Feed

2021-10-23

Post Rhetoric

The Future of Argumentative Writing

I've published an update to this post here.

A few years ago, I first read the excellent essay by Bret Victor, "What can a technologist do about climate change?." For its treatment of climate change alone, I can't recommend the essay enough—there's enough food for thought to keep you satiated for a few months. But, then, near the end, Victor sneaks in a little section titled "Model-driven debate" that has has kept me thinking for years.

Screen Shot 2021-10-19 at 7.15.10 PM.png

If you haven't read it yet, bump it up to number one on your reading list.

He begins with the example of Alan Blinder's "Cash for Clunkers" proposal. The federal government would offer car owners a rebate to exchange old, inefficient vehicles for newer ones. Proponents claimed it would cause massive emissions reductions. Meanwhile, critics claimed there were more cost-effective ways to reduce emissions. Who's right?

Of course, it's both and neither—the answer depends entirely on the parameters of the program. As Victor writes:

"Many claims made during the debate offered no numbers to back them up. Claims with numbers rarely provided context to interpret those numbers. And never were readers shown the calculations behind any numbers. Readers had to make up their minds on the basis of hand-waving, rhetoric, bombast."

Victor asks us to imagine a better world: what if the author had proposed a model rather than mere words? Then, we, the readers, could make up our own minds. Instead of bombast, we get an informed debate about the underlying assumptions and resulting tradeoffs.

Let's look at an example (a slight modification of Victor's original example1):

Say we allocate 3.0 billion](budget=[0..10;0.1]&margin-right=1ch) for the following program: Car-owners who trade in an old car that gets less than [17 MPG](old_MPG_limit=[5..30]), and purchase a new car that gets better than [24 MPG](new_MPG_limit=[5..50]), will receive a [3,500 rebate.

We estimate that this will get 828,571 old cars off the road. It will save 1,068 million gallons of gas (or 68 hours worth of U.S. gas consumption.) It will avoid 9.97 million tons CO2e, or 0.14% of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The abatement cost is 301](dollars_per_ton_CO2e&margin-right=0.5ch) per ton CO2e of federal spending, although it’s [-\20 per ton CO2e on balance if you account for the money saved by consumers buying less gas.

Try sliding clicking and dragging the items in green to update their values. You'll see the items in blue change as a result. To see how these outputs are computed, click on one of the blue items, and you'll see the calculation in the appendix to this article.

When I first saw this example, I had the kind of feeling that I imagine people in the '80s must have had when they first saw wheels on a suitcase, that of dockworkers when they first encountered shipping containers in the 60s, or of late 15th century Europeans when they first read the results of movable type. A combination of "oh that's so obvious!" with the shame of your civilization not having come up with the idea earlier and something akin to disgust at how we used to do things (or are still doing them).

Victor's vision is what journalism and argumentative writing should look like. Next to this better system, hand-waving opinion pieces border on offensive.

Unfortunately, his vision has gotten almost no attention since its conception. Victor provided a small library, Tangle, to implement models like these, but not much has happened with it in the last half decade. That's understandable—the library requires prior experience with web development, which makes it unapproachable for most people, but it also offers no direct integration with any major JavaScript (JS) framework, which does not encourage actual web developers to use it.

In its place, we've seen success with somewhat similar projects like Observable. Observable helps you write JS notebooks that are highly interactive and relatively easy to embed in other websites. But the experience is not seamless: you still need familiarity with JS. Of course, we've had Jupyter notebooks and R Markdown for a while. Unfortunately all of these notebook-based models remain somewhat clunky and cumbersome. None of them offer a really fluent and easy inline input option like Tangle.

In this post, I'd like to look at a middleground—a (almost) no-code way to create interactive documents, which offers a much easier writing experience at the cost of sacrificing some of the customizability of Tangle or Observable/Python/R notebooks. Let's call it interactive Markdown.

Now, I'm not the first. Shortly after Victor published Tangle, there was an explosion in Markdown related integrations: dynamic Markdown, active Markdown fangle, and TangleDown are what I could find. I'm sure there are yet more.

Still, I think there's a good reason to reinvent this wheel. For one, I'm not happy about the syntax of any of these options (though least unhappy with that of active/dynamic Markdown). The problem is that none of them are backwards compatible with existing Markdown interpreters. I'm of the strong opinion that since there are so many Markdown extensions already, if you come up with a new, it had better be backwards compatible.

Second, all but fangle miss the ability to do inline calculations. Third, none is actively maintained. Fourth, all of them work by compiling .md to .html; I'd like an option to compile to .jsx from .mdx, which I think would generally make this much easier to adopt for other people. Five, none offer an elegant way to display supplementary calculations the way Victor's example did.

