Category: Commentary

On Feedback and Data Gathering

Expressing an opinion is free.  Everyone will tell you they think your idea is good.  That’s not the same as giving up something to read it or listen to it or purchase it.  Focus groups, surveys, polls, and research can’t tell you as much as putting a product or idea out into the world.  In a marketplace where people have to trade-off other opportunities to take advantage of what you’ve made, you’ll learn more about its value than any test-case or lab experiment.

It doesn’t mean you can’t gather some facts or be informed.  But it’s more important to have a sound theory, and a clear bet on what gap you’re filling or value you’re creating than it is to have a lot of cost-less expressions from disinterested parties of whether or not they imagine it will be valuable.

Do it if it’s valuable to you and if you believe in your unique vision.  Do it if the process of answering the question, “Is this a good idea?” is exciting in and of itself.  Do it if you’re willing to fail to get the answer.

The Biggest Problems are the Biggest Opportunities

In their book Bold: How to Go Big, Achieve Success, and Impact the World, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler talk about the fact that the biggest problems in the world are also the biggest opportunities.  Higher education is no exception.

We are by now well acquainted with the myriad problems with the traditional higher ed conveyor belt system.  Student debt is reaching astronomical levels, institutions have become little more than degree mills spitting out graduates unequipped for the world, students are bored and restless, employers aren’t finding skilled workers, and nobody’s happy.  This is a big problem, and therefore a big opportunity.

It’s not only an opportunity for entrepreneurs to create new education models like Praxis, Minerva, Gap-Year, Enstitute, and others; it’s also an opportunity for you as an individual.  You can capitalize on the problem by creating your own path.  The degree is declining in value and the classroom is fast becoming one of the weakest ways to gain relevant information, skill, confidence, network, and knowledge.  This is an opportunity for you to gain a first-mover advantage and step out of the classroom and into the world.

Those who can boldly say, “I opted-out of the stagnant status quo to create my own path”, and demonstrate the value they can produce will have a tremendous advantage over the throngs of young people hoping that BA on their resume will get them an interview.

Praxis is Democratizing the Degree

Above all a college degree is a signal.  People buy one to signal to the world – their parents, peers, employers, investors, co-workers – that they are a valuable, smart, skilled person worth working with.  Yet the signalling power of the degree has been dropping fast.  Ask any employer and they’ll tell you they have less and less trust in a degree to accurately signal a high-performing, value-creating person.  They prefer experience and demonstrated proof of knowledge, but instead they are asked to simply trust a credential that’s supposed to verify knowledge and skill they can’t see for themselves.  The whole system is based on trust, which is why it’s so vulnerable and ripe for innovation.

Why is Bitcoin a breakthrough? Because unlike all other methods of payment, it’s a trustless system. You don’t need to simply believe people and institutions, you can have demonstrated proof. It’s s platform for open, peer-to-peer verification.

That’s what we’re doing for credentialing at Praxis. The closed door, black box model asks everyone to trust universities and professors to accurately reflect knowledge and skill through tests, grades, and degrees, yet no one gets to actually see the process.  We’re opening it up to the world.  It doesn’t matter what your professor or institution thinks, it matters what the people who actually want to work with you think.  Let’s let them in.  Let’s let them give the grades.  Let’s decentralize this thing.

We’re not trying to create new and better credential gatekeepers. We’re tearing off the gates.  I describe what we’re doing and why in a bit more detail below.

You can also read and watch more about what we’re doing here.

It’s Not About GDP

I’ve been thinking lately about GDP, and common ideas of economic progress more generally.

I just attended an event about the causes of and cures for poverty in the poorest countries.  So much of the discussion utilized comparisons between countries based on measures of GDP, GDP growth, and the like.  The more I thought about it, the less sense this made.  Not that GDP doesn’t decently correlate to overall wealth, opportunity, and progress – it does – but that it does less and less as technology and markets change.  GDP charts would fail to show, for example, the tremendous progress made in many poor countries by the fact that nearly everyone now has access to cell phones.  In fact, GDP does a bad job at measuring the progress of information/communication/data in general.

