Viruses of the body and mind
💌 The Roundup // 012
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Friends–
Our beliefs motivate our behaviors, which, in turn, determine our fate. But how can we know whether our beliefs are setting us up for success? Are our political views providing an accurate model of human behavior? Do our religious convictions instill practices that aid our survival? When times are good, it can be hard to tell which beliefs are helping us flourish. Only when the environment presents a real challenge do we get the chance to test which of our beliefs are aiding our evolutionary fitness and which ones are endangering it. The recent outbreak of Coronavirus might be just such a challenge.
As of the latest report, over 100,000 cases of Coronavirus have been diagnosed across the globe, with likely many more yet to be confirmed. Unlike disease outbreaks of the recent past, this virus has managed to reach the status of a global pandemic in a matter of months. To accomplish this, the virus has benefited from humanity’s cognitive biases and sense-making systems to aid its rapid spread.
Based on what we know, Coronavirus spreads between humans when a healthy person inhales or ingests the respiratory droplets from an infected person's cough or sneeze. Convincing healthy strangers to get close enough to sick people for this transmission to occur is not easy. After generations of natural selection, we have evolved the ability to detect signs of illness in others and keep our distance. In a subversion of these defenses, Coronavirus’ onset is accompanied by relatively mild symptoms that enable the sick to continue their daily routines while spreading the virus among the healthy. Due to the virus’ lack of severe symptoms, and low mortality rate, it has managed to avoid triggering our innate, collective defenses that might have caused us to take more drastic action to limit its spread.
At a societal level, the virus has taken advantage of flaws in both our top-down and bottoms-up sense-making systems. From the top-down perspective, broadcast news channels have been slow to disseminate useful warnings due, in part, to the intellectual limitations and biases of the gatekeepers who determine what gets shared.
Our bottom-up systems like Twitter and Reddit have originated the most valuable analysis, but have failed to disseminate their best ideas to a wide enough audience due to the filter bubbles inherent in these platforms. As a result, people self-select narratives to follow based on their prior convictions. Those who believe the panic is overblown, listen to people who downplay the potential impact of the virus, comparing it to diseases like the flu.
Meanwhile, people who are familiar with the power of compounding growth, often with backgrounds in finance or probability, are more likely to subscribe to those who paint a bleaker picture about the virus' potential impact.
In simpler times, we could all go on living in our own filter bubbles believing whatever truth suited us. But this time may be different. If this pandemic turns out to be as bad as it seems, we all may be forced to put our existing mental models to the test in keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe.
Collectively, our aggregated mental models will determine the severity of this outbreak. If people allow themselves to panic, we may hoard all the valuable supplies, endangering our medical professionals, and lowering our societal defenses. If, however, we don’t exercise the precautionary principle and take serious action, we may increase the rate of spread, overwhelming the capacity of our medical system.
To combat Coronavirus, our society must equip individuals with mental models that help them clarify the potential impact of this outbreak and enable them to behave in ways that will diminish the toll this virus takes on our species. To get people to take aggressive preventative measures early (before they start perceiving a problem), we must help them understand:
Why even small probabilities of catastrophic outcomes are worth mitigating
How small systemic interventions, made early, can significantly alter the slope of the virus’ growth trajectory
The value of spreading out cases across time to protect the capacity of our healthcare system
It will be challenging to get people to take these ideas seriously since ~95% of those who contract the virus will experience symptoms no worse than the typical flu. Yet, given the scale of the potential impact, we must try. Until we have an effective vaccine, humanity’s best defense against this outbreak is our ability to disseminate useful beliefs.
Beliefs spread much like viruses. Ideas can only survive inside human minds and spread by motivating their hosts to infect others. Mormon beliefs drive teens to travel to far-away countries to share the gospel of Joseph Smith while CrossFit fuels its advocates to post-workout photos on Instagram. Ideas that can replicate across large populations are the most likely to get passed to future generations.
