Monism

Let’s face it, you usually hear advice from people who don’t know what they are talking about.

Do you see Elon Musk listing 10 plants he’d like to see on Mars, or Tim Cook raving about his favorite apps of the week? No, this is preposterous. Their time is better applied elsewhere – solving actual problems.

The same principles reverberate down to less busy people. Real experts and doers typically have more leverage doing stuff than writing articles. Where does it leave the professional advice-givers? Their core competence is giving advice, but the advice they give is not backed by real-world experience – how could they be experts in all they write about?

Hola, hola Artur! I am hearing a lot of advice from you. Does it mean that you don’t know what you are talking about?

This principle applies also to fields other than advice-giving. For example, programmers usually have no idea what the thing they are building is supposed to be doing. They get requirements, but the people who write those requirements have no idea how to write requirements. They can sometimes hire experts in writing requirements, but those, in turn, have no idea about the problem domain AND have no idea how to program.

Most software is unfortunately terrible, and it’s a perfectly implementing programmers’ understanding of how it should look like.

What’s the solution then?

Do you ever wonder how is that small startups with few people can compete with behemoths like Google or Microsoft? Even when their products are direct alternatives?

One explanation is of course the tremendous inefficiency of the corporate world. The other is that a person who knows and cares about the problem space AND can translate this into code is unstoppable.

We need more people who know what they are talking about:

We need programmers with experience in what they are coding.
We need writers with experience in what they are writing about.
We need teachers with experience in how the knowledge can be applied, not talked about.

Democratizing access to publishing has enabled an entire class of bloggers who can write in addition to (and about) things they do. You can read essays by scientists, farmers, construction engineers, and other professionals. Even if they are not experts, they know how to make things happen, which is not the case for career advice-givers.

In my previous email about Monism, I pointed out the perils of a world where everybody is narrowly focused on their fields and this feels like a continuation. The best software is by people with experience from outside programming and the best writing is by people who have something to say about the real world. If that’s you – write about it.

Deliberate Work

In an essay scarily titled “How to Work Hard”, Paul Graham explains why it’s valuable to apply your time effectively, how to do so, and how to enjoy it.

One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you’ll have to work very hard. I wasn’t sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty; one didn’t always have to work super hard to do well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed to do almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps, some way to evade hard work through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to that question. There isn’t.

Strangely enough, the biggest obstacle to getting serious about work was probably school, which made work (what they called work) seem boring and pointless.

Subjects get distorted when they’re adapted to be taught to kids — often so distorted that they’re nothing like the work done by actual practitioners

Hard Work may sound like something to avoid at all costs, but strategic bursts may be the laziest way to do great things. Check out my previous essay “The lazy way to being outstanding: go after hard things.”

the hard work I am urging you to tackle is the task that is unknown, complex, and emotionally challenging. Your Ego can be hurt, you can be ridiculed, and you can fail. That is the hard part. Copy-pasting spreadsheets or tackling something that should never be done in the first place is safe but tedious and time-consuming. This is dead-end, laborious, and unfulfilling work. Avoid that. Or Automate

Climate tales to inspire

Stripe Climate is an initiative of the payment provider Stripe to help remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

There is a lot to admire about their particular approach, but what caught my eye is that they are using capitalism effectively to enact a real change instead of rolling out another corporate responsibility effort.

Stripe’s mission is to grow the GDP of the Internet, and they recognize climate change as a direct threat. By tying the climate efforts into their main objective, they commit.
Instead of funding companies directly removing CO2 from the air, they act as early purchasers of their carbon removal services (aka offsets). The goal is to help the companies reinvest proceeds into cheaper unit costs and push technology down the innovation curve for next customers. Stripe may purchase removal of a ton of CO2 for $2000, but that purchase will help lower the cost to $200 for future customers.
By purchasing instead of donating, they ensure the economic viability of the technology. When the cost of removing a ton of CO2 from the air drops under $100, then it makes sense to involve government subsidies.
Stripe has committed $11 million to the effort. If you are using Stripe as your payment provider, you can set aside a portion of your earnings to pitch in.

Weird stuff

Scientists have found a way to build logic gates from soldier crabs. So, technically, you could build a whole computer that is powered not by electricity, but by crabs. Read more here.

“The Heart of the Andes” by Frederic Edwin Church aimed to present the interconnectedness of the ecosystem, with everything interacting with everything else.

While reading “The Invention of Nature” (a book I’ll definitely reference later), I stumbled upon the concept of Monism.

In a Monistic worldview, there is no difference between organic and inorganic life because they are deeply connected. There is no hard boundary between humans and animals because we’re all part of nature. There is no division into different drawers of sciences just because of some obscure taxonomy. Monism stands in opposition to Dualism, first popularized by Plato, and later embedded in the western culture.

The perils of dismantling the world into even smaller parts and declaring them separate sciences seems to underline many of my talking points. While studying Computer Science and Psychology simultaneously, I couldn’t help but notice how interconnected and similar those seemingly disparate areas can be, but how ignorant experts are to anything outside their precious labels.

The last 2 years (!) of the pandemic have shown how dangerous this mindset can be. Organizations like CDC, FDA, WHO, US Army, and countless other acronym holders did everything according to their own procedures. Still, it ended as an utter fiasco costing millions of lives because everyone focused on their own little slice of reality and missed the big picture.

Samuel Coleridge (a British poet) called the early 1800s an ‘epoch of division and separation,’ of fragmentation and the loss of unity. He was lamenting the loss of what he called the ‘connective powers of the understanding.’ He had no idea.

I’ll read up on Monism some more and report back the findings to you.

Deliberate work

In “Your lifestyle has already been designed,” David takes a closer look at the default workforce lifestyle, observing that it definitely is not aimed at helping the little guy:

For the economy to be “healthy”, America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials.

He also makes an excellent point about the 8-hour workdays:

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

But it all has to be worth it in the end, right? Few decades of slogging through, and you’ll be able to retire happily! Philip, who has reached the Nirvana of early retirement, is documenting his “struggles”:

Americans cannot imagine stopping work before they’ve either (1) purchased everything that they could conceivably want, or (2) collapsed from physical exhaustion

He recommends shifting the mindset before retirement because jumping from worker mentality straight to empty days can be more than a little disorienting:

Suppose that you are retired. At this point, your one job is the pursuit of happiness. If you are not happy, therefore you are a failure at your job and in your life. But how can you be happy 24/7?

Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren’t that organized, disciplined, or motivated.

“Worried Denizen” argues that Leisure is the end in itself, and we have to learn to “waste it”:

In the long run, wasted time is indistinguishable from time well spent.

The only viable strategy to make the most out of your time is to make sure that it’s fun

Climate Tales to inspire

Companies like Heimdal are working carbon-negative cement – it means that they suck out CO2 to produce the material, in opposition to the traditional manner, which is a huge contributor to climate change.

Concrete is responsible for 8% of global CO2 emissions. Cement is usually made from mined limestone, which is one of the largest natural stores of carbon dioxide. Using that to make cement is a bit like burning oil. The world is addicted to concrete, so this problem is not going away. We make synthetic limestone using atmospheric CO2, such that when it is used to make cement, the process is carbon neutral.

This essay is a fantastic resource on the economics and chemistry of carbon-negative concrete.

PS: Yes, this issue of my newsletter is sent late. We are finally on the road, giving our RV a spin, and so far – so good!