There were many fascinating comments to my previous post on drugs, and are evidence for why Cal Newport has called readers of this blog "freakishly smart."

Lindsey of Crooked Lines left this comment:

… because [drugs] are illegal, drug creation and the ensuing multi-level drug distribution scheme usually involve violence, intimidation, and corruption in some form or another — especially in urban communities with fewer resources, which are often the main source of many different drugs that the more affluent people use. Many of the drugs at the University of Michigan, where I went to school, for example — especially the ever popular marijuana — made their way there from Detroit, and while the affluent drug users in Ann Arbor are, for the most part, safely insulated from the effects of the trade, the people who live in and around the earlier links of the supply chain (whether or not they are part of the trade itself) are not so privileged…

… the reality is that as long as drugs are illegal and thus…must be grown/harvested/created in a way that begets violence and corruption — violence and corruption that are often endured by people who are removed from but no less affected by the people you will ultimately buy from – for me personally outweighs any of the other considerations.

Lindsey is elevating the societal impact of her behavior — the funding of narco-violence — above personal preferences in deciding not to buy drugs on ethical grounds. The tricky part is that there is essentially zero societal impact of a single person buying or not buying a drug.

Economists argue that it's irrational to vote in an election because it's essentially impossible that your vote will affect the outcome. As the old joke goes, if an economist sees another economist at the voting booth, they say, "I won't tell if you won't tell." But what if everyone adopted this mentality, people reply, then your vote would matter! Why yes, but everybody does not think this way.

What are the ethics surrounding decisions that, if universalized, would make a big difference, but which, at the margin, make essentially zero difference?

In Kant's Categorical Imperative he includes this moral maxim of universality: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction." In other words, if your action were to be the action everyone was taking, would you still do it? The implications of Kant to non-voters would be, "If everyone chose not to vote, the democracy wouldn't function. So vote!"

That seems like a fine aspirational ethic — a principled stance applied to things like democracy and drug buying — but the more realistic approach would to weigh the probability of universal adoption of the action. If it's insanely low — like in the case of non-voting or drug-buying — then ignore it. If, on the other hand, there were only five total drug buyers in the world, and if you stopped buying drugs that would drastically shrink demand and perhaps result in less drug violence, you would be right to incorporate societal implications more seriously in your decision as they much greater.

Bottom Line: In the case of buying drugs, since the personal impact (positive and negative) so vastly outweighs the societal impact, I believe solely a personal consideration of costs and benefits is an ethical way to think about it. But ethics is simply a basis for making individual decisions, and to each his own.

(thanks to Dave Jilk and Nathan Labenz for brainstorming this post)

The term "loyalty" often carries with it the connotation that it is unconditional. For this reason, loyalty is an overrated and sometimes dangerous virtue.

Loyalty is better viewed as a phenomenon of other traits and virtues: trustworthiness, empathy for fellow humans, investing in a relationship in good times and bad, variations of the golden rule, etc. These are constitutive virtues of loyalty. For example, fidelity is its own virtue. You should be faithful in a relationship. To describe this concept, I say use the word "fidelity" and not "loyalty."

The Bush Administration was criticized for prizing loyalty over competence. You had a place at the table so long as you were strongly loyal to the President. Ron Suskind wrote a book about Paul O'Neill and the Bush administration titled The Price of Loyalty which documented the uncurious and unquestioning habits of a loyal cabinet.

Nor should loyalty trump independent moral judgment. I do not believe in unconditional love or sticking with someone through thick and thin to an indefinite point. If my brother started raping and murdering people, I would call the police.

Bottom Line: Better to employ more precise words to describe the positive virtues in a person than the broad and potentially dangerous "loyal."

(thanks Dave Jilk, Ben Abram, and Cal Newport for their feedback on this idea.)

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I first started thinking about "overrated virtues" when I read Alec Baldwin tell Vanity Fair that the most overrated virtue is patience.

"I always sing, even though I never know the words to the song. I like this as a metaphor for how I live my life, too."

A perfect life metaphor indeed. It's from Melissa Sconyers.

Since the beginning of time political theorists have debated the relationship of power between the elites and the masses. Plato talked about it. Jefferson and Hamilton argued about it. Adams was wary of an overly democratic democracy; Paine championed the everyman. Contemporary thinkers have weighed in. Bill Buckley famously said he’s rather entrust the U.S. government to the first 400 people in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard. A few months ago an editor from the Wall Street Journal told me he believes an illiterate Afghan has a “horse’s sense” for what’s right and therefore can make the right choice at the voting booth.

I am less instinctually trustful of the common man. There is a worldly wisdom that comes from walking the earth, but it’s hardly sufficient to be an informed voter or ruler. I sooner put my lot with the well-educated elite.

