Jonathan Gheller2024-03-10T16:16:14+00:00https://www.gheller.coJonathan GhellerA bus on a Nepali road2024-03-10T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2024/03/10/a-bus-nepali-road<p><img src="https://images.saymedia-content.com/.image/c_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_auto:eco%2Cw_639/MTc0MjE3MTg3MTE5MTQ2NDky/10-most-dangerous-roads-in-the-world.webp" alt="A bus on a Nepali road" /></p>
<p>Running a startup is like driving a bus up a narrow Nepali road. You are trying to climb a mountain through a perilous road with a vehicle barely suited to the job. To achieve this, you need a specific set of skills unique to this road and your vehicle. To make it worth it, you need to pack your bus with passengers who are taking a big risk with you because you can get them there faster, cheaper, or ideally both.</p>
<p>The bus driver is your technical team. You are building a thing as fast as you can and as well as you can. As you climb higher, commitments to customers create further challenges that require even more technical ability to execute fast and well.</p>
<p>The passengers are your customers, who must stay calm and happy on the bus. The engineers’ job is to keep the bus moving and not falling. The job of sales, customer support, and other related functions is to load the bus with people and keep them there calm and happy.</p>
<p>Sometimes, half of the road is not there. When it rains, the ground gets extra slippery. For one reason or another, you may end up, by design or accident, with one wheel hanging off a cliff. The job of the technical team is not to die and keep going. The job of the rest of the people is to keep the bus packed with people.</p>
<p>Could you fall? Yes. Will it hurt? Most certainly. So, why do it? Why risk your life and others when there are better ways to reach the top? Here is a thought: How about going up in a helicopter?</p>
<p><img src="https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/attractions-splice-spp-720x480/06/fd/6d/de.jpg" alt="A helicopter Nepali montain" /></p>
<p>Wouldn’t that be nice, eh? Well, here is the thing: helicopters are for rich companies, not for you. You are running a startup. First, you must get people up the mountain on a bus several times. If you don’t fall off the cliff, you might be able to save some money, grow your business, and eventually even get yourself your first helicopter. With time, you may buy many helicopters that will get tons of people up and down that mountain. With tons of effort and good luck, you may build a nice mountain transport business. I hope you do. I am rooting for you!</p>
<p>But as long as you are a startup, you are on a bus, climbing a Nepali mountain, trying not to die or ruin your customers’ lives. That’s just how it is. You just have to keep driving forward and don’t fall off the cliff.</p>
<p> </p>
Times they are a changin2023-10-12T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2023/10/12/times-changin<p>There is great pride in remaining unchanged over time. To look the same despite age, to be able to do the same things despite a frailing body, to improve and contribute to a lifelong craft, to adapt your work to the changing times, and to be a beacon to the world and yourself as everything else changes.</p>
<p>Warrant Buffet has invested for over 70 years with the same “value investing” approach. As fads have come and gone and new paradigms emerged, he has stayed the same. He takes great pride in staying the same, making it a core part of his public persona. In turn, The financial world sees him as a reference point, an anchor in an ever-changing world.</p>
<p>Jerry Seinfeld has been writing observational humor for about 40 years. Using clever wordplay, he comments on the mundane and weird social norms and human behavior. He used to joke about dating more; now, he jokes about his wife and kids. But the structure remains the same. He has commented on his writing method and the process of refining jokes, and that has stayed the same. He is aging as well as anyone would want to and doing well as he goes about it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>There is also great pride in changing. Our bodies and minds change with time, and our activities and priorities change. People who played soccer later in life play golf; those who used to fight and compete in something can engage in other activities for their intrinsic rewards. New professions, hobbies, and places that did not make sense before can make sense now. It can be great to be multiple people in one life.</p>
<p>Unlike Buffet, Mike Bloomberg has had at least three very different jobs. Mike Bloomberg started his career at Salomon Brothers, where he spent about ten years before getting fired. With the money from the severance bonus, he seeded Bloomberg L.P., a company with tens of billions of revenue today. He became mayor of NYC in the early 2000s and did that job for a decade. He has been a Republican, an Independent, and a Democrat. He ran for president. And he is an active philanthropist.</p>
<p>Or compare Jim Carey to Seinfeld. Like Seinfield, he started as a standup comedian. Then, he moved to TV and quickly followed with comedic films. Afterward, he decided to spend some time in dramatic roles. At some point, he took time off and focused on painting and, to some degree, writing. After a long hiatus, he got back to making films. He has spoken publicly about his fascination, tension, and finally, indifference to fame and, indirectly, to his relationship with art.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This happens in all fields. Clinton and Bush Sr are the forever politicians; Carter and Bush Jr farm and paint, respectively. While the Beach Boys kept their sound constant, the Beatles tried all sorts of sounds and instruments. The list goes on.</p>
<p>Some people stand as a constant against time; some like to change with it. There is no right way to do it, but it is worth noticing which is suitable for you.</p>
Whenever, Whatever2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2023/10/03/whenever-whatever<p> </p>
<p><strong>Whenever</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>There are different ways to make time for each other; some are better than others.
I put together a list below that ranks how I think we make ourselves available to others, from worst to best:</p>
<ul>
<li>6- Offer to be available to others whenever, but in practice, you are rarely available</li>
<li>5 - You are available to others promptly but rarely and never scheduled in advance</li>
<li>4 - Available to others always, only if scheduled in advance and on a long lead time</li>
<li>3 - Available to others always, only if scheduled, but with a short lead time</li>
<li>2- Available recurrently (every day, week, month, etc.) in a way that works for that person</li>
<li>1 - Available whenever and can get on a phone very quickly or in person within days</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>Notice that “whenever” is both the worst and the best way to give time to others. The key difference is if the other person can comfortably act on “whenever” or not.</p>
<p>This issue with “whenever” really applies to any form of sharing. Take sharing things: ”Use my lakehouse whenever” is either the worst or the best invitation, depending on the personalities and the deepness of the relationship.</p>
<p>‘Whenever” means one thing or another, depending on how much you and the other person want to share. Maybe how much you want to share underlines the entire ranking: people who schedule recurrently are both more interested in being together than one person asking and the other person replying, “Sure, let’s meet in Q1 of next year”.</p>
<p>Wanting to be with each other is a function of how much we value each other. That’s probably the net: the ranking improves the more each party is willing to give time (or things, space, etc) for the value of someone else’s company.</p>
<p>Sometimes someone says “whenever” meaning #1, but you hear #6. How do we debug this? Easy! If your “whenever” offer does not take in, move to #3 or #2 (depending of context), and then over time move to #1. Again, here, the key is how much you value it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Whatever</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>As a comparison, let’s look at a much better list: the medieval philosopher Maimonides proposed a hierarchy for the types of charities we can give.</p>
<p>This is a summarized version of his list, from worst to best:</p>
<p> </p>
<ul>
<li>8- To give charity unwillingly</li>
<li>7- To give not enough but to do so willingly</li>
<li>6- To give to a poor person after being asked</li>
<li>5- To give to a poor person directly in his hand, without being asked</li>
<li>4- To give without knowing to whom, but the beneficiary knows who the benefactor is</li>
<li>3- To give knowing the beneficiary, but they don’t know your identity.</li>
<li>2- To give without knowing who benefits from it, and the beneficiary does not know its benefactor.</li>
<li>1- To give a loan or find a job to someone so they will not be dependent on others.</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>Something similar happens here: Giving charity you don’t want to give is the worst. Progressively, the easier it is to receive (anonymous being easier than being beholden to a donor), the more “valuable” the charity is according to Maimonides.</p>
<p>Giving charity anonymously also signals the receiver that you really value the act, regardless of what other values you get from it (say recognition).</p>
<p>In the end, since charity is not a desirable event, getting people out of the need for charity is the highest form of charity.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So with money and charity, you can say “whatever”, which is the absolute worst you can say or the best. Similar situation to “whenever.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>All this to say: it is curious how ”whenever” or ‘whatever” is either the crappiest or most generous things someone can say, depending on how much we value each other.</p>
The Right Distance2023-08-27T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2023/08/27/right-distance<p>There is an optimal distance for any relationship at any point in time. It is a rope that connects two people, which runs longer the more space they need and shorter the closer they want to be.</p>
<p>The rope allows the in-between space to change, but it also helps to decide if it is worth getting closer or further apart.
If you keep a sense of the rope, you notice when it has too much tension, and it is best to let it run longer or when there is slack, and it is worth getting closer.</p>
<p>Of course, the other side is held by someone else, so holding the rope on both ends is a bit like a game of tug of war, but the goal is not to pull anyone to your side but rather to keep the rope at the proper tension so you are as close as possible, but not closer. Let’s call that a tug of peace.</p>
<p>In tug-of-war, you want to pull as hard as possible to make people move towards you. In tug of peace, where we want to keep the tension, there are better strategies than pulling hard.</p>
<p>Game theory, the field of mathematics that studies games, suggests optimal strategies for games similar to the tug of peace.</p>
<p>But first, a bit of context: The classical game theory thought exercise is called the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma">prisoner dilemma</a>, where collaborating or coordinating efforts are hard, and the payout is such that it is best if people can coordinate but terrible if only one collaborates, but the other does not. Without the ability to work together, the “equilibrium” is that no one collaborates.</p>
<p>That game gets a nice twist once you can play it more than once. This is called the :</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoner's_dilemma">iterated prisoner’s dilemma</a>. In it, even if it is hard to talk or collaborate, you can see the actions others take and react in any way, whether random or predictable.</p>
<p>One successful strategy in such games is called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat">tit-for-tat</a>. The tit-for-tat strategy suggests that in an iterated prisoner dilemma game, an optimal strategy is to start cooperating but then replicate the other person’s action.</p>
<p>Tit-forTat works well with our tug of peace game: we treat people the best way we can, and then if they don’t reciprocate, we let the rope loose a bit to make some space. Now, because the rope is tense, we can feel when they want to pull closer, and if they do, we can reciprocate.</p>
<p>The challenge with letting the rope loose and creating space between two people is that the more apart they are, the more different their worlds are. As time passes, they will be influenced by different environments and likely drift apart. Over time, you might want to pull back closer only to find the person on the other side of the rope is not who you remember, and you are not the same either.</p>
<p>Ideally, we want to be as close as possible with the people we care about, but the real goal is to keep the rope tense to know what is happening on the other side. Still, if we let the rope go too long, we might not recognize who is on the other side when we pull back.</p>
Duct tape!2023-04-01T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2023/04/01/duct-tape<p><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/544985/229412279-f3d2c4d2-2d4a-4717-9b95-603643b06387.png" alt="DALL·E 2023-04-03 00 33 55 - I modern painting main subject is duct tape" /></p>
<p><em>modernist duct tape art by dall-e</em></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>1</strong></p>
<p>SVB’s failure seems to have been caused by a mix of bad luck, wrong decisions, and terrible crisis management.</p>
<p>The fallout revealed weakness in the broader banking system, resulting in a significant Fed intervention. For all of us caught by surprise, the episode reminded us that the banking system, and everything invented by people, is held together with duct tape.</p>
<p>Usually, things work smoothly, or at least as expected, but occasionally, a strong wind brings some of our institutions down and reveals what keeps them standing.</p>
<p>The way I understand it, SVB’s most significant issue was overexposure to a low-risk debt instrument that was super safe but yielded a minuscule interest. No one wants these bonds now that rates are up, so their price is down a ton. That overexposure led to poor decisions and even poorer communications, which made people extra nervous, and as a result, there was a bank run.</p>
<p>Initially, overexposure to underwater assets didn’t surface to most people’s attention because their book value assumed the bank would hold them until maturity.
But since SVB had so many of those (almost equal to the number of deposits), a small, harmless piece of accounting duct tape - reporting a bond at face value if held until maturity, even if the market price was down - peeled off just a tiny bit. Everyone saw the duct tape peel off, and then everyone got nervous.</p>
<p>Tons of questions followed: who else is holding such assets until maturity, which are short-term underwater? What? Almost all banks, you say? Do you mean to say this is just an accounting trick, and they could be in trouble if people take their money out? Wait, what do you mean by fractional reserve?…are you implying that banks don’t have all their customers’ money right now?….. This is Outrageous!</p>
<p>Yup. It’s all kept together with duct tape.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>2</strong></p>
<p>Some people see this and get inspired to improve it. After all, it works reasonably well most of the time, and that duct tape is there because someone put it there. Everything was flimsier before, and constantly adding new and improved duct tape makes possible more prosperity, longer lifespan, ever-increasing comfort, and all sorts of wonders, inspiring many to try and improve it. Yes, often, part of our system falters, and at times the brittleness of the whole of our civilization is plain to see, but it does work amazingly well, and we have the means to keep improving upon it.</p>
<p>But others look at it and yell: “DUCT TAPE! DUCT TAPE EVERYWHERE! LOOK, IT’S ALL ABOUT TO COME CRUMBLING DOWNl!!!!!”.</p>
<p>That’s very scary. Because underneath that duct tape is an older, lesser duct tape. And the further you go, the more feeble everything looks and feels. And the less structure we have under our feet, over our heads, and between us, the nastier and brutish life turns.</p>
<p>Who yells duct tape? First, we have the understandable first-timers: the young are prone to yell duct tape! Once they realize the world of grownups is shaky and random. There is also a contingent of people who are light on their nerves, which is also expected.</p>
<p>But there is a more problematic duct tape yeller: the cynic. He thinks the duct tape means the world is a farce and nothing is to be trusted. This is an issue because our world is a delicate and critically important construct. And we want to protected it.</p>
<p>The first, most obvious reason to protect it: this world, put together with duct tape, is way better than whatever savage, pre-civilization thing would have preceded it. Having it hold on for us is a precious thing.</p>
<p>Second: Everywhere around us, there is duct tape due for improvement, so we should work on improving it.</p>
<p>Third, we can’t remove all duct tape and replace it with something shiny. The history and traditions behind all this duct tape are not superficial; if nothing else, it is reasonable to assume we should try and understand it before we change it. And in doing so, we are likely to find things that work quite well and are worth preserving. But also, practically, if we pull it all at once the whole construct will crumble.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>3</strong></p>
<p>So how does the duct tape work? The fundamental trick that makes it all work is to elicit a certain degree of trust and optimism from all of us. There have been worse and better duct tape in the past, but it is up to us to keep it standing and improve it.</p>
<p>Doing all the work alone is impossible, so we must find a way to trust each other to get stuff done. So every time trust is lost and optimism wanes, the whole system shakes.</p>
<p>How can we build so large and with such resilience with just duct tape? Because we have trust in each other and our institutions. And because we share a general optimism that things can be better tomorrow than they are today and that this better future will be shared by all who work on it.</p>
<p>If we constantly focus on duct tape and try to pull it, change it all, or believe that someone else will do such things, it can fall apart.</p>
<p>The enemy of the duct tape is not truth (seeing it for what it is), fear (a natural reaction to seeing how fragile it all is), nor blind optimism (that assumes that it is a simple thing to change and add to). The number one enemy is Cynism; that’s why it is such a big problem.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>4</strong></p>
<p>We have mounting evidence that cynism in our country is growing. A recent WSJ survey asked people which values were “very important” to them. The results show that across all age cohorts, the values of patriotism, religion, having children, and community involvement are dropping fast, and only money continues its rapid rise.</p>
<p>A disregard for the lessons of the past, a generalized mistrust in others, and a pervasive pessimism about the future underlineof the values depicted in this survey.
