Superlinear Returns
October 2023
One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world
when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance
are superlinear.
Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear.
"You get out," I heard a thousand times, "what you put in." They
meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half
as good as your competitor's, you don't get half as many customers.
You get no customers, and you go out of business.
It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear
in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if
we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear
returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact
of rules we've invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power,
military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity. In all
of these, the rich get richer.
[
1
]
You can't understand the world without understanding the concept
of superlinear returns. And if you're ambitious you definitely
should, because this will be the wave you surf on.
It may seem as if there are a lot of different situations with
superlinear returns, but as far as I can tell they reduce to two
fundamental causes: exponential growth and thresholds.
The most obvious case of superlinear returns is when you're working
on something that grows exponentially. For example, growing bacterial
cultures. When they grow at all, they grow exponentially. But they're
tricky to grow. Which means the difference in outcome between someone
who's adept at it and someone who's not is very great.
Startups can also grow exponentially, and we see the same pattern
there. Some manage to achieve high growth rates. Most don't. And
as a result you get qualitatively different outcomes: the companies
with high growth rates tend to become immensely valuable, while the
ones with lower growth rates may not even survive.
Y Combinator encourages founders to focus on growth rate rather
than absolute numbers. It prevents them from being discouraged early
on, when the absolute numbers are still low. It also helps them
decide what to focus on: you can use growth rate as a compass to
tell you how to evolve the company. But the main advantage is that
by focusing on growth rate you tend to get something that grows
exponentially.
YC doesn't explicitly tell founders that with growth rate "you get
out what you put in," but it's not far from the truth. And if growth
rate were proportional to performance, then the reward for performance
p
over time
t
would be proportional to
p
t
.
Even after decades of thinking about this, I find that sentence
startling.
Whenever how well you do depends on how well you've done, you'll
get exponential growth. But neither our DNA nor our customs prepare
us for it. No one finds exponential growth natural; every child is
surprised, the first time they hear it, by the story of the man who
asks the king for a single grain of rice the first day and double
the amount each successive day.
What we don't understand naturally we develop customs to deal with,
but we don't have many customs about exponential growth either,
because there have been so few instances of it in human history.
In principle herding should have been one: the more animals you
had, the more offspring they'd have. But in practice grazing land
was the limiting factor, and there was no plan for growing that
exponentially.
Or more precisely, no generally applicable plan. There
was
a way
to grow one's territory exponentially: by conquest. The more territory
you control, the more powerful your army becomes, and the easier
it is to conquer new territory. This is why history is full of
empires. But so few people created or ran empires that their
experiences didn't affect customs very much. The emperor was a
remote and terrifying figure, not a source of lessons one could use
in one's own life.
The most common case of exponential growth in preindustrial times
was probably scholarship. The more you know, the easier it is to
learn new things. The result, then as now, was that some people
were startlingly more knowledgeable than the rest about certain
topics. But this didn't affect customs much either. Although empires
of ideas can overlap and there can thus be far more emperors, in
preindustrial times this type of empire had little practical effect.
[
2
]
That has changed in the last few centuries. Now the emperors of
ideas can design bombs that defeat the emperors of territory. But
this phenomenon is still so new that we haven't fully assimilated
it. Few even of the participants realize they're benefitting from
exponential growth or ask what they can learn from other instances
of it.
The other source of superlinear returns is embodied in the expression
"winner take all." In a sports match the relationship between
performance and return is a step function: the winning team gets
one win whether they do much better or just slightly better.
[
3
]
The source of the step function is not competition per se, however.
It's that there are thresholds in the outcome. You don't need
competition to get those. There can be thresholds in situations
where you're the only participant, like proving a theorem or hitting
a target.
It's remarkable how often a situation with one source of superlinear
returns also has the other. Crossing thresholds leads to exponential
growth: the winning side in a battle usually suffers less damage,
which makes them more likely to win in the future. And exponential
growth helps you cross thresholds: in a market with network effects,
a company that grows fast enough can shut out potential competitors.
Fame is an interesting example of a phenomenon that combines both
sources of superlinear returns. Fame grows exponentially because
existing fans bring you new ones. But the fundamental reason it's
so concentrated is thresholds: there's only so much room on the
A-list in the average person's head.
The most important case combining both sources of superlinear returns
may be learning. Knowledge grows exponentially, but there are also
thresholds in it. Learning to ride a bicycle, for example. Some of
these thresholds are akin to machine tools: once you learn to read,
you're able to learn anything else much faster. But the most important
thresholds of all are those representing new discoveries. Knowledge
seems to be fractal in the sense that if you push hard at the
boundary of one area of knowledge, you sometimes discover a whole
new field. And if you do, you get first crack at all the new
discoveries to be made in it. Newton did this, and so did Durer and
Darwin.
Are there general rules for finding situations with superlinear
returns? The most obvious one is to seek work that compounds.
There are two ways work can compound. It can compound directly, in
the sense that doing well in one cycle causes you to do better in
the next. That happens for example when you're building infrastructure,
or growing an audience or brand. Or work can compound by teaching
you, since learning compounds. This second case is an interesting
one because you may feel you're doing badly as it's happening. You
may be failing to achieve your immediate goal. But if you're learning
a lot, then you're getting exponential growth nonetheless.
This is one reason Silicon Valley is so tolerant of failure. People
in Silicon Valley aren't blindly tolerant of failure. They'll only
continue to bet on you if you're learning from your failures. But
if you are, you are in fact a good bet: maybe your company didn't
grow the way you wanted, but you yourself have, and that should
yield results eventually.
Indeed, the forms of exponential growth that don't consist of
learning are so often intermixed with it that we should probably
treat this as the rule rather than the exception. Which yields
another heuristic: always be learning. If you're not learning,
you're probably not on a path that leads to superlinear returns.
But don't overoptimize
what
you're learning. Don't limit yourself
to learning things that are already known to be valuable. You're
learning; you don't know for sure yet what's going to be valuable,
and if you're too strict you'll lop off the outliers.
What about step functions? Are there also useful heuristics of the
form "seek thresholds" or "seek competition?" Here the situation
is trickier. The existence of a threshold doesn't guarantee the
game will be worth playing. If you play a round of Russian roulette,
you'll be in a situation with a threshold, certainly, but in the
best case you're no better off. "Seek competition" is similarly
useless; what if the prize isn't worth competing for? Sufficiently
fast exponential growth guarantees both the shape and magnitude of
the return curve — because something that grows fast enough will
grow big even if it's trivially small at first — but thresholds
only guarantee the shape.
[
4
]
A principle for taking advantage of thresholds has to include a
test to ensure the game is worth playing. Here's one that does: if
you come across something that's mediocre yet still popular, it
could be a good idea to replace it. For example, if a company makes
a product that people dislike yet still buy, then presumably they'd
buy a better alternative if you made one.
[
5
]
It would be great if there were a way to find promising intellectual
thresholds. Is there a way to tell which questions have whole new
fields beyond them? I doubt we could ever predict this with certainty,
but the prize is so valuable that it would be useful to have
predictors that were even a little better than random, and there's
hope of finding those. We can to some degree predict when a research
problem
isn't
likely to lead to new discoveries: when it seems
legit but boring. Whereas the kind that do lead to new discoveries
tend to seem very mystifying, but perhaps unimportant. (If they
were mystifying and obviously important, they'd be famous open
questions with lots of people already working on them.) So one
heuristic here is to be driven by curiosity rather than careerism
— to give free rein to your curiosity instead of working on what
you're supposed to.
The prospect of superlinear returns for performance is an exciting
one for the ambitious. And there's good news in this department:
this territory is expanding in both directions. There are more types
of work in which you can get superlinear returns, and the returns
themselves are growing.
There are two reasons for this, though they're so closely intertwined
that they're more like one and a half: progress in technology, and
the decreasing importance of organizations.
Fifty years ago it used to be much more necessary to be part of an
organization to work on ambitious projects. It was the only way to
get the resources you needed, the only way to have colleagues, and
the only way to get distribution. So in 1970 your prestige was in
most cases the prestige of the organization you belonged to. And
prestige was an accurate predictor, because if you weren't part of
an organization, you weren't likely to achieve much. There were a
handful of exceptions, most notably artists and writers, who worked
alone using inexpensive tools and had their own brands. But even
they were at the mercy of organizations for reaching audiences.
[
6
]
A world dominated by organizations damped variation in the returns
for performance. But this world has eroded significantly just in
my lifetime. Now a lot more people can have the freedom that artists
and writers had in the 20th century. There are lots of ambitious
projects that don't require much initial funding, and lots of new
ways to learn, make money, find colleagues, and reach audiences.
There's still plenty of the old world left, but the rate of change
has been dramatic by historical standards. Especially considering
what's at stake. It's hard to imagine a more fundamental change
than one in the returns for performance.
Without the damping effect of institutions, there will be more
variation in outcomes. Which doesn't imply everyone will be better
off: people who do well will do even better, but those who do badly
will do worse. That's an important point to bear in mind. Exposing
oneself to superlinear returns is not for everyone. Most people
will be better off as part of the pool. So who should shoot for
superlinear returns? Ambitious people of two types: those who know
they're so good that they'll be net ahead in a world with higher