While some ideas are aligned with human goals of survival and reproduction, certain ones are not. For example, antinatalism is a philosophy that assigns a negative value to having children. While it may be challenging for this set of ideas to persist for generations, it doesn’t stop any of us from being infected by this philosophy and failing to pass on our genes.
Fortunately, as free-thinking human beings, we can defend ourselves against viruses of mind and body by being selective about which ideas we allow to govern our behavior. In service of never wasting a crisis, we should all use this opportunity to question which parts of our individual and collective operating systems have passed their expiration date.
Start by asking yourself whether, during this outbreak, you've been surprised or misled by the usual sources you trust to interpret the world. How good has your worldview and the people you trust been at preparing you for this? If the answer is not very good, perhaps it's time to challenge your existing beliefs by exposing yourself to some new mental models. Below are some excellent resources to get you started:
Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin
Incerto (Deluxe Edition): Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile, Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Coronavirus Primer for Reasonably Rational People by Taylor Pearson
While scrutinizing your beliefs may be uncomfortable, it’s worth remembering that your identity consists of more than the ideas that reside in your brain. By ridding yourself of beliefs that no longer serve your goals, you make room for mental models that can enable you, and our species, to overcome whatever challenges the world may bring.
Notes:
Thanks to Justin Mares, Liz Fosslien, and Sachin Maini for reading drafts of this.
A permalink to this post can be found here.
Recommendations
🍭 The Age of Decadence
(22-minute read from Ross Douthat)
One of the most moving scenes from the movie Shawshank Redemption comes when 73-year-old inmate Brooks Hatlen is released from prison. After 50 years in Shawshank, he attempts to navigate a 1950s American cityscape as he narrates a letter to his friends on the inside:
Dear fellas, I can't believe how fast things move on the outside. I saw an automobile once when I was a kid, but now they're everywhere. The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.
I remember feeling some version of this in 2012. I had recently moved back to Silicon Valley and signed up for an account on a new social network called Twitter. Scrolling through my feed, I remember feeling like I was mainlining the collective consciousness of humanity. The thinkers I followed painted visions of the future that heralded the end of work and the merging of man and machine. It felt like the world was starting to change faster than I could keep up.
Eight years later, it still feels like the world is changing quickly, but it’s unclear whether that change is actually materializing outside of the internet. Ross Douthat argues that the turbulence of our digital lives may be masking the stagnation in our physical world.
While venture capitalists herald the incredible breakthroughs that are just around the corner, thus far, our technology companies have failed to deliver innovations that rival the advances in transportation, antibiotics, and indoor plumbing that marked the early 20th century. On the positive side, despite the political vitriol in our social media feeds, we’re also not being subjected to the levels of violence or societal upheaval seen in the 1960s. Douthat believes both of these are symptoms of Western society’s age of decadence:
“If you want to feel as if Western society is convulsing, there’s an app for that, a convincing simulation waiting. But in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth.”
While decadence feels comfortable, it is often the harbinger of decline. To prevent collapse, we need to wake up to our current reality and see it with clear eyes.
You also might enjoy this review of Douthat’s new book on the topic by Peter Thiel.
📉 The New Status Game for Companies: Fewer Employees
(10-minute read by Auren Hoffman)
Status-games tend to be an underrated driver of industry practices. In Silicon Valley, a startup shares its latest funding round in the TechCrunch as a way of delivering status to the company as well as its founders, investors, and employees. Because others value this status, the company can use it to form profitable relationships with new customers, investors, and employees.
One signal that a new business trend is taking hold is when the rules of industry status games start to change. Will corporate embrace of stakeholder capitalism continue? That depends, in part, on whether founders, investors, and employees can gain legible status among their peers by embracing the trend. While some see regulation as the best lever for this kind of change, it usually only results in companies doing the bare minimum to avoid trouble. To supercharge a trend, it must be integrated into influential people’s quest for status.
