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Review of The Conquest of Happiness, by Bertrand Russell

I recently finished The Conquest of Happiness, by Bertrand Russell. The book consists of Russell’s thoughts on how to live a happy life. The book was written in 1930.

  Russell’s main advice is that the secret of happiness is to be interested in lots of things, and to be open-minded about what those interests are.

He writes: “The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

Here are Russell’s thoughts on open-mindedness about interests.

“Suppose one man likes strawberries and another does not; in what respect is the latter superior? There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. What is true in this trivial instance is equally true in more important matters. The man who enjoys watching football is to that extent superior to the man who does not. The man who enjoys reading is still more superior to the man who does not, since opportunities for reading are more frequent than opportunities for watching football. The man who enjoys reading is still more superior to the man who does not, since opportunities for reading are more frequent than opportunities for watching football. The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another. Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days.

“...Think of the different things that may be noticed in the course of a country walk. One man may be interested in the birds, another in the vegetation, another in the geology, yet another in the agriculture, and so on. Any one of these things is interesting if it is interests you, and other things being equal, the man who is interested in any one of them is a man better adapted to the world than the man who is not interested.”

Continuing the topics that lots of interests are good, whatever they are, Russell writes:

“One of the most eminent of living mathematicians divides his time equally between mathematics and stamp-collecting. I imagine that the latter affords consolation at the moments where he can make no progress with the former. The difficulty of proving propositions in the theory of numbers is not the only sorry that stamp-collecting can cure, nor are stamps the only things that can be collected. Consider what a vast field of ecstasy opens before the imagination when one thinks of old china, snuffboxes, Roman coins, arrowheads, and flint implements. It is true that many of us are too “superior” for these simple pleasures. We have all experienced them in boyhood, but have thought them, for some reason, unworthy of a grown man. This is a complete mistake; any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued. For my part, I collect rivers: I derive pleasure from having gone down the Volga and up the Yangtse, and regret very much having never seen the Amazon or the Orinoco. Simple as these emotions are, I am not ashamed of them. Or consider again the passionate joy of the baseball fan: he turns to his newspaper with avidity, and the radio affords him the keenest thrills.”

“…To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”

Another fascinating insight Russell has about happiness is “To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.” Russell doesn’t elaborate on this insight as a major theme of the book, unlike his observations about having lots of interests. But I found the idea that part of being happy is not getting everything you want a deep idea. Elon Musk tweeted yesterday a similar thought:

  ​​”Two of the worst possible curses: - You will live forever - You can have anything you want”

The book is packed full of fascinating observations about life, not all of which are related to the book’s theme of happiness. Here are some of the general observations that I liked.

On getting the unconscious brain to work on problems of your choosing:

Russell details a technique for getting your unconscious mind to do useful work. The technique he writes about is fascinating, and it would be fun to read more about it.

“My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted in the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigor and intensity is put into it. Most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying deliberately, and in this way the unconscious can be led to do a lot of useful work. I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity - the greatest intensity of which I am capable - for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits.”

On eradicating beliefs that are held within the unconscious:

Russell also believes that the unconscious mind can be trained in this way for other objectives, for instance to eradicate some bias that was wired into you in childhood, and which you don’t agree with rationally, but can’t fully eradicate. He considers a case where someone was brought up with a set of ethics, and when this person examines these ethics as an adult, in the cool light of day, the adult rejects them; and yet these ethics still hold some sway over the adult’s behavior because they are wired in: “It is quite possible to overcome infantile suggestions of the unconscious, and even to change the contents of the unconscious, by employing the right kind of technique. Whenever you begin to feel remorse for an act which your reason tells you is not wicked, examine the causes of your feeling of remorse, and convince yourself in detail of their absurdity. Let your conscious beliefs be so emphatic and vivid that they make an impression upon your unconscious strong enough to cope with the impression made by your nurse or your mother when you were an infant.”

On training yourself to have more intellectual courage:

In a section on courage, Russell writes: “Courage in war has been recognized from time immemorial as an important virtue, and a great part of the training of boys and young men has been devoted to producing a type of character capable of fearlessness in battle. But moral courage and intellectual courage have been much less studied; they also, however, have their technique. Admit to yourself every day at least one painful truth; you will find this quite as useful as the Boy Scout’s daily kind action… Exercises of this sort prolonged through several years will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.”

On the contribution of work to happiness:

Russell has some thoughts about how work contributes to a happy life. The first observation he makes is rather amusing. “To begin with, work fills a good many hours of the day without the need of deciding what one shall do. Most people, when they are left free to fil their own time according to their own choice, are at a loss to think of anything sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. And whatever they decide on, they are troubled by the feeling that something else would have been pleasanter. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level. Moreover the exercise of choice is in itself tiresome. Except to people with unusual initiative it is positively agreeable to be told what to do at each hour of the day, provided th orders are not too unpleasant. Most of the idle rich suffer unspeakable boredom as the price of their freedom from drudgery. At times they may find relief by hunting big game in Africa, or by flying round the world, but the number of such sensations is limited, especially after youth is past.

“…Work therefore is desirable, first and foremost, as a preventive of boredom, for the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary though uninteresting work is nothing in comparison with the boredom that he feels when he has nothing to do with his days. With this advantage of work another is associated, namely that it makes holidays more delicious when they come. Provided a man does not have to work so hard as to impair his vigor, he is likely to find far more zest in his free time than an idle man could possibly find.” Russell also mentions the value of constructiveness in work: “There is, however, another element possessed by the best work, which is even more important as a source of happiness than is the exercise of skill. This is the element of constructiveness. In some work, though by no means in most, something is built up which remains as a monument when the work is completed.” Russell also talks about the value of consistency of purpose that can be found in work “Consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy, but it is an almost indispensable condition of a happy life. And consistent purpose embodies itself mainly in work.”

On envy as the basis for democracy:

Russell has an intriguing thesis that envy is the basis for democracy. And that intellectual theories about justice are all well and good, but they are camouflage for underlying passions that are what are actually responsible for political change:

“Envy is the basis of democracy. Heraclitus asserts that the citizens of Ephesus ought all to be hanged because they said “There shall be none first among us.” The democratic movement in Greek States must have been almost wholly inspired by this passion. And the same is true of modern democracy. There is, it is true, an idealistic theory according to which democracy is the best form of government. I think myself that this theory is true. But there is no department of practical politics where idealistic theories are strong enough to cause great changes; when great changes occur, the theories which justify them are always a camouflage for passion. And the passion that has given driving force to democratic theories is undoubtedly the passion of envy.”

On humans being happier when they were hunter-gatherers than when agriculture arrived:

Russell has a rather interesting thesis about happiness in the hunter-gatherer phase of human existence “In taking to agriculture mankind decided that it would submit to monotony and tedium in order to diminish the risk of starvation. When men obtained their food by hunting, work was a joy, as one can see from the fact that the rich still pursue these ancestral occupations for amusement. But with the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are now only being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine. It is all very well for sentimentalists to speak of contact with the soil and the ripe wisdom of Hardy’s philosophic peasants, but the one desire of every young man in the countryside is to find work in towns where he can escape from the slavery of wind and weather and the solitude of dark winter evenings into the reliable and human atmosphere of the factory and the cinema. Companionship are cooperation are essential elements in the happiness of the average man, and these are to be obtained in industry far more fully than in agriculture.”

The book is beautifully written, by a remarkable thinker. The book is full of fascinating thoughts and insights.

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Review of The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles

I recently finished The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles’ latest novel.

It is set in 1954, and the story starts off on a farm in Nebraska. One boy, Emmett, has just returned home from a juvenile detention center, where he had been carrying out an 18 month sentence for punching someone who was bullying him.

Emmett returns to his family farm, and  to his younger brother Billy. Emmett and Billy’s father recently died. Their mother ran away 10 years previously. The farm is being foreclosed upon. Emmett, age 18, has a car that he earned from doing carpentry jobs before going to the detention center.Emmett and his brother, Billy, resolve to drive to California in the hope of finding their mother there.

Two other boys, Duchess and Woolly, escaped from the juvenile detention center at the same time that Emmett was let out. Duchess and Woolly end up at Emmett’s family farm just as Emmett and Billy are planning their road trip to California. Emmett agrees to drop Duchess and Woolly off at the Greyhound bus stop the next day.

The next day, during an unscheduled stop on the way to the Greyhound bus stop, while Emmett is out of the car, Duchess and Woolly manage to steal the car, and they leave the 8 year old Billy on the sidewalk. Duchess tells Billy he is only “borrowing” the car to drive to New York, and will return it when he is done with his errand. When Emmett comes back to the sidewalk, he and Billy resolve to hop on a freight train to New York in order to retrieve the car.

What ensues is an adventure where Emmett and Billy travel to New York by freight train, meeting various characters along the way. And Duchess and Woolly travel to New York by car, also meeting various characters along the way.

I think a great novel has three qualities: great prose, great characters, and a great plot. The Lincoln Highway has great prose. Towles’s prose is mellifluous, beautiful, and occasionally wise. It reminds me of John Steinbeck’s prose, at least in its beauty.

The characters are interesting, but none of them is as great a character as Count Rostov in Towles’s prior work, A Gentleman in Moscow. This may be because, in The Lincoln Highway, there are so many characters, both main characters and secondary characters, and Towles sacrifices some depth for breadth. I also think that, in this novel, Towles did not set out to make any characters that were as likable as A Gentleman in Moscow’s Count Rostov.  Personally, I enjoy likable characters, and the more likable the better.

Much like there is a buffet of characters in the book, there is a buffet of plots and mini plots. There is a loose over-arching plot. One of Towles’s prose skills is the ability to create suspense out of ordinary situations. As you are in the grip of one of the mini-plots, there is dramatic tension: you want to know what happens next. Having said that, Towles, in this novel, did not set out to write a plot-driven novel.

Overall: I’m glad I read the book. What stands out is the prose, which is so good.

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Review Of The Attention Factory, by Matthew Brennan

I recently read The Attention Factory by Matthew Brennan. It is about the founding of TikTok.

