Category Archives: Philosophy

Tyler Cowen once suggested that if you want to find out what someone really believes, ask him what he thinks everyone else believes.

A slight re-frame can elicit the information you’re looking for.

Here’s a re-frame I thought of: If you want to find out what someone really does for a living, ask him what he does “on a day-to-day basis.”

Usually, when you ask someone, “What do you do?” you get a grand, idealized vision of what their job is supposed to be. Hence, I follow this question with, “Interesting. So what does that entail on a day-to-day basis?” This question reveals a more concrete and helpful description.

Breaking down time into micro-chunks is also helpful for evaluating happiness. It’s hard to contemplate the present-tense question, “Are you happy?” in the abstract. Past and future tense also fail. Looking back in time, we rationalize. Looking forward in time, we make terrible predictions about what will make us happy. So, one of the most famous and effective studies of happiness involved participants who carried around pagers and, several times a day in the heat of a moment, took note of how they were feeling. The researcher then evaluated the aggregate of these momentary entries.

Bottom Line: The best inquires about one’s work and life are rooted in day-to-day activities and feelings.

Here’s one of the simplest ways to test someone’s knowledge of an issue: ask them to explain the other side of the argument.

Ask the person who’s pro-choice to explain the pro-life perspective.

Ask the person who’s in favor of spending more money on marketing project X to explain the thinking process behind those who oppose the budgetary move.

Ask McCain supporters why in the world someone would support Obama and see if they give an answer beyond, “He’s a good speaker.”

Ask those who deride the bailout plan in Congress to explain the argument for the bailout plan.

Bottom Line: I have yet to find a more efficient and reliable way to probe the depths of a person’s knowledge and seriousness about an issue than asking them to explain the other side’s perspective.

Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have said the following:

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

Now contrast that with this great quote from Teddy Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Roosevelt seems to imply that it doesn’t necessarily matter what the man in the arena is fighting for, but that he is fighting, and this alone elevates him to a higher pedestal than the spectator.

That’s all fine and well in, say, a sporting event. But apply this logic elsewhere.

Should we think higher of the politician who believes he is fighting for a worthy cause — but a cause we virulently disagree with — than the citizen bystander not running for anything?

Should we respect the person who has taken the time to come up with ideas — but ideas you think are dangerous — more than the person who has produced no ideas at all?

Do you respect the ignorant voter more than the one who chooses not to vote at all?

That “funny feeling” of envy / jealousy only exists when the subject of our envy resembles us in some way. I don’t get jealous if Bill Gates has a big success, but I do get jealous if someone close to me in age / race / location does something very similar to what I’m trying to do. I don’t get jealous if a good friend becomes a marvelously successful chef, but I do get somewhat jealous if he becomes marvelously successful (or at least more successful than me) in my field of choice.

People who lead traditional career paths, then, have more people to compare themselves to. A young attorney has thousands of other attorneys around the same age and pursuing the same type of law against whom he can measure himself.

One reason I think envy is less pronounced in entrepreneurship circles is that entrepreneurs tend to lead idiosyncratic lives. It’s hard for a life entrepreneur to find another person whose path overlaps in a major way. Hence, fewer people seem directly competitive.

This has its downsides. Loneliness. You feel like few people can appreciate how you got here and where you’re going. And you lack easy benchmarks on how you’re doing in life relative to peers.

But there are upsides. You more frequently can Bask in Reflected Glory of your friends’ successes. Your drive to soar higher can come from genuine inspiration at others’ success instead of raw jealousy. The latter can incite action, but the former is more pure and sustainable.

Bottom Line: If you carve a unique path in life, fewer people (especially in your friend set) will seem directly comparable / competitive, and this will allow you to genuinely revel in their successes as opposed to being privately consumed by jealously.

(hat tip to Ramit Sethi for helping spark this theory)

In his 2007 speech at the Singularity Summit (this year’s event is coming up in October in San Francisco), Peter Thiel offered insight into how he makes sense of the world. Worth reading. I’ve bolded certain sections of my excerpts below.

(Here’s my post about Thiel’s Hoover article on "The Optimistic Thought Experiment." Also, at the TechCrunch 50 conference Thiel was widely quoted as saying the best predictor of a start-up’s success is low CEO pay.)

His fundamental premise, vis-a-vis the Singularity:

I suppose the basic intuition that I have about it is very simply, this is a world in which there is a possibility of things going extraordinarily well or extraordinarily badly, where both the good things and the bad things are bigger than people think. If you have a bell curve distribution of possible futures for the world, the tails on that bell curve are much fatter than people think. There is far more that can happen at the far edges. This would lead to a very different behavior in markets from a normal bell curve of distributions where nothing that interesting or extraordinary is going to happen. In particular, the Singularity will either be very successful, in which case we are going to have the biggest boom ever, or it is going to blow up the whole world and there will be nothing left to invest in whatsoever.

Something that resonates more than ever after these past few crazy days on Wall Street, about the bottom falling out of economic textbooks:

The alternative to a good Singularity is the apocalypse, and we don’t really know where it is going to happen. You would expect the world to be full of massive manias, booms, and busts on a scale unprecedented in all of history. Interestingly, if you actually look at the world’s financial markets over the last 25-30 years, that is exactly what they have manifested. It is one of things that I think is very striking. All of the conventional theories say that markets should be getting more smooth and efficient as there is more and more information out there. Somehow everything smoothes out, the volatility gets suppressed, and stocks should move up like 6% a year in a smooth, monotonic function. Instead, we’ve seen bigger booms, busts, bubbles than ever before.

On the internet boom, Thiel wonders whether the late 90’s mania actually represented enlightened thinking:

What if March 2000 in some sense represented not a peak of insanity but a peak of clarity, and that at the peak of the boom people could actually see the furthest, and what they could see was that in the long-run, in the next 20 years, 30 years, the entire old economy was going to be doomed and that all sorts of businesses and ways of doing business were no longer going to work? Therefore, and this is the tricky part, you had to bet on this one way that was going to be the way out. And that was the internet.

Want to make money? Thiel says predict the next boom:

It is very difficult to know where one necessarily goes from there, but the point that I would stress is, probably the best thing to try to focus on are these sort of incipient booms that people have not yet realized. My guess is that we will see a whole series of booms, bubbles, and busts for the next ten, twenty years as we are getting closer to this. It’s not at all clear that it will be any of the ones we’ve seen. If you look at the historical info, we had Japan, the internet, we now have financial engineering on Wall Street, we have emerging markets, even the boom in the late 1960’s, it was outer space. It was basically thought that the Singularity was going to be driven by whoever controlled outer space. Maybe we’ll have a combination of all of those. If I had to bet, I think it will probably be something completely different that people are not expecting at all. That makes it quite difficult to figure out. I would say that as a baseline, it’s going to happen and it will be none of the above.