Exploring Premium Mediocrity

Epistemic Status: Mediocre Premium

Response To (Rao / Ribbonfarm) : The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millenial

Builds Upon (not required): Play in Easy Mode, Play in Hard Mode

Good Other Commentary (Jacob / Put a Num On It): Escaping the Premium Mediocre

I

A few days ago I read this very good sentence by Venkatesh Rao:

Premium mediocre is the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden.

Exactly, my brain thought. Say no more! Long have I waited for a name to put to this concept! Somewhere Plato was smiling.

Then Rao continued, and I wondered if he was pondering something different than what I was pondering:

Premium mediocre is cupcakes and froyo. Premium mediocre is “truffle” oil on anything (no actual truffles are harmed in the making of “truffle” oil), and extra-leg-room seats in Economy. Premium mediocre is cruise ships, artisan pizza, Game of Thrones, and The Bellagio.

As Elanor of The Good Place observed when given a list of supposedly sexy things, well, some of those are right. In particular, froyo, “truffle” oil, extra-leg-room seats in Economy and cruise ships are clearly right. Artisan pizza at first struck me as wrong but now strikes me as right, because the ones that are wrong don’t call themselves ‘artisan.’ Cupcakes are Actually Good, but kind of by coincidence, which is a strange gray area. Then there were two clear errors: The Bellagio is a terrible example given the casino options, and Game of Thrones, which is both Actually Good and outside the pattern entirely (or rather, it wasn’t until some point in the past two seasons, which is a clue).

Something was amiss.

Then he came back with a sentence that, while not quite as high Quality as the first, sums it all up perfectly:

Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes.

More examples follow:

Premium mediocre is Starbucks’ Italian names for drink sizes, and its original pumpkin spice lattes featuring a staggering absence of pumpkin in the preparation. Actually all the coffee at Starbucks is premium mediocre. I like it anyway.

Premium mediocre is Cost Plus World Market, one of my favorite stores, purveyor of fine imported potato chips in weird flavors and interesting cheap candy from convenience stores around the world.

The best banana, any piece of dragon fruit, fancy lettuce, David Brooks’ idea of a gourmet sandwich.

Premium mediocre, premium mediocre, premium mediocre, premium mediocre.

Heavy on the food examples, but quite good! I suspect he’s wrong about the best banana and quite possibly dragon fruit, but I’m unable to eat either without physically gagging, so I don’t have enough information to tell.

A more focused attempt at a definition is then offered:

Mediocre with just an irrelevant touch of premium, not enough to ruin the delicious essential mediocrity.

This isn’t quite right, but it’s close. Then the two of us completely disagreed and I knew we were going in different directions:

Yes, ribbonfarm is totally premium mediocre. We are a cut above the new media mediocrityfests that are Vox and Buzzfeed, and we eschew low-class memeing and listicles. But face it: actually enlightened elite blog readers read Tyler Cowen and Slatestarcodex.

I do read Tyler Cowen and Slatestarcodex (and only selectively read ribbonfarm)! I still call out this false humility, for it reflects a deep error on the part of Rao. Ribbonfarm does not fit the above example set at all. Or if it is, that fact is why it can’t take its place in that top tier. Ribbonfarm is doing an original, valuable thing with its own internal logic, for the joy of exploring concepts wherever they lead. That should be the opposite of the list being created above.

I will post the rest of the example list now:

Premium mediocre is international. My buddy Visakan Veerasamy (a name Indian-origin people will recognize as a fantastic premium mediocre name, suitable for a Tamil movie star, unlike mine which is merely mediocre, and suitable for a side character) reports that Singaporeans can enjoy the fine premium mediocre experience of the McDonald’s Signature Collection.

Anything branded as “signature” is premium mediocre of course.

Much of the manufactured cool of K-Pop (though not the subtly subversive Gangnam Style, whose sly commentary on Korean life takes some digging for non-Koreans to grok) is premium mediocre. Carlos Bueno argues that Johnny Walker Black is premium mediocre in the Caribbean. In Bollywood, the movies of Karan Johar are premium mediocre portrayals of premium mediocre modern urban Indian life.

The entire idea of the country that is France is kinda premium mediocre (K-Pop is a big hit there, not coincidentally). The fact that Americans equate “French” with “classy” is proof of its premium mediocrity (Switzerland is the actually elite European country).

At its broad, fuzzy edges, premium mediocre is an expansive concept; a global, cosmopolitan and nationalist cultural Big Tent: it is arguably both suburban and neourban, Red and Blue, containing Boomers and X’ers. It includes bluetooth headsets favored by Red State farmers and the tiki torches — designed for premium mediocre backyard barbecues — favored by your friendly neighborhood Nazis. It includes everything Trump-branded. It covers McMansions, insecure suburbia-dwelling Dodge Stratus owners and Bed, Bath, and Beyond shoppers. It includes gentrifying neighborhoods and ghost-town malls. It includes Netflix and chill. It includes Blue Apron meals.

At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase.  Premium mediocrity is a stand-in for the classy kind of post-scarcity digital utopia some of us like to pretend is already here, only unevenly distributed. The kind where everybody gets a mansion, is a millionaire, and drives a Tesla.

After that point, Rao goes on to associate the concept with an entire generation and lifestyle, and wraps it up in a classic Rao-style theory that asks the question ‘what if the whole world, or at least some people’s worlds, revolved around this idea?’

His answer is ambitious, far-wielding, interesting in its own right and further proof of his own lack of premium mediocrity.

I’ll get to that.

First, we need to break down the small definition. The one that’s about small things, that explains what the above list has in common.

II

Definition:

Something is Premium Mediocre if and only if it is primarily optimized* to superficially appear to be, or sound like it is, to at least some people, the convenient or premium** version of a thing.

*: The extreme cases are where it is solely optimized in this way; you get premium mediocrity to the extent that this is being optimized for. I think using primarily here is the right compromise.

**: You can also appear to be any of superior, high-class, glamorous, fancy, etc, but I think simply saying premium here is sufficient. Convenient is an interesting case but seems intuitively right to me.

Alternate Definition:

Premium Mediocre is the set of things created in easy mode.

