Time and Messes
Part of our lives is measuring things to determine how valuable, true, useful, or good they are, so we know what to spend our time on. Or what beliefs to have, or which movie to watch, or whom to hire.
But measuring things is hard. We have come up with a million ways to measure things, like review sites and Top Ten lists and resumes, and some of them do the job some of the time. But they don't always work.
We often have to resort to proxies to get information about how valuable, true, useful, or good something is. We resort to things like upvotes or likes. I still find it hilarious how the best we can do on the internet is upvotes and likes. (I don’t think they’re ineffective; in fact, I think upvotes on Reddit are a fabulous indicator of how worthwhile something is. Reddit might be the best place on the entire internet at sorting content. I just find it funny how a pile of yesses and nos is probably the most effective system we have in an age of algorithms.)
Or we resort to secondary systems to determine how good a primary system is. We turn to journalists to determine how good a video game studio is, when we could just play their games and decide for ourselves.
Or we go through a pile of resumes and pick out a good one, only to find that a great-looking candidate on paper is a narcissistic asshole on Zoom.
Humans have invented the academic system, which gives degrees. We have also invented the accreditation system, which gives the academic system a degree for giving out its degrees. This is already two layers of validation. Who accredits the people who run the accreditation institutions? How do we know those people aren’t completely full of shit? How do we know that college educations are even worth anything anymore?
Well, most of them aren’t. Academia in the United States is little more than a jobs program and a program for setting up 18-year-olds on legally-sanctioned reverse-annuities: forcing them to pay the salaries of bureaucrats for the next 20 years. And the degrees they’re receiving no longer even earn them jobs capable of paying for that obligation.
The accreditation system is no longer a useful proxy for how valuable a university education is. Proxies can be very useful until they aren’t anymore.
In 2006, the ratings agencies on Wall Street no longer offered a useful ratings system for corporate debt. The evidence is that the entire global economy collapsed 2 years later. The opinions of credit ratings people no longer served as a good proxy for the health of the economy.
Facebook likes, on the other hand, have never been a good proxy for anything.
There isn’t always a proxy or a good measurement for what you’re trying to measure. Sometimes the only real way to measure credibility, validity, value, or truth is to try something messy and see if it has legs. See if it stands the test of time.
I used to hate Mark Zuckerberg. Also, I still hate Mark Zuckerberg. But if you apply his principle of letting engineers do creative things freely, you’ll find that they can do a hell of a lot and that maybe Zuckerberg isn’t wrong just because I hate him.
People want desperately to believe that there's one single answer to “is this thing worth doing” — which is why review websites are such a fixture of the front page of Google. Or “can I trust this person and their opinions” — which is why we insist on labelling people Republicans and Democrats. Because it’s easier than getting into messy conversations where we actually have to think and try things.
But the wise people on planet earth have something very special called taste. They have experienced enough of the world, willingly, and thought enough about that experience, to genuinely have their own opinion-making mechanisms. They're willing to give things time.
Almost nobody actually forms their own opinions. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do. Because it requires you to have unique insights that only come from hard work, reflection, and curiosity. It requires you to be okay with messes, both in your life and inside your own head.
But messiness is often the trade-off if you want good information. The strongest friendships are formed after two people see the darkest or most desperate sides of each other. The best startups are often founded in garages and apartments. Not nice, clean office spaces.
Time as a measurement
Freedom of speech is a mechanism that lets time ultimately decide the goodness or badness of something. Free markets are an economic and social force which does the same thing.
People often say that if only we could put more government in between bad ideas and the world, we would have a better society. “If we could just shut the bad people up, we’d only have good ideas left.”
First of all, you need to think carefully about that. The only reason you're reading this on your phone is because people in America are allowed to experiment freely with business and technology — and that means allowing all ideas, including bad ideas, to exist in the marketplace. If that weren't the case, America would still be poor and you'd be reading this in a magazine. If I was even lucky enough (or great enough) to get it published there. Which I wouldn’t have been.