There's also a good "cultural" reason to reinvent this wheel. Thanks to note-taking tools like Notion, Roam, and Obsidian, Markdown is having a moment. More people are playing around with Markdown than ever before, so if ever there were a time to build on Markdown, it's now.

Without further do, let me present interactive Markdown.

An Example

Let's take a look at a very simple example (again from Victor):

When you eat 3 cookies, you consume 150 calories. That's 7.5% of your recommended daily calories.

Under the hood, this looks as follows:

When you eat [3 cookies](cookies=[0..100]), you consume **[150 calories](calories=50*cookies)**. That's [7.5%](daily_percent) of your recommended daily calories.

Interactive Markdown is built around "fields". There are three in this example: [3 cookies](cookies=[0..100]), [150 calories](calories=50*cookies), and [7.5%](daily_percent).

If you're familiar with Markdown, then you'll recognize a field as a link. Like a link, every field is made up of two parts ([text representation](variable configuration)): a text representation of the element between square brackets [](the link text or alt text for a media element) and the variable configuration between round brackets ()(the link href or image src).

The reason for using the same syntax as a link is backwards compatibility. If there is no interactive Markdown interpreter, you only lose interactivity, not the reading experience.

There are three kinds of fields: input, output, and reference fields.

Input Fields

[3 cookies](cookies=[0..100]) is an input field. In the variable configuration, (cookies=[0..100]), we define a variable, cookies, that takes its value from a range of 0 to 100. In the text representation, [3 cookies], we give the default value, 3. The surrounding text is used as a template (for example, to specify units).2

There are two kinds of input field, range and select:

  • Range Input (my_var=[min..max;step]): By clicking on the range input and dragging left or right, the user can adjust its value between min and max in intervals of size step.
  • Select Input (my_var=[a,b,c]): By clicking on the select input, the user cycles through the options a, b, c…

Output Fields

[150 calories](calories=50*cookies) is an output field. On the right, we define the variable calories as the product of 50 and our previously defined variable cookies.

Since the definition contains neither a range [min..max;step] nor select [a,b,c] input, an output field is not directly adjustable via user input. It is dynamically computed from the other variables in a document's scope.

Because of this, the value of 150 is really more like a fallback than a default. An interactive Markdown interpreter won't ever user this value. A standard Markdown interpreter will render it as 150 calories for the same experience just without the interactive part.

Reference Fields

Lastly, [7.5%](daily_percent) is a reference field. Unlike definition fields (i.e., input and output fields) references do not contain an equal sign = in their variable configuration. They display a variable that has already (or will be) defined elsewhere in the page.

For example, we might put the calculation for daily_percent in the appendix to avoid cluttering the body text for your reader:

Calculation for daily_percent

  • Daily recommended calories limit = 2,000 calories
  • Percent cookie calories per day = 7.5%

Behind the scenes, this is:

### Calculation for `daily_percent`  
- Daily recommended calories limit = [2,000 calories](daily_calories=[0..5000;50])  
- Percent cookie calories per day = [7.5%](daily_percent=calories/daily_calories)

References are useful for separating long calculations from your story line. It also helps to remind readers what variable values are, so they don't have to scroll back and forth a hundred times.

Each variable should only have one definition field but can have arbitrarily many reference fields.

Note that reference fields act differently depending on whether they reference an input or output variable:

  • Input references let you update the original variable. To the reader, input references are indistinguishable from input definitions.
  • Output references link to the original output definition. So I recommend you define an output variable in the same place that you describe its calculation to readers.

Conclusion

For the time being, it will take some technical know-how to get interactive Markdown up and running for yourself. If you're interested, I've written a remark plugin that you can drop into an existing remark/rehype pipeline.

That's because interactive Markdown is still in its infancy. There are many features I'd like to get to that I haven't had the time for yet (e.g., automatic dimensions checking to make sure your calculations make sense, popover links to calculations, more math functions, support for distributions and other data types), not to mention tools to make working with interactive Markdown easier: an in-browser editor, a plugin for Obsidian support, etc.

If you're interested in all of this, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter to stay updated. And if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear from you. Check out the repository and raise an issue (or, even better, send a pull request).

Appendix

A More Complicated Example

Let's look at the more complicated example from the beginning.

Here is the example again (thanks to reference fields, it's perfectly in sync with the first instance):

Say we allocate 3.0 billion](budget=[0..10;0.1]&margin-right=1ch) for the following program: Car-owners who trade in an old car that gets less than [17 MPG](old_MPG_limit=[5..30]), and purchase a new car that gets better than [24 MPG](new_MPG_limit=[5..50]), will receive a [3,500 rebate.

