Kyle's Files: Paranoid Winners, Right Meaning, Duck Spies
(Perfect House, by Francisco Fonseca)
Glad you're here, this week is going to be fun. Going from productive paranoia to making meaning.
Next week's letter will probably be on Substack.
1. Tweets'n'Things™
You can't replace reading with other sources of information like videos, because you need to read in order to write well, and you need to write in order to think well. Paul Graham, Tweet
That’s why there’s 51, 52 albums, because I want to do this and I can still feel it so I’d be crazy to stop. 77-year-old Neil Young, TikTok
When the environment changes in such a way as to render the old skills and strengths less relevant, we almost instinctively cling to our past. Andrew Grove, Only The Paranoid Survive
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. Goethe, Faust
I have an idea for a new study. No one has ever researched the effect of trigger warnings for *people*. What if you’re told someone you’re about to talk to is “problematic” vs. not told anything. Then get ratings of the interaction quality and perceptions of the person. … I predict [w]ith trigger warning you are much less likely to:
- Report a high quality interaction
- See the person as a fellow human
- Spot strengths in the person
- Find any areas of agreement on a contentious issue
This could be studied systematically.
Scott Barry Kaufman, Tweets
Our insistence that it be guaranteed to work almost ensures that it won’t. Seth Godin, Blog
The ultimate achievement of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can't get as far as understanding that. Blaise Pascal, Human Happiness
Many think that ad hominem is actually a fallacy. It is more often a rigorous method of exploration. There are cases when you focus on the person, others when you focus on the argument. Nassim Taleb, Tweet
2. Only The Paranoid Survive
When the Internet was just a baby, Andrew Grove, Intel’s CEO, wrote the classic management book Only The Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit The Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company And Career. It’s kind of the perfect book for a lot of people right now. There’s a great balance between strategic and emotional intelligence in navigating big environmental shifts.
Probably the best summary of the book comes from Grove himself, towards the end of the book, looking back at the process:
The other side of the valley of death represents a new industry order that was hard to visualize before the transition. Management did not have a mental map of the new landscape before they encountered it. Getting through the strategic inflection point required enduring a period of confusion, experimentation and chaos, followed by a period of single-minded determination to pursue a new direction toward an initially nebulous goal. It required listening to Cassandras, deliberately fostering debates and constantly articulating the new direction, at first tentatively but more clearly with each repetition. It required casualties and personal transformation; it required accepting the fact that not all would survive and that those who did would not be the same as they had been before.
In the rest of this section I want to focus on the some of the psychological dimensions Grove maps out in the Let Chaos Reign chapter. He compares the emotional process of moving through an inflection point to grief, saying that you can see business leaders move through “denial, escape or diversion and, finally, acceptance and pertinent action.” As you’ll see, he provides some patterns to look for in ourselves and others to help determine how a difficult transition is currently being dealt with.
Denial is prevalent in the early stages of almost every example of a strategic inflection point I can think of. During Intel’s memory situation, I remember thinking, "If we had just started our development of the 16K memory chip earlier, the Japanese wouldn't have made any headway.
He says that during these incredibly stressful periods, executives often create projects for themselves that easily justify taking their time and focus, while their true purpose is to allow one to feel good about ignoring difficult problems:
When companies are facing major changes in their core business, [leaders] seem to plunge into what seem to be totally unrelated acquisitions and mergers. In my view, a lot of these activities are motivated by the need of senior management to occupy themselves respectably with something that clearly and legitimately requires their attention day in and day out, something that they can justify spending their time on and make progress in instead of figuring out how to cope with an impending strategically destructive force.
He personally had used writing a book to do the same before, and is self conscious about doing the same while writing this one:
Frankly, as I look back, I have to wonder if it was an accident that I devoted a significant amount of my time in the years preceding our memory episode, years during which the storm clouds were already very evident, to writing a book. And as I write this, I wonder what storm clouds I might be ducking now. I'll probably know in a few years.
He goes on to describe the importance of some level of detachment and emotional intelligence in coming to the acceptance and action phases of the process:
Good leaders are also subject to the same emotional wriggling. They, however, eventually emerge to the acceptance and action phases. Lesser leaders are not capable of that and they are often removed. Then they are replaced by individuals who are not necessarily more capable but who do not have the emotional investment in the previous strategy.
This is a key point. The replacement of corporate heads is far more motivated by the need to bring in someone who is not invested in the past than to get somebody who is a better manager or a better leader in other ways.
The book ends with a section on the internet and it’s fascinating to see how Grove was grappling with its potentialities at the time. His conclusion provides a perfect, real-world example of the importance of holding frameworks and heuristics loosely. As Grove comes to the end of his analysis of how the internet could impact Intel, he says:
All this suggests that the Internet is not a strategic inflection point for Intel. But while the classic signs suggest it isn't, the totality of all the changes is so overwhelming that deep down I think it is.
3. The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning
Iain McGilchrist, the author of The Master and His Emissary (2009) and the $150 The Divided Mind (2021) , wrote a 10,000 word essay, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning in 2012 focusing loosely on how his work on the left and right hemispheres of the brain apply to meaning making. It’s a beautiful, fascinating snapshot of a much deeper body of work.
The upshot is that, because of the left hemisphere’s strengths, it’s come to dominate our individual and societal lives. Unfortunately, the mode of being associated with the left hemisphere is incapable of experiencing meaning. McGilchrist believes that this explains not only our crisis of meaning, but all sorts of other badly and brutally shaped parts of the modern world.