Consider MOOC’s and the abundance of free online learning.  Since the education industry is a chunk of GDP, putting it all out there for free can actually bring GDP numbers down, even as human well-being and human capital increase.

Think about other areas of misleading measures.  What you can do with a computer or smart phone in terms of sending data across the globe means fewer freight ships, the things easily measured in GDP calculations, but not less progress and opportunity.

Automation, information technology, decentralized networks, open-source…these make the world better and increase human flourishing, though they don’t do much for old-school metrics like employment and GDP.  Being listed as on the payroll of a company doesn’t always equal being better off (depending upon what else you might be doing of course), and having a larger number of physical objects to count doesn’t either.

For this reason, I don’t take much stock in those who lament slowed economic growth and fear it will bring an end to the complex market systems in countries like the US.  We used to consider farming the only thing that really mattered for economic well-being.  Then manufacturing.  As machines can do more of both of these, we humans can be redeployed in myriad ways previously unimagined.  Think about all the micro entrepreneurship going on today.  Think of crowdfunding for one-off projects.  I know authors who probably aren’t technically “employed” most of the time, if at all, and don’t produce GDP enhancing widgets, but they live wonderful lives by pitching book ideas on kickstarter, raising the money, travelling the world, doing the writing, and selling ebooks.  They may make aggregate data appear we’re economically worse off, but they’d rather not trade their life for one hoeing rows or assembling buggies.

The fact that no one quite knows how to calculate the value of the internet and other information age technologies probably causes us all to underestimate just how well-off we are today, and how bright the future is.  It’s the perfect time to seize the opportunity and do something new.  Carpe diem.

Escape

When was the last time you escaped?  I mean fully escaped into a wonder-inducing, awe-inspiring landscape, or sci-fi, or song?

Humans are meant to escape.  We are driven by the impulse to escape.  It’s what led us to multiply, fill the earth and attempt to subdue it.  It’s what drives us to space travel and interplanetary colonization.  It’s what allowed us to discover mind-altering substances and rituals.  It is not the avoidance of living, it is living.

We all have a deep longing for escape.  Escape is a kind of homecoming.  We all feel slightly out of place; we all have an urge to return home, whatever that might mean.  It is the drive to do this which lies at the back of all of our other impulses.  It’s a beautiful motivation.  It is making peace with life and death.  It is seeing beyond time and space.

I do not mean escape motivated by fear.  That is hiding.  I mean adventure motivated by the desire to escape in and of itself.  Escape requires boldness, persistence, vision, and integrity.  It is not cowardice but courage.

What are you escaping into?  What are you enraptured by?  Do you have the courage to follow it?  Your point of origin is not your destination.  Living is escaping.

Three Dangerous Words

“Must be nice.”

My friend and I have a longstanding joke where, no matter what reason one of us has to end a phone conversation, the other one says these three words with faked jealous anger.  The point is to get as absurd as possible and apply it to the worst situation.  “I’ve gotta run, the kids have smeared a dirty diaper on the walls!”….”Hey, must be real nice to be you man.”

It’s obvious how misplaced the sentiment is when purposely applied to extreme and negative circumstances, but the thing is, it’s always a misplaced sentiment.  A famous comedian (I can’t remember who) once said that he could have a giant brain tumor visibly protruding from his head and people would still claim he had it easy because of the millions he made on the last movie.  We don’t and can’t know the struggles of others.  We have no idea if their life would be nice.  It might be hell.

The worst part about the mentality that views others as having it easy is not that it misses their struggles, it’s that it increases your own.  At the heart of this sentiment is a mimetic desire – we want what we imagine other people want, simply because they want it.  This kind of desire blocks us from discovering our own true desires.  It clouds our vision and dampens our pleasure.  You assume that what they have is better than what you have.  When you dig down, the reason is more because they have it than any quality of whatever it is they have.

