I. The challenge

The main challenge of living is that it has to be done in real time; it has to be an improvisational dance with reality.

With the explosion of networked computing power over the past two decades, a belief that has seeped into our culture’s water supply is that everything can be made better if we have more data. I think this is fundamentally mistaken for other reasons, but the main problem I want to address is that data collection is costly. You have to make sure that you are collecting the right data to begin with - and oftentimes the thing that you want to measure can’t be measured directly so you have to think of good proxies, which then run into problems of representation - and even then, it is costly to run the analysis and make the right decisions. But the main issue is: you can’t collect a statistically significant data set on most real life events.

For example, recently my wife and I had to make a quick decision to enroll our 1-year-old daughter in a new daycare center. The previous one had a whistleblower event where a teacher called out another teacher for child neglect and contacted all the parents using the center’s app. The whistleblower was summarily fired and my wife and I escalated immediately to management to get their side of the story. After hearing their case, we decided to aggressively search for a daycare center that did not have the same issues as her current center. We believed that their hiring practices were responsible for the whistleblower crisis and found the whistleblower’s account credible.

We were forced to find a center that was nearby and did not have the same issues (high teacher turnover, obsession with growth at the expense of quality) that our previous center had. Luckily, we were able to find something that met all of our criteria and had an opening for our daughter. We pulled the trigger immediately and enrolled her.

That entire process took a week and was forced onto us. Before the whistleblower incident, we knew our center had some problems - mainly poor customer service from management - but we weren’t sufficiently motivated to leave. Once the crisis hit, however, we were forced to act quickly because we wanted to ensure our daughter didn’t fall victim to negligent care. We contemplated pulling her out immediately with no notice; we know some other parents exercised that option. And once we made the decision to leave, my wife only had a few days to gather information on other centers, mostly by soliciting feedback in her Facebook mommy groups. No one had anything bad to say about the new center, but even so, she only got 10-20 replies, a small sample size.

The rest of life is like the daycare crisis: you’re forced to make do with what you have under time pressure. External conditions are never good enough to make a perfect decision. Everything is a roll of the dice.

II. Timing the market

The difficulty with living in real time can be understood as another manifestation of “timing the market”. Everyone knows that, as a retail investor, you should invest in index funds for the long-term and avoid trying to time the market on anything.

But the rest of life can’t be approached that way. You can’t just passively invest in an index fund career - probably the equivalent of taking the first job you’re offered at a S&P500 company - or you will get caught flat-footed. Should you change roles at your job? Change companies? What if you need to move to get the career opportunities you want? These are also cases where you’re trying to time several markets at once - the general labor market, the labor market in your particular industry and role, the housing market if you have to move… And you have no choice but to play the game.

III. The Adversarial Zeitgeist

One way to try to time the market is to correctly read the currents of culture and politics. This means one should stay plugged into the zeitgeist, digesting the latest output of the take-industrial complex.

Previously, prior to 2021 or so, I had been adamant about avoiding social media. I still don’t keep up my Facebook account and my twitter account is pseudonymous (not quite anonymous since I’ll be linking to this blog from there). Don’t even ask about Instagram or TikTok. But over time I’ve realized that there is value in being plugged into the information streams that dominate our lives. Venkatesh Rao, who is probably 25% of the reason I am even attempting to write all of these blog posts, wrote a vigorous attack on what he called “waldenponding”, or the desire to smash your smartphone, delete your social media and take up artisanal sourdough bread baking (note that I make sourdough bread and am mostly making fun of myself). It was convincing enough that I signed up for an account on Twitter. [Note that the below image, reproduced from Rao’s post, is a pretty good approximation of what I think the optimal information diet is]

Twitter has been an incredibly useful tool for me, so long as I am vigilant about only following people who have substantive things to say and am extremely liberal with the block button. I turned myself private for the purposes of marketing this blog and protecting my identity somewhat, but have changed that since yesterday because people who don’t follow me can’t read my replies, which has had the effect of taking me out of the conversation altogether.

Among the better people who hang out on Twitter (still, after what Rao has called “The Muskening”) is Adam Elkus, whose blog posts on COVID were simply astonishing to read in real time and even more sobering to read 3 years later. He doesn’t write many blog posts anymore, but tweets under a locked account. Pretty much every one of his threads (about 1 thread every 3 days by my estimation) is gold. Over a year, that’s 100+ golden threads by Adam that I am privy to that I simply wouldn’t if I were waldenponding.

One of those post’s of Elkus’s that I linked above was “The Counter-Disinformation Agenda is Dead”. In it, he discusses how the New York Times published an explainer-like article that advised that people not wear masks to protect themselves, while they published an op-ed by Zeynep Tufekci (incidentally, the public intellectual who received the biggest reputation boost from COVID) the day before that eviscerated the argument that masks don’t work, unless you’re a healthcare worker, in which case they are essential PPE and you’re killing nurses just by buying them off store shelves. Clearly, obviously, Zeynep was correct. But no one else at the New York Times was able to spot the terrible logic - or they lacked the courage to counter it outright. (Hey, someone had to green-light Zeynep’s op-ed!)

Elkus’s point here is that the “counter-disinformation agenda” was premised on the idea that prestigious publications with lots of editorial oversight could be trusted to sift through the ambiguity of real events to present the Truth, cleansed of potentially-harmful Disinformation. What actually happened is that these publications unthinkingly parroted the official line, which turned out to be wrong. Very wrong.

The counter-disinformation agenda is dead because the balance of power has shifted to the masses, who now have the ability to access the raw data of real events and aggregate it as well as large organizations. The mass of interested amateurs can now beat large organizations - if they’re disciplined. This was done by a few people I followed on Twitter, including Elkus. But the problem is that the access to raw data - or at the very least, very large amounts of academic papers and on-the-ground videos of events - is being channeled by bad actors with huge amounts of reach. Every event is an excuse for the conspiracy theorists, antivaxxers, and fad diet hawkers to attribute it to their personal hobbyhorses, and they have legions of fans that pollute the information environment with retweets and shares of their influencer idols. The problem here isn’t that bad actors exist - they always will. It’s that the mainstream hasn’t realized how costly it is to shred their credibility parroting nonsense while pretending to care about the capital-T truth. Many people are radicalized by being shown that official sources were lying and there really is something out there that They don’t want you to know.

The key to avoid radicalization is the realization that the modern information environment is completely adversarial. As a rule, anyone posting frequently enough to dominate your social media feeds is trying to make money off of it. This means they are highly incentivized to curate an information environment that is biased to their view of the world. And everyone is participating in it. The key is to keep your head and let the influencers wash over you instead of letting them dictate your decisions. As Rao’s graph above shows, you should only be making small bets based off Twitter, unless it happens to be from accounts that are “primordial soup level early-warning researchers”.