Auren Hoffman recently noticed a change in Silicon Valley’s status game that’s causing founders and CEOs to shift their focus from increasing employee headcount to growing revenue per employee.
Because revenues of private companies tend to be secret, most venture-backed companies have historically bragged about how many employees they have. A CEO will say: “we went from 100 to 200 employees last year” as if fast employee growth is always a good thing.
But this is changing: there is a new status game brewing between companies concerning who has the fewest number of employees, centered around who is engineering greater amounts output with less staff.
I think this trend is largely a good one that will have interesting effects on the HR function within the tech industry. Silicon Valley has long viewed HR as a support function rather than a strategic decision-maker– however, this seems to be changing. Many CEOs are realizing that their HR leaders are the next largest capital allocators at the company. With new mandates from investors to pursue profitability, CEOs will prioritize hiring HR leaders who can do more with less. Increasingly, the best executives will be judged not just on their ability to hire but also their capacity to retain and develop existing employees.
At some point, I hope founders will win status based on the career success their employees went on to achieve beyond their tenure at the founder’s company.
You also might enjoy this post about Social Capital in Silicon Valley by Alex Danco.
📝 How to Take Smart Notes: A Step-by-Step Guide
(7-minute read from Nat Eliason)
Over the past month, I’ve been aspirationally reading a book called How to Take Smart Notes. By “aspirationally reading,” I mean, I’ve been carrying it around in my backpack to feel like I’m the kind of person who spends his time off reading books about note-taking. If I’m being honest, I’ve barely cracked it open… which is why I was pumped to find that Nat Eliason summarized it into a blog post. Since it feels a bit silly to summarize a 1700-word summary, I’ll just suggest that you read it, if you want a better way to remember the content you consume.
You also might enjoy this slightly longer summary by Tiago Forte.
💼 Old People Have All the Interesting Jobs in America
(4-minute read from Tyler Cowen)
Why do so many of America’s smartest college grads pursue careers in low-value areas of the economy like law, finance, and management consulting, leaving higher-value professions like material science, manufacturing, and chemical engineering to the Boomer generation? Tyler Cowen believes part of the reason may have to do with the relative attractiveness of the onramps into these professions. Unlike other career paths, the entry-level roles in law, finance, and consulting offer:
Immediate prestige
The chance to contribute without knowing lots of specific skills
A thick and liquid job-market
High upside possibility
Downside protection
Optionality – “If you don’t like [these] vocations after a few years of trying, you still have elite connections and credentials that you can take somewhere else.”
The result is that many young people are making careers out of “low-return, high-stability, establishment-oriented activities,” leaving the most valuable jobs to older people who have lost their appetite for risk-taking and creativity. Cowen theorizes that this sorting function may be one of the puzzle pieces to explaining America’s declining productivity growth.
🔮 A Visual Framework for Product Vision
(8-minute read from Dan Schmidt)
I love a well-constructed framework. Sadly though, unless it can be explained with a 2x2 matrix or a simple loop, frameworks rarely get the distribution they deserve. As a good example, I only recently encountered Dan Schmidt’s excellent articulation of product vision.
If your role touches product strategy in any way, I recommend reading the full post. As I was absorbing it, I couldn’t help but wonder how much valuable industry knowledge remains tucked away in hidden corners of the internet.
You also might enjoy this further explanation of the framework by the same author.
💼 What The CEO Wants You To Know
(25-minute read from Cedric Chin)
To build a successful career in business, you need a strong mental model of how companies grow and make money. While an MBA can help cultivate this, it’s not the only way. But you also don’t want to solely rely on your experience to build your mental model. While startup employees may grasp the importance of product-market fit and growth, they may undervalue the dynamics of cash generation. Employees of larger companies can get stuck in silos and miss the bigger picture. To help build your model, I recommend reading some foundational business books and relating their principles to your own experiences.
