Last summer, I worked as a mentor for an entrepreneurship camp for high school students. The students’ first assignment was to brainstorm all the problems that they had observed that day to help them find problems they could potentially solve.

Problem identification is one of the most valuable skills an entrepreneur can have and I wanted to demonstrate to the students how valuable the activity was, so I decided to participate and make my own list of problems.

After making a list of problems, the next step in the assignment is to choose one or two that seem interesting. In looking over my list, there was one that I found particularly interesting.

My sister had just finished her junior year of high school and was preparing to apply for college in the fall. At home, right inside the door there was a giant bin, full of junk mail that she had received from colleges. When the mail first started coming during her sophomore year, I think she found it cool that colleges were reaching out to her. By the time she received her 500th piece of mail that looked just like the last, it had gotten old.

The thing that I grabbed on to as really interesting about this situation was this giant trash bin full of college mail. Colleges had an interest in reaching students and informing them about their schools, but the way they were doing it was at best ineffective and at worst actively harmful to students’ perception of them. At the same time, students have an interest in learning about schools they are interested in, but colleges send so much spam that many just tune it out altogether.

The core problem that I saw was that these two groups, students and colleges, didn’t have an effective medium to connect. The place that students spend most of their time, on their phones, is a place that universities haven’t yet found a tactful way to use to their advantage. The mediums colleges are traditionally comfortable using, mail and email, are ones that students tune out. Finding a way to bring high quality information about colleges to students in a place where they actively pay attention, on their mobile devices, seemed like a potentially valuable thing to do.

At the entrepreneurship camp, the students’ next assignment was to generate potential solutions for the problem. My initial idea for a solution was a platform where high school students could see profiles of a college and give them a rating from 1–10. This data could then be shared with the universities and they could reach out via the platform to students who were interested.

Immediately, it was clear that there was one big flaw with this idea: what incentive would high school students have to rate universities? I knew I would need something to incentivize them, so I started brainstorming potential incentives. Eventually, I came up with offering high school students the opportunity to message real college students at the schools they rated highly to learn more about them.

At the entrepreneurship camp, we teach the students to go run tests in the real world to see if their assumptions are true. I decided it was time to run a test to see if my assumption that messaging real college students would be a valuable incentive for high school students was true. In order to run this test, I made a simple post on Reddit.

I had expected maybe a few students would sign up on the google form I had attached. To my surprise, over 1,200 signed up in the first 48 hours.

There were two ways of interpreting the results of my Reddit experiment:

1. Success! High school students find messaging college students to be a valuable incentive. Time to go build the college rating service.
2. Wow! High school students really want to message college students. Maybe I should experiment a little more with this and see where it goes.

I chose option 2.

Next, it was time to find college students to talk with the high school students who had signed up. Initially, my plan was to just use my friends, but that was when I was expecting at most a few dozen sign ups. The 1,200 high school students had requested to talk to students from over 600 universities. That was way beyond my personal network.

So what did I do? I posted in the dedicated subreddits for each university looking for college volunteers.

This was certainly slightly spammy and I got quite a few rejections, but overwhelmingly the response was positive and over 600 college students from over 300 universities signed up to participate.

The next step was the fun part. I started connecting each of the high school students with the college students via iMessage.

At this point, I was just doing this as a fun experiment and an example for the students at the camp on how to run assumption tests, but the more I kept connecting people, the more I realized that this might actually be something that people really wanted.

It took me about two months to connect the first 1,200 high school students with all the college students they wanted to talk to. By the time I had finished, hundreds more had already signed up and I had received dozens of requests to build the service into an app.

An app seemed like a cool idea, but I wanted to make sure that this was something that people really wanted before investing the time necessary to build a fully functional app. Frankly, I had also never built an app before and wasn’t sure where to start. By January, it was clear that people loved the service and that there was significant demand for an app. By that point, I had facilitated over 10,000 iMessage conversations between high school and college students.

In January, I reached out to my friend, Pranav Neyveli. I had met Pranav through a cold Facebook message and we had connected over our shared interest in dropping out of school. I knew that Pranav was a talented developer and I wanted to get his opinion on what it would take to build out a simple messaging app.

In talking to Pranav, it became clear that there was a lot of potential to build the platform into something that provided significant value. After talking through everything, we decided to co-found Scope Analytics, a startup focused on helping high school students discover their dream college, along with Pranav’s close friend and engineering partner, Satya Koppu.

By February, we started development of the initial app, Scope Messenger. After five days of nonstop work, we had a rough beta version complete. We launched the beta version of the app through Testflight and made it available to the initial set of students who had participated in the iMessage test.

Launching a beta version allowed us to quickly get feedback from students who were eager to try out the product. We stayed in beta for about six weeks, quickly iterating and adding new features, before launching publicly on the App Store on April 7th.

The app is still in its infancy, but we’ve been lucky enough to have thousands of high school and college students use it in its first month. For a high school student, the value proposition is simple. By creating an account, a high school student can message college students at over 200 universities to ask about campus life, application tips, or anything else one might be curious about.

The core problem that Scope Messenger solves is that there is too much information about college admissions and that high school students have trouble filtering out the good information from the spam. Scope Messenger provides an easy solution: talk to a real student at the school you want to go to and hear about their real, unfiltered experiences.

While it’s still early, we are optimistic that we can build Scope Messenger into the go-to platform for students looking for information about specific colleges.

To download Scope Messenger, check it out on the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scope-messenger/id1455435215?mt=8

To sign up for the Android waiting list, visit our website: www.downloadscope.com.

A lot of tips about saving money talk about how saving just a little bit each month will add up. This is true, but I’ve found that a month is too long of a time period to track consistently. Instead, I’ve started using a system I refer to as “Daily Positive Cashflow.” I have no idea if it is original or not, but here is how it works:

1. Find your net monthly earnings after taxes and deductions (using paystub).
2. Subtract all repeated, monthly expenses, such as rent or a phone bill.
3. Divide by 30.
4. Aim to spend less than this number each day.

Let’s say you make $50,000 annually, which is about $3,000 per month after taxes. You also have fixed monthly expenses of $2,000. $1,000 / 30 = $33.33.

In this example, your goal is to spend less than $33.33 each day. In practice, this is probably not possible to do every single day. Presumably, at least one day a month you will have to incur a large expense, like buying groceries or getting gas where the benefits will be spread over many days.

Still, it’s useful to have this number in your head and track where you are in relation to it. If you find yourself spending more for several days in a row, that’s not a good sign. On the other hand, if you can routinely spend less than this number, it will add up quickly. Spending even $5 less than your daily number yields $150 in savings over the course of a month.

Monthly tracking of cashflow might work for some people, but it requires more discipline. It’s quite easy over the course of a month to lose track of where your money is going and then be surprised at how much you end up spending. If, on the other hand, you have a number in your mind each day, you’re forced to notice whether you are saving or not. At least then, there should be no surprises when you check your bank account at the end of the month.

After spending even a few days in the American schooling system, it becomes perfectly clear to students and teachers alike that school is not really about learning. In fact, to the ambitious learner, it seems as though school actively makes it harder to learn anything useful by taking up lots of valuable time, ruining sleep schedules, and separating all of the bodies of knowledge into discrete disciplinary boxes.

In my case, most of my friends lamented that school had actually ruined reading and learning for them and one of my close friends summed up the learning environment of high school precisely, saying, “I’m too busy to learn.”

It is also quite clear to the adults that send children to school for thirty-five hours a week as adolescents and often pay six-figures to send their children to college that school is not really about learning. When I asked the adults in my life how much of what they learned in college they actually used, most laughed. I think the highest answer I got was around 10%.

If school is not really about learning, then why do all ambitious, smart young people go and why do all of the adults in their lives insist that they go? The conventional answer is the financial payoff. Students don’t go to college to learn about Plato, but rather to earn a larger payday after college. In this view, college is a financial investment.

The conventional view of college as a financial investment is flawed. Almost half of the observed college degree premium can be explained simply by ability bias. Of the other half, almost all of it is explained by Signaling Theory, which has interesting implications that suggest, particularly for high-achieving, smart students, there may actually be an economic deterrent for attending college.

In this essay, I will analyze the economic argument against attending college as well as posit an alternative explanation for why students attend college and parents insist on it: conformity.

Primarily, students attend college to signal conformity to members of their tribe, notably their parents, relatives, teachers, and peers. While it is possible to signal intelligence, work ethic, perseverance, and many other traits in other ways, a college degree remains the only true signal of conformity.

If a student refuses to adequately signal conformity, members of the tribe will impose social costs on them in the form of lost friendships, disapproving “life talks,” and sometimes even the withdrawal of emotional and financial support. Scariest of all for the student who skips college, he must stand on his own as an individual and take responsibility for his own actions, decisions, and beliefs. This is true the mark of adulthood and it is a lot of responsibility, but for those who are ready, it is incredibly liberating.

Tribal Traditions

Why are so many talented young people wasting four (or more likely, six) valuable years of their lives on college campuses?

Ever since I stepped foot on a college campus for the first time last Fall, I have been fascinated by this question: why is it that essentially all smart, hardworking young people end up on a college campus immediately after graduating high school?

At least for me, this type of conformity was a bit unsettling. When everyone is doing the same thing, there are two options:

1. We have reached the end of knowledge in the domain and everyone is acting optimally by doing the same, correct thing.
2. There are social forces encouraging individuals to converge on one sub-optimal solution.

Although humans like to believe that we know everything, we should not be too hasty in our arrogance. History is full of examples of incredibly smart people believing that they had found the end of knowledge, only to later be proven spectacularly wrong. Most infamously, in 1900, Scottish Physicist Lord Kelvin declared definitively, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement,” just five years before Einstein published his groundbreaking theory of Special Relativity and turned physics on its head.

It is at least theoretically possible for us to all be correct and to reach the end of knowledge in a domain, but we should proceed with extreme caution, being open to the likelihood that there is some critical piece of information that we have missed.

In order to determine whether a certain action is correct or just conformity, one needs to parse the thinking and motivations of the people taking action. If the logic of these actors makes sense and the actors experience positive outcomes as a result of their actions, that is a tell that maybe everyone really is right. If the logic does not make sense or the actors do not seem to understand their own motivations, that is a tell that social forces are at work and that the crowd has gone mad.

Malcolm Gladwell and others like to talk about the wisdom of crowds, the idea that a large group can make decisions far better than individuals. One of the most famous examples of this effect involves Sir Francis Galton, who in 1906 observed a livestock fair where over 800 individuals guessed the weight of an ox. The average of all guesses was 1,197 pounds. The ox weighed 1,198 pounds. Social scientists have observed similar results in a variety of experiments where crowds have demonstrated a collective “wisdom.”

An important precondition for any wisdom of crowds effect is that all of the individuals in the crowd must be acting and thinking independently. If, for example, each member of the crowd announced their guess as to the weight of the ox, one by one, such that the second guesser was aware of the first guess, the crowd would be no wiser than any individual making a guess.

As American author and journalist, James Surowiecki, notes, individuals have a susceptibility to both anchoring bias and social proof, which wipe out all wisdom of crowds effects in situations where there is no independent thinking. In situations where the beliefs of some members of the crowd impact the beliefs of other members of the crowd, one observes the madness of crowds effect.

This madness of crowds effect is one of the driving forces behind all economic bubbles. In the mid-aughts, people justified “investing” in homes that they could not afford with logic like, “the value of the house will increase over time and I can sell later,” or “everyone is buying a bigger house so I need one too!” If you examined that logic and dug into the evidence in 2007 like Michael Burry did, you would have realized that the conventional thinking was flawed. Banks were propping up unsustainable growth by giving out loans to people who had little to no ability to pay them back. Everyone in the crowd was wrong.

The problem was that by 2007 most people did not actually examine the logic or really think too hard about whether things made sense on either a systemic or individual level. That is because in the mid-aughts buying a home had become a Tribal Tradition.

Tribal Traditions are things that people do because lots of other people do them. They are the byproducts of madness of crowds effects. Generally, we do not think through Tribal Traditions and question whether they make sense; rather, we just do them, largely because of the social proof generated by observing other people do them. Everyday, we all partake in hundreds of different Tribal Traditions: everything from brushing our teeth in the morning to driving on the right side of the road.

It is worth mentioning the logic behind the social proof algorithm, which underlies all Tribal Traditions. This algorithm relies on two premises:

1. Action x has positive results for people that I can observe.
2. I am similar to the people I observe in some relevant way.

Given these two premises, the logical and valid conclusion is, “I should take action x in order to achieve positive results.” While this logic is valid, it is not always sound. In some cases, you may not be similar to the people that you observe. Likewise, your observation could be flawed; that is, the action may not result in the exact positive results that you believe it does for the people you observe.

In order to further understand Tribal Traditions, let’s look at how they evolve using our buying a home in the 2000s example:

• Person A carefully considers whether to buy a home. Person A decides to buy the home and it works out.

This is the first step in the mimetic chain. Initially, there is some individual who independently considers and makes a decision that has positive consequences.

• Person B sees Person A have positive results buying a home. Person B, prompted by the social proof from Person A, carefully considers whether to buy a home. Person B decides to buy a home and it works out.

This is the second step in the mimetic chain. Some individual observes the positive consequences of the initial individual’s independent decision. This second individual is partially motivated by the social proof produced by the first individual, but this second individual still independently thinks through the decision before acting.

• Person X sees Persons A-N buying homes and having positive results. Person X buys a home without independently thinking through whether it makes sense. Buying a home does still make sense for Person X and he has great results purchasing his home.

This is the third step in the mimetic chain. A certain number of individuals, N, take some action, have positive results, and create a sufficient amount of social proof to cause individuals to stop independently considering the decision. At this point, individuals act almost entirely because of social proof. They may consider the decision a bit, but the calculus is so clouded by social proof that this thinking cannot be considered independent.

