Irrelevance
What is the worst that can happen if I write something dumb here?
When I was about 13 years old, I sat out one summer night looking up at the stars and the Milky Way. The vastness of the universe really hit home. I saw thousands of stars and the haze of the Milky Way with its billions of stars, and knew there were untold trillions of galaxies that I couldn’t see.
And it sunk in – that my life, no matter how large or small, would not affect any of these stars and their planets and moons and any life on them. And my life, no matter how large or small, would not have a significant impact on our own planet or on human history.
And this was incredibly freeing. Yes, my successes and accomplishments wouldn’t matter that much — nor would my mistakes. I could bumble around and screw things up, and in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t matter at all.
There are a lot of other implications about how one might want to live one’s life in the light of total irrelevance. You could fill your lifetime philosophizing about this topic!
But for me it has translated into a bias towards action. Don't sit around worrying about how foolish you will look or how many mistakes you will make. Just do something.
Another view on this – C. S. Lewis once said, “I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself”. Writing forces you to understand your own thinking; it is a critical component of learning.
And sometimes I think I know something, or even how I feel about something, but when I try to put it on paper, I just ramble around, and it becomes clear quickly that I don’t really know what I think. So I keep writing, because that is how to learn. Apologies in advance if I am still just rambling.
Billionaires
What does any of this have to do with billionaires? I've been thinking about the impact they have on our politics and society and how relevant their voices should be. A friend suggested I watch the recent Economist interview of Elon Musk. As my friend is super smart and well-read, I gave it a go. I had a lot of reactions to the interview, and it has taken me a few days to untangle them.
First, our economy is designed to create some breakout success companies that are worth a great deal of money. We encourage entrepreneurism, we encourage competition, we encourage Schumpeterian creative destruction and renewal; this all leads to young high-growth companies that are really valuable. And we should embrace this dynamism and not break it.
- While we should stay out of the way of entrepreneurs, some new companies may be more socially valuable than others. China’s attempts to bias innovation away from consumer internet and towards hard tech is probably a wise move. We should enact tax policies and early r&d funding policies that encourage our best entrepreneurs to go solve hard things. A hugely valuable energy, space, or chip company is probably worth a lot more than another consumer internet or SaaS company.
- We should also encourage platform thinking from our early-stage companies. The PC, the Internet, Cloud Computing — these innovations opened the door for thousands of companies to build businesses on top of them, employing millions of people, and they have enriched our society far beyond the success of any one company.
So we are going to have some highly successful young companies, and hopefully we can steer some of this energy towards hard problems and platform thinking so that we create durable, widespread benefits for our economy. Some of the principals of these successful companies will inevitably become very wealthy due to their ownership share.
- We should encourage ownership to be spread to all employees, and many tech companies have done that. And we should spread out equity ownership to stakeholders more broadly — Chris DeVore talked this year about granting some ownership to the community, and I am all for that. Still, there are going to be some very wealthy founders.
What do these founders do with their wealth, and should we create incentives to encourage or discourage these behaviors? We know that these people are just human beings, with all the failings of human beings. There is no correlation between wealth, IQ, and morality. So there will be a range of behaviors.
- Some will sign a giving pledge and try to give away most of their wealth. They will seek to save lives, end global hunger, help the powerless, or whatever. This seems good, and we should encourage it through estate taxes — either give away your money, or we will do so for you.
- Some will spend spend spend on yachts, homes, fashion, luxuries. This seems fine; it will create a lot of jobs, and again, an estate tax can encourage this behavior.
- Some will invest in new businesses and try to recapture the magic or help a young entrepreneur do the same. All good.
- Some will have a vision about how to transform government or politics, based on their own biases and often weird conceptions about human society. And they believe that their economic success gives them unique insight and a unique ability to influence government policy. They use their money to make their voice more important than anyone else’s voice. These people are dangerous. We must do everything we can to limit their ability to influence policy, and, sadly, our country is doing a poor job of this.
So how does this apply to Elon?
- SpaceX and Tesla are remarkable companies with remarkable achievements. They have created breakthrough products and navigated tough financial and scale-up issues.
- Elon deserves a great deal of personal financial success for his role at these companies. Whether he was the founder or not, he certainly had a huge impact on the growth of these companies.
- He allows himself to be distracted by businesses and issues that aren’t his strength. After owning 3 Teslas, I walked away — in part because of his politics, but also because innovation had slowed in the cars.
- He is not a great citizen. He uses his wealth to try to influence elections and push extreme policy issues. He doesn’t deserve an outsize voice in our country.
Your mileage may differ. I don't need to give Elon any more of my attention.
Shorts
Are there diminishing returns to AI? Noah Smith quoting Francois Chollet:
Increasing intelligence is not so much like "making the tower taller", it's more like "making the ball rounder". At some point it's already pretty damn spherical and any improvement is marginal.
Noah goes on tho to suggest some areas where AI can outperform humans
- by spinning up a lot more agents than we can humans
- by discovering “cloud laws” — behaviors that are too complex or diffuse for humans to grasp, but that can be handled by large scale AI systems
A useful read.
Once upon a time I could use my email inbox (or before that, my physical desk inbox) as a reliable “To Do” list. Those were innocent times. Now I have inbound tasks coming by multiple email accounts, text messaging, Signal, WhatsApp, work chat systems, embedded app/site comment systems, etc etc etc. I have to build my own ad hoc system to manage all this. Surfboard is chasing this idea, and I am intrigued to see where it goes — I’d love to have a simple prioritized view across all my communications systems of a to-do list and inbound requests.
I have 300+ unread books in my to-read pile, so the last thing I need is more book recommendations, but this site seems great — A searchable index of nonfiction book prizes
And some commentary by the guy who built it: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop ... so I vibe-coded a tool for finding more of them
- "First of all, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win."
From the Economist, these two points are probably not unrelated: