Notes from What we Owe the Future

William MacAskill has been a hugely influential person in my life thanks to Effective Altruism; I was hanging out at a friend’s place and snooping around the bookshelf when I caught a glimpse of the word “MacAskill” printed onto one of the spines. I borrowed that book, and took notes of the highlights as I was doing so; eventually I decided to get an eBook copy for easier reading which allowed me to grab screenshots of the diagrams.

Chapter 1

  • The value of future lives is nonzero. Even if you don’t weight their lives equally with today’s people, the vast difference in scale between today’s population and the potential future population means that a vast majority of the utility we should optimize for is in the future. Just as EA as it relates to global health means that we shouldn’t neglect lives that are distant from us geographically, longtermism implies not neglecting lives distant from us temporally.

Chapter 2

  • Many systems exhibit a degree of plasticity, during which they are malleable, followed by a time of hardening in and become more resistant to change.

  • Three factors to consider when evaluating an action or intervention:

  1. Is the intervention going to yield a significant change that notably influences day-to-day lives?

  2. Is the intervention going to have a long-term effect? (persistence)

  3. Was the intervention going to happen anyways? (contingency)

Chapter 3

  • Values changes can be hugely important to improving global utility.

  • Case study: abolition of slavery. Significant change to many people’s lives, quite possibly may not have happened (or if it were inevitable, perhaps it would have been inevitable slowly), and likely to carry on for a while. Ergo it’s worth advocating for these value shifts.

  • Fitness landscape: it is possible that there are multiple equilibria of values systems. Some equilibria are not inherently globally-optimal, e.g. values systems that don’t spread themselves (e.g. religion) may get overrun by those that do.

Chapter 4

  • AI presents an opportunity for moral lock-in; a hardening of the values systems and an end to plasticity.

  • Moral lock-in today would be dangerous; it’s evident in the past and there’s no reason to believe that we’re currently at the end state of moral progress (especially given some unresolved moral questions).

  • Experimentation would help to identify the best systems.

Chapter 5

  • Humans don’t have the best track record of seriously taking on risks proactively

  • Engineered pandemics are a second area of concern for short-term reasons civilization would collapse

  • A third world war is more likely than not to occur in the next century based on betting markets; such a world war would incentivize powers to be more fast-and-loose about biowarfare (e.g. engineered pandemics), AI deployment, etc.

Chapter 6

  • MacAskill thinks that devastating wars (killing off ~99% of the population) might not actually kill off humanity, assuming that there’s still access to industrial technologies and tools. However, there’s not enough certainty in this thought to ignore the possibility.

  • In a scenario where there’s a need to re-industrialize, being easily able to access fossil fuel reserves (e.g. surface coal) would be greatly beneficial to ensure energy resources needed to “start-up” the economy from nothing. Full decarbonization is necessary to ensure a long-term future with easily accessible fossil fuel reserves.

  • Agricultural knowledge is unlikely to die off, given the vast number of people employed today in agriculture. (Corollary: What professions would be key for rebuilding civilization from nuclear war, or some other mass population disaster? Even if there are ~2B agriculturalists today, would that number hold up over time as countries develop economically?)

Chapter 7

  • An efflorescence is a short-lived (perhaps a century or two, point is that it isn’t sustained) period of intellectual and economic expansion in a single culture (e.g. Islamic Golden Age, Ancient Greece)

  • Technological progress may be slowing down in the recent part of history (in the last 50 years), as measured by Total Factor Productivity (essentially, the productivity per unit of labor/capital/technology/resources). Nonetheless, the slowdown of growth isn’t too worrisome; exponential growth must eventually taper off and we’ll just arrive at the “destination” asymptote of productivity a bit later.

  • However, a complete stagnation would be more concerning, esp. if we’re in a currently unsustainable economy – e.g. using fossil fuels that must eventually run out; having the capability of nuclear offense without any tools to defend against that threat.

  • Stagnation is possible: total research output can be thought of as a function of a number of man-hours, with diminishing marginal returns on each man hour (we’ve already “picked the low-hanging fruit”, technologically). Population growth is trending negative as countries get richer; there’s a limit on how much of the population can be involved in research. If AGI is developed “in-time” before we reach a state of declining global research throughput, then it’s possible that we could avoid this problem, but AGI could be hard to develop before this point.