This reflects an abandonment of self and one’s own core values.  It means you are moving towards ‘be like others’ as a goal, and using other people as a measuring stick or standard against which to judge.  This is envy, and it is probably the most pernicious and destructive force in human society.  If you really make yourself discover what personal fulfillment looks like for you, and set that as your goal, devising your own standard to measure, you  will gain more from your own life and find that the apparent success of others adds to your life, rather than creating competitive pressure.

When you find yourself saying, “must be nice”, stop and consider what you actually know and what you mean.  Do you know that person is living a great life?  Would you actually want what they have and all the challenges that come with it?  Do you even know what it is you do want?  Unless they inspire you to discover and do what makes you feel alive, these three words aren’t doing you any good.

The Problem of School

The great problem of school is that it’s a constant search and effort to teach children all the things they’d learn naturally if they were not in school.  School removes children from the world – the natural learning environment – hence kids don’t pick up the skills and knowledge they need and want. Schools then struggle and attempt all manner of convoluted methods to replace the knowledge they prevent kids from acquiring.

None of these methods work as well as freedom. Remove kids from schools and the purported purpose of schools – educated children – will be realized.

Of course, it will be realized in great abundance, depth, and diversity. This flowering of individual plans and ideas is messy and threatening to moral busybodies and power hungry social planners. It prevents mass control and threatens the status quo with wild beauty and innovation. Liberty upsets patterns. That is precisely why it is so important.

The Real Education Podcast with Blake Boles

Can you combine liberal arts and work experience?  Can you combine virtual and real-world?  That’s what Praxis is all about and what I discuss with Blake Boles on this episode of his Real Education Podcast.

Blake is an author and pioneer in the world of self-directed learning.  He’s got his hand in numerous projects and programs and his podcast is one of my new favorites.  Give a listen to the episode, and check out Blake’s stuff at his website.

Why I Don’t Care About Income Inequality

AbundanceSmartPhone

In the 1980’s if I told you for only a few hundred dollars anyone could have a $1 million asset in their pocket you’d call me crazy.  But here we are.

The chart above (actually a picture of a chart taken with my iPhone and uploaded to this blog with an app to further emphasize the point) is from the book Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.  It illustrates why I think worry about and policy efforts aimed at changing differences in income between rich and poor are dumb, destructive, and miss the point by being stuck in a dead paradigm.

The above chart only scratches the surface.  It’s hard to comprehend just how much wealth (not income) we have today compared to 20, 30, or 50 years ago, let alone a century or two ago.  Anyone who complains that income gaps are growing misses the miracle under their nose of wealth exploding, and more accessible to individuals at any income level than ever before in human history.  50 years ago, it could take a hefty sum to launch and run a basic advocacy organization, for example.  You would need a secretary, long-distance phone line, office space, filing cabinets, a travel agent, a print shop that you’d have to visit to approve runs of literature (at least several thousand at a time), space to store them, shipping cost, etc. ad nauseum.  Today you can setup a WordPress website, bid out for design work on Fiverr or 99 Designs, get VistaPrint to run a few hundred after proofing a digital copy, book your own travel, store your own files, run email campaigns with MailChimp, etc. ad nauseum for a few hundred bucks.

Anyone can write and record songs, publish books, start businesses, sell goods and services, learn anything in the world, or meet people across the globe for free or close to it with a phone and some WiFi.  These things are equally accessible to rich and poor.  Wealth – as measured in opportunities and fulfilled desires, the real end of money – is greater than ever and flatter than ever.

The biggest obstacles are those erected by the wealthy to stymie competition from upstarts taking advantage of all this accessible capital.  Licensing requirements, regulations, wage laws, tax laws, immigration restrictions, intellectual monopoly status on non-scarce resources, and subsidized education and idleness are the biggest hurdles to the poor seizing the newly available wealth and creating a better life.  It’s not about income or even net worth.  It’s about what you can do and the value you can create and consume.  The chart above and the world around us indicate that there has never been a more broad and deep spread of wealth.

