ever-improving good players (2).

My experience with high school sports was my first exposure to a fairly universal problem – it’s easier to help people closer to the top than those down at the bottom. I think some of this is explained by definition. A good player is good at most things (including being coached) so a coach can focus on improving just one or two deficient areas. In comparison, a poor player isn’t good at much of anything and therefore the coach must find a way to improve on almost everything. The latter is, simply put, a tougher coaching job, and tougher coaching jobs generally require good coaches. Unfortunately, just like there are more bad players than good players, there are more bad coaches than good ones. You do the math, reader.

Where is the universality of this phenomenon? I see it everywhere, reader, and I’m afraid a comprehensive list would waste all my remaining time. It applies to medicine, insurance, income inequality, mass transit, education, and more. Generally speaking, whenever a given field or endeavor’s results can be aggregated and averaged, the temptation to ‘lift from the top’ comes into play.

I think the local rental market is a good example. Let’s say a given neighborhood has eight units at $100 a month. Their tenants earn, say, $300 a month (and therefore spend close to the recommended thirty percent of income on housing). Then, a construction project creates a new building with two luxury apartment units. The rent for each unit is $200 per month. Two new people move into these units, each earning $600 a month (and therefore maintaining the same ratio of income to housing as their new neighbors).

Let's pause for a moment to review the neighborhood's aggregate metrics. After these new units are rented, the average rent has increased from $100 per unit for eight units to $120 per unit for ten units. The average income is up from $300 per tenant to $360 per tenant. Given that absolutely nothing changed for the eight original tenants, these changes in the aggregate metrics are quite significant.

The impact of these changes is felt in the next rental cycle. The landlords of the $100 units will look around and say to themselves – hey, pay in the neighborhood is going up and we should get a fair share because, after all, we provided and maintained these units that served the foundation for our tenants earning recognition at work! Only fools would continue charging below the market price! And so after leases expire, rents immediately increase, perhaps up to $120 per unit so that their tenants who are now on $360 wages per month maintain the same proportion of income to housing costs as they did prior to the rise in income.

Sounds good, of course... but did incomes rise? On average, of course they did, since the average income of all tenants in the area went up 20%. But only an idiot would care about something that was true on average (!) - in this carefully constructed example, no one is actually making more money than they did a year ago except for the landlords. And even if some folks do eventually get that raise - perhaps by citing those same aggregate statistics to their employers as evidence of rising costs of living - it’s highly unlikely their raises would approach the 20% mark imposed by the landlords. The most likely end result after a rental cycle or two with these new luxury units in place is that the folks who once paid $100 on a $300 income will now pay $120 on $300 - which is forty percent of income on housing costs and, for pretty much everyone I know, not affordable.

When people around here talk knowingly about ‘the up and coming Boston neighborhoods’, this is what they are actually talking about – the income redistribution to the rich that comes whenever real estate appreciation outpaces wage growth. If I were more of an alarmist I would use the b-word here (rhymes with 'rubble') - instead, I'll settle once more for acknowledging that most people are bad at math, worse at statistics, and completely hopeless with economics. Given these realities, I suppose I should be kinder about the ways people misunderstand the reality of Boston's rental market.

Of course, the problem with being bad at math is that you can just not bother doing the math, instead settling on 'talking' as a way of guessing at the truth often a calculation or two away. But why wax poetic about such a simple concept? Is gentrification so difficult to measure that all we can do is talk about it in the abstract? I have another b-word for that mentality (rhymes with 'horseshit') but who knows, maybe I'm wrong, just waxing prophetic, because in some long run and aggregated sense we're always on the same rocket ship, being propelled upward by these luxury units that stretch closer and closer to the stars, ever higher and higher, so close to the sun that soon enough whinging on will have no use at all.

Footnotes / a tempting thought / no spit-balling in the bench press area, please / wtf, math now?

0. I suppose some of them didn’t graduate at all…

Another application of the ‘pull from the top’ concept was the way my school system growing up seemed to operate – some of my classmates went on to Ivy League schools, the best undergraduate institutions in world history, while others barely scraped together enough passing grades to make it to graduation. The temptation here is to suggest factors outside the classroom played a big role. I get it. But does this really explain the huge variation? How much bigger can variation in an educational outcome get than one student going to Yale while her classmate drops out of high school?

1. Objection: speculation…

I know strength training is influenced by a lot of factors beyond a coach’s control – genetics, nutrition, things like PEDs, and so on (I repeat: I get it). But if these were such critical factors, why did the coaches continue having the weak players lift? The fact that everyone remained in the program despite varying levels of success implies a belief that additional strength training benefits everyone regardless of how much it benefited them in the past.

2. I say this because most of the worst helmet football players – the one sport I remember where nobody was cut – rarely got any better over the course of the year…

I wonder if this is why the worst players were cut during tryouts – this way, at least the coach wouldn’t waste everyone’s time by failing to improve him over the course of the season.

stop interrupting - this is just my opinion

I know I’m not allowed to write about certain ideas. I’m not referring to some top-secret list of banned topics here or admitting that there are certain sentences I’ve decided to never put into print. No, I’m talking about YOU, reader, and how there are certain limits to what you are willing to read that I remain mindful of whenever I sketch out an idea for a post.

What kinds of topics are these? I think any topic where the reader was more interested in my position rather than my thinking would qualify. To put it another way, if I thought a reader would only skim to see my conclusion, then I'm probably not going to write the piece. Topics about which a reader already has an opinion are good candidates for this consideration. I imagine a reader who starts reading about such a topic will stop reading at some point and think – wait… I don’t care about Tim’s thinking because I already know my conclusion... but does he agree with me? Fully distracted, I imagine this reader would immediately start scrolling up and down the post until my stance was identified.

