If You’re Reading This, You’re WEIRD…

As the world gets bigger, we’re starting to understand just how complex life is. Unless we seek atrophy by feeding it a consistent junk food of disposable television, our brains should become increasingly better with experience at making connections between seemingly unrelated topics.

Take assessing human behaviour for example. Look long enough and you’ll start to understand how others will react to events. Or how they’ll misjudge situations for any number of reasons. Some people call it wisdom. Or experience. But whatever it is, there’s no doubt it’s easier to identify in others – we recognise patterns taking shape once they become prominent because we noticed them in the first place (the red car, or Baader-Meinhoff, phenomenon).

Of course, you’re likely to suffer from similar flaws yourself. It’s just that we all have terrible eyesight when it comes to identifying our own behavioural prejudices, making them much easier to identify in others.

Someone (Einstein? if not, perhaps Mark Twain – since most internet quotations tend to get attributed to him by default if there’s any doubt as to its provenance…) once said:

“The more I learn, the less I understand”

Things are complex. As Tyler Cowen is fond of saying, he’s not hugely enthusiastic about space exploration – because there’s so much vast untapped potential still to explore here on earth that could bring more immediate benefits for humanity (initially in the oceans which to this day remain undiscovered territory).

But as we start to travel more freely (and quickly) and communicate near-instantly around our global village, one thing that’s becoming clear is that so much of the research that we’ve been carrying out into what makes humans tick is fundamentally flawed – because we keep using a very small group of humans in our scientific research. To put it another way, most of those test individuals are WEIRD – Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. And most of the people in the world are not like that:

“more than 90 percent of studies recently published in psychological science’s flagship journal come from countries representing less than 15 percent of the world’s population.”

For example, in carrying out a simple pattern recognition test on children in Zambia, it turned out that they scored way below those in the West on identifying the missing item in a row of simple two-dimensional shapes (squares, triangles etc). Yet in a repeat test using more familiar three-dimensional shapes (stones, toothpicks etc), those figures changed significantly for the better.

The research was flawed because the context was wrong.

In other words, there seem to be some fairly significant misplaced presumptions about what constitutes ‘normal’ when it comes to human behaviour. We’re only now starting to realise that this is the case – so I think it’s safe to assume that there are going to be some pretty different and surprising test results that arise in experiments around human behaviour over the next few decades as the net gets cast far more widely and we expand the focus of our research considerably.

We’re all humans. And maybe we’re all very similar. But if it turns out that we’re not and you’re reading this blog today, it’s good to remember – you’re probably one of the weird ones.

 

Happy Tenth Birthday Bitcoin

I’ve written before about Bitcoin reaching a milestone birthday – three years ago on its sixth birthday and then for its (first!) tenth birthday back in November 2018. You see this sovereign, just like the Queen, has two birthdays – the date of the publication of the original White Paper and the date of the very first block that was mined (the Genesis Block).

You’ve got to admire the chutzpah of BitMex placing an advert on the front page of the very newspaper whose headline was embedded in the very first Bitcoin block that was ever mined.

On top of that, it’s worth taking note of the # proofofkeys campaign that’s being pushed across social media today as well. Fronted by well-known Bitcoin evangelist Trace Mayer, the Proof of Keys campaign aims to remind the many newcomers to the cryptocurrency scene that if you don’t have control of your private keys, you don’t have control of your money. Or to use their slogan:

“Not your keys; Not your bitcoin”

The reason that I, amongst many others, support this campaign is because it is a reminder to everyone not to lose sight of the reasons why Bitcoin is so powerful. It’s the hardest money that the world has ever seen. There is absolutely no way to inflate the monetary supply – and it has an existing money supply that can be publicly verified by anyone at any point in time. That’s a huge advantage over the previous hardest money the world had ever seen (i.e. gold). And that’s before you even start to build into that equation the values of divisibility, portability etc.

And yet. So many people these days rely on exchanges to store their funds – and the vast majority don’t realise that by doing so, they’ve given these third parties control of their funds. They no longer have any control whatsoever. It’s an incredibly worrying trend and, in some ways, far worse than simply relying on the current banking system – because so many have tasted monetary sovereignty only to sacrifice it once again at the altar of convenience.