Chapter 8

  • Population Ethics - the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be

  • Intuition of neutrality: the view that bringing a new person into the world that would live a happy life isn’t inherently morally valuable (which MacAskill argues against)

    • His claim instead: Having one additional person in the world that lives an overall happy life is an inherently desirable outcome

  • The Repugnant Conclusion:

    • Dominance Addition: making people better off while adding population with a positive wellbeing. A population of 1M +90 people isn’t as good as one with (1M +95 people and 1M +75 people); see Fig. 8.5

    • Non-Anti-Egalitarianism: equally distributing utility while also increasing it in total is ideal. A population of (1M +95 people and 1M +75 people) isn’t as good as one with 2M +86 people; see Fig. 8.6

    • Assuming transitivity, a population of 1M +90 people isn’t as good as a population of 2M +86 people.

    • “Repugnant Conclusion”: following the above example ad infinitum, a population of 1M +90 people isn’t as good as a population of 1T +2 people, for example; see Fig. 8.9

  • 3 way to optimize in population ethics:

  1. Maximize the average utility (downside: a world with 1K +100 people > a world with 1M +99 people)

  2. Maximize total utility (downside: Repugnant Conclusion)

  3. “Critical Level”, you can add lives to the world, provided that the utility of those people is above some threshold (downside: Sadistic Conclusion)

  • Critical Level denies the Dominance Conclusion premise; see Fig. 8.10

  • Sadistic Conclusion: adding fewer people with negative utility could theoretically be preferred over adding more people with small but positive utility; see Fig. 8.11

  • Many of the population ethics considerations can be applied at the micro-level: is it ethical to bring a kid into the world? Is it obligated to bring more kids into the world?

  • Note: Even if a person’s overall life utility is negative, they can product positive externalities - so if someone’s experience is -100, that doesn’t mean it’s better for them to die; it merely means that from their own utility perspective it’d have been better for them to be unborn

Chapter 9

  • By MacAskill’s estimate, most people alive today are likely happy “overall” (so we can assign a positive value to their lifetime happiness)

  • It’s quite likely that humans are getting happier over time also - though this hasn’t been a monotonic trend.

  • Animals’ lives in factory conditions are quite miserable. It’s unclear if animals’ lives in the wild are overall positive or negative (in the sense that from their perspective, it would have been preferable to not have been born). MacAskill notes that if the lives of wild animals are negative on balance, then extinctions caused by humans may be positive from a hedonistic perspective.

  • Non-wellbeing goods are goods which don’t immediately impact wellbeing, e.g. “natural ecosystems”, “educational level of the world”, “artistic accomplishments”, etc. There are trends in both directions here, so it’s a judgment call on whether these are getting any better or worse.

Chapter 10

  • Three guidelines for improving the future: (1) take actions that you’re comparatively confident are good; (2) preserve optionality where possible (e.g. by preserving different political systems and cultures); (3) learn more.

  • Prioritizing between which of these problems we could contribute to is a function of (1) importance – does solving this problem matter? (2) tractability – how much resource-wise do we need to solve this problem? and (3) neglectedness – how much attention is this problem already getting?

  • Personal changes to your life to do good, while beneficial, can easily be outweighed by targeted donations to specific effective organizations.

  • Career-wise, you can apply similar principles as society for improving the future of your career: (1) choose to do good in your career, (2) learn more about different career paths, and (3) build options by seeking upsides. Personal fit is critically important.

For some further reading, I might check out Brian Christian’s, The Alignment Problem. He’s an excellent author who wrote one of my favorite books of all time, Algorithms to Live By.

Death of a Consultant.

Note: I hope it’s obvious, but this post is dripping with sarcasm.