TikTok was founded by Yiming Zhang. Zhang grew up in Fujian, China, and went to Nankai University, which is a good university in China. Zhang was a strong software engineer, and after leaving university, did 3 startups, as well as a stint at Microsoft.

Zhang started ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, in 2012. The origin story is that Zhang was looking at the top ranking mobile apps in China, and noted that in the non-gaming category, light entertainment apps were at the top.

Zhang’s first app was “Hilarious goofy pics”. It was a feed of memes and silly pictures. A second app “Implied Jokes” was also about internet memes. Zhang built 12 apps in 6 months, with names like “Laugh so much you’ll get pregnant”; “Sooner or later you’ve got to read this” and “Real beauties - Every day 100 Beautiful Girls.”

The culture in ByteDance was one of rapid experimentation: push ideas out quickly, and let the market decide.

The next app ByteDance built was “Toutiao” which means “Headlines”. Toutiao amalgamated all kinds of content: news and light entertainment. Toutiao was cross-promoted from other apps to get users. Toutiao was getting traction, and ByteDance raised some early rounds from SIG and DST.

Toutiao hired top ML talent out of Baidu, and started to improve its recommendation systems, which were based on collaborative filtering. Zhang declared his view about the trajectory of the internet: portals came first; then search; then micro-blogging; then recommendations. His idea was that recommendations represents an entire chapter of the internet.

ByteDance acquired tens of millions of early users using pre-installs as a growth tactic. On their way from distribution centers to stores, packages of new smartphones would get intercepted at warehouses. People at the warehouses would blow hot air on the seals of the boxes containing the phones; open the boxes, and then plug the smartphones into machines that would install 12 apps on the phone. The boxes would then be sealed up, and sent on to the store.

As the pre-install growth tactic became more widespread, often packages of phones would be intercepted 3 or 4 more times after the first warehouse, and at each warehouse new apps would be installed. In some cases the later warehouses would un-install apps that had been pre-installed at the previous warehouses. This was a widespread practice,  and the cost per pre-install grew from $0.06 to $1.68 over a four year period.

On Toutiao as an app, Matthew Brennan writes “The app had gained a reputation for serving people a concoction of mindless, uncultured garbage. “We must face the fact that for 96% of people, their needs are so vulgar,” explained Gao Han, a senior UI designer, and ByteDance employee number 22. He confirmed the app’s reputation was well-earned, “Toutiao is of course trashy. It’s all click-bait, all kinds of messy news. It’s indeed trashy. That’s right, I will admit it.”

On a separate timeline, in Paris, an app called Mindie had launched. Mindie was about people sharing short videos, with music added to the video, with likes and shares on each video. The UI concept we see today with TikTok is largely the same as the UI Mindie launched with, without the incredible power of TikTok’s machine learning.

In 2014, a team in China cloned Mindie, calling it Musical.ly. Interestingly, Musical.ly took off in the US, instead of China. Louis Yang, one of the founders of Musical.ly said “Instead of saying we chose the US market, I would say the US market chose us. The US is a music country - everyone there is so into music.” 

Matthew Brennan writes “The early US adopters were middle and high schoolers who, after finishing class, had plenty of time for leisure and entertainment. In contrast, Chinese teens typically had a grueling schedule of after-school tutoring and exam preparation homework. If social media was about sharing one’s life, Chinese teens didn’t have much to share. “I have a cousin who studies 12 hours every day. How could he have the time to spent time on Musical.ly to do something creative?” noted Louis Yang in an interview.”

By 2016, Musical.ly had 40 million MAU, and had a $500 million valuation. Louis Yang described the cultural differences around competition between US and China: “In the US, you have the possibility to market in an efficient way by creating word of mouth, because the competition pattern is different. There, if you are doing something innovative in an area, your competitor is going to try to create a differentiator, so both of you are competing with different characteristics. Here in China, it’s a different way - if you do something right… they will follow, they will do exactly the same thing… People here have a very different business logic, they think you can always get a market share very quickly by powering in with money, and once you have that, you can kick the others out…. people don’t have that patience to grow up very gradually. Everything happening in China is so fast, so people lose their patience.”

In 2016, ByteDance noticed that short videos were driving engagement on Toutiao. ByteDance then decided to clone Musical.ly, which had failed to crack the Chinese market. ByteDance called the new app A.me, and then later Douyin. Later, TikTok was chosen as a name for the international app. The new  Douyin app was staffed with a small team: 10 people out of 2,000 total ByteDance employees.

Matthew Brennan writes “Just like Musical.ly, the Douyin team made use of theme-based challenges to build communities and actively encouraged users to riff off each other’s creations, building upon shared memes… [The team] would reward the best video creators with gifts such as cameras, celebrity merchandise, or snacks, yet another way to make people feel special… The tactics that Douyin was using are part of what is termed “operations.” Heavy reliance on operations to achieve growth is one of the defining characteristics of the Chinese internet. At Western tech companies, the role of user acquisition typically falls under the marketing, sales, or growth teams, which tend to systematically achieve user growth through highly scalable data and technology-driven methodology. In addition to these established techniques, Chinese companies also favor using manual, labor intensive methods to promote and grow their platforms. Examples include paying for celebrity endorsements and media exposure, operating promotional accounts on other platforms, or running regular competitions and festival holiday promotions. Operation teams are typically active all day, maintaining relationships with outside stakeholders, including users, creators, and promotional partners.

“… Douyin went as far as assigning account managers to individual creators who would do everything possible to please them, even buying them dinners and helping with school assignments or relationship issues. Next to the team’s workstation was a big box filled with all kinds of props for shooting videos, from wigs and glasses to funny placards. When an early user celebrated their birthday, the operations team would record an exclusive video for them.”

Despite this emphasis, and the ByteDance powerhouse behind the app, Douyin’s early results were weak. There was a question whether to abandon the project. ByteDance executive said “To abandon a project, mainly we look at the data, but the leader also has to use their judgment.” Yiming Zhang decided to persevere with Douyin, stating “The logically correct thing is definitely right. And others have already verified (this path), our data is poor because we haven’t done a good job ourselves.”

Douyin started recruited creators from art schools, which Brennan describes as being “highly effective. The influx of users helped build an original content pool and establish the app’s tone as cool and fashionable.” Another change was adding the Douyin logo as a watermark on videos (which Musical.ly had done), meaning that videos shared on other platforms would advertise Douyin. Douyin started buying branding ads, including ads that ran in cinemas.

Another change was that ByteDance’s recommendation engine started to be ported over to Douyin. This had a dramatic effect on engagement. In October 2017, DAU doubled from 7 million to 14 million in 30 days; another doubling to 30 million 2 months later; and then another doubling to 70 million 2 months later.

Brennan identifies 2 reasons why Douyin was successful in China, where Musical.ly was not. When Douyin launched, adoption of 4G was more widespread, meaning people could stream video on their daily commute. Secondly, a culture of recommendations, data, and machine learning pervaded Douyin, but not Musical.ly. Brennan states “Previously Musical.ly had wasted much time and effort mistakenly believing their app was first and foremost a social network. With Douyin, the company culture and technology stack was aligned with the true value of this format - a content platform. In a content-based community, content is more critical than people. Douyin was a recreation of television entertainment for the mobile age, not a new video first Facebook.”

In 2017, ByteDance decided to take Douyin global. The name “TikTok” was chosen, the explanation being “TikTok, the sound of a ticking clock, represents the short nature of the video platform.” In November 2017, ByteDance bought Musical.ly, which has 100 million MAU, for $800 million. In August 2018, the Musical.ly app was re-branded. Users with the Musical.ly app opened their app one day to see that it had been re-branded as “TikTok - including Musical.ly”. Various Musical.ly features had been dropped from the new app, such as leaderboards. There was initially some user outcry about the loss of these features during the re-brand.

TikTok then went to spend massive amounts of ad money on Facebook and Google to acquire users in the US and Europe.

I enjoyed the book. I hadn’t read anything on the story of TikTok before. There are many interesting details in the book about how ByteDance found its way to TikTok, starting with light entertainment apps. And there are some interesting observations about the differences between how startups operate and compete in China and the US.

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Review of The Power Law, by Sebastian Mallaby

I recently finished The Power Law, by Sebastian Mallaby.

The book traces the venture capital industry, from its origins in the 1950s and 1960s, to where it is today.

One theme of the book is that venture capital has gone from a state where investors were hands-on, almost co-managing the company, with total fund sizes of $5 million, to being founder-friendly funds with $1 billion+ funds.

In the early days, typically the founding CEO would be replaced at the series A, and the investor would make the CEO replacement a condition of investing. The investor themselves played a significant role in using their network to recruit the new CEO, and the management team in general. John Doerr described himself as “a glorified recruiter”.

Mallaby considers Google as the start of the shift to founder-friendliness within venture capital. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins led the series A in Google, and there was an understanding that a new CEO would be hired at an unspecified time in the future. Sergey Brin and Larry Page told their investors that they had changed their minds after the series A, and that they thought they could run the company themselves. John Doerr and Mike Moritz disagreed, with Moritz saying “There was some saber rattling from me in the board meetings.” Eventually Page and Brin agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as CEO, but Schmidt was one voice in a triumvirate that led the company.

The best thing about the book is the many well-researched stories about how companies got financed. These stories are based on many interviews with the investors involved, and contain color and detail.

Some great stories in the book are:

The financing of Apple at the seed and series A stage.

The Cisco founding story. Cisco was founded by a husband and wife team, Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner. The founding story was wild.

The John Doerr and Vinod Khosla relationship at Kleiner Perkins: the deals they did, and how their skills complemented each other’s.

A great story about Masayoshi Son and Yahoo. Son was an investor in Yahoo, and in 1996, as Yahoo was preparing to IPO, Son insisted on investing $100 million into Yahoo. Yahoo’s management team and investors (Mike Moritz) didn’t want the money, but Son threatened to invest the money in Excite if Yahoo didn’t take the money. Son said “If I don’t invest in Yahoo, I’ll invest in Excite and kill you.” Eventually Yahoo and Moritz agreed to take Son’s $100 million.