But also... it works the same way with spoken ideas. The only way you can discover the best and truest long-term ideas is by allowing all the shitty ones to exist beside them. By allowing the world to water all ideas for a little while until the bad ones begin to rot and they have to be extracted and tossed aside to give more resources to the better ones. The ones that are clearly making better use of the resources.
It's just like gardening. And gardening is filthy.
Good ideas require things to be messy. In the same way that startups are often founded in dank, borderline-unlivable spaces, great ideas are often built and improved by crass non-conforming people who refuse to play by the rules.
There are proxies for things. Like subscriber count, revenue, college degrees, etc. But the true test of something is whether it gets used again later. Purely out of merit. Or whether it turns into something better by letting people play with it.
In this way, being offended is a required part of having any freedom at all. If you want your country to be run by good ideas, you must allow bad ideas to have their turn in the sun and then wilt.
Some people called South Park a vulgar, sophomoric waste of time the first few years it was on TV. But it turns out that Trey Parker and Matt Stone understand more about human society and human behavior than most people who are in charge of everything. They are, by any reasonable standard, geniuses. Especially because comedy is the best way to make meaningful comments about things.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone have done more to educate people about the world than most college professors.
I’ve encountered high-rated video games that I thought were incredibly boring and poorly made. And I’ve also encountered poorly-rated movies and TV shows that I thought were excellent.
First impressions don't always work, the same way proxies don't always work. And it's really hard to tell whether somebody's review is accurate without… well, going and seeing for yourself. Which means that reading someone else’s opinion wasn’t very useful in the first place.
And unfortunately it's impossible to untangle things like politics from things like Rotten Tomatoes or other rating/review venues. No matter where you go in life, you're going to encounter systems that are biased. People will always have politics, and people will always have reasons for doing something other than discovering the truth.
If someone has an actual numerical rating for something, they have a reason for having that rating. After all, if they care enough about a genre or group to rate its members, it’s because there are things they like to see in that genre that each member either is or isn’t living up to. To some degree it’s about having standards, but to some degree it’s just about their standards.
Complex, authoritarian systems (which includes subjective ratings systems that disguise themselves as objective) are often just trying to do one main thing: to eliminate time as the means of testing something.
Google is incentivized to show you enough to make a decision right on its front page. Because it wants you to develop a routine of going to it for answers. It doesn’t want you to do any thinking for yourself, because then you’ll stop asking it for the answer to every question you have.
A desire for certainty is, from the perspective of a search engine, profitable. And a desire for certainty is just another way of saying a refusal of messiness. Google is only a useful tool if it leads you to go explore things. It’s not useful if you just demand black and white answers from it. That’s not learning, that’s being a passenger of your own brain.
No more bad ideas
Think of communism. It’s a system set up by people who swear that letting good ideas flourish is bad, because it leads some people to be poor. So they replace it with a system where good ideas aren’t allowed at all, and no one gets rich or creates jobs, and everyone gets even more poor. They swear that they understand what it takes to make a billion people prosperous, and if only those people would hand over control we’d all finally be rid of bad ideas forever.
In this way, it’s hard to determine Mao Zedong’s biggest sin: the deaths, or the fact that he was a complete dumbass. After all, if he had the self-awareness to realize how divorced his actions were from reality, those 50 million people wouldn’t have starved to death. Mao fundamentally did not understand the difference between good ideas and bad ideas, and that the freedom to experiment is the only thing that produces enough good ideas to outweigh the bad ideas (because bad ideas are coming either way). For someone who allegedly read so much history, that’s a pretty big oversight.
If you try to brute force the world into giving you information you have not earned, you’re gonna have a bad time. If you try to force the world to deliver you good news about ideas that might be bad, like Mao did, you risk acting on bad information and producing even more bad ideas instead of good ones.
Mao refused to let time be the judge of anything. He wanted China to Leap Forward, right now, immediately. He wanted Google to just give him the answer. And in refusing to exist in a mess for a while, he created the biggest mess ever made.