So the Proof Of Funds campaign encourages everyone to withdraw their crypto holdings from exchanges today. For minimal transaction fees, the campaign urges you transfer any funds to an address that you control (i.e,. you physically hold the private key to that address). At that stage, you no longer have to trust that someone holds your bitcoin – because you have the mathematical means to do whatever you like with your funds.

The other major benefit of this (if done at scale) is that it stress-tests the exchanges. There’s no doubt that exchanges provide security and comfort for many around the world – but if this is your choice then you have to accept that you are inherently trusting a third party to be telling you the truth when it says that it holds the actual bitcoin behind the ledger entry on your account.

What’s to say that one (or more) of these exchanges have actually spent your bitcoin and are just giving you IOU’s that it hopes its customers will never redeem en masse?

Let’s see if any exchanges go down today. For those that didn’t live through Mt. Gox back in 2014, you’ll have to take the word of those that did at face value. It wasn’t a good time.

Let’s not do it again.

Using Fiction to Simulate Decision-Making

One of the things that I wrestle with when it comes to choosing reading material is the balance between fiction and non-fiction. Over the past couple of years in particular, my focus has been almost exclusively on non-fiction. And whilst that has brought a huge number of benefits, that practice (enjoyable as it is) has meant that picking up fiction isn’t as relaxing as it could be. It feels as if there’s often a subconscious battle between ‘learning’ (expanding knowledge via non-fiction) and ‘consuming’ engaging stories.

For example, I’m currently reading what is generally accepted to be one of the finest novels of the twentieth century – but feel conflicted as I look at the vast piles of unread non-fiction that populate the room, each one representing an area that I’m fascinated to learn more about. After all, why buy a physical copy of any book unless it’s one that you believe you’ll likely want to revisit again in the future?

But listening to an old 2017 North Star podcast interview with Shane Parrish on a run today, it feels like as good a time as any to reconsider that distinction in my head. Shane runs Farnam Street, a blog I’ve been reading for a number of years now (highly recommended – if nothing else, check out this post on mental models).

When talking about fiction, a couple of things jumped out at me:-

1/ Reading fiction is the closest that you can come to seeing simulated decision-making in alternative worlds. 

You might not be choosing the circumstances or actions, but for the most part, you get to live through the outcomes vicariously – and the most powerful novels will often mirror the realities of the human condition, thus informing what might happen in a parallel (real) world.

2/ Acting like your heroes can help you to improve your own behaviour and outcomes.

This one is a little bit more fuzzy – but a concept that I’ve heard a number of people discuss recently is that when they’re facing a difficult decision or situation, they make a conscious decision to pick someone that they admire and ask themselves “What would [X] do in this situation?”. Interestingly, this can often put you into a more balanced frame of mind when taking action. Somewhat counterintuitively, it also goes part of the way to explain why ‘fake it til you make it’ actually does work at times.

On a related note, I’ve written recently in this blog about the need to read things that contradict your world views. As Shane puts it:

“A lot of people stop reading if they don’t agree with something. I think part of being an adult is being able to read something that you don’t agree with and being able to put yourself in different perspectives that allow you to see the problem from different angles.”

The reason is simple: the more angles you can view any problem from, the less chance you’ll have of suffering from blind spots. And blind spots are where bad decisions come from.

Whilst I’ve always understood the value of good stories, I need to work on reframing reading fiction as simply another form of learning. The evidence is clear that science fiction can not only predict but also inform the development of the future and there are many other benefits to having a healthy fiction habit (developing empathy for a start).

Feels like another good target for 2019.

Patreon Censorship: The Story Continues

I’d originally planned to start the year with a review of the top books I’d read in 2018. But after seeing this video today, it’s a natural follow-up to my previous piece on digital patronage. As I’d mentioned in the last line, there’s so much more to discuss on this topic. So to see a couple of other big Patreon-supported names confirm today that they’re leaving the platform over concerns about censorship, it feels like the beginning of a more significant movement starting to shape up.

I realise that both Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson can be divisive. But they both rely on significant financial support for their work from supporters via Patreon’s platform. So to see them announce that have chosen to cut off those not insignificant income streams voluntarily as a result of their discomfort at Patreon’s growing proclivity to censor content places them in a positive light.