We estimate that this will get 828,571 old cars off the road. It will save 1,068 million gallons of gas (or 68 hours worth of U.S. gas consumption.) It will avoid 9.97 million tons CO2e, or 0.14% of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The abatement cost is 301](dollars_per_ton_CO2e&margin-right=1ch) per ton CO2e of federal spending, although it’s [-20 per ton CO2e on balance if you account for the money saved by consumers buying less gas.

And here's what it actually looks like (the first example):

Say we allocate [$3.0 billion](budget=[0..10;0.1]&margin-right=1ch) for the following program: Car-owners who trade in an old car that gets less than [17 MPG](old_MPG_limit=[5..30]), and purchase a new car that gets better than [24 MPG](new_MPG_limit=[5..50]), will receive a [$3,500](rebate=[0..20000;100]&margin-right=1ch) rebate.  
  
We estimate that this will get [828,571 old cars](cars_traded&margin-right=1ch) off the road. It will save [1,068 million gallons](gallons_saved&margin-right=1ch) of gas (or [68 hours](hours_of_gas&margin-right=1ch&margin-right=1ch) worth of U.S. gas consumption). It will avoid [9.97 million tons](tons_CO2_saved&margin-right=1ch) CO2e, or [0.14](_percent_annual_emissions)% of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.  
  
The abatement cost is [$301](dollars_per_ton_CO2e&margin-right=1ch) per ton CO2e of federal spending, although it’s [-\$20](dollars_per_ton_CO2e_on_balance&margin-right=1ch) per ton CO2e on balance if you account for the money saved by consumers buying less gas.

A few points to note:

  • The number in the text representation determines display precision. If you're familiar with format strings, 3.0 is converted to %.1f, 17 to %d, 3,500 to %'d3, etc..
    • You can also use format strings directly in the text representation, e.g., [%'d old cars](cars traded), but I don't recommend this because it won't be compatible with standard Markdown.
  • [0..10;0.1] specifies a range with a step-size equal to 0.1. By default, the step size is 1.
  • I haven't figured out spacing yet (hence &margin-right=1ch)

Cars Traded

Here you see one more trick in interactive Markdown: A link containing an inline code element of the kind [`variable_name`](variable_name) is a reference label. It gets a TKLabel class for easier formatting, and, eventually, will synchronously darken whenever you highlight any references to or dependencies of its variable.

Gallons Saved

This is where my example diverges from Victor's example. His calculation uses the distribution of mileage over current cars and cars being sold. I haven't yet added distributions to the interactive Markdown spec (though I plan to), so you'll have to accept a less precise version. Note that the comments come from Victor's original work.

Average Mileage of Old Vehicles

Assume that traded-in cars are chosen with equal probability from the pool of eligible cars. We use the harmonic average because we'll be calculating gallons consumed for constant miles, so we really want to be averaging gallons-per-mile.

Alright so I haven't even actually added support for more complicated formulas like this. But it is coming.

Average Mileage for Vehicles Currently Being Sold

Assume that new cars are purchased with equal probability from the pool of eligible cars. The distribution really should be sales-weighted. I'm sure the data is available, but I couldn't find it.

Average Gallons Saved per Car Replaced

Assume that everyone who is buying a new car now would have eventually bought a similar car when their current car got too old. So the fuel savings from the program should be calculated over the remaining lifetime of the old car. Ideally we'd like the joint distribution of MPGs and age of the current fleet, but I can't find that data. So we'll just use averages.

Total Gallons Saved

The importance of models may need to be underscored in this age of “big data” and “data mining”. Data, no matter how big, can only tell you what happened in the past. Unless you’re a historian, you actually care about the future — what will happen, what could happen, what would happen if you did this or that. Exploring these questions will always require models. Let’s get over “big data” — it’s time for “big modeling”.

Hours of Gas Saved

Tons of CO2 Saved

CO2 comprises 95% of a car's greenhouse gas effective emissions. The other 5% include methane, nitrous oxide, and hydroflourocarbons. To account for these other gases, we divide the amount of CO2 by 0.95 to get CO2e (“carbon dioxide equivalent”).1

Percent Annual Emissions

That last one should read something like 0.14% for default options but not all formatting options are available yet.