As Rao says, premium mediocre is intentional. It is about aiming for the symbolic representation of the (higher-level version of the) thing, rather than the thing.

You can tell yourself that you’re not doing that. Doesn’t matter. It is impossible to accidentally create something in this class. You chose to do that.

You can also tell yourself that you’re creating something premium mediocre, and even explicitly claim to be premium mediocre, and be wrong because you are actually optimizing for a real thing. This describes Rao. Rao does authentic things, but is surrounded by a world that is so lost in a meta-signaling trap that he is terrified of anyone finding that out, so he disavows it every chance he gets, even to himself.

To go Full Rao (Never go full Rao? Always go full Rao? Hard to say) the 2×2 would have the X-axis be Actual Easy Mode vs. Actual Hard Mode and the Y-axis be Self-Identified Easy Mode vs. Self-Identified Hard Mode.

Figure 1: Easy and Hard Modes, 2×2

(Easy, Easy) is Sociopath. They know what they want and they get it. They don’t care about anything else.

(Easy, Hard) is Clueless. They enforce the rules of the system, thinking they are fighting for something that matters, but instead are being tricked, either the tools of others or fighting for lost purposes.

(Hard, Hard) is Loser. They care about things that matter to them, even if that means they’ll work harder for less. They know the game and choose not to play.

(Hard, Easy) is Hero. The Hero thinks they are in Easy Mode, but their Easy Mode goal is to actually accomplish or create the thing. The Hero focuses on cutting the enemy. The Hero doesn’t think they’re a hero. The hero often doesn’t even want to be a hero. The hero simply wants something you can’t cheat on.

It isn’t a choice. The hero is a hero despite themselves.

Rao is a hero. He would be the first to say, he isn’t one, and also, don’t be one. Doesn’t matter. He is one anyway.

Meanwhile, as corporations create more and more of the things, and/or those things are built to hit explicit optimization targets, those things are built or ‘improved’ by Sociopaths directing the Clueless. Which all means, of course, Premium Mediocre.

III

How does this relate to things that are Actually Good?

It is common for Premium Mediocre things to in some aspect be Actually Good. The catch is that they are, whether in terms of money, time, or something else, expensive. Often, the easy path to making something superficially premium is to make the thing actually premium! You can then get the delicious high-grade mediocrity you crave, but you pay for it.

As Rao points out, Cupcakes are Actually Good. I love me a cupcake, but they are still Premium Mediocre, whereas cake brings you even more Actually Good at a fraction of the price.

He also claims Avocado Toast is Actually Good, which it might well be. I’ve never had it. What I know for sure is that it is shockingly expensive for a vegetable on a piece of toast.

Same thing with Starbucks Coffee. I don’t drink coffee, but by all accounts it’s good – it’s just shockingly expensive for what it is. I’ve had their hot chocolate, which is both good and shockingly expensive.

The finest wine at Olive Garden is premium mediocrity on top of premium mediocrity, so it’s going to be super expensive for what it is, but it’s still probably better than the median wine at Olive Garden.

This is my resolution of what Rao calls the Avocado Toast Paradox. This is not premium mediocrity deciding to occasionally treat itself, it is simply that Goodhart’s Law is not perfect.

What premium mediocre cannot be, is Perfectly Good or Really Good. And it certainly can’t be Insanely Great.

Things which are superficially flawed, but which do their functional job just fine thank you, are Perfectly Good. Perfectly Good things satisfice on functionality and entirely ignore superficiality. There, I Fixed It is their official website and slogan.

If something is either Actually Good or Perfectly Good, and that is surprising, then it is Not That Bad.

An easy way to end up with a premium mediocre product is to discard the Perfectly Good. We throw out Perfectly Good tomatoes because they don’t have the right shape. This results in premium mediocre produce. We throw out a Perfectly Good old and comfortable sofa, rather than patch it with duck tape. Instead we buy one from premium mediocre IKEA.

My parents would not have dreamt of throwing out something that was Perfectly Good.

Some products and experiences are the best versions of themselves. Given the restraints of their format and budget, they exceeded all your expectations. These are not merely Actually Good, they are Really Good. There’s nothing wrong with the Actually Good, but the Really Good will brighten up your day. You go out of your way for the Really Good.

If something spares no expense, with full attention to every detail, and still blows you away despite that, it is Insanely Great. Insanely Great changes your life.

Things that are some combination of Really Good and Insanely Great are The Real Thing.

Figure 2: Good Things, 2×2

Can’t beat The Real Thing!

Note: Extending this to the left from Not That Bad gets us to That Bad, also known as Not Great, Bob. Paired with Looks Bad we get No Good, and paired with Looks Good we get what some would call Superficially Good but which I prefer to call Not Good. Subtle but important differences.

IV

A while back, I wrote a Restaurant Guide. This shares the best tools I have found for differentiating whether you’re dealing with The Real Thing and getting the highest quality experience and value for your dollar. Some of the tools are things like seeing what percentage of customers have their dishes, which is an impossible-to-fake measure of how fast service is.

Most, however, are about the signals the restaurants are choosing to send, because restaurants tell you who they are. Who are they claiming to be? If a place is The Real Thing, every subtle action they take will inform you of this fact. As Rao points out, the premium mediocre tells you what it is. A lot of my tactics are about identifying and thus avoiding the premium mediocre. Even when it is Actually Good, you’re still overpaying, so you can do better.

Premium mediocre can be a reasonable fallback, but you should almost always be sad about it.

That raises the question at the heart of the rest of Rao’s post. Why would one choose to live premium mediocre? Why would one self-identify that way?

Certainly it is fine to indulge in occasional premium mediocrity. If you like Starbucks Coffee, it can be better to pay $4 for that than go without good coffee. You would want to know about good $2 coffee around the corner, but it might not be there. It might be there but you might not know about or trust it.

Suppose equally good $2 coffee is there. Suppose you know it’s there. What the hell are you doing in line at Starbucks?

Good question. My plan is to address that in part two.

 

 

 

 

Play in Hard Mode

Epistemic Status: Love the player, love the game

Also consider: Playing on Easy Mode

Raymond Arnold asked me, why do you insist on playing in hard mode?