Today I realized that I would not hit 1K - the upper echelon in United’s loyalty program (there’s actually a level above that that’s invite-only, but eh, technicalities). I ended up booking all of my flights for the rest of the year - turns out I’d be well over two grand in spend away from the coveted position. I’ll now have to endure months of mere Platinum status; when I sit in Economy Plus I will not be given a mediocre snackbox for free with a fancy-sounding marketing-derived name designed to evoke feelings of wanderlust. I will not enjoy the gift of 280 PlusPoints, which can elevate travel from ordinary to extraordinary as I get upgraded to United’s First Class cabin, replete with wider seats, as I sit amongst people that either (1) have more money than sense, (2) are also spending other people’s money on airfare, or (3) just got lucky when they got upgraded. Worst of all, I’ll only earn 9x the miles on each dollar spent on airfare, instead of the double-digits 11x for 1K members.

And then, to make matters worse - I won’t be hitting Marriott Bonvoy Platinum status either. My bonus points earn rate is a mere 25% instead of 50%; now I’ll accrue points at a slower rate than my Platinum-endowed peers (again, there are higher tiers, but one step at a time). I’ll be forced to check out of my hotel at 2pm instead of 4pm; I very much would have enjoyed the extra two hours in the Heavenly Bed with my complimentary water bottles (worry not, I’m sure that the recycling bins don’t actually get emptied into the same dumpster).

Woe is me! If only I had worked harder! Spent more time on the road, away from the denizens of my home office. What is in Houston, anyways? I’ve explored Los Angeles, Denver, Austin! Well, perhaps just the 5-block walk over from the office to the hotel, but I’ve gotten a taste of the restaurants through Uber Eats! I’ve met the locals - the drivers associated with the same company. Besides, what would I do in Houston during the week anyways? That’s for working - Sunday night to Friday at 5 (sometimes 6, on terrible occasions 7, thankfully never past 8). All I need to keep me cheery is the occasional workout and the hour spent with my long-distance girlfriend. The best part - with all of this travel, I get to see her more often! And soon I’ll move over to her - I’ll earn the same salary despite the massive increase in taxes and cost of living, but I’ll now get to spend much more time with her! I’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of proximity whenever she drops me off to the airport for me to travel to the client site 50% of weeks.

It’s not the worst, I suppose. The team is planning an epic team event on a weekend where we’re in the same city back-to-back. I’ll get to spend the weekend away from home, getting to explore and enjoy a city with my co-workers. We already spend 55 hours a week together, so I know we’ll get along well enough.

Some travel hacks for renting cars, flying, and lodging.

After a bit of time optimizing (perhaps too much) how to travel on the cheap, I’ve come across a few tricks to getting cheaper car rentals and looking for flights — time to share what I’ve learned.

car rentals

Renting a car can be quite annoying for anyone under the age of 25 - the young driver fee often makes it super expensive. Whenever I rent a car, I compare 3 different rates:

under 25 | hertz with aaa discount

If you’re a AAA member (which costs about $5/month in Texas), you can rent cars from Hertz without having to pay the young driver fee - you just need to be sure to book through this link. There are better discounts available for those over 25, but I’ve found the no-fee price to usually be pretty competitive.

under 25 | lyft

I’ll be checking the Lyft app for rentals more often, as I recently had two great experiences with them - the overall process is super smooth (far better than the traditional companies are doing it), and if you have Lyft Pink then you get some additional benefits (it’s unclear to me if Lyft Pink also gets you a discount compared to non-Pink members, but if so, the $20/month could easily pay for itself).

turo

There’s nothing I know on how to “game the system” on Turo, but it’s a website worth checking out just in case some cars are available for much cheaper. The primary downsides of Turo are you might not get the same level of coverage from your regular car insurance, nor the perks from your credit card.

autoslash

The mother-of-all-search-engines for car rentals, Autoslash is a super effective way to search all of the rental car companies with many of the discounts available - e.g. holding a certain credit card, being a part of an airline’s loyalty program, being a member of AAA or Costco, etc.

loyalty programs

Regardless of where you rent your car from, it can be helpful to use the various status match programs available from the different rental agencies. I had Gold status with Marriott from a credit card, which I was able to use to get top-tier status with National, which in turn can be used to get top-tier status with most rental agencies.

flights

A shorter section, but I'll always look for flights through Google Flights and Southwest (since their results don’t show up through Google Flights). If I have a ton of credit card points racked up, I’ll also look through AwardHacker to see if there’s a way to get the flight for fewer miles - though I often find that the flights aren’t available.

