Square Man Roundup Vol. 1
A lot of my smaller writing ideas sit in my notes for a while without growing, because they don’t need a full essay. Maybe I’ll start putting these smaller notes together in batches. Square Notes. Square Ideas for Round People.
Here are some ideas I’ve been thinking about recently, in whatever order I felt like putting them in.
Smart TVs are dumb as hell
Sometimes my “smart” TV will auto-turn on immediately after I’ve turned it off. As if to ask, “Are you sure it’s not TV time?” It’s hard to describe how angry this makes me.
Sometimes it will refuse to turn on late at night when the room is dark. As if it’s sure I made a mistake. “You must be asleep and rolled over onto the remote.”
I shouldn’t have to explain my behavior to a television. You have one single purpose, and it’s to do exactly what I tell you and nothing else.
So much of our technology behaves this way now — it offers the convenience of making decisions for us. But I often find the side effects worse than the problem. I don’t need to be saved from the catastrophe of accidental TV power.
Eventually there will come a day when people will pay a premium for analog digital technology. I already will. For technology that just has buttons and works. For technology that doesn’t use AI.
Maybe this is why people still buy classic cars, vinyl, and Nintendo 64 consoles. Because simpler is better. It just is.
How does, not how should
I have spent a portion of this year researching the history of economic theory. Something I came across repeatedly is that some of the smartest people in history, with some of the most impressive ideas, failed to grasp one simple concept.
Over and over, philosophers have tried to describe how the economy should behave, given a certain set of assumptions, logical systems, or morals. How the economy should behave, if people and businesses act a certain ideal way under certain theoretical conditions. Unfortunately, the theories that make such assumptions are no good.
John Maynard Keynes, by far the most influential economist of the modern era, did something different: he described how the economy does work, in messy, messy reality… and described what we should do with that information. John Keynes answered “how does,” not “how should.” That’s why the foundation of modern macroeconomics is Keynesian.
I’ve been thinking about this in comparison to relationships.
The unhappiest partners I know are people who spend all their time trying to describe how the opposite sex should behave, and what it should want and need.
The people with the happiest relationships heed how the opposite sex does behave. Because they know you can’t lecture them into changing, the same way you can’t lecture the economy into being logical.
People are pretty simple if you actually listen to what they want and need. Sex, quality time, movie night, back rubs, a pocket full of money, cute little gifts, freedom to go out with friends, a pair of listening ears… you can have an amazing relationship if you just give your partner what he or she wants without making excuses.
People who make moral judgments about the opposite sex are missing the point.
Thin, grey aliens
I saw an interesting tweet last week from Rob Henderson. He quoted a book called The Theory of Everyone:
Humans are an astonishing species...Instead of evading local predators, we hunted them. Instead of evolving fat or fur, we wore the pelts of our prey. We didn't process poisons in our bodies, we processed the plants before we ate them.
In other words, we are evolving to become more sophisticated, while simultaneously, in my opinion, devolving as a species. We are evolving all of our most important strengths to take place outside our bodies. Warmth, food safety, physical strength, basic tools, computation, maybe eventually our immune systems — all of these things take place outside our bodies. The human body on its own can barely even survive in nature anymore. Especially since we’re not trained for it.
The reason our vision of advanced aliens has always been these thin, frail-looking grey beings is because that’s exactly what they would be. They barely have a need for “bodies” anymore at all.
Maybe eventually we’ll all just be little brain stems who use machines to do all of our living for us. Can’t say I’m too excited about that.
The impact we have on others’ thoughts
For the first 10 years of my life, every time I walked by a dark bathroom, I wondered if Bloody Mary was waiting for me inside. It creeped me out, and it took me a long time to forget. Because one time when I was wee someone told me that if you stand in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights off and say her name three times, Bloody Mary will come to collect you through the mirror.
It takes a long time to forget some of the ridiculous things we “learned” in childhood from people lying to us or passing along bad information.
But that doesn’t just arbitrarily stay in childhood. It happens to adults too.
As a young man, I thought that the manifold was a section of the car’s frame that sat underneath the engine to hold it up. Because some bastard told me so.
When you give someone a piece of knowledge that doesn’t fit in with anything else they know, any of their existing mental frameworks, they have no way of falsifying it or even evaluating it. It doesn’t matter if the information is wrong; it doesn’t even matter if they suspect that it’s wrong — it will sit in their mind and make connections as part of their understanding of the world.
This is how you end up with grown adults who think that paper is merely slices of tree, or that it’s okay to live with an abusive person because maybe this is just how relationships are.
People often have no way to un-learn the bad information without learning something that can replace it.
Be careful what you teach your kids — they will live by your lessons for years, whether you were right or not.
The reward
There’s a video game developer called Super Evil Megacorp who made a game called Vainglory. They were immensely popular for a few years in the 2010s, and always had a good reputation as a game developer.
When asked about their goals and their business philosophy, they replied, “We don’t want to make great games so we can make money. We want to make money so we can make great games.”
Everything in business, and in life, is made of feedback loops. Which part of the feedback loop someone sees as the reward will tell you a lot about who they are and whether you’d want to work with them.
And we can’t stop
I’ve been watching Suits on Netflix. It’s comical, yet incredibly sad, how bad the characters are at communicating with each other.
Working at a law firm, all the characters on the show are always sort of trying to “win” against each other, since there is glory to be had and clients to be impressed by their antics. Power games, manipulation, anger, pride… all among people who are supposed to be teammates.
Episode after episode, it’s a show about relationships spiraling out of control. Every time one of the characters walks into another’s office with bad news or a hard situation, pride and ego immediately take over and the situation gets worse. Every time. Because it’s about winning. It’s about how each one feels slighted or bested and what must be done about that. Even though 90% of the situations in the show are based completely around misunderstandings.
It’s amazing how many of their conversations could be completely changed by one person putting their hands up and saying, “wait. Stop. Please sit down with me.” By choosing the non-emotional response to any given situation.
Part of the genius of the show is that it makes you think of all the things the characters should have said to each other.
But none of them do. Ever.
—
Drink some water and let your TV make decisions about your life.
JDR
“I apologize for writing you a long letter; I did not have time to write a short one.” - Unknown