 

Hard mode is harder. The reason to Play in Hard Mode is because it is the only known way to become stronger, and to defend against Goodhart’s Law.

Strategies that work in Easy Mode won’t work in Hard Mode.

The key idea of Hard Mode is to keep your eyes on the prize. You know exactly what you want. You can’t munchkin your way to getting it. Once you start aiming to make a number go up, or get a check in the right box, you have lost sight of the thing you actually want. Proxy measures lead to failure; your value is fragile. That number correlates to what you want, but only insofar as you’re aiming for the goal and not the number. If you break the spirit of the exercise, all is lost. Your values have been hijacked. If you fail to develop skills along the way, you have missed the point, because the game has no end.

I

Consider playing guitar in Rock Band. You must choose whether to play in Hard Mode. If you do, you will fail a lot. You will play the same songs over and over again. Tricks that rely on there only being so many notes, or going at a relaxed pace, collapse. Eventually, you learn new techniques. You get better. You play on expert, your fingers get sore and you smile as you sing along.

II

You have a test in a week. You ignore it. You’ve asked questions based on your curiosity, to resolve your confusion. You study what is interesting to you, and what you feel would help you in the future.You focus on learning key principles, knowing you can derive what details you need later on. When the test comes, you work to figure out the answers. When you get the test back, you know how much you have learned. A year later, you remember everything, and build upon it.

III

You prepare for a tournament. You seek out the toughest opponents to help you prepare. You stop to criticize each other’s technique and point out every little mistake, no matter how irrelevant to the ultimate outcome of the practice match. You ask why and how you made that mistake. You do the same when you learn something new in a surprising way. You focus on the fundamentals, and don’t worry too much about exactly who you are up against this week. During the matches, you remember every tough decision and every mistake, so you can train again next week.

IV

You start a website writing articles devoted to the things you care about. To monetize it, you sell advertising through Google. It does not pay much at first.  You keep at it, attracting a small but devoted readership. Some were already your friends, others soon join them. You look at what resonates so you can get feedback, but are careful not to take actions designed to maximize page views. Over time your writing improves and you learn much together. A community of sorts arises. You don’t quit your day job, but you teach others what you have learned.

V

(Spoilers for the excellent Groundhog Day)

You are stuck in a small snowed-in town, caught in a time loop of unknown origin. At first you have fun doing absurd things, but then you buckle down. With unlimited time, you decide to develop the skills and knowledge to give everyone a perfect day. You learn to play the piano, you read great literature. You listen to and remember the stories of everyone in town, and grow fond of them, learning what your opportunities are to engage in small acts of kindness. At the end of the day, after sufficient iterations*, you know you will be proud of your accomplishments, because you’ve made yourself and the world better, and you just might impress the hell out of your crush. If the loop continues*, you can do it again.

* – Results not guaranteed. You are unlikely to be in a movie. Local maxima may or may not be sufficient.

Interlude!

VI

 

Your help your friends move. With time and practice, your group of friends gets quite good and reliable. Any time, day or night, if someone needs to relocate, you’ll all be there, no questions asked. You call yourself the Midnight Movers. Most of your stuff arrives safely at its destination with a minimum of fuss, and you order everyone pizza. Your group draws closer together, and eventually tries going into business together on an unrelated matter.

VII

(Medium spoilers for The Good Place, highly recommended, skip this if you haven’t seen it yet)

You have an idea for a television show about a group of strangers who arrive in a mysterious place that plays by very different rules than our reality. You figure out exactly how this place works, plot everything meticulously, and lay out mysteries for the characters and viewers to uncover slowly over time. You use flashbacks that parallel events to examine and deepen the characters. Your production values are top notch and you produce great television. Your show is not a smash hit, and you know exactly where you are going with all this, so you don’t waste a minute, keeping your seasons short. In the end it all fits together, and the journey was still pretty great on second viewing.

VIII

Despite the terrible odds against you, you decide to strike out and open a fine Italian restaurant. Your dishes are sublime, but you soon learn that is but a small part of a successful enterprise. You must hire quality staff, arrange logistics across many suppliers, draw in customers and much more. Each step of the way, while ruthlessly keeping costs in check, you answer the question of what you would want your place to be like, and evolve your menu to offer a small selection of the best things you can affordably make. You get to know your customers by name. A casual observer would think you almost dislike money, as you can barely tell from the outside that there is a dining establishment there at all. Slowly word spreads among the cognoscenti, who show up and order the wine. Business is good enough. You get to keep working on perfecting your art.

IX

You have something to prove. To yourself.

Refuse to hire a cleaning service, ever, even though it’s totally worth it.

Minimal applause lights.

Tell the job interviewer your true strengths and weaknesses. If they don’t hire you, you didn’t want the job. Keep looking.

Find people to come to your meetup by promising them interesting intellectual discussions and a community devoted to truth.

Refuse to pirate music, television, movies, software, even when the owners are being kind of a dick and won’t sell it to you.

When you are in power, respect and minority even when you have the votes, don’t change the rules to pass the laws you want. Strengthen free speech rules and don’t silence those you disagree with, lest they do the same to you.

Write carefully as you fill out the forms. They might look like bureaucratic nonsense, and no one is likely to ever read them, but you should get this straight and cultivate good habits.

Learn to speak the language.

At your meetup, welcome challenges to in-group principles, so your group will be viewed better and feel more welcoming to and attract more members who seek the truth more than they demonstrate membership in the in-group.

Show other people what to do by example.

For demo day, you show what your system can do, and hope that you can keep building it. For that you need funding.

X

Dismayed by terrible things, you devote your life to the promise of artificial general intelligence. You discover that contrary to your initial beliefs, not only is creating AGI not easy, most versions of it kill everyone and destroy all utility in the universe. Explaining this is super hard. None of your explanations work. No one understands the danger. You set out to teach the world rationality, hoping this will cause them to see the potential dangers, with limited success. You write a book that’s silly but gets you exposure. You keep writing. Machine learning accomplishes more things and starts to get more funding. People start to come around to AI being dangerous, but mostly for the wrong reasons, so you don’t expect anyone to take the right precautions, and fear the world is doomed. You think that when they arrive, it will be far too late to correct for safety problems later.