• Person Z sees Persons A-Y buying homes and having good results. Person Z buys a home without independently thinking through whether it makes sense. At this point, buying a home does not actually make sense for Person Z and his home is eventually foreclosed on.

This is the fourth and final step of the mimetic chain. At some point, the action stops making sense for the individuals taking the action. These individuals, who have not thought through the decision independently, experience very negative consequences.

In our example, we can see that the mimetic chain continues until some point, point N, at which the quantity of social proof is so great that Person X no longer independently thinks through whether or not to buy a home. At this point when individuals stop independently assessing some behavior / belief, the action / belief has become Tribal Tradition. It is worth noting that all of this exists on a gradient; that is, there are many points on the spectrum between complete independent thought and complete Tribal Tradition.

Importantly, Tribal Traditions can still make sense. After all they become tradition because lots of people had great success following them. In fact, most Tribal Traditions do make sense and are incredibly useful (shout out to people who brush their teeth). For Person X, the Tribal Tradition of buying a home still makes sense. On an individual level, it works out for him.

However, environments change quickly and at some point the Tribal Tradition will not make sense anymore. When this occurs, because individuals no longer independently think through their actions, many will continue partaking in the Tribal Tradition even once it no longer makes sense. This opens the door for a possible madness of crowds effect, where everyone is stuck doing the same, wrong thing. Eventually, the mimetic cycle will be broken, but only after a sufficient number of individuals experience a sufficient amount of devastation to break it. Observed negative effects are the only way, other than breaking the mimetic cycle by thinking independently, that members of the tribe can break free from partaking in a dysfunctional Tribal Tradition.

Implications of Tribal Traditions

We can separate Tribal Traditions into two categories: functional and dysfunctional. Functional Tribal Traditions are ones that are still correct, i.e. brushing your teeth, whereas dysfunctional Tribal Traditions are ones that are not still correct, i.e. buying a large house in 2008 when you have little money.

The narrative arc of Tribal Traditions posits that at some point any Tribal Tradition will result in some level of suffering for members who adopt the tradition after it does not make sense. Eventually, tribe members will observe the suffering and conclude that the tradition does not work anymore, breaking the mimetic cycle. The length and amount of suffering required to break the mimetic cycle for society at large depends largely on the degree to which the tradition has been reinforced psychologically.

All Tribal Traditions have the same origin and destination. They all begin as functional. If the initial behavior did not work for anyone, then it would not be adopted. Similarly, all Tribal Traditions end as dysfunctional. Even for the ones that work really well in the present, eventually they will stop working. Environments change; once successful behavior eventually becomes outdated. This is a simple fact of life and evolution.

In thinking about decision-making generally, any decision can be categorized on two axes: from completely independent thought to Tribal Tradition and from unimportant to highly consequential.

Unimportant decisions that are Tribal Traditions are generally useful / harmless, i.e. brushing teeth in the morning. Unimportant decisions that are independently thought through are usually a waste of time. Imagine spending a week thoroughly researching the optimal time of day to brush your teeth.

The danger zone consists of highly consequential decisions that become Tribal Tradition, i.e. buying a home. When one stops thinking independently, he opens himself up to the madness of crowds effect. This is the reason why cults are so dangerous: they encourage people to make life-altering decisions without allowing them to fully think them through independently.

For highly consequential decisions, one should take the time needed to independently think through all the options and find the best one. There are only a few dozen of these decisions in most people’s lives, so they merit careful consideration.

For high stakes decisions that become Tribal Tradition, there are great risks. If it turns out that brushing our teeth in the morning is actually not helpful and we only need to brush once a day, it is a relatively inconsequential mistake to have brushed your teeth every morning. On the other hand, if the housing market collapses and you lose your life savings, that is a bit of a bigger problem. If you are going to make some consequential decision, and everyone will at some point, it is worth at least making sure it is you who believes that it is the correct decision and not your tribe.

College as a Tribal Tradition

For the generic high-achieving, highly intelligent, relatively high socio-economic status high school student, getting a college degree has become a Tribal Tradition. It is automatic and merits little thought or serious consideration.

In order to identify a Tribal Tradition, one must first identify the tribe that creates and enforces the tradition. In the college realm, the tribe is composed of incredibly hardworking students that regularly put in sixty plus hour work weeks focusing on school, that have a general cognitive intelligence in the top 10% of the population (SAT greater than 1340 or ACT greater than 28), and that come from families earning more than $100,000 annually. Further, the tribe is also made up of the parents of these children as well as guidance counselors, university admissions officers, and some teachers.

For the members of this tribe, it is an absolute imperative that the young receive a college degree, ideally from one of the more prestigious four year institutions. For children in these families, 87% are enrolled in a four year college by the fall after they graduate from high school. These top students may think through which college they want to attend, but almost none seriously consider post-high school options that are not a four year, residential colleges. Perhaps a few rebels will flirt with the idea of a gap year or consider a two-year community college or technical school, but even mentioning these relatively tame “alternatives” is often enough to draw the ire of the Tribe.

Getting a college degree falls under the category of highly consequential Tribal Traditions. College degrees are very expensive both in terms of time and money. The choice about what one does after high school to educate oneself is incredibly important. It is a decision worth serious independent thought and reflection. Unfortunately, members of the tribe view attending college not as a decision to make, but rather as an imperative.

At the very least, this problem is serious in nature. At its worst, it may be catastrophic. In the best case scenario, the Tribal Tradition is still correct for almost all students. In this case, it is still not good that society has lost the ability to independently make an important life decision. A college degree is not a silver bullet that solves all problems in all times. Even if it is the case that college still makes sense for most members of the tribe today, at some point in time it will not. And when it no longer makes sense, members of the tribe who no longer think independently will be unable to adapt and make a different decision.

Before moving on, let’s briefly explore how college developed to be the robust Tribal Tradition that it is today. Contrary to modern belief, it was not always this way.

Going to a four year, residential college after high school started to become really popular after World War II in the 50s and 60s. In 1950, only about 6% of the young adult population had a bachelors degree. Essentially, the only people who went to college pre-1950 were the children of wealthy aristocrats. As Zak Slayback notes,

“As global wealth increased through the Industrial Revolution [early 1900s], aristocrats who were already comfortable in their wealth had two options for their children who were coming of age: A) send them to work, or B) give them some leisure among their same class. The university evolved into an institution to help young aristocratic men to transition into adulthood by moving away from home and studying subjects only the most well-off had the leisure to study.”

Once these children of aristocrats graduated, they usually went on to be very successful, as one would expect. They were not successful because they spent four leisurely years on a campus with peers of a similar class status, but rather because they came from a background that assured that they would always have been successful no matter what they spent those four years doing.

Nevertheless, it was easy to observe that the most successful people in society had degrees from colleges and to mistakenly conclude that college caused success. Post WWII, college was heavily promoted, and backed by the GI Bill, as the path to economic success. Thanks to this promotion and subsidy, by 1970, the number of young adults with bachelors degrees had more than doubled to 16% and by 1980 it had quadrupled to 24%. For perspective, in 2018 the number is around 32%.

For smart, hard-working kids in the 1960s and 1970s, going to college proved to be a successful path. At that point, a relatively small portion of society obtained a bachelors degree and employers viewed the degree as a real differentiator and signal of strong ability. Thus, having a degree gave Baby Boomers a real leg up in the job market.

Because college was a successful path for the Boomers, they ensured that their children, who had similar demographic characteristics as them, went to college and received a degree. This cycle of success has repeated for a couple generations and at some point, people in families with multi-generational track records of success via college stopped thinking of it as an option, and rather as a necessity. Eventually, society at large followed suit, and attending college became a Tribal Tradition.

The narrative of the college degree Tribal Tradition is easily recognizable; it is the same narrative arc that all Tribal Traditions progress through and that we outlined earlier. Initially, it made sense for individuals that consider the decision and understand their motivations (early elites going to college for leisure). Later, the Boomers saw the success of the early elites and decided to pursue the same path, still considering the choice individually but understanding it less than the early elites. Eventually, there was enough social proof (successful college graduates) that individuals stopped independently considering whether to go to college. At this point, it was no longer a choice. This point was probably reached sometime in the 90s.

The final step in the evolution of a Tribal Tradition is the inevitable crash, the point in time at which it stops making sense and tribe members are unable to adapt. In the next section, we explore when we will reach that point, if we are not already there.

The Dysfunction of College

We have established that college is a Tribal Tradition, but is it functional or dysfunctional? In this section, I will argue that college is no longer a functional Tribal Tradition for many members of the tribe. Rather, for the highly intelligent, hard working high school student, getting a college degree is a Tribal Tradition that no longer makes sense.

In order to make the case that college no longer makes sense for members of the tribe, I will argue that:

1. There is an economic penalty for members of the tribe who choose to attend college.
2. Students do not understand their own motivations for attending college.

Traditionally, the main justification for college is the financial payoff over a lifetime of earnings. Not only do I believe that this financial payoff does not exist for members of the tribe, but I also believe that in many cases they sacrifice economically in order to attend college.

The most common statistic used to support the economic advantages of attending college is that, on average, students with college degrees out-earn those without college degrees by $1 million over the course of their lifetime. This is a true fact. No serious analysts of education dispute that this is the case, myself included. It is undoubtedly the case that, on average, those who go to college make more money over their lifetimes than those who do not go to college.

However, it is not necessarily true that college causes those who graduate to earn more.

In statistics, one of the foundational principles is that two things can be correlated, i.e. as x increases so does y, but this does not necessarily mean that an increase in x causes y to increase. In the case of the college degree premium, it is true that those with college degrees out-earn those without them, but that does not mean that it is the college degree that causes this earnings gap.

A quick example: 1% of the American population has the first name David, while about 1.2% of the American population has the first name William. It is also true that in the United States House of Representatives, before the 2018 midterm elections, 3.2% of the representatives had the first name David, while just .2% had the first name William. Despite the correlation between having the first name David and being elected to the House of Representatives, no one would seriously claim that naming a child David makes him significantly more likely to be elected to the House of Representatives than naming the same child William. When there is a correlation between two things, it means that there may be reason to investigate further as to whether causation exists, but it does not mean that causation definitely exists.

There are many possible explanations for why the college degree premium exists and what causes it. The conventional explanation is that students learn valuable skills in college and that the degree premium is entirely a result of that which is learned in college. This is commonly referred to as the Human Capital Theory, which argues that individuals increase their human capital, i.e. knowledge and skills, through college and that this leads them to earn more than those with less human capital, i.e. those who do not attend college.

The Human Capital Theory is clearly false, at least in the sense that it does not tell the entire story. An easy way to debunk the Human Capital Theory is to observe Sheepskin Effects, which show that completing the last year of college is much more profitable economically than completing any other year.

Using General Social Survey Data, Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason, finds that non-degree years of college increase earnings by under 3%, whereas the degree year increases earnings by over 45%. In other words, going to college for three years and not getting a degree does not meaningfully increase your earnings, even though you presumably would have had three years of human capital development. If college was about increasing human capital, why would the last year be rewarded so much more than the other years combined? Are all of the valuable skills and lessons learned during senior year?

If Human Capital Theory explained the degree premium, one would expect the economic returns per year of college to correlate with the human capital development each year. A decent argument could be made that the distribution of human capital development is not evenly spread throughout four years of college, but rather that a majority of it happens during the latter stage of college, as one progresses into the more advanced and specialized courses.

Maybe 30% of the human capital is developed in the first two years of college combined, with 30% happening junior year and 40% senior year? Even if this were the case, we would still expect to see roughly 30% of the economic gain occur during the first two years of college and another 30% during junior year if the Human Capital Theory were correct. Instead, economic gains are steady and minimal for all non-degree years and are almost entirely concentrated in the degree year. This is a critical flaw in Human Capital Theory.

A more correct explanation for the college premium is that it is almost entirely some combination of selection bias and signaling.

Selection bias refers to anything that causes two samples to be improperly randomized and representative of the population at large. In the case of college, the population of students who graduate from college is vastly different than the population of students who do not graduate. On average, students who graduate from college earned better grades in high school, have higher levels of general cognitive intelligence, achieved higher SAT scores, worked more hours in school, and came from a higher socioeconomic background than students who do not graduate from college.

Comparing the outcomes of these two populations is like comparing apples and oranges. Intuitively, in a world where college did not exist and education ended after high school, one would expect the population of students who currently go to college to significantly out-earn the population that currently does not. Attributing this “natural” earnings gap to college, when it would have existed without college, does not make sense.

In order to understand the true economic impact of the college degree, it is crucial to adjust for the impact of selection bias. Failing to do so when citing statistics about the college earnings gap is either ignorant, disingenuous, or both.

In calculating the true economic impact of the college degree, it is important to figure out approximately how much of the earnings gap can be explained by selection bias. It is clear that selection bias accounts for some of the earnings gap, but if it is 10% of the earnings gap that is very different than if it is 90%.

Bryan Caplan has looked at the role of selection bias in the context of the earnings gap, which he refers to as ability bias. In order to correct for ability bias, Caplan measures IQ and then corrects for that to establish a lower bound for ability bias. IQ is an incomplete measure of ability, so the presumption is that if one were able to measure and correct for all forms of ability, the result would be larger, hence the establishment of a lower bound.

In crunching these numbers, Caplan finds that correcting for just IQ reduces the college earnings premium by 40%. In a paper analyzing National Longitudinal Survey data, economists McKinley Blackburn and David Neumark come to a similar conclusion:

“OLS (Ordinary Least Squares) estimation of the standard log wage equation, including test scores, appears to provide an appropriate estimate of the return to schooling. Such estimates indicate an upward bias of roughly 40% in the usual OLS estimate of the return to schooling (that omits proxies for ability).”