If your car is broken, you want a mechanic who possesses elite knowledge. If you’re going to get surgery, you want an elite surgeon — someone whose knowledge of the matter far surpasses the average Joe.

Shouldn’t you want the same out of the people in government? Yes, with two qualifications.

First, elites should rule but be able to be replaced by the masses. This is why we have a republican form of government.

Second, the ruling elites need to be humble. One reason why elites are more dangerous in politics than in the narrow sphere of car mechanics is that they can widely exercise unbridled ambition. The Obama cabinet is stacked with elites — very smart individuals. And they are probably trying to do too much. They are too ambitious and too confident in their ability to direct and organize events. It’s tricky because ambition and talent tend to go hand-in-hand. In politics we need the rare talent who’ll be very humble once in office.

Elitism, by the way, has come in all sizes. Some of America’s finest leaders did not possess elite educations or ex ante high brow status, but rather were in an elite category in terms of their fundamental decency and perseverance. George Washington and Harry Truman come to mind. It’s unlikely we’ll see this type of elitism in the future.

I’ve read two main concerns about elites in politics.

There’s first the Sarah Palin View. She sees the common man as a better representative of the aesthetic ideals of Americana, and thus more fit to participate in the democracy. She will crack jokes about latte drinking, New York Times reading, sushi eating elites who are “out of touch.” I believe Palin’s dislike of elites is fundamentally stylistic not substantive. She disrespects George Will and Maureen Dowd, even if Will shares some of her policy beliefs.

Then there’s the Arnold Kling View. Arnold’s wariness of elites stems from their substantive failures in the past and policy tendency toward state control. He’s disheartened by elites’ failures: he sees “mostly harm in the way educated elites have exercised power…from Vietnam to the current economic crisis.” He agrees that the common man’s ignorance can be dangerous, yet he also notes the danger that can come from over-confident elites:

The gap between what one knows and what one thinks one knows may be higher in the ranks of the elite. The result is supposedly-clever government interventions, introduced with excessive confidence, leading to disastrous results.

Bottom Line: I share Arnold’s conclusion: “I think that the best solution to the elitist/populist dilemma is an elite with humility. Don’t let the mob rule, but at the same time don’t let the elite get too sure of itself.”

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The “people” are stupider than you might realize. Here’s Robin Hanson reminding us of this fact. Here’s Bill Maher doing the same. Nick Shulz dubbed the following Summer’s Law, after Larry Summers’ utterance: “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.”

My mom tells me, "When you were a kid, you were so laid back and happy that we were worried you might be retarded."

In my tween years, I grew fiercely competitive. I always wanted to win and lead things. Any type of game I played in, I wanted to win. Every conversation, I wanted to be the smartest and funniest. Every group effort, out in front.

Now, in adulthood, I try to stake out middle ground that goes something like "be intense about things that matter, super laid back about everything else." In other words, be more intense about fewer things.

By shrinking the "stuff I really care about" box to just a few areas — off the top of my head: my relationships (friends and family), my work, and my personal development / learning — it allows me to focus intensely on those things and let go and/or be non-competitive on everything else.

A casual game of ping pong? Enjoy it. Political debates? Don't let it get too intense. It's okay not to win. Better, even, to listen and ponder while sipping green tea and staring pensively up and to the right. Non-core professional endeavors? Just suck less than the next guy, or outsource it altogether.

One reason I am less competitive the older I get is I see more situations as non-zero sum. I am more attuned to shared interests. Others don't need to lose for me to win.

Bottom Line: Maybe one part of growing up — oh, to grow up! — is picking your battles, winning the ones that matter, and seeing the others as much as possible as non-zero sum endeavors

Somewhat Related Posts: Is a Killer Instinct Necessary in Business? and The Components of a Killer Instinct.

That's the work / productivity philosophy of Cal Newport. He targets it to students but all should consider it:

Qualifying questions with "at the meta-level" means that the answer should be quite general in its implications.

You might ask me after I returned from Switzerland the other week, "What did you learn at the meta-level?"

A wrong answer is: "Zurich is a pretty city."

A possible answer is: "National pride is unaffected by the health of the economy." Or: "56 percent of the value of a trip is in the memories, not the actual travel."

Asking people what they learned from an experience is always illuminating. It tests how reflective they are (do they even ask themselves this question?), whether they are able to abstract general lessons from a specific experience (that is, answer at the meta-level), and whether they can separate out and discount the lessons rooted in unique circumstances (the lessons not generalizable).

(Hat tip Tyler Cowen, in an email, for this insight and the travel example above.)

