[Link] On Saving the World and Other Delusions
A blog post by Athrelon on More Right.
1.
I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who suffered a crisis of faith of sorts. His startup, which initially had an extremely ambitious, world-altering business plan, had to retrench and start to find a more modest product-market fit. He was upset, not so much because of decreased prospects for a big dollar exit, but because, as he put it, “if I’m not trying to save the world, what’s the point of all this?”
It’s a standard narrative in the startup world: “the world is broken; I have a really ambitious plan to fix it.” But what I told him was that this is a totally crazy way of measuring both impact and a meaningful life. Most of the people who make a big impact in the world are doing paperwork, publishing research, working with the constraints of the system. They’re closer to a paper-pushing bureaucrat than a bold maverick. Sometimes the papers you’re pushing are exit visas for Jews.
The nerd’s sense of measuring everything here is a big handicap when it comes to assessing life meaningfulness. Our instincts for impact evolved in a world where only a few dozen people had real agency in your world; you were part of what we’d perceive as a small ingroup by default, and it wouldn’t be too crazy to think you could be one of the most respected and influential people in the known world. Today, it’s more difficult but still possible to achieve that feeling – but crucially, you have to carefully cultivate insensitivity to scope. You could become the manager of a small business, or a local leader in the Mormon church. Despite all the social disruptions of mobility and super-Dunbar living, that could probably still feel pretty similar from the inside to being a tribal elder.
But then nerds have to come in and ruin everything by measuring in terms of real world impact. And by that metric, nobody measures up to our brain’s expectation of impactfulness. Measured in terms of a civilization of billions, even the most successful career is going to feel like a drop in the bucket, and narrative-based dreams of world-changing are cartoonish. In theory, this quantitative thinking should also provide compensating solace, by saying “Yeah, well at least you did 10x what the average person is able to accomplish,” yet in practice I haven’t seen that many people deeply satisfied by that. It’s “save the world” or bust, without a sense of moderation.
It’s also not at all clear that saving the world is the best way to measure your life. Almost all societies in the past had a complex bucket of metrics involving personal virtue, material success, and success of the family – with “impact on the state of the world” being an also-ran at best. I suspect something in that vein is the most sustainable thing for humans, and that the startup bluster is maybe economically adaptive (as a way to overcome risk aversion and to project confidence) but also deeply insane given how human brains work. And the undermining of traditional notions of life success proportionally increases the importance of saving the world.
2.
One of the odd things I’ve noticed in our depictions of great leaders is that a big part of their influence comes from being able to get people to buy into a vision, and thereby get people to do things that they would otherwise never do. An ordinary leader can assemble a bunch of people doing their normal jobs at market wages, but if you can extract an effort or flexibility surplus in service of your vision, that makes it possible to attack a whole different class of coordination problems. Messianic leaders have been a staple throughout history, of course, but it seems that both the supply and the demand for such leaders is at an all-time high. Reading a self-improvement book published in the 1800s, it struck me how much of the leadership advice was personal, almost feudal: to make people follow you, be a publicly virtuous, reliable guy, someone people would be proud to work for. By contrast, for the vision-based leader, the pathos of the vision precedes the ethos of his claim to leadership ability.
I think this demand is related to our dysfunctional sense of meaningfulness. An undermining of traditional sources of meaningfulness leads people to seek meaning in their work, and this produces both a demand and an incentive for narrative-supplying entrepreneurs to fill that gap in exchange for super-market loyalty and dedication. This is potentially a fair bargain – the question, of course, is whether the entrepreneurs end up delivering, or whether they’re just providing the leverage to inflate a meaningfulness bubble that never gets paid off.
3.
There’s a phenomenon in psychiatry where people with two different psychiatric disorders – narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder – are frequently found in pairs. Commonly, you’d have a narcissist and borderline as close friends, or a (usually) male narcissist in a relationship with a (usually) female borderline. Narcissism is exactly what it sounds like: someone who for whatever reason has a deeply held need to be admired and considers his life story the most important thing in the world. Borderline personality disorder is best defined as a lack of a sense of identity; they tend to have huge emotional swings and identify themselves with a rapid succession of people in their lives. The narcissist needs others to validate his self-narrative; the borderline needs someone to give her a narrative to live. And so, it may not be surprising that relationships between a narcissist and borderline are pretty frequent, and, if not exactly stable, at least as stable as can be expected for people with personality disorders.