XI

You are at a meeting to arrange educational services for your son. You know that the only thing that matters is what is written on the education plan. Whatever is in that document is what will count. Still, you cannot let the numerous falsehoods and stupid things pass, even though you realize that if you just play nice, they are going to put down on the piece of paper the thing that you want on the piece of paper. If you keep arguing, you risk getting nothing. Luckily, you think better of it in time. You go into easy mode. They write the words you need on the piece of paper. You sign it. You walk away happy.

In conclusion:

 

 

 

Play in Easy Mode

Epistemic Status: Love the player, love the game

Also consider: Playing on Hard Mode

Raymond Arnold asked me, why not play in easy mode?

Easy Mode is easier. The reason to Play in Easy Mode is because it is the best known way to achieve your explicit measurable goal and get to the victory screen.

Strategies that work in Easy Mode won’t work in Hard Mode.

The key idea of Easy Mode is to keep your eyes on the prize. You know exactly what you want. You will munchkin your way to getting it. As long as you get a high enough number, or a check in the right box, you have what you want. That number isn’t just a proxy for victory. It is victory. If you break the spirit of the exercise, nothing is lost. Your values are safe. You are not here to develop skills, because the game ends here.

I

Consider playing guitar in Rock Band. You must choose whether to play in Easy Mode. If you do, you won’t fail. You won’t need to play the same songs over and over again. You can use tricks that rely on there only being so many notes, or going at a relaxed pace. You get to enjoy playing what you want, enjoying all the modes, advancing your band, right away. You get treated better. You play on medium, your fingers don’t hurt, and you smile as you sing along.

II

You have a test in a week. You cram for it. You’ve asked questions based on your desire to know what will be on the test, to resolve your confusion. You figure out what questions will be asked, what will help you in the exam. You focus on memorizing key facts, phrases and techniques, knowing you can guess the teacher’s password. When the test comes, you give back the answers. When you get the test back, you know you have passed and never have to think about that class again. A year later, you have forgotten everything, but you have a degree to build on.

III

You prepare for a tournament. You seek out representative opponents to help you prepare. You look for mistakes you can exploit, and ask what won or lost you each practice match. You ask how you can turn those events in your favor. You don’t worry about surprising things unless you expect them to be common. You focus on what wins matches, and don’t worry too much about little things that are unlikely to make a big enough difference this week. During the matches, you do everything you can to win, then train against next week.

IV

You start a website writing articles devoted to the things you care about. To monetize it, you sell advertising through Google. It does not pay much at first. You keep at it, posting links where you can and tracking what vectors draw in readers. Some are your friends, others seem less special. You look at what gets you clicks and likes, and craft your posts and topics that way, sculpting articles to maximize page views. Over time you learn the tricks of the trade and periodically go viral. A community knows who you are. You quit your day job to run the site full time, and teach others what you have learned.

V

(Spoilers for some old movie)

You are stuck in a small snowed-in town, caught in a time loop of unknown origin. At first you have fun doing absurd things, but then you buckle down. With unlimited time, you decide to seduce the person you have a crush on. You learn to play them like a piano, to act like a character out of great literature. You listen to, A/B test and remember every reaction, until you learn what will make them fond of you, locating opportunities to get and succeed on a date. At the end of the day, after sufficient iterations*, you know you will be proud of your accomplishments, because you will get to bang the hell out of your crush. If the loop continues*, you can do it again.

* – Results not guaranteed. You are unlikely to be in a movie. Local maxima may or may not be sufficient.

Interlude!

 

VI

You hire a moving company to help you move. With time and practice, this group of employees has gotten good and reliable. Any time, if someone needs to relocate, they’ll all be there, no questions asked. You call yourself, every so often. All your stuff arrives safely at its destination with a minimum of fuss, and you tip generously. You get some well-needed relaxation and peace of mind.

VII

(Minor spoiler for Lost, at least Season 1 recommended)

You have an idea for a television show about a group of strangers who arrive in a mysterious place that plays by very different rules than our reality. You figure out some of the ways this place works, know some of the events that will happen, and lay out mysteries for the characters and viewers to uncover slowly over time. You use flashbacks that parallel events to examine and deepen the characters. Your production values are top notch and you produce great television. Your show is a smash hit, plus you’re not sure exactly where you are going with all this, so you let things drag a bit, padding with extra episodes. In the end it doesn’t quite fit together, but the journey was still pretty great.

VIII

To fulfill the terms of your late uncle’s last will and testament, you are forced to pursue what he knew to be your passion, and to strike out and open a fine Italian restaurant. Your dishes are sublime, but you soon learn that is but a small part of a successful enterprise. You must hire quality staff, arrange logistics across many suppliers, draw in customers and much more. Each step of the way, while ruthlessly keeping costs in check, you answer the question of what customers would need to see in your place to come in, and expand your menu to offer all the things a diverse group might want. You get to know your customers by type. A casual observer wouldn’t notice how your choices of seating and lighting make you more money, or the new cheaper sources for your ingredients; all they know is that the signs tell them the establishment here will let them have a nice evening. Steadily you iterate and attract more people, and get more of them to order the wine. Business is good. You hope you made your uncle proud and talk to an agent about franchising.

IX

You have something to prove.

Hire a cleaning service every so often. It’s totally worth it.

Lots of applause lights.

Tell the job interviewer the strengths and weaknesses they want to hear. If they don’t hire you, learn and improve your game, and keep looking.

Find people to come to your meetup by offering them a free hat. Or at least, free pizza.

Pirate music, television, movies, software, even when the owners aren’t being kind of a dick and would sell it to you.

When you are in power, respect the minority only when you don’t have the votes, change the rules to pass the laws you want. Weaken free speech rules and silence those you disagree with, lest they win and do the same to you.

Write whatever you want on the forms. They are useless bureaucratic nonsense. No one is ever going to read them. Now you can forget this and move on to more important things.

Learn your whole speech phonetically.