Admittedly, it’s hard to nail down exactly how much explanatory power selection bias has, but it seems fair to establish 40% as a conservative lower bound. It appears that ability bias explains a significant portion of the earnings gap between college graduates and those without degrees, although certainly not all of it.

Conservatively, let’s say that selection bias accounts for 40% of the earnings gap. That still leaves a majority, 60%, of it still to account for. Is the rest of this 60% the skills and knowledge that college graduates gain? Is Human Capital Theory 60% right?

It does appear to be true that most of the non-selection bias explanation for the earnings gap can be attributed to gaining a college degree. That is, the average college graduate can expect to increase her lifetime earnings by $600,000 over what she would have earned without a degree. Not quite the $1 million many like to cite, but still a pretty hefty return, depending on the costs.

So how can I possibly argue that there is actually an economic disincentive for top students to attend college? One word: signaling.

Signaling Theory provides an alternative explanation for why the labor market rewards those with college degrees. Whereas Human Capital Theory proposes that students are rewarded because of the valuable skills that they learn while in college, Signaling Theory suggests that they are rewarded because college degrees signal certain positive qualities in an individual that the labor market values, whether those qualities are actually present or not. An easy way to see the merits of Signaling Theory is with a quick thought experiment:

Which would you rather have: a degree from Harvard without ever having stepped on Harvard’s campus or a full, four year residential Harvard experience complete with as much learning as you can handle? The only catch is that if you choose the latter option, you get no degree or recognition of your time on campus. In fact, no one will ever know and you will not be allowed to tell anyone about your time at Harvard.

Signaling Theory posits that economically motivated actors will chose the first option. Degrees from elite institutions signal positive traits about the degree holder to society and specifically, to potential employers. If you have a degree from Harvard, there are a set of assumptions most people will have about you. In most situations in society, this set of assumptions works in your favor and gives you an advantage. This is why hundreds of thousands of students apply to Harvard every year.

Implicitly, colleges and students both endorse the Signaling Model. As Bryan Caplan says,

“Fact: anyone can study at Princeton for free. While tuition is over $45,000 a year, anyone can show up and start attending classes. No one will stop you. No one will challenge you. No one will make you feel unwelcome. Colleges do not card.”

As a professor himself, Caplan knows that almost no one does this and that elite universities are not worrying about unofficial students swarming campus. Why? Because the unofficial learning does not produce any signal and colleges and students alike believe that what is rewarded in the labor market is not their actual skills, but rather their credential.

Another fact that is hard to square with Human Capital Theory that is readily explained by Signaling Theory: school is the only product where the consumers celebrate when they do not receive what they paid for.

Only the truly rare student will protest when a professor cancels or ends class early. In fact, more than 25% of college students report skipping class at least once a week, with less than 15% reporting that they never skip class. How could this be? If it was the learning in class that produced an economic benefit, wouldn’t students religiously attend class and protest when teachers deprive them of their learning? The answer, of course, is that what students and parents alike pay for is the college degree, not the college learning.

The reason that thousands of students apply to Harvard every year is not because it offers a world class education, but because it offers a world class signal (and to some extent a world class network). To be clear, this is not to say that Harvard does not offer a great education. I have several friends who attend Harvard and I do believe it offers a great education relative to most colleges. It’s just silly to think that what goes on in the classrooms is the reason that students apply in droves to Harvard. Through EdX, Harvard now has much of its curriculum online for free. How many of the students who were rejected from Harvard would be willing to forgo their second or third choice college to get a Harvard education online?

Together, signaling and selection bias account for almost the entirety of the earnings gap between those with and without college degrees. If selection bias is 40% of the premium, signaling appears to be about 80% of the remaining premium, or close to 50% total. The remaining ~10% is some combination of human capital development and networking.

Okay, so what? Even if selection bias accounts for 40% of the earnings gap and even if the entire other 60% is just signaling and doesn’t actually have to do with learning or human capital development, doesn’t the rationale of the students attending college to make more money hold up? Yes and no.

Caplan makes the argument that college makes sense from a selfish, economic perspective. That is, even if you do not learn that much at Harvard, as long as you graduate, the labor market will still reward you with an income reflective of a Harvard graduate. Caplan uses this rationale to argue that the higher ability one has, the more likely college is to make sense for that individual.

What Caplan’s rationale fails to consider is that college degrees are only one potential signal and that it is possible to build a signal that is better than a college degree. Further, college degree signals are only as strong as the reputation of the university you attend. If one is very high ability, with high ability defined as comprising those traits which the labor market tends to reward, and attends a lower tier university, it is quite possible that the degree signal from that university will undersell that person’s true ability.

The higher ability that one is, the less likely it is that the college degree signal will be worth it and the more likely it is that the person should instead attempt to build a better signal.

Let’s start with the claim that it is possible to build a signal that is better than a college degree. What exactly does a college degree signal? It depends on the tier of school that one attends, but for a generic, middle of the road, decent state school, a college degree signals that one has some level of work ethic, some level of general competence, and exhibits conformity.

The average college degree is not a very strong signal, which is why 44% of college graduates ages 22–27 are underemployed in jobs that do not require college degrees. Because so many more people get college degrees now than in the 1950s, the degree is less of a differentiator. As degree inflation increases, signal quality decreases.

It is worth noting the specific utility of the college degree signal. No one lines up to give you a job just because you have a college degree. Instead, college degrees function as the signal that most people use to attempt to convince employers that they are worth considering for a job. Employers use degrees to make decisions about whether to consider someone because they allow the employer to make a quick judgment based on assumptions that are informed by the college degree signal.

Once you get to the point where you are actually being considered for a job, the signal becomes much less important because the employer can gather specific information about you rather than just rely on the signal as a proxy. At this point, you need something else besides a degree, like impressive work experience or specific demonstrable aptitudes / skills to actually get the job.

Given this, it is worth thinking about whether one can develop the “something else” needed to actually get a job while finding an alternative, cheaper way to signal to employers that one is worth considering for a job.

The average starting salary for a college graduate is right around $50,000. This is the average, which means about half of college graduates start making less than this. Building a better signal than the generic college degree is not a very high bar to clear. Programs like Praxis and Lambda School already offer a stronger signal at a much cheaper price than most colleges, with average starting salaries over $50,000 for Praxis and $86,200 for Lambda School. Both programs result in no debt for the student.

While it may have been true even twenty years ago that a degree was the best signal that most people could create, the information cost of signaling has decreased to the point where that is no longer true. As Isaac Morehouse, the founder of Praxis says,

“A person with a strong GitHub profile has a signal that beats a degree. If you’ve launched a startup, even if it lasted only six months and ultimately failed, you’ve done something that sends a more powerful signal than a degree. If you’ve raised money, sold products, done freelance work, produced videos, run social media campaigns, mastered SEO or AdWords, built a website, designed logos, started a nonprofit, been published in a handful of outlets with good content, had valuable work experience, or even just have an amazing online presence via a personal website and/or excellent LinkedIn and social media profiles, you have a signal more valuable than most degrees.”

It is clearly possible to build a better signal than a college degree. One might argue that all of these “better” signals require extreme ambition and creativity and that this may work for geniuses, but that for the average person, this would not work. On some level, this criticism is valid. Creating a better signal than a college degree does require ambition and creativity. It does not require one to be a genius, but generally speaking, those with higher ability will have an easier time building a signal that is better than a college degree. If one is not very ambitious, creative, or hard-working and has the chance to attend a top level school, then getting the degree probably makes sense. It might not be possible for this person to create a signal that is better than college.

The implication of all of this is extraordinarily counterintuitive: the more talented, smart, creative, hardworking, etc. that you are, the less likely it is that college makes economic sense.

In general, the lower level of ability you have, the more likely it is that you can earn a signal from college that oversells your true ability. Similarly, the higher level of ability that you have, the more likely it is that any college degree you earn will undersell your true ability.

Of course, all of this disregards cost entirely, which only makes alternative signals even more attractive. Whereas the average college graduate graduates with over $37,000 in debt, graduates of programs like Praxis and Lambda School have none. Building real skills via online courses, building out a GitHub profile, or spending a few weeks analyzing a company’s marketing strategy do not result in any significant level of debt either.

Obviously, none of this can be taken as prescriptive advice. College makes sense for some people and does not make sense for others. My argument is simply that college might not make sense for the exact group, high achieving, high ability high schoolers, that everyone urges must go to college. At the very least, members of this tribe should consider whether they may be able to create a better signal than the college degree that will be dangled in front of them.

Why Does Anyone Go?

If one accepts my argument in the previous section, then it is obvious that something strange is happening. The logical extension of the idea that the higher ability one has, the less likely it is college will pay off is that high ability students are attending college in droves despite an economic deterrent. If this is true, then there must be an even stronger incentive that compels members of the tribe to attend college.

In this section, I make the case for the social incentive as the driving force behind why members of the tribe actually attend college.

It really sucks to feel like you let your parents down. It is really uncomfortable to have conversations with your relatives about why you are not in school anymore. It is alienating when everyone your age is doing one thing and you are doing something completely different. These are the main reasons members of the tribe attend college. In a nutshell, it’s absolutely terrifying to defy societal convention and tribal wisdom.

In order to understand why humans are naturally such conformists, it is important to understand the history of humanity. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans actually did live in tribes as hunter gatherers. As a member of the tribe, the absolute last thing you wanted to do was anything that would single you out from the group or signal that something was different about you. Why? Because you risked alienating yourself and getting kicked out of the tribe. And if you got kicked out of the tribe, you died.

Getting kicked out of the tribe also meant that you would likely not reproduce. This means that for hundreds of thousands of years humans have quite literally evolved to be conformists. This is why it feels so dangerous to do things that separate you from the crowd. It’s why many people fear public speaking even more than death.

While conformity was a good strategy for survival in hunter-gatherer times, it can be an incredibly dangerous strategy for modern humans. As outlined earlier, Tribal Traditions will inevitably become wrong at some point in time. When really important decisions become Tribal Traditions, bad things tend to ensue. Unfortunately, this is exactly where we are with college.

For smart, ambitious young people, doing anything besides college after high school makes you weird. Friends do not understand your decision, parents will likely disapprove and may cut off financial and emotional support, and your relatives undoubtedly will try to convince you that you are throwing your life away. It can be a lonely journey and even for students who recognize that they may be sacrificing economically to attend college, it may not be worth it to endure the ridicule and shame of their loved ones.

In case there was not enough, another point of evidence for the dysfunction of the college Tribal Tradition is the confusion that members of the tribe have about their own motivations. When people do not understand their own motivations for acting, this is a clear tell that the tradition has become dysfunctional.

In the latest Higher Education Research Institute annual survey of college freshman, the top stated motivations for attending college were “learning about things that interest me” (83.8%) and “to get a better job,” with 83.8% and 84.8% respectively of college freshman noting these as “very important” reasons to attend college. As we have detailed, college is not primarily about learning and for many, it actually doesn’t lead to higher paying jobs compared with alternative signals. The real reason most students attend, fear of social costs, doesn’t make the HERI list. Unsurprisingly, you can’t trust most people to accurately self-report their own true motivations.

Conclusion

I don’t think every smart, ambitious young person should drop or opt out of college. Obviously, college makes sense for some of these people. But just as obviously, college does not make sense for some of them. Unfortunately, this seemingly balanced opinion is considered radical by members of the tribe, who believe that college is right for everyone, at least everyone in the tribe. In reality, the truly radical belief is the one that encourages everyone to do the same thing. One size usually does not fit all.

Again, I’m not hoping for everyone to drop out of college or for universities around the country to close their doors, but it would be good to restore some level of independent thought to the education landscape. Increasingly, there are legitimate options for learning and career development besides college, a trend which promises to only gain in strength in the coming years.

In conclusion, I am neither pro-college, nor am I anti-college; rather, I am pro-good decision making. I hope that this, at least, is something we can all agree on and commit to pursuing.

Intellectual humility — a feeling that stems from a general awareness of one’s “unknown unknowns”, i.e. the things that one is unaware that they do not know.

I recently wrote about intellectual humility and how if you want to learn anything, the first step is to admit how little you know. Learning necessitates seeking truth, which exists on a gradient that runs from completely false to completely true. In order to seek truth, you should aim to correctly evaluate where on this gradient from completely false to completely true each of your beliefs exists. In doing this, you will come to view your beliefs as guesses that are subject to change as you learn more.

In looking at the world recently, I’ve noticed two things:

1. People underrate the value of intellectual humility and learning in general.

2. There’s an incredible lack of intellectual humility in society at large.

In this post, I will attempt to explain both why intellectual humility is incredibly valuable for individuals and why it’s a necessity for a democratic society.

To start, we need to dive into our definition of “intellectual humility”:

A feeling that stems from a general awareness of one’s “unknown unknowns”, i.e. the things that one is unaware that they do not know.

To understand this concept, think about all of the things that you don’t know. Perhaps you can’t change the oil in your car or you never quite learned how to do multi-variable calculus. Whatever your answers, these are things that you consciously know that you do not know; in other words, these are your “known unknowns”. But what about the things that you don’t know that you don’t know? These are your blindspots, the “unknown unknowns” and all of us have them — no one has zero blindspots.

This, I posit, is what intellectual humility really is: a general awareness that one has blindspots that make his / her current beliefs not entirely correct.

You may not know what exactly your blindspots are, but once you recognize that they exist you become willing to learn and to consider that others may know things that you do not know. It becomes okay to shed a previous belief for a more true new belief.

