The Lesson to Unlearn
December 2019
The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you
learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.
When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student
once told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only
what he learned in it. This stuck in my mind because it was the
only time I ever heard anyone say such a thing.
For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning
completely dominated actual learning in college.  I was fairly
earnest; I was genuinely interested in most of the classes I took,
and I worked hard. And yet I worked by far the hardest when I was
studying for a test.
In theory, tests are merely what their name implies: tests of what
you've learned in the class. In theory you shouldn't have to prepare
for a test in a class any more than you have to prepare for a blood
test. In theory you learn from taking the class, from going to the
lectures and doing the reading and/or assignments, and the test
that comes afterward merely measures how well you learned.
In practice, as almost everyone reading this will know, things are
so different that hearing this explanation of how classes and tests
are meant to work is like hearing the etymology of a word whose
meaning has changed completely. In practice, the phrase "studying
for a test" was almost redundant, because that was when one really
studied.  The difference between diligent and slack students was
that the former studied hard for tests and the latter didn't.  No
one was pulling all-nighters two weeks into the semester.
Even though I was a diligent student, almost all the work I did in
school was aimed at getting a good grade on something.
To many people, it would seem strange that the preceding sentence
has a "though" in it. Aren't I merely stating a tautology? Isn't
that what a diligent student is, a straight-A student? That's how
deeply the conflation of learning with grades has infused our
culture.
Is it so bad if learning is conflated with grades?  Yes, it is bad.
And it wasn't till decades after college, when I was running Y Combinator, that I realized how bad it is.
I knew of course when I was a student that studying for a test is
far from identical with actual learning. At the very least, you
don't retain knowledge you cram into your head the night before an
exam. But the problem is worse than that. The real problem is that
most tests don't come close to measuring what they're supposed to.
If tests truly were tests of learning, things wouldn't be so bad.
Getting good grades and learning would converge, just a little late.
The problem is that nearly all tests given to students are terribly
hackable. Most people who've gotten good grades know this, and know
it so well they've ceased even to question it.  You'll see when you
realize how naive it sounds to act otherwise.
Suppose you're taking a class on medieval history and the final
exam is coming up. The final exam is supposed to be a test of your
knowledge of medieval history, right? So if you have a couple days
between now and the exam, surely the best way to spend the time,
if you want to do well on the exam, is to read the best books you
can find about medieval history. Then you'll know a lot about it,
and do well on the exam.
No, no, no, experienced students are saying to themselves.  If you
merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you
learned wouldn't be on the test.  It's not good books you want to
read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class.
And even most of that you can ignore, because you only have to worry
about the sort of thing that could turn up as a test question.
You're looking for sharply-defined chunks of information. If one
of the assigned readings has an interesting digression on some
subtle point, you can safely ignore that, because it's not the sort
of thing that could be turned into a test question.  But if the
professor tells you that there were three underlying causes of the
Schism of 1378, or three main consequences of the Black Death, you'd
better know them. And whether they were in fact the causes or
consequences is beside the point.  For the purposes of this class
they are.
At a university there are often copies of old exams floating around,
and these narrow still further what you have to learn. As well as
learning what kind of questions this professor asks, you'll often
get actual exam questions. Many professors re-use them.  After
teaching a class for 10 years, it would be hard not to, at least
inadvertently.
In some classes, your professor will have had some sort of political
axe to grind, and if so you'll have to grind it too. The need for
this varies. In classes in math or the hard sciences or engineering
it's rarely necessary, but at the other end of the spectrum there
are classes where you couldn't get a good grade without it.
Getting a good grade in a class on x is so different from learning
a lot about x that you have to choose one or the other, and you
can't blame students if they choose grades.  Everyone judges them
by their grades  graduate programs, employers, scholarships, even
their own parents.
I liked learning, and I really enjoyed some of the papers and
programs I wrote in college. But did I ever, after turning in a
paper in some class, sit down and write another just for fun? Of
course not. I had things due in other classes. If it ever came to
a choice of learning or grades, I chose grades. I hadn't come to
college to do badly.
Anyone who cares about getting good grades has to play this game,
or they'll be surpassed by those who do. And at elite universities,
that means nearly everyone, since someone who didn't care about
getting good grades probably wouldn't be there in the first place.
The result is that students compete to maximize the difference
between learning and getting good grades.
Why are tests so bad? More precisely, why are they so hackable?
Any experienced programmer could answer that. How hackable is
software whose author hasn't paid any attention to preventing it
from being hacked? Usually it's as porous as a colander.
Hackable is the default for any test imposed by an authority. The
reason the tests you're given are so consistently bad  so consistently
far from measuring what they're supposed to measure  is simply
that the people creating them haven't made much effort to prevent
them from being hacked.
But you can't blame teachers if their tests are hackable. Their job
is to teach, not to create unhackable tests. The real problem is
grades, or more precisely, that grades have been overloaded. If
grades were merely a way for teachers to tell students what they
were doing right and wrong, like a coach giving advice to an athlete,
students wouldn't be tempted to hack tests. But unfortunately after
a certain age grades become more than advice. After a certain age,
whenever you're being taught, you're usually also being judged.
I've used college tests as an example, but those are actually the
least hackable. All the tests most students take their whole lives
are at least as bad, including, most spectacularly of all, the test
that gets them into college. If getting into college were merely a
matter of having the quality of one's mind measured by admissions
officers the way scientists measure the mass of an object, we could
tell teenage kids "learn a lot" and leave it at that.  You can tell
how bad college admissions are, as a test, from how unlike high
school that sounds. In practice, the freakishly specific nature of
the stuff ambitious kids have to do in high school is directly
proportionate to the hackability of college admissions.  The classes
you don't care about that are mostly memorization, the random
"extracurricular activities" you have to participate in to show
you're "well-rounded," the standardized tests as artificial as
chess, the "essay" you have to write that's presumably meant to hit
some very specific target, but you're not told what.
As well as being bad in what it does to kids, this test is also bad
in the sense of being very hackable. So hackable that whole industries
have grown up to hack it. This is the explicit purpose of test-prep
companies and admissions counsellors, but it's also a significant
part of the function of private schools.
Why is this particular test so hackable? I think because of what
it's measuring. Although the popular story is that the way to get
into a good college is to be really smart, admissions officers at
elite colleges neither are, nor claim to be, looking only for that.
What are they looking for?  They're looking for people who are not
simply smart, but admirable in some more general sense.  And how
is this more general admirableness measured?  The admissions officers
feel it. In other words, they accept who they like.
So what college admissions is a test of is whether you suit the
taste of some group of people. Well, of course a test like that is
going to be hackable. And because it's both very hackable and there's
(thought to be) a lot at stake, it's hacked like nothing else.
That's why it distorts your life so much for so long.
It's no wonder high school students often feel alienated. The shape
of their lives is completely artificial.
But wasting your time is not the worst thing the educational system
does to you. The worst thing it does is to train you that the way
to win is by hacking bad tests.  This is a much subtler problem
that I didn't recognize until I saw it happening to other people.
When I started advising startup founders at Y Combinator, especially
young ones, I was puzzled by the way they always seemed to make
things overcomplicated. How, they would ask, do you raise money?
What's the trick for making venture capitalists want to invest in
you? The best way to make VCs want to invest in you, I would explain,
is to actually be a good investment. Even if you could trick VCs
into investing in a bad startup, you'd be tricking yourselves too.
You're investing time in the same company you're asking them to
invest money in. If it's not a good investment, why are you even
doing it?
Oh, they'd say, and then after a pause to digest this revelation,
they'd ask: What makes a startup a good investment?
So I would explain that what makes a startup promising, not just
in the eyes of investors but in fact, is
growth
.
Ideally in revenue,
but failing that in usage. What they needed to do was get lots of
users.
How does one get lots of users? They had all kinds of ideas about
that. They needed to do a big launch that would get them "exposure."
They needed influential people to talk about them. They even knew
they needed to launch on a tuesday, because that's when one gets
the most attention.
No, I would explain, that is not how to get lots of users. The way
you get lots of users is to make the product really great. Then
people will not only use it but recommend it to their friends, so
your growth will be exponential once you
get it started
.
At this point I've told the founders something you'd think would
be completely obvious: that they should make a good company by
making a good product. And yet their reaction would be something
like the reaction many physicists must have had when they first