The attitude I’m describing reflects a simple mentality – who cares about the thinking when all it leads to is a position? I consider such a response to a written idea as the reading equivalent of an interruption (and a loud one, at that). Instead of hearing the writer out or doing the hard work necessary to follow the line of thinking, we as readers start skimming along until we determine whether the writer is on our team. There is so little point in writing about a topic I expect the reader to skim rather than read that I think I would be better off just publishing a list in these cases.

How can you identify these topics for yourself, reader? I’d start by thinking about the topics you respond to by saying - that’s interesting, but only because the way I do it is a little different. There’s nothing wrong about this approach, of course – everyone is entitled to an opinion. But it’s hard to get better at almost anything when thinking in this way. I didn’t get better at running by hearing about someone’s technique and saying – oh wow, well, the way I do it is different – and I certainty didn’t get any better at eating healthy by explaining my meal planning to someone who ate better than me.

I guess the main idea here is that an obsession over positions can distract us from learning. This usually manifests through an interruption, often because of an insistence on knowing the ending before hearing the story. As readers, we cripple ourselves when we cut writing down to a list of conclusions. And we writers enable sloppy reading whenever we strip our work bare of all traces of thinking. We are all entitled to our opinions, of course, and it is important not to forget this. But in what other context excepting holding opinions is ‘entitled’ used with any positive connotation? Instead of feeling entitled to a position, a better way might be to earn our positions through the hard work of challenging our own thinking, understanding the thinking of others, and being open to whatever that means about the opinions we’ve hold so dear.

how to guarantee a good book

I’ve always felt that books with three specific components always turned out pretty good. First, it needs to be well written. The writer doesn’t need to be great (though greatness helps) - the only important thing is that the writer continuously express a thought, explain it clearly, and move on smoothly to the next topic, repeating until the accumulation results in a good book.

Second, the writer needs to do some deep thinking about the topic. If this component is missing, the book often degenerates into the equivalent of a transcript from a dull lecture. As a reader, I often start to wonder during such reading if I could get the same information elsewhere (like Wikipedia or even maybe one of my silly TOA reading reviews).

Third, it needs the writer to draw on some significant amount of life experience with the topic. The obvious reason is that those without life experience rely on other sources – including previously written work – to get the information they are missing. This results in the obvious question - if the information were coming from somewhere else, then why would I read your book (1)?

One place I often see books that have these components are those written by good authors in fields that do not generate many good authors. I think Jonathan Rowson’s Seven Deadly Chess Sins is a good example of this in action. As a grandmaster, he passes the ‘deep thinking’ and ‘significant life experience’ tests – all he does every day is think and experience chess! But despite going through the time-consuming process of becoming a chess expert, Rowson also learned how to write somewhere along the way. Don’t ask me how he did it – I just know it happened because his book was really good (2).

My rules explain the strange phenomenon of the ghostwritten 'auto'-biography that turns out to be pretty good. It’s because it goes three for three in a roundabout way – the subject being interviewed brings the life experience, the ghostwriter adds the writing ability, and the two of them chatting about the project works out as a good substitute for deep thinking. In the case of the ghostwritten 'auto'-biography, it is a case of two people coming together to go three for three rather than one writer carrying the full load.

Footnotes / into the weeds of logic we go!

1. Just remember – I’m talking about what will lead to a good book, not what a good book is.

A good book requires a good writer who has thought deeply about the topic and has some life experience to draw from – does this sound too obvious, reader? Or perhaps, just flat out wrong? Well, it’s not what I said. The logic there is reversed – what I’m saying is that if a book has all those components, it’ll turn out pretty good.

The books with two or even just one of those components might turn out pretty good, too. Hell, I won’t even rule out a book that has none of those components. I’m just saying today that if the book doesn’t have all three, its success isn’t a sure thing.

2. Applying the checklist concept to being… better?

I saw a different but very helpful angle to this idea when I thought about Atul Gawande’s books. Like Rowson, Dr. Gawande is a superior writer to his peers in a field that does not make much time for working on writing skills (doctors are stereotyped for having illegible handwriting - it's no mystery that few can write a good book). However, some of his books were clearly better examples of my idea in action than others. I thought his best work was The Checklist Manifesto. This book drew on his deep thinking about the ‘checklist’ concept and described the ensuing challenge of his experience as he implemented it across various medical organizations.

His other books (such as Better or Being Mortal) were perfectly enjoyable works in their own way. But they lacked the direct link of deep thinking and intense personal experience that made The Checklist Manifesto work so well. Better is a good book that draws together various experiences while Being Mortal is at times reflection on what others in the field have implemented. As I noted in footnote #1, these facts do not preclude them from being great - and at times these books do reach a level of greatness - but if I had to pick out one of Gawande's books as truly great, I would select The Checklist Manifesto.

reading review - we were eight years in power (racism)

As I read Ta Ne-Hisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, I found myself taking notes anytime he wrote about racism in a way that I considered important, interesting, or novel. Today’s post collects a few of the notes that stood out to me when I was preparing to write about this aspect of his work.

Regular readers will recall that one of my recent posts about this book centered on Barack Obama. In the context of how racism influenced his Presidency, Coates notes that one way racists coped with the reality of a black President was by denying Obama his blackness. He also points out that Obama appealed to the country by seeming to suggest that the country’s historical errors regarding race were due to the malevolence of a small minority of racists, an approach that underscores a certain white innocence about the brutality of the country’s history.

I also wrote a general post about this book that pointed out the straightforward and cliché-free manner of Coates’s writing. The way he writes about racism exemplifies this method. One example is how he cites research showing that a white person with a criminal record is sometimes as likely to get a job as a black person without a record. He also challenges the narrow interpretation some have of patriotism, asking why people talk about America’s history of freedom without considering our foundations as a slave economy. I like the simple manner he uses to raise these details because it forces readers to consider their own thinking without challenging them in a way that encourages hiding behind existing positions, identities, or affiliations.