On the contrary, if you believe that you know everything (i.e. that you have no blindspots), then you can’t and won’t learn. Instead, you will viciously attack beliefs and ideas that contradict your own, since in this conception where you know everything they are obviously wrong.In talking to others with different viewpoints, you will be unable to listen to them and thoughtfully consider their points. Instead, if they do not immediately realize how wrong they are, you will assume that something must be wrong with them and you will likely attack them personally.

What’s shocking to me is that many people seem to function as though they know everything, refusing to consider ideas that do not mirror their own. An unwillingness to consider opposing beliefs / ideas is the hallmark sign of someone who is unaware that they have blindspots.

There’s nothing wrong with being confident in your beliefs, only with misplaced confidence that precludes learning. The goal should be to have a level of confidence in your beliefs that mirrors the chances that your belief is correct. For example, if you have a belief that has an 80% chance of being correct, you should have a corresponding 80% level of confidence in that belief. This 80% level of confidence grants an awareness that there is the 20% which you do not know and it allows for the possibility that at any time you may be proven wrong.

If, on the other hand, you believe something with 100% certainty, then you leave no room for the possibility that you may be missing some information. In this case, you make it impossible to learn anything. In practice, it is impossible for most beliefs to calculate the precise odds that you are correct, but even having a simplistic estimation will grant you a wondrous learning advantage — most people’s first instinct is to assume that there is a 100% chance that their belief is correct, which precludes them from actively seeking disconfirming evidence.

I don’t read news or go on social media very often, but when I do I’m always shocked by one thing: there’s a toxic level of people who think they know everything. I will give an example.

Today I was reading a story about a court case. The author made an argument in favor of the plaintiff in this court case. In my opinion, the author’s viewpoint contained some truth, but was much, much too simplistic. The author saw the case as completely black and white. In my estimation, the case was much more complex and nuanced, as most things are, than the author presumed it to be. Now, the author’s simplistic viewpoint was not in and of itself problematic. Reasonable people can have very different opinions and since the site where this story was published prides itself on having an engaged and thoughtful community, I looked forward to diving into the issue further in the comments section.

As I started reading the comments section, I was utterly impressed. People with all different perspectives were engaging in thoughtful and respectful debate about the issues at hand, many of them exhibiting an impressive level of intellectual humility. As I continued reading through the comments I noticed one exception: the author. The author of the story was outright indignant that anyone could possibly disagree with the argument that he / she had made. Rather than engage in the thoughtful debate that the rest of the commenters were participating in, he / she proceeded to personally attack those that disagreed. For the author it was inconceivable that he / she may not have been completely right. Operating under this belief, the only logical conclusion was that everyone else was an idiotic racist.

Note: for this example, I will not talk about the specifics of the court case that I reference nor will I reveal the author’s identity. The specifics are not the point, nor is the point to personally attack a specific author. Rather, the point is to provide an example of the type of attitude that I see all too often in today’s society. Due to the politics surrounding the court case, I believe that were I to reveal the specifics, it would be very difficult for most people to not form an immediate judgment, based on whose viewpoint they agree with.

No matter how disgusting or vile you find someone’s viewpoint, you need to be able to understand it. If you can’t understand it, then you can’t defeat it. You can’t just will away ideas you disagree with, no matter how repulsive, by shouting really loudly or attempting to personally shame the people who endorse them. The only way to defeat ideas you disagree with is to prove that they are wrong through well-intentioned, truth-seeking debate. If you refuse to actually defend your own ideas in this way and instead choose to personally attack people with different viewpoints, you will only encourage people with different viewpoints to double down on their own beliefs. And who can blame them? If you want to change someone’s mind, show them they’re wrong — don’t call them an idiot, racist, sexist, etc.

This process of changing people’s minds through rational dialogue is crucial for any democratic society to operate functionally. Whereas an autocracy relies on force to compel behavior, a democracy relies on rational debate to change behavior. This is the reason why free speech is one of the foundational values of the American democracy. Absent free speech, the only way to change behaviors is with force.

Rational dialogue only works if all parties approach it with intellectual humility and a genuine truth-seeking function. Without these, democratic society loses its ability to solve hard problems peacefully. Increasingly, society turns into a battle for power between warring factions. Unfortunately, it appears that this is the direction we are headed.

Every day, we have to make millions of decisions. Most of them are small and inconsequential, hence we make them almost entirely subconsciously.

The processes we use to inform our subconscious decisions / beliefs are called heuristics. Essentially, they are short cuts to help the brain make decisions quickly and effectively.

Common heuristics include:

• When lots of other people do / want something, it is good.
• Expensive means higher quality.
• What comes to mind quickly is correct.
• The less of something there is, the better it is.
• Those in positions of authority should be believed.

Heuristics work well in most situations. This is why they exist. Heuristics develop because they work for many people in many situations. If they never worked, they would not have evolved to still be present.

But, heuristics can also backfire, and they have an annoying habit of not working in very important situations. The problem with heuristics is that they are all flawed; that is, there is no heuristic that works perfectly in all situations. Thus, for any heuristic that one adopts, he has to be willing to be wrong in at least some situations.

Even generally useful heuristics that are worth adopting will backfire in certain situations. For example, social proof, the tendency to follow the crowd, is often a very useful heuristic. It saves time by allowing one to adopt society’s conventional wisdom in a range of areas. Imagine having to do a study to figure out how many times a day to brush your teeth, for how long, and with what products. Instead, most people just brush their teeth twice a day for about two minutes with whatever they find at the store.

The social proof heuristic saves us all countless hours of our day by reducing the amount of things that we have to think about, but it has also led to some of the world’s greatest suffering. How could millions of Germans support Hitler and the Final Solution? Well, it was a lot easier to justify when everyone around you supported it too. Similarly, social proof underlies financial bubbles. In 2008, everyone wanted to buy a home because everyone else wanted to buy a home.

If social proof and other heuristics can lead to devastating results, what alternative do we have? The answer is independent thinking.

Independent thinking requires a lot more work than heuristics, but it is worth the extra effort when making consequential decisions. For example, things like one’s morality, how to educate oneself, what to pursue as a career, who to spend time with, etc. are worth thinking through independently. These decisions will have an outsized effect on your life and it is worth some extra mental energy to increase your odds of getting them more right.

Heuristics work well for relatively inconsequential behaviors. For relatively important decisions, it is worth the extra effort required by independent thinking to improve the decision making quality.

In addition to independent thinking for important decisions, it is worth thinking consciously about which heuristics we adopt.

Given that we make decisions every day on the basis of our heuristics, deciding which ones to adopt is important. Given also that we have not reached the end of knowledge, we should acknowledge that our heuristics are imperfect and always be seeking to update them to more closely match reality.

Increasingly, it appears that heuristics have become subject to the political battle for power.

In the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and allegations of sexual assault, #BelieveAllWomen gained traction. At its core, #BelieveAllWomen is a heuristic that its proponents encouraged us to adopt.

Just like any other heuristic, #BelieveAllWomen is flawed. Clearly, if one were to literally believe all women, then there would be times when he would be wrong. However, in the domain of sexual assault reports, all data suggests that #BelieveAllWomen is a much better heuristic than #BelieveNoWomen.

If this were a zero-sum battle between only these two heuristics, then clearly adopting the #BelieveAllWomen heuristic would be the better choice. This is the case its proponents make.

The problem with this reasoning is that whether or not to believe a sexual assault allegation is a fairly important decision, given the implications it has for both the accuser and the accused. In a domain of this importance, it is worth taking the time and effort to independently evaluate the evidence and then to make a decision based on the evidence.

Now, there will be cases where the evidence is inconclusive. In these cases, proponents of #BelieveAllWomen argue that we should adopt their heuristic. The problem these proponents run into is that #BelieveAllWomen runs counter to a much deeper heuristic in American society: innocent until proven guilty.

The presumption of innocence is the dominant heuristic that the American legal system is based on. At least for now, that doesn’t seem likely to change. Right now, the main battle is over what the dominant heuristic will be for the American cultural system, which becomes increasingly more important in a technologically connected world where individuals can be de-platformed and shunned.

As of now, it appears that #BelieveAllWomen is beating out innocent until proven guilty as the heuristic in American culture. Whether or not that is a good thing is a subject for another article. For now, it is worth noting that this battle over heuristics is happening and thinking consciously about which heuristics we choose to adopt.

At the end of 2018, I set some goals for myself for the upcoming year. I would like to audit these goals at least once a month. I think this will help in several ways:

• Reflection — priorities and goals can change. I want to check in with myself and see if my initial intention still holds true. If it has changed, why has it changed?
• Accountability — this is my reasoning for posting these and for posting my intention to post these audits once per month. Even if no one were to read this, the thought that even one person might be expecting my audit to be posted each month adds some level of motivation.
• Planning — examining one’s plan is often more consequential than simply executing it. A small plan upgrade can make up for several days (or even years) of sub-optimal execution. Checking in once a month will allow me to audit my plans and see if there are upgrades that I can make. I’d like to be auditing my plans more routinely, but setting aside this time will force me to do it explicitly at least once per month.
• Truth-telling / self-knowledge — I want to be more honest, both with myself and with others. Especially in entrepreneurship, there is a tendency to want to “stretch” the truth. There are altruistic reasons to tell the truth, but there’s also a selfish one: lying distorts your view of reality. If you lie enough, eventually you start to believe your own lies. Once you can’t trust your own view of reality, it’s very hard to think clearly for yourself. Posting these with the intention of not lying should force me to practice not distorting reality.

Goal #1: Publish a book.

I finished writing a draft of a re-worked theoretical approach to the book. It’s an around 30 page high level summary of what will eventually I think become the rewritten manuscript. I will probably publish that draft to Medium in the next week.

I still need to work more on theorizing about who I am writing for and what my goals are in publishing this book. To this point, my motivation has primarily been to understand for myself a topic that I find very interesting and perplexing. I do think I understand much better now what is going on and although I am nowhere close to having a full understanding, I would like to share my theory with people who I believe are operating using a less good theory about the way the world works. That seems like my primary intention in writing and publishing the book, although I am sure there is a part of me that would enjoy the self-indulgent aspects of having a book published.

Next month, I plan to:

• Publish Medium high level summary of working theory.
• Research and create a publishing and distribution plan.
• Begin work on the rewritten manuscript.

I would like to have a rewritten manuscript completed by the end of March, along with a solid publishing and distribution plan. This would allow me, starting in April, to go through a process of receiving feedback, revising, and preparing to launch the book in the Fall.

Goal #2: Meditate Daily

This goal did not go very well for the first half of the month. I have been more consistent (although not perfect) in my morning / nighttime routines. Towards the end of the month, I started using Sam Harris’ Waking Up app for daily meditation and have found it quite useful. I plan to continue using it next month and intend to use it daily in the mornings.

At this point, I feel comfortable in having a basic daily morning / nighttime routine. This is the rough outline:

Mornings:

• Meditate using Waking Up App.
• Daily journal on goal setting for the day.

Evenings:

• Daily journal on reflection, gratefulness, and intentions for improving.

This is a very basic architecture, upon which I would like to improve. Some things I would like to add at some point:

• Daily Bible reading at night (neglected this in January)
• Stretching / yoga routine in the morning
• Fiction reading before bed
• Non-fiction reading in the morning
• 30 minute wind-down, wind-up periods in mornings and evenings to detach from all screens

I have some more ideas, but my sense is that this is something that I can build on throughout the year. For February, I want to try adding the Bible reading in the evening. I found myself usually being tired by the time I got ready to head to bed and not wanting to read the Bible. I also got bored by it pretty easily. This month, I want to give it an honest shot. I’m about 10 pages into Genesis at the moment. I’d like to at least finish Genesis in January.

Goal #3: Build something that 100,000+ people use.

I think this will be the month that we launch Scope, which I am pretty excited about. The problem it solves is real and one that I experienced first hand when going through the college process: it’s really hard to get accurate, qualitative information about what it’s like to live on a specific college campus. There’s tons of quantitative information out there, but in truth once you get to campus, the things that matter aren’t going to be the median graduating salary or the acceptance percentage of your freshman class; it’s going to be what are the dorms like, what times are the dining halls open, what are the people like, etc.

Theoretically, college tours are supposed to give you this qualitative information and while it’s better than nothing, I found tours to generally not be that useful. First, tour guides are paid spokesman of the university. The campus tour is highly engineering to sell you on the school. The intention of the tour is not to show you exactly what it will be like, but rather to sell you (and your parents) on the school. Second, most tours are really boring and blend together. They’re long, the tour guides talk a lot, and you get tired of walking.

The best way to actually get a sense of what the school will be like (besides trying it for a bit) is talking to real students that attend the school. Many students do this as part of their due diligence process in researching a prospective school, but the cost is relatively high: you either need to know someone who goes to the school or reach out to try to find someone.

What Scope does is reduce the cost of gathering high-quality, accurate qualitative information about prospective colleges by connecting high school students with college students to have free text based conversations. It’s quick, free, and easy. You can gather multiple opinions from real students at the school you want to attend right from your couch. And all for free.

That’s the vision and it is looking like we will launch this month. We have close to 1,000 total high school and college students signed up to test the early version of the product. The intention will be to iron out the kinks, gather lots of feedback, and then build a version 2 that will be ready for the summer, when the next pool of applicants kicks into high gear. We’ll have to see how early testing goes, but I am optimistic this might be the thing to get to 100,000+ people.

We also launched I Choose Extraordinary this past month. The Youtube channel is on a brief hiatus until February, but I have been releasing weekly podcasts. We will see how things go. For now, my intention is simply to release honest conversations that I think would have been beneficial for me to hear when I was first getting started.

Goal #4: Travel to six completely new places.