heard about the theory of relativity: a mixture of astonishment at
its apparent genius, combined with a suspicion that anything so
weird couldn't possibly be right. Ok, they would say, dutifully.
And could you introduce us to such-and-such influential person? And
remember, we want to launch on Tuesday.
It would sometimes take founders years to grasp these simple lessons.
And not because they were lazy or stupid. They just seemed blind
to what was right in front of them.
Why, I would ask myself, do they always make things so complicated?
And then one day I realized this was not a rhetorical question.
Why did founders tie themselves in knots doing the wrong things
when the answer was right in front of them? Because that was what
they'd been trained to do. Their education had taught them that the
way to win was to hack the test. And without even telling them they
were being trained to do this. The younger ones, the recent graduates,
had never faced a non-artificial test. They thought this was just
how the world worked: that the first thing you did, when facing any
kind of challenge, was to figure out what the trick was for hacking
the test. That's why the conversation would always start with how
to raise money, because that read as the test. It came at the end
of YC. It had numbers attached to it, and higher numbers seemed to
be better. It must be the test.
There are certainly big chunks of the world where the way to win
is to hack the test. This phenomenon isn't limited to schools.  And
some people, either due to ideology or ignorance, claim that this
is true of startups too. But it isn't. In fact, one of the most
striking things about startups is the degree to which you win by
simply doing good work. There are edge cases, as there are in
anything, but in general you win by getting users, and what users
care about is whether the product does what they want.
Why did it take me so long to understand why founders made startups
overcomplicated? Because I hadn't realized explicitly that schools
train us to win by hacking bad tests. And not just them, but me!
I'd been trained to hack bad tests too, and hadn't realized it till
decades later.
I had lived as if I realized it, but without knowing why. For
example, I had avoided working for big companies. But if you'd asked
why, I'd have said it was because they were bogus, or bureaucratic.
Or just yuck. I never understood how much of my dislike of big
companies was due to the fact that you win by hacking bad tests.
Similarly, the fact that the tests were unhackable was a lot of
what attracted me to startups. But again, I hadn't realized that
explicitly.
I had in effect achieved by successive approximations something
that may have a closed-form solution.  I had gradually undone my
training in hacking bad tests without knowing I was doing it.  Could
someone coming out of school banish this demon just by knowing its
name, and saying begone? It seems worth trying.
Merely talking explicitly about this phenomenon is likely to make
things better, because much of its power comes from the fact that
we take it for granted. After you've noticed it, it seems the
elephant in the room, but it's a pretty well camouflaged elephant.
The phenomenon is so old, and so pervasive. And it's simply the
result of neglect. No one meant things to be this way. This is just
what happens when you combine learning with grades, competition,
and the naive assumption of unhackability.
It was mind-blowing to realize that two of the things I'd puzzled
about the most  the bogusness of high school, and the difficulty
of getting founders to see the obvious  both had the same cause.
It's rare for such a big block to slide into place so late.
Usually when that happens it has implications in a lot of different
areas, and this case seems no exception. For example, it suggests
both that education could be done better, and how you might fix it.
But it also suggests a potential answer to the question all big
companies seem to have: how can we be more like a startup? I'm not
going to chase down all the implications now. What I want to focus
on here is what it means for individuals.
To start with, it means that most ambitious kids graduating from
college have something they may want to unlearn.  But it also changes
how you look at the world. Instead of looking at all the different
kinds of work people do and thinking of them vaguely as more or
less appealing, you can now ask a very specific question that will
sort them in an interesting way: to what extent do you win at this
kind of work by hacking bad tests?
It would help if there was a way to recognize bad tests quickly.
Is there a pattern here? It turns out there is.
Tests can be divided into two kinds: those that are imposed by
authorities, and those that aren't.  Tests that aren't imposed by
authorities are inherently unhackable, in the sense that no one is
claiming they're tests of anything more than they actually test. A
football match, for example, is simply a test of who wins, not which
team is better. You can tell that from the fact that commentators
sometimes say afterward that the better team won. Whereas tests
imposed by authorities are usually proxies for something else. A
test in a class is supposed to measure not just how well you did
on that particular test, but how much you learned in the class.
While tests that aren't imposed by authorities are inherently
unhackable, those imposed by authorities have to be made unhackable.
Usually they aren't.  So as a first approximation, bad tests are
roughly equivalent to tests imposed by authorities.
You might actually like to win by hacking bad tests. Presumably
some people do. But I bet most people who find themselves doing
this kind of work don't like it. They just take it for granted that
this is how the world works, unless you want to drop out and be
some kind of hippie artisan.
I suspect many people implicitly assume that working in a
field with bad tests is the price of making lots of money. But that,
I can tell you, is false. It used to be true. In the mid-twentieth
century, when the economy was
composed of oligopolies
,
the only way
to the top was by playing their game. But it's not true now.  There
are now ways to get rich by doing good work, and that's part of the
reason people are so much more excited about getting rich than they
used to be. When I was a kid, you could either become an engineer
and make cool things, or make lots of money by becoming an "executive."
Now you can make lots of money by making cool things.
Hacking bad tests is becoming less important as the link between
work and authority erodes. The erosion of that link is one of the
most important trends happening now, and we see its effects in
almost every kind of work people do. Startups are one of the most
visible examples, but we see much the same thing in writing. Writers
no longer have to submit to publishers and editors to reach readers;
now they can go direct.
The more I think about this question, the more optimistic I get.
This seems one of those situations where we don't realize how much
something was holding us back until it's eliminated. And I can
foresee the whole bogus edifice crumbling. Imagine what happens as
more and more people start to ask themselves if they want to win
by hacking bad tests, and decide that they don't.  The kinds of
work where you win by hacking bad tests will be starved of talent,
and the kinds where you win by doing good work will see an influx
of the most ambitious people. And as hacking bad tests shrinks in
importance, education will evolve to stop training us to do it.
Imagine what the world could look like if that happened.
This is not just a lesson for individuals to unlearn, but one for
society to unlearn, and we'll be amazed at the energy that's liberated
when we do.
Notes
[1] If using tests only to measure learning sounds impossibly
utopian, that is already the way things work at Lambda School.
Lambda School doesn't have grades. You either graduate or you don't.
The only purpose of tests is to decide at each stage of the curriculum
whether you can continue to the next. So in effect the whole school
is pass/fail.
[2] If the final exam consisted of a long conversation with the
professor, you could prepare for it by reading good books on medieval
history. A lot of the hackability of tests in schools is due to the
fact that the same test has to be given to large numbers of students.
[3] Learning is the naive algorithm for getting good grades.
[4]
Hacking
has
multiple senses. There's a narrow sense in which
it means to compromise something. That's the sense in which one
hacks a bad test. But there's another, more general sense, meaning
to find a surprising solution to a problem, often by thinking
differently about it. Hacking in this sense is a wonderful thing.
And indeed, some of the hacks people use on bad tests are impressively
ingenious; the problem is not so much the hacking as that, because
the tests are hackable, they don't test what they're meant to.
[5] The people who pick startups at Y Combinator are similar to
admissions officers, except that instead of being arbitrary, their
acceptance criteria are trained by a very tight feedback loop. If
you accept a bad startup or reject a good one, you will usually know it
within a year or two at the latest, and often within a month.
[6] I'm sure admissions officers are tired of reading applications
from kids who seem to have no personality beyond being willing to
seem however they're supposed to seem to get accepted.  What they
don't realize is that they are, in a sense, looking in a mirror.
The lack of authenticity in the applicants is a reflection of the
arbitrariness of the application process. A dictator might just as
well complain about the lack of authenticity in the people around
him.
[7] By good work, I don't mean morally good, but good in the sense
in which a good craftsman does good work.
[8] There are borderline cases where it's hard to say which category
a test falls in. For example, is raising venture capital like college
admissions, or is it like selling to a customer?
[9] Note that a good test is merely one that's unhackable. Good
here doesn't mean morally good, but good in the sense of working
well. The difference between fields with bad tests and good ones
is not that the former are bad and the latter are good, but that
the former are bogus and the latter aren't. But those two measures
are not unrelated.  As Tara Ploughman said, the path from good to
evil goes through bogus.
[10] People who think the recent increase in
economic inequality
is
due to changes in tax policy seem very naive to anyone with experience
in startups. Different people are getting rich now than used to,
and they're getting much richer than mere tax savings could make
them.
[11] Note to tiger parents: you may think you're training your kids
to win, but if you're training them to win by hacking bad tests,
you are, as parents so often do, training them to fight the last
war.
Thanks
to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison,
Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Harj Taggar for reading
drafts of this.
Russian Translation
Arabic Translation
Swedish Translation