The thought that made the biggest lasting impression on me was his description of how social policy affected land values in certain neighborhoods where an unwelcome black homeowner moved in. In short, Coates describes how the wrong combination of laws and systems has come together to drive down the value of certain properties regardless of how the landowner feels about the new black neighbor. This situation would often force all homeowners, bigoted or otherwise, to resist anything that might upset the homogeneity of their neighborhoods because such changes would lead to a reduction in land value. The idea gets at what I consider the most important policy level question about racism – how do we organize and run our cities and towns so that people are not being asked to choose between what is best for their families and what reinforces the systemic racism built into our policies and institutions?

reading review - skin in the game (the melon metaphor)

A thought provoking section from Skin in the Game was Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s analysis of how intolerant minorities have the potential to alter a society’s default preferences. He used an example involving food preferences within a neighborhood that I will recreate almost in its entirety here.

First, suppose that you live in a family of four. Let’s say someone in the family suddenly develops an allergy to melons. The level of intolerance is severe enough that even airborne exposure will cause immediate illness. Although the rest of the family loves melons, the fruit is far from being a nutritional requirement in anyone’s diet and the family stops buying melons with little extra fuss.

Next, let’s say this family lives in a multi-unit building. One day, neighbors chat as neighbors do and it comes up that due to this new intolerance for melons the family on the first floor no longer buys the esteemed fruit. After parting ways, the upstairs neighbors reflect on this news and decide to play it safe – they, too, like melons, but it’s probably better to keep the entire property as melon-free as possible lest anyone become gravely sick thanks to one other person’s preference for a bit of fruit at lunch. The neighbors soon stop buying melons.

Finally, suppose these families live on a tight-knit block. Every year, they all get together at one house for a block party. In the process of planning the party, the news gets out that the families living in the nice duplex unit next to the dog park no longer eat melons. Oh dear, think the hosts, and they instruct the guests to leave all melons at home, which is too bad since about a third of the block’s residents describe melon as being ‘one of their favorite fruits’. But these same residents also describe 'no one dying from allergies in the neighborhood' as being among 'their favorite preferences' (or at least would do so, were anyone smart enough to ask). Given the realities of the neighborhood, these residents secure other fruits to bring to the party.

When the guests arrive at the block party, their curiosity leads to the melon allergy becoming the first topic of conversation. How bad is the allergy? No one knows, but everyone agrees that it is serious. What if someone threw out a melon on trash day and the wind picked up the scent? Let’s not think about that, everyone agrees. Or what if a dog - a homeless dog, to clarify, since the neighborhood dogs would never do anything to harm the block, those piles of dung on the sidewalk notwithstanding - what if a homeless dog got into a trash bag, pulled out a half-eaten melon, and then left it on the front steps of the duplex? Oh, the horror! By the time the party ends, no one on the block will ever buy another melon.

And the math of this result is the point of the allergy analogy - one person's intolerance of the fruit leads the entire block to stop buying melons.

i’m still no scientist

One of the hallmarks of science is the counter-example. The search for it powers the entire field. A researcher with a new idea, theory, or hypothesis builds a strong case for how the world works. However, at any point a single observation of the world working in another way will force the researcher back to the proverbial drawing board.

I think a lot of people like this style of thinking. I notice the approach pop up in many different contexts. I might be in the process of explaining a new idea or thought to someone and I’ll hear in response – well, what about this? The really clever ones will continue on and ask... and what about that? And usually, I’ll think about this (or even that) and conclude – you know what, you are right, this is a counter-example to my hypothesis!

And so I slink back to the proverbial drawing board and ask myself - what next? As science goes, I would need to return to the lab and come up with a new idea. But in real life, I usually just walk on. This isn’t because of my self-belief or my sense of superiority or even my immense stubborn insistence on always being right (hold your counter-examples, reader) – I think this is because most of what I talk about isn’t very scientific. I think what most people talk about isn’t very scientific. And yet, I often find myself held to the lofty standards of the scientific method (and observe the same phenomenon in even the most casual conversations among others).

I’m not really complaining, reader, of course not. I’m honored, in fact, when someone considers my scattered ranting and raving as the equivalent of a well-honed null hypothesis. And it makes sense that even the most casual conversation is littered with over-application of the counter-example. The scientific method isn’t just some thing taught in school – it is a simple application of basic logic. I rail against many things, reader, but basic logic isn’t one of them.

The problem is that an automatic instinct to refute a new idea might become an obstacle to understanding a new idea. These are two sides of the same coin to me – a refuted idea is similar to a fully understood idea in how neither one requires additional comprehension or brainpower. The former is obviously a much easier approach. But how many counter-examples must be explained away before the idea is understood?

Of course, this presents the true problem with the casual pseudo-science we are bombarded with (or bombard others with, really) on a daily basis – since the starting idea isn’t particularly scientific, the attempts to apply the scientific method will create skewed results. To put it another way, I think the instinct to refute only reveals that a decision about the idea has already been made. In a casual conversation that turns on a pseudo-scientific point, it really isn’t that hard to overload the other with endless counter-examples. And the other can refute these points, or not, but in the end it really doesn’t matter because no one is budging from their initial position since the initial position isn’t defined well enough to budge from.

I think the best approach to these situations is to demand detailed explanation of the idea. If someone like me comes around and says something like – you know, in the future I bet overweight people will think of weight gain as an allergic reaction to certain foods – then I would suggest asking me countless questions until I fully explained myself. And I’m not talking about assumption-laden questions that I could dismiss with yes-no responses; I’m talking real questions like – how did you come up with that? – or – why do you believe in this? – or – surely, you didn’t waste the last week coming up with this idea (1)?

Eventually, what will happen is one of two things. One possibility is that my nonsensical point will crumble under the weight of my own explanation. This is the reason to ask those open-ended ‘how’ or ‘why’ questions (can you describe… is also a good opener for such a question) – by challenging the speaker to sort out all the little details and overlooked inconsistencies, the possibility of the speaker refuting his or her own point becomes much more likely.

The second possibility is in a way even better – you might help the speaker build the argument to such a place that the point is essentially scientific. This might not sound so good right away, of course, but remember – if the point is scientific, all it takes is one counter-example to bring the whole house down.