You can see where this is going. The need for, and premium on, vision-based leadership sort of looks like a widespread, subclinical version of borderline personality disorder – maybe we could rebrand it as “chronic questlessness.” Of course I’m not suggesting that people are crazy in the Beautiful Mind sense. Psychiatric disorders in general and personality disorders in particular are more a gradient than a Boolean diagnosis; they’re almost always exaggerations of heuristics that normal people use all the time. The threshold for diagnosis is nothing more than “okay, you’ve got some weird stuff going on; does it interfere with your functioning?” So what I’m suggesting can be translated to saying that there’s a broad-based, subtle shift in heuristics resulting in a lot of people seeking outside opinion on what they should value.
4.
For a long time I regarded the save-the-world thing as a basically harmless motivating delusion, the nerd equivalent of the coach’s pre-game pep talk where he tells your team that, against all odds and in the face of all objective evidence to the contrary, you are a bunch of winners and are going to take home the division trophy. But seeing my friend having his motivational system semi-permanently warped was something of a wake-up call, and got me thinking about how to avoid being sucked into that attractor. It’s tough because the tools of quantitative analysis that underpin this change-the-world heuristic are valid and indeed valuable. But these observations suggest that we should be wary of how easy it is to smuggle in the assumption that our benchmark should be a totally unrealistic amount of efficacy. And at the same times they argue for keeping a diversified life-meaning portfolio – you should include things like family success, physical and emotional quality of life, human relationships, and even relative social status as part of how you measure your life.
If you value the future, you can make a huge expected difference. Imagine that your contributing $100 to the MIRI increases by one in a trillion the probability that mankind will go on to colonize the universe, eventually creating more than a trillion times a trillion happy, meaningful lives. Your contribution, therefore, has an enormous positive expected impact. We are morally lucky to live in what appears to be the critical period for determining if mankind will spread or go extinct.
Agree. Every person living today looks extraordinarily impactful when you consider that 1000 years from now there will probably either be a million+ times as many humans or we’ll all be extinct.
I think the key issue for people like Athrelon’s friend is that there is a kind of “impact hedonic treadmill” that operates something like the regular hedonic treadmill in that you get used to seeing yourself as a person who is likely to have X level of impact, and if that level goes down, there will be a painful adjustment period kind of like if a wealthy first worlder was robbed and dropped in the middle of an unfamiliar city. It’s much, much better than being dropped in Antarctica and left to die in the cold, but it takes mental discipline to keep that in perspective. (Some of today’s beggars arguably live better than kings of centuries ago; I met one who had a cell phone and a laptop.)
I’m dealing with something similar as a nasty bout of eyestrain has made it difficult for me to use my computer for the past month.. wrote this comment mostly using a screen reader :( (Would love to hear from anyone who’s suffered from this problem in the past via PM)
This statement looks equally applicable to the year 1900, for example.
We have more reasons now (nuclear weapons, unfriendly AI, grey goo, the great filter) to think we will someday destroy ourselves than people in 1900 did.
The question isn’t what we think, the question is whether in fact every person is “extraordinary impactful”.
As a baseline may I suggest the humans during Pleistocene?
I don’t believe that it is generally agreed upon where the great filter lies. We could already be past it. Finding multi-cellular life elsewhere in the solar system would support the hypothesis that the great filter lies ahead of us. But, we have not done that.
Why would the great filter (between current circumstances and astronomically-visible artificial events) being ahead of us imply there being no humans in the future?
Great point. Even if the great filter lies ahead of us, that in no way implies there being no humans in the future. However, it does increase the probability of an existential catastrophe in the near to midterm future.
True in the sense that part of the possibility space of the human future that does not include interstellar engineering includes worlds where such things are possible/likely but humans go extinct. I think though that the possibility space is much thicker with possibilities in which interstellar engineering is something that isn’t possible/practical but extinction is not necessarily in the cards.
True, but we have a lot more reason to fear it than people in 1900 did.
insert my obligatory objection to essentially religious singulatarian eschatological mythology here
insert my obligatory link to my book Singularity Rising.