@X_FedericoX @growing_daniel When they were having their pictures taken.

If you want to feel hopeful about the future, this is a great account to follow.

@levelerai @growing_daniel The best people aren't looking for jobs.

@ahistoryinart Somerville and Ross write about it in the Irish RM.

@nizzyabi This is the trough of sorrow.

@growing_daniel If suits made you think better, people would put them on when they needed to solve hard problems. But in fact it's the opposite. When you need to solve a hard problem, you wear your most comfortable, least constraining clothes.

@RepThomasMassie You now have a national reputation.

@richardmcj Whoah, this must be a record for depth.

@thewillbaron If there's one thing history shows, it's that persecuting comedians who mock the head of state is _always_ on the wrong side of history.

@jessegenet Not giving a company your money is a very effective way to make a point about your opinion of them.


@whatifalthist Your children.

@johnmsides Already there.

How many Olympic medallists even know why one would bite a medal?

I bet few do. And for the rest it must seem such a bizarrely pointless thing to do.

Occasionally I check the profiles of random people who reply to me, and often 20 out of 20 of the last tweets they've posted are about politics. They can't all be bots, and yet how can there be so many people who have nothing to say about any other topic?

@NNunnelee I didn't at the time, but I was willing to risk being early if it helped increase the likelihood that he'd withdraw.

This aged well.

@mattyglesias I don't think he's lying for personal gain. I just think his opinions have extremely high variability.

@MattHasTweets_ You need more fiber in your diet.

@GarettJones @JohnHCochrane Don't you think stock prices are simply a stick-slip phenomenon?

https://t.co/ZkTRDzggRp

@larper69420 He would like that picture.


Me: How much salt do you put in your tomato sauce?

Jessica: Not too much. But not too little.

Me: How long do you cook it for?

Jessica: Not too long.

This monster parsnip from our garden ended up yielding three dinners and a lunch. https://t.co/N9ZHZBYv4A

We developed a new technique for measuring the boys' heights accurately: we make them put their heels on a piece of paper, and if Jessica can pull it out, we know they're cheating.

Hard to say what's more striking, the amateurishness or the brutality.

Something that's obvious in retrospect but I only noticed after years as a primary school parent: kids who are bullies or assholes tend to have parents who are too, and this often makes it hard for the administrators to keep a lid on bad behavior.

A rare case where you don't want the logo to be too legible. https://t.co/e17vb2NkBZ

Google search autocomplete presents an alarming picture of its users. https://t.co/c8x7u12FuL

Very briefly I got a version of GMail where one email in my inbox *had* to be selected, even if there wasn't one I wanted to focus on. It was unbearably annoying. Then the feature just disappeared. Anyone else see it? Do I dare to hope it's gone?

Jessica's on the train home. What will she want for dinner? Black beans, I decided. So I made black beans. Then I checked my email and found a message from Jessica saying she'll be home soon and would I make black beans for dinner?

I'm reading Thomson's History of Chemistry, written in 1830, and it's all the more interesting because they're still just beginning to figure things out.


@Carson By their support for autocratic leaders killing large numbers of people in neighboring countries.

It's alarming to think how many people on Twitter would be supporting Germany if World War II were happening now. After Pearl Harbor nearly all the American ones would instantly go quiet, of course.

@VDHanson I can think of another way: for Russia to stop the invasion.

Why is Ukraine giving up practicable and Russia giving up not practicable? Just because Putin seems more unreasonable?

@sarmadgulzar Usually they've never consciously thought about it in those terms.

I often use this technique with founders who have some kind of specialized technical expertise. They're often genuinely surprised to learn that they're the best in the world at something.

Jessica: Sometimes I'm not sure I should call myself the social radar.

Me: Of course you should. You're the best at it.

Jessica: But I can be fooled. I'm not perfect.

Me: Is anyone else better at it?

Jessica: Probably.

Me: Do you know anyone who's better?

Jessica: No...

Newton was 46 in this picture. The Principia had been published 2 years before. https://t.co/jzo3bQ4fHq

Trick I discovered in England: when you're stuck behind something driving slow, open all your windows, and it will at least feel like you're driving faster.

If I'd commissioned this portrait, I'd be pretty unhappy about where the artist put my knees. https://t.co/NiIU7hXHe8

@rootsofprogress @foresightinst @HumanProgress @TheIHS @IFP @WorksInProgMag @patrickc @tylercowen @jasoncrawford @sapinker One day we will walk on the roofs of buildings designed by an AI Syd Mead.


@QualiaLogos Yesterday I saw someone riding a horse.

@cixliv There are still steam locomotives.

You know perfectly well what I mean.

Interesting data point about the date of Trump's mental model of the world. Television repairmen disappeared in the 1990s. https://t.co/ChzdntWCuF

@fentasyl Yeah, that's the other thing that has made the site less interesting.

@cortesi Ugh, really?

@Joe_0_ Balanced is net impoverished though, because the most interesting people tend to be on the left politically.

@PaulJeffries I think one reason they aren't willing to explain themselves is that they're not articulate enough to. They believe what they believe and that's the end of the story.

@__tzs I agree Twitter is more politically diverse now. The problem is that it's impoverished in many other topics, because the experts on these topics were disproportionately on the left. So unless you care mostly about politics (which I don't) this is a net loss.

@michael_nielsen In each room, ask which thing you'd have if they'd let you take one for free.

@nate_hannon Interesting. One should never write him off.


@rauchg Have you heard of Syd Mead?

@raahilgadhoke I don't know what high deterministic need is.

@mayacfounder Maybe, but conviction is a terrible predictor of how well a startup will do. There is an infinite supply of (usually single-founder) startups with unshakeable conviction about bad ideas.

@nwbotz Definitely not.

@sebo_gm Not even that.

@HughTang87 As I just said, it's the founders that made them stand out, not the problems that they're solving.

@p_e_cooper I said explicitly in the second tweet in the thread that it isn't.

Every experienced investor already knows this. So if you want to start a startup to work on a non-AI idea, go ahead. If you're good, good investors will see it, and those are the only ones you want to convince anyway.

The lesson to take from this is not that AI is unimportant (it's very important), but that the founders matter more than the idea. The founders are the best predictor of how a company will do, not the industry it's in.

I haven't met all the startups in the current YC batch yet, but the two most impressive companies that I've seen so far are not working on AI.


@Chris_arnade Intellectuals always think that as people get more time they'll spend it the way intellectuals would.

@LandsknechtPike Thank you, I just bought a copy.

@CompSciFact Languages shouldn't enforce levels of abstraction.

@APompliano Every national leader says that. What people are upset about are the ham-fisted things he's actually doing.

This gave Jessica one of her incapacitating fits of laughter.

@ianbremmer Brexit at least exempts the UK from regulation by the EU. That could turn out to be a net win on account of AI regulation alone. Whereas the tariffs are a pure own goal.

@planetmcd @CoreyWriting A harder SAT makes it easier for admissions officers to select applicants on the basis of intelligence and harder for them to hide it when they don't. That yields a smarter student body, and smarter students choose harder subjects.

This aged unfortunately well.

@snowmaker Sounds a lot like what used to happen with new microprocessors in the 1990s. A new processor would ship and suddenly your slow software was fast.

@roundorbit @shw1nm @hackernews Hardly ever.


@garrytan Prediction: Once all the parents in Palo Alto realize this has happened, it will get reversed very quickly.

Palo Alto parents are just about the last people in the world to tolerate something like this.

@AssalRad @nytimes The real question is not why she spoke out, but why so many others have remained silent.

"We have lifesaving supplies ready, now, at the borders. We can save hundreds of thousands of survivors."

"But Israel denies us access."

@paulmidler @BillAckman I looked it up, and the Clinton Foundation was established after Clinton left office.

@paulmidler @BillAckman How much of this money was donated while Clinton was in office?

@BillAckman If he were willing to treat the plane as if it were actually a gift to the DoD, meaning it becomes government property that they manage according to their usual procedures, then it wouldn't be such a problem. It would still be dubious, but not a bribe.

@BillAckman It would be fine if they just wanted to give us something. The dubious part is that it's supposed to be transferred to his library after he leaves office instead of remaining part of the US fleet. That makes it more of a bribe for him personally than a gift to the DoD.

@migueldeicaza Apple's being the final step.

@cremieuxrecueil It's a sign of Twitter's intellectual health that you can post this politically incorrect but in fact deeply interesting thread now. In 2020 it would have provoked the mother of all mobs.

@JoJoFromJerz Careful, or you'll be detained and questioned next time you enter the country.


Journalists don't like Occam's Razor, because it implies that events have more boring causes than the ones they'd like to write about.

@urandomd @garrytan I think what motivates it is British culture. Kindness is more prized here.

@ESYudkowsky @garrytan Our kids' school in England teaches it very successfully. The teachers teach by example, they're nearly all genuinely kind.

It's a lot of the reason we stayed here. Perhaps the single biggest reason in fact.

@garrytan I think they should put kindness first. Especially primary schools.

@hamy_ptran I never said that. I'd never add adjectives to "trust your gut." It's already a metaphor.