Four months ago I wrote a post titled In Praise of Feeling Utterly Confused. I said confusion, self-doubt, feeling like you're treading just above water, deep uncertainties about things others seem so certain about: this is part of life, or at least part my life.

Andrew Sullivan has a thoughtful meditation on this topic on his blog. He reflects upon his internal angst and confusion by noting the failure of some of his most cherished institutions: the Catholic church, conservatism, and America.

After describing how those institutions have failed him, he ends:

Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it's a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.

Where to go? What to do? You read me flounder every day; and you can find many less conflicted bloggers to read. Maybe I should take a break and live a less examined life for a while. Or maybe I should do what I am still doing: trying to make sense of where I belong, stay praying in a church that has sealed itself off from modernity, cling to a conservatism that begins to feel like a form of solipsism, hang on in the hope that America can reform itself and repair the world a little. I think, in fact, that this is obviously the right and only serious choice. Life is always a temporary and losing battle, an engagement with the deadliness of doing. It just feels deadlier than usual in these past few years of brutally unsentimental education.

Or maybe I should laugh more.

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

I think there's some truth to the idea that "everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it."

As Martin Buber said, "The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable."

Leah Hager Cohen is a talented writer who I first discovered via her reviews in the New York Times Book Review. Her semi-frequent dispatches on her blog, Love as a Found Object, often cause me to pause and think. In her latest post she relays a story from her adolescence to make a point about the hunt for identity and authenticity, a familiar process for anyone "poised between childhood and adulthood." The two best paragraphs below:

Whether or not you enjoy the company of reflective teens and young adults depends a lot on how stimulating you find this stage of life and the broad experimentation that Cohen points out. To retain sanity as a professor, for example, you must find thrill in engaging a constituency (students) doing all the above and more, if you're lucky, as they're also indulging intellectual enthusiasms: Nietzsche! Locke! Burke! Every day is a new hero, which is great except that appreciative hero-worship demands more than staccato attention.

Myself, when not engaged in my own exploring and confused wonderings along these lines, I tend to most enjoy people a few notches beyond this stage (age and stage are not always connected) where the sand beneath your feet is firmer not because you've answered all these questions or resolved all these self-doubts, but because the earnest, anxious, important, falsely urgent, and somewhat trite quest to "find yourself" and "figure out what I'm going to do with my life" has been replaced by a longer range view, one familiar with the real opportunities to reinvent yourself and your career over a lifetime, the surprising benefits of shade over light in some situations (ie, the joys of not knowing certain parts of you, the future, the world, etc), an appreciation for the permanence and fluidity of identity, and, bottom line, the acceptableness of "I don't know" to any number of meaty philosophical or practical questions.

High functioning people tend to be very good at pattern recognition: they accumulate lots of experiences (pieces of pattern) and then synthesize them (whole pattern) into something meaningful or actionable.

Some people are particularly good at seeing patterns in lines of code. Others are good at seeing patterns in human behavior, or in architecture, or in the way tennis balls fly over the net.

Accumulating lots of random experiences isn’t enough. The experiences need to be concentrated / focused. An early-stage VC needs to have seen a lot of early stage tech companies, for example, not just companies in general. Second, once you have a bag full of concentrated experiences, you still need to make sense of them and spot patterns. Probably the most important skill in this respect is being able to identify experiences that are generalizable versus experiences are that are to be discounted as anomalous.

Here’s the complicating factor: at an elite level experience-synthesis happens sub-consciously. A pro tennis player has hit the ball so many times that he doesn’t actively think about moving his arm and smacking the ball with racket. A premier venture capitalist has seen so many companies that he can match in his head 10 elements of New Co X to 10 analogous elements in 10 other companies — but he won’t always be able to explain this process in words. A yay or nay response on an entrepreneur pitch gets explained as a “gut feeling.”

Perhaps the most famous example of sub-conscious synthesis is when radiologists look at x-rays and try to figure out whether a patient has cancer. Apparently, the best way to be able to reliably predict cancerous x-rays is to look at thousands of x-rays marked cancer or no-cancer. Over time, you develop an intuitive sense of what’s cancerous. There are no rules or formulas. You can’t always explain your reasoning. You just know.

Sub-conscious synthesis creates problems when trying to understand how the elites did something. We listen anxiously to venture capitalists explaining how they knew Yahoo and Google were going to be winners or to Lance Armstrong explaining how he won a race, but their comments are almost always banal and not very useful. Their level of synthesis (true experts) is so deep they cannot helpfully explain what’s going on in their head to others.

It’s why some of the best advice-givers tend themselves not to be in the top 1% of whatever it is they offer advice on.

It’s why the post-game analysis by the chubby broadcaster who was only a mediocre player in his day is nine times out of ten more rewarding than the post-game interview with the star player of the game.