52 Aces

Learning, competition and capitalism

philosophy

Losing Games

This is part of my 5 Minute Concepts series, which is designed to help you understand fundamental concepts about subjects like learning, memory and competition in the shortest time possible. Each episode is available in video format on my YouTube channel and audio via my podcast. If you prefer to read, the transcript is below.

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Much of what I create revolves around the idea of competing intelligently. My overall hypothesis about competition is that most people do it haphazardly, and expect their own intuitions — mixed with a recognition of incentives — to carry them to victory.

Thinking this way is a serious error. It leads to making the same mistakes over and over again, and creates situations where meaningful learning takes much longer than it should.

What’s more important, in my opinion, is that we recognize just how competitive the world is. Competition exists at all levels of life, all the way down to single-celled organisms. Competition is a key component of evolutionary biology, and there isn’t any form of life on earth that can escape this dynamic.

There’s competition for money, competition for status, competition for relationships. There’s competition everywhere.

Life is competition and competition is life.

With all that being said, there’s an idea that’s just as important to keep in mind: sometimes, you’re playing a game you can’t win — no matter how intelligent you are or how hard you work. When you find yourself in this kind of game, what can be called a losing game, you need to exit that game as fast as you can.

Recognizing losing games like this is a skill in and of itself, one that many people find hard to develop. It’s particularly common in American culture, where we’re constantly told that hard work is the answer to all of life’s problems.

An extreme example I like to use is professional basketball. The first requirement for playing basketball at the pro level is to be very tall, which is something you can’t train for. You’re either born with tall genetics or you aren’t.

This can be a hard pill to swallow for people who don’t hit those height requirements but love the game enough to dedicate their lives to it. Someone who is only average height can spend every waking hour refining their game, doing everything they can to get better, and still come up short.

The problem in this situation isn’t that the player isn’t committed or intelligent enough. It’s just not a game they can win — and there’s nothing they can do about that.

Instead, this same player could find another way to be involved with the game. Maybe they could find work as a talent scout, or a commentator, or a sports writer, and still play for fun in recreational leagues.

Maybe they’re an exceptional programmer or mathematician, and that could allow them to build some kind of technological product that is intertwined with basketball.

Those are all winnable games for this fictional person: they offer odds with large payoffs and none of them have requirements that are impossible to train for.

What tends to drive people like this crazy is the search for glory. They want to do what’s most admired in society, like playing a sport professionally.

The irony is that wasting time on paths like this more often than not generates an excessive amount of unnecessary misery. Most people don’t really know what they want, they just think they know, so they waste their time pursuing goals that other people or society set for them.

That same player who wants to be a player more than anything might find more fulfillment in an auxiliary role than they can estimate.

Instead of wasting years pursuing a professional playing career that ends badly, they should find something else that might even end up being more fulfilling (or even lucrative).

Sometimes you can create the game yourself, and sometimes you have to go play someone else’s game. Either way, you should be doing this kind of analysis on a regular basis. Every now and then, stop and ask yourself: Is this a game I can win?

I’ve failed at this more times than I can count, and it’s cost me dearly on a few occasions. Hopefully you can heed my words and not make the same mistakes I have. Don’t play games you can’t win — find a place where you can play with favorable odds, and then throw yourself into that.

Specialization

This is part of my 5 Minute Concepts series, which is designed to help you understand fundamental concepts about subjects like learning, memory and competition in the shortest time possible. Each episode is available in video format on my YouTube channel and audio via my podcast. If you prefer to read, the transcript is below.

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A real-world manifestation of the exploration-exploitation dilemma can be found in the choice we all have to make between being a specialist, which is a path dominated by exploitation, or a generalist, which involves a focus on exploration.

In my course on competition, I tell students that specialists tend to win in competitive games. I still stand by that, but only because I was talking about the specific context of formal games. The real world is much more complex and therefore the answer is murkier.

The problem is that the world is a fascinating place, and there’s so much to learn. Even if you spend all day learning and probing around, you’ll continue to uncover knowledge that makes you feel like you’ve been wandering in ignorance your whole life. This tends to pull us towards becoming generalists.

On the other hand, endless exploration is not a feasible choice for those of us living within a capitalist framework. Nobody is going to pay you to read and think all day, unless you already have a pool of resources to work with.

This is why people who spend their whole lives immersed in creative activities tend to either be rich already, or benefit from some kind of patronage (the Medicis financed many of the great Italian Renaissance artists, for example).

That means most people are expected to become specialists, which is why there’s such an emphasis on professional training.

Going to college and spending time climbing a corporate ladder is the common path for demonstrating expertise within a given domain. Kids in school aren’t encouraged to explore much, and instead are told it’s best to pick a pathway that’ll guarantee a healthy income in the future.

There are some problems with this. First of all, a contradiction lives at the very core of all this: you can’t find the best exploitation paths without exploring first. I’ve covered this before in great detail, but it’s worth reiterating that exploration and exploitation feed off of one another.