@christiancooper I think judging from the armor and fortifications and the drawing that it's about 100 years earlier. https://t.co/LR7zJwC8EQ

@cperciva Not to that specifically, but I did find it strange that he had decided to begin with a kind of meditation session to relax the founders, and that as a result everyone in the audience was asleep.

@michael_nielsen I think that was the goal — get information without getting attention.

Can any medieval ship experts identify these ships? As far as I can tell they seem to be early carracks, from the mid to late 15th century. https://t.co/z5UFb6HbsG

@Mr88AG @HossamShabat Not targeting households?

https://t.co/hvNiiycyOm


@jsngr They care a medium amount about it. They're not obsessed with design like Apple, but they don't want things to look bad. There are a lot of companies in this category. In fact probably most companies are, including some of the biggest ones.

@JimDMiller @pitdesi The difference — and this is a very big difference — is that in political fundraising, the money goes to the campaign, not to the candidate himself.

@pitdesi It's true. A decade ago this would have seemed like dystopian fiction. It would have been part of a Simpsons plot.

@IAPonomarenko The real winner here is the grocer's apostrophe.

@Swavity @Liv_Boeree I'm 100% sure *they* know. They'd have made sure of that.

This picture is amazing. It could be titled "Ron Conway, the Giant of Silicon Valley"

@LandsknechtPike Doesn't seem any more meager than the way Anglo-Saxon lords would have lived in 800 AD.

@Liv_Boeree If you're 95% sure deliberate obfuscation went on, that implies a 95% chance it was a lab leak, because there would be no need to hide the source of the virus if it really emerged from a wet market.

@Liv_Boeree Do you feel sure Covid escaped from a lab?

@finmoorhouse And the fact that he was driving this change himself, and doubling every 18 mos seemed like a reasonable goal to aim for.


Believe it or not, it's usually wise to walk investors through the risks involved in your startup. Investors know there's risk. If there wasn't, your valuation would be billions of dollars right now. And if you're vague about the risks you seem glib, or worse still, clueless.

@mmay3r @cremieuxrecueil Presumably my model underestimates people's capacity for intellectual dishonesty. Which is not surprising, considering that I despise this quality and have always tried to avoid people who have it.

@MacaesBruno Few, I would think. The people who think it's a good thing use other words for it.

@megannunes The editing of the latest batch of Social Radars interviews, which is apparently taking longer than expected because they're videos.

@JillFilipovic It would be very useful to put into words the difference between good and bad engaging things — between books and addictive apps.

@JillFilipovic I agree with what I think you're trying to say. I just think you need a better definition. Even this isn't good enough, because books are in fact designed by some of the world’s smartest people to capture your attention for as long as possible.

@JillFilipovic Do books count as devices designed to capture their attention and keep them as sedentary and indoors as possible? Because it sounds like that description covers books.

"I'm not going to panic now. I'll see how things go and then panic first thing tomorrow."

— Jessica

@rajatsuri People still play chess.

@cremieuxrecueil Isn't this strange? Even after all these years it still surprises me. People just invent ideas to attribute to you, and then attack you for them.


@jamesrcole @mattyglesias Probably what he means is that a lot of government spending is entitlements. I wouldn't have disputed that.

@harris I don't know. I don't think I'd ever advise a startup to delay making money in order to please investors. Investors are fickle idiots. You can't let them be your compass.

@typesfast Medieval Technology and Social Change

The Copernican Revolution

Life in the English Country House

Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy

Anabasis

The Quest for El Cid

The World We Have Lost

@pavan_rikkula I can't write actual paragraphs without it, but brief notes feel different.

@whitegoldsword Do you mean the first patented product in some specific sense? Because there were many others patented before this.

@Ricois3 @elonmusk Every superlinear graph looks like that if you stretch it vertically. That's my point.

@mattyglesias "You can't drastically reduce government spending without hurting people" implies the federal government is very efficient, and we know that's not true. It's like a big company but more so.

@SpencerHakimian FWIW that's a bad heuristic for early stage investing.

I'm taking some notes about AI and for some reason I find myself using all lowercase...

@MisaDev4 @jesslivingston @chafkin I actually understood that.


"She wasn’t looking for the next killer product, though. She was looking for people."

https://t.co/iNNewXj25H

One way Timex made their watches cheap was to cut the retail markup in half. Jewelers resisted, so they sold their watches off racks in drugstores.

Something I told 17 yo: Till their early 20s most people are so completely incapable of cooking that if you can make even basic things like pasta and scrambled eggs you'll seem to your friends like brilliant cook.

Unexpected occupational hazard: I often walk with founders while doing office hours, and today I talked to one guy for so long about potential startup ideas that we must have walked several miles.

There's a kind of feature that gets used more by accident than on purpose, and for some reason splitting screens is this kind of feature, for me at least. MacOS, vim, and now Chrome all have screen-splitting, and I only ever do it by accident.

I used to think woke mobs would be the death of Twitter. Then it seemed like right-wing goons would be. But cheery, vapid AI-generated replies seem more dangerous than either of them.

A lot of having taste about something is just caring about it enough to be honest with yourself, so that you can get past "I like what I like" to "Is this actually good?"

When I have to rewrite an essay and I know I'll want to reuse part of the previous version, I usually retype it instead of copying and pasting. I don't worry about losing anything, because I usually have it almost memorized. But I may write it a little better the second time.

This is a big deal. It's like Stripe but for moving money in and out of companies. You just call the API and Modern Treasury does the rest.

Something I told 17 yo and 13 yo: There are things on the internet that you can't unsee, and it truly is better never to have seen them.

(I don't think they believed me, but I tried.)


@grace_za This is a very important point.

@JuanIsidro You're conflating people and work. People themselves aren't commodities. You can't legally buy them. But their work is. You can buy that.

@CburgesCliff Did you mean that as a joke? Because that performance is a byword in England.

@lamg_dev Does talking of stealing someone's watch mean that watch ownership has a moral dimension?

@PSkinnerTech As soon as? Technology has been replacing human labor for millennia.

@sarmadgulzar By commodity I mean something people pay for. People will pay you for work, so it is one. If you wanted to prevent this from happening, you'd have a really hard time doing it.

@lamg_dev Well that's not true. It's possible to use tricks to prevent suppliers of any commodity from getting market price for it. Stealing it from them, for example. Slavery is one of the tricks used to prevent suppliers of labor from getting market price.

@smalera Or at least use a picture of Phil Mickelson.

@camhahu @smalera When I was a kid people used to stop me on the street and say I looked like him.

@smalera Why do you guys use these freaky looking AI generated images? There are so many real ones you could use.


@cullenroche It's not so much six months apart as one election apart.

@remusrisnov Yes. If you're making something for kids or families, for example.

@billybinion I don't even think it's political theater. I think the employees making these decisions are simply incompetent and insufficiently supervised.

@Signalman23 Not if you're disciplined. Tony Xu spends a lot of time with his family, and his startup is doing great.

@avoanjali Yes! That's the optimal solution.

Now people can say what they wish done, but it's true that they don't say it in a formal language, and I doubt they could.

@def__ai Of course. I have many times.

No one ever, when they're old, feels they spent too much time with their kids. But there are plenty of people who feel they spent too little, and this must be the bitterest kind of regret.

A founder asked my advice about combining a startup with having small children. I told him family is more important than business, and to put his kids first and cram the startup into the remaining time.

@0xfriedrich Airbnb is one.


Now that many of the top American universities have gone back to requiring standardized tests, which still don't? That might be a useful index of where the rot is deepest.

@overtquail @cremieuxrecueil The way they've always wanted to: they chose the people the admissions officers liked the most.

@AlexShulepov7 They never do.

"These are the good old days."

— Carly Simon

Stopped in to buy some food in a local shop yesterday. Felt strangely relaxed. Later I realized why: because they weren't about to close. Shops in the English countryside are always either closed, or about to.

@EricsElectrons @ValaAfshar If I ask you if you've fed the cat, you're not clever unless you reply in a way that an ordinary person couldn't fully understand?

@ValaAfshar Well that's wrong. What if the clever man is talking about something mundane?

@TravisseHansen @BrennanWoodruff @mateohh I'm careful about claiming anything in the physical world is infinite.

@BrennanWoodruff @mateohh Human wants are effectively infinite in the short term.

@mateohh Sorry, but I can't do better than inevitable in the thought outness department.


@robinhanson Mafia doesn't imply monopoly.

@alexandreforget The labels.

@rickasaurus At least it's not hardware or music.

@josephjojoe Seems to be a lot easier now.

When people say "Next time I'm not going to start an x startup," two common values of x are "hardware" and "music". But for completely different reasons: hardware is intrinsically difficult, and the music industry is mafia.

I'm not saying this is false, but CEOs in unsexy businesses have a strong incentive to emphasize how much they're using AI. We're an AI stock too!

