Category: Commentary

I like browsing Quora and answering questions.  If you do, you’ll notice that many people ask bad questions.

It’s not that the content is bad, or the thing they’re trying to get at, it’s that many questions feel like no pre-work was done to drive them to the question.  Or the asker hasn’t considered the best way to get the information they want.  Or they have no idea what it is they want or why they’re asking the question.

Questions like this:

Should I become an engineer?
What can a startup do to succeed?
What’s the best career to have?

These questions are so vague and context-less that it’s hard to imagine really useful answers.  The questions are general questions about the world at large, rather than specific questions about the individual’s specific goals and challenges.  They don’t demand accountability, and they smack of searching for guarantees, off-the-hooks, or just dilly-dallying.

I was thinking about the importance of specific vs. vague questions the other day when someone found out I knew someone else and asked for an email intro.  I said sure at first, then when I went to draft the email, it felt incredibly burdensome and like I’d be burning a lot of social capital for unclear reasons.  I went back to the person and said, “I can intro you, but what specifically are you asking of the person?”  They told me they didn’t know, and I said come back when you do and I’ll do it.

I’ve been on the other end.  An email with a specific, relevant ask is not hard to answer.  “Can you tell me what software you use to record your podcast?” or “Where do I submit a guest post to the Praxis blog?” etc.  A generic ask is the worst.  It eats up so much mental space.  “Hey, we have a lot in common, here’s a bunch of info, we should connect”, or, “Meet person A, they’re really cool and think similarly to you.”

What can I do with that?

I’ve had the temptation to be really general myself.  When someone I respect opens a line of communication, I feel like I have to use it somehow!  But if I don’t have a real, clear, specific ask, it’s worse to keep the line open then to let it close.

Ask questions you really want an answer to, and make them clear, specific, concise, and contextual.

Most commenters on articles or social posts are not making arguments or offering objections. Most are playing out an emotional state from compulsion or for catharsis.

I saw an infuriating video of police arresting a nurse who refused to draw a patients blood at their request.

Comments on Twitter included a lot of, “Why are police so nasty and brutish?”, and most responses were, “They need better training and to be nicer.”

Nope.

The incentive structure dictates the result.  As Lord Acton said, power corrupts.  Put a good man in a role that requires him to do bad to succeed, or turn a blind eye when others do, and either you’ll attract only bad men or good men will become bad.

Police misconduct is ubiquitous not because they lack training.  It’s because they face no competition, have no threat of losing money or position, and don’t need to please customers.

Remember the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment?

Now imagine if the prisoners got to choose the guards among several groups?  Of course guards could choose whether they wish to offer services to the prisoners too.  Guards would only get compensation and maintain their role if chosen.  How would treatment change?  Guards would be competing with each other for the most humane experience.

It’s not that complicated.  Government services are always worse than everything else because they don’t have to earn customers money, they just take it.  Incentives are powerful.

Traditions emerge for a reason.  Society is impossible without them.  Traditions provide lenses, rules, norms, and expectations that help make sense of the world, harmonize competing aims and interests, provide stability, and enable long-term planning.

But tradition can be tyrannical.  Traditions can oppress, restrict, stagnate, and destroy individuals and society.

So where’s the line?  When does tradition become tyranny?

I offer simple test for the tyranny of a tradition.  Does it rely on violence?  When those who would deviate from tradition are threatened with violence, or a tradition must initiate violence to sustain itself, it has become tyrannical.  The beneficial aspects of the tradition are now outweighed by the harm in its maintenance or expansion.

Imagine a deeply religious society, in which a strong tradition of weekly church attendance has emerged.  Whatever you think of this tradition, it’s not tyrannical so long as attendance is voluntary.  When that society begins to mandate church attendance, or prohibit other activities during services, the tradition has moved to the dark side and become tyrannical.

Some liberators come along to break the chains of the tradition-turned-tyranny.  They succeed in ending the use of violence to support religious activity.  In the process, they gain considerable power and social standing as leaders of the secular revolution.  In time, the tradition of churchgoing strengthens once again, and more and more people choose to attend.  The secular revolutionaries, now threatened by the peaceful emergence of the formerly deposed tradition, employ violence in repressing it.  Church attendance is illegal, in order to support their “liberal” aims.