By telling people to simply take the path of least resistance — to exploit a known payoff schedule, like going into investment banking — employers, teachers and other authority figures are nipping potential in the bud. 

As a society, we’ve decided that securing an income in an established industry matters more than developing new ways forward.

Secondly, there’s a serious risk associated with deep levels of specialization: path dependence. If you go far enough down a path, it becomes near-impossible to turn around and reorient yourself in the world.

For example, if you’d spent 20 years becoming an expert in typewriters right as the personal computer boom began, you’d be in trouble. The payoff for your expertise would have evaporated, and adjusting to this new world would be a tall order (to put it lightly).

This obsession with specialization helps people who are already part of the status quo, and hurts those who don’t fit into the molds those with power hold sacred. It’ll get you a job, but it might also shut off your capacity to live the way you want to.

I remember one time I saw a job ad for a company in the credit card industry, and one of the “Nice to Haves” was, no kidding, “A deep passion for credit cards.” All I could think when I read that was, “What kind of psychopath has a deep passion for credit cards?” 

The answer is simple: people who want to get jobs in the many modern industries can’t just be knowledgeable about credit cards (or whatever domain they want to work in), they have to be so specialized that it seeps deep into the fabric of their personal lives.

To put it another way: the world wants you to not only know something about what you do for a living, it wants you to be dominated by that subject until it consumes your whole identity. I can’t help but see this as a problem.

But, again, we come to a quandary. This is the world we live in, and it won’t change overnight. What can a single person do to give themselves a chance at success?

My suggestion here — and it is only a suggestion, because I don’t think this can be fully fleshed out and resolved in a single 5 Minute Concepts episode — is to think about the intersections of your interests. Where do different skills and ideas overlap to create something that could be viewed as “useful” to others?

It’s not an easy task to accomplish, as I can tell you from experience. But if you can come up with some kind of mix that’s both unique and valuable, you’ll find that you’ve flipped the whole formula on its head.

You will be specialized because of your generalist tendencies, and not specialized in spite of them.

Failure & Learning

This is part of my 5 Minute Concepts series, which is designed to help you understand fundamental concepts about subjects like learning, memory and competition in the shortest time possible. Each episode is available in video format on my YouTube channel and audio via my podcast. If you prefer to read, the transcript is below.

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Transcript:

Failure is a subject that I have a love-hate relationship with. On the one hand, failure is an important feedback mechanism that can drive learning. On the other hand, it’s been fetishized by the self-help crowd and turned into some glorious path to success.

Yes, it is true failures are inevitable and cannot be divorced from the expertise-gathering process. Everyone, even the best in the world in any given field, has experienced failure at one point or another along the way.

Sometimes a particular type of failure — usually some kind of dramatic departure from what you wanted to happen — can act as a beacon for a beneficial change that leads to a big win. That is a very real side of failure, and I don’t want to discount the value of failure in certain situations.

And yet there are all kinds of memes that lead people to view failure in the wrong light, or get used as a means of not doing the hard (but necessary) work of examining why they failed.

The most common meme around failure is the “Man in the arena” quote by Teddy Roosevelt. Now, I’m not knocking the quote — there’s a lot to be said for giving something a shot when others aren’t willing to — but I am knocking how it’s used as a means of hand-waving away failures.

Every time I see or hear someone using that quote, I want to ask that person, “Is failure always meaningful?” The hard truth is that it usually isn’t, and sometimes critical failures completely derail us. Sometimes that derailing is permanent.

It’s important to confront this uncomfortable truth head-on. There are, in fact, events in life that have serious consequences. There are situations where it’s not possible to recover from a failure, as much as we might want to play the role of the eternal optimist.

Why do we fail? More often than not, it’s because we underestimate the problem we’re trying to solve, and overestimate our ability to solve it. Or we don’t even understand the problem in the first place, and as a result we apply an inappropriate solution.

It’s common to lean too much on our own psychology as well. We think that belief or motivation alone are enough, when more often than not they’re only small, insignificant pieces of the puzzle.

We tend to have high opinions of ourselves, so it’s not so shocking that we step on landmines which could have been spotted if we had our egos a little more in check. When it becomes clear that failure is inevitable, we’re shocked at our own hubris — but alas, it’s too late.

After the fact, we’re prone to pointing fingers in the wrong directions. Not to say that there aren’t ever external factors to blame (I’m personally not a fan of the “absolutely everything is the fault of the individual” school of thought), but there are usually signs that mistakes were made ahead of time.

So, now that we have that dark side out of the way, when does failure help us instead of hurt us? What are the heuristics we can all use to figure out if we’re failing in the right direction, or just failing?

While there isn’t a simple algorithm for all situations, there are some guidelines you can use to make an educated guess.

First of all, ask yourself if said failure was unexpected. If it was, what kind of probability did you assign to it? If it wasn’t, what could you have done to stop it? Asking these questions will force you to confront your own estimations of yourself and what you were trying to accomplish.

