Prelude
Karnofsky talks about useful vices for wicked problems. Laziness, impatience, hubris and self-preservation.
Nate Soares talks about desperation, recklessness, defiance, naming them the three dubious virtues.
Next, I will talk.
Where have I underutilized these tools
Desperation
I am quite commitment averse. This causes behaviour such as holding nuance and unconfidence all the way up, the opposite of what Soares paints as a useful trait in his post. Uncertainty, thinking “I don’t know enough about this topic to actually commit to my views”, and meta-uncertainty (“I’m not smart enough to form a confident view on this subject”, “The common views on this topic seem to be missing something important and I can’t elaborate what, but I’m too lazy / incapable to figure out what it is.”) are useful tools - for not doing anything.
By “desperation towards a goal” I mean the possession of a goal so important to you that you can commit yourself to it fully, without hesitation, without some part of you wondering whether it’s really worth all your effort. I mean a goal that you pursue with both reckless abandon and cautious deliberation in fair portions. I mean a goal so important that it does not occur to you to spare time wondering whether you can achieve it, but only whether this path to achieving it is better or worse than that path.
In a way these exact patterns of thinking are directionally opposite from Desperation. And actually my current top theory is that they were formed as defence mechanisms against desperation - there was a time when I figured I often went in the wrong direction when I fully trusted myself and so I stopped. But I think the time for this is over.
I think Soares says well what is needed to fuel desperation:
In my experience, the really powerful intrinsic motivations require that you’re able to struggle as if something of incredible value is on the line. That’s much easier if, on a gut level, you believe that’s true.
I think on a gut level I have believed that the fact that saving lives, working on important topics, is important, for years. But I was also holding a contradiction - the way I’d describe it is I held a belief of “If I can save multiple lives per year by working on the right topic, making the right decisions, that implies that I must burn as much of myself as I can to get that work done, since there is no philosophical reason why my life would be worth more than anyone else’s.” I now know that I was wrong - and we will elaborate on it more under self-preservation.
I think the short instrumental case for why this isn’t true is “You can’t do your best work if you go too far under your happy price.“. This has some implications, one of which is that lifestyle creep is very real in a way.
The philosophical case is more so just plain - ”You deserve your happy price and so you are allowed to demand the world for it.”. Of course, if your values are truly selfless, maybe your happy price is “Being able to work on the most important problems of the world.”. I am not this selfless. My happy price consists of:
Economic safety and reasonable healthcare
Being able to focus on work that is aligned with my psychology - I’m not the kind of person who can “lock in” and do unpleasant work for more than a few months, even if the stakes are high.
Having time for creative self-work and fun creative projects.
Autonomy - but with collaboration. I dislike working alone, and I dislike being given a rigid specification how to work.
Having space to engage my curiosity and trust my gut when it tells me observations about the work.
One observation here is: These are actually conditions for how I think and work the best. And, ironically, a big part of my happy price is getting to think well. It is one of the most enjoyable parts of life, after all, and one reason why I quite like work, when the work is aligned with me.
Soares in his text says
Ask yourself: is there anything you would go all out for? Is there anything some antagonist could put in danger, such that you would pull out all your stops? Is there any threat so dire that you would hold nothing back, in your struggle to make things right?
I have met many people who cannot honestly answer “yes” to this question, not even under imaginary circumstances. If I ask them to imagine their family being kidnapped, they say they would call the police and wait anxiously. If I ask them to imagine the world threatened by an asteroid, they say they would do their best to enjoy their remaining time. These are fine and prudent answers. Yet, even if I ask them to imagine strange scenarios where they and they alone can save the Earth at great personal cost, they often say they would do it only grudgingly.
And, in a way, my fully honest answer to his question is, that I can finally admit aloud (after years of being unable to): If I didn’t get my happy price, I’d still do my best, but I would do it only grudgingly.
Recklessness
The second dubious virtue is recklessness. As with desperation, there are many bad ways to be reckless. … Nevertheless, there is a type of recklessness that is a virtue. This is recklessness in the pursuit of an external goal, and I have found it to be rather rare.
I get a lot of questions from people about how cautious they should be as they make changes in their lives. If they remove their guilt motivation, will they be able to do anything at all? … And I tend to answer: You are not made of glass.
Dive in. Change things. Fix problems. If more problems crop up, fix those too.
…
During my undergraduate education, I was the president of an entrepreneurship club. The first most common type of person who would drop by asking for advice was that young wannabe founder all full of naïve excitement about some half-formed notion that they’re about to make the next facebook. The second most common person was that competent programmer with an idea that wasn’t half-bad — maybe they had some idea for an app that would let couples communicate in a way they couldn’t yet easily do, six years ago — but, being tempered and level-headed and well aware of the naïvety of the first folks, were entirely unable to commit to their idea. Both sets of prospective entrepreneurs were doomed to failure. The first set, for all the obvious reasons — they’d focus too narrowly on writing code that no one would ever buy, or fail to find their first users, or fail to make a minimum testable product, or they’d dramatically misunderstand and underestimate the difficulty of the technical challenges, or whatever.
