Tragically lucky?
Moontower Munchies #10
Friends,
Venkatesh Rao is one of my favorite writers active today1. He was recently interviewed by Jim O’Shaughnessy on the fantastic Infinite Loops podcast.
Venkat puts words to so many things I think about but he also completes the thoughts. His mental LLM has been trained on 100x more inputs than my brain so I’m flattering myself but the bigger point is this interview was one of the most resonant I’ve heard. Its influence will follow me.
[Venkat is a prolific writer and he’s re-factored much of his online work into the 2-volume Art of Gig book series making it much easier for a reader to approach the work in a coherent order. I’m almost finished with Volume I. You can buy the books directly at https://artofgig.com
I also have his book Tempo in my reading queue which he published in 2011. The Amazon description:
Tempo is a modern treatment of decision-making that weaves together concepts and principles from the mathematical decision sciences, cognitive psychology, philosophy and theories of narrative and metaphor. Drawing on examples from familiar domains such as the kitchen and the office, the author, Venkatesh Rao, illustrates the subtleties underlying everyday behavior, and explains how you can strengthen the foundations of your decision-making skills.]
You can find my keepsakes from the interview here.
Some excerpts and topics you’ll find:
I had an equal number of people calling me a communist and a capitalist. – Venkat
I loved this line for the same reason I love this quote by Niels Bohr:
“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
“Paycheck people” and corporate life
It’s like it’s outside their frame of reference to understand risk at all. It’s like, all right, you make this narrow band of maybe very intelligent and imaginative decisions, but within an extremely narrow band of acceptable risk. And beyond that, risk-taking is for senior executives, weird people in the investing world, artists and creative types who live hand-to-mouth and are starving. Risk is not within the frame of reference for how to navigate the world. And I think that’s kind of why I relate the paycheck economy to kind of a structural failure of nerve, it sort of trains you to not have nerve, it trains you to survive without it, and I think there’s a cost to that over a long term.On Arthur C. Clarke’s distinction between a failure of imagination vs a failure of nerve: Arthur C. Clark has this wonderful essay called Failures of Prophecy, I believe, and he talks about two kinds of failure in thinking about the future, failure of imagination and failure of nerve, and he makes the very interesting claim that the failure of nerve is, by far, the more important. A lot of
people are extremely imaginative, they can take in the vast amount of confusing information in the world now and come up with very imaginative sort of interpretations and sense-making constructs. But very few people can look the confusing or mess of reality in the face and say, “This is actually the nervy, courageous thing to do,” And go against their instincts. And it’s easy to, I don’t know, spend as much time as you like on the fun imaginative stuff and never do a courageous thing in your life, whereas the nervy thing is kind of the hard thing to do.The false sense of security in the paycheck world
A lot of the sense of security in the paycheck world is a completely false sense of security. That security does not actually exist. It’s as risky as being a gig economy independent, it’s just that they manifest and structure themselves differently. And if you refuse to take risks for year after year, quarter after quarter, for years on end, you’re going to end up with lots of risks. So yeah, it blows up in your face.[Kris: this feels like another one of those failures of mental accounting. We have a “first order effect” myopia where we are sedated by a steady paycheck while the wild world evolves and the sociopathic forces that govern corporate life conspire at least subconsciously against you — unless you are also all-in on the corporate Hunger Games. The person who is not playing the game ruthlessly is the one quietly accumulating all the risk when they thought they were playing it safe]
If you're mired in the "paycheck economy", you may be in such a routine that more existential questions about meaning are ignored or not given space. How does Venkat think about this?