Second, was something meaningful learned from the failure? It’s critical to be honest here — don’t just make up some sorry, generic phrase to describe the failure like “I learned that I have a long way to go.” That may be true, but you need to be specific — what actions led to this outcome? What could you have done differently?

Lastly, what’s your experience level in this domain? If you’re brand new, it’s normal to fail a ton, and it’s equally normal to learn quite a bit from each failure.

As your experience increases, you’ll hit diminishing returns on each failure because you should be collecting enough data to fix the biggest mistakes over time.

If you possess a deep level of expertise and you’re making big mistakes, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board. The world you’re in may have changed in some fundamental way, and you might have to rethink how you approach solving that set of problems.

You’ll never escape failure entirely — even the best still screw up sometimes — but you should see a decreasing frequency in the biggest failures if you’re learning the right way.

In general, it’s worth pondering the overall value of failure. In many cases it’s not helpful, despite what the gurus would lead you to believe. But it’s also a crucial part of any successful learning plan, especially for beginners.

You could say that failure is both underrated and overrated, it just depends on the nature of the failure itself and who it’s affecting. Think about that next time you hit a snag in your learning.

Autonomy

This is part of my 5 Minute Concepts series, which is designed to help you understand fundamental concepts about subjects like learning, memory and competition in the shortest time possible. Each episode is available in video format on my YouTube channel and audio via my podcast. If you prefer to read, the transcript is below.

Want to know when new content shows up? Sign up for my newsletter here.

If you ask most people what they want out of their work lives, there are two answers that appear to be tattooed on the inside of their skulls by popular culture:

  1. Money
  2. Making a difference

The priorities might be switched, but these are the two most common replies. It’s not a surprise that people pick these two, because A) we need money to buy things like food, shelter, and pleasurable experiences, and B) working a job where you feel like you aren’t making any sort of dent in the world is a soul-crushing experience for most non-sociopaths.

Neither of these answers are wrong — they’re just incomplete.

When someone gives these answers, worth asking a follow-up question: What is the common, fundamental thread between the two of them?

A common answer to this question is “meaning.” That’s a little too whimsical for my tastes, as meaning strikes me as an ideologically-charged construct that is borderline impossible to define. Even if meaning is given a quality definition (which I haven’t seen yet, but I’m open-minded), it still misses the target.

Instead, the real answer is (in the vast majority of cases), autonomy. We want to be able to determine how we spend our limited time on this planet. In short, we don’t just want to survive — we want to survive on our terms.

Nothing makes us more miserable than having someone breathing down our necks, telling us what to do every day.

And, unfortunately, that’s what most of us end up doing with the bulk of our lives.

We give up a lot of autonomy in the pursuit of money, which is both sad and ironic given that we’re working for the thing that is enslaving us in many cases. The fantasies about freedom we feed ourselves all seem to revolve around money, and not about autonomy.

This isn’t entirely misguided: within a capitalist framework like the one we live in, money can (at certain amounts) provide a great deal of autonomy.

If you suddenly have 50 million dollars in the bank, you can tell your boss to go fuck himself and proceed to jump into a pool of champagne.

Or you could politely hand in a resignation letter and shake everyone’s hand on the way out of the office. Or you could just never show up, never respond to an email or call, and laugh about leaving your former colleagues in the dark.

That’s the power of autonomy. You get to decide what you do within any given moment, so life becomes a “choose your own adventure” story instead of a constant context switch between what you want to do and what someone else wants you to do.

Making a difference and the search for meaning both fall into the autonomy bucket as well, because both are activities that you judge on a subjective basis. Maybe your definition of making a difference is volunteering at a local animal shelter, or creating a documentary about a local endangered species.

Searching for meaning might involve spending your days reading big, complex books and then going for long walks on the beach. Or maybe it dawns on you that nothing has meaning and you turn into a shameless nihilist.

This is the power of living on your own terms. You get to decide what you want to do. The world is what you make of it.

From this point forward, you should evaluate the different opportunities you have in life based on how they’ll affect your ability to operate autonomously. But, as I’ve been alluding to, this can be a monumental task.

Quite a few people make a trade-off of money for autonomy, and discover that it makes them miserable. Investment banking is a good example of this, as bankers are paid tons of money but often work soul-crushing hours with very little autonomy.

Many of them would likely be much happier making a fraction of their incomes engaging in activities that they actually want to be engaging in.

Working your face off while you’re young in hopes of some autonomy payoff in the distant future is another landmine many people step on. These people look back when they’re older and realize their best years were spent in service of someone else’s desires — and there’s no going back.

I know it’s hard with how competitive the world is now, but try to make an effort to think less about the monetary rewards you might get from doing something. Instead, reorient your thinking towards what you can do that will give you the best chance at living an autonomous life.

You might be surprised how little it costs.