variation, and those, particularly the young, who can afford to
risk trying it to find out.
[
7
]
The switch away from institutions won't simply be an exodus of their
current inhabitants. Many of the new winners will be people they'd
never have let in. So the resulting democratization of opportunity
will be both greater and more authentic than any tame intramural
version the institutions themselves might have cooked up.
Not everyone is happy about this great unlocking of ambition. It
threatens some vested interests and contradicts some ideologies.
[
8
]
But if you're an ambitious individual it's good news for you.
How should you take advantage of it?
The most obvious way to take advantage of superlinear returns for
performance is by doing exceptionally good work. At the far end of
the curve, incremental effort is a bargain. All the more so because
there's less competition at the far end — and not just for the
obvious reason that it's hard to do something exceptionally well,
but also because people find the prospect so intimidating that few
even try. Which means it's not just a bargain to do exceptional
work, but a bargain even to try to.
There are many variables that affect how good your work is, and if
you want to be an outlier you need to get nearly all of them right.
For example, to do something exceptionally well, you have to be
interested in it. Mere diligence is not enough. So in a world with
superlinear returns, it's even more valuable to know what you're
interested in, and to find ways to work on it.
[
9
]
It will also be
important to choose work that suits your circumstances. For example,
if there's a kind of work that inherently requires a huge expenditure
of time and energy, it will be increasingly valuable to do it when
you're young and don't yet have children.
There's a surprising amount of technique to doing great work.
It's not just a matter of trying hard. I'm going to take a shot
giving a recipe in one paragraph.
Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in.
Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter
what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work
as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually
bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth
from a distance, but up close they're full of gaps. Notice and
explore such gaps, and if you're lucky one will expand into a whole
new field. Take as much risk as you can afford; if you're not failing
occasionally you're probably being too conservative. Seek out the
best colleagues. Develop good taste and learn from the best examples.
Be honest, especially with yourself. Exercise and eat and sleep
well and avoid the more dangerous drugs. When in doubt, follow your
curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's
worth paying attention to.
[
10
]
And there is of course one other thing you need: to be lucky. Luck
is always a factor, but it's even more of a factor when you're
working on your own rather than as part of an organization. And
though there are some valid aphorisms about luck being where
preparedness meets opportunity and so on, there's also a component
of true chance that you can't do anything about. The solution is
to take multiple shots. Which is another reason to start taking
risks early.
The best example of a field with superlinear returns is probably
science. It has exponential growth, in the form of learning, combined
with thresholds at the extreme edge of performance — literally at
the limits of knowledge.
The result has been a level of inequality in scientific discovery
that makes the wealth inequality of even the most stratified societies
seem mild by comparison. Newton's discoveries were arguably greater
than all his contemporaries' combined.
[
11
]
This point may seem obvious, but it might be just as well to spell
it out. Superlinear returns imply inequality. The steeper the return
curve, the greater the variation in outcomes.
In fact, the correlation between superlinear returns and inequality
is so strong that it yields another heuristic for finding work of
this type: look for fields where a few big winners outperform
everyone else. A kind of work where everyone does about the same
is unlikely to be one with superlinear returns.
What are fields where a few big winners outperform everyone else?
Here are some obvious ones: sports, politics, art, music, acting,
directing, writing, math, science, starting companies, and investing.
In sports the phenomenon is due to externally imposed thresholds;
you only need to be a few percent faster to win every race. In
politics, power grows much as it did in the days of emperors. And
in some of the other fields (including politics) success is driven
largely by fame, which has its own source of superlinear growth.
But when we exclude sports and politics and the effects of fame, a
remarkable pattern emerges: the remaining list is exactly the same
as the list of fields where you have to be
independent-minded
to
succeed — where your ideas have to be not just correct, but novel
as well.
[
12
]
This is obviously the case in science. You can't publish papers
saying things that other people have already said. But it's just
as true in investing, for example. It's only useful to believe that
a company will do well if most other investors don't; if everyone
else thinks the company will do well, then its stock price will
already reflect that, and there's no room to make money.
What else can we learn from these fields? In all of them you have
to put in the initial effort. Superlinear returns seem small at
first.
At this rate,
you find yourself thinking,
I'll never get
anywhere.
But because the reward curve rises so steeply at the far
end, it's worth taking extraordinary measures to get there.
In the startup world, the name for this principle is "do things
that don't scale." If you pay a ridiculous amount of attention to
your tiny initial set of customers, ideally you'll kick off exponential
growth by word of mouth. But this same principle applies to anything
that grows exponentially. Learning, for example. When you first
start learning something, you feel lost. But it's worth making the
initial effort to get a toehold, because the more you learn, the
easier it will get.
There's another more subtle lesson in the list of fields with
superlinear returns: not to equate work with a job. For most of the
20th century the two were identical for nearly everyone, and as a
result we've inherited a custom that equates productivity with
having a job. Even now to most people the phrase "your work" means
their job. But to a writer or artist or scientist it means whatever
they're currently studying or creating. For someone like that, their
work is something they carry with them from job to job, if they
have jobs at all. It may be done for an employer, but it's part of
their portfolio.
It's an intimidating prospect to enter a field where a few big
winners outperform everyone else. Some people do this deliberately,
but you don't need to. If you have sufficient natural ability and
you follow your curiosity sufficiently far, you'll end up in one.
Your curiosity won't let you be interested in boring questions, and
interesting questions tend to create fields with superlinear returns
if they're not already part of one.
The territory of superlinear returns is by no means static. Indeed,
the most extreme returns come from expanding it. So while both
ambition and curiosity can get you into this territory, curiosity
may be the more powerful of the two. Ambition tends to make you
climb existing peaks, but if you stick close enough to an interesting
enough question, it may grow into a mountain beneath you.
Notes
There's a limit to how sharply you can distinguish between effort,
performance, and return, because they're not sharply distinguished
in fact. What counts as return to one person might be performance
to another. But though the borders of these concepts are blurry,
they're not meaningless. I've tried to write about them as precisely
as I could without crossing into error.
[
1
]
Evolution itself is probably the most pervasive example of
superlinear returns for performance. But this is hard for us to
empathize with because we're not the recipients; we're the returns.
[
2
]
Knowledge did of course have a practical effect before the
Industrial Revolution. The development of agriculture changed human
life completely. But this kind of change was the result of broad,
gradual improvements in technique, not the discoveries of a few
exceptionally learned people.
[
3
]
It's not mathematically correct to describe a step function as
superlinear, but a step function starting from zero works like a
superlinear function when it describes the reward curve for effort
by a rational actor. If it starts at zero then the part before the
step is below any linearly increasing return, and the part after
the step must be above the necessary return at that point or no one
would bother.
[
4
]
Seeking competition could be a good heuristic in the sense that
some people find it motivating. It's also somewhat of a guide to
promising problems, because it's a sign that other people find them
promising. But it's a very imperfect sign: often there's a clamoring
crowd chasing some problem, and they all end up being trumped by
someone quietly working on another one.
[
5
]
Not always, though. You have to be careful with this rule. When
something is popular despite being mediocre, there's often a hidden
reason why. Perhaps monopoly or regulation make it hard to compete.
Perhaps customers have bad taste or have broken procedures for
deciding what to buy. There are huge swathes of mediocre things
that exist for such reasons.
[
6
]
In my twenties I wanted to be an
artist
and even went to art
school to study painting. Mostly because I liked art, but a nontrivial
part of my motivation came from the fact that artists seemed least
at the mercy of organizations.
[
7
]
In principle everyone is getting superlinear returns. Learning
compounds, and everyone learns in the course of their life. But in
practice few push this kind of everyday learning to the point where
the return curve gets really steep.
[
8
]
It's unclear exactly what advocates of "equity" mean by it.
They seem to disagree among themselves. But whatever they mean is
probably at odds with a world in which institutions have less power
to control outcomes, and a handful of outliers do much better than
everyone else.
It may seem like bad luck for this concept that it arose at just
the moment when the world was shifting in the opposite direction,
but I don't think this was a coincidence. I think one reason it
arose now is because its adherents feel threatened by rapidly
increasing variation in performance.
[
9
]
Corollary: Parents who pressure their kids to work on something
prestigious, like medicine, even though they have no interest in
it, will be hosing them even more than they have in the past.
[
10
]
The original version of this paragraph was the first draft of
"
How to Do Great Work
."
As soon as I wrote it I realized it was a more important topic than superlinear
returns, so I paused the present essay to expand this paragraph into its
own. Practically nothing remains of the original version, because
after I finished "How to Do Great Work" I rewrote it based on that.
[
11
]
Before the Industrial Revolution, people who got rich usually
did it like emperors: capturing some resource made them more powerful
and enabled them to capture more. Now it can be done like a scientist,
by discovering or building something uniquely valuable. Most people
who get rich use a mix of the old and the new ways, but in the most
advanced economies the ratio has
shifted dramatically
toward discovery
just in the last half century.
[
12
]
It's not surprising that conventional-minded people would
dislike inequality if independent-mindedness is one of the biggest
drivers of it. But it's not simply that they don't want anyone to
have what they can't. The conventional-minded literally can't imagine
what it's like to have novel ideas. So the whole phenomenon of great
variation in performance seems unnatural to them, and when they
encounter it they assume it must be due to cheating or to some
malign external influence.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Tyler Cowen,
Jessica Livingston, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts
of this.