“Superficially religious” seems fair, but I object to the “essentially religious” characterization. What makes religious claims essentially different from other sorts of claims is when their advocates say they exist in a “separate magesteria” where the normal rules of reason and empiricism don’t apply, fail to recognize that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, etc. (in other words, the essence of religion amounts to failures of rationality—if your idea of “religion” amounts to “woo, I don’t know, that sounds pretty fantastic” then I don’t see why things like supersonic air travel, cell phones, etc. wouldn’t count as “religious” phenomena, at least to people who lived long before they were invented).
By my reckoning, Sagan’s dragon in his garage is the opposite of transhumanism—it’s a claim that doesn’t look superficially all that much like most religious claims, but it’s an essentially religious one because of the rationality failures Sagan exhibits in his attempts to defend the existence of his dragon. You talk as though there is some well established body of thought explaining the rationality failures behind transhumanist claims, but I find it a bit suspicious that you’re not linking to anything and the best you seem to be able to do is draw what looks like a superficial analogy between transhumanism and religion… if you know of a better argument, please by all means share it.
(I think the best you could do would be something along the lines of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, which I’ll accept… I should have used “likely” or “plausibly” in order to qualify my claim, and I do think the transhumanist community is a bit overly attached to specific scenarios, but they still seem to me like important possible scenarios to consider and plan for. The alternative looks a lot like sticking our collective heads in the sand and pretending that there’s no chance at all that trends will keep going in the direction they’ve been going.)
Proving God’s existence on the basis of reason and empiricism was very popular only a few centuries ago. Were not these pieces of theology religious?
They would certainly count as magic.
Dressing up bad arguments with the clothes of science and reason doesn’t make them any less bad. What matters is the quality of the arguments. And if the arguments for transhumanism are good, it hardly would seem to matter if the conclusions bear superficial similarity to some religious claims. Again, what matters is the quality of the arguments. I’d love to see critics of transhumanism engage with the actual arguments put forward for transhumanist positions, but so far what they’re doing looks more like pointing and laughing than engaging in a meaningful discussion. I’m not asking them to become transhumanists; I’m asking them to stop pointing and laughing. Pointing and laughing is a heuristic that helps you find whichever positions are currently trendy, but there are lots of positions that at one time weren’t especially trendy and are now much trendier (atheism being one).
Exactly… “seems magic” is a bad heuristic for figuring out what’s true or possible.
Where do these people get that sort of confidence from? I mean okay you have a good idea and know how to put it into practice, but it is like 10% of it.
Let’s discuss MealSquares, since it is a startup made by LW members. OK they figured out the ingredients, the recipe and a method to make it on a home stove. That is what a smart “geek” can confidently done. But it is not business. The business is the rest. A good product is not business. A shrewd businessman can sell used shoes as gourmet food, so the business is 100% in everything else.
So where did the confidence to do the actual business from? Did they build an industrial kitchen, a food factory? Rent one? There are companies in the US willing to subcontract and make any ready meal and package it if you supply them with the recipe? Did they have contacts to buy ingredients cheaper than the market price? How did they figure they are able to figure it out when it is not traditional “geek” stuff but something people with actual food industry experience know? Is the answer in the US / Valley / Bay Area circumstances somewhere, there is a shorter path from a recipe, a product design to a business than elsewhere?
It’s paying our bills and making a nice profit… are you sure? ;) We are incorporated as a California LLC, so I think we meet the technical definition of being a business.
The short answer to your question is stop being afraid and start googling. To put things in perspective, if there was a college class taught on all the non-geeky stuff we needed to learn in order to start MealSquares, everyone reading this site would sleep through it and get an easy A. Sometimes being a bold agent really is all that it takes. Being highly intelligent and analytical makes you overqualified for most tasks that “regular” people routinely do. For example, to name MealSquares, I generated lists of nouns and verbs in text files and combined them until I stumbled on something we really liked. In principle our product could have been named by a “regular” marketing person who studied communications in college, phones it in at their 9 to 5 corporate job, and keeps thinking of names until they find one their boss doesn’t hate, but we’re hoping having a clever name is something that will give us a cumulative edge.
Or to give you another example: When our employees bake MealSquares at the commercial kitchen we rent space at, they bake them using square molds we had custom made at a factory in China. Sounds impressive right? Here was the procedure for getting those molds made:
Search on alibaba.com for a manufacturer who creates food grade silicone molds for a good price with a relatively small minimum order quantity.