At your meetup, do not allow challenges to in-group principles, so your group will be viewed better and feel more welcoming to and attract more members of the in-group, by demonstrating loyal membership in the in-group.

Tell other people what to do.

For demo day, you show something cool your system might someday do, when you get around to building one. For that you need funding.

X

Dismayed by terrible things, you devote your life to the promise of artificial intelligence. You discover that contrary to your initial beliefs, not only is creating AI not easy, the problem is super hard! None of your programs work! No one understands the potential. You set out to teach the AI to play games and optimize recommendations, hoping this will let them see the potential benefits, with limited  success. You schedule exhibition matches that are silly, but get you exposure. You keep coding. Machine learning accomplishes more things and starts to get more funding. People start to come around to AI being dangerous, but mostly for the wrong reasons, so you know their arguments are bad. You take some precautions, but you don’t worry about the world being doomed. You are confident that if they arrive, we can correct for any safety problems later.

 

XI

You are at a meeting to arrange educational services for your son. You know that the only thing that matters is what is written on the education plan. Whatever is in that document is what will count. You let numerous falsehoods and stupid things pass, because you realize that if you just play nice, they are going to put down on the piece of paper the thing that you want on the piece of paper. They write the words you need on the piece of paper. You sign it. You walk away happy.

In conclusion:

Altruism is Incomplete

Previously (SlateStarCodex) on Effective Altruism: Fear and Loathing at Effective Altruism Global 2017

I

A few weeks ago, I listened to a podcast from Freakonomics Radio that purported to ask the question, Are The Rich Less Generous Than The Poor?

A clever researcher decided he wanted to measure altruism. He’s tried testing it in the laboratory, but lab settings are often importantly different than the outside world, so he wanted to do an experiment in ‘the field’.

His idea was that he would pose as a postal worker in The Netherlands, and drop off envelopes addressed to someone else, with the envelope window showing visible cash money, up to 20 euros, along with a card like “thanks to Grandpa on his birthday.” He then waited to see how many rich and poor people returned the envelopes.

He found, to his surprise, that rich people returned far more of the envelopes than the poor. One thing he noted was that rich people returned the envelope at the same rate regardless of how much money was there, whereas the poor were more likely to return 10 euros than 20 euros, but he still essentially disbelieved the result.

To his credit, he still presented his findings at a conference, even though they were in conflict with his priors and the agenda pretty much everyone is trying to push these days.

Then Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame got up, and said you aren’t measuring altruism, you’re measuring who has the life skills and available time to return misaddressed envelopes.

Story checked out, at least to some extent. Rich people were more likely to know how to return an envelope or to have the time to do so. The findings were adjusted for this variable, and a new story emerged that rich and poor were exactly equally generous. What a coincidence!

My instincts tell me that if you issue a correction for an unexpected and hard to measure hidden variable, ignoring many other potential hidden variables and differences, and your result is now to find no result at all, there are two possibilities. Either your study is under-powered and you’re saying ‘no effect’ when you mean ‘the effect isn’t that large,’ or you “corrected” for the variable in a way that effectively assumed it was the entire difference.

Rich and poor differ in lots of different ways. There are reasons to think poor people would be more generous, and reasons to think rich people would be more generous. Neither result would surprise me. The idea that you’ve found one of those reasons, decided that reason doesn’t really count, and then miraculously all the other reasons exactly cancel out? TINACBNIEAC. Omega doesn’t happen to equal one by happy accident. You did that.

Those mistakes are illustrative and important. It’s good to see them in a low-stakes place where all participants are truth seeking and admit their errors once the errors are found. Ten points for all!

The most important mistake was that returning a lost envelope isn’t only not effective altruism. It mostly isn’t altruism at all.

Returning a lost envelope is honesty. Returning a lost envelope is honor. You return the envelope because it isn’t yours. It belongs to someone else and it is your honor-bound duty to make sure that it reaches its intended destination, to the extent that you are willing to go out of your way to do so even if the cost to you in lost time exceeds the expected benefits to the recipient of this particular envelope. You are defending the system, upholding the public trust, and reinforcing the habits that make you the person you want to be.

Returning the envelope isn’t entirely not about altruism. You certainly can feel compassion for the person who is about to lose money, to worry about the relatives who will argue over what happened to the envelope and who forgot whose birthday. You could have the argument over whether it would be better to do that or to donate the money to mosquito nets or existential risk prevention. If you do have that argument, even in your mind, to me you are already lost, because it’s beside the post. The envelope isn’t yours. Give it back. That’s all there is to it.

I am not claiming it is never right to take what is not yours. I am not arguing for death before dishonor. I am not arguing against it, either. That’s beyond scope. I am simply saying that in such a context, it should completely dominate the calculus.

II

Effective altruists are trying to do good. We salute you for that.

We even salute you even when you are worried about things I do not care about at all. Even when they pursue plans that would actually be a negative for me, and make my life noticeably worse. Even when they pursue plans that would be both pointless and catastrophic, proposing killing off wildlife or collapsing physics.

We even salute you when we think that it’s more than a little worrisome that your statements logically imply you really should be trying to wipe out humanity. Even when I think they’re completely wrong and have made rather silly and fundamental errors. You’re trying to do good, and at least for now all such people claim to have the ‘but killing people or using force to do that would still be bad’ hack going on, although that has a shaky historical track record under pressure.

Charity and non-profit work is one path to doing good, and optimizing its impact is a great idea on the margin. Some of you should do that.

Some of you should do the other. They have the more important job.

What concerns me about the culture of effective altruism is the implication that the altruistic actions are the ones that count.

I worry many in EA are looking at life like a game where giving money to charity is how the world scores victory points.

I worry that others in EA are looking at life like a game where giving money to charity is how the world saves lives, and saving lives is how you score victory points. You can also substitute prevent suffering, or other such worthy (and unworthy) causes.

I am not saying to stop giving money to charity*, stop saving lives or stop preventing suffering. I am saying that this is not The Good, how good is primarily done, how most victory points are scored, or what the game of life is or should be about.