It's not unusual for founders to say this. If anything it's the norm. It would be great if there were some way to prolong this period without harming the company. Perhaps being very slow to hire would help.

I was talking to the founder of a very successful startup, and he said the best time was in the first few years, when they were just a handful of smart people trying to solve hard problems, and no one expected anything of them.

@sfmcguire79 Source: https://t.co/fyY32RrEzu

@ahall_research @sfmcguire79 I'm going to delete my original question and replace it with a link to the source.

@ahall_research @sfmcguire79 Sure enough, the quotes are accurate (if the transcript is). Google has just been slow to index this. Thanks!

@thechosenberg Banana cream.

@levie He knows the word inept. Interesting.

@sfmcguire79 Yes. Very adhesive though.

I made a deal with 12 yo that if he did well enough on his end of term exams, he could hit me in the face with a pie. He did well enough. https://t.co/vkw7MjGHJv

@mattyglesias That would be a great way to shake off the weird label.


@bcjordan Oil paint is the best for it.

@armin_sommer @WowHauser Really? I thought he was named after a kid who bullied Fleming's nephew in prep school. Maybe that was another Bond villain...

@tedgioia Slightly alarming that I had to look closely to assure myself this wasn't Monty Python.

@Nairebis @Shariflabo I'm sure it did actually.

Learning to program doesn't mean abandoning other kinds of work any more than learning to read does.

@chrislein7 If you have a friend who's a programmer, whatever language they prefer.

@nw3 No, just backlit.

@Shariflabo Learn to program!

It's hard to predict what AI will do to the world, but that's all the more reason to learn to program. AI may churn up any industry, but the programmers have the best chance of surfing on this wave instead of having it crash on their heads.

@WowHauser Did Erno's son attend the same prep school as Ian Fleming's nephew? If so he may be the original Goldfinger.


@gabrielchuv @SurendranNisha You can talk to 1 year olds.

@SpencerHakimian Because 20% of the population will believe you, and 19 of that 20 are Trump supporters.

@AndrewYang You mean to the US presumably. It would be hard to top the Great Leap Forward.

@ATabarrok Man, these people are just. so. dumb.

@eshear Whereas if you told them to make something that was beautiful, or interesting to look at, they'd have some idea of what to do.

@eshear My test of a definition is how much closer I am after hearing it to being able to reproduce the thing being defined. And frankly if you sat someone down in front of a canvas and told them to embody virtue it wouldn't really help them much.

Messi plays like the daydream of a 10 year old: dribble past half the opposing team, then blast it into the corner of the net.

What companies are overextended and are going to collapse if there's a recession? Might be good to start asking that now.

@magantifa @lulumeservey Can you think of a better verb for it?

@raveeshbhalla @lulumeservey Brian himself was extremely courageous. I'm saying the cascade wasn't.


@mattxyzed @anammostarac There's that too.