GDP doesn’t matter.  Neither does income.  Opportunity matters.  Value matters.  Times have never been better across the board, which is exactly what most threatens those precariously perched at the perceived top.  Don’t worry about them.  Let the doomsayers and wannabe warriors of equality clamber for an illusive goal that doesn’t make anyone better off.  Take advantage of the exponential growth in opportunity all around you.

The Cure is Not the Cause

A friend worked at a company that instituted a no cell phone policy during meetings. Apparently too many people were on their phones instead of paying attention.

If you look at it from an authoritarian standpoint as an organizer, the cause for lack of engagement was cell phone use.  But put yourself in the shoes of an attendee and you see that cell phones were not the cause of the problem, but the cure for it. The problem was boredom. The cause was too many or too long or not interesting enough meetings.

We see cures blamed as causes everywhere. Schools routinely blame whatever form of escape, entertainment, distraction, or even real learning that kids conceive to cope with the rigid soul-sucking structure of the system. From a top-down, black-and-white rulers standpoint, the answer is always more bans and more rules.

What would happen instead if we assumed rationality and no malintent on the part of the cell phone users or students?  What might their behavior reveal about the system or process?  If you run a business you can get mad at customers who don’t do what you want all you like, but attacking or placing restrictions on them is not a long term strategy for success in a competitive market. You must try to understand why they aren’t doing what you want and adapt your offerings.

When people are looking for an escape don’t block the exit.  Instead try to learn why they want out in the first place.

If You Don’t Like Profit, Advocate Free Markets

I don’t find anything at all distasteful about profit.  Profit seeking behavior is as natural and inescapable in humans as breathing, and deserves no moral censure.  When placed in an open and voluntary institutional setting profit is an indicator of value created for others.  Still, a great many people find profit disturbing and wish to curb it.  If that is you, you have no practical choice but the full-fledged support of free-markets.

Competition exerts a relentless downward pressure on profit.  Open markets invite competition and power positions in the market are never secure.  It is for this reason that those in the temporary position of high profit-earners are most likely to be the ones lobbying for new rules and regulations.  They don’t want to compete, they want to monopolize.

The only true monopoly is government monopoly.  All other applications of the term are illusory and not to be feared.  Peter Thiel has famously advocated for monopoly, but he uses the word to represent a business that creates a product so unique it is all but impossible to be replicated by competitors for a long period of time.  That is not the same as the textbook description of monopoly with all of its attendant dangers.  The only true and dangerous form is government monopoly.  It eliminates not only present competition, but potential competition.

Unlike competition, monopoly exerts no downward pressure on profit.  Indeed, its sole purpose is to suppress competition so that profit can balloon, without any corresponding increase in value creation.  In this sense, the critique that, “There is too much profit in X industry”, or, “The profit motive corrupts Y good or service”, is correct.  In a truly monopolized industry, the profit motive is terrible.  Again, not because of the motive itself, which is ever-present in all humans, but because of the institutional setting which prevents all of the incentives to curb and corral profit motive towards value creation and away from plunder.

In monopolized industries the profit motive is very destructive.  Do not be fooled by tax designations or accounting terminology.  Governments and “non-profits” are also profit driven.  It is here where profit is the most dangerous and often deadly.  The justice and law enforcement industry is all-but entirely monopolized by the state.  Because it faces no real competition there is no downward pressure on profits.  It is therefore one of the most profit-driven enterprise imaginable, only it needn’t create value to profit.

An ever growing number of laws and regulations ensure that more and more people are guilty of crimes.  This is a highly profitable state of affairs for the justice system.  Law enforcement routinely harass and abuse and give out tickets for violations of no practical importance.  They find or plant illegal substances for the sole purpose of seizing assets of the accused.  Prosecutors, medical examiners, judges and law enforcement regularly lie, exaggerate, and falsely convict.  The profit motive is what drives them.  They have a monopoly on the administration of justice, so they invent whatever means they can of increasing the profitability of the enterprise.  The greater the number of crimes, the greater the receipts.  Indeed, the origin of government monopolized police and courts attest to the revenue-enhancing motive at their core.