In short, we have chosen what to believe in and settled on cynicism. That’s not good.</p>
<p>Without the church, the nation-state, our bowling alleys, and our neighbors, we have been left with nothing but money. But we have something; we have this world of man, even if it is shakier than it appears on first impression. It’s the force that brought all those things that we cherish and the same force that can renew and bring new things.</p>
<p>We have also seen how cynism hollows out other nations, and it should serve as a warning sign for the US.</p>
<p>Francisco de Miranda is my favorite Venezuelan founding father. And this is my favorite phrase from him: “¡Bochinche, bochinche! Esta gente no es capaz de hacer sino bochinche” which translates to something like: “ Chaos (or maybe pandemonium), chaos! These people are only capable of generating chaos!”. He wasn’t talking about the Spaniards by the way, he was talking about his own people.</p>
<p>This phrase is so good because it describes what makes Latin American countries charming but also politically unstable.
As I see the rise of cynicism in the U.S, this Venezuelan phrase has come to mind repeatedly (not so much for its charm, but for the political instability part)</p>
<p>A cynic sees no point in originality, only in doing the things that get him what he wants. It’s hard to care about beauty, public spaces, nature, and the strangely other among us if we are cynics. It prioritizes the present over the past and the future. Cynisms make it hard to honor and admire others, and it makes it hard to dream about a different, better world.</p>
<p>At the root of a weak rule of law, low economic growth, poverty, and inequity is cynism. Cynics believe we can’t trust each other or our shared institutions and should only live for the present, grab what we can, and move on.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>5</strong></p>
<p>Even worse than the cynic is the person who yells duct tape out loud and uses it to its benefit; those people are dicks. There are different ways of being an dick that leads to different political inclinations: The one that says it’s all duct tape, so screw it, let’s grab as much as we can. A different kind says the duct tape is fake, but there is a real and authentic duct tape that we need to put in, and we should start from scratch. Both of them suck.</p>
<p>Sometimes one can find these people in positions of power, and there they can wreak havoc. But I don’t worry too much about them: My sense is that there is a somewhat stable supply of shitty people, and the efforts to deal with them sort of ebb and flow. But cynicism can become a broad societal malady that we need to address head-on.</p>
<p>One of the mechanisms by which cynism undermines all our duct tape is via conspiracy theories. And conspiracy theories can be far more problematic than a few horrible people.</p>
<p>Most conspiracy theories are wrong because they assume few have profound control of the system, and if something moved, it is because someone moved it intentionally. But that’s rarely so, and often things are easier to understand as a set of unintended consequences from a system held up with duct tape.</p>
<p>Conspiracy theories rely on a persistent illusion that looks at the world as something solid, purposeful, and consistent end to end. But it only takes a peak at the duct tape to know this is rarely true.</p>
<p>One thing all conspiracy theories seem to have in common is a deep mistrust of institutions and people who are “other.” Conspiracy theories depend a great deal on cynicism.</p>
<p>Again, let’s look at our current banking issues and the Fed policy that goes along withi, once from the lense of cynicism and one from the realization that everything sticks together with duct tape:</p>
<p><br />
<em>SVB</em></p>
<ul>
<li>Conspiracy theory: reckless VCs and startups make reckless, terrible investments but somehow get to profit regardless. The bank goes under because it served this degenerated customer base.</li>
<li>Duct tape theory: We change the zero interest rate duct tape for the rapid rise rate duct tape to patch up another duct tape (fiscal stimulus) which patches another duct tape (closing the economy due to Covid), and this has a ton of unexpected (for most) consequences, especially for those who already put the wrong duct tape on other issues (overexposure to what looked like safe bonds which are now underwater)</li>
</ul>
<p><br /></p>
<p><em>Monetary policy</em></p>
<ul>
<li>Conspiracy theory: Those who share fears about the U.S dollar and U.S treasuries are in cahoots with adversary foreign entities which want to undermine the U.S global supremacy.</li>
<li>Duct tape: People see duct tape, get nervous, and scream duct tape! The system requires trust, and the lack of trust makes people scream duct tape even louder! Adversary foreign entity who wants to undermine U.S supremacy sees a wave and surfs it to the best of its ability (which peels other duct tapes they can’t even anticipate)</li>
</ul>
<p><br /></p>
<p>Ok, two more:</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><em>Meta</em></p>
<ul>
<li>Conspiracy theory: An young evil villain funded by the CIA and maybe a foreign entity brainwashes people’s minds for the benefit of the deep state, and maybe something more ancient and sinister (after all, the founder is Jewish)</li>
<li>Duct tape: Running a product that impacts 2B people changes, fixes and damages all sorts of duct tape out there. It enables the Arab spring but also misinformation. It connects friends and families spread out far and wide, but it also mindlessness distracts. The Meta organization is a bunch of people doing for the most part, the best they can, making tons of forced and some unforced errors. It’s also an organization made of people with conflicting opinions who change opinions with time and with new information.</li>
</ul>
<p><br /></p>
<p><em>Covid</em></p>
<ul>
<li>Conspiracy theory: An adversary foreign entity in cahoots with big pharma and its lackeys within the US government purposely spreads out a virus to destabilize the US and China to concentrate power into the deep state here and the CCP in China.</li>
<li>Duct tape: I have no idea what happened, but I know that duct tape holds Bio research labs, as it holds together everything else. So it is easier for me to imagine a mistake over a corporate-US-China conspiracy. Then, I can imagine the government and/or pharma looking at a lab’s ripping duct tape and rushing to put more duct tape, some good, some not so good. I can also imagine the virus escaping a food market and then, just a ton of duct tape.</li>
</ul>
<p><br /></p>
<p>I actually can’t know what happens in any of these cases. Still, if we look at our own lives and the world around us (our co-workers, neighbors etc) I think the duct tape explanation deserves as much if not more faith than a pervasive cynic view of our institutions.</p>
<p>The issue with conspiracy theories is <em>not</em> that they are built on an illusion; instead that it chooses the wrong one: cynism.</p>
<p>A functioning and ever-improving system is also built on an illusion, a sort of hope, a dream, a vision, that things can be better tomorrow than today because things are better today than 200 years ago. The difference between the conspiracy theories and the hopes of the duct tape theory is straightforward: we can see the duct tape and that it works for the most part.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>6</strong></p>
<p>Cynicism also undermines our ability to put the right duct tape tomorrow. Pessimists make for terrible builders.</p>
<p>Every day, people try to do new things. New laws, art, fashion, technology, and science. Each a new piece of duct tape to keep it all together.</p>
<p>Some of it reinforces old things differently, and some are duct tape in novel places. Some are just ripping up duct tape to make room for new ones.</p>
<p>New things like AI and LLMs, gene editing, space travel, crypto, or new music, art, etc tend to reveal the system’s fragility. One significant change in any of these can peel off tons of duct tape that keeps it all together.</p>
<p>In the face of these changes, some will push for optimism and remind us that everything today was invented by someone, and everything tomorrow will be created by us today. Others worry about the system’s fragility and may want us to move slower or more carefully. Both need to be weighted. But the one that causes real trouble is the cynic who wants us all to be paralyzed by the frailty of it all.</p>
<p>So, how do we conduct ourselves in this duct tape-made reality? We have to accept its resilience and fragility and be ok with all the duct tape, and we need trust in each other and maintain optimism for this to be possible. Politically, my one-liner on this, paraphrasing the social democrats in Germany, is:</p>
<p>As much innovation as possible, as much conservation and regulation as needed. As much new and better duct tape as possible, as much integrity to our duct tape reality as necessary.</p>
Marriage and kids2023-01-15T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2023/01/15/marriage-kids<p><strong>Getting married</strong></p>
<p>With marriage comes a couple of beneficial life changes. The first is a mindset, and the second is an emotional state.</p>
<p>There a very few things in life where we get to think long-term and, till death do us part, is probably the first time most people encounter a truly long-term initiative.
Not only is marriage often the first, but it is one of the genuinely long-term endeavors anyone can do, even for the most interesting and complete individuals. Of course, marriage, like all long-term plans, can be nothing more than an initiative because plans and efforts never guarantee results.</p>
<p>Many changes come when you start thinking genuinely long-term, but the most profound thing to me is that you start wondering less about how people around you can change and more about how you can change.
The reason is that there is only genuine partnership with change. If someone adapts fully to you and you stay the same, you are not in a partnership. If you hold your partner’s life equally, anything other than a true partnership will break, or you will have to endure it with much pain.</p>
<p>To be clear, I don’t believe this necessarily means an equal partnership is required, but most partnerships depend on a great degree of complementarity.</p>
<p>The second change is in the emotional range. If you have a supporting life partner, you end up with less painful emotional downs.
<br /></p>
<p><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/544985/212560846-4a261cbf-7f37-437f-8e75-50503beba217.png" alt="Group 1" /></p>
<p>Having someone betting on you “forever” may not initially make the best moment better, but it will immediately make the worst moments less painful. To have someone alongside “for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health” drastically raises the lowest you can fall.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Kids</strong></p>
<p>Life is like a circle, and kids make it bigger.</p>
<p>Think of a circle with lines from the center to different points in circumference. Some of these lines represent happiness others represent sadness, pain, despair, pride, hilarity, etc. A kid gives you more of all of it. I have experienced this as “having more life”.</p>
<p><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/544985/212560870-6fbafe6d-acb8-4fad-be6c-43c96187c698.png" alt="Group 2" /></p>
<p>Some people disagree that having an expansive life is good and that having kids is good, and they may even argue we should live smaller lives and reverse humanity’s growth rate. I won’t try to argue at length here for expansive lives, having kids, and growing humankind. I will limit myself here by saying that life is good and worth living, and increasing humanity is good.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>How to make the best of marriage and kids</strong></p>
<p>In my experience, marriage is predicated on the idea that we can learn infinite things from one person, that the process can give boundless gratification, and that our relationship with them can be infinitely interesting and intimate. In my experience, the essential condition for a happy family is to find your spouse and kids infinitely interesting.</p>
<p>For this, it helps a lot if you generally find people interesting. If so, your family is privileged because your shared intimacy provides a degree of fidelity and detail that is hard to find anywhere else. As a general observation, people who are generally curious about others and see their partners and kids as having equal value to them are usually in happy relationships.</p>
<p>After curiosity, the next emotion that drives a great degree of family happiness is admiration. The first member to admire is your spouse. If you have a good partnership, this comes naturally. If you value how they use their time and attention, deal with adversity and take in the gifts of life, then admiration naturally follows. People you admire are fascinating to pay attention to, reinforcing this essential driver of happy partnerships.</p>
<p>Kids have some advantages and some disadvantages in being subject to curiosity and admiration. First, they have a leg up because, in most cases, parents have some sort of hormonal or evolutionary conditioning that makes them care deeply for their kids.
But also, if you find humans interesting, kids are like reality tv from national geographic, being broadcast in real-time from your house!</p>
<p>As for admiring your kids, this can come easily if their struggles and aspirations resonate with yours, and it might be harder if they don’t. But, again, human curiosity and their equal standing as humans is the best path to admiration.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Cupcakes and rainbows</strong></p>
<p>Marriage and kids can be a lot of work. We don’t always know what we want, and we don’t always express ourselves clearly. We can be petty, shortsighted, temperamental, and unfair. So often, curiosity turns into confusion.
And, like in all things of value, there is a lot of grinding. At times, clean-cut incompatibilities can make any of this relationship distant or outright unviable.
But overall, the one thing one can count on in marriage and with kids is the commitment to a long-term relationship with someone we believe has as much value and worth as ourselves.</p>
Course correction2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2022/12/20/course-correction<p>My most excellent overheard experience was at a ski lift. This was 13 years ago, and I was trying to learn how to snowboard. I took one class, tried different things on the slopes, and fell a ton, but also paid attention to the conversations people had on the lift. They would talk about what went right and what went wrong, and I would try to learn from what they said.</p>
<p>In one of these conversations, someone asked his friend how he avoids making mistakes and falling. The friend said: “oh, I do make tons of mistakes, I just correct them before I fall”</p>
<p>He explained that much of what he does with snowboarding is a function of a misstep he took a second prior, which now needs correcting. Wherever he is going with the board was often heavily influenced by an error he previously made.</p>
<p>This is a version of the famous Miles Davis quote: “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterward that makes it right or wrong.”</p>
<p>This is also a version of the famous Antonio Machado verse, which my father is a big fan of quoting in all possible situations: “caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar” (“walker, there is no path, the path is made by walking”)</p>
<p>This is also a version of this cool Tim Urban (waitbywhy author) graph:</p>
<p><img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/544985/208748119-8c4bc02a-fe73-4261-a111-34419ecbe52e.png" alt="image" /></p>
<p>All of these point to one insight: there is no right path and there is no point in looking back; there is only course correction.</p>
Listen to that nervous feeling2022-09-08T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2022/09/08/Listen-to-that-nervous-feeling<p>In the U.S, there is a bright line separating public spaces from private spaces. In Europe, the American notion of private and public spaces blur. I had two moments of clarity on these differences while visiting Spain; one while using a public bathroom, and another jumping off a pier.</p>
<p>In a coastal town in Spain, I found a peculiar public restroom: It is a wall on the side of a boardwalk, with a urinary attached to it. There is a semi-circle, metallic mesh surrounding the wall providing some cover for the bathroom user. This mesh is detached by about half a meter from the wall.