@zdrks @anammostarac Do you have any idea how long I've been inundated by stupid replies? I remember back in the day when they were by SJW scolds instead of Trump gorillas.

@anammostarac You don't become a billionaire by being wrong about things related to how you made the money. You can be wrong about other things though.

@PriorMabe @santiagopliego @elonmusk The plans for tariffs seem very dangerous.

12 yo decided that our house is a sovereign state. He made his brother supreme leader, which seemed generous. But later I learned he had been deposed by the cat, Weegenstein, who formed a coalition with the dog, Biscotsky. They now hold the capital, Paulingrad. https://t.co/hC4IUPSJyk

@santiagopliego @elonmusk I don't agree with all of either party's policies. But Trump's character is so bad that it's the deciding factor for me. It's just too risky to have someone like that as president.

@tubergen This wasn't a one-off mistake though. He operated here the way he has always operated.

@naval Since judging from the massive number of replies there seems to be so much interest in this topic, I started a new thread about it!

https://t.co/qGZg5X7Tkk

If you want more details about the lengths Trump and his associates went to, the whole story is on Wikipedia. Thank God other Republicans like Mike Pence stood up to him. You have to give them credit for that. https://t.co/RSJY6ZxnOt

Democracy depends on the peaceful transfer of power. But Trump was willing to sacrifice even this principle after he lost in 2020. Trump did a lot of bad things, but this was the most dangerous. If elections stop working, you stop being a democracy.


@eriktorenberg @gfodor Many people are working hard to get the bad supervisors voted out in the next election.

@gfodor It's dishonest to blame SF's dysfunction on the Democratic Party. It's mostly because Ed Lee died unexpectedly and his successor was so weak that she lost power to the supervisors. Any city can be brought down temporarily by that kind of random breakage.

Do we want to live in a country governed like California or Florida? Well, let's check the numbers, shall we?

CA GDP per capita: $102,527

FL GDP per capita: $71,703

Sometimes when people delete a tweet, they still believe what they said, but don't want anyone to know they believe it. But other times they've changed their mind. You can't pretend it's always the former.

It's not fair to assume that a deleted tweet reflects someone's actual opinion. In fact if you take them at their word, you should assume the opposite, because by deleting a tweet they've explicitly said "I don't believe this."

@danielwchen0 The history of any startup.

Mario Draghi. He's kind of right, except that like a lot of outsiders he thinks "innovation" precedes "commercialisation." In fact most of it happens afterward. So the claim is not that Europeans have good ideas, but that they could have them. That much is true though. https://t.co/pQ3SbfYN5t

@nicogarcia Robert wasn't my college roommate. We didn't even go to the same college.

@StephNass I considered that variant when I first coined the phrase. But this is advice for founders, and making something you think people should want, rather than something they will want, is a classic mistake for founders.

@sama You may have just surpassed "Move fast and break things."


The greater the extremes they go to in order to block the release of the Epstein files, the more it seems there must be really bad stuff about Trump in there.

@mertesakib @XFaure If you do the math, a 2.5% wealth tax works out to confiscating about 3/4 of a startup founder's stock.

https://t.co/qfbO6MJRig

@IntegraMacro @richardmcj It says I like good art.

@wtergan @piersmorgan I wrote an essay about why America is becoming more polarized: https://t.co/Luw9oakxo2

The short version is that mid-20th century uniformity was artificially induced.

@manca1 @richardmcj I know @richardmcj can ship to the US because he told me he recently sold a painting to someone in Seattle.

@piersmorgan In those days the Republicans and the Democrats were so similar that you could barely tell them apart. This was not a special quality of talk show hosts. You couldn't tell what most people's politics were.

@dened21 @XFaure Nothing formal, just funding individual startups and going to speak at a few schools.

@hammi_ip @richardmcj Only about £1000. I told him he should be charging at least 3x as much.

This new painting by @richardmcj just arrived, and it's even better in person. It's so cool the way the left third is a mid-century modern abstract painting (even the colors), and the rest looks like it was painted in California this summer. https://t.co/S1zGXhsPLG

@XFaure If the historical rate of return on capital is 4-5%, this would amount to banning being rich.

The UK tried that in the 1970s. It worked so well that they needed an IMF bailout, like a third world country.


@nullret My kids don't think of me that way. They have little evidence of it in their day to day lives. They see me as a chauffeur who occasionally lectures them about obscure topics.

@staysaasy @Austen If for example the company could use the political power that comes from having the stock being owned by a large number of individual investors.

@ArmandDoma If you want to be downtown. But in a town as dispersed as LA, the airport and downtown are more like two separate points of entry. If you want to go to Santa Monica or El Segundo, the airport is closer than the train station.

@Austen Or don't. It doesn't usually help a company, and can hurt it.

@typesfast Another is the care with which we do things. This is one of the big differences between teenagers and adults. Teenagers tend to operate as if they had one speed. Adults realize you can deliberately slow down and do things more carefully.

@__tosh Usually I read out loud the last couple paragraphs of whatever he dictated most recently, while he paces around deciding what happens next.

@nullret He did. This is actually his third. He wrote the first one when he was 9, after his English teacher asked the class to write a story. He decided to be ambitious and write a book instead.

@FMasoodWriter Write. You don't need to show it to anyone, but you do need to write.

Yesterday 13 yo finished the book he began dictating to me in May 2023. It ended up being about 67,000 words. He started dictating stories to me when he was 5, because he was barely able to write, and we've just continued since then.

@harjtaggar How to Be an Expert in a Changing World: https://t.co/67xPN1hZ1V


@russell_m No immediate changes. Like everyone else in the business world we're watching and waiting to see how this incipient trade war plays out, and what other insane things he does.

Tom Blomfield and I were doing office hours with a startup in the new batch and he suggested an easy tweak that will make them at least 10x bigger. That's the real point of YC. Not the brand or the money or intros to investors, but making the company better.

@lacker @GrantSlatton @octal If they have to chant something, this would be the thing to chant.

@sapinker Pilots call this overcontrolling.

@Birdyword Or advice to emigrate.

I met a startup using GPUs for something that's neither their original purpose (graphics) nor AI. This seems an interesting territory. Like dolphins surfing in the bow wave of AI.

@ahistoryinart Boy does Scotland not look like that.

@ForteKate85889 I did stand up for due process when far left zealots were the ones attacking it.

@Petar_DRC @gaborgurbacs "Perfect is the enemy of good" doesn't apply to justice.

@LokiJulianus You're mistaken. The fact that a certain level of damage is now locked in doesn't imply that he can't do additional damage. So far companies are just holding back and waiting. But there's a later stage where they actively try to leave the US.


@patrickc What does the professor think caused this change?

@prashant_hq It's similar but I think this one may be bigger.

This is a good list of accidental moderates (meaning not centrists but people who think for themselves and whose opinions thus average to moderate).

@eastdakota Who is Triangle Man?

@anammostarac Do you have some examples?

@credistick This is not a data point about returns. This phenomenon is due to the fact that a huge number of crappy new VC firms got started during the Internet Bubble. More than half of VC firms are jokes, so the median VC firm is.

@needtofilm How smart and effective the founders seem.

@robinhanson About 30% of Seinfeld episodes were about this.