Kevin Efrusy and the story of Facebook series A. The outlines of this story has been told before, but there is more detail than what has been reported before.

The merging of PayPal and X.com. Max Levchin didn’t want to do the deal. Mike Moritz went to Levchin and gave what Mallaby says is the “call to greatness” speech. He found Levchin in his office, “Moritz sat down in front of him. He leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees, threaded his fingers together, and rested his chin on top of them. Moritz told Levchin, “If you go forward with this merger, I’ll never sell a single share.”” Levchin agreed to the merger. It was a 60/40 split for X.com and PayPal, with X.com getting 60%. Musk taunted Levchin at one point saying “you are getting a great deal at 40%.” Musk’s view was that X.com was worth more than the 60% of the combined entity. Levchin, angered at this remark, called off the deal, and then Musk eventually had to agree to a 50/50 split.

There is a chapter on Sequoia: its management style, performance, and how it has extended its franchise. The chapter covers how Sequoia launched new funds in China, India, and also a hedge fund and a stewardship fund. In many of these cases, the early experiences of the new funds were tough: the managers raising the funds would get a string of rejections from LPs for the new funds, and Sequoia partners would have to stump up their own money to get the fund started; there were management issues, where Sequoia had to replace management, or place bets on young and rising stars. The lesson of this chapter is that Sequoia was bold in extending its business into new areas; that they experienced tough setbacks; and that they persevered, and the new funds did extraordinarily well.

The book is well written. The prose is delightful, the kind of prose that you can sink into at the end of a day.

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Review of The Proving Ground, by G. Bruce Knecht

I just finished The Proving Ground by G. Bruce Knecht.

It is about the 1998 Sydney Hobart race in which there was a large storm. 5 boats sunk, and 6 sailors died. 55 sailors had to be rescued from the ocean by helicopters.

The book focuses on 3 boats of the 155 that started: Larry Ellison’s 80 foot all-carbon boat, Sayonara; a 44 foot racing boat, Sword of Orion, and an old wooden boat, called Winston Churchill.

A storm blew up shortly after the race started. Winds were gusting over 80-90 knots. The wooden Winston Churchill capsized, and then started filling with water. As the boat sank, the crew separated into two life rafts. Over the next two days, the life rafts themselves capsized several times in the huge waves, and the crew had to figure out how to right them. The technique they figured out was: climb out, while upside down, and pull on a rope attached to the upturned hull. The raft would right.

During a capsize of one of the two life rafts, 3 of the people got separated from the life raft and were not able to get back to it. Those three eventually drowned. Everyone else in the two life rafts were rescued by helicopters. Helicopters lowered harnesses to the water, and would winch the sailors up. 

During the storm, the 44 foot Sword of Orion capsized. During the capsize the helmsman’s safety line, a tough piece of fabric connecting him to the boat, snapped under the pressure, and the helmsman, Glyn Charles, fell from the boat. By the time the boat righted itself, Glyn Charles was in the water and had drifted 80 feet away. The Sword of Orion’s engine wasn’t working, and the mast had come down during the capsize, meaning the boat could not maneuver to pick Glyn up. The wind was pushing the boat away from Glyn, and Glyn was unable to swim and catch up. Sadly Glyn drowned.

Larry Ellison’s boat, Sayonara, made it to the finish line in one piece. But only just. Various “blisters” had emerged in the carbon hull during the race: areas where the carbon was becoming detached from the foam that was part of the hull “sandwich” structure. Also, some of the bulkheads, which connect the deck with the hull, had become separated from the deck. Ellison was worried that his boat might fall apart during the race.

The book is well written and well researched. The author interviewed many of the sailors and uses their memories to re-create a vivid scene-by-scene depiction of the race, including the capsizes, the tragedies, and the rescues.

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Neuralink Solves The Alignment Problem By Having Human Values Update To The Values Of The Superintelligence

A penny dropped for me the other day about how Neuralink proposes to solve the alignment / AI safety problem.

Elon Musk often introduces Neuralink by saying that it is designed to address the AI safety problem: the problem that, in the future, superintelligences might emerge whose values are not aligned with the values of humans.

The problem that Neuralink is solving is increasing the i/o rate between the brain and computers.

On the face of it, i/o rates and the alignment problem seem orthogonal to each other. You could have a high i/o rate to a mis-aligned superintelligence, and a low i/o rate to an aligned superintelligence.

Musk has never explicitly connected the i/o problem to the alignment problem, and I have often wondered about how he thinks of the connection.

The penny dropped for me the other day when I realized that what he means is that in a Neuralinked system, human values will evolve, and they will update to the values of the new three-part neural system, whatever those values are.

Musk’s view is that the current brain consists of the limbic system / reptilian brain, which handles things like emotions, and the pre-frontal cortex, which handles things like planning, logic, math, and so on. Musk’s vision is to add a tertiary layer, which would be a superintelligence in a data center, and the Neuralink chip in the brain would communicate to the superintelligent tertiary layer in the data center with high i/o.

So far, so good. The best articulation of the AI safety problem is Stuart Russell’s King Midas problem. King Midas was given one wish, and he said “I want everything I touch to turn into gold.” Unfortunately all of the food King Midas touched turned into gold, and he almost died of starvation. King Midas had mis-specified his goal.

The AI safety problem is that, when coding a set of goals into a superintelligence, you might code in something that sounds good, but turns bad when you push the goal to the limit. Nick Bostrom has the example that if a superintelligence was given the goal of creating paper clips, it would end up turning all matter in the universe into paper clips.

The other day I was thinking about i/o rates, and alignment, and the penny dropped for me about how Musk might be thinking about it. I think Musk’s idea is that the human has “evolved” by adding a tertiary layer, and that, whatever values the tertiary layer brings to the party, those are the evolved human values. Those new values, whatever they are, are your values.

What if those values are the kind of nightmare scenario that AI safety researchers worry about, where we attempt to codify human goals, but get it wrong, and suddenly superintelligences wipe out humanity in service of some larger goal?

Musk’s answer, I think, is that it’s better that we are the ones wiping out humanity, or turning the universe into paper clips, than it being done to us. He often repeats the phrase “if you can’t beat them, join them.”

If everyone on Earth got Neuralinks, and our values updated, then the evolved race of superintelligences might look back wistfully on human values and think “our human ancestors used to love mountains, trees and rivers. That was great for them. We just want to escape to the moon and play chess all day. Chess is awesome.”

I think Musk’s view is something like this. It would be great if we could design superintelligences to align with human values. We should do what we can to make that happen, but it is a hard problem. The other option is for human values to align with superintelligences. That is the second best option. Hence his phrase “if you can’t beat them, join them.”

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Review of “Once Is Enough” by Miles Beeton

I recently finished “Once Is Enough” by Miles Beeton.

It is about a couple, Miles and Beryl Smeeton, who set off from Australia and want to go around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America. They have one other passenger on board. Near Cape Horn, the stern of the boat gets lifted up on a massive wave. The bow digs into the water, and the boat does a somersault. Beryl, who is at the helm, gets catapulted 30 feet from the boat, her harness snapping during the somersault.

The boat loses both masts, and when it rights itself, is half full of water, up to crew members’ hips. Beryl has a broken collar bone, but manages to swim back to the boat. The coach roof has been ripped off during the somersault, so there is a large open area on the deck where more water can come in, which could sink the boat. The first priority is to cover the open area on the deck where the coachroof used to be. They put a sail over it, and hammer the sail down with wooden battens on all sides.

The next priority is to bail out. They have a bucket and they spend the whole day bailing out.

After they have done this, the next job is to create a jury rig out of whatever materials they have. The third person who came along, John Guzzwell, was a carpenter. He took whatever wood he could find, both broken spars, and also wood ripped from the sides and roof of the cabin, and started to make a new mast.

After a few days, John has made a 20 foot mast, which they stepped themselves on the deck. They had some spare rigging which they used for stays. The rudder had fallen off too, and they constructed an oar to use as a rudder.

They hoisted sails, and sailed for a month and reached a port in Chile. They stayed in the port for several months, re-fitting the entire boat. New masts, re-conditioned engine, new rudder, new rigging.

Once the boat was ready, Beryl and Miles set off themselves, in another attempt to round Cape Horn. Two weeks later, they were caught in a storm. They took the sails down, and tried to ride out the storm. But a wave rolled the boat, and they capsized. Both masts (as it was a ketch) broke. Fortunately, this time, the boat didn’t fill with as much water, but the batteries were spoiled, so the engine wouldn’t start. This second capsize gave the book the title “Once Is Enough”.

Miles and Beryl constructed another jury rig, and sailed to another port in Chile. In this case, Miles and Beryl had bought insurance for the boat, and they had the boat shipped back to England and repaired there. After it was repaired, the Beetons continued with their circumnavigation of the world, and this time, they pulled it off, including a crossing of Cape Horn, without any more capsizes.

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Review of “When I Fell From The Sky” by Juliane Koepcke

I recently finished “When I Fell From The Sky” by Juliane Koepcke.

It is a true story about the author’s experience flying across Peru in a small plane in 1971. The plane flew into a storm, and then the plane fell apart in mid-air. Juliane Koepcke, fell through the air, still buckled into her seat. She fell 10,000 feet, and landed on the jungle floor, and survived.

Later on she thought there were three things that led to her surviving the 10,000 foot fall. One was that, in storms in the jungle, there can be powerful drafts going upwards, and these upwinds could have slowed her fall. Second, she was sitting at the end of a bench, and she thinks that the bench may have created a wing effect, causing her to spin like a sycamore seed, also slowing her descent. Third, she thinks some densely intertwined vines on the tree cover cushioned her fall.

When she landed, she was in a state of deep concussion, and she woke up 9 hours later. She assessed her injuries. Her collarbone had broken, but she said it caused no pain. She had an inch-deep gash in her leg, seemingly caused by some jagged piece of metal. She was surprised that the deep gash wasn’t bleeding.