The mesh makes it very easy to see it if someone is in there, looking down doing the deed. But playing peek-a-book is not the goal of the mesh; Assuming people are decent, this semi-transparency keeps people from walking in inadvertently.
The space separating the mesh from the wall is more risqué; its main purpose is to allow people to come in and out of the urinary, but since people pee onto the wall, men’s privates are fairly exposed to those strolling on the boardwalk and passing next to the bathroom.</p>
<p>This contraption presented me with a new type of public bathroom; it is public in that it is free and available to all, but also public in that anyone who wants to see you or jump you while you pee, can do so with ease. Of course, no one peeks, and no one jumps. Still, for us tourists and first timers, using this public bathroom is a thrill and an adventure.</p>
<p>Coming from the U.S, I had to triple check I was using the public bathroom right, checking I was not missing a door or some instructions or regulation. But that’s not how public spaces work in Europe.</p>
<p>In contrast, most public spaces in the U.S come with a manual: what you can and cannot do, who can be where, and at what times.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Here are the instructions for the Sue Bierman Park Playground in San Francisco:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>For the enjoyment of all visitors, please obey the following regulations:</p>
<ol>
<li>Be courteous and respectful of others</li>
<li>Adults must be accompanied by a child</li>
<li>No dogs</li>
<li>Smoking prohibited</li>
<li>Feeding of birds or animals prohibited</li>
<li>No alcohol or glass containers</li>
<li>No Riding of skateboards, scooters, bikes, or rollerblades</li>
<li>Littering prohibited</li>
<li>THIS PARK IS A DRUG-FREE ZONE</li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p>The feeling it conveys is that this place is not yours and most people are not to be trusted here. Not a great vibe for a public park.</p>
<p>At the end of that spanish beach boardwalk there is a large pier built out of concrete, resting in a bed of rocks. The pier stretches far into the sea, and as it extends, the distance down to the water grows to around 5 meters, maybe more.</p>
<p>We asked our family, who visit this beach town every summer, where were the fences for the pier. The questions took them by surprise. We talked about the risks of falling by the side on a low tide and getting injured or worse, and they talked about individual responsibility and common sense using the pier.
Then we talked about legal liability for the city and they inquired about that rare phenomenon, wondering how one could sue something like a city, and why would any want to do it. We explain the financial rewards that could come from such exercise, and some of them thought this presented an interesting new business opportunity in the old continent, and in the moment we could see in their eyes the sparkle of late stage capitalism (just kidding).
We couldn’t quite explain the suing of a city issue, so we trailed off talking about how the metric “lawyers per capita” is inversely correlated with GDP growth everywhere with one exception, the U.S, where we have the highest lawyer per capita ratio and hence many lawsuits….</p>
<p>Anyways, the next day my brother in law and I went back to the pier, and did a little jump. It was fun.</p>
<p>On the subject of jumping into bodies of water: have you seen those pictures of people jumping off cliffs on Europe’s beaches? So Fun! Guess what: the U.S has such cliffs and beaches. The difference is that in Europe those cliffs are not fenced. In the U.S we have fences and fines for those who jump and warning signs for all.</p>
<p>I looked online for American warning signs for cliffs. My favorite one, which the internet shows at various spot, reads:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>LISTEN TO THAT NERVOUS FEELING. <br />
Don’t jump off the cliff.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This phrase says a lot about our approach to public spaces, and our fearful retreat into safety and privacy.</p>
<p>Part of the difference is simple to see: Some of the uses Europeans give to their public spaces are surprising to us because many of these activities are reserved to private spaces in the U.S. In The U.S, public spaces are a place of strangers, and so we give each other tons of limitations and instructions, to make sure those borrowing these places make good use of it.</p>
<p>But that’s just part of it. There is something more beyond ownership and a sense of belonging. Today the Queen of England died and I read a beautiful tweet that celebrated the cathedral (a public space) where her body would rest, referring to it as “one of the jewels of our inheritance”. The idea of public spaces as an inheritance is very touching, and describes I think with brevity and depth what public spaces mean in Europe.</p>
No kids menu2022-08-13T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2022/08/13/no-kids-menu<p>Spain offers one big, fun, happy life. It’s a culture that works for everyone there, and for all who visit every year.</p>
<p>For the most part, everyone in Spain is very happy, kids behave well in public and have fun, the young spend copious time with friends and family, and the old partake of the same life as everyone else.</p>
<p>This life Is lived out in the open, sitting outside in places that are restaurants, coffee shops and bars all rolled into one, where people enjoy themselves in the company of friends or colleagues, where they spend time with family and neighbors; where the young and the old eat and drink together.</p>
<p>The drinking is anything but water and the food is delicious everywhere.</p>
<p>You have wine, tinto de verano, vermouth, and beer. the kids have a couple of juice options and the one popular sports drink called Aquarius which comes in two flavors.</p>
<p>You have about 20 dishes of various seafood, pork and beef, and a little chicken here and there.</p>
<p>If you know how to order in one place, you know how to order everywhere. And everywhere it will be delicious, and in many places, very affordable.</p>
<p>You can walk miles from affordable neighborhoods into posh parts of town and the “plan” will be the same; seating outside at these restaurants+coffee shops + bars to people watch, drink and talk. Maybe some places are a bit fancier than others and certainly, people’s clothing and watches change a bit, but the food, drink and the activity itself remain the same.</p>
<p>There is one big culture, one big and effective way to be happy and have fun. This life is truly amazing; Spaniards love it, and visitors love participating in it.</p>
<p><em>Side note: of course, I am aware Spain has different provinces with different sub-cultures. Each area has its grapes for its wines; some have the best cheeses and some the best ham and some have different languages and at times some even harbor desires of secession. So by one big culture, I only mean this way of leading a life with others in public spaces. That seems to be shared across all these different provinces and their cultures and serves as a common thread across Spain. A bit of data to back this up: Spain has the most bars and restaurants per capita in the world. My brother-in-law shared an article that claims there are more bars than hospital beds in Spain</em>.</p>
<p>The U.S on the other hand is a factory of cultures. What is American food? I am not sure there is a definitive answer but I am sure it includes Italian pizza, French fries, hotdogs, Tex-mex, and American Chinese food.</p>
<p>It’s also: carnivore, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, organic, free range, synthetic almost plastic stuff like breakfasts cereals, fermented and sprouted foods, and who knows what else. We make these food cultures and on their back, we build the businesses that profit from it. And behind all the cultures, sects, and silos, there are genuine people who love some of these and abhor others. In the U.S, there is something for everyone, and something new each new day.</p>
<p>Spaniards engage with these American inventions at a safe distance.</p>
<p>It reminds me of a philosophy professor who taught Wittgenstein and when asked if he believed in his ideas he replied that he did not believe but rather was no more than “a user of Wittgenstein”. Spaniards don’t seem to fully buy into these American cultural products, but they certainly use them.</p>
<p>Even the most parochial restaurant+coffee shop+bar play 90s MTV on the TV. American music plays everywhere and everywhere there are Nikes and Vans and whatever else that screams Americana is somehow part of the day-to-day life of Spaniards.</p>
<p>There are Spaniard hipsters too and they seem to love Brooklyn and Native Americans themed tattoos as much if not more than their U.S counterpart.</p>
<p>Yet these hipsters are spending little to no time in bespoke coffee shops buying 12 euro dripped coffee; they too enjoy these restaurants+coffee shop+bars with friends and neighbors and colleagues and their grandmas and little kids. They use one of the many American Cultures ™, but they are not Americans.</p>
<p>This great, fun, life-affirming culture works for most, but not all. Imagine the shock of my picky eating son when he noticed these dining places don’t have kid menus.</p>
<p>The kid culture that has been growing in America where we have all these parallels product offerings for the little ones does not exist in Spain. Either this invention has not hit Spain yet, or it was not accepted, because it is a bit of an attack on their one big culture.</p>
<p>Spain It’s one big culture and kids are a part of it. I honestly don’t know if picky eaters exist in Spain, I need to find that out. But for my picky eater, this is mind-blowing.</p>
<p>It’s also very healthy for him. Because he does need to eat he has been finding a way to partake in these meals. Acuario is ok, so that’s good. Meatballs at actually delicious so the rare meatball extravaganza back home, became the day-to-day meal here. And some non-nugget chicken seems to have percolated unto his diet as well. That’s a big deal for our family, but the most normal thing in Spain, because again, maybe picky eaters are a U.S invention after all.</p>
<p>In Spain, there is little hanging out inside. To keep their beautiful buildings and their beautiful streets, their beautiful apartments have remained small. As a result, much hanging out with other people happens outside. It’s easy to be outside because it’s easy to know what to do; to be in Spain is to know how to fit everywhere here.</p>
<p>In contrast, a lot of daily life in the U.S is lived in private places, at people’s homes. To be in public in the U.S means encountering a ton of strangers doing all sorts of different things, following all sorts of cool, innovative unique ways of eating, socializing, working, and living.</p>
<p>One intimate aspect tidbit where this private/public difference showed up: In the U.S, a good host wants to know what you need and want. In Spain, good hosts welcome you into their world; their friends their restaurant+coffee shop+bars their families, and their summer family towns.</p>
<p>In Spain, everyone shares one main culture so everyone is closer. It’s a very high-trust society. During the first week in Europe, our kids were shaken, hugged, and kissed by so many adult strangers that they could not tell if they needed to call the police or dismiss everything they had learned at home and school regarding strangers. Once, I lost track of the kids for a second in a perfume store only to find some store clerks holding the kids by the neck to put some perfume on them. That image I think is an impossibility in the U.S.</p>
<p>Spaniards and Europeans at large seem to have a love/hate relationship with the U.S and U.S culture. I certainly heard a lot of shitting on the US on this trip.</p>
<p>My snarky comeback was always this: Spain is a wonderful place as long as you have the US to give you the vaccines you need to don’t die in a pandemic. That usually does it.</p>
<p>And there is some truth to that; the U.S generative culture, the respect for individuals, their ideas and wants, and needs, is a factory for surprises and exceptions which often make the world better.</p>
<p>Europeans often think of the US as a mix of a torture chamber and some sort of greedy place, but in reality, U.S good fortune is the result of letting people be all that they can be, damn social norms, history, location, or anything else. Our public lives as a result are often fragmented, and difficult to navigate, but also as a result, we create new worlds, technologies, ideas, and products that the entire globe gets to use and enjoy. I guess there is a tradeoff for everything, the proverbial there is no free lunch maxim.</p>
<p>I do think Spain has reached the minimum material conditions that allow them to lead this life: with enough prosperity to provide universal healthcare, education, solid public transportation, amazing public spaces, and pensions upon retirement, maybe Spaniards do have enough and are ready to enjoy it.</p>
<p>They will let the colonization of Mars to the Americans, and hitch a ride when they can find a good use for it.</p>
A very simple plan for California2021-12-12T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2021/12/12/a-simple-plan-ca<p>
<strong>The state of affairs</strong></p>
<p>
Bad ideas are winning all over U.S politics, and especially in California.</p>
<p>In the last 4 years, our state government has done little to manage our <a href="https://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/08/wildfires-newsom-recall-forest-service/">forestry</a>, keep our <a href="https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/abc10-originals/newsom-pge-protection/103-65ca1d41-8efe-45b4-87bc-0cdecc714378">utility</a> providers accountable, and protect <a href="https://calmatters.org/economy/2021/07/california-small-business/">small businesses </a>from the impact of the pandemic. It has given up on raising those at the bottom and focused on <a href="https://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/08/californias-proposed-new-math-curriculum-defies-logic/">handicapping our brightest</a>, all while managing to potentially misplace<a href="https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jun/01/gavin-newsom/did-john-chiang-lose-track-31-billion-californias-/"> 31B USD.</a></p>
<p>As a response, the republican opposition presents <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/how-larry-elder-upended-california-recall-n1277815">this guy </a>as their best alternative.</p>
<p>Surely we can do better.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>The root cause</strong>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is wrong to ask who will rule. The ability to vote a bad government out of office is enough. That is democracy - Karl popper
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We have an election system that favors extremist, highly ideological, and incompetent candidates. Here’s how:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Political candidates select their candidates in primaries</li>
<li>Few voters participate in primaries. Of those who do, most are highly ideological and extremist.</li>
<li>Naturally, candidates who pander to extremes win primaries in both parties, leaving the general population with two bad options.</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Solutions</strong>
</p>
<p>The first step is to vote on primaries.</p>
<p>California has open primaries, meaning you don’t need to declare a party affiliation to vote on them.</p>
<p>For the November 2022 elections, we need to move primary participation from 10% to > 50%. The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans are moderate; they just need to go out and vote on the primaries. Add to that, non-party affiliation represents 25% of the total California voters so if we all go we can get sensible candidates on both parties.</p>
<p><em>Action item #1: We need to run an aggressive campaign to get people out to vote in the primaries of 2022.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>The second step is to do stack rank voting.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We proposed some criteria for what a good system should be: what is it you want from a voting system, and impose some conditions. And then ask: can you have a voting system that guarantees that? — Kenneth Arrow.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
We need to let the top candidates in a primary all pass to a general election, and in the general election, we need to do <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Ranked-choice_voting_(RCV)">stack rank voting</a>. That is, we need to select not just our favorite candidate but our second, third, etc. And if our favorite does not win, our vote goes to our second, and so forth. You can model this out and see how to stack rank voting yields the candidate that most people want.</p>
<p><em>Action item #2: To achieve this we need to finance and run a voter initiative to change our election system to stack rank voting. <a href="https://www.elections.alaska.gov/Core/RCV.php">Alaska</a> is doing it, we can do it too.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Ps: Katherine Ghal has been doing some awesome work with this; check it out <a href="https://katherinegehl.com/">here</a></p>
Regulating Social Media2021-10-11T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2021/10/11/Regulating-Social-Media<p> </p>
<p>I think there are three main paths to regulate FB and other social media apps: access, content, and personal data. In this post I will use FB as the main example.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Access</strong></p>
<p>A good example of access regulation is currently playing out in China, where the government is setting a limit of hours of usage per day for video games. One could imagine a similar regulation that limits the number of hours people could use FB or other social media apps.</p>
<p>In a country with limited civil liberties and where state violence is used graciously, such measures might work. But in a free country like the U.S, that’s less likely to be the case.</p>
<p>In the 1920’s, the prohibition amendment tried to regulate access to alcohol. Enforcement was difficult and costly and people found ways to access the product, often at a higher price and lower quality. In the end, the prohibition failed because people wanted to continue drinking alcohol.</p>
