💥Thought Shrapnel newsletter #444
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💥Thought Shrapnel newsletter #444
Curiosity, billionaires, and release valve principles
👋 Hello!
Hope you’re well, I am fair-to-middling.
Situation report: I’m composing this on Saturday morning on my laptop in the chair next to the fish tank in the dining room. It’s my wife’s birthday. The walls are bare as we’ve taken down all of the pictures in preparation for moving house. She’s insisted we get rid of the fish before we move. #sadface
I haven’t published this week’s weeknote on my blog yet, but it’ll go on there at some point this weekend. Much appreciation to those who liked, commented, or replied to last week’s newsletter. Good to know there’s people out there!
💥 Best of Thought Shrapnel
As usual, I posted 16 times at Thought Shrapnel this week. Of those, here are three to which I'd like to drag kicking and screaming into the limelight.
Curiosity and infinite detail
This is a wonderful reminder by David Cain that there’s value in retraining our childlike ability to zoom in on the myriad details in life. Not in terms of leaves and details in the physical world around us, but in terms of ideas, too.
Zooming in and out is, I guess, the essence of curiosity. As an adult, with a million things to get done, it’s easy to stay zoomed-out so that we have the bigger picture. But it ends up being a shallow life, and one susceptible to further flattening via the social media outrage machine.
If you were instructed to draw a leaf, you might draw a green, vaguely eye-shaped thing with a stem. But when you study a real leaf, say an elm leaf, it’s got much more going on than that drawing. It has rounded serrations along its edges, and the tip of each serration is the end of a raised vein, which runs from the stem in the middle. Tiny ripples span the channels between the veins, and small capillaries divide each segment into little “counties” with irregular borders. I could go on for pages.
[…]
Kids spend a lot of their time zooming their attention in like that, hunting for new details. Adults tend to stay fairly zoomed out, habitually attuned to wider patterns so they can get stuff done. The endless detail contained within the common elm leaf isn’t particularly important when you’re raking thousands of them into a bag and you still have to mow the lawn after.
[…]
Playing with resolution applies to ideas too. The higher the resolution at which you explore a topic, the more surprising and idiosyncratic it becomes. If you’ve ever made a good-faith effort to “get to the bottom” of a contentious question — Is drug prohibition justifiable? Was Napoleon an admirable figure? — you probably discovered that it’s endlessly complicated. Your original question keeps splitting into more questions. Things can be learned, and you can summarize your findings at any point, but there is no bottom.
The Information Age is clearly pushing us towards low-res conclusions on questions that warrant deep, long, high-res consideration. Consider our poor hominid brains, trying to form a coherent worldview out of monetized feeds made of low-resolution takes on the most complex topics imaginable — economic systems, climate, disease, race, sex and gender. Unsurprisingly, amidst the incredible volume of information coming at us, there’s been a surge in low-res, ideologically-driven views: the world is like this, those people are like that, X is good, Y is bad, A causes B. Not complicated, bro.
For better or worse, everything is infinitely complicated, especially those things. The conclusion-resistant nature of reality is annoying to a certain part of the adult human brain, the part that craves quick and expedient summaries. (Social media seems designed to feed, and feed on, this part.)
Source: The Truth is Always Made of Details | Raptitude
Billionaires shouldn’t exist, even if they’re philanthropists
I’m sure Charles Feeney was a great guy, and it certainly sounds like he gave the money he amassed to very good causes (and anonymously too!)
The thing to remember when reading these stories, though, is that billionaires shouldn’t exist. They make their money off the back of workers and tax loopholes. I’d challenge anyone who says otherwise to send proof.
As I’ve said many times before, if a regular person wakes up with what they think is a ‘good idea’ but is actually misguided and dangerous, then nothing much is likely to come of it. But a billionaire, by dint of their huge unearned wealth can make it happen. And recently, we’ve had an object lesson in how that can go wrong… (*cough* Musk *cough*)
Feeney was a proponent of “Giving While Living,” believing he could make more of a difference in causes he cared about while he was alive, rather than setting up a foundation after he died, according to the Atlantic Philanthropies.
“It’s much more fun to give while you are alive than to give when you are dead,” Feeney said in a biography about him, “The Billionaire Who Wasn’t.”
Feeney set up the Atlantic Philanthropies in 1982, transferring all of his business assets to it two years later, according to the foundation. In 2020, the foundation closed its doors after it said it had successfully given away all of its funds.
In total, the Atlantic Philanthropies made grants totaling $8 billion across five continents — much of it anonymously, the foundation said. Donations supported education, health care, human rights and more. Feeney’s foundation donated to infrastructure in Vietnam, universities in Ireland and medical centers devoted to finding cures for cancer and cardiovascular disease, according to the foundation’s website.
Feeney chose to live the last three decades of his life frugally, his foundation said: He did not own a car or home, preferring to live in a rented apartment in San Francisco, according to the foundation.
Source: Charles Feeney, retail entrepreneur who gave $8 billion to charity, dies at 92 | CNN Business
Pre-committed defaults
Uri from Atoms vs Bits identifies a useful trick to quell indecisiveness. They call it a ‘release valve principle’ but I like what he calls it in the body text: a pre-committed default.
Basically, it’s knowing what you’re going to do if you can’t decide on something. This can be particularly useful if you’re conflicted between short-term pain for long-term gain.
One thing that is far too easy to do is get into mental loops of indecision, where you’re weighing up options against options, never quite knowing what to do, but also not-knowing how to get out the loop.
[…]
There’s a partial solution to this which I call “release valve principles”: basically, a pre-committed default decision rule you’ll use if you haven’t decided something within a given time frame.
I watched a friend do this when we were hanging out in a big city, vaguely looking for a bookshop we could visit but helplessly scrolling through googlemaps to try to find a good one; after five minutes he said “right” and just started walking in a random direction. He said he has a principle where if he hasn’t decided after five minutes where to go he just goes somewhere, instead of spending more time deliberating.
[…]
The release valve principle is an attempt to prod yourself into doing what your long-term self prefers, without forcing you into always doing X or never doing Y – it just kicks in when you’re on the fence.
Source: Release Valve Principles | Atoms vs Bits
Image: Unsplash
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Until next week!
Thought Shrapnel Weekly is published by Dr. Doug Belshaw. You can connect with him by replying to this email, or via LinkedIn or the Fediverse.
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Currently reading
The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith
The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.
I finished Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith this week which was good, but my least favourite in the series so far.
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