Technically, I travelled to 3 completely new places this past month: Paris, Barcelona, and the Canary Islands. The trip was wonderful and renewed me in several ways.

I do want to clarify my intention on this goal. It was not simply to travel to six completely new places. Rather, it was to take a genuine trip regularly at least every two months.With this in mind, I am planning to book a trip to Moab, Utah for mid-late March. Our new employee with Y Innovations is interning there and the hiking and natural canyons are also beautiful. If I have a weekend to get away in February, I will take advantage of it, but I am unsure yet if this will be possible.

Goal #5: Take a new Udemy / MasterClass every month.

The intention here was simply to learn new things every month. I didn’t spend as much time on this as I would have liked to in January. I did purchase two Udemy courses on developmental and educational psychology. I started one of them and it was fairly interesting. I supplemented it by starting one of my favorite psychology books. I would like to dive into psychology more this month.

My intention is to post some thoughts / learnings on psychology by the end of February.

Goal #6: Read the Bible.

Detailed above. I need to do a better job with this. Depending on the outcomes this month, I may evaluate shifting this intention or at least the strategy for pursuing it.

Goal #7: Start a podcast.

Technically, I did start the I Choose Extraordinary Podcast this month. I would like to improve the sound quality of the podcast. That is my intention for this month.

2018 has come and gone. With it, I want to take time to reflect on what I have learned, done, and saw in 2018 with the intention of using this reflection to guide my actions in 2019.

I had hoped to complete this exercise by the end of 2018, but it turned out to be even more involved than I had anticipated. Alas, better late than never.

I set five large goals for myself for 2018:

• Publish a book
• Meditate every day
• Build a house
• Read 50 books
• Travel once every two months

I missed the mark on the first two, but successfully accomplished the last three. I want to reflect on each goal briefly.

1. Publish a book

I made a lot of progress on this goal this year and was on pace to accomplish it halfway through the year. I have about a 200 page draft that I have sent to a few close friends and family members for feedback. I finished that draft back in the spring and have left it largely untouched since then.

In Originals, Adam Grant discusses how purposeful procrastination can actually be a boon for creativity. I think he’s right and I think that is what I am doing right now. Taking time away from the book is allowing me time to reflect on it and the ideas that I am presenting. I am realizing that I may want to take a different angle altogether.

I think that I will probably rewrite the first draft almost in its entirety. The first draft took me about six months, on and off, to write. Once I am ready, I suspect the second draft will take a month or less. I need clarity on who I am writing for and what exactly I am trying to communicate to them. Most of my theoretical models in the domain are pretty strong, but I need more explicit models on my audience.

I am deferring this goal to 2019. I would like to publish a book. I think that I have some ideas worth sharing and I would like to be able to more consistently talk about ideas with people.

I plan to self-publish. This was one reason I deferred this goal. When I publish the book, I would like to do it right. I would like to spend time promoting it and possibly even lining up events / podcasts to talk about it. Planning all of this will be a large endeavor. Possibly even more challenging that writing and editing the book.

Once I return from Europe in late January, I should have two months or so where I can focus more intensely on rewriting the manuscript. At the same time, I would like to start working on the marketing for the book. If all goes well, I will aim to publish the book sometime next Fall.

2. Meditate daily

This goal was an utter failure. I meditated maybe a dozen times all year. I know that it is beneficial for me when done correctly and I am integrating it into my 2019 goals.

3. Build a house

Originally a 2017 goal, this goal was accomplished in 2018. Reflecting to one year prior, I remember feeling like building a house was going to be impossible. Right now, I feel like building four will be impossible. Reflecting further back, I can remember other goals I set that I believe would be impossible to accomplish.

It seems as though we (or at least me) consistently underrate our abilities. Perhaps, I do not have an explicit enough model of how to build four homes for it to feel possible. Perhaps, that was the experience of feeling like building one was impossible. It wasn’t exactly that I thought it was impossible, but rather that I did not have a super explicit model of all the steps necessary to accomplish it. I knew that there were steps I was unaware of and I was aware that I was unaware of several steps that I was unaware of (confusing sentence).

What’s slightly different this year is that I have more confidence in my ability to operate in domains where I do not have explicit models of all of the steps necessary to complete a task. In other words, I have more confidence in my ability to discover the steps necessary and to then complete them as I discover them.

4. Read 50 books

I accomplished this in the first half of the year and then slowed down my pace quite a bit. I realized that I was prioritizing the number of books I read over actual learning. I also shifted my book reading philosophy halfway through the year, largely because of reading, How to Read a Book.

Early in the year, I finished basically everything that I read and read it cover to cover. Now, I read primarily to learn and that means not finishing most books. I start each book by reading the index to get a feel for what the book is about and what kind of book it is. If it has something specific that I want to learn, I dive into that. I’ll often read the introduction, conclusion, and / or the first pages of key chapters during this stage of feeling out the book too. Once I have a good feel for the book, I decide how I want to read it.

Some books are great books. These are the ones that I want to digest heavily. These are the books that I will read several times in full throughout my life. These books will have a transformative effect on my life / beliefs. I read several such books this year. Below this level, there are very few books that I will read in full, at least for now. Because of this, I don’t have any goals around reading in 2019. I am sure I will read quite a bit, but I am trying to orient my goals more around learning. Reading is one tool that can be used as an end to learning, but it is not the end in itself.

5. Travel once every two months

I am counting this once as a success, although there is room for improvement in 2019. On average, I traveled every two months, but it was not always regular intervals and there were longer stretches of no travel.

On the surface, this seems decadent and perhaps even sloth to travel so much. I based this goal on research about travel and vacation I read in late 2017 that suggested the positive benefits of travel begin to wear off after six to eight weeks (these benefits include increased creativity, productivity, etc.). This research matched up with my anecdotal experience with traveling, so I decided to try it out.

There are certainly benefits I experience from being away and traveling to new places. For one, it gives me an opportunity to dedicate time to planning. If I can spot a flaw in my plans and create a better plan, this allows me to be much more productive in achieving whatever the plan is aimed at achieving. Taking a step back and working on planning like this requires reflection. Stress and day to day execution make it harder to do this type of reflection. It would be good to start doing more regular planning while not traveling, but traveling allows me to improve my plans by forcing myself to take time off from executing.

Here are the trips I took in 2018:

Asheville, NC (January)

San Francisco, CA (March)

Memphis, TN (May)

New York, NY (June)

Denver, CO (July)

Acadia, ME (August)

Colorado Springs, CO (December)

Of these, the only trips I took alone were San Francisco and Colorado Springs. Colorado Springs was the only alone one that was explicitly focused on self-improvement. I would like to focus more on self-improvement in my trips and also to take more trips alone. Traveling alone is a weirdly spiritual and meaningful experience for me. I love traveling with friends, but there’s something about being out on my own that is very humbling and cool.

Possible trips for 2019:

Paris, Barcelona, Canary Islands (January)

Moab, UT (February / March)

Perry County, PA (March / April)

Charleston, SC (May / November)

Key West, FL (November / December )

Colorado Springs, CO(June)

Wyoming (July)

Yellowknife, NT (August)

Puerto Rico (September / October)

I’d like to also find an extended weekend to go backpacking at some point this spring / summer.

Goals for 2019

For 2019, I am setting seven large goals:

• Publish a book
• Build something 100,000+ people use / interact with
• Daily meditation / reflection practice
• Travel to six completely new places
• Take a new Udemy / Masterclass course each month
• Read the Bible
• Start a podcast

I want to take a moment to reflect on each goal, noting why I chose the goal, my current plan for achieving each goal and clarifying what I am hoping to achieve with each goal.

1. Publish a book

As I mentioned before, this is a goal that I am carrying over from last year. My main motivation in pursuing this goal is sharing ideas that I believe are worth sharing and building my platform to share future such ideas. It is also possible that if the book is successful, it could yield financial resources. Also, in writing about the topic that I am writing about, I am hoping to signal to certain interesting people that I am an interesting person with interesting ideas. In that vein, I am hoping publishing this book could yield new connections / friends.

For the purposes of this exercise, I will divide my plan for publishing the book into two phases: writing and marketing.

Writing Plan:

1. Clarify specific demographic that I am writing for (January)
2. Clarify angle / what I am hoping demographic takes away from the book (January)
3. Re-write the first draft (February / March)
4. Solicit edits / feedback (March / April)
5. Edit / rewrite / feedback (May / June)
6. Send to editor for final edits (June)
7. Manuscript finalized (August)

Publishing Plan:

1. Build list of early readers / feedback providers (January)
2. Research / build marketing plan for book (February)
3. Schedule podcast / speaking appearances for Fall (March / April)
4. Work with cover artist (April / May)
5. Create FB group for early readers / feedback providers (June)
6. Solicit blurbs (June)
7. Early release / pre-orders (August)
8. Publish (Early September)
9. Podcast / speaking appearances to promote (Fall)

I intend to stick to this schedule to the best of my ability. Since the book has to do with school and education, I think positioning its release with the start of the school year may make sense. I have a lot of work to do on the marketing research side to figure out my plan on that end. I am more confident that I can execute the writing plan and write a good book and less confident that I can get a lot of people to read it. Still, even if this book is not wide read, but it is well written and conveys my ideas well, it could accomplish several of my goals (getting ideas out there / signaling to certain people).

2. Build something 100,000+ people use / interact with

I would like to build things that are impactful. Perhaps it is irrational, but there is a part of me that reacts very favorably to positive feedback that is in the form of large groups of people gaining utility out of something that I produce. For instance, I like very much giving an impactful talk to a large group of people. Further, in tests that I have run that have gone moderately viral, I have enjoyed very much getting feedback from large groups of users.

I am somewhat agnostic on what it is that I want to build to fit this qualification. There are a couple options:

• Scope — I am hoping to launch this in early 2019. I have no idea what to expect at this point, but when I ran my MVP tests earlier this year, the response and interest were overwhelming. I do believe this solves a real problem many high school students face. There are outstanding questions about the business model that will need to be tested post-launch.
• I Choose Extraordinary — this was a documentary project that morphed into a YouTube channel / podcast project. I am pretty excited about the quality of the interviews we have done / the content we have created. There’s a lot of really insightful young people doing awesome things. I want to share their stories.
• Podcast — I need to decide what kind of podcast I want to do / what my angle will be. There are a few options. I could do a podcast for CollegeHacks where I interview students that have gotten into top schools. This could be interesting, but I lean towards thinking it would get a bit boring. I do not exactly have a huge interest in learning how to get into top universities. Another option is to just do a general podcast where I interview people that I want to learn from. This is probably the most interesting angle for me personally, but it seems the least viable both in terms of getting guests and in terms of building an audience. No one (or essentially no one) knows who I am or really wants to talk to me because of me. Some people will just want to talk about whatever their niche is and will accept any invitation, but they would not be accepting the invitation because of me (most likely). Another option is to do a podcast focused on a niche that actually interests me. One option for this would be to focus on the higher education space / alternatives to it. I need to think more about this and settle on a vision.

3. Daily mediation / reflection practice

Overall, I want to improve my mental and physical health a lot this year. There are several things that I do that I know that I should not do that would make large improvements:

• Avoid eating after 8pm.
• Avoid eating sweets except on special occasions.
• Avoid any screens in the half hour before sleeping.
• Regular cardio / workout schedule.
• Avoid empty calorie carbohydrates.

In addition to these improvements which mostly have to do with my physical health, there is room for improvement in my mental health space. I would like to establish the following before bed routine in 2019:

• Gratefulness reflection (written and spoken)
• Read Bible verse(s)
• Daily reflection journal (written)
• Read fiction (optional depending on fatigue level)

My hope in establishing this routine is that I:

1. Improve my sleep quality.
2. Improve my inner awareness / level of spirituality.
3. Create a record of my previous thoughts that allows future me to reflect in a positive way.

I will try to complete this reflection every day, but if I miss a day or two, I do not plan to beat myself up. Again, it is not my intention to miss a day or two, but I recognize up front that progress is not always (usually?) linear and that I a certain level of patience with myself will be useful.

4. Travel to six completely new places

I detailed this goal fairly extensively in my reflection on my 2018 goals. In addition to traveling to six new places, I would like to also not go more than two months without having taken a trip and to commit to doing more trips alone.

5. Take a new Udemy / Masterclass course each month

This is my learning goal for 2019. As I wrote above, I found the quantity approach with books to be insufficient for a number of reasons. I may find that quantity may not be the right approach with this goal either, but generally I want to commit to learning something new that seems interesting each month.

Potential areas to explore:

• Personality psychology
• Intelligence and its measures (psychology)
• Middle eastern history
• Self driving vehicle technology
• Cryonics
• Sociology
• Greek philosophy
• Philosophical roots of Communism / Nazism
• Collectivism vs. Individualism (philosophy)
• Russian history
• Chinese history
• United States history
• Buddhism / Hinduism
• Mystical theology

I used Udemy / Masterclass as fillers, but I intend on supplementing whatever online class I am taking with external readings (books, scientific articles / studies, etc.). It is also probably the case that for the best results I should write some synthesis of whatever I end up studying. Whether that is a reflection article, a post, or a more academic essay, I am not sure yet. I am sure that writing about whatever I study will enhance my learning / understanding and help me to clarify my own thoughts / understanding.

It is quite possible that a month is not the right increment of time to spend on each of these studies. Many of these subjects may lend themselves to more intensive study over a longer duration of time. I am hoping that I can consistently find five hours a week to focus on whatever it is that I am studying. At certain points this year, my project based execution took complete control over how I spent my time and I spent very little time invested in learning. I do not think this is good. I think balance is a good approach (in reference to learning vs. execution). Learning and execution are not mutually exclusive. Lots can be learned from execution, but focusing too much on one project can lead to psych barriers in my experience (too much emotional investment / inability to think clearly in the domain). Investing totally in one project can make sense in narrow circumstances, where the intention to focus totally is clear.