Koepcke had spent some years as a teenager living in the jungle with her parents. She remembered that, if you are lost, you should listen for the sounds of a stream, and then follow the course of the water. The stream will eventually lead you to a river, and the river will eventually lead you to human habitation because humans like to live on rivers.

She heard the sound of trickling water, and found a tiny stream. There was no-one else in her vicinity. The only supplies she found was a bag of candy, which she took. She was wearing one shoe. The other one had fallen off.

She followed the stream, and after a few days, the stream met a river. During the nights she would find some plants for cover and sleep under them. She said that, when it rained at night, the rain drops were icy cold. And when it wasn’t raining, mosquitoes would swarm over her all night.

When she got to the river, she started swimming in the middle, following the current. She said her time in the jungle taught her what to be afraid of, and what not to be. For example, when swimming along, she would pass groups of caimans, lying on the beach. Caimans are like alligators. When she swam past the caimans on the beach, the caimans would immediately slide into the water. She said that, someone who didn’t know the jungle would panic and swim to the other shore, assuming the caimans were chasing after them, and run away. She said that, in fact, caimans, when they see a threat, like a human, enter the water as a protective mechanism. And in fact they don’t attack. The caimans would swim up to her, and under her.

Koepcke says the most dangerous animal in that part of the jungle is the stingray. Stingrays lie on the muddy floor of the river, and if you step on one, its tail will sting you, and this will cause swelling and a high fever. She said that mud can get into the wound, causing blood poisoning. To avoid stingrays, she would use a walking stick to poke the part of the mud where she was about to place her foot.

She had one injury she was worried about. She had a flesh wound on the back of her arm, about the diameter of a coin. Flies had laid their eggs in the open wound, and the eggs had turned into maggots of about 1/2 inch long. She tried to dig the maggots out with her watch strap, but the maggots just burrowed deeper into her flesh. Later she would find out that there were 50 maggots that had dug as deep as a foot into her arm.

She had no food, apart from a few pieces of candy, which quickly ran out. She drank a lot of water from the stream. She said she never felt hungry, but did feel the effects of starvation, which manifested as extreme tiredness and apathy. She had to will herself to get up in the morning, and continue swimming with the current.

On the tenth day, she stopped at a beach, and then noticed a small boat. Next to the boat were some steps leading up to an open hut. She said that she was so tired by this point that it took her several hours to climb up a few steps on the riverbank to the hut. In the hut was an outboard engine under a cover. There was a can of gasoline. She knew that you can coax maggots out of a wound with gasoline, so she poured gasoline into her wound. Eventually about 30 maggots came out of the wound. Not all of them, but just over half.

She slept the night at the hut, and the next morning, 3 forest workers turned up at the hut. She explained who she was, the survivor of the plane crash. By this time, everyone in Peru had heard of this plane crash, and search efforts had been underway.

The forest workers took Juliane back in the boat to a nearby town, Tournavista. Doctors extracted the remaining 20 maggots from her arm wound, and Juliane made a full recovery. With Juliane’s knowledge, the search effort located the crash site. It turned out that Koepcke was the only survivor. Juliane’s mother was also lost in the crash.

After the crash, Juliane flew back to Germany to live with her aunt. Her father stayed in Peru for a while, and then joined her. In 1998, Werner Herzog made a film about the crash, and Juliane’s survival story, called Wings of Hope. In 2011, Koepcke wrote her own book. It is an amazing story, and a well-written book.

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Review of “Four Against The Wilderness” by Elmo Wortman

I recently finished “Four Against The Wilderness” by Elmo Wortman.

It is a true story about a man and his three children, who survived for a month in the winter on a deserted island in Alaska after their boat sank. They ate minimal food: mostly seaweed from the beach and a few clams they found. The only shelter they had from the cold and wind was a sail that had washed ashore after their boat sank, which they huddled under. The average temperature was 11 degrees Fahrenheit. After their rescue, the coastguard and doctors were amazed that the family had survived, saying “this kind of thing just doesn’t happen”. The family had grown up in Alaska and were incredibly tough, and their survival instincts, and their wills to survive were extraordinary.

The family left a port in Prince Rupert Island in Alaska on their 30 foot sailing boat in February 1979. They got caught in the worst storm in 100 years, with winds of 80-90 knots. Their boat was drifting towards the rocks near an island, and the boat started to take on water and sink rapidly. With a storm raging outside, the family had to quickly exit the boat. They released a dinghy from the coachroof, filled it with clothes, and dispatched it from the boat, hoping it would reach the nearby rocky shore. Then they all left the boat, in the raging, stormy, freezing ocean, and swam. The children’s ages were 12, 15 and 16.

Miraculously, they were able to make it to the shore and avoid getting pummeled by the rocks. They weren’t able to re-unite during the night, because they had ended up on different parts of the shore, but the family re-united the next morning.

The family gathered some of the items that had drifted ashore from the boat as it sank. A sail, a small dinghy that could fit two people, and a tank of diesel. They used the sail to make a shelter, and diesel to start a fire with the driftwood on the beach.

The island they had landed on was uninhabited. After a couple of days, they made a raft structure from driftwood that sat under the dinghy, so that the overall raft + dinghy structure became buoyant enough to carry 4 people.

They used the raft, and some paddles they had built, to paddle north from beach to beach, trying to reach a cabin which some of their friends owned, where there was a radio that they could use to call for help.

They paddled in their raft for two weeks, making gradual progress, stopping for the night at beaches covered with snow along the way. Many of them had not had time to gather proper footwear when leaving the boat as it was sinking, or they footwear had slipped off as they swam to shore. This meant that many of their feet were exposed to the cold, and were frozen as a result. Despite their feet being frozen, they were able to walk on them.

For food, nothing had been salvaged from the boat. They ate a few clams that they able to dig up from the beaches, and cook on the fire. For water, they would melt snow on the fire, and drink that. For shelter, they gathered each night under the sail, and huddled together.

To make things more challenging, the father had caught stomach flu, and this meant he was unable to eat food of any kind for the first 10 days.

After 2 weeks, they decided to split the group up. They were making less and less progress per day in their raft: they were heading north and were battling strong headwinds. And their physical strength was waning, due to lack of food.

They decided that if they extracted the tiny, two person dinghy from the raft, the father and son could make rapid progress paddling the dinghy towards the cabin, where they could call for help.

They decided that the other two children, the two girls, would remain on the beach, sheltering under the sail. The father estimated that the cabin was only 1.5 miles away, and that they would be back at the beach, to rescue the girls, in 3 hours time.

Remarkably, it took 13 days for the father and son to return to the beach. The father and son had suffered complications. When they did return, they were convinced the two girls would not have survived the 13 days. Remarkably, both girls had survived, which was testament to their incredible determination, and will to live. The girls had gathered seaweed from the beach and eaten it. And they had eaten snow for water. One of the sisters did not leave her position under the sail for the final 7 days. She was too weak. The girls survived because they had total confidence that their father would return, and this optimism kept them alive. They assumed, when their father and son did not return after 3 hours as stated, and then not for day after day, that there must have been difficulties. But they believed that their father could accomplish anything, and that he would overcome the difficulties.

The father and son did indeed encounter difficulties. After the father and son set off in their dinghy, promising to be back in 3 hours, the first thing that happened was that they realized that the cabin was 7 miles away, not 1.5. This meant they arrived at the cabin at night, not during the day.

When they got to the cabin owned by their friends, their friends were not there, but the cabin was stocked with food, and it had a radio.

It was night time, and the father’s first priority was to get the radio working to arrange a rescue for the girls. He connected the radio to a car battery in the cabin, and there was a spark, and he realized that he had connected the electrics incorrectly, and had possibly shorted, or broken, the radio, which was their only way of rescuing the girls.

He decided that he was too tired and cold and hungry to be working on the radio at night, and might make further mistakes that could break the precious radio further. The father and son decided to go to sleep for the night, and work on the radio in the morning.

The next morning, the father took the radio apart and saw that the fuse had blown. Fortunately, he knew of a trick, that if you wrap the fuse in aluminum foil, current will pass through the broken fuse. He got the radio working. The next problem was that, after calling for help, no-one was responding. It turned out later that the cabin, which was itself on a deserted island, was in a radio dead spot, and the radio only worked at 10pm at night, and then only on clear nights.

After a couple of days of trying to contact someone on the radio, and failing, the father and son discussed going back in the dinghy to the beach to re-unite with the girls. However, by this time, another problem had set in. In the warmth of the cabin, their feet had started to thaw. The thawing process led to incredible pain, so great that the father and son were unable to walk even across the floor of the cabin. They manufactured crutches to help them walk around the cabin. The son said it would be suicide for them to get back in the dinghy. Even if they could get back to the girls, now that the father and son couldn’t walk, it would mean that they wouldn’t be able to help the girls on the beach, and everyone would die on the beach. Despite being better nourished, they were less mobile than when they had left the beach in the dinghy.

They resigned themselves to the reality that the girls would not survive. This was the most psychologically harrowing part of the story. From about day 7 at the cabin, to about day 14, they were convinced the girls would not have made it.

Luck had been against them at various junctures. Now luck started to turn in their favor.

After 2 weeks at the cabin, the father and son realized that their feet were rotting, and the infections in their feet would lead to their own deaths if they didn’t get off the island to a hospital. They used knives to cut off as much dead and infected flesh from their feet as possible, but time was ticking.

One day in mid-March the temperature rose and the snow around the cabin melted. As the snow melted they found an old, large-ish dinghy that had been covered by the snow. There were holes in the hull, but they found a small amount of epoxy in the cabin and fixed as many holes as they could.

It would be a long row to the nearest island with a town on it. They filled the boat with food. The father first wanted to go back to the beach with the girls on. He thought the girls would be dead, and wanted to pick up their bodies.

When they got back to the beach with the girls on, the father asked his son to stay away. He didn’t want his son to see the girls in the state they would be in. The father walked up to the sail, and said “I’ve come to take my girls home.” The eldest girl jumped out from under the sail and threw her arms around his neck. The younger girl could barely move: starvation had set in.