Ask carefully, skeptical reader.

Thanks for reading.

Tim

Footnotes / analysis of my questionable logic

0. I know, I’m no scientist...

When presented with a new idea you do not understand, there are two options. If you try to understand it, you might be in for a long mental struggle. If you instead try to refute it, you might no longer need to understand the idea since if you successfully discredit the idea, it won't matter much whether you understand it or not. I think this is another good explanation for why people immediately try to discredit new ideas.

Again, when the two options are understanding or discrediting, it's important to remember how the latter is much easier – all you need is a counter example! Most people pass off presenting counter-examples as a way of ‘trying to understand’ - this isn’t the same thing! There is a fine line between trying to understand an idea versus trying to refute it.

1. But a yes/no question IS a question…right?

You could come the other way, dear reader, and point out the realities of calories and nutritionists. You could even frame it in question form – how come you think this when you know most allergic reactions don’t lead to permanent physical changes? Don’t fool yourself, reader, into thinking such a retort is an example of an open question because open question do not have any built-in assumptions (in the above, the assumptions is revealed by the phrase '...when you know...').

you lift from the bottom, part two

The first thing I learned about weightlifting was to always lift from the bottom. The power of the idea was its universality. It applied to leg exercises like the power squat, full body movements like the deadlift, and upper body lifts like the bench press. In each, the correct technique was to push straight up from directly beneath the weight. The weight lifter who jerked or pulled risked injury, usually from the weight toppling over as a result of lost stability after the sudden movement.

As I do with all universal concepts, I eventually had my ‘Neo Moment’ and applied it elsewhere. It took a long time, around ten years, but I finally got around to it last year. I was chatting on Charles Street with a local guy I run into every once in a while. We were talking about the different neighborhoods in the area and sharing our skepticism that these were the ‘up-and-coming’ places everyone was making them out to be. How could it be when housing costs were rocketing up yet wages were holding steady? Who was paying for it? And in the midst of this, I realized that the answer was no one, no one was paying for it, because rising neighborhoods must lift from the bottom yet these places were clearly being yanked from the top.

I didn’t come to this conclusion because I understand real estate or development economics or frictional unemployment. I didn’t come to this conclusion after reflecting on the break-in many years ago at my apartment in South Boston – one of The Great Rising Boston Neighborhoods – and finally recognizing that a simmering undercurrent runs beneath any new development. I came to this conclusion because I’ve seen people get injured weightlifting. You can’t just pull from the top and expect everything below to follow – what usually happens instead is a dizzying rise met with a swift, painful fall.

reading review - we were eight years in power (obama)

A major connecting link in Ta Ne-hisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power was Barack Obama’s presidency and the way his two terms influenced Coates’s writing. This was something I expected given what I knew about the book before I started reading (and the title, I suppose). What I did not anticipate was how much I would learn about Obama, mainly through the piece ‘My President Was Black’ in which Coates interviewed the President at the end of his term. When I looked back on this collection, I recognized that these insights into Obama were among the most valuable things I learned from this book.

I suspect history will look back on Obama as an early example of how the leadership standards for the US presidency changed during the 21st century. The country is approaching a certain form of crossroads at the moment. Do we remain loyal to our long history of waiting for important problems to become urgent before we commit our time, energy, and resources to resolving them (1)? Or, do we change our approach and take the initiative as de facto leaders in the international community? Obama’s approach to leadership, one where he looks at those in his charge and says that he believes, trusts, and sees the best in all of them, would help future presidents set the right tone as world leaders and help the US demonstrate the ethos of cooperation and mutual accountability required in our future leaders to tackle the global challenges we face in the century ahead.

The way Obama described how he applied his leadership philosophy helped me develop a greater understanding of how to lead within large, complex organizations. For Obama, it was always important to consider the consensus for what he could accomplish and weight it against the risks he needed to take in order to achieve beyond the limits set by that consensus. The calculation was essentially a measure of the expected stability after a change because leadership through consensus limits the opportunity for counterattacks from opponents. On the other hand, change driven by force is vulnerable to resistance from those who feel the hurt, anguish, or injustice that necessitated the change has gone unacknowledged in the implementation.

One up: Another consideration Obama highlighted for leaders was the importance of remembering that people are better at talking about doing things rather than simply doing things. When too much talk threatens a group’s ability to act, the leader’s responsibility is to refocus the group on what can be accomplished and steer the group away from simply outlining all that must be done.

I think those thoughts bring added clarity to how he described his frustration with activists. An activist who fails to understand the limits of a public office will often make a leader feel like not enough is being done to address the concerns of their downtrodden, repressed, or marginalized constituents. A leader tempted to respond to this pressure must remember that an activist will always demand more than what can be accomplished in a given time period. If the leader forgets this basic truth, he or she will risk exchanging the stability inherent in progressive changes for the volatility that comes with sweeping reforms.

One down: Obama drew two lessons from countries that could not maintain sustained support for their attempted reparations-like measures (South Africa and India). First, he noted that the underlying society must accept nondiscrimination as a basic principle. Second, the society must hold itself accountable for its failures in equal measure to how it celebrates accomplishments. I found these lessons discouraging because I don’t see the US doing a very good job in either respect.

Just saying: Reading about Obama in this book was such a highlight for me that I made reading his two published works one of my reading goals in 2019. I’m not sure if this will extend to reading about Obama, though I could probably be convinced if the right author wrote such a book.

Footnotes / US leadership concepts

1. Because, like, what could I possibly know about this topic, right?

Another way to look at this is to consider how Trump might be looked back on as the last President to exemplify a certain kind of leadership standard – a profit-driven, strong-armed figure encouraged by our country’s unquestioning acceptance of easily digestible corporate success stories. I think the world’s success in the future hinges on us losing our patience for the kind of leader energized by narratives, interruptions, and urgency ahead of reality, focus, and priority. In other words, we need more of the standards Eisenhower set for the job during his tenure and less of the oversimplified transactional mentality Trump is reintroducing to the office.

leftovers #2 - the 2019 toa podcast awards

Hi all,

Let’s review a couple more extra thoughts from my 2018 podcast review.