@davidshor Does this rule only apply to TV and radio ads?

@millepun @PeterDiamandis Not many, because to get into the richest 100 you usually have to have been working on the original company for a long time.

@davidshor That's strange. Why are candidates' costs lower?

@seanm_sf @rickasaurus What Made Lisp Different: https://t.co/q6TSQNEede


Life is Short
January 2016
Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder
about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining
about its finiteness?  Would we be just as likely to feel life was
short if we lived 10 times as long?
Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stopped
wondering about it.  Then I had kids.  That gave me a way to answer
the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time,
into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year
old.  If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only
get to watch your child experience it 8 times.  And while it's
impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity
like time, 8 is not a lot of something.  If you had a handful of 8
peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would
definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
Ok, so life actually is short.  Does it make any difference to know
that?
It has for me.  It means arguments of the form "Life is too short
for x" have great force.  It's not just a figure of speech to say
that life is too short for something.  It's not just a synonym for
annoying.  If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for
something, you should try to eliminate it if you can.
When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word
that pops into my head is "bullshit." I realize that answer is
somewhat tautological.  It's almost the definition of bullshit that
it's the stuff that life is too short for.  And yet bullshit does
have a distinctive character.  There's something fake about it.
It's the junk food of experience.
[
1
]
If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit,
you probably already know the answer.  Unnecessary meetings, pointless
disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's
mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.
There are two ways this kind of thing gets into your life: it's
either forced on you, or it tricks you.  To some extent you have to
put up with the bullshit forced on you by circumstances.  You need
to make money, and making money consists mostly of errands.  Indeed,
the law of supply and demand ensures that: the more rewarding some
kind of work is, the cheaper people will do it.  It may be that
less bullshit is forced on you than you think, though.  There has
always been a stream of people who opt out of the default grind and
go live somewhere where opportunities are fewer in the conventional
sense, but life feels more authentic.  This could become more common.
You can do it on a smaller scale without moving.  The amount of
time you have to spend on bullshit varies between employers.  Most
large organizations (and many small ones) are steeped in it.  But
if you consciously prioritize bullshit avoidance over other factors
like money and prestige, you can probably find employers that will
waste less of your time.
If you're a freelancer or a small company, you can do this at the
level of individual customers.  If you fire or avoid toxic customers,
you can decrease the amount of bullshit in your life by more than
you decrease your income.
But while some amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you, the
bullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking you is no one's
fault but your own.  And yet the bullshit you choose may be harder
to eliminate than the bullshit that's forced on you.  Things that
lure you into wasting your time have to be really good at
tricking you.  An example that will be familiar to a lot of people
is arguing online.  When someone
contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty
overtly.  Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself.  But
like a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world we
now live in.  Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of
the time not to defend yourself.  Otherwise these people are literally
taking your life.
[
2
]
Arguing online is only incidentally addictive. There are more
dangerous things than that. As I've written before, one byproduct
of technical progress is that things we like tend to become
more
addictive
.  Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious
effort to avoid addictions  to stand outside ourselves and ask "is
this how I want to be spending my time?"
As well as avoiding bullshit, one should actively seek out things
that matter.  But different things matter to different people, and
most have to learn what matters to them.  A few are lucky and realize
early on that they love math or taking care of animals or writing,
and then figure out a way to spend a lot of time doing it.  But
most people start out with a life that's a mix of things that
matter and things that don't, and only gradually learn to distinguish
between them.
For the young especially, much of this confusion is induced by the
artificial situations they find themselves in. In middle school and
high school, what the other kids think of you seems the most important
thing in the world.  But when you ask adults what they got wrong
at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids
thought of them.
One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask
yourself whether you'll care about it in the future.  Fake stuff
that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter.  That's
how it tricks you.  The area under the curve is small, but its shape
jabs into your consciousness like a pin.
The things that matter aren't necessarily the ones people would
call "important."  Having coffee with a friend matters.  You won't
feel later like that was a waste of time.
One great thing about having small children is that they make you
spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as
you're staring at your phone and say "will you play with me?" And
odds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option.
If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by
surprise. And that is just what tends to happen.  You take things
for granted, and then they're gone.  You think you can always write
that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize
the window has closed.  The saddest windows close when other people
die. Their lives are short too.  After my mother died, I wished I'd
spent more time with her.  I lived as if she'd always be there.
And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion.  But an
illusion it was. I think a lot of people make the same mistake I
did.
The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to
be consciously aware of it.  Back when life was more precarious,
people used to be aware of death to a degree that would now seem a
bit morbid.  I'm not sure why, but it doesn't seem the right answer
to be constantly reminding oneself of the grim reaper hovering at
everyone's shoulder.  Perhaps a better solution is to look at the
problem from the other end. Cultivate a habit of impatience about
the things you most want to do. Don't wait before climbing that
mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother.  You don't
need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait.
Just don't wait.
I can think of two more things one does when one doesn't have much
of something: try to get more of it, and savor what one has.  Both
make sense here.
How you live affects how long you live.  Most people could do better.
Me among them.
But you can probably get even more effect by paying closer attention
to the time you have.  It's easy to let the days rush by.  The
"flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin
that prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry
of errands and alarms.  One of the most striking things I've read
was not in a book, but the title of one: James Salter's
Burning
the Days
.
It is possible to slow time somewhat. I've gotten better at it.
Kids help.  When you have small children, there are a lot of moments
so perfect that you can't help noticing.
It does help too to feel that you've squeezed everything out of
some experience.  The reason I'm sad about my mother is not just
that I miss her but that I think of all the things we could have
done that we didn't.  My oldest son will be 7 soon.  And while I
miss the 3 year old version of him, I at least don't have any regrets
over what might have been.  We had the best time a daddy and a 3
year old ever had.
Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter,
and savor the time you have.  That's what you do when life is short.
Notes
[
1
]
At first I didn't like it that the word that came to mind was
one that had other meanings.  But then I realized the other meanings
are fairly closely related.  Bullshit in the sense of things you
waste your time on is a lot like intellectual bullshit.
[
2
]
I chose this example deliberately as a note to self.  I get
attacked a lot online.  People tell the craziest lies about me.
And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the
natural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!"
Thanks
to Jessica Livingston and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts
of this.
Korean Translation
Japanese Translation
Chinese Translation


One of my favorite videos. https://t.co/QFkEQBqGgz

@noclador They only have to pretend to care about his wishes though.

@AliceFromQueens If you consistently uphold the same principles and the government swings back and forth from left to right, then you'll seem to be alternately on the right and the left.

@Austen @gauntletai Do Lambda School's haters include Gauntlet in what they hate?

@tarksmarks44 @Big_Picture_89 This is how counterexamples work.

@jbensamo @BasicOptimism In other words, what everyone who criticizes Israeli policy is accused of.

@OpinionsMove Did Rumeysa Ozturk threaten or harass other students?

@BasicOptimism What law did Rumeysa Ozturk break?

@Big_Picture_89 In what way did Rumeysa Ozturk display hostility toward the US?

@0xjck They never truly supported freedom of speech.


Alien Truth
October 2022
If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd
share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics
would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for
the truths of physics; the mass of a carbon atom would be the same
on their planet. But I think we'd share other truths with aliens
besides the truths of math and physics, and that it would be
worthwhile to think about what these might be.
For example, I think we'd share the principle that a controlled
experiment testing some hypothesis entitles us to have proportionally
increased belief in it. It seems fairly likely, too, that it would
be true for aliens that one can get better at something by practicing.
We'd probably share Occam's razor. There doesn't seem anything
specifically human about any of these ideas.
We can only guess, of course. We can't say for sure what forms
intelligent life might take. Nor is it my goal here to explore that
question, interesting though it is. The point of the idea of alien
truth is not that it gives us a way to speculate about what forms
intelligent life might take, but that it gives us a threshold, or
more precisely a target, for truth. If you're trying to find the
most general truths short of those of math or physics, then presumably
they'll be those we'd share in common with other forms of intelligent
life.
Alien truth will work best as a heuristic if we err on the side of
generosity. If an idea might plausibly be relevant to aliens, that's
enough. Justice, for example. I wouldn't want to bet that all
intelligent beings would understand the concept of justice, but I
wouldn't want to bet against it either.
The idea of alien truth is related to Erdos's idea of God's book.
He used to describe a particularly good proof as being in God's
book, the implication being (a) that a sufficiently good proof was
more discovered than invented, and (b) that its goodness would be
universally recognized. If there's such a thing as alien truth,
then there's more in God's book than math.
What should we call the search for alien truth? The obvious choice
is "philosophy." Whatever else philosophy includes, it should
probably include this. I'm fairly sure Aristotle would have thought
so. One could even make the case that the search for alien truth
is, if not an accurate description
of
philosophy, a good
definition
for
it. I.e. that it's what people who call
themselves philosophers should be doing, whether or not they currently
are. But I'm not wedded to that; doing it is what matters, not what
we call it.
We may one day have something like alien life among us in the form
of AIs. And that may in turn allow us to be precise about what
truths an intelligent being would have to share with us. We might
find, for example, that it's impossible to create something we'd
consider intelligent that doesn't use Occam's razor. We might one
day even be able to prove that. But though this sort of research
would be very interesting, it's not necessary for our purposes, or
even the same field; the goal of philosophy, if we're going to call it that, would be
to see what ideas we come up with using alien truth as a target,
not to say precisely where the threshold of it is. Those two questions might one
day converge, but they'll converge from quite different directions,
and till they do, it would be too constraining to restrict ourselves
to thinking only about things we're certain would be alien truths.
Especially since this will probably be one of those areas where the
best guesses turn out to be surprisingly close to optimal. (Let's
see if that one does.)
Whatever we call it, the attempt to discover alien truths would be
a worthwhile undertaking. And curiously enough, that is itself
probably an alien truth.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Greg Brockman,
Patrick Collison, Robert Morris, and Michael Nielsen for reading drafts of this.