The whole family fit in the dinghy and rowed back to the cabin. Coincidentally, in the time that they were away, the owners had visited the cabin, and saw the note left by the father and son, and had called the coastguard. Shortly after the family returned to the cabin, a helicopter arrived and took them all to hospital.

They all stayed in hospital for several weeks. The father stayed for 4 weeks. He had half of one foot amputated, and all the toes on the other foot amputated. The eldest girl lost a few toes. The other two children emerged unscathed.

The father wrote a book about the experience: “Four Against The Wilderness”. It is beautifully written, and unputdownable. The father paints a picture of the elements that they were fighting against, and the remarkable characters of his children.

The book is out of print, which is surprising because it is one of the best survival stories I have ever read, both in the quality of writing, and the determination on display. It is in the same league, I would say, to A Desperate Voyage, by John Caldwell.

(It is available on Abebooks).

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Review of Albatross, by Deborah Scaling Kiley

I recently finished Albatross, by Deborah Scaling Kiley.

It is a true story about 5 people who set out in a 50 foot boat from Maine, aiming to sail down the east coast and reach Florida. They got caught in a massive storm on the way. During the storm, the boat was lifted up on a huge wave. As the boat fell off the top of the wave, the boat landed on its side. The portholes of the boat smashed, and water poured into the cabin. This was in the dead of night. It took 60 seconds for the boat to sink. During these 60 final seconds, the crew rushed on deck to release two boats that they had: an inflatable Zodiac dinghy that was lashed on the deck, and separately a life-raft that inflates on impact with water.

The person who released the liferaft was unable to hold onto the rope attached to it, in the high winds. The liferaft blew away, complete with essential survival supplies that come with a liferaft, such as food, water, and medical supplies. The five of them were left with the other dinghy, the inflatable Zodiac. In the rushed departure from the boat, there was no time to grab any supplies: not a morsel of food or a sip of water. It took 5 days for rescue to come. During those 5 days, the tiny Zodiac dinghy was surrounded by sharks. Two of the five crew survived the ordeal. 3 died, and of those 3, two went mad after drinking seawater, jumped off the dinghy, and were eaten by sharks.

One of the survivors, Deborah Scaling Kiley, wrote this book. It’s an extraordinary story, and extraordinary piece of writing. The story has been turned into 3 movies.

The backstory is that the owner of the boat had requested that a crew deliver his boat from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This was considered a routine boat delivery trip. Deborah Scaling Kiley was 25 at the time, and was already recognized as an accomplished sailor. The year before, she had been the first woman to complete the round-the-world Whitbread sailing race. Kiley met up with the captain, John Lippoth, who was charged with delivering the boat, and together Deborah and the captain assembled a crew of five. Two of the five members of the crew were strong: Deborah and a friend-of-a-friend that had agreed to come along, Brad Cavanagh. The rest of the crew was weak, including the captain himself. The captain’s flaw was that he was constantly drinking; one of other crew, Mark Adams, was also constantly drinking. The captain’s girlfriend, Meg, had never sailed before. Deborah got a bad feeling about the composition of the crew, and made the decision to back out of the trip. She called the owner with her decision to back out, but the owner talked her back into it, reminding her of the commitment she had made.

The boat set off, and off the coast of North Carolina they got caught in an unexpected and massive storm. It was the middle of the night. The crew were rotating watches on deck, and, after finishing her watch, Deborah went down below to sleep. The next thing she knew Brad was frantically waking her up, saying that the boat was sinking, and they had to abandon ship. As Deborah got out of bed, she could see water was rapidly filling the cabin.

The crew abandoned ship, and the life raft was lost to the wind. This left the crew holding onto the upturned Zodiac. There was a rope going round the edge of the dinghy, and they clutched onto this rope, while the rest of their bodies were submerged in the water. They decided that it was warmer to keep their bodies in the water than to get in the dinghy. The ocean was 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and the air was 40 degrees. With the wind chill from the strong winds, and wearing just thin layers, they decided they would quickly get hypothermia if they were out of the water.

They stayed a few hours of the night clutching onto the rope on the side of the upturned Zodiac, treading water with their feet. As the sun rose the next day, one of the crew members, Mark Adams said to Debbie, who was next to her “Stop kicking me”. She said “I’m not kicking you.” He said “Yes you are, stop kicking me.” She said “I’m definitely not kicking you.” Debbie put her head under water, and under water she saw sharks everywhere. She estimates that there were at least 10-20 sharks under and around the boat. They quickly turned the dinghy over to its upright position, and climbed in. Debbie said that she was never able to figure out why the sharks didn’t attack them that night.

Meg, the captain’s girlfriend, had suffered a serious leg injury when abandoning ship. One of the wire shrouds had dug into her leg, cutting her leg to the bone. The blood from her leg may well have been what attracted the sharks to the dinghy during the night.

The wind and the waves were still significant, and there was a risk that the dinghy would capsize in the waves. Debbie’s friend Brad took care to balance the dinghy as it got pushed around in the waves.

On the dinghy, they had no provisions: no food, water or means to catch fish. By day 3, the captain and Mark Adams decided to drink sea water. Debbie speculates that their level of dehydration may have been higher, as they had both been drinking alcohol during the storm. The captain and Mark drank a lot of sea water. A few hours later, both the captain and Mark Adams started to go mad. Debbie and Brad were expecting this, as it was conventional wisdom that you go mad if you drink sea water. (Alain Bombard, in his book The Voyage of L’Heretique, said that if you drink sea water, you should drink less than a liter a day, and should start immediately drinking sea water rations on day 1, and not wait until your body is de-hydrated).

The captain, John Lippoth, was the first to go mad. He started saying “Where are my cigarettes? I just went to 7-Eleven to get cigarettes. Where are they?” The others said “We are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. You didn’t just go to 7-Eleven. There are no cigarettes.” This dialog went on for a few hours. At some point John said “Okay, I’m going to get my car. It’s near here.”. And he jumped off the dinghy and started swimming. A short distance off, Kiley writes “we heard a terrible, gut-twisting scream.” John had been eaten by the sharks.

The next day, Mark, who had also drunk sea water, started to go mad. In the morning he said “I’m going back to the 7-Eleven to get some cigarettes.” Mark lowered himself into the water from the dinghy. Brad told Mark to stop, but Mark said “I’m not going anywhere, I’m just going to hang here and stretch my legs.” Then a shark grabbed hold of Mark’s body and dragged it under the Zodiac. The Zodiac was swung violently this way and that as the shark ate Mark under the boat.

The captain’s girlfriend, Meg, was suffering from a terrible leg wound. The leg was infected, and the infection had spread. On the 5th day, Meg died, and Debbie and Mark slipped her body into the ocean. Debbie and Brad immediately went to sleep, as they didn’t want to observe what would happen to Meg’s body.

The bottom of the dinghy was filled with pus and blood from Meg’s leg. Debbie was keen to turn the dinghy upside down to wash it out. This would necessitate both of them getting in the water as they capsized, and then righted the boat. Brad was unconvinced, saying that there are sharks around. Debbie said that she hadn’t seen sharks for hours. Debbie insisted, and Brad went along with the plan.

They capsized the dinghy, and cleaned it out. Both Debbie and Brad were low on strength, and initially had trouble righting the dinghy. But they were lucky: Debbie lifted the windward edge, and a gust of wind got under the dinghy and righted it. Brad helped Debbie get back in. Brad was not strong enough to pull himself back in, and was worried about sharks returning. Debbie tried to help Brad, but gave up, and moved to sit on the other side of the dinghy, sobbing inconsolably, as Brad was in the water. In her book, Debbie said that she tried one final time to help Brad, grabbing Brad’s belt with all his strength, and Brad kicked and got back in the dinghy. (In a separate account of this episode that Brad wrote up in the Boston Magazine, he said that Debbie stayed on the other side of the dinghy sobbing, and never helped Brad get back in. He said he had to use all his strength to get into the dinghy by himself. Brad said he could never understand why Debbie didn’t help him get back in, as they had been a team up to that point.).

A few hours later, Brad said to Debbie “I see a ship.” A ship was indeed bearing down on them. They stood up in the raft, waving like mad. The ship came close, and they threw a life ring towards them on a rope. The life ring didn’t reach the dinghy. Debbie decided to swim for it. Brad followed her. They got to the life ring, and held on. The sea swell was reasonably significant, and the ship had not stopped moving; it was a huge ship and took a long time to come to a stand still. As a result, Debbie and Brad were dragged along by the ship, their heads occasionally being dragged under the waves, and then re-surfacing. Gradually people on the ship pulled the life ring in. In the official ship’s report, which Kiley reproduces in the Appendix to the book, the sailors on the ship, who were Soviet, wrote that they thought they were witnessing a terrible tragedy just at the moment of rescue: they thought that Debbie and Brad would drown as they were dragged under the waves by the life ring. They had not intended Debbie and Brad to swim for the life-ring They were planning to circle the dinghy again and attempt a better throw.

Debbie and Brad were hauled up onto the ship. They were taken to the ship’s hospital and put on an IV. They had not eaten or drunk anything for 5 days. Usually you are thought to be able to survive for only 3 days without water. Both Debbie and Brad were unbelievably determined. They refused to give up at any point during the ordeal. The US Coastguard was called and a boat came out to rendezvous with the Soviet ship. Debbie and Brad were taken to a hospital in North Carolina, where they spent 8 days in hospital, being treated for dehydration and infections.

Kiley co-wrote the book with a writer called Meg Noonan. It reads like a thriller. I couldn’t put it down. It’s a remarkable story, grippingly told.

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Review of The Voyage of the Heretique, by Alain Bombard

I just finished The Voyage of the Heretique, by Alain Bombard.

It is an extraordinary book. Bombard is a French doctor in the 1950s who decides that he would like to prove that you can survive for a substantial period of time in a life raft.