The loser’s bracket

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge some podcasts that I listened to this year that did not quite make the final cut.

-Malcolm Gladwell got involved in Broken Record, a music podcast that I never quite got into in the same way I’ve enjoyed his other work.

-Pardon My Take is well regarded by its many fans but for me the show isn’t good enough to crack an already crowded list of sports-centric shows.

-Economics With Subtitles was an entertaining and informative show that I might recommend to the subject’s beginners but concluded was too simplistic for me (and my undergraduate degree) to get excited over.

-Quack Attack seems right down my alley but I don’t have the energy at the moment to listen to a show with 250+ episodes in its backlog, even if those are all related to the greatest movie trilogy of all time - The Mighty Ducks.

Is this a memory palace?

I realized as I was going through the list that Against All Odds was like a 2.0 version of an ESPN gambling show I used to listen to, Behind The Bets. Both shows dug into the details of sports betting but Against All Odds is an improvement because it brings the right level of humor to justify listening to a show that is about what I don’t consider a very serious pursuit.

In a similar way, Revisionist History has some traces of one-time favorite The Memory Palace. Both podcasts dig a little further past the surface to uncover interesting stories that are in danger of being lost to the ever-receding tide of history. The difference in the podcasts is relevance – Revisionist History covers stories that impact today's world while The Memory Palace was always a show more interested in simply telling a great story.

Next year?

I recently went back into the Song Exploder archives to see if any new artists or songs have popped up. I’ll likely add this show to my regular rotation because good music podcasts are difficult to find and this program that dissects how artists create songs is among the very best.

The Japan Times recently started a new show about various topics related to living in Japan. Newspapers rarely produce great podcasts but I think the topic will keep me involved for a little while. I'm as of yet unable to download this but as soon as I get a few episodes into the show I'll chime in with an update.

Finally, I was asked about current events podcasts at the start of 2019 and realized that Dan Carlin's recent hiatus for Common Sense had left a big hole in my regular podcast rotation. By this time next year, I'm sure I'll have at least one solid replacement in place.

And now that I think about it, I should see what The Memory Palace is up to – I miss that show. I’m not sure why I stopped listening to it in the first place. Maybe The Moth, too, now that I’m a good ten feet down memory lane…

i read we were eight years in power so you don't have to

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates (July 2018)

I was trying to think of what thought or theme, if anything, best tied together this collection of Ta Ne-Hisi Coates’s essays from the eight years of the Obama administration. As I was reviewing my notes, I came across this thought – honest writing is threatened at every moment by clichés and truisms – and I realized that Coates had given me the answer at some point in this remarkable work.

The theme is evident in so many ways throughout the pieces that make up this collection. He defines, for example, the problem of mass incarceration by simply noting that we jail more people than China despite being one-fourth its size. He does so again when he explains the Civil War – the death of two percent of our nation because part of the country wanted to continue owning other people. He reflects the same theme in subtler examples, such as when he describes the importance of asking for clarification instead of simply nodding along whenever we are uncomfortable with our own ignorance. Throughout the collection, Coates lives up to his thought by avoiding the clichés and truisms that would give away the power of his words and threaten the honesty of his writing.

The intent of this writing style is to create a work of art – as he himself notes in one passage, art’s responsibility is to reflect the world in all its truth. When done well, art rejects the world’s lies and replaces myth with reality. This collection, by its own definitions, is a true work of art, one that captures how the country balanced and juggled its failures, contradictions, and dreams during the most astonishing time of its history – the era of a black president.

reading review - skin in the game (show, don’t tell)

Longtime readers of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s many bestselling books will know that he has very little patience for those who talk, talk, talk about topics they do not know a great deal about. I suppose this impatience has many possible sources and going through each possible one seems like an endless task I’ll save for another day.

One consistent factor I noticed is how Taleb dismisses talk, talk, talk anytime actions give more insight into thinking than words. For Taleb, good investment advice means telling others what is in your portfolio as opposed to telling others about all the surefire bets that you have mysteriously chosen not to make for yourself (1). Astute readers will make the connection here to the title of the book and recognize the crucial distinction between having an opinion and having a stake in the outcome.

There is a little more to this thought than linking the ‘skin in the game’ concept to some real-life applications. Taleb is also using this example to explore a much deeper observation about the tension between abstract intellectual principles and the realities of daily life. Taleb notes that when private life and intellectual opinion contradict, it is often the opinion and not the life that gets compromised. This insight draws partly from the basic truth that people sometimes provide explanations, thoughts, or beliefs about a hypothetical choice that do not hold up when the actual opportunity to make the choice comes to them.

However, the insight about this tension also recognizes how difficult it is to abide by certain hypothetical principles when these challenge real loyalties to family, friends, or community. In the face of these loyalties, no intellectual, ethical, or moral stance is safe. When Taleb points out how showing someone else your portfolio has much more significance than telling someone else what you think might be a good investment, I don’t think he is just extending the barroom logic of ‘wanna bet?’ to the realm of personal finance. I think he is also aware that people always make sound long-term recommendations in a vacuum that ignores how quickly an opinion will be compromised if a loved one asks them to do otherwise.

Footnotes / self-plugs are no plugs

1. A TOA classic?

Longtime readers may also recall this post, a simple observation I made about a friend who worked at a firm that actively managed investment portfolios.

leftovers – you lift from the bottom

Let’s take a look at another set of major problems that might be more important than ending poverty – border security, immigration, and tribalism.