This hypothetical illustrates that the tyranny of a tradition has nothing to do with the tradition itself, nor do the intentions of those who support or oppose tradition determine whether it’s tyrannical.  Again, when violence is relied upon to force a tradition – even if the tradition is the rejection of older traditions – it has become tyranny.

Transition into tyranny is not always so visible and obvious, because the state obfuscates violence.  In state legal codes or edicts, violence is slathered with noble intentions and shiny rhetoric, and the perpetrators are several steps removed from the advocates.

Traditions upheld by state violence are harder to identify, but they’re tyrannical nonetheless.  When money is forcibly extracted from people and used to subsidize a tradition, for example, it’s moving decidedly in the tyrannical direction.  It may be a small tyranny at first, but it’s tyranny.

Anything from educational traditions and institutions, norms around work, language, or movements in art, when they accept the succulent temptation of government largess,  cease to be noble traditions and become tyrannies.  Accepting the fruits of violence positions a tradition to rely on violence to maintain its power.  Ironically, the stronger the violence used to maintain a tradition, the weaker the tradition.  Strong traditions don’t need boots on necks to survive or spread.

If you advocate a tradition, resisting the temptation of the violent fruits dangled in front of you – whether state subsidy, mandate, or prohibition – is necessary for preventing its morph into tyranny.

So long as it’s poisoned with violent supports, it’s impossible to know the true worth of a tradition.

A great many good traditions have been turned tyrannical because they follow the allure of ill-gotten gains.

I love sports.  Football is my favorite to watch, and the NFL is my preferred league.

A lot of people sing the praises of “amateur” college football, where the NCAA and government funded schools ensure 18-21 year old players can risk their livelihoods forever but cannot make any money, while the institutions risk nothing an make millions.

It is fun to watch.  The talent disparity between teams and individual player is huge, but the emotional maturity is so low that anything can happen.  It can be wild and crazy.  I enjoy college football.

But nothing comes close to the NFL.  Because the talent is so, so much better than college, it means you can’t win on flukes, emotion, or raw athleticism.  It takes a higher degree of strategy, and especially psychological toughness, consistency, and chemistry.

I love the chess match of the NFL, and the mental challenge of the best players to rise above mere talent and become something more.

If you advocate free speech, free movement, freedom in exchange, and freedom to engage in any peaceful activity an individual desires, you will hear an objection.

“But surely there are limits!”

The most important limits are limits on violence.  Yet these are the limits most people show least concern with.  At the first fear of the results of freedom, most people are ready to sanction violent repression of peaceful behavior, via government edict.

The limits that deserve our attention are limits on coercion, not peaceful behavior we happen not to like.

Do you believe:

A) Governments need to determine if/when people need to develop skills in manufacturing, knowledge work, farming, etc. in order to ensure that individuals and the economy as a whole can prosper.

Or,

B) Self-interested individuals reacting to market incentives will do a better job of matching their skill/interest with what benefits them and the economy as a whole than a government effort to direct them.

If you chose B, congratulations.  You understand history and economic theory.

If you chose B, you ought also to have no trouble answering a similar question.

Do you believe:

A) Parents/teachers need to determine if/when children need to learn reading, writing, alegbra, chemistry, history, etc. in order to ensure that individuals and society as a whole can prosper.

Or,

B) Self-interested children reacting to market incentives will do a better job of matching their skill/interest with what benefits them and society as a whole than a top-down effort to direct them.

If your answer is B to the first but not the second, you have a very shaky set of assumptions.

On the one hand, you believe it’s not from the benevolence of the butcher that we get our meat, but by his regard to his self-interest in a market context.  On the other hand, you believe that children have no regard for their self-interest and do not respond to market incentives so must be forced and directed to do what’s good for them and by extension society.

If this is true, at what point do humans suddenly begin responding to incentives?  This view would require an entirely new social science completely divorced from everything we know so far, and also divorced from observed reality.