In particular, he wants to show that you can drink sea water and survive, contrary to what conventional wisdom says. And that you can catch fish in areas of the Atlantic that fishermen told him contained no fish.

He sets off from France in a tiny rubber dinghy, with a sail, with the goal of crossing the Atlantic and reaching the Caribbean.

His theory of drinking sea water is that if you drink less than a liter a day, the salt content is low enough that your kidneys can handle it. He had been practising drinking sea water in a laboratory setting for a few months before setting off.

Another observation he made was that the mass of a white fish is about 77% fresh water. So his theory was that he would catch the fish, squeeze the fish in a small metal press that he brought with him, and drink the water that came out. He called it “fish juice”. He had also tested the fish juice theory in his laboratory setting before leaving on his trip.

His theory was that you can survive on sea water for about 5 days. After about 5 days, he thought the initial filters in the kidneys, the Malpighian corpuscles, would start to get clogged up. His theory was that it might take about 5 days to get the hang of fishing at sea, and start catching fish. During that period he would drink sea water, and then switch to “fish juice” once he figured out how to catch fish.

Another theory he had was that it’s important to start drinking sea water immediately, on day one, so your strength doesn’t deplete. If you dehydrate yourself, and wait till day 3, say, hoping for rain, then at that point, switching to sea water won’t work. You would have to drink too much sea water to restore the body to its normal hydration levels. The maximum daily allowance of sea water wouldn’t restore your hydration levels to their previous healthy level.

His motivation for the trip was to prove to people who have had to abandon ship for a life raft that you can make it, and that there is reason for optimism.

He set off from the south coast of France, stopped at the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa, and then across the Atlantic.

He drank sea water for the first few days, keeping to his rations of under a liter a day. Then fish started being drawn to his craft, and he was able to catch them. He had brought an emergency fishing kit, but also wanted to prove you didn’t need to bring fish hooks in your life raft to catch fish. He caught his first fish, a dorado, by harpooning it with a knife that he had strapped to an oar. He then dissected the dorado and found one of the bones behind the gills that is shaped like a hook. He used that hook, attached to line, as his new fishing gear, and it worked.

It has been observed before that fish find a life raft to be an object of interest in the ocean. Small fish are attracted first to the life raft, and then medium sized fish come to eat the small fish, and then larger fish come. Eventually sharks come, who are less welcome. Bombard found that if he hit the sharks on the nose with an oar, they would disappear.

In advance of the trip, Bombard wondered how he would get vitamin C and avoid scurvy. He then wondered how whales get vitamin C. Whales, unlike some other mammals, don’t manufacture their own vitamin C. Bombard speculated that whales get their vitamin C from plankton, the tiny fish that live in the ocean.

Bombard would throw out a silk net from behind his craft, and collect two cups of plankton per day. He would eat the two cups of plankton to get his vitamin C. At the end of the trip his medical diagnosis showed, he said, no signs of vitamin depletion.

There were various trials and tribulations along the way: storms, where waves would swamp the boat, and he would have to bail out. And periods of calm and no wind, where he would drift aimlessly.

The solitude was challenging for him. He said he had not appreciated how deeply the solitude would affect him.

He said he made a few bad mistakes along the way.

He was relying on his self-winding watch to tell when noon was, so he could calculate his longitude. The watch strap broke early in the trip, and he pinned the watch to his sweater, hoping that his bodily movement would keep the self-winding watch wound up. This tactic didn’t work, his watch lost track of time, and there was no way he could reset it to the correct time. He was no longer able to calculate his longitude. This had an impact on his morale during the trip: not knowing how far across the Atlantic he was, and not being able to estimate how many days left there were.

One day he noticed that his pillow had fallen out of the boat and was 200 yards away. He threw his “sea anchor” overboard, which is a small canvas bag attached to a rope, designed to slow the boat down, and then jumped in and swam the 200 yards to get his pillow. When he got to the pillow, he saw, to his dismay, that his boat was sailing away; he guessed that the sea anchor must have got fouled and failed to halt the boat. He was a strong swimmer, and in fact, in a previous year, had swam across the English Channel. He left the pillow behind and swam like mad, faster, he said, than he had swam ever in his life. He closed the distance between him and the boat a bit, but not enough. He was still some distance away, and he found his his strength draining. Then, suddenly, miraculously, the boat stopped, and Bombard deduced that the sea anchor must have un-fouled and started to work, halting the boat. Bombard was able to catch up with the boat and haul himself in. He vowed he wouldn’t go swimming again.

Another time Bombard said he made a mistake and let his last harpoon fall overboard. He had been relying on having a harpoon handy in case a shark came and attacked the boat. Fortunately that did not happen.

Another silly mistake was that, 600 miles off the coast of Barbados, he came across a ship. The captain of the ship said “climb aboard”, and Bombard did. Bombard had a shower on board and then decided to depart on his merry way, and complete his journey. The captain said “you must stay for a meal”, and Bombard did.

It was a mistake to accept this meal, Bombard said in retrospect. The meal, Bombard said, was delicious. But it knocked his digestion off its routine of eating just fish and drinking fish juice. For several days after his meal he dreamed of good food, something other than his diet purely of fish, and had extreme hunger pains. Bombard thinks the meal made his digestive system “reset” to its pre-trip state of eating normal food, popping it out of the diet it had become accustomed to.

Another mistake was that he had brought two sails with him, an old sail and a new sail. He was using the old sail initially, and then it ripped in a storm. He attached the new sail to the mast. A few minutes later the new one was pulled off the mast and was blown away in the wind: he must have forgotten to tie it down. He had to repair the rip in the old sail, using a needle and thread, and he was nervous for the whole trip that his repair job wouldn’t hold. Luckily it did hold.

After 62 days at sea, he reached Barbados. He had been dreaming of landfall for weeks. He kept a daily log, monitoring his physical and mental state. He had experienced many mental dips in morale, mostly related to weeks when he was becalmed and wasn’t making any progress. Physically he was generally fine - he would monitor his urine and stools daily. He did have a 2 week period of diarrhea plus blood in his stools, which he was a little worried about. And his skin was covered in painful red spots, making any kind of abrasion or contact painful. But his body’s general functions, he said, were fine.

One of the challenges of the boat is that everything is always wet: his clothes, his sleeping bag. Even if the sun comes out during the day, things would get wet at night again with the heavy dew.

One of his biggest concerns during the trip was the integrity of the dinghy. He would conduct a daily check of all rubber seams on the dinghy to ensure that there was no chafing. Chafing could lead to weakening of the rubber, and then air escaping. The dinghy held up the entire way.

I have never read a story of someone voluntarily submitting themselves to a life raft and restricting them to the conditions that a someone might find themselves in after abandoning ship. The courage is tremendous.

The book is also beautifully written. The prose is crisp and elegant. The observations are interesting and amusing. The book is also gripping: the book pulls you along.

Overall the book reminds me, both in courage, ambition, and the beauty of the writing, of Joshua Slocum’s “Sailing Alone Around The World.”

[richardprice-blog]

Review of “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt

I recently finished “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt.

I have never read a book quite like this book. I would describe the genre as “business fiction”. It is a management textbook turned into novel form.

The closest analog would be historical fiction, where you learn something about history in the course of reading a novel. A closer analog would be if a historian had developed a contrarian theory about some episode of history, say the causes of World War 2, and decided that the best way to proselytize the theory to a mass audience was to write a novel in which the new idea is explored in the novel through the characters and the plot.

In the case of The Goal, the main character is someone called Al. He runs a factory which is under-performing financially. He works hard and is rarely home, and that creates pressure and drama within his family.

The owners of the factory give Al a few months to turn the factory around and put it into the black. Al employs a consultant, Jonah, who is a kind of alter-ego of the author Eliyahu Goldratt. Jonah helps Al learn about the optimizations of operations and logistics within a factory; where to find bottle-necks and how to fix them; the problems with conventional financial accounting systems for factories.

The drama is partly about the factory, and how to turn it around. And partly about Al’s home life, and how that plays out.

The novel is a tremendous accomplishment; it turns something as dry as logistics optimization / operations management into a page-turner. Goldratt is a famous management thinker who has developed a number of influential management theories. It is remarkable that he is also a good novelist: the main characters is well-drawn, there is suspense, there is humor. I understand Goldratt wrote it without a ghost writer.

The book was written in 1984 and has received acclaim. I wish the genre of explanatory fiction was larger. E.g. David Deutsch could write a novel to convey to a mass audience his many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Or someone could write a novel that explains CRISPR.

[richardprice-blog]

The Druckenmiller Conundrum

Right now the US federal revenue is $4 trillion, and its expenditures are $7 trillion, so it is running a $3 trillion deficit. If the US government was a company, it would be running at a $3 trillion loss. In this case the loss is funded through printing money (the Fed printed about $3 trillion in the last year and a half).

The US national debt is $30 trillion. I.e. the US owes $30 trillion to various institutions around the world ($30 trillion is 1.5x the US GDP, which is $20 trillion). 

If interest rates rise to 5% (to curb inflation), then the interest payments on the $30 trillion will be $1.5 trillion a year, which is 21% of the $7 trillion federal budget. (The investor Stanley Druckenmiller pointed out this conundrum in May 2021).

What will happen if the interest payments get super high, like this? Options are: 

The US borrows more / prints more money to pay for the new $1.5 trillion interest payments. The risk here is that the money-printing caused the inflation, so if the government prints more money, inflation will go up yet further, causing interest rates to go up etc etc. This is a bad spiral!

The US cuts spending by $1.5 trillion (or even more), and tries to bring spending in line with revenues. This is austerity.

[richardprice-blog]

The 2004 USS Nimitz UFO Sighting

The 2004 USS Nimitz incident is considered by some to be the most credible publicly available sighting of a UFO.

In this interview with Lex Fridman, David Fravor, a TOPGUN pilot who saw the UFO, tells the story of seeing the UFO in clear blue sky for about 5 minutes, as close up as 1/2 a mile away. The UFO was a white object in the shape of a “Tic Tac”,  the breath mint. It was about 40 feet long. It had no visible propulsion system: no rotors or jet engines. It was able to instantly stop and instantly accelerate in ways that are not consistent with known methods of propulsion.