Meaning I think is extremely strongly related to the first topic we were talking about, nerve versus imagination. I think meaning-making begins when you first take your first courageous decision in your life and then realize just how much agency you have. To what extent you are operating in a condition of learned helplessness in institutionalized environments. And the first time you sort of make a reach for a truly autonomous decision, despite the risks, you realize how much more opportunity there is to do so. And for me, the first time that happened was actually long before my leap into the gig economy, when I was unhappy with my first PhD advisor. And I made the decision that even if it'll costs me my financial aid and I'm sort of adrift for a while, I'm going to break up with my PhD advisor and sort of go off in the wild for a while and find another advisor and new funding.And that is what I did. It was very sort of a tough decision. I quit that advisor, I lost my funding, I had to go off and work at a startup for a year. Then I came back, worked with another advisor I got along with better. But I think that flipped a switch in me where after that, solving for meaning became so easy and so much second nature because it's not an intellectual problem. You don't have to be smart to solve for meaning-making, you just have to be courageous. You have to do the tough and hard thing as opposed to the maybe intellectually complex but easy thing. So I think I'm a reasonably smart guy, but I think what unlocked meaning-making for me was that first choice to make a tough decision. And after that, it was brain-dead obvious to me. Anytime I came to a fork in the road, it's like, "Yeah, this is obviously the more meaningful thing to do, so I'm going to do it."How the world obscures this
I would say that today the world is set up in a way where it's actually hard to learn this meaning-making trick except by accident. And one of the things that I think this growing conversation around the gig economy is doing, is sort of reinforcing the intense practicality of looking for meaning. A lot of people don't get this.
[Kris: I think this is the most important point in the whole interview]If you look at conversations about meaning-making in the abstract, the way talking heads talk about them and talking about lost voice, listening to podcasters and getting radicalized, that level of conversation about the meaning crisis, it seems like a philosophical spiritual problem that should be addressed with religion and philosophy, ideas and so forth. It's not. It's really as simple as meaning-making is unlocked when you first learn to take courageous decisions and keep doing that, so it becomes a habit. And after that, you kind of unlock this idea of fixed point futures and all these other little tricks become sort of self-evident.
Learning to make meaning is the most intensely practical thing you can do. It's not a matter of spiritual retreats and going on soul-searching journeys and having shamans take you on Ayahuasca retreats and things like that. It's not about that at all. It's the first time you come to a hard decision in your career or life, make the hard decision, see how good you are at making tough calls, and then keep doing that and meaning-making will take care of itself.
And I think that's a lesson that the emerging conversation in the gig economy is driving home for a lot of people. And a lot of people who stay in the paycheck economy, stay in an environment that makes this way too hard, that tells them, "You have to go on spiritual retreats and read Zen philosophy and take drugs to learn meaning-making." And it's not that hard.
Is there a character type or archetype that tends to be more open to risk?
This is a complex and interesting question. He explores 3 “layers of the onion”. I won’t spoil the discussion, check that one out yourself.How rationality leads to nihilism and how fixed-point futurism can break the nihilistic cycle
The "tragically lucky"
At age 23, it's very tempting to conflate agency and determinism in scripts. You think you control your future, you think you can make a very specific future happen. You think "I'm a smart guy, I have these resources at hand and I can solve the problem and solve the equation of how to turn my talents and resources into the outcomes I want." And then of course, life hits you in the face. You realize it's much more complex.Then you ask, "What happens next?"Do you then refactor your sense of agency as in "I still have agency, it just doesn't work the way I thought it did, so I'd better get about understanding how the world actually works and understanding how agency actually operates." That's one path.
The other path is of course the world sort of mashed my plans to bits and pieces and I'm going to be helpless from here on out, and that happens to people too.
So I think a naive sense of youthful agency does not survive first contact with the enemy...but for some people it does. And of course, there are also people who just get lucky in a very naive sense in the sense that they plan a particular future and actually it unfolds because they never get hit in the face with conflicting reality. So there are people I know who are these spirits who go through life everything having gone exactly as they planned.