We cannot wish away the profit motive, or hope to elect or appoint people who magically do not possess it. (How would they win an election or appointment without it?)  We can, however, realize the danger of granting monopoly status to any profit-seeking enterprise, including governments.  If it is profit that is driving the corruption and abuse among police, courts, and other sectors, the surest way to suppress the ability to generate more profit is to open it up to competition.

If You Did Vote, Don’t Complain

Sometimes people say, “If you didn’t vote, don’t complain.”  Nonsense.  Everyone can complain.  Complaining about pompous politicians and oppressive regulations doesn’t require participation in popularity lotteries.  In fact, if one were to stipulate who has less reason to complain, it would be those who do vote, not those who ignore the charade.

To the extent that voting is a kind of ascent to the political process, those who do it are implicitly agreeing to abide by the outcome.  I don’t really think voters can’t complain or that voting means you submit to any outcome of politics, but for many who believe in the process, the ritual is an attempt to cleanse oneself of guilt.  Your show of support for thug A means you can feel self-righteous when nearly identical thug B advocates bad things.  Yet it’s the process, the institutional setting itself not those elected within it, that creates the bad things.

Voting is not the way to cleanse yourself from guilt or attempt to achieve social objectives.  Many people argue that voting shows you are civic-minded and highly engaged.  This is a lot of horse manure.  Voting makes you less engaged, less humane, less civic-minded, and less effective at creating the kind of world you want to live in.  There are three primary reasons voting is problematic:

1) Sometimes it works.  If your candidate wins and implements the policy you like, you might feel good because now people will be told to do things the way you prefer.  But consider what this really means.  It means violence.  It means your preferred social change is being generated by force.  That’s an ugly reality any decent person should want to distance themselves from.  If you can’t get there peacefully, maybe you shouldn’t try to get there at all.

2) Whether or not it works, it has side-effects.  If your person or policy wins or loses, whatever political ploys are put into practice have myriad deleterious effects on the world.  Well-meaning minimum wage laws make the poor less employable.  Well-meaning environmental laws encourage waste, fraud, abuse, and price the poor out of many markets.  The list goes on.  You probably don’t know enough about the complex world to know the unintended consequences of top-down enforcement of any policy.  Let the more dynamic, adaptable, open social process figure out the trade-offs instead of a zero-sum either/or ballot box.

3) It reduces the incentive to engage in civil society.  When you vote for something you relieve the pressure to do something more meaningful.  Voting offers just enough satiation for your heart and mind so you can return to your regularly scheduled programming.  It makes people self-righteous and annoying.  It incentivizes signalling you care instead of figuring out how to really care enough to bring about change.  It turns friends into enemies.  It saps creativity by offering a brute, ham-fisted quick-fix.  If you get a bunch of kids together and they disagree about toys or rules of a game they’re less likely to find a creative solution if you also give them a magic authority hat that anyone who wins a vote can wear, thereby conferring the power to dictate all rules and dole out punishments and favors.  Voting makes us little barbarians.

Don’t let people tell you a good citizen must vote.  Quite the opposite.  Abstain, and get busy building your own life and world in a positive, productive, cooperative, and civilized manner.

The Problem of Forced Association

There’s a lot of ruckus over laws that either require or don’t require businesses and individuals to interact with each other.  Most of the discussion is focused on the identity of various parties in favor or opposed to the laws – gay couples, Christians opposed to gay marriage, liberal or conservative activists, etc.  It’s an ugly debate to watch.  Everyone is battling for control over the laws that determine who should associate with whom and under what conditions.  The real problem is not which people like and dislike which other people.  The real problem is the acceptance of forced association as a concept.