Radar controllers on the USS Princeton, a cruise ship in convoy with the USS Nimitz, had been tracking some strange objects in the sky for about two weeks. These objects were seen on the radar ascending to 50,000 feet and then descending to 100 feet in seconds. David Fravor and another fighter jet, piloted by Alex Dietrich, were sent up to take a look at these objects.

This is David Fravor’s testimony of what he saw.

“The radar controllers are telling us they have a contact on their radar, they don't know what it is. They just have a blip. They have a little blip. Well, they've been watching these things. And what he told me is “Sir we've been tracking these things for about two weeks.” We'd been at sea for two weeks. “This is the first time we've had planes airborne. “We want you to go see what these are.”

So we start driving out there. And as we get down to he's going, you know, 20 miles, 15 miles, 10 miles. And then you get to a point where they call merge plot, which means we are inside of the resolution cell of the radar. Well, when we say merge plot to us, it means he's right around. So we're not looking at radar scopes anymore. Everyone is heads out when they say “merge plot”. You're done looking at your displays inside.

You're looking around and you're trying to find it. So as we look out to the right and you look high and low because he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up. So as we're looking around, it's a clear day. There's no clouds and there's no whitecaps. It's just a calm. It's actually a perfect day. It's unrestricted visibility. You can see literally all the way to horizon. It's just clear. It's nothing. And we're basically off the coast. If you look at a map and you go San Diego and Ensenada, Mexico, we're kind of in between that. And we're probably about by the time this all hits, we're probably about 80-100 miles out, I don't know, but somewhere out, it's pretty far off the coast.

So here's no waves. There's no wind. There's no white caps. And we look down and we see white water. So if you put a piece of land, a sea mount below the surface, even 20 feet below the surface, if it's big enough, you'll be able to tell there's something underneath the surface. You’ll see waves crash and you’ll get white water. Yeah, so that's what it was. We see we don't see an object because there's all kinds of “Oh, they saw this, they saw it. Another craft below the water.” We didn't see anything below the water. We just saw white water. But the white water, and I like to shape it, you can say it was a cross. I say it's about the size of a 737. So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet below the water, so the waves are breaking over the top, and you're going to get white water where the plane is at, you'd see that this kind of shape. So it looks like a cross.

So we're looking down off the right side, the back seater on the airplane. Jim says, and this is talking in partials again, he says, “Hey, skipper, do you?” And that's about what he gets out of his mouth. And I go, “what the hell is that?” So we see the white water, and that's what draws our eyes down. Otherwise we'd never seen it. So we see this white water. And then we see this little white Tic-Tac, because we're about twenty thousand feet above it, and it's doing it's going basically north, south and then east, west, north. And it's abrupt. It's very abrupt. If a helicopter is going sideways, what it'll do is it'll go, it's got a speed; it slows down because there's inertia and it stops and then it goes back the other way.

This thing's not. It's like left, right, left, right. So as a pilot, the first thing you think is it's a helicopter. Right. So you go, oh, what is? Because we see it's moving. We're like, “oh, helicopter”. So the first thing you look for to see if it's a helicopter when they're doing that, because usually when they get down there towards fifty feet, you'll get rotor wash.

So you see it and you go, “well, there's no there's no rotor wash. What is that thing?” So by this time, we're driving around. So as we're if we were at the six o'clock, we're driving around towards that nine o'clock position and we're just watching this thing. And it's just it's still pointed north, south and it's going left, right. And it's kind of moving around the object. And if I had to say it biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half.

So if you've got the east-west and then the north-south kind of a cross, it's hanging out on the southern thing, just kind of moving up, down, left, and it's crossing over it, it's going up. So now we're like, what the hell is that? So then I go, hey, I'm going to go check it out. And the other pilot says, “I’m going to stay up here”. And I said, yes, “stay up high”, because now we get we get a different perspective.

So she's up here and I'm down here as I'm descending. She can watch because right now all I'm watching is the Tic-Tac. She can watch me and the Tic-Tac. So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on, which is really important.

She's watching me, which is it's perfect as the story goes on, because it gives us two perspectives, a perspective of about eight thousand feet above us when that thing disappears. So as we come down, we get to about 12 o'clock and I'm just descending. It's an easy descent. I'm doing about three hundred knots, which is a really good air speed for the airplane for maneuvering, because I have I have everything available to me at that speed.

So I'm coming down and, as I get to 12 o'clock as the Tic-Tac is doing this, it literally it's like it's aware of us and it just goes “blip” and it kind of points out towards the west and starts coming up. So now it's obviously knows that we're there, whatever this thing is, it knows we were there.

So as we drive around, it's coming up and I'm just coming down. We're just I'm just watching it. You remember, this whole thing is like this is like five minutes. This is not like we saw it, and it was gone. Or “I saw lights in the sky and they were gone”. We watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers, and we watched this thing fly around. So we're like, OK, so I get over to the eight o'clock position and I'm a couple of thousand feet above it. And so I'm probably about 15k I think it is, it's just estimating. The other pilot is still at about twenty thousand feet so they're in the air slowly and I'm descending, they're staying up there.

OK, so I'm looking at this thing and it's about the two o'clock position. We're about the eight o'clock position. And I'm like, oh, I've got I've got enough altitude. I'm going to I'm going to cut across the circle. I tell the guy in my back seat “Dude, I’m going to do this”. He's like, “go for it, Skip”, because I was the skipper, so I cut across the bottom. So I'm almost coming out co-altitude as this thing's coming up, I'm going to meet it. And I'm driving, and I get to probably about a half mile away, which you think, well, half mile is pretty far. Half mile in aviation is nothing. I mean you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane. You can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile. You can see pretty good detail. So I'm like right there and it's coming across my nose. So now I'm basically pointing back towards east. So I'm cutting across because I'm going to the three o'clock position. It's at two o'clock and I'm going to meet it at three o'clock. As I do this, it just accelerates and disappears. So this happens at around, estimating, about 12,000 feet. So they're at twenty. So they've got about 8000 foot of altitude above us when this happens. And as it crosses our nose, it accelerates. And literally in probably less than a half second, it just goes and it's gone. And the first thing is, “dude, do you guys see it?” The other airplane is like “It's gone. We don't we have no idea where it’s at.”

So we kind of spin around. I go “let's see what's down here”. And I turn around. We're looking for the white water. The whitewater's gone. There's nothing. It's literally all blue.  And I remember telling the guy in my back seat “I don't know about you, but I'm pretty weirded out”. Because at the time, I had thirty some hundred hours of flying. I've been doing it for 18 years. So as we turn, we go, oh, well, let's just go back, you know, because now I've got to put on my real hat, which we have to train, because we're getting ready to deploy to overseas. Yeah, we come back up to train, we're talking to the the kid on the Princeton, they're called operation specialists. They're the ones that run the radars.

And we're talking to him and he's like, “Hey, Sir, you're not going to believe this. But that thing is that your CAP, it showed back up. Just popped up.” You know, this is like 60 miles away. It just reappears. We're like, oh, OK. So we got the radars that we're looking for it. We get out there. We never see it. We never see it again.”

The pilot in the other jet, Alex Dietrich, has emerged and confirmed the sighting of the Tic Tac. Dietrich said that she and Fravor would not have reported the sighting if they had been flying alone that day. Dietrich said “If we had been on a solo flight and had seen something like that, we probably would have come back and just not said anything. It would have sounded crazy. We would have probably gotten sent for a psych eval, had our security clearance taken away, or something like that.”

Various people from the CIA, the Pentagon and NASA have come out in the last few months saying that there is footage, not all of which is public, of phenomena that they can’t explain.

In May this year, Obama said “What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain how they move, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. So I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is. But I have nothing to report to you today."

[richardprice-blog]

Review of “The Man Who Solved The Market” by Gregory Zuckerman

I just finished “The Man Who Solved The Market” by Gregory Zuckerman. It is about the mathematician, Jim Simons, who started Renaissance Technologies.

Renaissance pioneered quantitative trading, the idea of using models, instead of intuition, to make trades. Zuckerman estimates that Renaissance is the most successful fund of all time, more successful than Berkshire Hathaway. Zuckerman estimates that Renaissance had average returns each year of 66% for 30 years.

A central theme of the book is that Simons’ contribution to the firm was a) the high-level conviction that model-based investing can be made to work, despite initial challenges and b) creating a culture where brilliant people want to work.

According to Zuckerman, despite Simons being an acclaimed mathematician, Simons did not himself build Renaissance’s investing model. According to the book, it was people on the Renaissance team that had all the breakthrough ideas: Peter Brown, Robert Mercer, and Henry Laufer amongst others.

Some of the breakthrough ideas are interesting signals that the firm can trade on, called “trading signals”. One was an observation that futures traders used to like to sell out their position on Fridays, and buy back into their positions on Mondays, to avoid anything scary happening to their portfolios over the weekend. Renaissance could make money by buying on Fridays and selling on Mondays.

Another set of breakthroughs was to do with having reliable engineering infrastructure. There is an example in the book of there being a period when the firm’s model was putting out theoretically profitable predictions, and yet somehow the firm was losing money for a run of several weeks. It turned out that there was a bug in the model where the value of the S&P was hard coded, instead of being a variable. This bug was causing the model’s predictions not to be properly executed. Another example of infrastructure was the data-cleaning operation: a team was dedicated to consuming huge amounts of data per day, and scrubbing it clean.

The book is well-written, and it manages to shed a bit of light on an interesting firm.

[richardprice-blog]

A Logical Guide To Everyday Conversation

I was thinking it would be good if there was a book called “A Logical Guide To Everyday Conversation” or “How To Have Free-Flowing Conversations and Avoid Conversational Ruts”.

Just as chess books model out certain moves and counter moves, it could be helpful to have a book that maps out common moves that people make in conversation, and counter-moves. The goal such a book would be to enable free-flowing, truth-seeking conversation.