Draw up some plans showing the exact dimensions that we wanted our mold manufactured in. (Getting the dimensions right was actually pretty important; Romeo wanted things set up so the squares packed tightly in to a flat rate shipping box so our shipping costs would be lower. I ended up using a turtle graphics library for Python to write a program to draw the molds, because I kept making subtle but slow to correct errors using free hand graphics programs I found online. Again, these are examples of how being smart and strategic gives you an edge even when doing tasks that a “regular” person could easily accomplish themselves, even if in a slow and mediocre way.)
Throw emails and money at the manufacturer until our molds arrive in the mail.
The key to startups in my opinion is making something people want. You want to pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in the economy and what sort of products succeed and fail, without suffering from hindsight bias and seeing all success as obvious in retrospect. A good sign that you’re on the right track may be that you are sometimes confused when you hear that a product has succeeded, because then you know you are at the point where you are diffing the world against some internal model you’re building. MealSquares is my fourth startup attempt. The two before MealSquares were complete failures, so I generated a huge list of all my ideas and did market research on all of them trying to figure out which had potential. I concluded that none of them represented a sufficiently compelling need in the market and reluctantly redirected my surplus ambition towards other things (taking Coursera classes on machine learning after getting home from work). The meal replacements Romeo was playing with almost immediately struck me as representing a much stronger need than any of the ideas I had been looking at before, and fortunately I managed to convince him to work on commercializing them.
I really hope MealSquares is a big success, and that I’ll be able to buy them in the Netherlands soon. Good luck!
Thanks, so, to sum it up, the world is moving from ownership-based capitalism where you must own a shoe factory in order to manufacture shoes to everything is a service.
There is just one thing I don’t fully understand. How comes a fraud did not start it earlier nor do you get outcompeted by a fraud?
Because I would expect that scenario. Businessmen, who understand the market, not smart science geek stuff, should notice the demand earlier. But not knowing how to satisfy it, they would just make up something, like market any random fruit bread as nutritionally complete.
Well, there are laws preventing outright fraud, so lying catches up with you eventually. But customers are also smarter than you think: http://www.cluetrain.com/ In the long run, the best form of marketing is having a great product. Google is a good example: they entered a crowded search engine market and focused mainly on just having a better product. Now they’re one of the world’s most valuable companies.
On the other hand: our biggest competitor is Soylent, whose sales volume vastly exceeds ours, mainly because they were first to the market and got a lot of attention. But people who understand nutrition are much more interested in eating our product. So we’ll see if we can oust them in the long run.
To comment further on your build vs rent a factory point: My general model of how building a business works is that you are constructing a plane as it takes off. At the beginning, a cheap biplane will do as long as you have all the basics in place: landing gear, wings, propeller, etc. Once you’ve gotten in to the air and your concept has proven itself, you want to gradually be upgrading your plane’s components: replace wooden wings with an aluminum alloy, replace your propeller with a better one. Then through gradual upgrades you get all the way to supersonic fighter jet. You don’t want to invest all of your time and money in an expensive jet engine while you’re still on the runway: it’s not going to fly your plane by itself (you’ll also need wings, a fuselage, etc.) and you’ll waste a lot of money if it turns out you’re building on the wrong runway. So in general when starting a business you want to prove your concept as cheaply as possible before going to the next stage: survey customers to make sure they actually want what you’re making before you make it, experiment with prototypes before doing batch production, etc. We left the cooking in a kitchen stage of our operations component a while ago and are now in the rent kitchen space stage; if we’re lucky, we’ll eventually have to upgrade our operations component again as demand grows.
If you’re interested in learning more about starting a business, especially one that eventually grows to be large and profitable, I recommend Paul Graham’s essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html He’s a brilliant and extremely knowledgeable entrepreneur/investor.
Stupid question: I looked up Soylent, and I am confused: you have a large group of people who totally doesn’t care how their means feel in the stomach? I mean, who don’t care about the joy of eating as such, and don’t want the kind of warm and glowy effect in the stomach that comes from say a good greasy Chinese takeaway? (Taste in the mouth is IMHO not so important, things like the greasy feel in the stomach, the weight felt from filling meat, or the carb high on rice matter more.)