6. Read the Bible

This is my one concrete reading goal for 2018. I want to read the entire Bible regularly and in full. My motivations are threefold.

1. Increased understanding. If nothing else, the Bible is one of the most (the most?) influential books in the history of humanity. I want to understand why.
2. Spiritual insight / wisdom. My guess is that as the most influential book in the history of humanity, the Bible has some good insights / wisdom. I would like to learn these if possible.
3. Religious. I have had a lot of religious experiences in my young life (raised Jewish / Quaker and attended Catholic high school). I would like to figure out what this religion thing is about and determine what (if any) role I want it to have in my life. Reading the Bible seems like a good start. Bonus: if I get through the Bible, I would like to also read an English version of the Qu’ran.

I intend to read a bit of the Bible each night before bed. A good companion to this exercise would be Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Lecture series.

7. Start a podcast

I detailed this a bit above, but I would like to do this for several reasons:

1. Increase my platform to discuss / spread ideas.
2. Increase my network of interesting people to discuss ideas with.
3. Potentially develop additional financial resources long-term (likely not this year)

In order to do this successfully, I need to do a few things:

1. Clarify my vision / angle for the podcast.
2. Create a releasing plan (how often will I release).
3. Reach out to and schedule interviews with guests.
4. Research technical aspects to uploading / spreading podcast.
5. Record and edit podcasts regularly.

I am hoping to accomplish the first two steps in January and to begin reaching out to guests in February. If all goes well, I could start releasing early in the spring.

That puts a wrap to the goals reflection / planning section of this 2018 reflection. Now, on to the books.

I want to begin this section by focusing on the great books that I read this year. I believe that Pareto’s Law holds true in this domain. I believe these few great books will be responsible for almost all of the learning / positive future life developments that came as a result of my reading this year.

The Great Books I Read this Year:

These are books that I plan to return to throughout my lifetime and to read several times. They are books that have yielded significant belief changes / insights and that have changed something fairly significant about how I live.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger —

Big models: psychological causes of human misjudgments, mental models as a theoretical concept, inversion, man with a hammer tendency, circle of competence

Psychological causes of human misjudgments — there are all sorts of tendencies that humans have to make bad decisions. Studying and understanding what these are can help one to guard against them and to hopefully make better decisions.

Mental models — a model is a description of reality. It is our understanding of how something works. All of us have lots of models, most of them implicit, about how different things work. By explicating and examining our models, we can attempt to improve them and thereby improve our understanding of the world. Similarly, by adding mental models, we add different ways of looking at and analyzing reality.

Inversion — sometimes the best way to solve a problem is not to ask how to solve the problem but how not to solve the problem. Do you want to be happy? Instead of asking what you should do to be happy, ask what you should do to be miserable. Then, don’t do those things. You might just find this increases your happiness.

Man with a hammer — to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In order to gain a better understanding of reality one needs a variety of mental models. Most people have only a few models and they are concentrated in a very specific area. Biologists analyze reality through evolution or engineers analyze reality by looking at systems. Each of these are valid ways of looking at reality, but neither shows the full picture. In order to gain a fuller picture, one must have all of the big models in all of the important areas. As Charlie Munger says, you need “a latticework of models.” This is one of the terrible parts of most modern school. Each teacher teaches one or two of the models of their speciality without any understanding of the other big models, let alone how they interact with each other.

Circle of competence — each of us has things that we are very good at and many more things that we are not good at. Knowing which things fall into which category is important. Now, one can expand one’s circle of competence, but it’s important to be in touch with reality first. After all, if you think you have no weaknesses, you have no motivation to improve. Knowing your circle of competence can also help you know when you are likely to succeed. For Charlie Munger, this helped him to determine his investment strategy. Instead of trying to jump over eight food hurdles, he tries to step over one foot ones.

Principles by Ray Dalio —

Big models: idea meritocracies, radical open-mindedness, thoughtful disagreements, pain + reflection = progress, individual as machine manager, another one of those

Idea meritocracies — neither democracy nor autocracy seem optimal for good decision making (note: this is different than being optimal for being a good political system). Democracy means everyone’s vote has the same weight. In most circumstances, some individuals are more knowledgeable in certain areas. It would make sense for these individuals’ votes to have more weight on topics they are knowledgable about. Autocracy means one person’s vote has all the weight. No individual is the most knowledgable about everything.

Idea meritocracies use believability weighted decision making, wherein people have believability scores in various areas that determine their vote’s weight when an issue in the given area comes up. This process is not perfect, but it can easily be cross-referenced with the democratic and autocratic decision making process to get a full sense of the landscape. Ex: CEO with decision making power could independently determine his belief, then gather a believability weighted vote from employees and cross reference that with the unweighted vote from employees. Bridgewater has tested a similar system of decision making with much success.

Radical open-mindedness — this is needed if one wishes to find out what is true. We are operating in a world where we see only a very tiny, foggy picture of the map that is reality. Each of us sees a tiny sliver of the map and by interacting with other people in a genuinely open-minded way we can hope to see more of this map. There are things we can learn from everyone. This does not mean we should believe everything everyone says, but it does mean we should try to genuinely listed to what other have to say. And it also means we should never be too sure of our position. There should never be a belief that we would be unwilling to change if presented with compelling evidence that it is wrong. If we find we have beliefs we would be unwilling to change, it is worth thinking about why that is the case. Usually, it’s because it will cause a lot of pain, emotional or physical.

Thoughtful disagreements — this is the process by which two individuals with two different beliefs attempt to find truth. It is not a debate. The goal is not to win. The goal is to find what is true. Again, both individuals should be willing and eager to change their viewpoints if presented with compelling evidence.

Pain + reflection = progress — progress requires pain and reflection. Pain indicates that there is a problem, that there is something that you want that you are not getting (or that something is happening that you do not want to happen). In order to stop the pain, you must transcend it and reflect to figure out the root cause of the pain. Often, it is not a simple fix and there is actually a flaw with the plan you are operating. In order to detect this plan-level flaw one must not succumb to stress induced tendencies to become narrow focused on the immediate problem and ignore the root cause of the problem.

Machine manager — in order to achieve what we would like to in life, one must be able to avoid reacting emotionally to everything that happens. Instead, one must transcend and look down objectively at oneself and the situation. In this way, one must be the manager of the machine (you). Thinking of yourself in two parts, machine and manager, can be a useful model for transcending the pain and completing the reflection necessary for progress.

Another one of those — similar to the mental model concept. This is the idea that, particularly in history, you can classify events as “another one of those.” Very rarely do truly unprecedented things happen. Something can not have happened in a very long time, i.e. hundred or thousands of years, but this does not mean there is not precedent. Rather, it means one must study history to find the precedent and understand the context of the event. Once you can classify things as another one of those it becomes much easier to understand things as they are happening.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel —

Big models: mimetics, niches, technology vs. globalization, contrarian thinking

Mimetics — this is Girard’s theory, which Thiel extends to startups. Individual desires are the byproduct of other individual’s desires. Because of this, there are certain things that lots of people want that everyone competes for: money, fame, good jobs, etc. In business, there are lots of similarly competitive industries / business opportunities. The best opportunities are the ones where you can gain a monopoly, where you understand something that no one else understands. Gaining this insight requires independent thinking.

Niches — big businesses start small, dominate and then sequence markets correctly. Amazon dominated as an online book-seller, PayPal provided a great solution for Ebay PowerSellers who previously had to wait for checks to arrive to ship products. If you want to build a big business, find a clear problem in a niche and then provide incredible value for that niche.

Technology vs. globalization — technology is about going from 0 to 1. It is a singular act of creation. Globalization is about going from 1 to n. It is the repetitive process of copying what has previously worked. Technology is much harder than globalization. At least in my view, the future is much more likely to be defined by technology than by globalization. There are still a lot of problems left to be solved and a lot of secrets still to be discovered. Just copying what we currently know works will not yield an exciting future.

12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

Big models: hierarchies

Hierarchies — hierarchies exist largely as a consequence of natural differences between individuals. Hierarchies create problems, but they are not new and they are not largely caused by social inequities. Solving the problems caused by hierarchies requires first understanding what causes them.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Big models: Flexible cooperation, Dunbar number, intersubjective realities

Flexible cooperation in large numbers — this is what separates humans from other animals. Many different species can cooperate, but they can do so only in rigid patterns, i.e. bees cooperating to pollinate flowers and bring back food for the hive. Similarly, there are species, such as apes, that can cooperate flexibly, but only on a one to one basis. Humans are able to cooperate flexibly in large numbers, largely because of intersubjective realities.

Dunbar number — this is the limit on the number of people that one can have stable social relationships with in any domain.

Intersubjective realities — these are things that are not objectively real, but are real because humans believe they are real. Money, government, laws, etc. are all examples. Pieces of paper only are valuable because we all agree that they are valuable. If we stopped believing they were valuable, then they would stop being valuable. This common belief and ability to invent myths is incredibly useful and is what allows flexible cooperation in large numbers. No monkey would trade a banana for a piece of paper.

Books that had a large impact on me / concrete lesson learned:

The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant —

Great quote: “Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”

This book piqued my interest in biology and the contradictory nature of freedom and equality. More than anything, this is a history book, but, like all great books, it is interdisciplinary.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl — existentialism is a pragmatic life philosophy. I laid out the argument for its utility here. I don’t think existentialism is likely to be true (it could be though), but acting as if it is true and doing the hard work of determining for ourselves what we find meaningful seems like the right path.

The Dictator’s Handbook: why bad behavior is almost always good politics by Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita — this was a really fun one. I’m working on the longer version of this book, The Logic of Political Survival. All rulers follow a few basic rules. First, no man rules alone. All rulers need people to carry out their wishes. Second, keep the coalition of supporters needed to maintain power as small as possible. The less keys to support, the easier it is to maintain power. The fundamental difference between democrats and dictators is in essential coalition size, not moral virtue. Third, distribute the treasure (money) to key supporters to keep their support. Dictators distribute rewards via private rewards because they have relatively few key supporters. Democrats distribute these rewards through public rewards because it would be too inefficient to privately reward all of the coalition supporters (plus there are usually laws that make it tough). I want to dive into political strategy and sociology a bit more this year. Paired with an understanding of game theory it allows one to understand world events much more thoroughly.

Rest: why we get more done when we work less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — this is where I first learned about the research that influenced my taking a “vacation” every six or so weeks. It also motivated my recent purchase of an Oura ring to start tracking my sleep cycles / quality. Productivity is so much better than artificial busyness. Further, detecting plan level flaws can yield exponential gains in productivity. Realizing you are on a flawed path and switching to a better one could change you from going in the wrong direction to making progress towards where you really want to go. In these cases, busyness and constant execution are actually counterproductive. Working incredibly hard can make sense when you are very confident that you are on the right path and there is a specific thing that needs to be completed. Working hard all the time with minimal reflection is suboptimal.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius — this was a good introduction to stoicism. We can always control ourselves. That is what we have control of. Even when it is really hard and external things happen that make it hard to control our own disposition, it is still in our control. Having an inner locus of control seems like a good thing. I should focus on what I can control. If I can’t control it, I can still create plans to deal with the uncertainty but stress does not help.

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Ancor — most people believe that happiness comes as a byproduct of success, but really success usually comes as a byproduct of happiness. This is deeply counterintuitive. I realized this year that I was forcing myself to be unhappy / stressed because I believed that it would cause me to work harder and be more successful. I think a lot of people have similar belief structures.

There are a few flaws in this reasoning. First, stress and anxiety cause people to make bad decisions. In any situation, stress does nothing to help and can do a lot to hurt. Second, stress hinders your ability to reflect and detect flaws in your plans. When you stress, you tend to narrow your focus on what’s immediately happening. When you reflect and think long term you can look at your plans and find improvements that you can make. Improving your plans can create exponentially greater results. This is the essence of work smarter, not harder.

Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa — this book is a complete guide on how to sell, particularly in B2B situations. Rather than approaching sales as a hardball negotiation where you try to trick the person into buying your product, you should approach it as an opportunity to mutually explore whether or not there is an opportunity. As the seller, you want to make sure that the buyer actually gets a positive result. If the buyer wins, then the seller wins. If there is no opportunity, then you should not “play,” i.e. you should stop talking. The first step of any sale is trying to mutually discover if there is an opportunity in the first place. After that, getting very specific and quantifying the exact opportunity and what solving the problem would do makes things very tangible and sets goals. Only after that should you see if you can find a solution. Similar to working on startups, you should not go problem hunting when making sales. If you are a consultant, particularly, your job is first to identify problems, not to lug around your one size fits all toolbox and try to fix every problem with your specialized toolkit.

The Diversity Myth by Peter Thiel — ideological diversity is a very good thing and it is very helpful in trying to find truth and confront various cognitive biases. Diversity is not about having a bunch of people who look different but think the same. Further, there’s something quite disturbing about this perverted diversity that claims that on the basis of various types of group identities (ethnic, gender, etc.), certain groups of people should think and believe certain things, i.e. all women should be pro-choice. Gender identity (or any other identity) does not require one to believe or think any particular things. Interacting with people and grouping them based on their identity characteristics rather than based on their individual thoughts / beliefs is the essence of racism, sexism, etc; that is, it confers certain attributes / beliefs on people based on their group identities rather than treating them as individuals capable of making their own decisions.

The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan — this is an attempt to explain the earnings gap between those who graduate from college and those who do not, referred to as “the college premium.” No one disputes that an earnings premium exists on average for students who graduate from college, i.e. the average college graduate earns more than the average individual who does not graduate from college. The dispute is about the cause of this premium.