Here’s a couple of quotes from the conversation – first up, from Jordan Peterson:-

“I think the biggest danger here…and it’s just made my jaw drop over the last couple of weeks thinking about it…is the fact that the credit card companies are taking it upon themselves to potentially police the activities of their users….I can’t think of anything more totalitarian than that.”

Next up, from Dave Rubin:-

“Maybe this will be the defining idea of 2019, that we’re basically at the point where people have to decide what sort of internet they want. And it’s not just internet – it’s ‘what sort of freedom do you want in a digital world? What type of ability to communicate with other people do you want? And if you want something that’s a little better than we’ve got right now, we’d better standup quick because this window – we know it’s closing slowly but we never know when it’s really going to slam shut quick.”

This is particularly interesting to me as this area is one in which many of my interests collide. Sovereign digital currency, free speech, the rights to self-publication, the ability to spread ideas virally without barriers – here is the crucible in which the concepts comes smashing into one another. It’s where a new sustainable future will be forged – or the existing world will very well break under the pressure. And it’s a great example of just how pervasive (and divisive) the influence of money is in the human world (both ancient and modern).

At this stage, without a solution in general use, as has been pointed out many (many) times before, we’re dicing with passive acceptance of a future that I believe that few truly want to live in. After all, do we not care if our spending habits are monitored by large corporate third parties to whom we then grant the authority to actively police and control the activities of society?

It’s an incredibly thin line to move from cancelling transactions to denying individuals the right to hold political views that run counter to those in power, for example. And even you do believe that some institutions should have the right to do this, my vote doesn’t go to awarding such power to companies such as Visa and Mastercard…

There’s a great page on the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) that focuses on precisely why payment processors can be so destructive to free speech:

“they are attractive points of control for anyone hoping to use Internet intermediaries as censors — especially governments seeking to censor speech”

Today, there are plenty of ideas, and some are very close. But there’s no easy solution out there today. But it’s a challenge that will only get harder over time unless people start to act yesterday. Failing that, start today. You can build and/or support the systems that enable individuals to transact and support each other directly. It’s exactly the reason why a decentralised internet – and cryptocurrency – is so vital moving forwards.

2018 Wrap-Up

Like this time every year, the blogosphere for the past couple of days has been full of the ‘review of the year’ type posts. So instead of simply adding to the list, here’s a few random personal thoughts at the end of 2018:

1. Tech continues to both inspire and terrify…

As the year closes, it’s almost become a cliché to warn about how dangerous Facebook has become; the sensitive data that Google is hoovering up about every area of your life; the scary dystopian surveillance that has become normality in countries such as China; and the security breaches across pretty much every sector of the modern online world. And yet these issues not only continue to occur, in 2018 they have become far worse than ever before.

This year it seems like the cracks were starting to show above ground level for the first time and we’re collectively becoming more aware of the reality that lies beneath all of that sexy UX layered across apps and services. The challenge of finding out who you can trust is only becoming more acute.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a simple task to solve and one that will take a combination of technical expertise and collective will to change everyone’s behaviour. The best time for us to make these changes was a long time ago. The second best time is today.

2. Ankles are more important than you realise…

Running is my sport of choice – for fitness but also for the discipline and mental clarity that it provides that I’ve never found in any other pursuit. But this year was the first I’ve properly knackered myself doing it… I’ve been incredibly lucky to avoid bad injuries over the last 20 years or so but that all came to an end as I did my best impression of Kilian Journet running fast down some Highland Hills in June. Unfortunately it translated into something more akin to Madonna at the Brits…

Cue 3.5 months of minimal walking, intense physio, strong pain relief, more ice than Lake Baikal – and zero running. Needless to say, it wasn’t a great year for fitness… ticking over, but no improvements.

3. Rediscovering how much fun speaking can be…

I gave loads of talks this year at conferences and events – in Manchester University, Edinburgh Uni, Aberdeen Uni, Strathclyde Uni, Glasgow Uni (theme developing here…) to various meetups and the obvious standout, a talk in Maratea, Southern Italy at the Hero’s Festival (which wins the prize for the hottest place I’ve ever given a talk at by a very long way…). On top of that I’ve given about 6 or so podcast interviews (that I can remember) which has been a new experience, plus heading into the studios to speak on BBC Radio Scotland. Once again, I’m reminded just how amazing this crypto journey has been over the past 5 years or so in terms of the conversations that I’ve been part of and the fascinating people that I’ve met – initially whilst speaking Bitcoin and now with the focus on the SAFE Network.