If, as I believe, there is no difference and the answer to both is clearly B, we ought to stop worrying about compulsion and curricula and “normal” ages for reading, etc. etc. and let children do what we all do in the market: respond to incentives.  When it benefits them to learn something, they will.  In fact, they’ll do it in record time.  When it doesn’t, they’ll fight it all the way and countless hours will be spent trying to get them to do something they don’t value.

Turns out, markets work.  Everywhere.

Great leaps in understanding human behavior when economists asked,

“What if we assumed individuals in the market were rationally self-interested actors?”

Leaps extended when Public Choice theorists asked,

Logically and historically, society precedes the state.  That’s from one of my favorite thinkers, John Hasnas.

This simple fact calls into question some of our deepest assumptions about the social order.  It smashes the Hobbesian notion that man outside the state suffers a brutal existence, and only Leviathan can bring order to the chaos.  It casts doubt on the idea that, absent the state, civilized life is not possible.  Indeed, the relationship is the complete reverse.

My good friend Chris Nelson offered a modified version of this statement yesterday: logically and historically, the learner precedes the teacher.

Consider the things everyone assumes must be taught, often forcibly and formally, by a teacher.  Reading, writing, and arithmetic are the most common.  If, absent the authority, expertise, method, and compulsion of a teacher, no one would ever learn these things, how did they become known at all?  Unless the myths of gods coming down to teach humans are literally true (even then, who taught the gods?), people had to first be learners before they could be teachers.  The act of learning must have preceded that of teaching.

This presents problems for our assumptions about education.  Learning does not require teachers.  In fact, the opposite is true.

This does not make teaching worthless.  But it does reveal the direction of the dependency, which helps us put teaching in its proper place: as a response to an individual desire to learn in that specific way.  The learner comes first.  Their desire to learn a fact or method or subject is – must be – the first mover in order for genuine education to occur.  If that desire prompts them to seek formal or informal teachers, the teaching is valuable.  If teaching is imposed on unwilling learners, it’s the opposite of valuable.  It does violence to education.

The economist Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk described the capital structure of the economy and the prices of goods with the theory of imputation.  The value of a higher order production good is determined by the value of the end product to the consumer.  A bulldozer or factory floor’s value doesn’t come first, and then determine the price of the widgets at the end of the process.  (A good way to go out of business is to build something and then price it based entirely on what it cost to produce).  The value of those tools of production is imputed backwards through the production chain by the price customers are willing to pay for the end product.  If your widget is worth little or nothing to a customer, than no matter how cool your production tools, they won’t be valuable either.

It is usually assumed that knowledge flows from teachers to learners.  As explained above, this is not always the case.  In those instances where it is – where learners voluntarily seek teachers to satisfy their desire for knowledge – education is similar to the structure of production in the economy.  The value of a teacher – or a process, method, or credential – is imputed from the value to the learner, freely shopping around to choose the method of learning that helps them best.  If they don’t willingly choose the classroom or the teacher, the classroom and the teacher are not educationally valuable.

If you don’t understand the product, it’s not for you.

If you’re offended by it, it’s not for you.

If you’re searching for objections, it’s not for you.

If you’re eagerly anticipating a “gotcha”, it’s not for you.

If it’s not for you, it doesn’t need to change to become for you. Because it’d never be for you anyway.

In their own words…

We pound the importance of lightning quick email and professional communication at Praxis.

It’s not just about speed, it’s also about tempo.

Early in your career, when you need others more than they need you, it’s especially important to not break the tempo set by your interlocutor.  This applies to in person meetings, video interviews, phone calls, and emails.  Especially if you’re in sales (and to some extent, we are all always in sales), keeping the tempo increases the odds of getting the result you want.

If you enter an interview and the other party asks a long, slowish question and pauses, they’ve set a slow tempo and you can and should be deliberate as well.  If they hit you out of the gate with a quick, no BS, “Why do you want this job?” they’ve set a quick tempo.  Follow suit.

For email this is under-appreciated and maybe more important.  If someone takes a day or two to respond, though speed is always the side to err on, you can take a day or so if need be.  You’re not breaking out of the tempo they set.  But if they respond in ten minutes or one hour, they’ve created a tempo that you need to maintain!  Get on it and respond now!

You’d be surprised how much this matters.

True.