The conventional story is that college graduates earn more money because they learn lots of valuable lessons and skills in college that are then rewarded in the job market. The entire college premium is attributed to the learning that happens in college.

This story is clearly wrong. Yes, some things are learned in college and depending on the major and school, some students learn a lot of valuable things that are rewarded in the job market. But the cause, on average, of the college premium is primarily two things: signaling and ability bias.

Ability bias is the sampling bias that occurs when two samples are compared that are not representative of the population. In the case of college, the kids who graduate on average have higher IQs, higher SAT scores, higher grades in high school, and come from higher socio-economic backgrounds than kids who do not graduate from college. These advantages exist independent of and before college (i.e. college has no effect on them). Comparing these two populations is like comparing apples and oranges. Of course, one would expect that the students who graduate from college earn more than the students who don’t even if there were no such thing as college. Ability bias accounts for about 40% of the earnings premium.

Signaling accounts for about 50% of the earnings premium. Signaling is how value is created by attending college. The college credential, degree, signals certain positive traits to employers that are then rewarded in the job market. College is not about what you actually learn, except in STEM fields, but rather about gaining a degree that acts as a signal.

The remaining 10% of the earnings premium can be accounted for by learning, networking, etc.

Caplan argues college is in the interest of the smartest kids. If you can graduate from college, Caplan argues you should if you are motivated by money. I believe the opposite is actually the case. The smartest kids have the biggest opportunity costs and should avoid all but the top colleges with the top signals. The smartest kids will be undersold by the average college credential, which lumps them together with average and below average college students. Instead, if they are focused on money and getting good jobs, they should focus on building better, alternative signals and actually learning valuable skills. I will be writing more about this in 2019.

How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler — ironically, I never finished this book and now I do not finish most books I read, which is a stark contrast to how I started out the year, where I finished almost every book I started. First, one needs to determine what type of book one is reading and what one wants to get out of it. You can usually do this by scanning the table of contents, reading introductions / conclusions, reading the first page of chapters, and scanning the cover and flap of the book.

The “Great Books” in the first category are books that I want to digest for the purpose of deep learning. These books are meant to be read through completely, marked up, and written about many times over the course of a lifetime. The books in this section are books that have concrete lessons to learn. Most of them I read completely, if I read them in the first half of the year, but most do not require that. A few key chapters usually is enough to learn the key one or two models in the book. Most fiction books I will read all the way through, because I mostly read them for enjoyment.

Originals by Adam Grant — lots of great insights / concepts. Entrepreneurs are risk mitigators, not risk takers. Creativity is often a function of quantity. Purposeful procrastination can be a good thing in creative projects. Pointing out the flaws in your plans de-arms people. If you are nonconformist and right you have the potential to create large impact.

The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy — I want to read more fiction this year. Not only is it enjoyable, but sometimes it is able to convey things that nonfiction is unable to. This book is about growing up and how that necessitates individuality. The main character, Will, attends a military college. He has always hated the authority and conformity aspects of the college, but he finds out eventually that the whole institution is corrupt. He ends up fighting for what he believes is right and loses everything in the process. His best friends die and his girlfriend leaves him. In the end, all he really has is himself. This is somewhat depressing, but it is the logical conclusion of individualism when presented with an aggressive and corrupt institution. In the end, all we really have are ourselves. How far are we willing to go to protect ourselves and our integrity (which really is just what distinguishes us from being a random person in a group)?

Other books that I read this year:

Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark — probabilistic thinking can be a good method for decision making. I should work on integrating it into my implicit models more.

The Movement by Jack Garbarino — a fun book. Nathan for You is great.

The Education of Millionaires by Michael Ellsberg — I didn’t really read much of this. Did a quick inspectional read. Might return to as some point as part of writing my current book.

On the Shortness of Life by Seneca — life is short. We should live intentionally.

The Republic by Plato — I want to re-read this this year. Plato raises really interesting points and I remember finding most of them very counterintuitive, i.e. abolishing parenthood and raising all children in common.

The Circle by Dave Eggers — creepy. Privacy is important. Transparency can become perverted. Increasingly, it seems to me like balance between two extremes is important (shout out to Aristotle). You don’t want total privacy and you don’t want total transparency. Same thing with equality and freedom. The argument is about which direction to tilt towards.

The Five Year Party by Craig Brandon — did an inspectional reading of this one too. Suffice it to say, college is not primarily about learning for many students.

Outrage Inc. by Derek Hunter — did an inspectional reading of this one too.

Homo Deus by Yuval Harari — studying history gives one an appreciation for how easily things could have turned out very differently. This makes it easier to see how consequential today’s actions can be.

100 Years by Joshua Prager — something I will probably revisit yearly. I like things that shed light on aging and the passing of time.

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton — founding narratives are intense. I think some of this might be exaggerated a bit looking backward, but it is clear that planning needs to be done from before the founding.

Panzram: A Journal of Murder — I can understand how Panzram got to where he was. That’s quite chilling. This does not mean that I believe that his actions were justified or am precluded from judging them as wrong. Rather, I can understand how he came to a very depraved and distorted view of reality.

What School Could Be by Ted Dintersmith — this made me optimistic. There are lots of good things happening in schools around the country.

Mindset by Carol Dweck — believing that you can improve is huge. So is viewing “failures” as opportunities to learn, rather than insurmountable obstacles.

Every Day — I read this for entertainment.

There is Life After College by Jeff Selingo

College Unbound by Jeff Selingo — education should become unbundled. Learning happen through a lifetime. College is not about learning, but rather about signaling. The real unbundling that needs to occur is decoupling signaling and learning.

This is Water by David Foster Wallace — there’s an insight from Foster Wallace here that is almost a combination of the best elements of stoicism and existentialism; that is, we can control the narratives of our own lives and determine on a day to day basis what we put meaning in.

Inbound Marketing — provide value before extracting value.

The End of School by Zak Slayback — Zak and I have very similar views on college and education. Dangerous for confirmation bias, but Zak has good models that have been influential on developing my thinking in this space.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou — it’s better to candidly point out the flaws in your plan, in most circumstances, than to be overly optimistic and positive. I know this on an intellectual level and yet I still struggle to consistently do it. By being honest with people about the struggles one is going through, you make them less skeptical and allow them to help you solve your problems.

Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath — I should revisit this one.

Symposium by Plato — I listened to this. It was interesting for the Socratic Dialogue but I don’t remember much of it.

Mind by Joel Walmsley — I’d like to return to this one. I likely will in early 2019 as I study psychology.

The Crisis of the Modern World by Rene Guenon — this summarized the differences between the West and the East in terms of pursuing truth and utility.

The Way by Lao Tzu — the focus on introspection and personal development was cool. This was another one that I listened to. Listening is not very good for retaining actual content it seems.

Maxims by Le Rouchecoufald — “It is more often our pride than our limited understanding which makes us fly so violently in the face of public opinion. We find the best seats on the correct side already occupied, and we do not care to sit in the rear.”

The most contrarian things one can do is think for oneself.

Apology by Plato — Socrates is a master of truth-seeking. He really just wanted to get to the reality of what was happening.

Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler — essentially, Nazism is based on a flawed evolutionary theory. The belief, which Hitler describes, is that the different races are very genetically different and that it is therefore possible for some races to evolve to be supermen and others to evolve to become subhuman. In reality, this is not the case. We now know that all humans are incredibly similar genetically.

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner — truth seeking and utility seeking are both important. I wrote about this idea here. What is very important is realizing what intention you are holding when completing an activity, as this materially affects what you get out of it.

The Last Interview with David Foster Wallace by David Foster Wallace — there’s something very relatable about the depression boredom Foster Wallace describes. Essentially, society has a crisis of meaning. By that, I mean, there are a whole subset of very well educated, materially well off individuals who have no idea what gives their lives meaning. I think a big reason for this is that the school system is set up to act as the thing that gives people meaning until they graduate. Once they graduate, they have this big whole in their lives that needs replacing. I also think schools and grades are bad things usually to place meaning in. This is reflected in the college depression and anxiety statistics.

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — I believe Marx was correct in his observation, but not in his analysis. I think he correctly noted that there are hierarchies in which a large majority of people are at or near the bottom and that this is a problem. I think he incorrectly attributed this to capitalism, when in reality hierarchies are natural byproducts of individual differences between people. Equality and communism / socialism sound attractive as theoretical concepts, but people are want to give up their individuality and freedoms, which these doctrines require. Basic social equities are good, but total equality does not seem desirable (i.e. Harrison Bergeron).

The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander — If you want a student to learn in class, give them an A before class begins. This seems counterintuitive, but people tend to act how you expect them to act. If you signal that you genuinely are expecting the person to do well, they are more likely to fulfill this expectation.

On Tyranny: lessons from the twentieth century by Timothy Snyder — it could happen here. Ordinary Germans were involved in the Holocaust.

The Income Tax, Root of All Evil by Frank Chodorov — I’d like to re-read this argument. Undoubtedly, income tax requires the sacrifice of individual liberty for greater equity.

Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto — fun read. Gatto is a character. His models on schooling are spot on.

Animal Farm by George Orwell — this was the third time I read this book. I read it through the lens of The Dictators Handbook with an interest in how the power plays worked. Animal Farm is run by a small coalition regime, with Napoleon at the head. Napoleon consolidates power by purging Snowball and several other “unloyal” pigs. The smaller the essential coalition, the better.

River out of Eden by Richard Dawkins — we are vessels for out DNA. The natural world’s utility function optimizes for DNA survival.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville — I listened to this. I enjoyed most of it.

The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto — this was where I learned about Horace Mann and the Prussian Model for education. The connections explain a lot about how the compulsory schooling system developed.

Who Rules the World by Noam Chomsky — the U.S. supports U.S. interests, not global democracy. The United States does not support global democracy. In countries where the United States is disliked by the population, it must support brutal dictators who suppress the population. My initial take on this book has changed since the beginning of the year. I began the year very skeptical of American exceptionalism. I still am, but I recognize that there are some values that are superior to other values (moral relativism is not tenable in my opinion). I am aware of the U.S’s flaws and it is worthy of criticism in many cases, but I do believe that its fundamental value (individual liberty) is praiseworthy and better than the fundamental value of more authoritarian countries. For this reason, I am less in favor of isolationism and allowing other countries to do as they please. It’s a fine line, though. This is something that I need to think about more.

Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz — overall a good analysis, but like so many other critics of the education system, Deresiewicz, nevertheless insists students must continue going to college. It is as if he cannot imagine that there could possibly be another path to life success. I can’t blame him too much, because these paths are much less visible and require a lot of creativity currently.

The Great People I Learned from this Year:

I think a good strategy for getting really good at something is to find someone who is the best (or at least top 5) at the thing you want to do and then to try to learn what models they have that allow them to operate so successfully (or if their advantages can be more readily attributed to hardware differentiation, which seems more rare at least in my experience).

These are individuals that have very clear, useful models in certain areas that I have found very useful in learning and that I believe I have more I can learn from.

Peter Thiel — great models in independent thinking (different than contrarian thinking) generally and in startups / strategy more specifically.

Paul Graham — great models in startups.

Charlie Munger — great models on decision making / flaws in human decision making processes.

Ray Dalio — great models for decision making.

Tim Urban — the best non-fiction author that I have read. Great models in how to write / convey ideas clearly.

Jordan Peterson — great models on hierarchies / fundamental nature of being.

Yuval Noah Harari — great big picture thinker. Good models on history.

For perspective on why almost everyone graduates with debt (or their parents pay for college), here’s an example of what it would take to pay your way through the University of Delaware as an in-state student:

Tuition (full-year): $13,680
Total Cost of Attendance: $26,542

50 hours per week * $10 per hour * 52 weeks in a year = $26,000.

Even in this ridiculous example where a full-time student works 50 hours a week every week all year, it’s still not even enough to cover one year’s total cost of attendance. In order to independently pay one’s way through UD a student must do one of the following:

1) work more than 50 hours a week all year doing low-wage work.
2) get a full-time, salaried job that pays more than $26,000 a year.
3) invent a time-machine.

If you can do #1, more power to you. If you can do #2, why are you in college?

It’s important to note that attending UD as an in-state student is extremely affordable relative to most four year universities. However, in absolute terms it’s still really expensive and it’s essentially impossible to afford without parental support or loans.

These past two months have gone by quickly. I think that moving forward I will go back to doing these reflections monthly. Two months seems slightly too long. I also stopped my daily reflections experiment. I realized it was based more in an irrational fear of forgetting things that I’ve learned than in any substantive benefit.

I’ve been reading over some of my earlier reflections and I want to maintain an intention of reflecting on things that I have learned. In some, I feel that I’ve been attempting to write with the intention of informing an audience.

Books I read:

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou — this story was fascinating. The main question that it raised for me was about the line between optimism and fraud in startups. A lot of people running startups are very optimistic / ambitious publicly and state timelines that they end up missing. I think the problems in Holmes’ case were that she 1) went over the line and was way more optimistic than was justified 2) actively lied and took steps to conceal her lies 3) was in a space (biotech) where missed deadlines / faulty prototypes impact people’s health. I think there’s a lot of startup founders that display the same type of blind public optimism / ambitiousness that Holmes displayed, but they don’t get in trouble because they don’t do #2 and #3.

I don’t think that extreme public optimism is a good trait for someone running a company. I actually think that a much better strategy is extreme skepticism mixed with enthusiasm. People don’t like to be sold to. It makes them skeptical and put their guard up. Instead of selling all of the positives of one’s company, it’s better to candidly point out all of the problems. Once you point out the problems, you can talk about your plan for fixing them and then talk about the positives. If you just talk about the positives, people will

1. Be more skeptical and try to think of all the problems.
2. Still think of all the problems you were hoping to avoid them thinking of.
3. Think you are either incompetent or misleading because you either can’t notice the problems or are purposely covering them up and don’t have a plan for addressing them.