Thoughts on Traveling

I’m now in the back half of a 26-day post-graduation trip to Spain and France, and I’ve learned a few things about how I travel along the way. Here are a few of the things that I’ve learned. Obviously, how I travel is different from how others travel - in terms of what I like to do, how I want to spend my time, and the things I require to keep myself happy and upbeat. This is my personal travel tips list to myself for the next time I take a trip somewhere new.

  1. Activities. Traveling through Europe entails being exposed to a lot of museums and churches - and it’s really easy for me to get tired of seeing that. During the planning stage, I had the foresight to mark all of the museums in red (as a way of guarding against accidentally loading up on museums), but I should have done something similar for churches. At this point, a lot of the museums have blended together (with a few exceptions) as have most of the churches (the Sagrada Familia being a major exception). I experienced something similar in Japan - I traveled with my parents and got dragged along to far too many temples, and yet only really remember one or two of them distinctly. Beaches are also easy to get tired of, though I don’t think I’ve ever hiked too much on a vacation. Pacing the trip is also super important - travel days are often not rest days. On that note…

  2. Scheduling. Not every other country has the same pace as the US when it comes to certain activities. Dinner in France is a reliably two-plus-hour affair; restaurants might close after lunch or open later for dinner.

  3. Payments. Not everywhere accepts American Express, so it’s helpful to carry a small amount of cash on me along with a Visa or a Mastercard (ideally, without foreign transaction fees). I made the mistake of withdrawing too much cash when I first landed in Madrid - I pulled out €500 but so far I’ve only used €20 (since I’ve either relied on my friends’ cash, or I’ve always defaulted to using my card for the convenience and rewards/protection it provides). If I were travelling alone, I might have used cash in more circumstances - but in general, it’s probably best to not shoot for just one cash withdrawal for the entire trip. Probably better to withdraw only $10 worth per day in cash and just withdraw more as necessary.

  4. Food. My happiness level while traveling depends greatly (much more so than for others) on what I’m eating and how expensive it is. In general, getting three high-quality meals a day without breaking the bank is a big determinant of my mood, which in turn influences how I’m experiencing all of the other activities. The Michelin Guide and Google Maps are great resources; I don’t appreciate the value of just picking a restaurant blindly. Grocery stores are super important for grabbing water and snacks cheaply; roasted nuts are compact, tasty, and satiating.

  5. Lodging. Some important things to consider: price, location (both for safety purposes and also proximity to activities), making sure everyone that wants one gets their own bed, and number of bathrooms (2 is worlds better than 1). It’s also important to check hostels, Airbnbs, and hotels to get a sense of all options.

  6. Packing. The Away bag really is a rockstar - being able to take a carry-on bag instead of a check-in saves a ton of money. Clothes with zipper pockets that fold compactly and are easy to wash and flexible in how formal they are are well worth their weight (basically, most of the stuff I’ve bought from Lululemon). This down jacket from The North Face is also nice - I can remove the inner down jacket liner when I just need a shell for rain, otherwise I can use both layers on the plane to help me stay warm while I sleep (plus, I got it at an outlet for $100 or so). A small laptop (e.g. a Surface Laptop Go) is another great item to pack - being able to access a laptop for watching videos, planning activities, or buying tickets is a huge bonus.

The Best 2021 Volvo S60 is Underpriced

Here’s the scenario: you’re interested in getting a compact luxury sports sedan, and you’re thinking about treating yourself to something that’s really quite nice. The usual Teutonic names come into play here: Mercedes, Audi, BMW, along with some others: Tesla, Genesis, etc. And then you think about looking into Volvo’s offerings - which you end up getting, because it’s so terribly mispriced compared to the competition.

Here’s a bunch of MSRPs (which, I know, isn’t what people will actually pay at the dealer, but nonetheless is a solid benchmark) for mostly-comparably-equipped sedans: all wheel drive, a heads-up display, automated parking, traffic-aware cruise control, a sunroof, and whatever free seats/paint color/wheels were available. You might have different preferences than I do, so the numbers might vary person-to-person.