Call me crazy, but I think this immigration problem, this desire others have to come here, to move here, it isn’t going away anytime soon. Let’s first take a moment to acknowledge what an immigration problem really means – it means America remains a place people want to move to. Despite all our flaws, we remain the ideal for the many seeking a new place to call home. And every time we talk about making America great again, all we are doing is marketing ourselves to the rest of the world. It probably sounds something like this – sure, we used to suck yet you still wanted to move here... better get here soon, because we are about to become GREAT!

But if people moving here is really a problem and we want to keep them out, I suppose I should offer up a solution. What do I think is the best plan? A big old wall? Two big walls? Maybe Amazon builds a really long HQ2 along the border? With all the corporate security I deal with getting into work, I bet having an Amazon headquarters would do wonders to slow the flow of immigrants...

I think the best plan is simple - make Mexico great again. Didn’t this happen after World War II when we made Japan great again? And in the next seven decades, guess who didn’t move here? Japanese people. Why not? Because it was worth it to stay in Japan. MAKE MEXICO GREAT AGAIN!

reading review - i wrote this book because i love you (riff offs)

I thought I would take a few moments today to look over some spare thoughts from Tim Kreider’s essay collection, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.

It is a pity that many prefer to confide certain things in total strangers rather than with the closest people in their lives.

When you want nothing from another, you can give freely and without fear.

I think these two thoughts work well in tandem. A total stranger is often a person we make no demands of and the lack of history makes it easier to share without risking anything valuable about the relationship.

A lack of reinforcement can quickly turn the desire for connection into its opposite. Babies have been seen to do this when their parents do not smile back at them – they will start fussing and finding ways to avoid eye contact with their parents.

An unshared life has a way of feeling like it isn’t happening.

It seems like we have very strongly developed instincts for self-preservation. This goes beyond merely the physical – like knowing to quickly break physical contact with a burning surface. The first quote suggests that even in our earliest years our instincts steer us away from the possibility of emotional harm.

What I found interesting about the second thought is the implication that reversing our self-preserving instincts might take years of focused effort. The loneliness and isolation of the unshared life will compel us to reverse the instinct for disconnection demonstrated by the ignored infant – but how long must a life go unshared before such a counter measure might develop?

The difficult part of identifying your own maladaptive patterns is how it invalidates much of the life you’ve lived by the programming of those patterns.

The end of relationship means the death of the person you were in that relationship.

The biggest opponent to any change is loyalty. In the context of self-reform, most people must overcome their instinct to remain true to a past self and the decisions made by that person.

The core of a protest is that it matters when the truth is spoken even if nobody seems to listen.

A truth is valuable to the extent that it values and promotes life.

This pair of ideas struck me as a decent rule of thumb for how to know difference between the time to speak up and the time to bite the tongue.

An aging pet is often just that – a vet will diagnose a dog as being seventeen years old. As long as the pet is eating and mobile, it’s probably best to keep it comfortable.

One thing that helps hospice caregivers think about how to care for a patient is to understand the patient’s goals. What would a patient like to continue doing to maintain a desired quality of life over the course of a terminal illness? These goals can be used as guidelines for treatment decisions. I liked this thought because it gives a pet owner a simple framework to consider during a related situation – if a pet has goals for its final months, what would those goals be? I suppose if an aging pet can eat and maintain a certain level of mobility, it’s probably appropriate to focus on comfort measures intended to maintain these two functions.

An institution goes into terminal decline when it starts giving irrelevant or obsolete answers to new, urgent questions.

I suppose the fundamental challenge for any institution is to find new problems to solve once it’s addressed the issues that prompted its original formation. This note suggests how to identify a failing institution because the inability to answer questions reveals an inability to adapt existing knowledge to new ways of thinking.

I want to go out but I want to stay home…

The final thought captures the spirit of the many small dilemmas discussed so far. The toughest decisions we have in life aren’t easily determined simply by calculating the positives and the negatives because at the core of the dilemma is a competing set of desires.

Huh?

Well…

Fine, that isn’t from the book, it’s from Courtney Barnett’s “Nobody Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party”. But who better to end a riff off?

Thanks for reading.

leftovers #2 – skin in the game (bad reasoning: the x-factor)

The third and final common reasoning error Nassim Nicholas Taleb cites in Skin in the Game is inappropriately reducing a problem with many dimensions down to just a single factor. I think this observation is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require an extended thought from me – if a given problem has three factors to consider and you decide to oversimplify things down to one factor, well, reader, I don’t really know for sure what kind of outcome you might be expecting.

In the past, I've ranted about the opposite of this very topic by using the general expression 'debate club mentality'. There are simply some matters that do not deserve a thorough examination of each side's three best arguments. The problem I've always had in mind when criticizing the 'debate club mentality' is the possibility that training people to think this way stunts their ability to determine whether a single powerful argument is more than enough to overrule the evidence presented by any number of equally true but relatively insignificant rebuttals.

Again, Taleb's point is the opposite of mine - Taleb warns against too much simplification while I worry about adding needless complexity. Which is better? I think the best answer, as always, is that it depends. The key skill to develop in this regard isn't to pick one approach or the other, it's to become capable of knowing which method is more relevant for a given situation.

you lift from the bottom

There’s a theme from a couple of posts I’ve written over the past month that I want to clarify today. These posts – about the invention of calculus and China’s goal to eradicate poverty – were similar in how they reflect my fundamental belief that societies move up when they are lifted from the bottom rather than pulled from the top. The more obviously unifying idea of these posts – that there is no more important task than ending poverty – is underscored by the theme of lifting from the bottom. I want to explore this concept a little further in a few upcoming posts.

I did want to touch on those two recent posts first, however, before moving on. The original idea of these posts was influenced by my own belief that there is no more important societal task than ending poverty. Is there a bigger accomplishment, reader, than lifting someone out of poverty, and keeping that person out of poverty for good? I think not. As is the case with most of my (many) strong opinions, I suspect I could be wrong about this. But until it’s proven otherwise, I’ll stick with my belief.