However if I was to pick my two favourite talks they would be the inaugural address to the Adam Smith Gala in Glasgow (the second of two different talks I gave during one particularly busy Saturday) and the out-of-the-blue keynote I was asked to give at a local secondary school awards ceremony at short notice. All in all, huge amounts of work went into each and every one of these things (talks are probably the only area in life that I consistently overprepare for) but, almost without exception, they were hugely satisfying.

4. Reading still rules…

It was another huge year for reading. As with last year, this was my number one goal – bar none – and I consistently carved out time to work at learning more about all manner of things. I’m even more convinced than ever of the value that lies in paper books as opposed to electronic screens where Twitter or (worse) the news constantly lie temptingly within reach. I’ve uncovered vast new continents of undiscovered knowledge around topics I previously knew close to nothing about that I now can’t wait to return to. I finished 56 books this year (including a few c. 1,000 page monsters) – in a future post, I’ll summarise the cream of the crop on my opinion.

5. Goals and Targets

The other big thing for me this year using the BestSelf journal system. There’s plenty to it as it combines lots of different approaches to goal setting and planning. But in summary, it comes down to identifying three key major goals, working on a plan/review each day and then carrying out a weekly review of things. If you click on that link you can download the pdf without buying the book to give it a go. But in practice, there’s no doubt that it helped me do a number of things more effectively this year – writing, cooking, reading a minimum of 1 book a week and relearning the piano after 25+ years off, to name just a few. After using it for six months, there’s no doubt in my mind that the process is worth the effort.

If nothing else, if you haven’t taken any moves towards something that you class as a major goal in life, you end up reminding yourself at the end of every week that either (1) you’re delusional about how important it actually is to you or (2) you’re useless and wasting your time elsewhere. So you have to take action either way.

That’s it for the most immediate things I can remember learning in 2018. Let’s see what lessons 2019 brings!

Moore’s Law Is Just A Collective Goal

Whilst reading through Dan Wang’s Review of 2018 post, I was struck by the following point that he makes about Moore’s Law:

“Moore’s Law is not some natural law built into the fabric of the universe, designed to self-execute without a bit of engineering effort. Instead, it’s a massive industrial undertaking to push forward this technological frontier.”

“The semiconductor industry set a benchmark for improvement early on, one that seems kind of arbitrary today, and made a collective effort to execute against it. Semiconductor companies—the leaders of which are TSMC, Intel, and Samsung—adopted Moore’s Law as an industry goal. The rate of progress seems to have gotten slower and more expensive, but it’s remarkable that Moore’s Law has held up for decades.”

In other words, the fact that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 to 24 months is generally known. But it’s a norm that only exists because of a combination of a collective goal that focuses many people’s minds on a tough problem in order to achieve that outcome not only once but repeatedly over many years.

In other words, it’s an example of a story that binds and empowers a huge collective group of people of a similar interest to move forwards. In some sense, it’s similar in that way to a religion. Or a football team.

It’s part of the reason why negative self talk is so badly damaging. Stories matter.

“Never say anything about yourself that you don’t want to come true.”

(Brian Tracey)

Good Ideas in 2019

Edging closer to the start of another New Year, this tweet definitely resonates:


For me, options 1 and 3 are all about consumption, whilst 2 and 4 are creative.

The real trick here is to focus on doing the following:

1. Finding (and building relationships with) A+ people.

2. Focus (in both selection and perseverance) when it comes to books – with increased weight given to choosing books that are older, and therefore are more likely to have resonated/persisted with valuable insights that have stood the test of time.

3. Regularly cull your Twitter feed to ensure that you are continually reducing the noise and only following those who make you think.

4. Just more long runs. Simple.

Bitcoin in Venezuela

It’s been an interesting year for Bitcoin. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve come up to me during the last 12 months and made some kind of kind of half-sympathetic, half-condescending comment, along the lines of, “Well – looks like that Bitcoin bubble has finally burst doesn’t it?”

No. Not really.