To that end, one great place to start is What the CEO Wants You to Know. The book does a great job of summarizing the four principles that create the foundation for a robust mental model of how companies succeed:
Satisfying customer needs better than the competition
Generating cash
Producing a sufficient return on invested capital
Growing well
I learned about the book by reading Cedric Chin’s summary, which does a great job of distilling the book’s main points. If you feel at all shaky about the fundamentals of business, I suggest giving the summary a read to help you decide if you want to buy the book.
💥 BlitzFail: How Not to Go Off the Rails
(15-minute read from David Sacks)
Recently, I’ve spoken with a fair number of job seekers who are strategizing about what kind of company to join in the event of a looming recession. Many seek some semblance of safety but feel spooked after observing the collapse of several promising growth-stage companies. While Silicon Valley has trained job-seekers to evaluate a company’s growth potential, few know how to spot the telltale signs of a company at risk of collapse.
David Sachs’ recent post provides a great list of warning signs that a company may be in for tough times, including:
Bad unit economics
Growing CAC
Unaddressed churn
External dependencies on other platforms
Regulatory compliance
Bad sales behavior
Mechanical Turk-ing the core product
Founder psychology
Company culture
Commoditization
Macro shocks
No matter what role you play in the startup ecosystem, it’s useful to cultivate the ability to spot risk. Beyond the benefits for your career, this framing can be valuable in many domains of life. Or as legendary investor Charlie Munger is known for having said:
All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.
You also might enjoy this classic post explaining why all revenue is not equally valuable by Bill Gurley.
👨👩👦 The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake
(55-minute read from David Brooks)
Picture a generic family– what image comes to mind? I suspect it looks something like a mother and father sitting around a dinner table with their 2.5 children. While it’s now the norm, this conception of a family is relatively new. For most of human history, we’ve arranged ourselves in small bands of 20-25 people that would link up with other groups to hunt and forage for food. Among these units, activities like child care, security, and tool-making were shared responsibilities. Even as late as the 1800s, the vast majority of American families consisted of large groups of kin who all played a role in the family business. The nuclear family, as we think of it today, was a product of young people moving to cities to chase the economic opportunity of the industrial revolution. These individuals found that by settling into smaller families, they had more privacy and individual choice to self-actualize. What many didn’t realize is what they were giving up.
An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents—a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are there to step in. If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach. Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens—when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.
A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.
Losing the shock absorbers of kin leaves nuclear families vulnerable to the blows of everyday life. This is particularly true for poor and working-class families who lack the financial means to pay for the services that extended families once provided like child-care, tutoring, and therapy.
Personally, I believe happiness is best achieved through a portfolio of meaning. This means finding a balance between career, family, and community, so a setback in one area doesn’t lead to ruin. For that reason, I wouldn’t advise sacrificing career ambition to remain in an area of low economic opportunity to live with kin. But, I do think it’s worthwhile to recognize the inherent limitations of the nuclear family and experiment with new types of living arrangements.
Community
Shoutouts
Adam Compain and the ClearMetal team are killing it
Anthemos Georgiades shared the Zumper origin story on This Week in Startups
Brianne Kimmel has a great newsletter on the future of work
Camille Ricketts shared her thoughts on brand building and marketing strategy
Cat Lagman wrote about managing stakeholders in the design thinking process
David Rogier dispensed some wisdom from his journey building Masterclass
JD Schramm just published his new book about communications mastery
Joe Du Bey helped Eden acquire Managed by Q
Julia Hartz told her story of starting Eventbrite on How I Built This
Justin Mares launched an experiment to hold people accountable for their health
Lucy Georgiades is helping people master difficult conversations
Mario Gabriele has been inspiring me with his newsletter: The Generalist
Mercedes Bent broke down the startups that are defining the Experience Economy
Shane Hegde and his team launched Air
Tom Griffiths chronicled his entrepreneurial journey building FanDuel and Hone
Trevor Sookraj shared his thoughts on the psychology of frugality
Will Houghteling introduced Upskilling-as-a-Service
*Header image credit: Pete Ryan