<p>In the U.S, we don’t allow people under 13 to use these apps. We could, if we think it’s important and there is strong supportive evidence, increase that age. But it is hard to imagine that a full grown adult needs to be protected by the government from social media.<br />
</p>
<p><strong>Content</strong></p>
<p>Regulating content is even harder. Aside from calls to violence, there is little consensus of what constitutes harmful content, and less so what constitutes truth. There are plenty of improvements that can be done to these products to give more context into what might be more or less truthful: the platform can show if it has been shared too many times, or limit reach from new accounts, or mark if some authoritative institution disagrees with a statement. Many of these ideas and more have been implemented, but the idea that FB or others can be the arbiter of truth seems like a fool’s errand to me.</p>
<p>People say hurtful and untruthful things on FB not because of FB, but because they want to. Regulating human nature would be like regulating a drug by asking the manufacturer to change its chemical composition. A bit like saying, could you make ibuprofen not give me a stomach ache?</p>
<p>The way I see it, either the drug is worth the tradeoffs in which case we make it available to market ( limited to some people) or it is not worth the tradeoffs, in which case we decide people should not be allowed to decide if the risk is worth it for them or not. Whether in the market or not, anyone can try to compete, and offer a better product.</p>
<p>This is not an exact science, but I can see how it is reasonable for a product to fall on one side or the other of the permission line. But the assumption that Congress can sit down and change the “chemical composition” of FB by regulating their feed seems unproductive. Congressmen are not running the company and often don’t even understand the most basic elements of it.</p>
<p>Congress is charged with being well versed with social media And the internet And energy And Education And healthcare And security And internal politics, etc. Mark and his team are focused on FB, hence I am fairly confident Mark and his team would run FB better.</p>
<p>Of course, If the legislature has a consensus on the risks associated with social media, they could, for example, mandate that these companies show a disclaimer every time the app opens up like tobacco companies were forced to do so in their package. But like with TV, I think the negative effects of social media are very hard to prove and impossible to balance out against their innumerable benefits.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Personal Data</strong></p>
<p>In my opinion, the most reasonable path to regulation is by increasing the access and mobility of personal data. The way I see it, FB owns the algorithms that organize content, the interfaces with all its features, the relationship with the advertisers, and even all the revenue. But I own my data. My graph of relationships, my photos, videos, and texts.</p>
<p>If I created a ton of content at FB and I would rather have all that content be somewhere else, there should be an open-source protocol to easily (only-click) move from one place to the other.</p>
<p>Today I can export my FB data, but not my graph. The export tool is kind of hidden, and not really good. More importantly, it is not thought of as a solution for interoperability (so I can use it somewhere else,), but rather of access.</p>
<p>In healthcare, there is a regulation of this nature, which aims to make it super easy to move my health data from one provider to another. The implementation is slow and mediocre, but it is the right idea, and it is moving in the right direction. I think a similar regulation should exist for social media.</p>
<p>In telecommunication, there is also a related regulation. The big infrastructure (the holes in the ground and the pipes that run through it which support the cables that connect your house to the outside world) were created by monopolies. In order to promote competition and protect the consumer, these companies were mandated to allow other companies to pass their cables through their pipes. FB built the pipes of the social graph, which I think is in the best interest of the consumer to allow them to move their graph wherever they want.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Power</strong></p>
<p>I believe the idea that FB has problems because the people in it are bad or evil is wrong. As far as I can tell, in the time that I spent working there, I mostly saw smart, good-intentioned people. Of course, I was only a middle-manager so my knowledge is limited - so is the case with the latest Whistleblower - but the times I had the opportunity to present and talk to people in the leadership teams I only saw people trying to build a big, useful, impactful company that would be loved by its users.</p>
<p>What I do think is a problem is Power. To be powerful means to have an outside influence in the lives of others. The bigger the influence and the larger the group of people you influence, the more powerful you are.</p>
<p>FB is very, very powerful. Mark and the leadership team, if they can be clearly accused of anything, is their ability to accumulate power. By building a product people love, that can serve billions of people at the same time, connecting the globe for the first time in human history, they have amassed a great deal of power.</p>
<p>When a powerful entity makes decisions, it affects many people, often very deeply. When +3B people are involved, not everyone is going to be better off with every decision.</p>
<p>There are always trade-offs. This is true regardless of scale: for every decision you make, there are always some aspects of your life that are better off and others that are not. When you add a couple of people to the mix - your family, your small company, your closest group of friends - the potential configurations arise very fast, and managing trade-offs becomes very hard. For billions of people, trade-offs are really hard to compute and even harder to resolve.</p>
<p>The challenge with FB is not that the people are not good - in fact, I think they are incredibly talented -; it is that they have a lot of power, and their decisions affect many people and in many profound ways.</p>
<p>I don’t think we solve for large, concentrated power by moving it around. The solution is not to take power away from Mark and give it to the chairman of the FCC, or to a bunch of congressmen. The solution, in my opinion, is to<a href="https://www.gheller.co/2021/01/23/diffusion-of-power"> diffuse the power.</a> From a regulatory standpoint, I think that starts by making it super easy to port my graph and data from FB to wherever I want.</p>
If Crypto was a house2021-10-06T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2021/10/06/Crypto-as-a-house<p> </p>
<p><strong>Buying a house</strong></p>
<p>I can buy a house wherever I want as long as I have the money, and the seller is willing.</p>
<p>To do this buy/sell transaction, we need to trust the city to vouch for the property titles, and we may pay title insurance to protect against errors.</p>
<p>I trust the government to give me the land and not take it from me by force (and protect me if someone attempts to do so). Buying a house in most places is an open, trust-dependent system. Anyone can do it, but they need to work with, and trust, the government to get it done.</p>
<p>50 years ago, my grandparents could not have bought a house in my neighborhood. Not because the property rights system was not trustworthy, but because they would not have permission. At the time, the city charters prohibited jewish families from moving in, so that ruled them out. In this case, the system was trustworthy, but not permissionless, and hence less open.</p>
<p>The proof of ownership of the house is recorded and validated by the government. Because people can successfully lie to the governments, and because the government can lie and cheat to its citizens, different governments have different levels of trustworthiness.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Cutting out the middleman</strong></p>
<p>It is really important when buying a house to know that property claims over it will be respected.</p>
<p>In some countries, you can’t trust the government to give you legitimate titles, or to keep the terms in which they give the titles somewhat constant, or to respect and enforce the rights of those titles. In some countries, people lose their houses to lawlessness, coming from fellow citizens or the government itself.</p>
<p>In the ideal scenario, buyers and sellers could transact without the need of a third party like the government. But without some form of enforcer, validator and witness to the transaction, how do we keep people from cheating? As a buyer, how can I know the house wasn’t sold to someone else 3 minutes ago? Or that the government will take it away by force if they choose to?</p>
<p>The grand contribution of the<a href="https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf"> Bitcoin whitepaper</a> was the invention of a mechanism where independent agents can find consensus and common truth, without the need to trust someone else. No government or any other form of trusted third party is needed. Bitcoin does this specifically for the transactions that take place in its network, commonly denominated in BTC.</p>
<p>Bitcoin and other legitimate Crypto protocols are permissionless, trustless systems. These systems are open to participation without asking for permission, and agents can participate without having to trust a third party to coordinate their interactions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Keeping my house</strong></p>
<p>For people living in mature democracies, sometimes it is hard to imagine why the government would want to take someone’s house, and even harder to think that the house the government could expropriate would be their house. Unfortunately this happens in many parts of the world, often for retaliation purposes.</p>
<p>One can imagine an example where the government dislikes my political opinion, and use that as an excuse to take the house from me.</p>
<p>There are two main protections I could have against a government attack.</p>
<p>One, is to make my ownership anonymous. It’s hard to imagine doing this with the house I live in, but easier to imagine with a house no one knows I own.</p>
<p>In this case, privacy is really important for me, since it protects me from abuse from others that can be stronger and more violent. Maintaining privacy with physical assets is super hard, but increasingly possible with digital assets.</p>
<p>Some Crypto projects focus on how to make transactions that can be not only trustless (no need for third parties) but also, private. There are different levels of privacy which can be achieved by different means, which go from bundling transactions so one transaction can not be separated from a larger group, to using advancements in math like zero-knowledge proof which allows people to transact without revealing identities.</p>
<p>The other protection against someone taking your house - and here I am stretching the housing metaphor quite a bit - is if no one but you has the one key to get in, and your house is designed in such a way that it is impossible to get in without the key.</p>
<p>Private keys are a cryptographic tool to keep information private (present in Bitcoin and onwards with other protocols). In Crypto protocols, private keys are used to make transactions; without that key no transaction can happen. If you have a ton of crypto and lose those private keys, you lost your crypto.</p>
<p>To manage these keys, some people use specialized hardware to keep them safe; others give private keys it to someone to look after them or have an account in an institution instead of keys(Coinbase business is to have the keys and create an internal account for their customers), but as you can see, if you give the keys to someone else, now you have introduced a third party again who you hope will take good care of those keys.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Getting help to buy more houses</strong></p>
<p>If I had tons of money and loved houses very much, I could have an army of agents buying houses for me. I would give them certain criteria including total yearly budget and per house budget, and they would go buy them for me. This system would be distributed, but not really decentralized because I control it (I can fire agents, change compensation or buying criteria, etc).</p>
<p>In Crypto, a lot of people from many different places participating in a project is no indication of how descentralized is.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>A co-op buying a house</strong></p>
<p>A Cooperative (co-op) can also buy houses and in that system ostensibly any member can bring an idea for what houses to buy, everyone gets a vote, the votes get aggregated and the decision is made. Since the power is shared among everyone, the decision is decentralized.</p>
<p>Of course, a co-op with only one member wouldn’t really be a co-op.</p>
<p>A co-op with 3 members is more decentralized than a co-op with only one member, but still 2 out of 3 could collude against the remaining one. So, the more people there are, the more decentralized the decision is.</p>
<p>In this sense, decentralization means that every member of the co-op makes a decision, each decision has equal weight, and the final decision is the aggregate of all.</p>
<p>A good co-op has tons of members, but the more people it has, the harder it is to coordinate. Also, the more varied the objectives of the co-op, the harder to coordinate: It is easy to coordinate if we all want the biggest house possible. But if some want a big house, others want the most walkable and the rest want the prettiest, coordination becomes harder.</p>
<p>Different Crypto projects have different ways to facilitate trustless transactions, but all of those depend heavily on decentralization. No matter how good the system, if few participate in it, or if few participants represent most of the controlling agents, then the system can be perverted.</p>
<p>But as with the co-op, decentralization in crypto projects comes at a cost. Depending on the nature of what is being transacted, or the participants’ tolerance to censorship, some protocols can make design decisions that make them a bit more centralized in exchange for being much faster, or cheaper. Solana is a good example of a protocol where it is much more expensive to help keep the system trustless, which makes at the moment a bit more centralized than say Ethereum, but in exchange it is much faster and much cheaper.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>A co-op buying many houses</strong></p>
<p>If the co-op wants to buy a ton more houses they can get more members, or they can also have the members agree on a process that can be automated. They can build their own co-op owned mini OpenDoor type system, and write a program that ingests a ton of data and build a model that outputs the right house to buy, and the target price. <br />
The more narrow the objective of this co-op buying these houses, the simpler the algorithm will be: it is simpler to aim for the biggest house than aiming to buy the biggest <em>and</em> somewhat walkable <em>and</em> cheaper than average house. Creating and maintaining consensus from the co-op members on a simple algorithm will be easier than on a more complex one.</p>
<p>We tend to talk about algorithms like they are all the same, but there is a big difference between simpler algorithms that are understandable, and highly complex ones where we only understand what goes in (the data) and what goes out (did we buy the right house?) but not how the decision was made.</p>
<p>When people need to know the consequences they can expect from these algorithms, and the ways in which they can improve them, complexity of algorithms has a great influence on the ability to decide which one to use.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Typical houses and weird houses</strong></p>
<p>Houses have tons of parts, but given the zoning regulations, their use is very limited. I can not sell stuff from my house, nor rent a bathroom per “visit”, or a room per hour. That limits the reasons for buying a house to a few: I either live in it, hold it for appreciation, or rent it (I could also rent a room, etc, but you get the point). If, however, I could do anything I want with the house, there would be more revenue streams, potentially many I can’t even imagine now, we would have more and more varied houses, and the usages could change and adapt over time. This house would be said to have more composability, because I can use each component - bathroom, each room, etc - differently and mix and match in various ways.</p>
<p>But if the co-op wanted to buy such a multifaceted and adaptable house, the decision would be even harder to make: there would be more things to agree on, and different members could want different, conflicting things.</p>
<p>In Crypto, the work of what the protocol does is programmatic. Simple programs with simple goals are easier to manage but can’t do very much. More complex programs can do more, but tend to be harder to manage, because different use cases may affect different participants (owner of the underlying token, user of the network, developers building apps on the network, and protectors of the trustless system - miners, validators, etc -) in different ways.</p>
<p>Ethereum is the first and biggest player in this space of multiple possibilities. As more use cases become possible (or are invented) more developers participate and more people use it. But also, as it serves many use cases with many constituents, it becomes a bit harder to manage, and competitors can emerge by focusing on specific use cases. As an example, the Crypto Kitties project, which started as a Non Fungible token (NFT) on Ethereum, built their own protocol, Flow, to specialize on that use case.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>The value of a house</strong></p>
<p>All markets, including the housing markets, need certain conditions to be a place where buyers and sellers can do business. Different conditions will affect the price of the asset.</p>
<p>For the housing market to come together we need more than trust and security. For example, if we don’t know if the market fees are going to be 3% or 30% when I sell, or if selling a house will take a week or 5 years, it is hard to price the asset and hold it long term. certainty might not be needed, but we can easily see how too much uncertainty negatively affects the price.</p>