Life is mostly about getting things done. Most good is done on the object level, and most of it is done for other reasons. A lot of it is done for profit or survival. A lot is done for love and friendship. A lot is done for status, for your tribe, for fame, for sex or for power. A lot is done because of curiosity, or because it is interesting, or because it is the virtuous thing to do. A lot is done because of how it would look if you didn’t do it, and people found out. A lot is done because it’s bothering the heck out of someone that it isn’t being done, to prove that it can be done, or simply because it’s there. A lot is done incidentally while doing something else; simply going out and doing things tends to create lots of positive side effects.

There are also some reasons that are less fine, but I think even they are far less not fine than people act like they are.

Stop feeling bad about doing things for those reasons. As long as you’re doing good, those reasons are absolutely fine. All of them. Yay motivation. Object level stuff has to get done. Life must go on, so must the show and so must business. People need to stay motivated to do things.

Stop feeling bad about not sacrificing everything including exploration, and doing the theoretical maximum amount of good on the margin. Jesus told us, take all you have and give it to the poor, as a suggestion to improve behavior on the margin, and anchor us. He correctly assumed almost no one would do that. It would not even be good if everyone did that, even if they did the sane William MacAskill version of that and kept the bare minimum. He knew that some people had to keep on doing the productive work, and getting rewarded for that, at least until some big changes happened. He didn’t actually want everyone to do it, and he also didn’t want everyone to feel bad about not doing it. 

The most impactful and successful charity in the world is Amazon.com.

Most importantly, for the love of utility, stop making other people feel bad about this, and stop using manipulative techniques to steer them towards what you think is more effective at scoring the world some victory points. I understand the temptation. I really do. To not do this, from a certain utilitarian point of view, is to implicitly say that you value your own scrupulousness and honor, or the feelings and abstract accuracy of those you are interacting with, more than you value saving human lives. Tough sell. Again, I really do get it.

We still have to do it. We still have to protect The Mission. EA is good to the extent that it shares with us The Mission. The other way lies madness.

You say people gonna die. I agree. Sad. Balance is tricky. Death rate stable at 100%. We should fund further research. We should fix it. This is not The Way.

It is also not the Official Party Line of EA. I’ll get to that at the end.

It is tricky to balance giving the right encouragements and rewards to those who do hugely ambitious projects, altruistic and otherwise, while also giving ordinary efforts the credit and honor they deserve, as well. Certainly, though, we need to stop feeling bad about doing better than almost everyone. More than that, we should make people feel good when they are doing better than almost everyone. Hell, we should probably do that even if they’re doing way worse than that!

I apologize to anyone who got the impression from last week’s post that they are bad and they should feel bad, simply because they weren’t out there saving the world, or they were not ambitious enough. Please do not do that. All that I ask is that you honor those who do set out to do so, and continue to seek what is true. Based on who has commented on this blog so far, I can say with high confidence and no known exceptions: You are not bad, nor should you feel bad.

I suspect that in some sense, rather than feeling bad one should instead feel what some traders call sad. You can be sad that you’re not doing more, because doing more would be great, without it being an ethical issue that more wasn’t done. No blame is assigned. You’re simply expressing the fact that more being done would have been better, and it would have been (or would be) nice to do more. If you bet on your favorite team, either you lose (and are sad you bet at all) or win (and are sad you didn’t bet more). It can’t be helped. Sad!

Que this week’s Quote That Should Freak You Out:

(I had been avoiding the 80,000 Hours people out of embarrassment after their career analyses discovered that being a doctor was low-impact, but by bad luck I ended up sharing a ride home with one of them. I sheepishly introduced myself as a doctor, and he said “Oh, so am I!” I felt relieved until he added that he had stopped practicing medicine after he learned how low-impact it was, and gone to work for 80,000 Hours instead.)

— Scott Alexander

This is insane on a minimum of three levels.

The first level is that Scott Alexander is feeling bad about being a doctor. On the list of ‘people who have done the most for EA’ he is probably not number one right now, but if he ended up at the top by doing what he’s already doing I would not be terribly surprised.

Scott Alexander is doing a hell of a lot of good, both for his patients and for other people, and the work he does as a doctor is vital to that.

Scott’s work as a doctor, seeing patients, experiencing how the other almost everyone lives, is vital to the jobs he does advocating and writing. Scott provides lots of value with his in-depth discussions of research, of drugs, of treatments, of how to deal with various problems and safely interact with various questionable ideas for self-modification. Having someone in our space that fills that role is incredibly valuable for its own sake, and having it be Scott allows those people to find his blog, find each other and be exposed to our ideas including EA.

The last thing Scott should be thinking about is not practicing because it’s eating too much time that could be used elsewhere.

The second level is that someone else quit being a doctor to do career counseling, because being a doctor wasn’t impactful enough.

It is one thing for a person to decide not to study medicine because what they want to do is save lives, and it isn’t the best way to save lives. I totally, totally get that. Learning to be a doctor is often a decade of misery, during which you are earning little, and by going to medical school you are taking a slot that could have been used by someone else. The link makes some good points, although it seems to be slanting its presentation to justify its conclusion.

It is entirely another thing to quit practicing medicine after getting your license to go work for 80,000 hours instead because you don’t think you are saving enough lives.

The calculation is completely different once you are already a practicing doctor. [EDIT: Note that 80,000 hours full analysis does realize that these cases are very different, and recommends that already trained doctors not quit, as is pointed out in the comments.]

That decade of work you were looking at before you could help much or earn much money? Already completed.

That slot in medical school? It’s gone. That slot in residency? Also gone. No one will replace you. There will be one less doctor. Yes, that’s stupid, we should train lots more doctors, and that would be a Worthy Cause to lobby for, but for now we don’t and that’s not changing soon.

The system spent a quite large amount of money on training you, and all of that is gone now. Demand will exceed supply by that much more, prices will rise to clear the market. More doctors will opt out of insurance, especially Medicaid and Medicare. More people will be unable to afford care, or find themselves bankrupted. The government will be under that much more burden to pay the higher fees.

It seems hard to me to look at a profession where the skeptical view is that you create four years of healthy life for every year you work, and you get one of the highest pay scales, and where no one can legally replace you if you quit, and where high costs from lack of supply are threatening to strangle the entire economy, and which gives you a high level of trust and a potential strong public platform, as something you have an ethical motivation to quit so you can spend more time telling other people what their ethical motivations are.