How to Think for Yourself
November 2020
There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking
differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for
example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be
both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other
people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized
yet.
The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market
investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of
other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already
reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable
insights are the ones most other investors don't share.
You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to
start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea,
or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do
something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but
that you know isn't  like writing software for a tiny computer
used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people
rent airbeds on strangers' floors.
Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already
knew would be boring. You have to tell them something
new
.
But this pattern isn't universal. In fact, it doesn't hold for most
kinds of work. In most kinds of work  to be an administrator, for
example  all you need is the first half. All you need is to be
right. It's not essential that everyone else be wrong.
There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but in
practice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of
work where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds
where it's not.
I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid,
because it's one of the most important things to think about when
you're deciding what kind of work you want to do. Do you want to
do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently
from everyone else? I suspect most people's unconscious mind will
answer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to.
I know mine does.
Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than
nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're
going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're
going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're
naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a
headwind if you try to do original research.
One difficulty here, though, is that people are often mistaken about
where they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded.
Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as
conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them
as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a
coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'. And
the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different
their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state
them publicly.
[
1
]
By the time they reach adulthood, most people know roughly how smart
they are (in the narrow sense of ability to solve pre-set problems),
because they're constantly being tested and ranked according to it.
But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness, except to the
extent they try to suppress it. So we don't get anything like the
same kind of feedback about how independent-minded we are.
There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work, where
the most conventional-minded people are confident that they're
independent-minded, while the genuinely independent-minded worry
they might not be independent-minded enough.
___________
Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This
quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify
it, or at least not to suppress it.
One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally
by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs
are. It's hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you're
supposed to conform to. Though again, it may be that such people
already are independent-minded. A conventional-minded person would
probably feel anxious not knowing what other people thought, and
make more effort to find out.
It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded
by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you
can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have.
But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll
have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising
things will encourage you to, and to think of more.
Because the independent-minded find it uncomfortable to be surrounded
by conventional-minded people, they tend to self-segregate once
they have a chance to. The problem with high school is that they
haven't yet had a chance to. Plus high school tends to be an
inward-looking little world whose inhabitants lack confidence, both
of which magnify the forces of conformism.  So high school is
often a
bad time
for the
independent-minded. But there is some advantage even here: it
teaches you what to avoid. If you later find yourself in a situation
that makes you think "this is like high school," you know you should
get out.
[
2
]
Another place where the independent- and conventional-minded are
thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early
employees are almost always independent-minded; otherwise the startup
wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly
outnumber independent-minded ones, so as the company grows, the
original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted.
This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the
company starts to suck. One of the strangest is that the founders
find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other
companies than with their own employees.
[
3
]
Fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded
people. It's enough to have one or two you can talk to regularly.
And once you find them, they're usually as eager to talk as you
are; they need you too. Although universities no longer have the
kind of monopoly they used to have on education, good universities
are still an excellent way to meet independent-minded people. Most
students will still be conventional-minded, but you'll at least
find clumps of independent-minded ones, rather than the near zero
you may have found in high school.
It also works to go in the other direction: as well as cultivating
a small collection of independent-minded friends, to try to meet
as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the
influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups
of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you can
often import ideas from one to another.
But by different types of people, I don't mean demographically
different. For this technique to work, they have to think differently.
So while it's an excellent idea to go and visit other countries,
you can probably find people who think differently right around the
corner. When I meet someone who knows a lot about something unusual
(which includes practically everyone, if you dig deep enough), I
try to learn what they know that other people don't. There are
almost always surprises here. It's a good way to make conversation
when you meet strangers, but I don't do it to make conversation.
I really want to know.
You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space,
by reading history. When I read history I do it not just to learn
what happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people who
lived in the past. How did things look to them? This is hard to do,
but worth the effort for the same reason it's worth travelling far
to triangulate a point.
You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from
automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is
to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say
something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out
loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to
you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take
upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later
turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is
not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new
ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones. So this game
should be an exciting quest for novelty, not a boring protocol for
intellectual hygiene. And you'll be surprised, when you start asking
"Is this true?", how often the answer is not an immediate yes. If
you have any imagination, you're more likely to have too many leads
to follow than too few.
More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your
head unexamined, and things don't always enter your head in the
form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit.
How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how
other people get their ideas.
When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideas
spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are
in fashion: you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt,
and then more and more, until half the people around you are wearing
the same shirt. You may not care much what you wear, but there are
intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate
in those. Not just because you want sovereignty over your own
thoughts, but because
unfashionable
ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting.
The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is
looking.
[
4
]
___________
To go beyond this general advice, we need to look at the internal
structure of independent-mindedness  at the individual muscles
we need to exercise, as it were. It seems to me that it has three
components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told
what to think, and curiosity.
Fastidiousness about truth means more than just not believing things
that are false. It means being careful about degree of belief. For
most people, degree of belief rushes unexamined toward the extremes:
the unlikely becomes impossible, and the probable becomes certain.
[
5
]
To the independent-minded, this seems unpardonably sloppy.
They're willing to have anything in their heads, from highly
speculative hypotheses to (apparent) tautologies, but on subjects
they care about, everything has to be labelled with a carefully
considered degree of belief.
[
6
]
The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which
require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and
to treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded person
that would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidious
about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a
large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.
Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can't be truly
independent-minded. It's not enough just to have resistance to being
told what to think. Those kind of people reject conventional ideas
only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories. And
since these conspiracy theories have often been manufactured to
capture them, they end up being less independent-minded than ordinary
people, because they're subject to a much more exacting master than
mere convention.
[
7
]
Can you increase your fastidiousness about truth? I would think so.
In my experience, merely thinking about something you're fastidious
about causes that fastidiousness to grow. If so, this is one of
those rare virtues we can have more of merely by wanting it. And
if it's like other forms of fastidiousness, it should also be
possible to encourage in children. I certainly got a strong dose
of it from my father.
[
8
]
The second component of independent-mindedness, resistance to being
told what to think, is the most visible of the three. But even this
is often misunderstood. The big mistake people make about it is to
think of it as a merely negative quality. The language we use
reinforces that idea. You're
un
conventional. You
don't
care
what other people think. But it's not just a kind of immunity. In
the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what
to think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but an
active
delight
in ideas that subvert
the conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better.
Some of the most novel ideas seemed at the time almost like practical
jokes. Think how often your reaction to a novel idea is to laugh.
I don't think it's because novel ideas are funny per se, but because
novelty and humor share a certain kind of surprisingness. But while
not identical, the two are close enough that there is a definite
correlation between having a sense of humor and being independent-minded
 just as there is between being humorless and being conventional-minded.
[
9
]
I don't think we can significantly increase our resistance to being
told what to think. It seems the most innate of the three components
of independent-mindedness; people who have this quality as adults
usually showed all too visible signs of it as children. But if we
can't increase our resistance to being told what to think, we can
at least shore it up, by surrounding ourselves with other
independent-minded people.
The third component of independent-mindedness, curiosity, may be
the most interesting. To the extent that we can give a brief answer
to the question of where novel ideas come from, it's curiosity. That's
what people are usually feeling before having them.
In my experience, independent-mindedness and curiosity predict one
another perfectly. Everyone I know who's independent-minded is
deeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't.
Except, curiously, children. All small children are curious. Perhaps
the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious
in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are. Whereas
the independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity, who keep
eating even after they're full.
[
10
]
The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert:
fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what to
think leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas to
fill it.
Interestingly, the three components can substitute for one another
in much the same way muscles can. If you're sufficiently fastidious
about truth, you don't need to be as resistant to being told what
to think, because fastidiousness alone will create sufficient gaps
in your knowledge. And either one can compensate for curiosity,
because if you create enough space in your brain, your discomfort
at the resulting vacuum will add force to your curiosity. Or curiosity
can compensate for them: if you're sufficiently curious, you don't
need to clear space in your brain, because the new ideas you discover
will push out the conventional ones you acquired by default.
Because the components of independent-mindedness are so interchangeable,
you can have them to varying degrees and still get the same result.
So there is not just a single model of independent-mindedness. Some
independent-minded people are openly subversive, and others are
quietly curious. They all know the secret handshake though.
Is there a way to cultivate curiosity? To start with, you want to
avoid situations that suppress it. How much does the work you're
currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much,"
maybe you should change something.
The most important active step you can take to cultivate your
curiosity is probably to seek out the topics that engage it. Few
adults are equally curious about everything, and it doesn't seem
as if you can choose which topics interest you. So it's up to you
to
find
them. Or invent them, if
necessary.
Another way to increase your curiosity is to indulge it, by
investigating things you're interested in. Curiosity is unlike
most other appetites in this respect: indulging it tends to increase
rather than to sate it. Questions lead to more questions.
Curiosity seems to be more individual than fastidiousness about
truth or resistance to being told what to think. To the degree
people have the latter two, they're usually pretty general, whereas
different people can be curious about very different things. So
perhaps curiosity is the compass here. Perhaps, if your goal is to
discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love"
so much as "do what you're curious about."
Notes
[
1
]
One convenient consequence of the fact that no one identifies
as conventional-minded is that you can say what you like about
conventional-minded people without getting in too much trouble.
When I wrote
"The Four Quadrants of
Conformism"
I expected a firestorm of rage from the
aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted.
They sensed that there was something about the essay that they
disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific
passage to pin it on.
[
2
]
When I ask myself what in my life is like high school, the
answer is Twitter. It's not just full of conventional-minded people,
as anything its size will inevitably be, but subject to violent
storms of conventional-mindedness that remind me of descriptions
of Jupiter. But while it probably is a net loss to spend time there,
it has at least made me think more about the distinction between
independent- and conventional-mindedness, which I probably wouldn't
have done otherwise.
[
3
]
The decrease in independent-mindedness in growing startups is
still an open problem, but there may be solutions.
Founders can delay the problem by making a conscious effort only
to hire independent-minded people. Which of course also has the
ancillary benefit that they have better ideas.
Another possible solution is to create policies that somehow disrupt
the force of conformism, much as control rods slow chain reactions,
so that the conventional-minded aren't as dangerous. The physical
separation of Lockheed's Skunk Works may have had this as a side
benefit. Recent examples suggest employee forums like Slack may not
be an unmitigated good.
The most radical solution would be to grow revenues without growing
the company. You think hiring that junior PR person will be cheap,
compared to a programmer, but what will be the effect on the average
level of independent-mindedness in your company? (The growth in
staff relative to faculty seems to have had a similar effect on
universities.) Perhaps the rule about outsourcing work that's not
your "core competency" should be augmented by one about outsourcing
work done by people who'd ruin your culture as employees.
Some investment firms already seem to be able to grow revenues
without growing the number of employees. Automation plus the ever
increasing articulation of the "tech stack" suggest this may one
day be possible for product companies.
[
4
]
There are intellectual fashions in every field, but their
influence varies. One of the reasons politics, for example, tends
to be boring is that it's so extremely subject to them. The threshold
for having opinions about politics is much
lower
than the one for having
opinions about set theory. So while there are some ideas in politics,
in practice they tend to be swamped by waves of intellectual fashion.
[
5
]
The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength of
their opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. But
strong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Rather
the opposite.
[
6
]
Fastidiousness about truth doesn't imply that an independent-minded
person won't be dishonest, but that he won't be deluded. It's sort
of like the definition of a gentleman as someone who is never
unintentionally rude.
[
7
]
You see this especially among political extremists. They think
themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists.
Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they
are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average
person's are.
[
8
]
If we broaden the concept of fastidiousness about truth so that
it excludes pandering, bogusness, and pomposity as well as falsehood
in the strict sense, our model of independent-mindedness can expand
further into the arts.
[
9
]
This correlation is far from perfect, though. Gödel and Dirac
don't seem to have been very strong in the humor department. But
someone who is both "neurotypical" and humorless is very likely to
be conventional-minded.
[
10
]
Exception: gossip. Almost everyone is curious about gossip.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica
Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading
drafts of this.
Italian Translation