Dollars per Ton CO2e

Dollars per Ton CO2e on Balance

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. The difference is that I haven't yet added the possibility of inputting a distribution. So the calculations for average MPG of old versus new cars is less precise than in Victor's case. (On the flip side, this coarser model is easier to modify for today's transportation fleet.) ↩ ↩2

  2. It's a little confusing that cookies shows up on both the leftand right-hand sides. On the right-hand side, it has a semantic purpose: defining the variable cookies. On the left-hand side it has a purely stylistic purpose (to inform the reader what units we're using). ↩

  3. Note: %'d is actually nonstandard. It puts commas (or periods) in the thousands places (depending on your locale). Another useful nonstandard addition is + or - for optionally separating the amount and magnitude as in -$20. ↩

The 48 Laws of Cooperation · 2021-10-17

40. Welcome the free lunch - Ask favors

What is offered for free or at bargain rates often comes with a psychological price tag—complicated feelings of obligation, compromises with quality, the insecurity those compromises bring, on and on. The powerful learn early to protect their most valuable resource: independence and the room to maneuver. — The 48 Laws of Power (2 Areas/3 Notes/3 Sciences/0 Mathematics/AM3D Axioms, postulates/48 Laws of Power/40. Despise the free lunch)

In Greene's world, there are no acts of kindness without agendas—"what is offered for free is inevitably a trick." Generosity, then, is just another weapon in your Machiavellian arsenal. He recommends that power-seekers try out this trick ("strategic generosity") themselves:

By giving the appropriate gift, you put the recipient under obligation. Generosity softens people up—to be deceived.

The main weakness in Greene's argument is that strategic generosity works both ways; it softens both the giver and recipient.1 When one performs a favor for others, they become more likely to perform favors for the other in the future. This is what's known as the "Ben Franklin Effect". In the great statesman's own words:

He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged"

Observances of the Law

Observance 1

In 1736, Benjamin Franklin was elected clerk of the General Assembly of Philadelphia. The next year, Franklin put himself up for reelection, only to find unexpected opposition from one of the newer members. Franklin prevailed in the election but was worried about his chances the following year, so he resolved to win over the affections of his new opponent. Rather than grovel and demean himself, Franklin chose another course:

"Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I return'd it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favour. When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death"

Interpretation 1

Franklin knew the feelings of obligation that accompany unanticipated gifts frequently cause the strategy to backfire. Rather than making the recipient more likely to do something for the giver in the future, the gift fosters resentment. No one likes spontaneous debts.

To get around this, Franklin's technique is to shift the initiative from the gift-giver to the recipient. The first advantage is that the gift-giver cannot have thought of the favor as part of an elaborate ploy to win control over you. The second advantage is that the recipient alleviates some of the feeling of obligation.

The typical explanation for this phenomenon comes from the psychological theory of "Cognitive Dissonance". We usually give gifts to people we like, so giving someone a gift who we do not like confuses us. One way to remedy the dissonance between action and feeling is to change the feeling—for the gift-giver to increase their liking of the recipient.

Accordingly, if an individual performs a favor for a person about whom he initially has neutral or negative feelings, he may come to like that person as a means of justifying his having performed the favor. [1]

Alternatively, the Franklin Effect might play on the theory of Self-Perception: if we have not yet formed an opinion about someone that would inform our behaviors towards them, then our behaviors towards that person end up informing our opinion of them [2].2 This is the fake-it-til-you-make-it of human relationships.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. — William James

But even when the giver and receiver are already well-acquainted, a regular exchange of favors is healthy and worth pursuing. Just a trickle of obligation flowing both directions is a great way to keep the relationship alive.

Observance 2

When Odysseus arrived at Phaeacia, shipwrecked, seaweed-crusted, torn, and battered, his only recourse was to trust in the generosity of the island's inhabitants. He approached the princess of the island who had taken her bevy of maids to do some washing at the seashore. Rather understandably, the maids' first reaction was to flee—who knows what this ragged guy (whose only covering was an olive branch) might want? But the princess, Nausicaa, stayed—she was too well-versed in the rules of xenia (=hospitality) to refuse a stranger in need.

“Strangers and beggars come from Zeus: a small gift, then, is friendly.”

She directed her maids to wash and dress Odysseus, who, in the manner of the Hollywood makeover, became the perfect picture of regal majesty. She then advised him how best to approach her parents for support, and, heading that advice, Odysseus was soon off again.

Unfortunately, Odysseus had a knack for getting shipwrecked (read: Poseidon liked to shipwreck Odysseus). The Phaecian ship with all its treasures (a gift from the Phaecians) went under just as the crew were coming up to Ithaca, Odysseus's home. He washed up on shore again the ragged beggar.

This time Odysseus's benefactor was his old swineherd, Eumaeus, who no longer recognized the king after the 20 year separation. Despite taking his king for a pauper, Eumaeus liberally extended his shelter, food, and company to the forlorn traveler. Then, later, when he became aware of Odysseus's identity, Eumaeus risked his life to help Odysseus reclaim his throne.

Interpretation 2

The small favor Odysseus asked of Nausicaa—an article or two of clothing—spiraled out of control. He soon gained his ticket home with a fair share of treasure to boot. On the giving end, Nausicaa's small act of generosity grew into unrequited love. It's the Franklin effect in extreme: the favor-asking stranger becomes a love-receiving intimate.