But there's a certain tragedy there, which is, they think they're super agenty then things go out exactly as planned and they become president or whatever, and then they're like 60, 70 or these old people and they come across as children. I talk to them and they're like, there's a sense of a lost child about them. It's like they were never really tested by life, so they'd never really actually learned what was going on. It's like they're 60 or 70 and they act like children or 23-year olds maybe. And part of the reason is they were on the surface, they were super lucky that things bent as they planned, but at the deeper sort of philosophical level, they're the most intensely tragic figures in the world because things went exactly as they planned. The most interesting thing that can happen to you in your life is things don't go as you plan. And because that forces you to come to terms with what's the actual nature of the world, what's the actual nature of agency.[Kris: I think most people's desire or goal in life is to become tragically lucky. Ignorance is bliss and all that. Hard to think of anything more boring.]
Finding a healthy sense of agency
2 versions of the problem
a) There are people who were so battered down by early life traumas that they never make those naively optimistic 23-year-old statements at all.The first challenge is to get them to that place of naive optimism in the first place. So I think of that as a much more basic challenge of humane treatment of young people, which is if they've been battered, just create kind environments for them where they can develop some confidence and say, "Hey agencies, actually I think that exists", even if it's at a very toy level. So often when I'm thrown into position of trying to mentor younger people, which I try to avoid, I'm not a mentor type person, but when I am thrown in the situation, my tendency is to ask "how burned are you? How much are you a devastated landscape of bad parenting and bad childhood conditioning that we have to get you to the starting line of being a naive optimistic age 20?" And this requires kindness and nurturing, and I'm not very good at that, other people are better.
b) But let's assume some people are already at that starting line of naive optimism
How do you ensure that you when throw them into reality they don't get tragically lucky. Let's hope they don't get tragically lucky. Throw them in something that actually challenges their assumptions about the world and breaks them in some way. But then how do you ensure that if they're broken, they're actually not going to react with complete helplessness, but then sort of pick themselves up and say, "No, the world works differently and I'm going to rethink what agency means."
And I think yes, that is a learnable, teachable skill, but it's one that the industrial environment with schooling and the paycheck world is actually anti-optimized for. It's designed to teach you exactly the opposite of that. It's designed to take you from a naive starting point and keep you tragically lucky for the rest of your life. And if they fail at it, you're tossed by the wayside. That's what the industrial world is set up to do, make you tragically lucky or throw you into the garbage heap.
In the developing world, more people are thrown by the wayside, and in places the US more people enjoy the tragically, enjoy is the wrong word, but suffer the tragically lucky outcome.
We don't want either of those outcomes. We want you to be thrown into the world, into a test environment where you're actually tested and then you kind of learn the skills through trial and error of acquired realistic agency
I can’t embed Tweets anymore because Elon but here’s the link to some absolute darts.
Tragically Hip > Tragically Lucky
Stay groovy ☮️
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In 2019, he blew my mind when I read the Gervais Principle. It’s such a fun read. I wrote back then:
Several people I have showed the following essays to are haunted. For those of you who work with others in anything even resembling an office setting, reading them is like taking the “red pill”. You will analyze your own language and that of others with labels like powertalk, babytalk, and posturetalk. You will view every person in your work environment as a sociopath, clueless, or loser. Venkat Rao, unpacks Ricky Gervais’ The Office with rigor and insight that will never let you see an office interaction the same way. I’m not kidding when I say that a few of the people that have read these are now reviewing their professional relationships through a lens that reframes meetings, hallway conversations, and negotiations. I certainly did.
Some tips if you dare.
Read parts I and II fully. After that, it starts to get very strenuous. Let me know if you make it.
You don’t need to have seen much of the Office to appreciate this. I have seen a few episodes here and there.
He redefines sociopath, clueless, and loser. Don’t let the baggage of those words misdirect you.
See if you can identify yourself.
As they say, caveat emptor.
Original source at Ribbonfarm.com
Thanks for summarizing! Just saw this last week and your summary captures it perfectly.
Thank you for sharing this. Two amazing perspectives. I'm grateful for all you share.