@0xaltyni Less dilution.

@RockittSocial I don't know.


@MuricanIndian Are you saying it was ok to kill these children?

@Sandy1648409 It sounds like you're saying it's impossible for an army to kill too many children. Because if one did, and someone criticized them for it, they'd be "picking sides and using dead children to win a moral argument."

@KemonomichiNL No innocent Palestinians? Even three year olds are guilty, and its's ok to kill them? Please just stop and think about that for a minute. You can't really believe that.

@midpackergeek These children didn't have any hostages.

@THEREALJEW613 How can you joke about the deaths of three children? Are you really so heartless?

@helayoty That's an interesting idea. I'm going to think about whether there's a practical way to define such a company.

@SamL2021 @GaryLineker Yeah. Football announcers wouldn't have to do this if political leaders did.

@Mayanktweeted Also, founders think they can focus on both, and then discover they can't.

@Mayanktweeted Raising money is an immediate, definite, and sexy problem. So it lures founders away from the more gradual, imprecise slog of making users happy.

@inquisitivesprt @GaryLineker Yeah, I can't help thinking that too. I understand why they're afraid to speak out. But it's time to.


Earnestness
December 2020
Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance
when we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we can
pay to founders is to describe them as "earnest." This is not by
itself a guarantee of success. You could be earnest but incapable.
But when founders are both formidable (another of our words) and
earnest, they're as close to unstoppable as you get.
Earnestness sounds like a boring, even Victorian virtue. It seems
a bit of an anachronism that people in Silicon Valley would care
about it. Why does this matter so much?
When you call someone earnest, you're making a statement about their
motives. It means both that they're doing something for the right
reasons, and that they're trying as hard as they can. If we imagine
motives as vectors, it means both the direction and the magnitude
are right. Though these are of course related: when people are doing
something for the right reasons, they try harder.
[
1
]
The reason motives matter so much in Silicon Valley is that so many
people there have the wrong ones. Starting a successful startup
makes you rich and famous. So a lot of the people trying to start
them are doing it for those reasons. Instead of what? Instead of
interest in the problem for its own sake. That is the root of
earnestness.
[
2
]
It's also the hallmark of a nerd. Indeed, when people describe
themselves as "x nerds," what they mean is that they're interested
in x for its own sake, and not because it's cool to be interested
in x, or because of what they can get from it. They're saying they
care so much about x that they're willing to sacrifice seeming cool
for its sake.
A
genuine interest
in something is a very powerful motivator  for
some people, the most powerful motivator of all.
[
3
]
Which is why
it's what Jessica and I look for in founders. But as well as being
a source of strength, it's also a source of vulnerability. Caring
constrains you. The earnest can't easily reply in kind to mocking
banter, or put on a cool facade of nihil admirari. They care too
much. They are doomed to be the straight man. That's a real
disadvantage in your
teenage years
,
when mocking banter and nihil
admirari often have the upper hand. But it becomes an advantage
later.
It's a commonplace now that the kids who were
nerds in high school
become the cool kids' bosses later on. But people misunderstand why
this happens. It's not just because the nerds are smarter, but also
because they're more earnest. When the problems get harder than the
fake ones you're given in high school, caring about them starts to
matter.
Does it always matter? Do the earnest always win? Not always. It
probably doesn't matter much in politics, or in crime, or in certain
types of business that are similar to crime, like gambling, personal
injury law, patent trolling, and so on. Nor does it matter in
academic fields at the more
bogus
end of the spectrum. And though
I don't know enough to say for sure, it may not matter in some kinds
of humor: it may be possible to be completely cynical and still be
very funny.
[
4
]
Looking at the list of fields I mentioned, there's an obvious
pattern. Except possibly for humor, these are all types of work I'd
avoid like the plague. So that could be a useful heuristic for
deciding which fields to work in: how much does earnestness matter?
Which can in turn presumably be inferred from the prevalence of
nerds at the top.
Along with "nerd," another word that tends to be associated with
earnestness is "naive." The earnest often seem naive.  It's not
just that they don't have the motives other people have. They often
don't fully grasp that such motives exist. Or they may know
intellectually that they do, but because they don't feel them, they
forget about them.
[
5
]
It works to be slightly naive not just about motives but also,
believe it or not, about the problems you're working on. Naive
optimism can compensate for the bit rot that
rapid change
causes
in established beliefs. You plunge into some problem saying "How
hard can it be?", and then after solving it you learn that it was
till recently insoluble.
Naivete is an obstacle for anyone who wants to seem sophisticated,
and this is one reason would-be intellectuals find it so difficult
to understand Silicon Valley. It hasn't been safe for such people
to use the word "earnest" outside scare quotes since Oscar Wilde
wrote "The Importance of Being Earnest" in 1895. And yet when you
zoom in on Silicon Valley, right into
Jessica Livingston's brain
,
that's what her x-ray vision
is seeking out in founders. Earnestness!
Who'd have guessed? Reporters literally can't believe it when
founders making piles of money say that they started their companies
to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery.
How can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible
they sound?
Though those asking this question don't realize it, that's not a
rhetorical question.
A lot of founders are faking it, of course, particularly the smaller
fry, and the soon to be smaller fry. But not all of them. There are
a significant number of founders who really are interested in the
problem they're solving mainly for its own sake.
Why shouldn't there be? We have no difficulty believing that people
would be interested in history or math or even old bus tickets for
their own sake. Why can't there be people interested in self-driving
cars or social networks for their own sake? When you look at the
question from this side, it seems obvious there would be. And isn't
it likely that having a deep interest in something would be a source
of great energy and resilience? It is in every other field.
The question really is why we have a blind spot about business.
And the answer to that is obvious if you know enough history. For
most of history, making large amounts of money has not been very
intellectually interesting. In preindustrial times it was never far
from robbery, and some areas of business still retain that character,
except using lawyers instead of soldiers.
But there are other areas of business where the work is genuinely
interesting. Henry Ford got to spend much of his time working on
interesting technical problems, and for the last several decades
the trend in that direction has been accelerating. It's much easier
now to make a lot of money by working on something you're interested
in than it was
50 years ago
.
And that, rather than how fast they
grow, may be the most important change that startups represent.
Though indeed, the fact that the work is genuinely interesting is
a big part of why it gets done so fast.
[
6
]
Can you imagine a more important change than one in the relationship
between intellectual curiosity and money? These are two of the most
powerful forces in the world, and in my lifetime they've become
significantly more aligned. How could you not be fascinated to watch
something like this happening in real time?
I meant this essay to be about earnestness generally, and now I've
gone and talked about startups again. But I suppose at least it
serves as an example of an x nerd in the wild.
Notes
[
1
]
It's interesting how many different ways there are
not
to
be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant,
to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to
be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make.
This pattern suggests that earnestness is not one end of a continuum,
but a target one can fall short of in multiple dimensions.
Another thing I notice about this list is that it sounds like a
list of the ways people behave on Twitter. Whatever else social
media is, it's a vivid catalogue of ways not to be earnest.
[
2
]
People's motives are as mixed in Silicon Valley as anywhere
else. Even the founders motivated mostly by money tend to be at
least somewhat interested in the problem they're solving, and even
the founders most interested in the problem they're solving also
like the idea of getting rich. But there's great variation in the
relative proportions of different founders' motivations.
And when I talk about "wrong" motives, I don't mean morally wrong.
There's nothing morally wrong with starting a startup to make money.
I just mean that those startups don't do as well.
[
3
]
The most powerful motivator for most people is probably family.
But there are some for whom intellectual curiosity comes first. In
his (wonderful) autobiography, Paul Halmos says explicitly that for
a mathematician, math must come before anything else, including
family. Which at least implies that it did for him.
[
4
]
Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies earnestness even
when used as a metaphor, the word "politics" implies the opposite.
It's not only in actual politics that earnestness seems to be a
handicap, but also in office politics and academic politics.
[
5
]
It's a bigger social error to seem naive in most European
countries than it is in America, and this may be one of subtler
reasons startups are less common there. Founder culture is completely
at odds with sophisticated cynicism.
The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly
this is also the region with the highest number of successful
startups per capita.
[
6
]
Much of business is schleps, and probably always will be. But
even being a professor is largely schleps. It would be interesting
to collect statistics about the schlep ratios of different jobs,
but I suspect they'd rarely be less than 30%.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, Jessica
Livingston, Mattias Ljungman, Harj Taggar, and Kyle Vogt for reading
drafts of this.