Asking Eumaeus for some food and shelter, meanwhile, led directly to Odysseus reestablishing his throne. He rekindles a dormant relationship, which was indisipensable when, at a later date, he needed to slaughter the suitors who had been infringing upon his home.

Odysseus knew when to put his trust in others. At his lowest moments, he had nothing else left over, so he had to resort to Greene's dreaded free lunch. But Odysseus never let these gifts demean him, and, by taking the initiative, he managed always to maintain a modicum of control.

Keys to Power

To understand the true purpose of unmitigated acts of generosity, we turn to an illustrative example from 1 Projects/Rationalia/LW/Concepts/Game Theory: the Prisoner's Dilemma3. For the unfamiliar, here's the situation: You and and an accomplice have been caught by the police for some heinous crime, and you've been taken to separate cells for interrogation. If both you and your accomplice hold quiet, then you can get away with a minor charge and only one year of jail time (the cops don't have enough evidence to convict for the full charge). If both of you testify against each other, then it's a two-year sentence. But if you testify and your accomplice does not, then you walk free, while your accomplice is locked away for three years. Vice-versa, if you're quiet and your accomplice blabs, it's three years for you.

What do you do? Cooperate with the accomplice by staying quiet or defect by blabbing to the police?

All other things being equal, rationally, there's only one right answer: defection. That's because if your accomplice cooperates, it's better for you to defect (no time vs one year), and if your accomplice defects, it's better for you to defect (two years vs three years). So even though it leads to the worst result on average, you expect two rational beings to always defect.

But all other things are rarely equal: the real-world has more than enough mechanisms that make defection unlikely. For one, the mafia boss that both of you report to will be none to happy to hear you've snitched—do you take the year or give your life? Forcing cooperation is one of the main functions (yes, benefits) of central authorities like governments. Less formally, your reputation among the criminal element is sure to take a hit if you're identified as a snitch. Even gossip has a function.

Perhaps most importantly, your interactions with your accomplice don't end with the jail sentence. After he gets out of his three-year sentence, you'll have some explaining to do. We begin to see why the "iterated" Prisoner's Dilemma—one which is repeated between the same parties many times—has a qualitatively different outcome to the one-off version.

In 1980, Robert Axelrod organized the first of his famous4 Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments. He invited research teams from the world over to compete against one another in an iterated Prisoner's dilemma. The result was that the most successful strategy was perhaps the simplest: "Tit for tat." A player taking this strategy starts cooperatively, then copies their opponent's previous action. This means they benefit optimally from cooperative players while limiting losses against defectors.

5

Tit for tat, however, has one major flaw: "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." If you pair two tit-for-tatters against each other, and one of them accidentally defects, then the two will enter a "death spiral." In one turn, player one cooperates, and player two defects. In the next turn, player one defects and player two cooperates. Then, player one cooperates again, player two defects again, and so on.

In order to remedy this vulnerability, there are more lenient versions of Tit for Tat: either leaky Tit-for-Tat which will randomly throw in a cooperation after a defection, or Tit-for-two-Tats, which requires two defections before changing behaviors.

“I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' … The twenty-five percent is for error.” ― Linus Pauling

Here, we begin to see the true meaning of the free lunch. An unrequited favor is simply preemptive cooperation. It starts a tit-for-tat cycle on the mutually beneficial cooperative side. This leaves both players with a higher payoff over the long run.

In this light, the Ancient Greek concept of xenia is but a formalized version of Tit for Tat: it guarantees the starting point for any relationship with a stranger to be cooperation. The Franklin effect, meanwhile, is but a clever trick (albeit positive one) to get the other person to start cooperating with a minimal downside if they refuse.

Real life is not nearly as zero-sum as Greene makes it out to be. Fortunately, the difficult societal challenges are closer to iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas than a one-off game of Chicken. With the right strategy of aggressive cooperation, everyone stands to win.

As long as you are sure that your relationship with the gift-giver is a long one, accept their gifts readily, and be quick to counter with a gift of your own. Also, keep the exchanges ambiguous—you want both parties to feel like they still owe the other party something. As soon as you quantify the kindnesses, and it becomes clear that one person is in favor-bestowing debt, the other player has a reason to start defecting. Otherwise, if you wish to establish a long-term relationship, begin by asking a favor or imparting one yourself. Set the precedent with kindness, and who knows how far the collaboration might go.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. I'm not even going to argue the other point about hidden agendas and kindness. It is true sometimes, but as a universal statement, this cynicism is so obviously absurd, it would waste my time to linger on. ↩