@bscholl Does that mean we can now vote Netanyahu out?

@pickover No one with kids would restart at 10.

@ThorChiggins @BasedMikeLee The first time I wasn't sure if I could trust the NY Post story that reported this. It seemed best to be cautious. But since then more evidence has emerged.

@bamboo_master_m @BasedMikeLee And his Oklahoma voter registration as a Republican, among other evidence.

@BrettYokom @BasedMikeLee The obvious reason is that they were Democrats. The hit list in his car was entirely of Democrats.

@garrytan I spoke recently at the entrepreneurship club at a high school. I couldn't quite say it openly, but I wanted to tell them they should all just be in the programming club instead.

@GavinWax If what you mean is that startup founders should get instant green cards, I couldn't agree more. In fact I proposed this 16 years ago.

https://t.co/n99oYhbcUZ

@BasedMikeLee Boelter was a conservative who voted for Trump in the last election.

@kobysoto Do you not believe this picture is real? https://t.co/1Q0NX8B9hs

@Jon_O90_ @BarthOmondi @elonmusk Ok, sure. The reason Elon is posting this now is the Boelter killing.

Goodbye.


@rauchg "A great software engineer who’s now making a killer career in sales" is a fairly accurate description of a successful startup. Except the great engineer has to keep writing software too.

@davidsirota You won't tell people what your story is about even when they ask explicitly? That has to be a new world record for burying the lede.

@rodrakic Apparently they get it less.

Cigarette sales and lung cancer deaths are the same curve, shifted 25 years. https://t.co/F7WIPNmuWr

Cancer is caused by convenience stores.

I've seen a lot of speeches and press conferences where a politician's advisors had clearly told him beforehand "you have to convince everyone that you're x," but I hadn't previously seen ones where x was "not too old," and it's pretty depressing.

@davidsirota You have buried the lede. What's this story even about?

I used to find it disconcerting that the EU seemed to be ruled by faceless bureaucrats, but it turns out to be even more disconcerting when they have faces.

@Noahpinion I guessed 2017 and I was right!

@shaig Do I have to figure out what mistake you've made or distortion you've introduced into the data, or can you just save all our time and tell us?


@RSwynar Not yet but maybe soon.

12 yo asked what people do between when they start working and when they become famous. I told him they work super hard at whatever they'll later be famous for. That's how they become famous.

@JohnDCook @electricfutures I often produce sentences almost identical to ones I've written before. It feels a bit uncanny but I don't worry about it. If essays intersect, they intersect. If I made a new essay bend to avoid this, I'd be making it worse.

@mar_hendriks @JohnDCook That's presumably a byproduct of choosing the cheapest optimizations first though.

@whyvert @MungoManic Roman spears were made with points that bent so that they couldn't be thrown back at you.

@JohnDCook Whoah, I had the exact same reaction when you first tweeted this four years ago: https://t.co/mSqn2bFwzs

@JohnDCook I wonder if there is a way to formalize this insight.

In investing, beta is volatility. Describing a founder as "high beta" means they're either going to flame out or take over the world. And at YC that translates to yes.

Jessica just interviewed Alexandr Wang for The Social Radars. She was also one of the interviewers when he applied to YC in 2016. She went and looked at the partners' notes on that interview. All said the same thing: high beta.

@_cam__mac_ They've never been open. I'd be overwhelmed.


The title of the email is "Investor Update." Talk about underpromising and overdelivering; the email itself brings the news that the company is switching from web design to a nutritional drink mix. Well, it might work...

@TomCayman It's one of the ingredients in Old Bay.

That said, it's actually pretty good. The median American dinner would be improved by a liberal sprinkling of Old Bay. It's particularly good on fried eggs.

12 yo is obsessed with Old Bay seasoning. He makes me use it in everything. The US packaging is cagy about the ingredients ("spices"), but apparently in the UK they have to list them all, and it's basically all the spices in your spice cabinet mixed together.

@SamsungMobileUS That tweet was a clumsy mistake.

If you want your stuff to last, arrange for the Swiss to capture it.

@nikitabier It doesn't assume that users will give something a second try, just that there will be a second cohort. And there invariably is a second cohort if you launch fast enough, because if you launch fast enough the only users you can get are your friends and their friends.