Sure if you only got into Bitcoin this time last year because you expected it would be like some kind of Yazz song then it’s not been a joyful twelve months I suspect. But I hope that even they are by now starting to realise that the true value of cryptocurrency isn’t one that can be measured in dollars or sterling. Because for a vast number of people in many places around the globe, self-sovereignty – over your thoughts, beliefs, association and money – is priceless.

If there’s one thing that we’ve seen this year with Bitcoin – again, as with every single previous year – it’s that for many people it has a genuine use case.

A few, in fact.

Just take a look at Venezuela. Or indeed any of the many countries in which the economic freedoms of its citizens have been strangled (if they ever existed in the first place).

On top of that, just take a look at any chart which tracks the growth in direct Bitcoin transactions between individuals in Venezuela.

https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1078645280420122624?s=19

Start to dig into some of the real-life stories in these areas and seek out ways in which the technology, far from simply being yet another speculative asset, is actually filling a demand in a way that nothing else can.

It’s another urgent reminder that you should check that you read behind the popular well-known headlines in order to flush out the far more accurate stories of real life for many millions of people.

Pretty essential if you’re also needing to see through all the other nonsense that’s out there. So if you’re a pensioner in Venezuela whose monthly pension payment is now being paid out in the Petro rather than the Bolivar, the situation looks very grim indeed, as other more able younger members of society rush to escape the country as it bobs around increasingly erratically on the ocean, with a huge ragged hole torn through its hull far below the water line.

And that has very little to do with Bitcoin being a ‘perfect’ currency. It just needs to be available, unable to be stopped by the government and at least marginally better than the existing hyperinflationary disaster that exists in that country today.

Sandbox In Your Brain

No, it’s not a new track by They Might Be Giants…

As always, anytime Stripe CEO Patrick Collison gives an interview, it’s worth listening in – and the recent chat on the Tim Ferriss Show is no exception.

One of the ideas that I particularly liked from the discussion was the approach towards continually testing your opinions – in effect, running a sandbox (Virtual Machine) within which you can test out different ideas that conflict with your own, without feeling that your whole identity is in some way being challenged. Indeed, that’s often the sign of an intelligent thinker: someone who can really interrogate an opposing idea.

Perhaps it’s my legal training working in the background in my own (subconscious) operating system – but I’ve always been attracted to the idea of steelmanning another’s opposing viewpoint (as opposed to constructing the straw man argument, where you simply attack the weakest possible variation of an opponent’s belief).

As I’ve mentioned before, I try (not always successfully) to go for the position of strong views, weakly held.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:-

“[my advice is]……just to not get mad and to not get offended, in that outrage and offence and anger are – they’re sometimes useful, of course. But I think they’re less useful than – well, they’re over utilized. They’re not useful as often as they are invoked. And I think for whatever reason, the ability to not take offence and to inspect and to try to understand and even try to really extrapolate from an idea or a set of ideas or a worldview without taking offence at it, that’s not something that for whatever reason is really valued in our culture but I think is actually super important.”

“As has been said, can you run an idea in emulation in your head – in computers, people talk about it running VM’s [Virtual Machines]. Take AWS [Amazon Web Services]: You upload your software, your code. They run it on their servers, but they run it in emulation and in a little sandbox to make sure that it can’t break out and affect other users’ applications.”

“And so similarly, can you run an idea and scrutinise it and inspect it and follow its consequences without it bleeding out into the rest of your brain and infecting your whole worldview?”

“And I think the ability to do that without getting angry or taking offence is really super powerful because if you can do that, you can then afford to – in a way, you can be less careful about what ideas you inspect and scrutinise. And so you can just – you can be much more far-reaching and broadly ranging.”

Become A More Effective Doctor

Thought for the day.

Evidence shows that the average doctor working in a rich Western country will save, on average, around 10 people’s lives during the course of a full medical career.

At the same time, there are a number of options open for any individual to spend a relatively small sum of money in order to pretty much guarantee that in doing so, a life would be saved. Now repeat that every year for 40 years.

If you adopt the viewpoint that you should always be seeking the greater good of society as a whole, which route makes the most sense? Be a doctor – or a small-time philanthropist?

And finally, before you do so, taking that to its logical conclusion – does it then matter where that money comes from (if its going to be used to save lives) ?

Try reading through some points of view that challenge your own. I’d recommend checking out this post by 80,000 hours (‘Is It Ever Okay To Take A Harmful Job In Order to Do More Good?’)