I, Pencil

  • Claim: not a single person can make a pencil, from end to end
  • Antecedents
    • Pencil starts out as a cedar tree
    • Think about all the work that goes into making the tools to cut down the cedar tree
    • Cedar logs are shipped to a sawmill
    • Think about all the work and infrastructure that goes into the operation of a sawmill
    • From the sawmill, slats are shipped to a pencil factory
      • $4 million machine that carves grooves into the cedar slats
      • Pencil lead made from Sri Lankan graphite, combined with Mississippi clay and various waxes
      • Pencil coloring comes from yellow lacquer
        • Think about all of the ingredients and expertise that went into making just the coloring on the outside of the pencil
      • Pencil’s ferrule is made out of brass and nickel
        • Think about the copper, tin and nickel that was mined
        • Think about the blackening process that allows the nickel to form the distinctive black band
  • No one knows
    • No single person in the process of pencil manufacture can make the whole pencil from raw materials
    • Each person in the chain contributes an infinetesimal amount of effort, often without realizing that they’re working towards the manufacture of pencils
    • However, when all of these efforts are combined, the result is over a billion pencils a year
  • No master-mind
    • There is no single individual or organization masterminding the production of pencils
    • The fact that we can make pencils at all should give us faith in the ability of free people to organize themselves around the production of goods and services
  • Testimony galore
    • Let society’s legal apparatuses remove obstacles, not create them
  • Counterpoint: Meditations on Moloch

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility

  • “Legibility” is introduced in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State
  • The Authoritarian High Modernist Recipe for Failure
    • Look at a complex and confusing reality
    • Fail to understand the subtleties of how that reality works
    • Attribute the failure to the irrationality of reality rather than deficiencies in your model
    • Come up with an idealized vision of what reality ought to look like
    • Argue that the platonic orderliness of your idealized vision means that it’s more rational
    • Bulldoze reality to fit the idealized vision
    • Watch as your utopia crashes and burns
  • Legibility and control
    • The central problem of modern statecraft has been one of making populations legible
    • Legibility is the ease by which on-the-ground reality can be processed by a centralized bureaucracy
    • States attempt to reorganize their territory (both physical and social) in order to make it more legible
    • Legible terrain is easier to control
    • The main failure of high modernism was to confuse legibility with rationality
  • The psychology of legibility
    • Apparent chaos is anxiety provoking
    • The effort to make society legible can be understood as an organizational response to that anxiety
  • The fertility of the idea
    • The concept of legibility appears simple but has explanatory power over a wide range of circumstances
    • Not all attempts to make reality legible result in disasters
      • Standardized weights and measures make global trade and infrastructure possible
      • Trade a multitude of local optima for a single global optimum
    • The reason legibility is so dangerous is that people pursuing legibility do not understand the tradeoff between local and global optima
    • The imposition of legibility is pursued as a pseudo-scientific prescription that claims to be the best for everyone
    • The failure mode of legibility can be seen in mid-20th century urban planning
      • Planners bulldoze illegible but livable neighborhoods and replace them with legible but unlivable apartment towers
      • In the worst case (e.g. Brazilia) planners create entire cities in this style
    • The failure mode is much worse when applied to agriculture
      • “Scientific” forestry
      • Soviet collectivization
      • Ethiopian famine
  • Applying the idea
    • Modern caste system in India allegedly arises from the British making a complex reality fit into four neat little boxes
  • The model is still relevant today
    • Time lag between the high-water mark of an ideology and the last of its effects
    • Authoritarian regimes love authoritarian high modernism
    • The desire to make things legible is a common failure of organizations - not limited to modernist thinkers
    • Modern design approaches make the same mistakes, but give them different names
  • Authoritarian high modernism in corporate and personal life
    • Authoritarian high modernism explains both the appeal and the limitation of the self-help industry
      • Individual lives are too complex to fit into neat self-help systems
      • Attempting to simplify your life so that it does fit into a self-help system is likely to end in disaster
    • Corporations are just as susceptible to the failures of authoritarian high modernism as are governments
      • The difference is that corporations (sometimes) have to answer to consumers when they try to make their customers legible
  • Supplemental reading: Scott Alexander’s book review of Seeing Like a State

Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development

  • The rate of loss of potential lives
    • Think of all the energy that is being currently expended heating empty space
    • Virgo Supercluster contains on the order of stars
    • Assuming that each star’s entire output can be captures and converted into computation at current efficiency levels, there are potentially 10^38 lives that could be simulated
    • Even if we limit ourselves to biological humans, this area of the universe could potentially sustain 10^23 humans
    • Every second that the entire supercluster is not colonized represents the loss of up to 10^14 biological human lives
  • The opportunity cost of delayed colonization
    • Any technology that increases the speed at which space colonization is achieved has a huge utilitarian payoff
    • Any value system which aggregates human desires ought to push for space colonization
  • The chief goal for utilitarians should be to minimize existential risk
    • Any change to when humans colonize the universe is massively offset by changes to the probability of humans ever colonizing the universe
  • Implications for aggregative person-affecting views
    • Even if you only consider the lives of people that would be cut short by an existential catastrophe, you should still assign a high cost to X-Risk
    • There is a small probability that the people whose lives would be cut short by an existential catastrophe would have become immortal due to a technological singularity, or some other mechanism
    • Safety trumps speed, but we should still advance towards space colonization as fast as we can

A Hanging

  • I’m not summarizing this. George Orwell is a wonderful writer, and you should just read the essay

How To Do What You Love

  • To do something well, you have to like it
  • School is tedious because its meant to be preparation for adults’ conception of work
  • However, society tells us that we’re supposed to enjoy our work
    • The people who are best at their jobs like their jobs
      • Pretending to like your job is a way of signalling that you’re good at what you do
  • This conflict between social messages leads to alienation
  • Doing what you love doesn’t mean doing what you want to do on a moment-to-moment basis
  • Unproductive pleasures pall eventually
  • To be happy, you have to do something you both enjoy and admire
  • Don’t worry about prestige - prestige is a way to get ambitious people to do boring work
  • If you’ve even admitted to yourself that you hate your job, you’re a step ahead
  • Finding what really motivates you is hard
    • Try to do a good job, even if you don’t like what you’re doing - that way you can’t use laziness as an excuse
    • Always produce - if you force yourself to always be producing, eventually you’ll converge on what you actually like to produce
  • How do you get paid to do what you love?
    • Organic route: start out doing both stuff you like and stuff you hate; then, as you get better and more acclaimed, start cutting out the stuff you hate
    • 2-job route: either try to make enough money so that you can do what you like or keep a “day job” so that you can work on what you like in your spare time
    • If what you like to do is something that people will pay for, go with the organic route, otherwise go with the 2-job route
    • Whichever route you take, expect difficulty