Let’s play Devil’s advocate for a moment, though, just to help me feel better about my conclusion. Is pollution and its connection to global warming more important than ending poverty? I think there is a case to be made here. If it turns out that an environmental catastrophe brought on by climate change wipes out a majority of the human race, the process of global warming will probably be looked back on as the most evil thing humans have ever done (assuming history will exist in a post-apocalyptic future, of course). However, when I look at the cause of climate change, it seems to me that the most significant increases in pollution come about to accelerate the rise out of poverty. Do the poor drive electric cars? I think if poverty ended, there would be less pressure to pollute as a means to increasing a society’s wealth.

How about rogue nations and the unpredictable nature of their crazed dictators? This is another strong candidate. If North Korea started nuking everyone, we would all regret not having done more to prevent it. However, I think one important reason we fear rogue nations is that we know their impoverished citizens have no choice but to support the hands that barely feed them. When starvation is a regular occurrence, people will support anybody who offers them bread and water. Maybe instead of tweeting at North Korea and trying to intimidate them with our military might, we should be sending planes over to Pyongyang and parachuting in all of our excess Wonder bread.

How about hate, discrimination, and intolerance? I think these are all big issues, perhaps each more important than poverty, and certainly with a different level of complexity. One thing I consider here is that these negative feelings require an internal system of winners and losers. Society’s casual acceptance of poverty makes it easier to understand others in this context because it starts to seem natural that there should be poor people in a world full of winners and losers. Further, by allowing others to remain in poverty, we subconsciously accept that poverty is caused by one’s own doing. We learn to discriminate anytime we accept the logic of idolizing winners and demonizing losers. Ending poverty would change this thinking in a big way by prioritizing equality not just in our rhetoric but also in the way we distribute our most essential basic resources.

Now, I should note that I don’t think getting everyone up to a basic sustenance level will solve all problems – ending poverty isn’t the magic domino that will knock over our other long-standing problems. However, I do think ending poverty will help simplify a lot of our current thinking about other problems that are much tougher to understand when so much of what they represent is influenced by the ever-present reality of poverty.

proving yourself wrong

I mentioned in the November newsletter that I was thinking about the value of being able to prove yourself wrong. This was a thought I had as I watched helmet football this past fall. The more I thought about it, the more there seemed to be two types of head coaches – those who were constantly trying to prove themselves wrong and those who were constantly trying to prove themselves right.

What do I mean by a head coach trying to prove himself right? In helmet football, a coach is always making decisions about which players to use during a game. These decisions reveal not just what the coach thinks about what will happen next but also serve as mini-retrospectives on what a coach thinks about his past decisions regarding who should be on the field. In other words, a coach who makes a change sometimes is doing more than just optimizing for the future – the change could also be an admission that he might have made a mistaken decision in the past.

A good way to notice these moments is to track how a player’s reputation relates to a coach’s decisions. Let’s define a player’s reputation as a sum of his accomplishments, salary, and draft position. Initially, players with better reputations should play ahead of those with lesser reputations. However, if a coach never removes poorly performing high-reputation players in favor of those with low reputations, it suggests that a coach is trying to prove himself right, at least in the sense of the initial decision to sign and play the player. On the other hand, a coach who makes such changes suggests he is trying to prove himself wrong, or perhaps allowing the players to do so, because these changes suggest he uses recent performance ahead of reputation to make decisions.

In any field where performance matters, I think a leader willing to be proven wrong is always my preference. Reputation is important, especially early on when there is little performance data, but over time a leader should know who is performing well and who is performing poorly. The leader who gives more responsibility to the highest performer regardless of reputation (which in the real world includes but is not limited to advanced degrees, prior work history, tenure, age, or appearance) should always do better than a leader who makes decisions based on reputation. The worst leaders of all make decisions based on reputation then stick with those decisions regardless of what happens next.

The challenge involved in this task is significant – how many leaders really want to step up and say ‘I got it wrong initially, but now we are making a change’? The answer is not many, but I think that’s the point, because great leaders are rare and would therefore be defined by unusual characteristics.

leftovers - the 2019 toa podcast awards

Hi all,

I had quite a few loose ends from the podcast awards we started a few weeks ago. Over the next few weeks, I’ll tie some of these together in a series of leftover posts. Below are the first two of those loose ends.

ASAP vs Storage

I skirted around a very simple question in my previous few posts – is every podcast on my ASAP list automatically better than those I leave in Storage Bin? The answer is a semi-obvious no and I’m sure my thinking is relatable to most who store anything – the precious family photos are in storage while your shitty plastic coffee maker is something you use every day. The balance of storage is a question of urgency, and as it is for my stuff, it also is for my podcasts. I listen to helmet football shows right away not because those shows are always better than discussions about economic policy but because helmet football shows become irrelevant far sooner than an episode about the minimum wage.

So, this leads to a natural follow-up question – what podcast is the cutoff point where the best Storage Bin show is better than an ASAP program? I studied my two lists and realized that since I had a hard time choosing between #7 ASAP The Tim Ferris Show and #1 Storage Bin EconTalk, the most appropriate place to draw the line was somewhere between those two programs.

Drink Diet Coke

My comment about Call Your Girlfriend being about a certain lifestyle came because of the episode when they defended their decision to bring on Diet Coke as a sponsor. The short version of this story is that the decision seemed to upset some of the show’s hardcore fans (aka, those on social media).

I wasn’t sure what to make of all this at first and I looked forward to learning more in this episode. As the show progressed, I realized that certain fans were upset because they felt the decision was inconsistent with the show's regularly discussed ideas. To put it another way, I came away from the show with the impression that some fans were very upset about the podcast accepting advertisement money from a large for-profit corporation that walks a very thin line between providing a valued product and exploiting an addicted customer. I understood what these fans were feeling but also thought it was a little naive of them in a certain respect – I seem to remember another episode where one of the hosts mentioned her six figure income. People don't make six figures because of their values, they make six figures by maximizing their worth to a capitalist system, and all I think any fans of the show can do in this situation is hope that CYG fleeced Diet Coke for every spare nickel in their marketing budget.