<p>Or take a more radical thought experiment where unique conditions affect prices and use cases –</p>
<p>There is a cool idea proposed by Glen Wyl to combat price distortion in the housing market: imagine if every number of years, your house price was assessed by you, so in effect you decide the amount to be taxed by the city. Here is the kicker: at that price, anyone can bid on the house to take it from you; if you price it too low you pay little tax but risk losing the house; if you price too high, the opposite happens.</p>
<p>What we have gained with this radical system is better prices. What we have lost is predictability. What would happen to the housing market? At least for use cases that require long term predictability (say, raising a family, retiring and dying in that house), buying a house will become less attractive.</p>
<p>One of the biggest differences between Bitcoin and other projects is that it aims to be predictable. This makes sense since the asset it secures is Money itself. Other projects trade off against predictability in order to be generative: more use cases are possible when more things can be built on these protocols. Ethereum, as we mention, is the main participant in this generative space.</p>
<p>There are many different types of projects happening in Crypto.</p>
<p>Like with the house buying examples, some Crypto projects are open but not trustless, trustless but not decentralized, decentralized but not predictable.</p>
<p>Predictability can be good for some things (specially scarce and elastic goods - where price matters), and bad for others (generative, creative use cases which need composability).</p>
<p>Privacy may be a human right to some, and worthless to others (we might also be in one position one day, and in another in the future) and privacy may matter more or less depending on the activity.</p>
<p>Many of the scams in cryptoland are predicated on claims to have all of these qualities when they have some, often just one and on occasion none of these.</p>
<p>The legitimate projects focus on different use cases requiring more or less of each of these dimensions (trustless, decentralized, composable, predictable, private), and in these tradeoffs different opportunities emerge.</p>
Identity power energy2021-05-16T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2021/05/16/identity power energy<p>It is very hard to think clearly about things that affect our identity. We want things that benefit our identity to be true, and those that are not to be false.</p>
<p>When our identity is at stake, instead of trying to figure out if the idea is true or not, we search for reasons to accept ideas that support it and reject reasons that threaten it, and we do that to the detriment of ourselves.</p>
<p>Yet strong identities are not all bad: in practice, they can be useful in that they make it very easy to act with vigor when at stake.</p>
<p>Tying ourselves to a personal narrative helps us motivate ourselves and get others to join our cause; it gives us a place in the world and a community to belong.</p>
<p><em>Identity power energy</em> ™ can take the form of online trolls or other unproductive and even destructive behavior, but when pointed in the right direction, big identities can be really productive. Think of people like Gandhi and Harvey Milk, or Buffet and Musk, and how tying themselves to a particular personal narrative propelled them forward.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>There are a couple of interesting ways to manage this tension in our identity:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Paul Saffo’s maxim “strong opinions, weakly held” gives a way to let our beliefs get</p>
<p>in and out of our identity without so much trouble: it is a form of big, but flexible identity.</p>
<p>The idea is to make a forecast or form an opinion with whatever data is available, and then correct it as new information comes in. This is a very popular model, especially in the tech industry ever since Jeff Bezos calls it the number one sign of high intelligence.</p>
<p>Yet strong opinions weakly held have a couple of weak flanks.</p>
<p>For one, it is often a cover for bad decisions. Meaning, it is not used as a way to make decisions or form opinions, but as a way to explain why something did not work, independent of how the decision or opinion came to be.</p>
<p>It is also very tricky to put into practice. You want strong convictions but not too strong, otherwise, they become too hard to move. Identities are reinforcing, so the stronger the opinion, the harder it will be to let go.</p>
<p>Identities get fortified when attacked or when they become a source of pride. The stronger our convictions, the more open they become to attack or praise, and as a result the more likely they are to become solidified.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Another proposal is to try and keep our identity as small as possible. Paul Graham writes: “<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html">If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let a few things into your identity as possible</a>”.</p>
<p>But keeping our identity as minimal as possible seems only part of the solution because we wouldn’t want to sacrifice all that identity_ power energy_ ™ and what it can help us achieve.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Julia Grief advocates for having a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinking/dp/0735217556">Scout Mindset</a>, which she defines as the “motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were. Scout mindset is what allows you to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course.”</p>
<p>This can serve as a type of identity: you think of yourself as someone who is intellectually honest, someone who takes pride in holding probabilistic opinions, and who is ok changing your mind.</p>
<p>Instead of saying “strong opinions weakly held” Grief seems to say: some opinions you hold strongly and some weakly, and upon new evidence, these can change. Less catchy, but likely better.</p>
<p>Compared with the minimal identity proposed by PG, Grief suggests a “light identity”. If you power your identity with the scout mindset, you will get the flexibility of a small PG identity without losing the benefits of an expansive identity: you can belong to a community (think the rationalist or the effective altruism communities), build a personal narrative as a truth seeker, and get the identity energy when your values are threatened or when you have pride in who you are: It’s like clean nuclear energy for your identity.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>I really like Grief’s proposal, and many of the tips and tricks she shared in her book to keep yourself intellectually honest.</p>
<p>But maybe the idea of a well-defined identity is in itself a bit overextended. We are never exactly identical to ourselves, other than, as <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Simulacra-Simulation-Body-Theory-Materialism/dp/0472065211">Brouillard</a> points out, when we sleep or when we die. Not even what we say is ever identical to what we want to say. Our words never fully signify the meaning we intend for them.</p>
<p>And given that our own words escape our desired meanings, how are we to assume we fully know who someone else is - be that someone who shares our identity or someone who opposes it - if even their words escape their desired meaning as well?</p>
<p>The search for truth and precision will take us a long way in getting clarity within ourselves and the world around us, but what do we to do with the gaps that remain a mystery?</p>
<p>This question is relevant since many of the people that matter a great deal to us (our family, neighbors, etc) are likely not sharing our identity. We might not be able to understand them or them understand us.</p>
<p>So perhaps we should think of our identities as tools, an engine or booster that can help us achieve a certain goal faster. I personally like the identity of intellectual honesty or a scout mindset.</p>
<p>But sometimes this tool is not useful. Sometimes, we don’t know what we feel or we are still forming an opinion, or we can’t really tell what other people think or how they react to what we say. At those times, we should probably leave space for the mystery of what gets lost between words and meaning, both in our own selves and most importantly in our understanding of other people.</p>
<p>That mystery is a totally different type of energy, but also a very fruitful and powerful one.</p>
In defense of beautiful homes2021-04-26T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2021/04/26/beatutiful homes<p>It seems everyone is constantly thinking about their home: its size, layout, location, and looks. Almost all my social conversations touch on the function, form, and status of houses.</p>
<p>Homes are a problematic and constant topic of conversation in part because our homes have to do too many jobs.</p>
<p>Our homes serve as functional living spaces but also as wealth storage. They need to be close to work and close to school, and close to people you like and activities you enjoy.</p>
<p>Homes need to be pretty but also fit in with the neighborhood aesthetics: their somewhat permanent nature makes it hard to take any chances on them, and well, they are so expensive that you want minimum common denominator aesthetics to maximize the set of future buyers.</p>
<p>Homes are also scarce and increasingly expensive, which makes them ideal targets to use to pursue ever-higher social status. Our brains have us locked in competitive signaling dynamics, and homes have become one of the most visible arenas for that fight.</p>
<p>The center of attention is cost: rapidly increasing in value, homes are a good store of value, and good social signaling vehicles, making them more of a commodity and less of a unique possession. We want homes to be cheaper.</p>
<p>Home prices have increased about 70% since the 70s; why? There seem to be two main explanations. The public policy explanation is that we are not building enough housing: for example, <a href="https://www.economist.com/special-report/2020/01/16/how-housing-became-the-worlds-biggest-asset-class">in 1960, NYC permitted to build 13,000 housing units, but it allowed for only 21,000 in all of the ’90s</a>. Surprisingly, average construction costs in the USA have remained relatively steady in real terms since the 70s, staging at a range of 107 and 128 in 2015 USD.</p>
<p>The more significant change is in home sizes, which <a href="https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-living-space-per-person-has-nearly-doubled/#:~:text=Over%20the%20last%2042%20years,2%2C687%20square%20feet%20last%20year.">increased about 1,000 sq ft or 63% since the 1970s</a>, a change eerily similar to the increase in cost.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So homes are more expensive in good measure because homes have gotten bigger.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>One solution is to get bigger homes further out from city centers, where the land has not yet been appreciated.</p>
<p>In the 40s and 50s, the automobile and highways helped us expand from the city to the suburbs, but there was a limit to how far we could be from work. In the post covid world, we might see an expansion further out of suburbs into the mountain and beach towns an hour plus from work, or maybe to fully remote work In smaller and cheaper cities.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>But another solution is to get smaller houses. Why are today’s houses much bigger than in the 70s? Maybe there is some functional reaction to the growth in individualism, where kids want their own room, and parents want maximum comfort, but for the most part, I think this has to do with a convergence of forces making the house the ultimate status signal. A big house is a sign of prosperity and success.</p>
<p>Is there an alternative model to the big home as social status? Rory <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Curious-Science-Creating-Business/dp/006238841X">Sutherland from Ogilby </a>tells the story of envying the big home of their wealthiest friends. He realized he didn’t want that much space and that he didn’t even think these houses were particularly pretty; he just liked that they signaled success.</p>
<p>He also realized that what he cares about the most was his aesthetic sensibilities: a beautiful home would be valuable in itself, but it would also solve for status since he could tell himself that his house did not need to be the biggest since it was that prettiest.</p>
<p>As for function, his apartment building did not have an elevator so that wasn’t great (it served, however, as a great excuse to get a daily workout climbing stairs), but it was centrally located, which eliminated commute time. A clear preference for the aesthetic solution for all the functional and status issues.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Cookie-cutter, practical, easy to buy, and easy to sell houses are the norm today.</p>
<p>Beautiful and unique houses are rare. I think it is a good social strategy to emulate Sutherland, focusing more on aesthetics than on size.</p>
<p>I believe attention to beauty is an integral part of fixing our current troubled relationship with our homes.</p>
<p>I want to think more about the beauty of a home than about its size. This would require a shift in status signals, but I believe status signals can and do change.</p>
<p>Kevin Simler in the<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995"> Elephant in the Brain</a> points to David Foster Wallace’s essay on the Lobster, a low-class food in the 1800s, considered akin to rats and limited to one serving a week to prisoners to minimize cruelly. As we all know, these sea rats soon became very desirable and valuable.</p>
<p>Pretty houses are like Lobsters today, rare and in the right mindset, very desirable.</p>
Enough2021-03-12T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2021/03/12/enough<p>The author of the bestseller Catcher in the Rye, J.D Salinger, is at a fancy party in New York City. He is talking to a friend when a magnate passes by. His friend says to him: J.D, that guy who just passed makes more money in a year than you have ever made with your book. To which, Mr. Salinger replies: but I have something he does not have. What is that? Asks the friend. <em>Enough</em> says Salinger, enough.</p>
<p>I have made several Google searches on this story and have not confirmed it is true. But I like it a ton and constantly share it with friends. I recently shared it with a dear friend, in the context of Bitcoin, and specifically the <em>hodl</em> culture. He mentioned how bitcoiners often feel they don’t have enough BTC and always want to buy more; how they would never want to sell their stash.</p>
<p>I like Bitcoin. It can diffuse political power, abolish the taxation of the poor via inflation, and provide better pricing and a more efficient market. I think Bitcoin is good for the world. Yet, my friend’s conversation reminded me a little bit of the One Ring to rule them all.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I am currently reading the Lord of the Ring with my kids, and I have perfected my impersonation of Gollum. As my friend and I kept talking about the _hodl _ culture, I interrupted with my Gollum voice, “my precious, yes, yes, my precious.” That Ring is scary. The holders of the One Ring not so much have it, as it has them.</p>
<p>Long-term holders are an essential component of the bitcoin network. In a sense, they are scarcity validators: they are the social counterpart to the algorithm that limits the minting of BTC to 21 million. By holding, they say: I believe the 21M limit is true, and I am acting accordingly. Their long-term holding is also rational: they expect others to think the same at some point, which will further raise the asset’s price.</p>
<p><em>Hodling</em> is good for the bitcoin network’s health, and I would say for the world at large, but also, maybe it is bad for people to _hodl _ too much and too tight because it turns them into Smeagol, maybe even into Gollum?</p>
<p>What the Ring shows is that owning a thing can be a nuanced affair. In one sense, the Baggins have the ring. In another sense, the Ring has them. The same thing may happen with Bitcoin.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Judaism has the idea of Shmita. Every seventh year, the land must rest fallow, and whatever grows in it is given out for free. In Judaism, the land is yours, but not in the same way we think about land ownership in modern, capitalistic societies. With Shmita, people are both an owner and a steward of the land: they own the land to their benefit and the benefit of others.</p>
<p>So here is a different way to think about <em>hodling</em> . Some of that BTC you own is yours to keep and enjoy. But at some point, you must be able to say enough; otherwise, the BTC starts owning you, like the Ring owned Gollum.</p>
<p>Still, you want to keep all that Bitcoin to protect and promote the Bitcoin network. In doing so, you can think of yourself not so much as the owner of that BTC, but as the keeper of those coins. You will keep them safe and out of the market, but they are not yours anymore.</p>
<p>The Bitcoin that is not yours is of whomever you decide. Maybe at some point, you give them to someone who will <em>hodl</em> as well as you. Or you gift them to people in need who can make good use of them. Or maybe you want to distribute them equally to everyone in the Bitcoin network, in which case you could burn them and lower the available supply.</p>
<p>You have the BTCs, but they are not all yours, because at some point you say alongside Salinger, I have enough.</p>
Types of entrepeneurs2021-02-03T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2021/02/03/types-of-entrepreneurs<p>I have noticed three main recurrent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes">archetypes</a> in entrepreneurs: artisans, business people, and politicians. These, I think, are core motivations or predispositions that drive entrepreneurs to start new companies.</p>
<p>Artisans can singularly materialize ideas. They take pride in their work, pleasure in practice, and enjoy the process of increasing abilities over time. Their goal can be building <a href="https://about.google/our-story/">something others can’t</a>, building something simpler than others, or something more fun or beautiful. <a href="https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3497-you-know-one-of-the-things-that-really-hurt">The artisan attends to details and respects the creative process. </a></p>