Another way to frame the goal is to avoid things that make conversations go off the rails or get stuck in ruts.

Some topics I think such a book would cover are:

Hypotheticals

Sometimes a conversation can get derailed because someone introduces a hypothetical, or a thought experiment, and the other person in the conversation refuses to entertain the premise of the hypothetical. The conversation stops moving forward. E.g.

  Sally: “If people had found that Saddam Hussein was hoarding WMD, the war in Iraq would have been justified.”George: “But Saddam wasn’t hoarding WMD…”Sally: “Yes but IF he had been and people had discovered that…” In this case, to avoid things going round in circles, I think there are two strategies that can work:

“Just bear with me for a second - I know it seems a bit out there.” Here you are allowing the person to put the hypothetical in the part of their brain where they can safely entertain seemingly out-there ideas without them feeling the need to judge the thoughts as true or false.

“Actually this hypothetical is not as crazy as it sounds. If you think about x and y, the hypothetical is actually not that distant from reality.” You can lean into the hypothetical and try to bring the conversation around to a point of view where the hypothetical is closer to reality than your partner in conversation was granting. 

Analogies

Analogies are often amazing ways of explaining things. They can be wonderful ways of shedding light in something.

One of my favorite ones is Richard Feynman’: analogy of a ball going up a volcano which he uses in his explanation of fire. Feynman explains how carbon and oxygen repel each other when they are nearby, but will snap together if the molecules are smashed together with enough speed. Feynman says that an analogy is rolling a ball up a volcano: if you roll the ball up a volcano, but don’t give the ball enough energy, it will roll back down; if you give it enough energy, the ball will fall in the hole at the top of the volcano.

Analogies can also derail conversations, some times in a similar way to hypotheticals.

Consider this dialogue:

A product manager at Amazon: “Convincing Walmart to stock Amazon’s hardware products is like world war 1: there are treaties and cross-cutting contracts between suppliers, content owners, and Walmart itself, and finding a path through that is challenging.” Other person: “Except no-one is dying, we are not European countries, and there are no tanks. So exactly like WW1 then.” Product manager at Amazon: “Ok, only in certain respects…”

My main feeling with analogies is:

Avoid analogies where there is an emotive component (death, wrong-doing) that is not relevant to the point you are making. The emotive component may capture people’s imagination and send the conversation in the wrong direction.

As with hypotheticals, judge your audience. Some people are happy to entertain tenuous hypotheticals and analogies and to milk useful insights from them. Others are not.

Generalizations

Generalizations can be useful ways of quickly mapping a terrain, but also introducing a generalization can send a conversation into a cul-de-sac while the details of the generalization are litigated out.

Sally: “Generally it doesn’t rain in California.”George: “That’s not true at all. It rains in November, and December. “Sally: “Okay, it rains occasionally in the winter months, but there is relatively little rainfall in California compared to other places in the US. ”

Some options:

 Soften the claim by using “many” instead of “generally”: “For many days in the year in California, there is no rain”. Softening the claim means you can still get the gist of your point across, and the person you are talking to can take the point in their stride without feeling the need to challenge it.

Be more precise up front: “For 90% of days in California there is no rainfall.”

This latter point about precision is echoed in this exchange on Twitter.

Ben Landau-Taylor:

“Obsessive precision and pedantic clarity isn’t just good for your own thinking. On social media, it’s also an incantation to ward off the fuzzy-headed. When I get sloppy, I am justly punished with sloppy replies.”

Response from Julia Galef:

“This is really true for me. I think Twitter makes me not just a better communicator but a better thinker, by forcing me to be precise and anticipate objections to my views. (Blogging and other public writing can do the same, but on Twitter the feedback loops are especially tight)”

Verbal Disputes

Some conversations start to go down a less and less fruitful path, and then you start to wonder: are we just disagreeing about the meanings of words?

People on both sides on the AI safety debate have expressed the view that the debate has been dominated by sloganeering and it is not particularly fruitful. People have wondered if the disagreement about how much to worry about AI safety is based on verbal disputes.

Elon Musk says that AI is like summoning the demon. Andrew Ng says that worrying about AI is like worrying about over-population on Mars. It’s quite possible that these two apparently opposing sides of the AI debate actually agree. Perhaps they both think that a very small proposition of resources, say 0.1% of AI resources, should be dedicated to exploring AI safety. Or perhaps, at least, if expressed in numerical terms, their views are less far apart than they initially seem.

Some options:

When you start to feel like you are spinning your wheels in a conversation with someone well-meaning, it’s a good idea to ask whether the issue is substantive or purely semantic.

Both Sides

The “both sides” move is used to neutralize a point by observing that both sides engage in the type of activity under examination.

Mother: “The first baby-sitter we interviewed was always on her phone during the interviewer. “

Father: “In fairness, the other baby-sitters we interviewed did that too.” 

Mother: “But the first baby sitter took it to another level.”

In this case one way to respond to the “both sides” move is to say that there is a difference in degree. That difference in degree itself may be litigated, but at least the conversation is moving forward.

Tangents

Tangents in conversations can be de-railing.

Engineer: “The roll-out plan for this product is dependent on how quickly we can get the database migration done, so let’s talk about that.”

Manager: “We also need to talk about the pricing of the product - price point, whether to offer free trial etc.” 

Engineer: “Great point. Let’s put a pin in that point about pricing, and come back to it.”

The “let’s put a pin in that and come back to it” allows the conversation to continue on its initial track, without getting de-railed, and also acknowledges the importance of the tangential point that came up.

Polarization

When a conversation starts to get heated, one thing that can happen is that one person starts using more extreme language, and adopting more extreme positions. Moderate phrases like “I think this is probably the case” harden and become “I’m certain this is the case”. Accusations enter the picture like “I cannot believe you think that.” And so on.

As the conversation starts to get heated, often what happens is that the other person, feeling attacked, starts to become more extreme in their own language in positions. Suddenly the other person starts to get polarized, and starts to use more extreme language.

Both people ultimately exit the conversation realizing it was a wasted conversation. “Who did I become in that conversation?” they wonder.

This is a hard one. When a conversation is starting to get heated and polarized, what do you do?

Your options are:

Become polarized yourself.

Exit the conversation gracefully saying “I respect your point of view but I think it’s best if we come back to this topic at a future time.”

Try to de-escalate the conversation, so you stay in the middle ground, stay charitable, stay supple and agile.

On the second option, one observation is that the nature of polarization and the heating up of arguments is that it’s a gradual thing. So you have to notice a point on the continuum where you can zoom out and say “okay, where are we going with this, I’m not sure this direction is fruitful, let’s pause this conversation.”

The third option is hard. There is already a good literature on how to have difficult conversations, if you know you are going to have one with someone. Less so if you have ended up in a conversation that is getting heated, and you are there without forward-planning.

One thing I have seen work is if you notice a conversation starting to get heated, it can sometimes be feasible to call a 10 minute breather, and people return to the conversation with a slightly fresh point of view. 

[richardprice-blog]

Categorical Thinking vs Spectrum Thinking

I often think there are two kinds of thinking: categorical thinking and spectrum thinking. Categorical thinking is thinking of terms of buckets: things are either in one bucket or the other. Spectrum thinking is thinking in terms of matters of degree.

  Pretty much every quantity we care about is on a spectrum: cost, speed, weight, height, power, beauty, wealth, health, CO2 emissions, love. As soon as you think of something, you realize it is on a spectrum.

The most precise kind of thinking is typically spectrum thinking. If you are thinking precisely about things like unemployment, you want to know how much unemployment will go up if you raise interest rates. You don’t want just to know that unemployment will go up. If you are buying insurance for your house, you want to know how much cover it will provide, not just that insurance will provide cover.

Sometimes it is helpful to think in categorical terms. One area is the law. The law needs to draw lines in the sand and say that things on one side of the line are legal, and things on the other side of the line are not legal. Some examples are driving over a certain speed limit; ages at which you can buy alcohol, and vote etc.

Another area where people think in categorical terms is when a concept is complex and hard to define, and yet some people have an intuitive grasp of when the concept applies and when it doesn’t. Sometimes when debating strategy people default to categorical thinking. Someone might say that company X has got itself into a “good strategic position” or that the goal is to get into a “strong strategic position”, which is a categorical way of thinking. The spectrum way of thinking would be to think purely in terms of the levers of the business: growing revenue by 20%, or growing some other key business metric by 20%. Strategists may think that those metrics are useful for understanding a company's “strategic position”, but they aren't the full story: there is a basket of metrics, stories and anecdotes, and you have to consider all of them, and weigh them against each other in a subjective fashion.

Another concept that people reason about in categorical ways is “product-market fit”: some people find this a useful concept, and they claim that they know product-market fit when they see it, but there isn’t a consensus definition of what the metrics are that define the concept.

In summary, so far: one area where we resort to categorical thinking is when we know there is a spectrum involved, but we need to draw a line in the sand for convenience purposes, such as making rules or laws. Another area where we resort to categorical thinking is when there are concepts that we find useful, and are, in some cases, related to certain metrics or spectra, but the meaning of the concepts isn't fully defined by those metrics or spectra. These are concepts like “strategic position” and "product-market fit".

A third area is one where it’s clear what the spectrum is, but someone nonetheless has a belief that they express in categorical terms, and they are not able to move down to the spectrum level and define that belief in spectrum terms. E.g. someone might say “Facebook’s year over year revenue growth last quarter was huge.” Someone else might say “by “huge” do you mean 10%, 50%, or 100%?” And the person might not know what growth rate they mean; they might have no idea what they mean in quantitative terms.

I think the charitable reading of the person who says “Facebook’s year over year revenue growth last quarter was huge” and is unable to define "huge" even within a wide margin of error is that they are saying “people who I trust, and who might therefore know the relevant comparisons, are saying that Facebook’s year over year revenue growth last quarter was huge; you’ll have to talk to them to find out what “huge” means.”

That latter usage of categorical thinking is a kind of "defer to the experts" kind of thinking.