Amusingly enough - I think I am the type of person who oscillates between both of these two modes. Between being hubristic, full of ideas, full of self-belief, and then later being full of cynical-tone “realism”. And I might blame this character trait as a large reason why the common advice for both fails for me - the core thing I need to do is integrate my cynical realism and hubris. Perhaps by seeing the dark world, perhaps by some other solution, but nonetheless, this oscillation is not the way. And I am not interested in blaming history.
So let’s engage with this question, and figure out why I cannot be reckless:
The second set would fail because they didn’t really expect themselves to succeed. They could make themselves work on their idea, while reciting to themselves some story about being risk-loving, but they couldn’t get their head into the idea, to the point where they were spending fourteen hours a day working feverishly while plans and paths and strategies dominated their waking thoughts.
There’s a fugue state that successful entrepreneurs report entering, which the second set of people had rendered themselves unable to enter. Somehow, their realistic understating of their odds destroyed their ability to commit.
In one fashion, this makes some sense: they, knowing that great success is likely a lie, cannot fool their innermost self into believing in their own vision, which precludes them from entering the fugue state. But in another fashion, is silly. What do the odds have to do with your ability to commit? Why is their epistemic state preventing them from entering the emotional state that would most help them succeed?
I think there are a few different skills it takes to be able to ender the fugue state even while knowing that your odds of success are low. One of them, I think, is the virtue of recklessness.
IDK mikä yläotsikko ja öö joo
Reality forces one to cash in their bets. I don’t like cashing in. I seek ambiguity. (This is perhaps a part of why I enjoy philosophy as entertainment more than many of my fellow humans.)
I quite enjoy fake staring at the darkness of the world. I find great entertainment in melancholic fiction.
“For a long time I thought I was good at bearing responsibility, because I could bear to execute even quite unpleasant responsibilities with appropriate neutrality. Now I see: I was not as desperate as my peers to avoid the unpleasant consequences to what is valuable, and so resigned myself to the role of a rubber stamp. I do not recommend focusing your ambitions on being an excellent rubber stamp.”
Defiance
One way I think of defiance is as the opposing force to compliance. Not being burdened, tied down, merged into expectations placed onto you.
Laziness
Usually thought of as a vice, in programmer circles the story of the smart, capable, but lazy, programmer who is nonetheless the one you often might want to hire, exists quite vividly.
I think the seed of truth here is that there are areas of life where over-eagerness is a vice, maybe one of the worst vices.
Cold-takes’ focus on specifically vices for wicked problems leads to a bit of a different approach;
When some key question is hard to resolve, often the best move is to just … not resolve it, and change the thesis of your writeup instead (and change how rigorous you’re trying to make it).
The approach Karnofsky presents seems like a combination of 80-20 optimization and admitting that humans (especially hubristic humans) often set goals that are unreachable or inefficient to reach.
Let’s check Karnofsky’s practical insights:
Questions for further investigation
Insight: You can just leave the parts of the work that aren’t immediately relevant to your thesis to future-you, or even better, the future-other. It communicates that you were mindful of the difficult questions, but doesn’t burden you with trying to address every branch of additional questions with a well-thought-out answer.
What standard are we trying to reach? How about the easiest one that would still be worth reaching?
This is again a classic form of the applied 80/20 and also I think one of the lessons that is straight out applicable to software engineering. “premature optimization is the root of all evil.”, and all that. Aim for the point in the quality line that is exactly enough for your goal, and no more.
Impatience
Hubris
Self-preservation
So. The self. Preserved. What to say about this?
I already talked about happy prices, under Desperation. So let’s get back to it.
”You deserve your happy price and so you are allowed to demand the world for it.”
Separately, let’s look at what Karnofsky has to say:
As noted above, working on wicked problems often involves long periods of very low output, with self-imposed deadlines creeping up. This sometimes leads people to try to make up for lost time with a “heroic” effort at superhuman productivity, and to try to handle the hardest parts of a project by just working that much harder.
I’m basically totally against this.
Oh! Intriguing.
Q: When Superman shows up to save the day and realizes his rival is loaded with kryptonite, how should he respond? What’s the best, most virtuous thing he can do in that situation?
A: Fly away as fast as he can, optionally shrieking in terror and letting all the onlookers say “Wow, what a coward.” This is a terrible time to be brave and soldier on! There are so many things Superman can do to be helpful - the single worst thing he can do is go where he won’t succeed.
Makes sense to me. But what is ther reason people don’t usually agree with this, when doing real world work?