<p>Business people want power, principally in the form of money, but often they also wish for fame. They look for <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/706779-your-margin-is-my-opportunity">opportunities in others’ margins </a>or for products where they can charge <a href="https://www.azquotes.com/quote/722081">luxury margins</a>. The biggest strength is a deep understanding of <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/">what people want to use and pay</a>.</p>
<p>Politicians want to change the world. They want a group of people (which can include the entire human race) to <a href="https://www.azquotes.com/quote/325530">relate to each other</a> or to the<a href="https://www.tesla.com/about#:~:text=Tesla's%20mission%20is%20to%20accelerate,to%20drive%20than%20gasoline%20cars."> world around them</a> in a different and better way. They recognize that business is an excellent way for the creative and independent-minded to make a dent in the world.</p>
<p>No one is just one of these archetypes. Entrepreneurs tend to have different combinations of the three. To illustrate this idea, below I speculate on the archetype configurations of three famous entrepreneurs:</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gheller.co/assets/titans.png" alt="titans" /></p>
<p>One of the reasons these three guys are legendary is that they are the best in the world in one of these archetypes and top 99% on the other two.</p>
<p>They did not start this way; people change and learn. As a result, these archetypes are not static: each person may start more heavily weighted on one dimension and change over time.</p>
<p>Still, what type of value entrepreneurs create will be influenced by their archetypes: some will bring better products, others cheaper products, and others novel products that change how we interact with each other and the world around us.</p>
<p>It is also interesting to think about how different startup advice matches different archetypes: I think “build something people want” aims at helping artisans become more business minded. the “MVP” philosophy is aimed at helping business people think about the iterative nature of a craft. “Move fast and break things” is meant to help artisans think more like politicians; to show how the world can be changed (hopefully for the better) if you put enough energy behind your efforts.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I personally find these archetypes useful in understanding my evolving motivations and understanding other entrepreneurs’ motivations. They serve as a useful mental model to use, at least for me (hopefully for you too?), when thinking about entrepreneurs.</p>
Rates of absorption2021-01-27T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2021/01/27/rates-of-absorption<p>The value we assign to things or actions depends in part on how we use them.</p>
<p>Killing is a terrible thing unless it is for self-defense. Lying is no good, but it can indeed be very good if used to save someone’s life. Drugs, TV, computer code, and many other things are valued depending on what use we make of them.</p>
<p>Another interesting modulator of value that sometimes goes unnoticed is the rate of absorption or use. How quickly we get something affects how we value it.</p>
<p>The first time I noticed this was in nutrition science literature, where evidence suggests <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Chance-Beating-Against-Processed/dp/0142180432">carbs cause troubles in refined forms</a> because they get processed too fast when digested.</p>
<p>In nature, carbs come bundled with soluble and insoluble fiber. These fibers coat the digestive tracks’ walls, slowing down the carbs’ absorption rate into the bloodstream.</p>
<p>When carbs are refined, they lose the fiber and get absolved rather quickly, overwhelming our metabolism with more energy than needed. As a result, the unused resources get stored as fat in our bodies.</p>
<p>More recently, an <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyMjAxNTcsInBvc3RfaWQiOjMxODQ1NTU0LCJfIjoiNDdLSnkiLCJpYXQiOjE2MTE3ODc2MTcsImV4cCI6MTYxMTc5MTIxNywiaXNzIjoicHViLTg5MTIwIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.U4NQ033EHQ-c3BDbSiAHvY_Ir3a4Sad9JzIxYao64lA">Astral Codex Ten</a> blog cited a study on amphetamines, which suggests that the real difference between the commercial drug Adderall and the street drug Meth is their different administration form.</p>
<p>Adderall the pill has a slower rate of absorption than smoked or injected Meth. As the author points out, something similar is likely happening in the addictive levels of cocaine (snorted) vs. crack cocaine (smoked).</p>
<p>Another example of something subject to the rate of absorption is the value of wealth accumulation.</p>
<p>The National Endowment for Financial Education (<a href="https://www.nefe.org/news/2018/01/research-statistic-on-financial-windfalls-and-bankruptcy.aspx#:~:text=DENVER%20%E2%80%94%20Over%20the%20past%20couple,receiving%20a%20large%20financial%20windfall.">NEFE</a>) states that 70% of lottery winners end up bankrupt in just a few years after receiving a large financial windfall. The reason is not the passing of a certain threshold of wealth (others of presumably comparable background have equal financial wealth), but rather how quickly they came to have their wealth.</p>
<p>A similar dynamic, I think, takes place with external validation. Too much too quickly is usually not a good thing. I have heard it said that celebrities get stuck at the age they become famous and have seen something similar play out with popular kids who peaked in high school.</p>
<p>Other examples show how the rate of absorption can also affect large groups of people.</p>
<p>In economics, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse">Resource Curse</a> refers to mono-producing commodity countries’ tendency to have worse-performing economies than average. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pablo_P%C3%A9rez_Alfonzo">Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso</a>, a key figure in creating the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), epitomized the curse when he referred to oil as the “Devil’s excrement.”</p>
<p>Yet, there is Norway, which found oil at a later period of its life. A nation once organized as a fishing society, Norway had the right institutions to make good use of it, much like a family that slowly grows its wealth and can be ready to receive a significant windfall when the values and skills are strong and ready.</p>
<p>Often, in political issues there is resistance to fast rates of absorption. In casual conversations with conservative friends, I have noticed that often one of their rejection of liberal identity politics (beyond the singular focus on it) is the speed at which these changes take place.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Many things have had a fairly stable rate of absorption for the longest time. Take learning. Its rate of absorption hasn’t really changed since the invention of reading. We have developed some techniques for faster recall, but nothing of the impact of reading.</p>
<p>What will happen when we figure out how to increase the rate of absorption of learning dramatically? Imagine a brain-computer interface like in the movie The Matrix: would that type of fast learning be harmful? The Matrix seemed to believe dosing of new information was important (one of the remarkable things about Neo was how much he could upload to his brain), and given the examples above, maybe there will be some truth to that.</p>
<p>A slow absorption rate can also be a problem. Catalytic events, network effects, acquiring new skills, among others, require a certain tempo to materialize. Without the right rate of absorption, the phenomenon dwindles away. In these cases harm could be inflicted, likely by inaction.</p>
<p>What’s less intuitive to me is how similar things can have dramatically different effects depending on how quickly we use them or absorb them.</p>
<p>I don’t know why absorption rates matter, but clearly, many things are okay when acquired up to a certain pace, and beyond that, they damage us.</p>
<p>What is clear is that, as it makes sense to consider the use of things when assessing their value, it seems equally reasonable to think about the rate of use or absorption.</p>
Diffusion of power2021-01-23T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2021/01/23/diffusion-of-power<p><strong>I</strong></p>
<p>I was born and raised in Venezuela. Twenty-plus years of Hugo Chavez’s Chavismo left me with a deep suspicion of power.</p>
<p>Add to that Trump’s presidency (and the constant parade of politicians consumed by power before that), the myriad of corrupt and extractive corporate and financial tycoons, and the yearly news of disingenuous religious leaders and the suspicion only grows stronger.</p>
<p>I used to deeply wish for good men to take positions of power - to some degree I still do. For the longest time, I personally wanted to take on roles of power because, naturally, I think of myself as a good person and thought I could do good.</p>
<p>As time passes, I find myself increasingly uninterested by the idea of having power and, more broadly, wishing for all these power positions to concentrate less power. I am increasingly interested in diffusing power, as I believe it to be a very effective way to do good.</p>
<p>In a<a href="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/havel.html"> beautiful brief speech</a> (which I strongly recommend you read) given upon accepting the Sonning Prize, Václav Havel meditated on what drives people to seek power. He identifies three main reasons: their ideas on how to better organize society, the longing for self-affirmation, and the perks.</p>
<p>Havel reflects on how the last two tend to overcrowd the first. He was trying to understand how power slowly becomes a goal in itself and how as power concentrates and tends to the absolute, it ends up corrupting absolutely, as Lord Acton famously said.</p>
<p>As president of Czechoslovakia, every day afforded Havel the opportunity to change the world for the better, affirming his identity as useful and loved by many.</p>
<p>Havel was indeed an essential man: he did not sit in waiting rooms or traffic waiting for the red light to change; he did not cook his meals or place his own calls. None of these things were more important than his daily work of running an entire nation.</p>
<p>These privileges are all fine and well. The challenge is: can we tell when someone crosses the line, from sensical privileges to abusive? There isn’t a straightforward, hard-line. More importantly, can the person in power tell? Well, that’s even harder.</p>
<p>Havel realized that while power affords self-affirmation, in the process, it robs people of their identity. The person who first wanted to limit the influence of power was changed by power. As he sees it: “Someone who forgets how to drive a car, do the shopping, make himself a coffee, and place a telephone call is not the same person who had known how to do those things all his life.”</p>
<p>For Havel, the conclusion is that power is a “job for modest people, for people who cannot be deceived”.</p>
<p>I think this is true, yet it is not nearly enough.</p>
<p><strong>II</strong></p>
<p>How do people accumulate power?</p>
<p>The first way is physical violence, the oldest and most enduring reason, yet decreasingly important, as physical threats are easier to ascertain and economic interdependence lower the payout of violence.</p>
<p>Persuasion and narrative control are also as old as power and growing in importance as new forms of communication provide a global audience.</p>
<p>And then there are economies of scale and network effects, or the benefits of being big.</p>
<p>As with the motivations for getting power, the methods for getting it are also deeply interconnected. And in this case, I believe it is the size and scale that subsumes and overcrowds everything else.</p>
<p>The best explanation I can find for why institutions get big is Coase’s theory of the firm. Coase argues that firms grow when internal coordination is easier and cheaper than transacting amongst different entities in the open market.</p>
<p>In imperfect markets, there is a cost associated with price discovery (benchmarking, negotiating, agreeing on terms). Inside a firm, prices and contracts are easier to set, so functions and products get internalized. As more things come inside the firm, it gets bigger. The bigger it gets, the easier it is to compete with others because costs go down and margins go up. The bigger firms get so does their market share, which reduces the cost of marketing and distribution.</p>
<p>As firms, parties and religious groups get too big, they fail to serve well smaller niches of their markets. This opens the door for smaller competitors, who can thrive caring for a smaller market, or grow to replace the incumbent if the market they serve overshadows the rest.</p>
<p>Yet, when companies get too big, they can cut out the basic supplies needed for smaller competitors to serve niche markets. When that happens, antitrust laws are enacted to limit their power. In politics, voting and election rules can be tinkered with to curtail the most powerful.</p>
<p>Yet laws and regulation are not always as effective as we would like.</p>
<p>In Judaism, there is this idea of building a fence around the Torah.</p>
<p>Following the law of the Torah is at times challenging and yet always so important that more laws are created to keep you from breaking the core laws. That’s the fence: laws designed to protect laws. For the layman, such fences are also built, to keep men from abusing positions of power.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the more laws are created, the harder they are to follow, which makes it harder to know if you are drawing inside the lines or outside. As complexity increases, laws tend to become harder to follow, and hence more unfair (for how can a law be fair if people can’t understand it).</p>
<p>As anyone who has kids knows, few and simple rules, which are easy to follow and enforce, do better. The challenge tends to be that, in big and complex legal systems, those who make the laws have the most power (that’s how the system got big and complex in the first place). And as power moves from doers to rule-makers, things end up worse off.</p>
<p><strong>III</strong></p>
<p>The right amount of power is like water. Too much concerntration of power and we get ice; a static system that can’t change. Complete dissipation of power and we get a gas; the random bouncing of particles that can’t coordinate. We want power to be, as the Santa Fe Institute crew says, at the edge of chaos; sufficiently well structured that organization and coordination is possible, but suffictly loose that change and learning is constantly happening.</p>
<p>I think we are coming out of an ice age of power. My fellow countryman Moises Naim calls this <a href="https://www.amazon.com/End-Power-Boardrooms-Battlefields-Churches/dp/1469031205">the end of power</a>. Big nations-states are breaking; since WWII, the number of nation-states tripled. Minority parties continue to grow in number and representation in Europe. We have more primaries than ever in the U.S. Around the globe, there are very few dictators left .</p>
<p>The role of government is being unbundled: Bitcoin is disrupting monetary policy, Gofundme, Khan Academy and the kickstarters of the world are complementing fiscal policy. SpaceX is privatizing NASA.</p>
<p>And yet, executive power is ever expanding in the US, state surveillance continues to increase, and the rise of China represents a massive black hole of power.</p>
<p>Companies stay less time on the S&P 500, CEOs last less on their tenure, popular brands have more dramatic arcs and new technologies are constantly redefining how we do basic things like communicating, eating and moving.</p>
<p>Still, the gap between CEO compensation and average employees is rapidly rising, real wages are stagnant, and inflation in essentials like education and healthcare is rampant.</p>
<p>Tiktokers, youtubers and podcasters are creating one-person media empires, while NYT and the likes are turning into technology companies to better serve (and better ad target) their audience.</p>
<p>As power thaws, some are trying to keep it cool, while others want it to evaporate.</p>
<p>There are jobs to be done in each of these camps. I for one, want to contribute to a productive diffusion of power. To do that, power certainly cannot be overly concentrated, but neither can there be total chaos.</p>
<p><strong>IV</strong></p>
<p>To keep power at the edge of chaos, we need some things to be very stable and dependable, so that other things can be very surprising and unpredictable. Is like life: we need the DNA to be super stable, so evolution can run its experiments, environment and randomness conditioning individuals in all sorts of weird and unexpected ways. There is no individualism in biology without stable foundations. I think this is also true in society, and specifically as it relates to power.</p>
<p>This means that we need a hierarchy: stability, predictability and trust at the foundation vs. change, surprise and competition at the surface.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>There are many projects out there today trying to build foundations that allow for the diffusion of power, or supporting agents that diffuse power via competitive means.</p>
<p>Here is a list of some interesting examples:</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Financial</span></p>
<p>Stable foundation: <a href="https://squarecrypto.org/bitcoin.pdf">Bitcoin</a>. I believe Hayek when he said prices transmit information. For an economy to work we need prices to do their work. The concentration of monetary policy power in the hand of a selected few nations had led to the abuse of money via debasing. BTC solves for trust and predictability, taking control from the few, and giving it to anyone who wants to participate.</p>
<p>Surprising surface: Fintech generally is an example here. In particular, <a href="https://aven.com/">Aven</a> invented the first asset-backed credit card. Wealth is a virtuous cycle: it accumulates, protecting against inflation, and bringing access to the debt via collateralizing the assets. People without assets are left out. With Aven, people can use a house or a car to get competitive credit terms, leveling the playing field.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Commerce</span></p>