  2. At the end of the day, most psychological theories like these are ad-hoc, nigh unverifiable, and bordering on Astrology, but at least it's entertaining and food for thought. ↩

  3. Apologies to those of you are fed up with every popular science account of Game Theory always beginning with the Prisoner's Dilemma. ↩

  4. Among the right crowd. ↩

  5. A different take on this is the "spatialized Prisoner's dilemma". You don't necessarily "compete" against the same players but against a small, self-contained, highly mixing population of players. Then "Tit for tat" emerges as a kind of "pay-it-forward" strategy. You're nice to your neighbors so they will be nice to their neighbors who will be nice to you. Read: your accomplice's buddies will come beat you up if you tattle. ↩

The Laws of Learning · 2021-10-10

1. Stop following your heart

If you dive into the self-help canon, you will stumble across the advice to discover your talents. We are all born, the story goes, with a unique set of fixed strengths: intelligence, creativity, athleticism, musicality, even our personality—abstract qualities like neuroticism and extraversion—end up etched in stone. So too, our interests, whether we prefer art and music over science and math or vice-versa, become inherent to who we are.

The obvious conclusion of this thinking is that, in order to make the most out of our education and careers (to be "successful") we should match these pursuits to our own strengths, qualities, and interests. We should respect our learning styles, cultivate our talents, find our passions, and follow our hearts.

This is awful advice.

Not because this line of reasoning is flawed but because the underlying assumptions are fantasy. In all the cases that matter, you are more flexible and adaptable than you are fixed or predetermined. You are, fortunately, a growing, adapting, dynamic mess of a person.

That's not to say you are a blank slate. On the contrary, each of us is born with a palette of preferences, occupying a unique, amorphous region on the personality-intelligence spectrum. Whether these early tendencies are ultimately genetic or environment, you remain a being of the biological world, and that world sets some hard limits. But with the right strategies, your initial position need not limit you. The abilities and qualities that define you most are the abilities and qualities most open to development.

Take innate talent. Sure, you probably won't flourish in the NBA if you're 5'2", but disqualifiers of this extreme are rare in ordinary life. As for measurable versions of "intelligence" and "creativity," scores like IQ and various creativity quotients are largely a farce [1] that is propped up by a fraudulent psychometrics industry peddling self-perpetuating pseudoscience. In the knowledge and service economy what matters are skills and tools—skills anyone can develop and tools anyone can acquire.

The same for "personality." Even the standard-bearers of the psychological literature (the 5and 6-factor models, aka OCEAN and HEXACO) have rather unimpressive predictive power outside the confines of the academic questionnaire.1 Your personality is too high-dimensional and dynamic to reduce to a limited set of fixed constants. Derivative ideas like a "learning style" fare even worse.[2]

In their defense, personality measures can be a source of useful vocabulary and good old-fashioned fun. But personality measures decide hiring practices, the fun stops. Just as flexible skill trumps static talent, what decides your behavior is not an immutable core of personality but a learned set of habits. Once you understand how habits form and fade, you will understand that your behavior and its outcomes are yours to shape. No personality needed (though certainly appreciated).

Even grit, the shiny new kid on the self-help block turns out to be a poser. It is not so much about imperturbable grit and will-power but unthinking, habitual momentum. Will-power is for suckers. Experts cultivate laziness—a special kind of laziness. They engineer their surroundings to make focus easy and undesirable behavior impossible. They know that the agent is only as static as the environment forces them to be. Change the input; change the output.

But most of all, the follow-your-heart cult fails because their foundational pillar, passion, is not innate.

Passion, like intelligence, creativity, and personality, is not hard-wired. To reiterate, we do already display different preferences at birth—for such things as faces, toys, and crying nonstop. However, preferences do not a passion make. (What fraction of three year olds actually ends up becoming firemen?) The causal link is opposite the standard picture: it is rare to acquire a sustainable, lasting passion before practicing it in person. Only by sowing the seeds of effort may we reap the fruits of passion. Rather than a hedonistic pursuit of spurious passions, we should consult the more durable pursuit of meaning. Do not do the things you impatiently want to do. Do the things that matter.

To find sustainable meaning, pursue higher purpose, and create lasting passion is the mission of a lifetime, and it does not come naturally. One has to train this ability with the right set of heuristics, tools, and systems. There's enough to fill a book.