At least your product looks like some kind of a wholemeal cake, although I still doubt I could feel satisfied from something not warm and not greasy, but that is a step closer to a normal meal. (But why five a day portions? Because the kind of health-oriented people who buy this are also the same kind of people who buy the health industries many small meals thing instead of the standard 3? I personally think 3 meals work better because you get to feel stuffed and enjoy that, with 5 you are never hungry but also never feel a full house feeling.)
I think the next best thing could be health food that does not taste like healthfood, for people like me who don’ t go anywhere near health food. Say, the least bad carb is probably wholemeal rye. The issue with wholemeal pastas is usually that they feel like chewing sand, but if ground down really fine, like Graham, maybe one could make borderline enjoyable noodles from them. Stir-fry vegan mystery meat and vegs with spices and souce in an ample amount of coconut oil, as coconut oil is close enough to grease, add to the noodles and you probably get a health food that feels like a not health food.
There are really two parts to this. The first part is that if you live in the Bay Area, you hear about startups being successful doing new things all the time, and you probably have met at least a couple people who have worked on their own startup. So you know that it’s possible to work on a startup. Especially if you’ve met a few entrepreneurs, you realize that they are pretty average people, similar to yourself. Their is nothing special about them except that they’ve done something you haven’t done yet.
The second part is that many people don’t realize that almost any conceivable service can be negotiated from someone. If you’ve only ever worked in a gigantic organization (like, a retail store, or a university or the like), you don’t realize the mentality of other people who run businesses. Small business owners and vendors can be very flexible, if the service they usually provide is close to the service that you need. If you actually work at a small business or a startup near to the ultimate owner or executive, you’ll see oddball requests come in all the time, and you’ll see the owner try their best to work with it, even if it’s not exactly what they do, because any customer is money. I don’t know what MealSquares in particular did, but I happen to know that if you want to distribute food products, they have to be made in a facility that is inspected by health inspectors. Since they started out small, they probably found a small shared commercial kitchen and paid to use it (for example La Cocina which I found by doing a google search for “commercial kitchen” and it was the first result). But even if shared commercial kitchens weren’t available, like if they lived in a smaller town outside of startupland, they could have found a caterer or restaurant that would have let them use their kitchen after hours.
Relatedly, if you work in a startup hub and know startup entrepreneurs (which I believe the founders of MealSquares did, since they had prior experience at startups), you’ll find that they are often very helpful to new entrepreneurs. They want to see you succeed, so they will provide free advice on business aspects. This can often help with the “you don’t know what you don’t know” problem. The rest is just research on business rules, reaching customers (the actual hard part), and everything else.
Yup, also this. We have had a lot of awesome advisers with expertise in baking, food science, manufacturing processes, and general business consulting etc. Starting a business is not the Randian notion of having it spring whole cloth from your mighty mind. Ok, that might be a slight straw man, but you get the idea.
Thanks, so, to sum it up, the world is moving from ownership-based capitalism where you must own a shoe factory in order to manufacture shoes to everything is a service.
There is just one thing I don’t fully understand. How comes a fraud did not start it earlier nor do they get outcompeted by a fraud?
Because I would expect that scenario. Businessmen, who understand the market, not smart science geek stuff, should notice the demand earlier. But not knowing how to satisfy it, they would just make up something, like market any random fruit bread as nutritionally complete.
It’s actually pretty complicated—the relevant field is called theory of the firm.
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It seems to be ok to be trying to save the world if, as Nate contends, if it takes the one in a million to save the World, there better be a million people trying.
I agree with the commenters who mentioned that we live in a high leverage time (though I think donating to MIRI should not be the main example of future expected returns, since other people may do equivalent research on a third of the MIRI employee cost).
A similar argument can be made for money making and anti-aging for some people. I read a lot of the papers on happiness and money, and I have no doubt I can continue to have a very happy life on a small salary for american standards. But if you put “not dying” into play, it seems worthwhile to actually maximize, or near maximize money and resources, to make sure I have enough resources to not die when anti-aging becomes fungible with money. It feels like an all or nothing.
Also, related to the original post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fsg/absent_transhumanism_and_transformative/
Really curious about the neurobiology of idealisation and devaluation often found in BPD and NPD. Fortunately, things are many times better in some places, where the biggest problems might be waiting lists than others where it is grave, intractable neglect and inprisonment to a miserable life.