<p>Foundation: The best counterbalance to the increasing concentration of power of Amazon is not legislation, and is not going back to the past; is <a href="shopify.com">Shopify</a>. Allowing more sellers to go independent with a business model that is transparent and aligned helps diffuse power in ecommerce. Shopify is the main component, but there are many more: there are many other pieces where it is hard for an independent seller to compete with Amazon and where other companies can help by setting the right foundations: for example, <a href="https://returnly.com/">Returnly</a> provides an Amazon level platform for returning products to any seller.</p>
<p>Surface: Beauty is probably the commerce category that has the most influence on power dynamics. What we deem beautiful influences identities and notions of self-worth. <a href="https://www.glossier.com/">Glossier</a>, a direct to consumer, customer driven beauty brand, that makes it ok to be yourself, is transforming and diffusing power dynamics around appearances.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Social</span></p>
<p>Foundation: <a href="https://twitter.com/bluesky?lang=en">Bluesky</a> wants to build an open and decentralized standard for social media. Social media power resides in the control of wallgarden identities and its connections. If we want to see power diffused here, we need stable standards everyone can trust at the foundation: identity and connections.</p>
<p>Surface: Most social networks have a content wedge. Sure, Facebook and Twitter support video, but Youtube and Tinktok rule it. Different content types yield different networks because different talent and interests are attracted to different formats. <a href="https://www.joinclubhouse.com/">Clubhouse</a> created a new type of format - drop-in audio chat. The content types and it’s containers - Rooms - bring a specific type of creator and a unique audience. In doing so, Clubhouse is diffusing power in social networks.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Creative tools</span></p>
<p>Foundation: A ton of creative tools are native desktop apps, that need the computational power and low latency of the edge to get things done. The creation, maintenance and distribution of these software is expensive, and so power concentrates in a few companies. <a href="https://get.webgl.org/">WEBGL</a> is a key component in rendering graphics on the browser (the browser in turn is one of the greatest power diffusers in technology). The better an open standard like WEBGL gets, the more surprising things can be built without the permission of those in power</p>
<p>Surface: <a href="figma.com">Figma</a> is the harbinger of surprising apps built on WEBGL. A decade ago, It would have been impossible to imagine Photoshop on the web, now all sorts of surprising new things are possible because WEBGL has improved dramatically ( also, paired with the improvements in <a href="https://webrtc.org/">WEBRTC</a>, real time collaboration becomes possible) .</p>
<p>It is also interesting to think of new powerful platforms disrupting older ones. An example: digital audio workstations are desktop bound and expert tailored; things like <a href="https://bounce.town/">Bounce</a> can use the app store, which competes with the desktop, to make DAWs more accessible in surprising and cool ways.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>These are just a few which are already happening.</p>
<p>There are many new frontiers opening up for power diffusion: new charter cities to compete with old ones, new voting mechanism like quadratic voting to better reflect the preferences of individual in collective decisions, more radical market solutions to property (I like <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-Democracy/dp/0691177503">Weyl’s idea</a> of having houses in an open market, priced by the owner to minimize tax but also to minimize odds of having someone else buy the house From her!). I even think of brain-computer interfaces as a power diffusion technology, in that it can counterbalance the growing power of AI systems.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Stuart Kaufman has a beautiful way of thinking about the edge of chaos. For him the context is biology, but I believe it applies to power as well: “Matter has managed to evolve as best it can. And we are at home in the universe. It’s not Panglossian, because there’s a lot of pain. You can go extinct, or broke. But here we are on the edge of chaos because that’s where, on average, we all do the best”</p>
<p>At times when the alternatives seem to be the conservation of power structures or their complete destruction, I think finding creative ways to diffuse power is an important, interesting, and profitable endeavor.</p>
Brain and Mind2020-12-17T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2020/12/17/brain-and-mind<p>We have many reasons to be optimistic about our increased understanding of the brain. We have certainly learned quite a bit already, and current scientific efforts are likely to reveal much more in the future.</p>
<p>The brain speaks the language of nature: biology, chemistry, and physics. Our tools for understanding the workings of nature are improving, and so we continue to make steady progress. In this journey, the brain is slowly revealing its secrets.</p>
<p>Some of the brain’s output have the making of nature: chemical reactions, electricity, mechanics. Other outputs, however, seem different: its thoughts, intentions, reasons, and fantasies, the way things feel, smell, taste, and sound to us - what we usually refer to as our mind - appear to be different types than say, the movement of my arm or the beating of my heart.</p>
<p>For many, the hope is that a deeper understanding of the brain will reveal the mind’s functioning. Those who believe this expect to map what we think, feel, and dream to the brain’s specific activities. This would provide a correlation between the mind’s subjective experience and the objective activities in the brain.</p>
<p>Others believe this pursuit will fail.</p>
<p>Some people believe this deep subjective experience we call our mind is nothing but an illusion. They think our brains have evolved to trick us into believing we have a rich internal life when in reality, it is making it all up in real-time, a bit like the movie Matrix, but the simulation is running on the edge in our brains.</p>
<p>Others, of more classical inclination, believe the mind is a real, subjective, likely immaterial thing.</p>
<p>The subjective experience certainly feels real to each of us. It seems very hard to suppose each subjective experience has a perfect correlation in a material representation in the brain. What it is and how it relates to the material brain is a question with many answers. Still, to those who believe this, there is an equally heavy burden of proof on those who think the mind experience is illusory or perfectly representable in organic - brain - matter.
<br />
<br />
<strong>I</strong></p>
<p>One of the most exciting things in brain science is our ability to probe a brain with microelectrodes, while the person is perfectly conscious and awake. In doing so, we can see people act or experience things as a direct result of these electrical stimulations. Indeed, there are many experiments where simple sensations – say a flash of the color blue, or the smell of roses – have been generated via direct stimulation of the correct brain region.</p>
<p>We have also seen successful experiments where certain volitions are translated into brain signals. We read the signals and know what the person wanted to see or do. People who have lost mobility can connect to a brain-computer interface and translate their thoughts for things like “move arm and grab Apple” into code that controls a mechanical arm. That is, the person can control a machine with their thoughts.</p>
<p>At first, the idea of sending tiny electrical currents into someone’s brain while they are awake seems strange and cruel. Still, two conditions have been made possible: first, neurosurgeons who need to remove an unhealthy area of the brain must first make sure they don’t cut the wrong piece of tissue, so they test what areas do what by stimulating them. Second, and more importantly, the brain does not feel pain. It can certainly process it and send signals to different parts of the body, but evolution was not expecting anyone to tinker inside our brains directly, so did not bother to place pain receptors there. Hence, once the skull has been lifted open (that does require anesthesia), we don’t feel anything done on the brain -</p>
<p>Certain brain regions map directly to experiences such as vision, hearing, language understanding, and others, strongly suggesting that the mind and the brain are the same things. More broadly, biology has proven that our brains are the function of the same material process that evolved everything else in the living world. If human beings are the outcome of a material process, we should expect human beings to be material beings.</p>
<p>Often, what we have explained in non-material terms is a phenomenon that needs to be explained at a different level of abstraction.</p>
<p>For example, the heart is an organ with parts (valves, muscles) that enable it to attain certain bodily functions (distribute blood to the body). The heart is made up of different types of cells for different parts of the organ, but all follow basic properties common to all cells. These cells, in turn, are made of atoms organized in various configurations.</p>
<p>It makes no sense to explain the role of the heart in the body, or how the heart works, or how the cells in the heart work in terms of the physics of atoms, yet physics, chemistry, and biology are congruent, and so it should be possible to do so. Pressure, electricity, chemical reactions, and cell biology are all underpinning the functioning of the heart.</p>
<p>Something similar may apply to the brain: we describe ourselves in mentalistic states like “I wonder if I should have breakfast now” but we are making steady progress in having an equivalent description in terms of a set of states of our neurons.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the pursuit of truth via scientific inquiry requires the presentation of verifiable and reproducible evidence. The mind, however, rests on subjective evidence - my experience of things -.</p>
<p>Consider Daniel Dennett hypothetical, which sheds light on this challenge:</p>
<p>Imagine you wake up after neurosurgery to discover grass looks red, and the sky seems yellow. What happened? Maybe some neurowires got crossed and affected your perception of color. Or, perhaps, the surgery tampered with something in your memory that makes you think grass was green and the sky was blue.</p>
<p>The only way to know which of these two is trustworthy is by asking the neurosurgeon. We can’t rely on our experience and mental states to determine what has happened; we need a third person’s evidence to know the truth. It is indeed hard to think of the mind as an entirely subjective thing since it would be impossible to know anything about it truly.</p>
<p>Or, Imagine a future where we have finally achieved a full understanding of how the brain works. In this future lives a world-renowned neuroscientist by the name of Mary. Her field of specialization is color perception. She fully understands the physics of colors and the physiology of their perception. Yet, she has never seen color. She has lived in a black and white room all her life. <br />
Now, let’s assume she finally can leave the room and, once outside, sees the color red for the first time.</p>
<p>Paul Churchland, who I think first came up with Mary’s scenario, asks: Has Mary learned anything new about color by looking at the color red? Maybe she didn’t learn anything new but rather now knows the same thing, not merely by description, but also by experience. Or perhaps she learned how to recognize and imagine the color red, but not really learned a new thing.</p>
<p>Maybe, the mind is whatever happens in the brain, and that is all there is to it.
<br />
<br />
<strong>II</strong></p>
<p>If there is such a thing as a mind, it is likely not what it seems.</p>
<p>Think about the blind spots in our visual perception, how, for example, we don’t really see our nose sticking in the middle of our visual field. Perception is designed not to show us what we see, but to give us a representation of the stable world in front of us. What is incredible, this representation of the world is not only lacking from what our external organs can capture, but it is not stored somewhere in the mind; it is actually generated on demand.</p>
<p>An interesting example is a syndrome called visual neglect, where those who suffer it can’t see one side of their visual field. What is fascinating is that they go on living their lives with a sense of a complete visual world; they just don’t know one half is missing.</p>
<p>We experience access to our conscious mind and sense of self, but a lot may be hidden from us in reality.</p>
<p>There is ample evidence that the actions we take are done <em>before</em> our brain is conscious of it. The brain keeps a model of reality and uses it to anticipate what it will experience. Before you even touch or see something, the brain already created a model of it.</p>
<p>If that does not seem to map to your experience, it is because the brain pushed consciousness of the event back in time, to account for the action. That is, the mind is a trick the brain deliberately plays on all of us.</p>
<p>For me, the most exciting experiments shedding light on the illusion of self and consciousness were conceived by Michael Gazzaniga, a behavioral neuroscientist who worked with patients who had the left and right hemispheres of their brain disconnected to prevent seizures.</p>
<p>The experiments consisted of feeding information to one side of the brain and asking the other - disconnected side - to process it.</p>
<p>Imagine a setup where you could show information to only one of the subject’s eyes. The word “face” is flashed to the right-field view. Input received on the right side is processed at the left side of the brain, dominant for language processing. Then, the subject is asked to write what it saw and successfully writes “face”.</p>
<p>Then, the word “face” is shown to the left-field view, but because the right side of the brain cannot share information with the left, it cannot say what it saw. And yet, when asked to draw something, the subject draws a face.</p>
<p>As if this wasn’t surprising enough, a fascinating part comes when the subject is asked why it drew a face. In this setup, subjects consistently made something up. They would say they drew it because they were feeling happy, or they wanted to draw. These replies were not performative; subjects believe what they are saying.</p>
<p>Another interesting experiment, this time applied to memory:</p>
<p>Dr. Claparède visits a patient with amnesia. The patient never recalls meeting him, and he must re-introduce himself every time. One day, Dr. Claparède reaches out to shake her hand as usual, but this time, he concealed a pin in his hand. Naturally, the patient withdrew her hand in pain.</p>
<p>On the next visit, the patient as usual failed to recognize him, but this time, she refused to shake his hand.</p>
<p>Daniel Wegner and Timothy Wilson call this form of thinking and acting the adaptive unconscious. It accounts for our ability to act and learn without us being aware of it.</p>
<p>The difference between this adaptive unconscious and our experience conscientiousness is akin to the system one and system two from Khaneman, in thinking fast and slow: one system or self is fast and reflective, the other is slow and rational.</p>
<p>We can see these two consciousnesses or systems in distinct brain pathways: there are neural pathways that form from the sensory thalamus to the amygdala, which allows for fast, unconscious reactions. A different path is available for the common sense of mind and consciousness: it first goes out of the cortex and then to the amygdala.</p>
<p>We believe that actions follow thoughts, but in reality, there is often a hidden third explanatory variable that accounts for the action: the adaptive unconscious.</p>
<p>It can then be pointless to try to examine our mind by introspection because, at least in part, it is designed to hide from us. We end up looking at our actions and then constructing a narrative that makes us feel good about ourselves. It makes little sense to talk about a single self and a single mind; we are often of different minds. The experience of consciousness entails providing some consistency to people’s experiences.</p>
<p>Introspection then involves constructing a story; many of the facts for the biography must be inferred, rather than directly observed. Introspection is akin to writing a self-biography.</p>
<p>It may seem we lie to ourselves because we need our adaptive unconscious to be fast.</p>
<p>We certainly don’t have intuitive access or introspection into perception, memory, language processing, likely because they developed before the brain features that enable consciousness where developed. They have stayed outside of the purview of the conscious experience most likely for reasons of expediency.</p>
<p>There are endless stories we can tell ourselves. It might be useful for some people to think of themselves as honest, while others benefit more to think of themselves as friendly. Whichever is most valuable is a function of some internal compositions (it is said 20-50 of personality traits are genetically determined) and social settings.</p>
<p>As a given model of self gets used repeatedly, it becomes chronically accessible, meaning they are the fastest model to load and the easiest to use.</p>
<p>What’s most puzzling to me is why we can’t detect our own confabulations.</p>
<p>Some behaviorist scientists that focus on evolutionary explanations have pointed out that the best way to convince others of our dispositions (say honest or friendly), is to convince ourselves first. To be great liars, we need first to be great at lying to ourselves.</p>
<p>Perhaps this idea that the mind is the executive in chief of our lives might be an illusion. Maybe what we think as the conscious mind is not animating the brain’s activity, but rather is at its peripheries, creating lies as we go, to make sense of it all.