By taking a skeptical approach of your own company and addressing the problems head on, you

1. Disarm people and stop them from trying to think of all the problems with your company.
2. Earn their trust and respect.
3. Show responsibility / diligence by outlining a plan to solve your problems.

I think Elon Musk does a great job of this in his SpaceX talks. He clearly outlines all of the challenges and things going wrong while outlining the plan moving forward, the potential pitfalls and then wraps up with enthusiasm about what success could mean. I’ve started taking this approach with Y Innovations in talking with stakeholders, candidly outlining the problems that we face as an organization in scaling and expanding our model. Up to this point, the results have been better than trying to sell the upside and neglecting the problems.

Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath — there are common principles for getting ideas to stick in people’s minds. Being able to understand these principles and use them in conveying a message is really valuable.

How to Read a Book — this book has really helped to improve my reading style / process. Books are all different and they should be read differently depending on what it is that you are attempting to get out of them. For me, in almost every book that I read, I am hoping to learn something. Because of this, it’s important for me to get a sense of what it is that a book might have for me to learn before I dive in and start reading it. I now read the table of contents and skim the beginning of key chapters before deciding how to read a book. For some books, I read them cover to cover. These are the books that have a lot to offer. For other books, I read only one chapter in depth or I skim several chapters. It depends on what the book has to offer and what I am hoping to learn. I’ve refined my reading intention from optimizing for reading to optimizing for learning.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger — this is another book that I read at least once a year. It’s what initially got me into learning about mental models and psychology. One takeaway from reading Munger and from listening to Buffet speak is how important it is to know your own competencies and to stay within your circle of competence. It’s incredible how few bets Buffet and Munger have made throughout their investing careers. Rather than making lots of small bets that you aren’t very confident in, it’s better to make a few big bets that you are extremely confident in. Just as this is true in investing, I think it’s true in life. Make big bets and investments in people and things you are very confident in.

Another takeaway from reading Charlie Munger is how important it is to understand your own psychology and the way that your mind works. This is something that I’ve been fascinated with. Our brains are like our own software programs. Sometimes they work well and sometimes they don’t. The wonderful thing is we have the opportunity to improve and adapt our own software, to fix the natural bugs that exist in our brains. I need to do a better job of noting the routine bugs that my brain has and working to update myself to run smoother.

Originals by Adam Grant — common theme: people who are nonconformist and right change the world for the better. Entrepreneurs aren’t risk takers; they are risk mitigaters. Sometimes, it makes sense to take time off from a creative project. Creativity is often a function of quantity. Pointing out the flaws in your plan / product disarms people and can increase their likelihood to listen to you.

The Movement by Jack Garbarino — I watched a bunch of Nathan For You recently. He actually has a lot of really good ideas. I think what’s jarring is that most people just aren’t very resourceful or creative. How do we encourage more people to actually think outside the box? I think most of it has to do with escaping mimetics and social pressures. Most of the things Nathan does most people wouldn’t do because the perceived social costs are high. If you can escape mimetics and reduce your personal social costs, there are lots of moves that you can suddenly make that other people cannot. This is an interesting topic in and of itself that I’d like to think more about.

The Education of Millionaires by Michael Ellsberg — not really what I expected and not materialistic at all like the title implies. In order to have unconventional results, you need to do unconventional things. If you do the same things as everyone else, then you should expect the same average results. People who have outlier levels of success don’t attain it by doing the conventional thing and toeing the company line their entire lives.

The Circle by Dave Eggers — spooky. When is transparency good and when is it bad? I thought about this a lot earlier this year. Is it possible full transparency is really good and our limbic systems just oppose it irrationally? I’m not sure. I feel very strongly that there are some things that should remain private and that total transparency as depicted here is dystopian, but I’m not 100% sure that isn’t just my limbic system talking.

The Five Year Party by Craig Brandon — part of what was disappointing about college was the learning environment. College is billed up as a place to meet lots of like-minded ambitious people who want to work on projects to improve the world. There are some of those people on college campuses, but they are an extreme minority. Most kids, even at ivies, aren’t even primarily at college to learn.

One thing that college definitely is is “like-minded.” There just isn’t that much original thinking. Everyone is scared of standing out or saying the wrong thing. In order to have a good intellectual learning environment you need people enthusiastically advancing extreme positions and engaging in thoughtful disagreement and debate. Socratic Dialogues don’t happen on college campuses because most college-aged people are either too insecure to confidently state positions that may not be majority positions or are too ignorant to be willing to really listen to other points of view.

Whenever someone talks about “higher education” as this idealistic version of Plato’s Academy, it’s a little depressing. It’d be great if that actually existed but people that still think that’s what college today is like haven’t been in college for several generations. We can dialogue about how to improve school to include more real education, but we need to recognize that most of what goes on now at college has absolutely nothing to do with learning.

Outrage Inc. by Derek Hunter — you need to listen to and think about positions that you disagree with. It’s the only way that you can hope to learn anything or to improve your beliefs. Most of what’s toxic about politics these days is that no one wants to learn anything. Everyone has a view and they just attack people who disagree with it. Few people believe that truth exists and no one really cares enough about it to actually pursue it.

While this book appears provocative, most of its points are pretty straightforward. It does a nice job pointing out a lot of the “fake news” that exists on both sides of politics. It’s really easy to tune out the other side and just assume that everything that comes from it is fake, but there’s a lot of misleading information. Some of it even comes from “authorities” or people who otherwise seem trustworthy.

Identity politics has always confused me. Group identities seem more often to be divisive than unifying. People on both sides of the aisle today seem to view everything through the lens of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The entire world is viewed as conflicts between males and females, conflicts between straight people and gay people, conflicts between white people and black people, etc. I don’t doubt that these conflicts exist, but I do doubt that every conflict that occurs needs to be viewed through this lens.

Panzram: A Journal of Murder — this was a fun one. The psychology of a man willing to kill people in cold blood is really interesting. The strange part was that I could understand this guy. I didn’t agree with his world view but I could see how he came to his view that humanity was evil and needed to be all killed based on his terrible childhood experiences. World views can be more right or wrong, but that doesn’t mean you can’t understand where someone’s world view comes from. This has always seemed like the fundamental disagreement between moral relativists and those who believe in objective goodness. The understanding of others’ perspectives is good, but that doesn’t preclude one from also judging a perspective as somewhere on the spectrum of right to wrong.

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton — modeling power dynamics is fun. It’s eye opening to see the power struggles that go on behind the scenes and to contrast that with the public facade.

100 Years by Joshua Prager — life moves quickly.

Things I’ve Been Learning About

Middle Eastern History — this has been a consistent interest during 2018. Recently, I’ve been interested in the more modern developments (post WWII) in the Middle East. I’ve dove into the history of Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. I’m not sure where these studies are going, but they are broadening my perspective of the world and are interesting to study from a sociological and political science perspective.

College Admissions + Enrollment — this has mostly been for a side project that I’m working on, but it’s surprisingly fascinating. College admissions is an industry just like every other industry and it’s starting to adopt a lot of the tools that startups and tech companies use. There seem to be lots of opportunities to have an impact in this space.

Technically, I am about to embark on my second consecutive semester on a leave of absence from college.

Almost as soon as I arrived on campus for my first day of classes, I knew I needed to take time off from school. Freshman lectures were boring compared to the books I was reading on the same topic, my marketing classes didn’t cover social media, and I was skipping half my classes to run two companies simultaneously. It was time for a break from school.

Although I had been thinking about taking time off for awhile, part of me was still a bit nervous when the time came and my first semester ended. For the past thirteen and a half years, school had defined my life and I didn’t know what to expect in a world where school didn’t dictate how I had to arrange my schedule.

Once my leave of absence actually started, my fears almost instantaneously melted away. It was awesome. I had free time, I was making money, and most of all I had agency over how I chose to live my life. In fact, things were going so well that I wondered what it was that I had ever feared.

In thinking back, it seemed silly for me to be nervous about taking time off. The apparent costs are incredibly low. Almost all universities allow undergraduates to take at least one semester off without any penalties (my school allows two). And I had enough AP credit to earn junior status as a freshman, so I wasn’t even in danger of graduating late, which is really the worst case scenario in taking a semester off.

While the downside to taking time off seemed very low in retrospect, the upside seemed incredibly high. During my semester off, I focused more intently on my entrepreneurial endeavors, started traveling once a month, and started reading 8 books a month, discovering intense interests in subjects like history and psychology that I had found boring in school. Most of all, I took time to slow down and think about what I actually wanted for my life.

After a semester off, I compared what I had done and learned to what I had done and learned in a semester in college and it wasn’t close. My time off from school had been the most productive and enlightening period of my life.

Some might argue that my situation was unique and that most students would not be motivated enough to take advantage of time off from school, nor would they have enough credits to avoid graduating late. This may be true, but it’s also irrelevant. Sure, some students would just sit around playing video games if they took time off, but leaves of absence aren’t designed for these students. Rather, for any sufficiently ambitious, intrinsically motivated student, a leave of absence seems like a low-risk, high upside opportunity. Even if a student enters with no AP credit and decides it is important to graduate in four years, if she is ambitious and motivated she can make up the credits during winter / summer sessions.

Given that the downside to taking a leave seemed so low and as I had seen the upside could be really high, I wondered why more ambitious students were not taking time off from school. While on leave, I had several peers, each who I would describe as motivated and ambitious, express interest in taking a leave of absence, but none ever pulled the trigger. Why do we not see more ambitious students take time off from school to start companies, pursue a job in a career they are interested in, explore the world, and learn about themselves? The answer to this question is that the true costs of taking a leave of absence are actually much higher than they initially appear.

The true cost of taking a leave of absence is the social cost; that is, in taking time off school you signal to the rest of society that there’s something “not normal” about you. Taking time off requires stepping away from the crowd and embracing your individuality. Not least of all, it requires having a plan and being able to answer the awkward questions from skeptical relatives about why you’re not just “hurrying up and finishing your degree”. It may sound silly, but I think there’s a not insignificant amount of students who could benefit from leaves who do not take them largely because they don’t know how they’d explain it to their relatives.

Before going any further, it’s important to note that I don’t believe leave of absences are good for everyone. Nor do I believe that they are bad for everyone. Rather, I believe that different educational approaches work for different people and that there is no one size fits all model.

What’s quite weird is that my stance that different educational approaches work well for different people is at the same time both deeply contrarian and incredibly uncontroversial. Who can find the “different strokes for different folks” argument controversial? Most middle and upper middle class Americans, that’s who.

In middle and upper-middle class America, almost everyone believes that a four year college degree is the right educational approach for everyone. While some may tacitly endorse the idea that different approaches work for different people, when push comes to shove they all believe that they / their kids should go to college. This belief is at the same time both deeply radical and incredibly conventional.

In any situation where there is unanimity or near unanimity, one should be very skeptical. When 80% of people agree on something, it is a majority. When 99% of people agree on something, it is either a dictatorship or there is some more innocuous form of oppression being caused by social forces. The only alternative is that the 99% have all converged on the truth, which almost never happens.

If you pay attention, it is very easy to notice when social pressures are causing conformity. Here are a few tell-tale signs:

• There is a stigma associated with taking the minority position.
• Many people in the majority don’t know why they believe what they claim to believe. A common justification is, “It’s just what everyone does.”
• People express doubts about the majority position in private, but are unwilling to publicly express these doubts.
• People become visibly upset when presented with evidence that someone taking an alternative stance may be right. Corollary: if someone taking an alternative stance experiences success, it is attributed to genius / innate talent.
• Most of the costs to taking the minority position are social costs.

Every single one of these can be applied to the college decision making landscape.

• There’s an incredible stigma associated with not being in school. When people hear that I’m not in school, their initial thought is almost always negative (this holds true even for people who know me well). The standards are also much higher for a 19 year old who is not in college vs. for one who is. Running a successful company while being able to support yourself financially and making time to manage great social relationships (so you’re not viewed as a loner missing out on “the college experience”) while also becoming well-read in every subject is the expected outcome for the former; for the latter, the expectations are a decent GPA and maybe getting a summer internship.
• 40% of freshman I surveyed at my school gave some variation of, “It’s just what everyone does” as the reason that they are in college. A large portion of the people who attend college do it simply because it is the default.
• Since taking a leave, I’ve had dozens of high school and college students express doubts about college in private, but none have been willing to go so far as to even talk with their parents about taking a leave of absence. Each has “confided” in me as though questioning whether college is worth it is heretical and punishable by a lifetime of misery.
• I’ve gotten two main reactions from peers about taking time off. The first and more common one is a mixture of disillusionment and contempt. For some, I represent evidence that they may not be making the right decision, which they would rather block out. The second reaction that I have gotten has been from people who attribute any success I have to me be being fundamentally different and more talented than them. Both reactions are attempts at blocking out any evidence that suggests that taking time off from school may be beneficial for the individual in question.
• The biggest downside to taking time off for me has been the awkward conversations explaining my situation to strangers / relatives. It can also be quite alienating among people my age to be in such a different life situation.

All of these points underscore the fact that decisions about whether to take time off from college are made more on the basis of a fear of going against the crowd than through a careful consideration of whether or not it makes sense. While the social costs of taking time off from school do exist, the decision about how you choose to educate yourself is too important to make on the basis of a fear of not conforming to society’s expectations. Again, leaves of absence are not for everyone, but for the ambitious, intrinsically motivated student it is worth considering whether time off from school may make sense.