@shw1nm @hackernews There is a problem with users abusing flagging on HN. I believe Dan plans to do something about it.

I think removing the "Why" from your title is something I added long ago because so many linkbait articles begin with it.

@meatballtimes Startups run on merit initially. Some work very, very hard to keep things that way as they grow.

@meatballtimes The smarter move would be to leave and find (or start) a company where this didn't work.

@dbasch @robinhanson He can opt out in the sense of not playing in that league.

@davgomdg @dapppunk Can you give me some examples of the kinds of correlations they mentioned?

@lulumeservey It's not *intrinsically* the case that the essay is not the place to list accomplishments. That's just one of those unwritten rules that the cultural elite know about, and smart outsiders fall foul of.

@CoreyWriting Individual elite universities don't need to grow. It's sufficient for the set of elite universities to grow. But that's already happening naturally.

@CoreyWriting I agree with you that you don't need to be a super genius to get through a top university. There are easy majors dumb kids choose. Where we disagree, apparently, is that I don't think that's a good thing.

@CoreyWriting At all elite universities there are easy majors. But that's not a good thing.

https://t.co/tl5GsNgAtw

@CoreyWriting An exam that differentiates between very smart and semi-smart people doesn't require studying for hundreds of hours.


@Ljungman I liked this before even reading the thread.

@1010Towncrier Not that I know of.

@chainyoda No, we would have been happy if he stayed and got someone else to run OpenAI. Can't you read?

@anammostarac It could be useful for an earnest nerd.

@llmluthor No, firing means you want someone gone.

I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened: https://t.co/3YvBDH7oqV

@MorePerfectUS NEW? CNN wrote about this almost 4 weeks ago.

https://t.co/sxLwmlSQ2A

@kendrictonn Whoah, he used a male model for the female figures? That must have given his murals an authentic quattrocento flavor. Do you have any examples?

@garrytan It was obvious at the time that it would be, but the few of us who spoke out against it got absolutely mauled.

@aethelamerican Not just once but several times.


@VictorieeMan Incidentally he loves top hats and has at least 3 of them.

@firstadopter Or at least do a Google search. Why do so many people not even do that? It only takes half a second.

@AhmadibnRachid It's not so much my views as the writing. What I'm thinking is "I hope I never wrote anything so clumsy."

@ikirigin @paultoo It would probably be boring because instead of debating we'd just talk about every point till we reached a consensus.

@EagleTurd He would be offended by the "some day".

@ahistoryinart Reminds me a lot of Bernard Fleetwood-Walker. https://t.co/vfrYa8Lzcd

"Mr. Latch resembled a Neanderthal in both appearance and personality. He had a heavy brow, deep sunken eyes, and a set of teeth that seemed to have been collected from a number of different donors and crammed into his mouth."

— from 12 yo's latest story

@MadhavanBohra In this case the word would be "picky." I'm really picky about the words I use.

Sometimes, to be honest, it's not "I'd never write that" but "Ugh, surely I never wrote that." Fortunately it has always turned out that I didn't, at least so far.

The way I can tell I didn't say a quote attributed to me is not by remembering everything I've ever said, but by knowing what I would say. When I read something and think "I'd never write that," I know I didn't.