Forced association is any kind of social, civil, or commercial interaction that is hemmed in by force rather than choice.  It demands inclusion and exclusion based on rules passed down from authorities, rather than the free interplay of autonomous individuals.  Immigration restrictions are a form of forced association (in this case dis-association).  So are most anti-discrimination laws.  The idea that your social network must be determined for you is destructive of genuine community, and breeds hatred.  Everyone is left fighting over the rules and calling names instead of simply choosing to interact or not interact with whomever they wish.  How do you manage your Facebook friends?  Imagine if there were laws dictating certain people you were not allowed to friend, or certain pages you had to follow, or that you must treat all friend requests equally no matter who they came from?  A terrible recipe for genuine and meaningful interaction, friendship, and exchange of ideas.

Yet in society at large nobody seems to question forced association.  And why should they?  After all, most people have been conditioned since age 5 to accept a social scene tightly dictated by authority figures, not chosen by themselves.  School is forced association.  You must be with people the same age and zip code all day every day.  You can’t freely wander the halls and pop in and out of classes.  You can’t shop for teachers or friends or mentors across the entire community.  You get your cinder block cell with your pre-assigned seat and social group.  Better hope you find someone to get along with.

Bullying is a phenomenon borne almost entirely out of age-restricted groupings.  The response is never to allow kids to exit the cohort, or class, or school district, or school altogether.  That would work.  But it would mean free association.  Free association is too dangerous.  What if kids don’t become the widgets we want to fashion them into?  Instead efforts to stop bullying are just like the absurd efforts to curb rudeness in society with laws of forced association.  It’s a battle over who gets to define the bully, the victim, the reporting process, the burden of proof, the new rules, the banned items and words, the sensitivity training, the punishments, and who gets to be the ruler of the forced association.

Forced association is ugly, inhumane, and barbaric in all its forms.  As long as people are raised in environments of forced association it should come as no surprise that when they encounter a jerk they immediately begin a debate over what rules should force the jerk to behave differently and why.  Debates over who the real victim is erupt.  Some side with the jerk, some side with the others.  Crowdfunding campaigns and public debates and interviews and one-upsmanship and absurd hypothetical and real court cases emerge.  The whole spectacle is dirty, rude, vicious, and pernicious.

No one needs to make rules for who can or must associate with whom and in what way.  Free association can and will do a better job of sorting out all the conflicting beliefs and behaviors of members of society than any plan or rule.  Break from the mentality you’ve been raised with.  Apply the mentality you use on Facebook.  Forced association is never the answer.

Some Rules I Have

I hate rules that come from arbitrary authority, but I love giving them to myself.  One of the best ways to experiment and find ways to get more productive and happy is through testing various rules.  It’s also a great way to learn about yourself.  Here are a few rules I have.  I sometimes break them, and sometimes temporarily suspend them, but for the most part I value and stick to them.

  • Don’t read the comments
  • Don’t refer to any political figure by name
  • Don’t check email, text, Voxer, or social media until a blog post has been written each day
  • Immediately throw away anything that can be thrown away
  • Walk outside at least once every day
  • Don’t follow the news
  • Build any commentary on underlying principles, not current events or specific instances
  • Don’t recommend books unless willing to buy them for the person
  • Have a budget for everything but books
  • Immediately delete/archive emails that do not require a response
  • Only read things by people I’d like to emulate in some way
  • Listen to the same playlist every time I write
  • Avoid phone calls unless absolutely necessary, and preferably only when scheduled
  • Travel no more than three times per month
  • Avoid calling anyplace that will put me on hold
  • Don’t haggle over anything less than $50
  • Outsource as many things I don’t love as possible
  • Say no to anything less than an obvious “Hell yes!”
  • When asking ‘why?’, try asking ‘why not?’ instead
  • Assume the moral neutrality of everyone

Making this list has been a really fun exercise.  I have more rules than I thought, and I’m sure I have others.  One interesting observation about this list is that there’s nothing here that just comes naturally as a part of my personality.  Every one of these things takes conscious effort, and they were all developed for specific reasons and continued because they are working for me.  I suppose things we do naturally without much effort don’t require rules.

This list also reminds me of the value of self-created structure, and the danger of other-imposed structure.  Most of these things may be useless to most other people, but they’re indispensable for me.