@Austen I told them it's because the earth is finite and if no one died we'd run out of atoms.

@CompSciFact This isn't necessarily a sign of bad design. When you use a bottom-up approach to language design, you often get emergent features. Not that C++ did.

@thomastupchurch Ah. That's a special case. And honestly you won't be missing much.


Holding a Program in One's Head
August 2007
A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it
in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working
on.  Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on
paper the way schoolchildren are taught to.  They do more in their
heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they
can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the
house you grew up in.  At its best programming is the same.  You
hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at
will.
That's particularly valuable at the start of a project, because
initially the most important thing is to be able to change what
you're doing.  Not just to solve the problem in a different way,
but to change the problem you're solving.
Your code is your understanding of the problem you're exploring.
So it's only when you have your code in your head that you really
understand the problem.
It's not easy to get a program into your head.  If you leave a
project for a few months, it can take days to really understand it
again when you return to it.  Even when you're actively working on
a program it can take half an hour to load into your head when you
start work each day.  And that's in the best case.  Ordinary
programmers working in typical office conditions never enter this
mode.  Or to put it more dramatically, ordinary programmers working
in typical office conditions never really understand the problems
they're solving.
Even the best programmers don't always have the whole program they're
working on loaded into their heads.   But there are things you can
do to help:
Avoid distractions.
Distractions are bad for many types of work,
   but especially bad for programming, because programmers tend to
   operate at the limit of the detail they can handle.
The danger of a distraction depends not on how long it is, but
   on how much it scrambles your brain.  A programmer can leave the
   office and go and get a sandwich without losing the code in his
   head.  But the wrong kind of interruption can wipe your brain
   in 30 seconds.
Oddly enough, scheduled distractions may be worse than unscheduled
   ones.  If you know you have a meeting in an hour, you don't even
   start working on something hard.
Work in long stretches.
Since there's a fixed cost each time
   you start working on a program, it's more efficient to work in
   a few long sessions than many short ones.  There will of course
   come a point where you get stupid because you're tired.  This
   varies from person to person.  I've heard of people hacking for
   36 hours straight, but the most I've ever been able to manage
   is about 18, and I work best in chunks of no more than 12.
The optimum is not the limit you can physically endure.  There's
   an advantage as well as a cost of breaking up a project.  Sometimes
   when you return to a problem after a rest, you find your unconscious
   mind has left an answer waiting for you.
Use succinct languages.
More
powerful
programming languages
   make programs shorter. And programmers seem to think of programs
   at least partially in the language they're using to write them.
   The more succinct the language, the shorter the program, and the
   easier it is to load and keep in your head.
You can magnify the effect of a powerful language by using a
   style called bottom-up programming, where you write programs in
   multiple layers, the lower ones acting as programming languages
   for those above.  If you do this right, you only have to keep
   the topmost layer in your head.
Keep rewriting your program.
Rewriting a program often yields
   a cleaner design.  But it would have advantages even if it didn't:
   you have to understand a program completely to rewrite it, so
   there is no better way to get one loaded into your head.
Write rereadable code.
All programmers know it's good to write
   readable code.  But you yourself are the most important reader.
   Especially in the beginning; a prototype is a conversation with
   yourself.  And when writing for yourself you have different
   priorities.  If you're writing for other people, you may not
   want to make code too dense.  Some parts of a program may be
   easiest to read if you spread things out, like an introductory
   textbook.  Whereas if you're writing code to make it easy to reload
   into your head, it may be best to go for brevity.
Work in small groups.
When you manipulate a program in your
   head, your vision tends to stop at the edge of the code you own.
   Other parts you don't understand as well, and more importantly,
   can't take liberties with.  So the smaller the number of
   programmers, the more completely a project can mutate.  If there's
   just one programmer, as there often is at first, you can do
   all-encompassing redesigns.
Don't have multiple people editing the same piece of code.
You
   never understand other people's code as well as your own.  No
   matter how thoroughly you've read it, you've only read it, not
   written it.  So if a piece of code is written by multiple authors,
   none of them understand it as well as a single author would.
And of course you can't safely redesign something other people
   are working on.  It's not just that you'd have to ask permission.
   You don't even let yourself think of such things.  Redesigning
   code with several authors is like changing laws; redesigning
   code you alone control is like seeing the other interpretation
   of an ambiguous image.
If you want to put several people to work on a project, divide
   it into components and give each to one person.
Start small.
A program gets easier to hold in your head as you
   become familiar with it.  You can start to treat parts as black
   boxes once you feel confident you've fully explored them.  But
   when you first start working on a project, you're forced to see
   everything.  If you start with too big a problem, you may never
   quite be able to encompass it.  So if you need to write a big,
   complex program, the best way to begin may not be to write a
   spec for it, but to write a prototype that solves a subset of
   the problem.  Whatever the advantages of planning, they're often
   outweighed by the advantages of being able to keep a program in
   your head.
It's striking how often programmers manage to hit all eight points
by accident.  Someone has an idea for a new project, but because
it's not officially sanctioned, he has to do it in off hours—which
turn out to be more productive because there are no distractions.
Driven by his enthusiasm for the new project he works on it for
many hours at a stretch.  Because it's initially just an
experiment, instead of a "production" language he uses a mere
"scripting" language—which is in fact far more powerful.  He
completely rewrites the program several times; that wouldn't be
justifiable for an official project, but this is a labor of love
and he wants it to be perfect.  And since no one is going to see
it except him, he omits any comments except the note-to-self variety.
He works in a small group perforce, because he either hasn't told
anyone else about the idea yet, or it seems so unpromising that no
one else is allowed to work on it.  Even if there is a group, they
couldn't have multiple people editing the same code, because it
changes too fast for that to be possible.  And the project starts
small because the idea
is
small at first; he just has some cool
hack he wants to try out.
Even more striking are the number of officially sanctioned projects
that manage to do
all eight things wrong
.  In fact, if you look at
the way software gets written in most organizations, it's almost
as if they were deliberately trying to do things wrong. In a sense,
they are.  One of the defining qualities of organizations since
there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable
parts.  This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting
wars.  For most of history a well-drilled army of professional
soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors,
no matter how valorous.  But having ideas is not very parallelizable.
And that's what programs are: ideas.
It's not merely true that organizations dislike the idea of depending
on individual genius, it's a tautology.  It's part of the definition
of an organization not to.  Of our current concept of an organization,
at least.
Maybe we could define a new kind of organization that combined the
efforts of individuals without requiring them to be interchangeable.
Arguably a market is such a form of organization, though it may be
more accurate to describe a market as a degenerate case—as what
you get by default when organization isn't possible.
Probably the best we'll do is some kind of hack, like making the
programming parts of an organization work differently from the rest.
Perhaps the optimal solution is for big companies not even to try
to develop ideas in house, but simply to
buy
them.  But regardless
of what the solution turns out to be, the first step is to realize
there's a problem.  There is a contradiction in the very phrase
"software company."   The two words are pulling in opposite directions.
Any good programmer in a large organization is going to be at odds
with it, because organizations are designed to prevent what
programmers strive for.
Good programmers
manage to get a lot done anyway.
But often it
requires practically an act of rebellion against the organizations
that employ them.  Perhaps it will help if more people understand that the way
programmers behave is driven by the demands of the work they do.
It's not because they're irresponsible that they work in long binges
during which they blow off all other obligations, plunge straight into
programming instead of writing specs first, and rewrite code that
already works.  It's not because they're unfriendly that they prefer
to work alone, or growl at people who pop their head in the door
to say hello.  This apparently random collection of annoying habits
has a single explanation: the power of holding a program in one's
head.
Whether or not understanding this can help large organizations, it
can certainly help their competitors.  The weakest point in big
companies is that they don't let individual programmers do great
work.  So if you're a little startup, this is the place to attack
them.  Take on the kind of problems that have to be solved in one
big brain.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev,
and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this.
Japanese Translation
Simplified Chinese Translation
Portuguese Translation
Bulgarian Translation
Russian Translation


@patrickc @IDC Paypal seems to be sniffing your butt though.

@PP_Rubens I thought Canaletto when I saw the women, but not anymore.

@RealTimeWWII Sound just like Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

@leigh22nyc Wow, hi Leigh!

@gf_256 Fortunately for you, there are other people focusing on the world of ideas and thoughts.

@testdumbass @Venice_Wes Imagine it was your baby.

@Austen I'd say: when you get so tired that you start to make mistakes.

@testdumbass @Venice_Wes People's babies aren't dying.

@jonartmir I think you meant to reply to this one: https://t.co/LK0ulaIdYG

@Austen This makes writing code oneself seem more attractive, not less.