  • Volvo’s S60 Recharge Inscription is basically the best S60 you can buy. It comes standard with basically everything, to the point where the only option worth adding (at least, for someone living in Texas) is the $200 automatic parking feature. MSRP + Destination comes out to $51,895, for a 400-horsepower plug-in hybrid with AWD. It also comes with a tax credit of $5,419, making the “actual” price $46,476 (for those who qualify, and I assume most people buying these kinds of products qualify).

  • Genesis’ G70 3.3T AWD came to $49,225. It lacked the heads-up display, but was otherwise well-equipped and easily one of the higher-value plays available.

  • Tesla’s Model 3 Long Range AWD was $47,190. There aren’t many options available, but it’s easily the most tech-focused product, which causes some polarization among shoppers.

  • Audi’s A4 Prestige 45 TFSI quattro S tronic (what a mouthful!) also comes equipped well without having to select options, so it tips the scales at $50,845. The A4 has 261 HP, so about 35% less power to show off four rings. The sportier S4 starts at $50,945 and goes up to $59,245 for the top trim.

  • BMW’s 330e xDrive is also a plug-in hybrid similar to Volvo’s. Equipping it comparably (build code: EF92K7CW) resulted in an MSRP of $54,870, though the tax credit would reduce it by $5,836 down to $49,034. Once again, it’s much less powerful than the Volvo: 288 HP just won’t cut it. The M340i starts at $57,695 - before any options.

  • Mercedes’ C 300 4MATIC came to $52,700. Once more, this version is relatively underpowered at 255 HP, while a more fair competitor would be the C 43 AMG that starts at $57,550 (adding options to make it comparably equipped pushed us to $63,700).

Of course, brand name can definitely justify some level of price premium between different competitors. Mercedes, BMW, and Audi are probably the first three names that you think of when someone says “luxury car”, which allows them to charge more. The Volvo has a solid but not stellar reputation among reviewers (Car and Driver ranks it #8, MotorTrend ranks it #4, Edmunds ranks it #2; meanwhile, the G70 gets top marks from everyone), which means that pricing power shouldn’t be too affected either way (though it’s not like that many shoppers are reading reviews thoroughly).

So why exactly are Genesis, Volvo, and Tesla operating at a different price bracket? Are Volvo shoppers not comparing the prices to German rivals? Perhaps that, or perhaps these companies are still in brand-building mode whereas the Germans are cashing it in. Perhaps Volvo dealers have a hard time convincing and explaining to buyers the mechanics of the tax credit.

internal pricing

The truly crazy thing to me is how Volvo’s pricing doesn’t even make sense within its own portfolio. The non-hybrid T5 AWD trim of the S60, matched option-for-option, makes 150 less horsepower yet costs $47,395. Adding the hybrid electronic bits gives you much more power, a more economical to drive vehicle, and saves you nearly a thousand dollars to start! What’s going on here? Volvo ought to be able to increase the price at least by a few thousand dollars. Why would anyone buy the T5 AWD trim otherwise?

Update

I asked this question on Reddit, where it was pointed out to me that MSRP is only loosely correlated with the actually important metric at play: leasing costs. Volvo’s leasing prices are apparently disproportionately higher than competitors, which explains the apparent “mispricing” vis-a-vis external competition.

Does that fully explain the “internal” product portfolio pricing? I’m sure that there’s something at play that involves production quantities, or perhaps government mandates to sell X% of electric/plug-in hybrids to avoid fines.

Future Recipes

Here’s a list of recipes that I haven’t gotten to yet, but hope to at some point in the future. This is likely to be an evolving list.

Einstein isn't that Smart

A friend recently shared a random life hack that I took advantage of this morning: Einstein Bros. Bagels doesn’t verify your account on their app. I downloaded their app, created an account using a made up email (that I don’t even know if it exists), a random password (that I’ll never have to remember), and a random phone number. They do check to see if that phone number has been used before, and I’m sure that they verify that the email address isn’t already tied to an account, but I never once had to do any verification to say that I owned that phone number or email.