But the message fits a paragraph…

Do not follow but lead your heart. Start with subtle preference without the expectation of enamoration. Find what matters and what is meaningful, not your heart’s destiny. Fuel your progress with the unstoppability of habit, and equip yourself with the skills and tools you need to achieve your higher goals. Once you chart a course, you will discover that passion follows close behind.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Just one example (a more thorough and up-to-date breakdown will come later): A review by Costa and McCrae (1986) claims that "Over the past decade, a series of longitudinal studies have demonstrated that personality traits are stable in adulthood: There are no age-related shifts in mean levels, and individuals maintain very similar rank ordering on traits after intervals of up to 30 years." In the very same article, they "back" this claim up with the results of eight longitudinal studies. They write: "Personality scales tend to show longterm retest correlations of from .30 to .80 over intervals of up to 30 years." Now, .30 to .80 sounds good until you realize that even an upper limit of .80 means the first test score explains only about 64% of the variance in later test scores. At the median retest correlation of .57, almost 70% of your personality is explained by something other than your continuity of existence. I don't know about you, but I prefer to see this glass as half-full. [3] ↩

The 48 Laws of Cooperation · 2021-10-10

18. Use strategic isolation

As a temporary recluse. . . isolation can help you to gain perspective. Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think. . . . The danger is, however, that this kind of isolation will sire all kinds of strange and perverted ideas. You may gain perspective on the larger picture, but you lose a sense of your own smallness and limitations. . . Be careful to keep your way back into society open. — The 2 Areas/3 Notes/3 Sciences/0 Mathematics/AM3D Axioms, postulates/48 Laws of Power/48 Laws of Power (18. Do not build fortresses to protect yourself: isolation is dangerous).

As ever, Greene is right: isolation can be either an indispensable tonic or lethal toxin; it all depends on the dosage. What escapes him is that in the information age, the value of regular and extended bouts of solitude has exponentially increased while the associated risks have nearly vanished. It is easier than ever to reconnect to the world after a long pause and more advantageous than ever to occasionally escape it.

Observance of the Law

In 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen read about the MITS Altair 8800 in the January issue of Popular Electronics. The Altair was soon to become the first commercially successful personal computer, and Gates and Allen, like many other geeks of their period, could see they were crossing the threshold of a new age. Soon hardware would become so affordable that software would enter the realm of consumer business.

Pasted image 20211007224758.png

The two called up Ed Roberts, founder of MITS, to announce they had an interpretor for BASIC that ran on the Altair. Would he be willing to license it? Not only innovators in software but also in sales strategy, Gates and Allen were prototyping what would become known as "vaporware"—a fancy synonym for "lying". They had no interpretor nor even an Altair to test code on. Skeptical but indulging, Roberts arranged for future Microsoft to demo its code several weeks later at the MITS headquarters in Albuquerque. [1]

What followed was a binge of—well—Gatesian proportion. First, they needed to procure an Altair. They settled for emulating one on the PDP-10 in Harvard's Aiken lab. While Allen was busy writing an emulator (with only the Altair's instruction manual as reference), Gates was already storming away at the BASIC interpretor code, content to write on yellow legal pads until the emulator was ready.

Gates gave up studying for exams and even his obsession with poker. For eight weeks, Gates and Allen, along with Monte Davidoff (who they had hired to write the math module), spent day and night perfecting the code.

“He’d be in the middle of a line of code when he’d gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard,” Allen said. “After dozing an hour or two, he’d open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely where he’d left off—a prodigious feat of concentration.” [2]

The miracle above all other miracles is that, at the end of this marathon, when Allen flew down to demo the interpretor in person, it worked. Their code had never seen the Altair in person, yet it did what it was supposed to. It is rumored that the demo gods have never again been so indulging.

Interpretation

Today's software developers tend to stick to one of the many agile methodologies: Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), etc. The overarching idea is that development should be iterative, incremental, and evolutionary. Shorter build sprints that clash more regularly with actual users exerts pressure on products to solve real-world needs rather than the whims of—let's admit it—not particularly representative software developers.

Agile development is anti-isolationism manifested as a software philosophy, and its popularity is worth celebrating: software today is, on the whole, vastly more user-friendly than it used to be. Even so, we should not altogether discount the value of the occasional creative binge in technology. Some types of products need to be more complete before they can be put out into the real world: a BASIC interpretor is one such example, others include product with sensitive usecases, such as in security and healthcare. Like a good wine, these products require a period of isolation to reach maturity. There is never just one answer to building great products.

Keys to Power

In technology occasionally, in science often, and in the arts usually, isolation is a wonderful stimulant of creativity.

Bill Gates still organizes a semiannual reading and thinking week. He retreats to an isolated cabin cut off from internet and restricts his input to only written material and outsourced meals. Clarity of thought requires time and distance.

"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings." — Nikola Tesla

Tesla may have died a pauper, but, in posthumous compensation, few other technologists are remembered for such breadth of influence. That the electric vehicle company is named "Tesla" rather than "Edison" goes to show who really won that competition.