Anyone who has read Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life will recognize a similar call for balance between logic and inexplicable creativity. I like to think of this imbalance as irrational rationality: logic applied in ways that, seen from a broader perspective, are clearly illogical.
Before getting to his explanation of exactly why that is, I want to share a few of the observations he makes about the different hemispheres that help describe our situation.
The left hemisphere, “pays the narrow-beam, precisely focussed, attention which enables us to get and grasp” while:
The right hemisphere underwrites sustained attention and vigilance for whatever may be, without preconception. Its attention is not in the service of manipulation, but in the service of connection, exploration and relation.
McGilchrist presents the difference between the two in a bunch of interesting ways, here are two:
One way of looking at the difference would be to say that while the left hemisphere's raison d'être is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere's is to open them up into possibility.
…
The left hemisphere's world is a representation only. It is like a map, useful precisely because almost all the information about the land to which it refers has been left out.
While the left hemisphere makes the world navigable through abstraction and subtraction, the right hemisphere experiences the world more directly:
As things are present in all their particularity, with all their individual, incarnate qualities, they are mediated by the right hemisphere: as they become general, abstract quantities, they are mediated by the left.
And so while the, “left hemisphere…allow[s] us to manipulate the world, not to understand it” the defining quality of the right hemisphere’s world is:
that it is all in relations, what I call ‘betweenness’. This starts with its having a relationship with the world at large, not seeing it as a separate object, ripe for manipulation.
He then highlights that recent
evolutionary theory suggests that this may be the whole purpose of logic – not to understand, but to persuade, to seduce others and win a competitive argument.
Logic’s self-referential worldview and demand for predictability makes inexplicable risks absurd to even consider, confining creativity and leading us toward mediocrity. He uses academia as an example of this:
In the world of research, we now have to be able to say in advance what we are going to find, and no one will fund a project unless it looks like having a chance of turning up a ‘positive’ finding, which in reality means that it must be something pretty close to what we already know. We are not prepared to trust; we feel we must micro-control. The aim is to increase efficiency by avoiding what are conceptualised as waste or error, but it assures only one thing: mediocrity.
With all of its weaknesses then, why do we lean so heavily on the left hemisphere? Because of four vitally important characteristics. First:
it makes you powerful, and power is very seductive.
Second:
it offers very simple explanations, that are in their own terms convincing, because what doesn't fit the plan is simply declared to be meaningless.
It discards whatever doesn’t fit, and anything that contradicts it clearly doesn’t fit. Third, it is:
the political heavyweight that controls the media. It does the speaking, constructs the arguments in its own favour.
Fourth:
since the Industrial Revolution, we have constructed a world around us externally that is the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally.
This restructuring of the world has cut off “routes that used to lead out of the hall of mirrors,” like nature, history of culture, art, body, and spirituality. These things are available of course, but their roles have been vastly diminished.
And so, McGilchrist concludes:
Our problem is not that we have failed to find an answer to the question of the meaning of life that would satisfy the left hemisphere – in the nature of things, no such answer could exist. Our problem is that we have allowed ourselves to respond to this failure by deriding the question as meaningless.
It’s not that the question is usefulness, it’s that the answer can’t be contained in a statement, because:
Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.
He leaves us with a vague instruction and a clearer warning:
[Meaning] comes from the world as process, not from the world as a thing, and relies on patient and consistent attention to whatever might remind us of what meaning might be like. Whatever slight movement of recognition ensues might then begin to grow in and inform a mind not entirely closed to its existence. Otherwise we invite the danger that what we might learn will be for ever lost, because we will no longer be capable of recognising it at all. We may, in terms of an image you will recognise, concentrate so much on getting our lunch, that we become the lunch. Only it is we that will have consumed ourselves.
4. Miscellany
Anatidaephobia is "the fear that somehow, somewhere a duck is watching you." It was made up by Gary Larson and is now being treated seriously on some mental health sites. (Tweet)
33% of American adult Tiktok users are trusting the CCP to serve them the news they need to be responsible US citizens. 🤦 (Website)
An incredibly thorough ranking of apples. I don’t know if I’ve ever tried a SweeTango but now I have to find one. (Website)
Interesting talks are freely available from Stanford’s Academic Freedom Conference. My favorite so far is from Jonathan Haidt. Tyler Cowen gave a short talk with nine pieces of advice in ~10 minutes (starting at ~30min). Peter Thiel retreads familiar territory, with some fresh stuff in there. The links to the talks I mentioned were not available on the home page when putting this letter together (I had them in my history), so it may be worth opening whatever talks you want to see now in case they’re removed totally. (Conference page)
Average hours worked by income level doesn't vary as much in the US as one might expect, but it is positively correlated here, which isn't true for many countries. Cambodians work an average of 9.4 hours a day while the Swiss put in 6 hours daily. (Website)
Tyler Cowen had a great conversation with Ken Burns. (Podcast)
Cops have the 22nd most dangerous job in the US. A few with more dangerous jobs: delivery drivers, farmers, crossing guards, crane operators, landscaping supervisors, cement masons, small engine mechanics, supervisors of mechanics, and grounds maintenance workers. (Website)
Andrew Huberman has a lot of useful stuff to say about dopamine. For instance, cold water exposure is the best way to boost dopamine without it crashing. (Podcast | Companion Blog)
A friend sent me this New Yorker interview with John Mearsheimer and it was just a weird, wild read that had me thinking it was satire at multiple points. (Website)
Freddy Mercury trying to explain living with a right-hemisphere dominant mind. (TikTok)
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Thank you for reading, it's an honor to be in your inbox. If there's an idea in here you liked, maybe forward this to someone who might appreciate it.
<3 Kyle