This is important because Einstein automatically gives you a “free bagel + shmear with purchase” coupon when you create an account, and they also give you a “free egg sandwich with purchase” coupon on your birthday. My purchase was a bottle of water; the other catch is that on the mobile app you need to add funds in a minimum increment of $5. The funny thing is that since I can use Apple Pay, they’ll never receive my actual credit card number; every time I make a different account and load it up with $5 it’ll always appear to be a different account. Perhaps their data scientists could have spotted a trend with certain credit cards constantly loading $5 onto accounts; now that information will blend in with the rest of the legitimate accounts that are genuinely loading $5 on for their purchases. I guess they’ll just have to realize that their Austin locations are seeing an uptick in the utilization of certain coupon codes. If you order in person, you wouldn’t even be locked into paying $5.

In other news, I’m a big fan of the Santa Fe Egg White Sandwich.

Rambling Thoughts on the Role of College

As always, I tend to engage in decent thinking about random aspects on life when I’m procrastinating a project or a task that I know I need to do but really don’t find the motivation for. This time, it’s the Market Research Presentation for my senior design project, which is somewhat funny, given that I chatted with my roommate today for hours about the role of college in society - both today and possibly in the future. The way I see it, there are five main roles that college plays:

  1. The trade function of colleges is to help students get a job, specifically by learning some knowledge relevant to obtaining a career. Why does seemingly everyone want to major in CS or engineering or business? Certainly, it helps that those majors tend to produce (at least at UT) average salary outcomes in the $60,000 to $80,000 range (data can be found here for McCombs, Cockrell, and CS - though I feel like the CS data must be off in a highly conservative direction). Taking 4 years of architecture classes teaches you something about how to “do architecture” for a living; taking 4 years of finance classes teaches you something about how to “do finance” for a living.

  2. Colleges play a certification role for your knowledge. MIT OpenCourseWare and Stanford Online and plenty of other websites have knowledge that’s publicly accessible for free, but it’s much harder to use that knowledge for the purpose of getting a job, since you can’t (as far as I know) have MIT or Stanford or whoever else tell an employer that you’ve taken the classes and passed some standard for knowledge. A degree from UT is a piece of paper, but it’s one that signifies a level of competence.

  3. To give a (residential) “college experience”. I think that this is one of the most important things I’ve taken out of college - the people I’ve met, the conversations I’ve had, the parties I’ve attended (of course, my definition of the latter is far different than your average business major’s). As this semester has illustrated better than any other, there’s an incredible different between doing classes online from home and doing classes in person. Late nights at the library or exploring the stadium are core memories of my time in college.

  4. To promote the idea of a classical education, which involves learning for learning’s sake. I think that most people would default to liberal arts majors when they think of this - people studying languages like Greek and Latin or philosophy or 19th century French literature, but I’ve always thought of the folks that study pure mathematics just because they find it interesting. I’d argue that the vast majority of students today don’t have any intention of get a classical/broad education - see why most kids (including myself) take classes at community college or take AP/CLEP exams to avoid “boring” introductory classes in history or economics or literature or calculus.

  5. To continue the research function. While most students aren’t interested in pursuing a PhD (and thankfully so, since there’s not enough spots for that many PhD applications), there are a few people that I’ve met that were laser focused on research in college.

My roommate holds the position that at least for CS, college doesn’t really do a good job of the first role. In my experience for electrical engineering, that certainly seems true - about half of the major ends up in software engineering related positions, yet my roommate and I never really learned solid practices for debugging, or writing documentation, or source control. At least our algorithms classes taught us how to prove obscure facts about Gale-Shapley!

The certification role is one that’s sticky over time, and one that slows down the progress of “career accelerators” like Hack Reactor, Lambda School, and Pathrise. Sure, those sources might be more focused on teaching you job-relevant skills, but ultimately the brand recognition of a university’s CS department is likely to remain stronger and more pervasive, at least for a while.

Digging into the Sankey diagrams of US Energy Flow.

If you haven’t seen them yet, go check out the Sankey diagrams from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory showing how the US produces and consumes energy. It’s super interesting. I decided to dig a bit and produced this cool (in my mind, at least) chart showing how the US economy has actually gotten more efficient over time - even as real GDP as increased (along with the population), total energy production has stayed more or less the same.

energy vs GDP chart.jpg

You can download the data here. Solar and wind don’t play a huge role right now, but solar’s share has 10x’ed over the past decade, and wind’s has 3x’ed. Coal’s has basically halved, thanks to cheap natural gas. There’s a lot of work to do - and this is only for a (large) share of the US’ emissions.