What You Can't Say
January 2004
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and
been embarrassed at the way you looked?
Did we actually
dress like that?
We did.  And we had no idea how
silly we looked.
It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the
same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all
of us riding on it.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too.
They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people.
But they're much more dangerous.
Fashion is mistaken for good design;
moral fashion is mistaken for good.
Dressing oddly gets you laughed at.  Violating
moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or
even killed.
If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing
would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch
what you said.
Opinions we consider harmless could have
gotten you in big trouble.
I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big
trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century,
and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said
it  that the earth moves. [1]
It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every
period, people believed things that were just ridiculous,
and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in
terrible trouble for saying otherwise.
Is our time any different?
To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is
almost certainly no.   It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours
were the first era to get everything just right.
It's tantalizing to think we believe
things that people in the future will find ridiculous.
What
would
someone coming back to visit us in a time machine
have to be careful not to say?
That's what I want to study here.
But
I want to do more than just shock everyone with
the heresy du jour.  I want to find general
recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.
The Conformist Test
Let's start with a test:
Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express
in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no,
you might want to stop and think about that.  If everything
you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could
that possibly be a coincidence?  Odds are it isn't.  Odds are
you just think what
you're told.
The other alternative would be that you independently considered
every question and came up with the exact same answers that
are now considered acceptable.  That seems unlikely, because
you'd also have to make the same mistakes.  Mapmakers
deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can
tell when someone copies them.  If another map has the same
mistake, that's very convincing evidence.
Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly
contains a few mistakes.  And anyone who makes the same mistakes
probably didn't do it by accident.  It would be
like someone claiming they had independently decided in
1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.
If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can
you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you
were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation
owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s  or
among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter?  Odds are you
would have.
Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea
seemed to be that there was something wrong with
you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud.
This seems backward.  Almost certainly, there
is something wrong with you if you
don't
think things
you don't dare say out loud.
Trouble
What can't we say?  One way to find these ideas is simply to look
at things people do say, and get in trouble for.  [2]
Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say.
We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least
have enough chance of being true that the question
should remain open.  But many of the
things people get in trouble for saying probably
do make it over this second, lower threshold.  No one
gets in trouble for saying
that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall.
Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or
at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to
make anyone mad.  The statements that make people mad are
the ones they worry might be believed.
I suspect the statements that make people maddest
are those they worry might be true.
If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall,
he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric.  Saying
the earth orbited the sun was another matter.  The church knew
this would set people thinking.
Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works
well.  A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seem
harmless now.  So it's likely that visitors from the
future would agree with at least some of the statements that
get people in trouble today.  Do we have no Galileos?  Not
likely.
To find them,
keep track of opinions that get
people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true?
Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but
might it also be true?
Heresy
This won't get us all the answers, though.  What if no one
happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet?
What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that
no one would dare express it in public?   How can we find these too?
Another approach is to follow that word, heresy.  In every period
of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to
statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask
if they were true or not.  "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy"
were such
labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times
"indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been.   By now these
labels have lost their sting.  They always do.
By now they're mostly used ironically.
But in their time,
they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political
connotations now.
But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in
a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace.
At the start of World War II it was used
extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their
opponents.
In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist".
Was it right or wrong?  Ideally, no one got far enough to ask
that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them,
from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive."
In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are,
simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree
with besides untrue.  When a politician says his opponent is
mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he
attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive"
instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying
attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations
will laugh at is to start with the
labels.  Take a label  "sexist", for example  and try to think
of some ideas that would be called that.  Then for each ask, might
this be true?
Just start listing ideas at random?  Yes, because they
won't really be random.  The ideas that come to mind first
will be the most plausible ones.  They'll be things you've already
noticed but didn't let yourself think.
In 1989 some clever researchers tracked
the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for
signs of lung cancer. [3]  They found that even when the radiologists
missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it.
Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just
didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge.
I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly
formed in our minds.  If we turn off our self-censorship
temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.
Time and Space
If we could look into the future it would be obvious which
of our taboos they'd laugh at.
We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we can
look into the past.  Another way to figure out what we're
getting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable
and is now unthinkable.
Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent
progress.  In a field like physics,
if we disagree with past generations it's because we're
right and they're wrong.  But this becomes rapidly less true as
you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences.  By the time
you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion.
The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines.
We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than
past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely
this seems.  People in past times were much like us.  Not heroes,
not barbarians.  Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas
reasonable people could believe.
So here is another source of interesting heresies.  Diff present
ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you
get. [4]
Some will be
shocking by present standards.  Ok, fine; but which might also be true?
You don't have to look into the past to find big differences.
In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas
of what's ok and what isn't.
So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as well.
(The best way to do that is to visit them.)
Any idea that's considered harmless in a significant
percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours,
is a
candidate for something we're mistaken
about.
For example, at the high water mark of political correctness
in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its
faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it
was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's
clothes.  No more "nice shirt."
I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present.
There are probably more where it's considered especially
polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered
improper.
Odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of
the taboos a visitor from the future would
have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992. [5]
Prigs
Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll
probably have a separate reference manual just for Cambridge.
This has always been a fussy place, a town of i dotters and
t crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and
your ideas corrected in the same conversation.   And that
suggests another way to find taboos.  Look for prigs,
and see what's inside their heads.
Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos.
It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean.
The picture we give them of the world is
not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds,
but sanitized as well, to suit our
ideas of what kids ought to think. [6]
You can see this on a small scale in the matter of
dirty words.  A lot of my friends are starting to have children
now, and they're all trying
not to use words like
"fuck" and "shit" within baby's hearing, lest baby start using
these words too.
But these
words are part of the language, and adults use them all the
time.  So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of
the language by not using
them.  Why do they do this?  Because they don't think it's
fitting that kids should use the whole language.  We like
children to seem innocent. [7]
Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleading
view of the world.
One of the most obvious
examples is Santa Claus.  We think it's cute for little kids to
believe in Santa Claus.  I myself think it's cute for little
kids to believe in Santa Claus.  But one wonders, do we tell
them this stuff for their sake, or for ours?
I'm not arguing for or against this idea here.  It is probably
inevitable that parents should want to dress up their kids'
minds in cute little baby outfits.  I'll probably do it myself.
The important thing for our purposes is that, as a result,
a well brought-up teenage kid's brain is a more
or less complete collection of all our taboos  and in mint
condition, because they're untainted by experience.
Whatever we think that will later turn out to be ridiculous,
it's almost certainly inside that head.
How do we get at these ideas?  By the following thought experiment.
Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character
who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time
as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a
nightclub in Miami.  The specifics don't matter  just
someone who has
seen a lot.  Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head
with what's inside the head
of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from
the suburbs.  What does he think that
would shock her?
He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present
taboos.  Subtract one from the other, and the result is what
we can't say.
Mechanism
I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't
say: to look at how taboos are created.   How do moral
fashions arise, and why are they adopted?
If we can understand this mechanism, we
may be able to see it at work in our own time.
Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary
fashions are.  Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when
everyone imitates the whim of some influential person.
The fashion for broad-toed shoes in
late fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII of
France had six toes on one foot.  The fashion for the
name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name
of a tough mill town in Indiana.  Moral fashions more often
seem to be created deliberately.  When there's something we
can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.
The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous.
The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble
for repeating Copernicus's ideas.  Copernicus himself didn't.
In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his
book to the pope.  But by Galileo's time the church was in
the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more
worried about unorthodox ideas.
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between
weakness and power.  A confident group doesn't need taboos
to protect it.  It's not considered improper to
make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English.
And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a
taboo.  Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be
numerous or energetic enough to have had their
interests promoted to a lifestyle.
I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to
be power struggles in which one side only barely has
the upper hand.  That's where you'll find a group
powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.
Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast
as struggles between competing ideas.
The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power,
but it ended up being
cast as a struggle to preserve the souls
of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome.
It's easier to get people to fight for an idea.
And whichever side wins, their
ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God
wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.
We often like to think of World War II as a triumph
of freedom over totalitarianism.  We conveniently forget that
the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.
I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas,
just that they will always be made to seem to be about
ideas, whether they are or not.   And just as there is nothing
so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is
nothing so wrong as the principles of the most recently
defeated opponent.
Representational art is only now
recovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin. [8]
Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources
than fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seems
much the same.  The early adopters will be driven by ambition:
self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves
from the common herd.  As the fashion becomes established they'll
be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear. [9] This
second group adopt the fashion not because they want to stand
out but because they are afraid of standing out.
So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the
machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make
unsayable.  What groups are powerful but nervous, and what
ideas would they like to suppress?  What ideas were tarnished by
association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent
struggle?  If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate
himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents),
which of their ideas would he tend to reject?
What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?
This technique won't find us all the things we can't say.
I can think of some that aren't the result of
any recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted
deep in the past.  But this approach, combined with the
preceding four, will turn up a good number of unthinkable
ideas.
Why
Some would ask, why would one want to do this?  Why deliberately
go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas?  Why look
under rocks?
I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under
rocks as a kid: plain curiosity.  And I'm especially curious about
anything that's forbidden.  Let me see and decide for myself.
Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken.
If, like other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous,
I want to know what they are so that I, at least, can avoid
believing them.
Third, I do it because it's good for the brain.  To do good work
you need a brain that can go anywhere.  And you especially need a
brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.
Great work tends to grow out of ideas
that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's
unthinkable.
Natural selection, for example.
It's so simple.  Why didn't anyone think of it before?  Well,
that is all too obvious.  Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe
around the implications of his theory.  He wanted to spend his
time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused
him of being an atheist.
In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able to
question assumptions.
The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the
good ones, is precisely that: look for places where
conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the
cracks and see what's underneath.  That's where new theories come
from.
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore
conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it.
Scientists go looking for trouble.
This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but
scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks. [10]
Why?  It could
be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could,
if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature,
but few professors of French literature could make it through
a PhD program in physics.  Or it could be because it's clearer
in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this
makes scientists bolder.  (Or it could be that, because it's
clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you
have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a
good politician.)
Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between
intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas.
This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in
conventional thinking.  I think conventions also have
less hold over them to start with.
You can see that in the
way they dress.
It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off.
In any competitive field, you can
win big
by seeing things that others daren't.
And in every
field there are probably heresies few dare utter.  Within
the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now
about declining market share.
Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider could
explain it in a second: they make bad cars.  And they have for
so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands  something
you'd buy a car despite, not because of.  Cadillac stopped
being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970.  And yet I suspect
no one dares say this. [11]  Otherwise these companies would have
tried to fix the problem.
Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages
beyond the thoughts themselves.  It's like stretching.
When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions
much more extreme
than any it will assume during the run.
If you can think things
so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end,
you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that
people call innovative.
Pensieri Stretti
When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it?
My advice is, don't say it.   Or at least, pick your battles.
Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban
the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are
denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the
color.  People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with
suspicion.  Suppose you realize there is nothing
wrong with yellow.  If you go around saying this, you'll be
denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a
lot of arguments with anti-yellowists.
If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may
be what you want.
But if you're mostly interested in
other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be
a distraction.  Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.
The most important thing is to be able to think what you
want, not to say what you want.  And if you feel you have to
say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking
improper thoughts.  I think it's better to follow the opposite
policy.  Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your
speech.  Inside your head, anything is allowed.
Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous
thoughts I can imagine.
But, as in
a secret society, nothing that happens within the building
should be told to outsiders.  The first rule of Fight
Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.
When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s,
Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him
his motto should be
"i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto."
Closed thoughts
and an open face.  Smile at everyone, and don't tell them
what you're thinking.   This was wise advice.
Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition
was a bit restive at that time.  But I think the difference
between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of
degree.
Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you
will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete
distraction.
I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet.
When I read about the harassment to which
the Scientologists subject their critics [12], or that pro-Israel groups
are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israeli
human rights abuses [13], or about people being sued for
violating the DMCA [14], part of me wants
to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on."
The problem is, there are so many things you can't say.
If you said them all you'd
have no time left for your real work.
You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky.  [15]
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though,
is that you lose the advantages of discussion.  Talking
about an idea leads to more ideas.
So the optimal plan, if you can manage it,
is to have a few trusted
friends you can speak openly to.  This is not just a
way to develop ideas; it's also a good
rule of thumb for choosing friends.  The people
you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on
are also the most interesting to know.
Viso Sciolto?
I don't think we need
the
viso sciolto
so much as the
pensieri stretti.
Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don't
agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but
not to be too specific about what you disagree with.  Zealots
will try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer them.
If they try to force you to treat a question on their
terms by asking "are you with us or against us?" you can
always just answer "neither".
Better still, answer "I haven't decided."
That's what Larry Summers
did when a group tried to put
him in this position.  Explaining himself later, he said
"I don't do litmus tests." [16]
A lot of the
questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated.
There is no prize for getting the answer quickly.
If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and
you want to fight back, there are ways
to do it without getting yourself accused of being a
yellowist.  Like skirmishers in
an ancient army, you want to avoid directly engaging the
main body of the enemy's troops.  Better to harass them
with arrows from a distance.
One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of
abstraction.
If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being
accused of whatever heresy is contained
in the book or film that someone is trying to censor.
You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer
to the use of labels to prevent discussion.
The spread of the term "political correctness" meant the beginning of
the end of political correctness, because it enabled one to
attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of any
of the specific heresies it sought to suppress.
Another way to counterattack is with metaphor.  Arthur Miller
undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee
by writing a play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials.
He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them
no way to reply.
What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials?  And yet
Miller's metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities
of the committee are often described as a "witch-hunt."
Best of all, probably, is humor.  Zealots, whatever their
cause, invariably lack a sense of humor.
They can't reply in kind to jokes.
They're as unhappy on the territory of
humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink.
Victorian prudishness, for example, seems to have been defeated
mainly by treating it as a joke.  Likewise its reincarnation as
political correctness.
"I am glad that I
managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote,
"but looking back I have often wished I'd
had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the
situation deserved." [17]
ABQ
A Dutch friend says
I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society.
It's true they have a long tradition of
comparative open-mindedness.  For centuries the low countries were the place
to go to say things you couldn't say anywhere else,
and this helped to make the region a center of scholarship and industry
(which have been closely tied for longer than most people realize).
Descartes, though claimed by the French, did much of his thinking in
Holland.
And yet, I wonder.  The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their
necks in rules and regulations.  There's so much you can't do there;
is there really nothing
you can't say?
Certainly the fact that they value open-mindedness is no guarantee.
Who thinks they're not open-minded?  Our hypothetical prim miss from
the suburbs thinks she's open-minded.  Hasn't she been
taught to be?  Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're
pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really
wrong.  (Some tribes
may avoid "wrong" as
judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism
like "negative" or "destructive".)
When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the
wrong answers on tests.  But when people are bad at open-mindedness
they don't know it.  In fact they tend to think the opposite.
Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be invisible.  It wouldn't
work otherwise.  Fashion doesn't
seem like fashion to someone in the grip of it.  It just seems like
the right thing to do.  It's only by looking from a distance that
we see oscillations in people's idea of the right thing to do, and
can identify them as fashions.
Time gives us such distance for free.  Indeed, the arrival of new
fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they
seem so ridiculous by contrast.  From one end of a pendulum's
swing, the other end seems especially far away.
To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort.
Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself.
Instead of being part of the mob, stand
as far away from it as you can and watch what it's
doing.  And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being
suppressed.  Web filters for children and employees often ban
sites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech.  What
counts as pornography and violence?  And what, exactly, is
"hate speech?" This sounds like a phrase out of
1984.
Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue.
If a statement is false,
that's the worst thing you can say about it.  You don't
need to say that it's heretical.  And if it isn't false, it
shouldn't be suppressed.  So when you see statements being
attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of
x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that
something is wrong.  When you hear such labels being used,
ask why.
Especially if you hear yourself using them.  It's not just
the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance.  You need to be
able to watch your own thoughts from a distance.  That's not
a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between
children and adults.  When a child gets angry because he's
tired, he doesn't know what's happening.  An adult can
distance himself enough from the
situation to say "never mind, I'm just tired."  I don't
see why one couldn't, by a similar process, learn to
recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions.
You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly.
But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs
instead of with them.  Everyone encourages you to grow up to the
point where you can discount your own bad moods.  Few encourage
you to continue to the point where you can discount society's bad
moods.
How can you see the wave, when you're the water?  Always be
questioning.  That's the only defence.  What can't you say?  And why?
Notes
Thanks
to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Eric Raymond and Bob van der Zwaan for reading drafts of this
essay, and to Lisa Randall, Jackie McDonough, Ryan Stanley and Joel Rainey
for conversations about heresy.
Needless to say they bear no blame for opinions
expressed in it, and especially for opinions
not
expressed in it.
Re: What You Can't Say
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