I am not saying that this former doctor is bad and should feel bad. I am certainly not saying that going to medical school is an implicit social contract that then obligates you to use that degree to help others. Even if I believed them, I would not have any social right to make such claims. Certainly there are good reasons to decide not to practice medicine, including simply no longer being interested in the practice of medicine. If the true justification was that staying wasn’t sufficiently ethical due to opportunity cost, that makes me quite sad.

The third is the level discussed earlier – even if being a doctor is not locally victory-point-maximizing-on-the-margin it’s pretty terrible to go around putting so much implicit pressure on well-meaning people that doctors start avoiding you out of the shame of continuing to practice. Seriously, everyone. Cut it out.

III

Scott then ends where I will end, on the Official Party Line:

And one more story.

I got in a chat with one of the volunteers running the conference, and told him pretty much what I’ve said here: the effective altruists seemed like great people, and I felt kind of guilty for not doing more.

He responded with the official party line, the one I’ve so egregiously failed to push in this blog post. That effective altruism is a movement of ordinary people. That its yoke is mild and it accepts everyone. That not everyone has to be a vegan or a career researcher. That a commitment could be something more like just giving a couple of dollars to an effective-seeming charity, or taking the Giving What We Can pledge, or signing up for the online newsletter, or just going to an local effective altruism meetup group and contributing to discussions.

And I said yeah, but still, everyone here seems so committed to being a good person – and then here’s me, constantly looking over my shoulder to stay one step ahead of the 80,000 Hours coaching team, so I can stay in my low-impact career that I happen to like.

And he said – no, absolutely, stay in your career right now. In fact, his philosophy was that you should do exactly what you feel like all the time, and not worry about altruism at all, because eventually you’ll work through your own problems, and figure yourself out, and then you’ll just naturally become an effective altruist.

And I tried to convince him that no, people weren’t actually like that, practically nobody was like that, maybe he was like that but if so he might be the only person like that in the entire world. That there were billions of humans who just started selfish, and stayed selfish, and never declared total war against suffering itself at all.

And he didn’t believe me, and we argued about it for ten minutes, and then we had to stop because we were missing the “Developing Intuition For The Importance Of Causes” workshop.

Rationality means believing what is true, not what makes you feel good. But the world has been really shitty this week, so I am going to give myself a one-time exemption. I am going to believe that convention volunteer’s theory of humanity. Credo quia absurdum; certum est, quia impossibile. Everyone everywhere is just working through their problems. Once we figure ourselves out, we’ll all become bodhisattvas and/or senior research analysts.

The Official Party Line is saying that the heroic values are optional. This is a movement of ordinary people, its yoke is mild and it accepts everyone.

Sorry. The Official Party Line is bullshit. It is philosophical bullshit. The people saying the Official Party Line are saying it because it helps spread the movement, rather than because it is true. This is what they have to say in the pitch meeting. This is what you have to tell the people who aren’t ready to give everything they have. You don’t say, “We are Out To Get You for every waking moment of your entire life, because doing less is letting children die” if you want to succeed. So you make sure not to say that.

You don’t have to be explicit. The logic of the movement implies it. Its culture implies it. Every interaction carries this undertone. Every action has the whispered motivation, ‘how can we make people give more of themselves’? Occasionally someone explicitly says that a night out drinking with your friends is tantamount to negligent homicide. The Life You Can Save isn’t exactly subtle.

You don’t have to be a vegan? Technically you don’t. In practice, if you touch on the community and aren’t vegan, you will get into fights and conversations about it. People will think less of you, and give you the impression you are bad and you should feel bad. Lots of people I know spend lots of time worrying exactly how vegan they need to be. Either your EA gathering is vegan, or it has a bunch of fighting about it not being vegan.

People pick up on all that. They follow this presumptions to their logical conclusions. One of those conclusions is to push others as hard as you can. Choices Are Bad, and many realize that under such conditions they are doomed to feel bad, so they look for solutions. Stopgaps are attempted, to contain the damage, like the Giving What We Can pledge. They help, sometimes. It’s a hard problem, and I’m sympathetic; I don’t think anyone is being malicious about this.

Life is mostly about life. That’s how and why it works and why we have nice things. Having nice things and selfish people trying to get them needs to take up a huge portion of GDP to make the system work and incidentally give us the power to help out with other stuff on the margin. Most people will start selfish and mostly stay selfish. It’s fine. Better than fine. If that hadn’t resulted in indoor pluming, industrialization and electronics, I wouldn’t be typing this, or even exist.

My model of EA is that it was originally founded by a few people who had money they wanted to give away, and wanted to make sure the money did as much good as possible, so they set out to analyze that question. That was insanely great. One of the things that kept it great was the framing that there was a certain budget to do the most good with, so it was time to focus on figuring out what was true. Once you put ‘how big is your budget’ into the mix, that starts to be the knob most attractive to try and turn, and the dangers of culture drift towards what is persuasive are upon you.

IV

[Author’s note/edit: Several quite smart people have said this conclusion is hard to parse and they aren’t sure what I’m getting at. I agree that it is not as clear as I would like, so if you’re confused, assume that the point you previously thought I was making is in fact the point I was making, because chances are that you are mostly correct. Sorry. Tsuyoku Nairitai.]

Last week I was talking about how a group dedicated to pursuit of truth and saving the world ended up with a different culture and organizing principle, and was mostly accomplishing living life, and noting that this seemed badly in need of fixing. To now say ‘life is mostly about life’ and worry about people feeling overly pressured to help others seems to directly contradict that.

To me, it’s not a contradiction at all. It’s the same concern. EA started out being about figuring out what charities had what effects, which meant its culture was all about pursuit of truth with a goal of world saving.

In both cases, there was a Worthy Cause, and to accomplish that Worthy Cause required creating a culture that put what is true above what sells. If anyone ever wants my help on a project like this, so long as I’m not actively against the cause in question, I’ll at least strategize with you.