The larger idea this show led me to think about was how at some point people become rich enough to have more in common with other rich people than they do with people who once shared their values. In a sense, it seems like wealth is always won in exchange for certain values. I thought the Diet Coke sponsorship was a classic example of the strain wealth disparities place on existing relationships (in this case, the relationship between the show and its fans). I’m interested to see how this show evolves in 2019 as Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman meet the challenge of remaining connected to their fans and their day-to-day experiences while their own world continues to be transformed by their much deserved success.

leftovers – skin in the game (bad reasoning – actions and interactions)

In a recent post, I reviewed the way Nassim Nicholas Taleb analyzes common reasoning errors in his recently published Skin in the Game. My recent post focused on ‘the nth effect’ and the reasoning problems it can cause. Today, I want to look more into a second type of error – focusing more on actions instead of interactions.

This is a very similar concept to the nth effect problem but there are a couple of minor differences. One subtle difference is that nth effects tend to rely on a more traditional ‘cause and effect’ mode of thinking while actions-interactions consider the way an unseen or unconsidered factor might influence the way a cause or an effect would manifest itself. If the nth effect is a way to ask ‘then what?’, actions-interactions is a way to ask ‘what else?’

A good thought exercise that illustrates the difference in these kinds of thinking is to consider what might cause automobile fatalities to fall. The reasons centered on lowering the rate of automobile fatalities are good examples of nth effect thinking. A new driving instructor who is far superior to a predecessor will improve the overall skill level for all his or her students. This, in turn, leads to an increase in the general skill level among drivers that leads to safer driving overall and a lower automobile fatality rate. Other similar examples could start with a different initial event – a governor introduces a new bill to fix potholes or someone at Honda invents a better airbag – and asking a series of ‘then what?’ questions in line with nth effect thinking would lead to the same overall result – a lower rate of automobile fatalities brought about by improved road quality or better crash safety features.

A less obvious set of reasons keeps the rate of automobile fatalities constant and focuses instead on explaining why people might drive less than they did in the past. In other words, these reasons show that keeping the likelihood of a crash constant for any given trip can be irrelevant from the perspective of total automobile fatalities so long as the total number of trips is decreasing. These reasons are more about interactions than actions. If investment in public transportation rises significantly and people start trading in their cars for train passes, the number of car trips taken overall will eventually decrease. This, in turn, would lower the total number of automobile fatalities because there are less people on the road to begin with.

The tricky part of these two concepts is that it can be hard to tell when nth effect thinking ends and actions-interactions begins. This brings me to magnitude, the second difference between the two concepts. Nth effects tend to work linearly in comparison to actions-interactions and this means magnitude has a consistent effect on the outcome.The airbag example above works here because each improved airbag fractionally lowers the fatality risk. If the public benefit of installing improved airbags in every car is a 1% reduction in total fatality rates, then each improved airbag moves the total fatality rate closer to that 1% target in equal and proportional measure.

On the other hand, increased investment in public transportation does not necessarily have such a smooth impact. The magnitude of the investment is crucial because until a certain amount is invested there will be no change to driver behavior and therefore no improvement in the fatality rate. However, different levels of investment will cause the transit system to seem like a good idea for people in stages. A helpful way to think of this is by extending a train service - for each additional station build into the line, more people who live or work near the new station will trade in a car for a train pass. Unlike with the airbag example, however, there is no linear progression to these changes. If a station costs $200 million to complete, it isn't until that 200 millionth dollar is spent that commuters will make new decisions and the fatality rate will see any improvement.

Decision makers that consider the difference between nth effects and actions-interactions can find endless opportunities to maximize their time, money, and efforts. Though instinct suggests that the best investment of resources is always the one with the most direct impact on the desired outcome, recognizing the influence of hidden or subtle interactions can present much better alternatives for certain situations.

proper admin - daily resolutions, part 2

Hi,

Welcome back for part two of my closer examination into my daily reminders, a list of thoughts I review each morning in preparation for the rest of the day.

Feedback is about what you did, not who you are; listen to verbs, ignore nouns

I think feedback is the most important skill that goes uncultivated in school. Therefore, I recognize that I must work on it myself and I take this responsibility very seriously.

The first part of this reminder reflects how people have responded better to my feedback when it doesn’t challenge their identity or self-worth. Instead, I focus on actions and suggest ways to do something differently in the future. The second part is a reminder that I should accept feedback using the same principles with which I give feedback.

Isolate feedback

I don’t mix messages in feedback – it’s all positive or all negative. I do this because I’ve noticed that people do not hear both types of feedback at the same time. What they do instead is pick one or the other based on factors I cannot predict. If I have conflicting messages to deliver, I resolve the conflict by delivering the messages separately.

Prove yourself wrong

This reminds me that what I think first is rarely correct and that I should present feedback in a factual way that can be easily refuted. Broadly speaking, it means that I should be routinely seeking ways to disprove rather than confirm my theories, hunches, or intuitions.

One problem means one solution

I’ve learned that most people learn best when they are given one thing to work on at a time. That doesn’t mean I always think of just one thing to focus on in feedback but it does mean I should have a very good reason if I present more than one thing. It might feel good to point out multiple intelligent observations at once but the result is usually just needless complexity for what should be a simple self-improvement idea.

I’ve also used this idea lately with my work emails – one question limit per email – and I’ve found this method has led to much improved results.

No one cares - coach your team

I consider my life’s work as anything I can do to coach others and help them improve. This line reminds me that the single biggest threat to good coaching is self-pity – show me a complaining coach and I’ll show you a losing coach. Coaching means leadership that results in steady, incremental, and relentless improvement. A complaining coach always halts this progression.

Work 45 to 75, rest 10 to 30

This is a tactical counterpart to the previous line. I work well in blocks of 45 to 75 minutes that are followed by 10 to 30 minutes of rest. If I set and protect that rhythm in my work, I can go from dawn to dusk without letup.