As Oliver Cromwell said, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
A problem that China has struggled with for a long, long time is authoritarian ego. Its leaders assume that all of the human knowledge required to lead a country of a billion people can be found in the minds of just a few leaders, and that no outside opinions are necessary. And that those capable few always seem to be the ones in power, because authoritarian government is just that good at getting competent people into power. And that by virtue of having been placed in power, those people must know how to run an economy that covers 6.3% of the entire surface of the earth.
Needless to say, none of those things is true.
Giving it time
If you think about something like the president's approval rating... that number serves absolutely no purpose. Its only job is to keep people busy taking and responding to surveys. It tickles our “attaching numbers to things” bone.
The reality is, we won't always know what kind of president someone was until 20 years from now. After things have had some time to get either better or worse, and we can determine that president's role in such things.
One of the empirically strongest ways to manage an economy is to tighten up credit when things are going well — to apply the brakes and keep the economy from overheating. But any president who does that is automatically an asshole, because “wow why would you cause people to be laid off you fucking jerk.” (Which is actually how we talk to presidents now, sadly.) We never look back on a presidency and say “the economy didn’t crash, he must have been doing something right.” We only criticize whoever’s in charge when it does. Even if it was the fault of the guy who was in office 6 years ago because he spent the economy down the toilet to make himself look good to voters.
At the very least, we could just wait three and a half years and ask ourselves what kind of president he was then. Keeping track of it in the meantime is like measuring the depth of the bay using an instrument on a fishing bobber.
Sometimes in life you don't get to have any useful information about a thing until later. You can rush it because you're impatient or biased or incapable of making a decision for yourself, but that doesn't mean the information was useful. That just means you're an impatient person.
This is also why people with strict standards on who they will or won't consider dating are bound to be disappointed.
There's this meme that was going around on social media about a list of things in a man that give women “the ick.” A list of red flags and deal-breakers, basically. And the second-order meme, the meme of the meme, was that it had become so long that it had disqualified the entire human race.
If you have a list of red flags 315 items long, you're never going to find someone to date. Because there isn't anyone that un-messy.
The sexiest (and most important) thing that can happen between two people is time. Time to be curious about each other and surprise each other. Time to develop something you weren't expecting. Time to actively desire without getting those desires fulfilled. Time to make a mess of each other's emotions and routines, and to live in it for a while.
If you want to know how tragic something in your life was, give it time. Decide later. Don't insist on labelling something “devastating” right away.
I lost $40,000 day trading and had to start my life over at 32 years old. I’m glad that happened, even though it absolutely sucked in every possible way.
Messy
You can't judge a writer until 100 years after his death, and all of the influence of his friends and followers has evaporated. Until the world has had time to judge his writing on its merits, outside the controversial and fleeting context of his time.
You can’t see how cool the nerds were until you’re 40 and they’re cooler than you are.
You can't judge how expert an expert is until you go try his ideas in the real world.
If human beings judged the quality and meaningfulness of a relationship by how good sex felt immediately in the moment, we'd end up in a lot of bad relationships.
Which we do. Because we do.
In a world that loves using metrics, scores, sensations, and Top Ten lists to measure things, we become accustomed to the idea that a measurement can immediately tell us whether something is good or bad, useful or treacherous. But very few things in life are as simple as a quick measurement. At least very few meaningful things. Sure you can judge how funny a meme is by how many upvotes it has. But even then, you have to wait ten years to see if it’s still relevant.
Most things in life require you to plant seeds, commit to the idea that something might be good, and then stick around and see. Creating a life you want requires doing a lot of shit you don’t want to do, and then living in it for a while. The reason everybody hates dating is because it’s messy. It’s a process of doing work and figuring things out. People don’t like doing that.
Embracing messiness will give you more opportunities to do interesting things. Don't insist on neat and tidy, black and white. They’re overrated.
Drink some water and destroy your life for a while.
JDR
“It's not time to worry yet. I'll let you know when.” - Atticus Finch