Then people involved realized that selling to and recruiting others would actually be kind of neat, allowing more people to focus on what was true and/or the Worthy Cause, making the world a better place. It required some compromises, but that’s life. That brought in more people, who were more concerned with selling and Worthy Cause and less with truth, and suggested how great it would be if we compromised a little more, and perhaps added this additional Worthy Cause.

In EA’s case, the good news is that at least this worked, and they’re now busy moving nine figure amounts to Worthy Causes, and at least some of that is going to the ones I consider most worthy, even if they’re also distorting them in ways that make me nervous. In fact, it seems likely that it was the very over-the-top actions themselves that largely led to those nine figure sums being moved.

In the other case, the good news is that it at least sort of worked in the sense that the people involved are happier, and people are now giving serious thought and money to Worthy Cause even if they’re mostly doing it in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons.

Truth is on the defensive these days. So are reasoning and discourse. Speaking the truth causes one’s voice to tremble more than it should, or than it used to. Many even speak of the post-truth era. My model of why this is happening would be beyond scope. I do feel the need to point out that the compromises seem to be happening in the places and people near and dear to me. That which makes truth-focused groups unique and valuable risks being lost as they are transformed into something else, and we risk passing future points of no return soon.

None of this is easy. Make no compromises and you have no movement. Make too many, or make the wrong ones, and you have no movement worthy of the name.

When you are looking to expand your group, it is hard to say, we’re going to only do exactly the welcoming things that the people who properly value our mission truly like. It is hard to intentionally not do the things that would attract other smart, nerdy, nice, sexy people that would make our lives happier in the short and medium term, but who do not share the mission.

It is really freaking hard to see nine figure sums being moved in ways that save lives, say the reason we get to move around these nine figure sums is by seeking truth and doing good on our own, so we need to keep doing only that, and trust in that enough. It is super hard to follow the decision theoretic implications that lead to that conclusion. Keeping your end of that deal means refusing to compromise your integrity even in the ways everyone compromises all the time. Even when you believe this means a lot people will die.

The good news is we don’t need to compromise on truth or say “Credo quia absurdum; certum est, quia impossibile” to avoid feeling bad about not being perfectly good. We can care about things that don’t show up as the maximum direct good done in a utilitarian calculus, do mostly object level things, and still sleep at night.

Believing that everyone will eventually become Bodhisattva and/or senior research analyst is absurd. Believing this will happen on its own is doubly absurd. But we don’t want everyone to be that. It wouldn’t even be a good idea. It is safe to not feel bad for spending your time and money doing object level things and enjoying ordinary life. You do not need to make everyone an effective altruist. Mostly you should confirm you do a lot of good, then make yourself effective.

*: The exception is if you’re not in a position to do this. You need to pay off your debts and get yourself an emergency fund. Seriously. If you are in debt, focus on paying it off, and stop giving large amounts of money away. Please.

 

 

Paths Forward on Berkeley Culture Discussion

Epistemic Status: Not canon, not claiming anything, citations not provided, I can’t prove anything and you should definitely not be convinced unless you get there on your own.

Style Note: Phrases with Capitalized Words other than that one, that are not links, indicate potential future posts slash ideas for future rationalist concepts, or at least a concept that is (in a self-referential example) Definitely A Thing.

I got a lot of great discussion, at this blog and elsewhere, about my post What Is Rationalist Berkley’s Community Culture? There are a lot of threads worth full responses. I hope to get to at least some of them in detail.

This post came out of a discussion with Ben Hoffman. I mentioned that I had more places to go next and more threads to respond to than I could possibly have time to write, and he suggested I provide a sketch of all the places. As an experiment, I’m going to try that, at least for the subset that comes to mind. Even as I finish up writing this, I think of new possible paths.

None of this is me making claims. This is me sketching out claims I would like to make, if I was able to carefully build up to and make those claims, and if after doing that I still agreed with those claims; trying to robustly defend your own positions is sometimes a great way to end up changing your mind.

Seattle Minimum Wage Study (Part 3): Tell Me Why I’m Wrong, Please!

Previously: On the Seattle Minimum Wage Study (part 1), On the Seattle Minimum Wage Study (part 2)

To summarize the finding of my previous two part analysis:

There was a study of the recent raising of the Seattle minimum wage and its effects on low wage workers. Everyone who wrote about the paper thought that it showed that the rise in the minimum wage severely hurt the hours and pay of lower wage workers, or thought it was a bad study and should be ignored.

The numbers seemed odd to me, so I took a closer look. I found what appears to me to be a fundamental error. During this period, overall wages in Seattle rose by 13.3%. If you raise the threshold for ‘low-wage worker’ by 13.3% between the two time periods, all bad effects from the minimum wage disappear, it looks like nothing bad happened, and low wage workers likely benefited. It also presumably didn’t hurt Seattle much, since it was booming the whole time.

If anything, the study seems to be providing evidence that, at least in some situations, raising the minimum wage is good, rather than it being bad. It’s still weak evidence, because Seattle was unusually well situated to handle the change, but it seems important. It also seems like a lot of people have a strong interest in shouting this result from the rooftops, if true.

Several hundred people saw the posts in question, and I got two good detailed comments, both of which essentially agreed with the analysis.

No one told me where I went wrong.

So while I work on harder, more substantive posts that I’m a bit stuck on at the moment, I’m going to ask: If no one’s going to start shouting the result from the rooftops, can someone please explain why I’m wrong here?

 

What Is Rationalist Berkley’s Community Culture?

Rationalist Status: Wonky (if you are not interested in the rationalist community or mission, this one is not for you)

Epistemic Status: Continuing the discussion

Response to (read this first): The Craft Is Not The Community (Otium)

Sarah’s post, The Craft Is Not The Community, was explicitly intended to start a discussion. Her central thesis is that the community has proven itself bad at doing outward-facing projects, so members should do their community-focused projects together, and form a community that can fulfill its members emotional needs, but do their outward-facing and world-saving projects in the outside world and play by the outside world’s rules.

I want to focus elsewhere, at least for this post, and accuse Sarah of burying the lead. She does not actually bury it – it’s right up at the top of the post – but she views it as background rather than the thing to be focused on.

We need to focus on it.