New updates every now and then.

I don’t really write on a strict schedule for this blog. There are some blogs out there that do create new posts every week or month or day, but this certainly isn’t that. It’s probably been months since I last wrote something for my website (at least, the public-facing section), largely because I only tend to write here when I have this sudden outburst of energy and passion that I feel a need to act on. That’s largely fine for what's essentially a creative project like this.

Alas, my thesis won’t be such an endeavor. It won’t be as creative; the scope of it is much, much larger; it’s also more important. I’ll probably need to schedule weekly time to work on it each week, and we’ll see how that plays out.

Don’t expect weekly posts here. At the same time, if I’m truly committed to the personal finance section, I ought to start scheduling that too…

Reality - Expectations

For the longest time, I had always heard a fundamental equation as:

Happiness = Reality - Expectations

Pretty basic, right? We have expectations, and when reality doesn’t meet them, we’re sad and unhappy. When reality beats out what we were expecting, we’re happy. It turns out that there’s a term for this: Expectation Confirmation Theory, or ECT. This was originally developed in the world of satisfaction with a product or service, but I guess people moved it out of that domain pretty quickly.

Anyways, I don’t think that the above equation is right. For one, happiness isn’t a singular spectrum; unhappiness and happiness aren’t completely collinear. There’s a degree of independence; you can be simultaneously happy and sad.

For another, I don’t think “happiness” is quite so dependent on outperforming expectations. There are many restaurants I’ve got out to eat at several times; I’ll frequently talk to and spend time with the same people over and over again. If happiness were really that dependent on constantly outperforming expectations, you wouldn’t expect marriages to ever work - eventually, expectations would catch up to reality, nearly everyone would stop being happy with their partner, and virtually everyone would get divorced. I do believe that you can be happy with reality (as long as you’re focusing on the right things). There’s something to be said for my grandparents’ daily walks around the lake, my “adopted” grandparents’ love of beer and brewing, and the enjoyment of nature and the outdoors. I feel like I consistently have high expectations and consistently am happy when those expectations are met.

So, I’ll propose two new, slightly modified equations:

Delight = Reality - Expectations

Disappointment = Expectations - Reality

Pretty basic. When reality beats out expectations, we’re delighted. When we expect a lot but only get a little, we’re disappointed. I think that this better captures what we’re actually feeling. As a side note, as I was writing this I discovered that we tend to use more happy words than sad words. Some interesting links are here, here, and here.

Good to Great

So, I read Good to Great by Jim Collins over the break (classic winter break activity) and as much as I enjoyed reading it, and despite the page full of notes I have on it in OneNote, I don’t think I’m going to remember it as a must-read business book. It won’t go into the Recent Reads section, and I thought that I might as well post my own notes to myself publicly:

Konana is highly skeptical about Collins' work in Built to Last. He didn't show anything that makes me second-guess my decision to not read it, and didn't say anything that indicates that I'm missing out by not reading it. In any case, Collins is a great storyteller (much like Gladwell), and that means we should be a bit more rigorous and careful when analyzing the ideas in Good to Great.

This book didn't (and probably couldn't have) covered all of the intricacies of each of the successful and failed transformations. Each of those happened in a context - the context of the company, the context of the market, the context of the industry - and that context has been left out from Good to Great.

Collins only studied companies that were in the Fortune 500 that had 15 years of average/below average performance followed by 15 years of market outperformance. This is an extremely small sample size, and there are likely to be many, many companies in the universe that had everything Collins mentioned (e.g. Level 5 leadership, a focus on getting the right people on board, a Hedgehog Concept, etc.) that eventually failed for a myriad of other reasons (perhaps the market addressed by the Hedgehog Concept fizzled out, for example). So there's no causal relationship between following Collins' advice and going from good to great. This is merely Collins noting, among the 11 good-to-great companies, what factors were present that were absent from the comparison companies. Had the criteria for selection been different, a different group of companies could have been selected, and the conclusions may have been different.

Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) points out that many of the good-to-great companies are no longer great. Now, this isn't the premise of the book: the book is focused on the factors that drive a turnaround or a transformation, and not on everlasting greatness in an organization. However, it's worth noting that the good-to-great companies didn't stay great forever.

It's worth wondering if the times have changed. As innovation cycles have sped up, and as the pace of technology only accelerates, does taking years and years to discover a Hedgehog Concept make sense? After all, how are the Japanese and German automakers doing as Tesla skyrockets in the EV space? Is this book perhaps too conservative in its advice? This is a classic tradeoff between speed and accuracy - we don't want to blindly go down the wrong path, but we need to start moving at some point. So, again, it's worth debating how much these concepts still apply.

It's also worth asking to what companies Collins' concepts, if valid, would apply to. All Fortune 500 companies? Smaller ones too? Those in the high-tech space?

The concepts can be useful for thinking about things on our own (e.g. an excellent point is the fact that companies receive hardly any attention while they're doing poorly, and a bunch once they start to do well, which in turn reinforces the idea of a miracle overnight transformation, even though the steps for a transformation may have been set up ahead of time). That said, this book isn't the Bible, and shouldn't be treated as such.

Again, I enjoyed reading it. But after some skepticism, I don’t know that it’s the one to read.

Surfing the Barrel > Anger

So, today I’m walking around Kyoto with my parents to go to a restaurant. I haven’t eaten breakfast; I’m kinda hungry. Prerna has been complaining nonstop for what’s probably half an hour about how she thinks we’re wasting time walking around; how she wants to just take a taxi over to a restaurant; how eating is wasting time and how much of a rush we’re in for time (my mom has a strong checklist mentality to her vacations – she wants to see everything on her list, which in turn makes it much less of a vacation to Robbie and I). The first lunch spot we dropped by said that we couldn’t eat there, since it was reservations-only or something like that. So I’m getting hangry, Prerna’s being annoying.

And then I walk right into a pole.

Seriously, I have no idea how that happened. I guess I was looking at my phone trying to navigate and figure out exactly where we were all walking to – but in any case I wasn’t looking ahead, and I just slam my face right into a tall metal pole (probably a streetlight, I didn’t really check). My mom starts laughing, and I’m just pissed. My face hurts. My glasses are a bit loose.

I could have told Prerna to quit complaining. Giving into anger is a default setting – it’s easy to do on Autopilot. Instead, I just put in my AirPods and turned on Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride (yeah, from Lilo and Stitch). And suddenly, I stopped being so angry. The noise-cancelling blocked out the complaints; it’s hard to be mad when you’re imagining surfing the barrel (which a friend said was dangerous? That certainly won’t stop me from putting it on my bucket list. Honestly, I just want to do it more.)

We ended up having Thai food. Everyone was just hangry. It’s amazing how much food helps things. Don’t pick anger. Pick surfing the barrel and shrimp fried rice.

Kanban Doors, Overcommitment, and Productive Procrastination.

This week is an absolute doozy. I turned my bedroom door into a kanban board with the help of some dry-erase markers (which don’t appear to be dry-erase on painted wooden surfaces, but I’m sure an alcohol wipe will take care of it). I wrote down something my dad used to tell me when I was younger:

Not shown: the bottom panel is where completed notes go.

So I have a lot of work on my plate. My roommate, bless his soul, texted me “Are you ok”, to which I replied “Questionably so.” Mental health has been something I’ve luckily never had to worry about; how I get myself in these situations is another story entirely.

There’s something to be said for wishful thinking.

There’s something to be said for wishful thinking.

Over the course of the summer I wrote down every single thing I wanted to do for Fall 2019. The list is to the right; that’s after I decided to drop 2 classes and a part-time internship. Looking back on things, the classes seem to have went fine; I got something interesting and fun out of TBF; the clubs were “fine” (for one of them, functionally nothing happened, though it did spawn the personal finance section on this blog); I did work out quite a bit (which really improved my quality-of-life); I did hardly any of the activities I planned on doing for fun (yet enjoyed myself constantly); I didn’t really read or audit much; recruiting went amazing-in-retrospect.

I wrote all of this just to avoid starting on the pink note under Today’s Queue. I’m incredibly good to making myself feel productive when I’m really just putting off the work that actually needs to get done.