In physics, the year 1905 will forever be remembered as Einstein's annus mirabilis. He published four ground-breaking papers (each of which might have independently warranted a Nobel Prize): on the photoelectric effect (for which he actually got the prize), on Brownian motion (which paved the path to experimentally verifying the atomic theory of matter), on special relativity, and on his famous e=mc2e=mc^2 formula. All while Einstein was spending his working week at a patent office—in his words, the "worldly cloister" that "hatched [his] most beautiful ideas" [3].

Gregor Mendel conducted his pioneering work on genetics as a monk at an actual cloister: the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in what is now Brno, Czechia [4]. That said, it was not quite the secluded outpost you might imagine it to be; the monastery had been a center of learning in the area for centuries [5]. Nor was Mendel entirely without scientific connections. He published his work abroad and lectured before dozens of scientists, including the leading biologist Carl Nägeli. Still, one doubts1 whether Mendel could have had as much success in a more urbane setting. His breakthrough results demanded years of patience, and few other employments would have afforded him this luxury in such abundance. Mendel's major weakness seems to have been the externally imposed kind of isolation rather than the self-imposed kind. The scientific community ignored his results until decades later, well after his death. Who knows where we might be today if only Darwin and Mendel has cross-pollinated their ideas.

Moreover, we ought to retire into ourselves very often; for intercourse with those of dissimilar natures disturbs our settled calm, and rouses the passions anew, and aggravates any weakness in the mind that has not been thoroughly healed. Nevertheless the two things must be combined and resorted to alternately—solitude and the crowd. The one will make us long for men, the other for ourselves, and the one will relieve the other; solitude will cure our aversion to the throng, the throng our weariness of solitude." — Literature Notes/Essays/De Tranquillitate Animi (Seneca)

The world of art, in particular, is filled with the stories of successful semi-isolationists. Impressionists like Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Morisot, and later post-impressionists like Gaugin, van Gogh, Cézanne, Seurat—all routinely retreated to the countryside where they could capture landscapes unencumbered by academic expectations. They eventually had to return to major cities to display their own works and share inspiration 2, and it was by alternating city and country that art finally escaped the shackles of photorealism. Progress often means forgetting the old, and people do not readily forget when together.

Pasted image 20211009101043.png

"I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being."— The Black Swan (Nicholas Nassim Taleb)

As in the visual arts, so in music. Eric Satie, who might today be diagnosed a hoarder (among many other clinical labels), spent decades mostly holed up in a tiny falt in Arcueil, dressed in an invariable costume of grey velvet. He was in contact with other artists (see, for example, the ballet Parade jointly produced by Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso), but, all-in-all, he consummates the ideal of recluse. João Gilberto, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, none of these were quite as eccentric as Satie, but all demonstrate that moderate reclusiveness need not impede musical brilliance.

We come finally to the written word. The most famous literary recluse is likely J. D. Salinger, who lived most of his life at an unknown address in Cornish (the middle of nowhere, more or less). He granted one interview in 1953, felt betrayed by the interviewer, then built a fence around his property and rarely spoke to the press ever again [6]. His example is not particularly vindicating of isolationism since his output dwindled to nothing during his self-imposed exile. Still, there are plenty of literary recluses who managed to publish throughout the years of solitude: Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Pynchon, even Harper Lee ultimately wrote a sequel.

Isolation might not win you Greene's political variety of power. But it can be a worthy tool in pursuing the more productive varieities of power—technological, scientific, artistic. Our interconnected world makes it easier than ever to return to the world at large after a protracted absence. In principle, anyone has a chance on the activity feeds of Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, HackerNews, etc. True, some of these platforms are less than conducive to long-form, thought-intensive content, but, at least, spending a decade as a hermit no longer means you have to spend the rest of your life meditating in the same cave.

Meanwhile, most of us have lost our attention spans to the surveillance algorithms. We're locked in cycles of endless consumption, thus unable to produce by ourselves. When you feel that pressure, take a page from the history books, and consider stepping away from the multitude.

As a very practical takeaway, start group brainstorms with a silent individual brainstorm—without already committing yourselves to any particular solution. When we argue our cases from the start, the net result tends to be a dilution rather than concentration of the best ideas.3 Otherwise, the initial anchor prevents you from covering new ground—you constantly cycle through the same ideas, unable to step outside.

In sum, whatever the concentration—a five minute pre-meeting meditation or five year prison sentence—isolation is invaluable if you just take the opportunity.

"Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe." — Literature Notes/Books/Philosophy/Tao te ching (42)

Footnotes

  1. That is: I, the author, doubt. ↩

  2. For some, like van Gogh, the return was, unfortunately, posthumous. ↩

  3. This is perhaps part of the reason that Jeff Bezos starts all meetings with a half hour of silent reading. ↩