<br />
<br />
<strong>III</strong></p>
<p>I am now considering having breakfast. I am trying to figure out if I am hungry enough to eat or if I should wait a bit longer. This thought depends on other mental states: my belief that there is a certain level of hunger that justifies eating, which in turn relies on my belief that feeling some level of hunger is not bad, or perhaps even good, which in turn depends on a belief I hold regarding the role of rationally in my experience of bodily sensations, and so on, and so forth.</p>
<p>These relationships cannot be described with the mechanics of cause and effect that served us well in understanding things like vision or hearing - and the physics of the brain that enacts them -; because all these variables that go into my decision of what to eat are something else: they are relational, symbolic, logical in nature.</p>
<p>I decided instead to drink some tea. It has a specific taste, odor, texture, and color. Yet, the particles that make up the tea have none of these properties. In fact, there is tons of space between the atoms that compose the tea, yet I experience it as a liquid.</p>
<p>What happens is these atoms are arranged so that my sensory organs perceived them as having all these qualities. Of course, my sensory organs and my brain have the same material features. And yet, these qualities do exist in what we experience to be our mind. It would seem, then, that the mind is real and nonetheless substantially different than the brain.</p>
<p>Thomas Nagel pointed out that the puzzling thing here is not that my tea feels this way or another, but simply that there is such a thing as “feeling like” something. It is interesting because that seems to be a relevant fact that needs to be accounted for, but it is hard to do so on material grounds.</p>
<p>Thinking on this topic, Nagel offers a fascinating thought experiment: try to imagine the experience of a bat, an animal that uses echolocation to find its way around. One has to speculate that their experience must be very radically different from ours. We may investigate their brain and nervous system’s inner workings, but clearly, that won’t reveal the bat’s perceptual experience; it won’t tell us anything about what it is like to be a bat. So again, the puzzling thing is that there are such things as “being like” someone.</p>
<p>There also seems to be a subjective experience of meaning and knowledge. In exploring this, John Searle came up with the now classic Chinese Room thought experiment:</p>
<p>Imagine someone is inside a room, locked in with a Chinese to English dictionary, a pen, and a paper. The room has a small opening where the person can receive pieces of paper.</p>
<p>Outside, someone who doesn’t know how this room operates introduces a piece of paper with a phrase written in Chinese and after a brief moment, gets a paper in return with the English translation. Assume the person inside has a great dictionary and as a result, the person outside experiences translations indistinguishable from a native Chinese speaker.</p>
<p>The person inside the room has operated a bit like a computer, manipulating symbols according to specific physical properties (in this case, their shape) and in doing so, arrived at the desired outcome. Yet, it can’t be said the person inside the room understands Chinese since she does not know the meaning of anything she is writing.</p>
<p>Maybe the person inside does not understand Chinese, but perhaps the whole system of room, dictionary, person, etc. can be said to understand it? On this, Searle points out that the system can only be said to understand relative to our interests and our interpretation. What makes the Chinese room a system that computes translation is what we are making of it. <br />
<br />
Any organized matter - a tree, a wall, the mitochondria, anything really - can be used as a system of inputs and outputs and turned into a computational device. Sure, this could be technically unreasonable, but it is certainly possible. What makes a particular arrangement of atoms a wall and not a computer is the use we give to it.</p>
<p><br />
Think of a knife: indeed, there are material limitations to what a knife can be made of: it can be made out of steel or plastic, but it cannot be made out of cream cheese. Yet it is not the material that makes the knife, but the use we give it. A knife is only a knife in relation to a subject and its use of the object.</p>
<p>The same thing happens in the mind. A single physical structure - a specific neuronal firing pattern - can potentially represent various subjective experiences we think of as radically different: For the brain, there might not be a difference between X, the representation of X and the representation of the representation of X. If the mind was equal to matter, it would be hard to see how these different experiences would be possible.</p>
<p>Conversely, multiple physical representations can have a singular meaning. Take a one-dollar bill, a one-dollar coin or a one-dollar digital record on a bank account; these are all the same dollar, despite different material subtracts. What makes them the same thing is a social consensus on value and meaning, both attributes which are hard or perhaps impossible to reduce to physics.</p>
<p>For the brain, the arrangement for firing patterns in neurons generates information (Information is nothing but the arrangement of physical things in a certain way). But information is not meaningful. Meaning comes from context and prior knowledge. That is, it comes from a unified experience of self.</p>
<p>We also experience the mind as having casualty over the brain. We can clearly state that a neural firing pattern is causing me to move my fingers while a type, by my decision to write where I am writing what I am writing, seems to be different from the causal pathways that get my fingers to move.</p>
<p>More importantly, it would seem my intention to write precedes the casual chain of neurons firing to get my fingers moving. So perhaps, there is a downward casualty where intentions, desires trigger the firing of neurons.</p>
<p>Is hard to imagine a state of consciousness that does not involve subjective intentionality. As I tap this keyboard and look at the words that appear on my laptop screen, there are multiple perceptual systems engaged in my brain, yet it is my intentionality, experienced somehow in a unified manner, that tells me this is a computer.</p>
<p>The mind seems to be symbolic and meaningful; it requires a material subtract but might not be determined by it.
<br />
<br />
<strong>IV</strong></p>
<p>We know that what we perceive externally or internally is not necessarily what is happening. Countless visual illusions show how our perception can be tricked. There is also ample evidence that our brain readouts say little about how that computation was performed. In fact, we know that the brain might deliberately lie about how our thoughts were constructed.</p>
<p>One interesting learning derived from these illusions, together with the study of patients with split brains where one side of the brain loses communications with the other, or the multiple studies of brain injuries where a section of the brain is destroyed, is that it reveals that the brain has a modular structure.</p>
<p>From the fact that the brain is modular, I gather three learnings relevant to the question of the mind and consciousness.</p>
<p>First, we remain conscious even when some modules are not working.</p>
<p>When a patient has a severe brain injury, we see a direct impact on functions associated with that region, while others work well. Individuals can certainly be changed by these injuries, but they remain conscious.</p>
<p>For example, people with a severe right parietal lobe injury can suffer from spatial hemineglect, which means they feel the left side of the world does not exist. This includes the left side of their laptop keyboard, the left side of their body (including their face, so they might shave just one side), and the left side of everyday objects like a book or the people standing at their left side. There is a dramatic change in their life experience; they clearly have a functional mind.</p>
<p>The second lesson: we are not conscious of brain circuits that are not working.</p>
<p>Think about the patients with seizures who wake up after surgery with the connection between the two brain hemispheres severed. The left and right sides of the brain are unaware of each other’s visual fields. When the patient is asked about his visual perception, his speaking left hemisphere will complain of lost vision. The patient can’t complain because the module responsible for noticing the problem is on the other side, and since the right side can’t communicate with the left, it can’t find out. What’s even more mind-blowing, as reported by Gazzaniga, is that the memories of having the other half of the visual field are also gone.</p>
<p>And the third lesson: we are not conscious of the output of different modules simultaneously, but rather there seems to be a competition for what bubbles up to consciousness.</p>
<p>There is this very peculiar brain condition called Feeling of a Presence. Is the feeling that someone is close to you when there is no one there.</p>
<p>We are aware of our location in space, but we are not aware of the coordination of inputs that derived the sense of location. Our brain orchestrates sounds, touch, proprioception, balance, vision, etc to help us give a sense of where we are. When this coordination fails, we can get confused when we fail to integrate one of these inputs or make another extremely salient. My understanding is that the Feeling of a Presence is caused by such problems, and it serves as an example of how there seems to be coordination and competition between modules of the brain as they reach our mind or consciousness.</p>
<p>As an aside, there is an exciting experiment involving a robotic arm that managed to induce the Feeling of Presence condition.</p>
<p>Imagine you are blindfolded, arms stretched out. One of your fingers has some sensors attached that allows it to control a robotic arm that sits behind your back. If the robotic arm is entirely in sync with your finger movement, you feel as if your body has moved forward and you are touching your own back. But if it is clearly out of sync, the illusion is that someone else is touching your back.</p>
<p>Given we remain conscious even when some modules don’t work, and that we are unaware when a module is not working and that different brain modules seem to compete to becomes conscious, it appears to many that consciousness is intrinsic to each brain modules not the brain as a whole and that, if we lose a brain function, we lose the consciousness associated with it.</p>
<p>This means there are multiple viable paths and possible instantiations of consciousness, and if one path gets shut down, others get more preeminence to deliver what we experience as our mind.</p>
<p>It is not impossible to shut down consciousness on a living person. If enough subcortical modules are damaged, those that control our sensorimotor experience, then we go into a coma. Yet, an experience limited to the sensorimotor realm can’t quite be thought of as the experience of having a mind.</p>
<p>It seems then that the interplay of emotions and feeling on one end, and cognition on the other, that is, the interplay between cortical and subcortical modules of the brain, make up the experience of consciousness.
<br />
<br />
<strong>V</strong></p>
<p>Plenty of our brain wiring is shared with the rest of the animal kingdom. The basic equipment is designed to sense and move around in the world. For us humans, much of this rests on the subcortical regions. Looking at brain injury patients we have seen evidence that a sense of self is developed deep in these structures we share with other animals.</p>
<p>According to neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, the subjective feeling of self arose in evolution when the more primitive emotion module connected with a module that mapped the limits of the body against the external world. Several zoologists have proven that such an egocentric sense is all it is needed in animals to have a subjective experience, a sense of self. In some almost incredible studies conducted by Barron and Klein, they believe the emotion and body map sense integrated in common ancestors to vertebrates and invertebrates, back to half a billion years ago.</p>
<p>Gazzaniga (remember him from the split-brain studies mentioned before) thinks that if the brain evolved to control the body as it moves about in the world, then cognition, memory, imagination are just added tools to increase performance in an ever-evolving and more complex environment. As the brain system has gotten more complex, the models have been placed in a layered architecture.</p>
<p>There are subcortical activities that bubble up into consciousness like say the feeling of pain (actual reaction to move away from pain happens on the periphery, and the edge of the body computation of sorts). For higher-level modules like cognition, we can see a process where subcortical regions provide inputs for the higher-level modules before these generate an output.</p>
<p>For Gazzaniga, subcortical regions are closer to the OS of a smartphone, and what makes us distinctly humans are closer to the Apps. We are conscious without the apps, but the apps completely change and define the conscious experience. Human brains, rich with layers, experience a sort of stitching together of modules at different layers bubbling up to consciousness.</p>
<p>This layered architecture makes sense: it allows for evolutions to do its bidding on the higher layers while keeping the core modules stable. This goes all the way down in biology: we share many the same organs and tissues with other animals. We also share the same enzymes with plants for cell division and metabolism processes with bacteria. Lower layers are made stable so that newer ones can be tinker with.</p>
<p>It also makes sense that the complexity is hidden from us: the same it is hard to build apps if you need to work with machine code, it would be hard to think if we had to be constantly conscious of what happens at every layer.</p>
<p>We experience the modularity and layered architecture of the brain in everyday life. Let’s say you are buying a puppy dog. You feel super happy and excited about it. This moment in time is committed to memory, in the higher layers of our brain architecture.</p>
<p>In memory, we keep tons of info about the event, including how we felt. But we don’t actually keep the feeling. When we reminisce on the event, we invoke the memory of the event, we may even remember how we felt at the time, but how we feel now is coming from a deeper module of the architecture. Current feelings are mapped to a past moment. The feeling might be the same, it may be more positive and intense, or negative, full of regret.</p>
<p>We don’t fully understand how memory works, so we don’t quite know how that memory of buying a puppy gets stored. But stored it is. However it physically gets stored, the question for the beginning of the text remains: how is this subjective experience associated with buying that puppy possible in the context of the material brain?</p>
<p>We want to know how the physical experience of caressing the fur of the puppy ends up feeling a certain way to us, how positive emotions evolve into complex feelings of love and attachment, and how an idea of what that puppy means to us comes up. How do we go from physical objects touching to the firing of neurons into patterns, to the subjective feeling of self experiencing what it is like to hold that puppy in our hands?
<br />
<br />
<strong>VI</strong></p>
<p>The brain runs on physics and chemistry, our mind on a system of symbols. The brain is clearly there, yet there is no clear path that connects the symbolic representation of the mind to the brain’s physics. It seems then that we need to start thinking about how these two seemingly incompatible systems can coexist.</p>
<p>We should start by noting that dual or complementary explanations are maybe not so crazy. Within the world of physics, we see this type of duality in quantum vs. Newtonian physics. One of the initial insights in quantum physics came about when scientists discovered that light could behave as both a particle and a wave. This issue arises when a subject tries to measure and describe a system: once measured it can be described as a wave or a particle, but not both.</p>
<p>When we try to explain reality, the quantum realm is best described statistically. In contrast, the physics of big objects follow laws. It is not that they are different realities, but instead, they must be explained in different modes.</p>
<p>There is good reason to question if complementarity, a principle formulated to handle the wave-particle duality, has any bearing on the brain-mind duality. If one thinks that this duality is a property of the electrons, then the doubt is warranted. But if it is a function of the observers’ nature, then it most certainly can be relevant.</p>
<p>Complementarity is a suspicious explanation because we don’t see it at the macroscopic level, where the laws of motion reign supreme. I have found there is a persuasive and somewhat straightforward explanation for this: the macroscopic physical world is one where the subject-object duality can be suppressed without affecting the quality of our predictions. Planets and stars are entirely isolated from the observer, so there is no impact in surprising the subject-object duality. For microscopic objects, where quantum physics is needed, the subject-object duality cannot be avoided. As we will see, this is also true of biological systems.</p>
<p>That idea that something can be described in two very different ways should not be a surprise, and it extends far beyond fundamental physics. Michael Polanyi points out as an example of how machines can be described both in terms of the principles of the machine’s design, and another layer which consists of its parts and processes. A machine he said can only be defined by its constraints (is it useful? Simple?), not the laws of motion.</p>
<p>It seems something similar (or the same thing at a different level) happens with the brain and the mind: one can describe it as a set of matter acting in this and that way, or as a set of symbols within a system, but not in both ways.</p>
<p>The question then is, how should we think about symbols within matter: the brain is a physical thing, symbols seem like they are not, so how do they co-exist? What is the nature of their complementarity?</p>
<p>Howard H. Pattee was fascinated by this difference, albeit on a scale much smaller than the brain. He wondered how the DNA, a simple, linear molecular structure could function as symbolic information that controls super complex enzyme dynamics that fully comply with the laws of physics.</p>
<p>In building a cell, the symbolic sequence in the genetic DNA produces other strings of polypeptides that are precursors to proteins. Eventually, the symbols sort of getting lost, and we find enzymes, folding themselves into machines, and then into proteins that then turn into membranes, muscles, etc. This assembly process is not symbolic; it harnesses the laws of motion that come about from the constraints and limitations established by the symbols. Of course, as we move further up, the proteins themselves serve as constraints for higher levels of biological organizations.</p>
<p>It is often assumed that physical laws must determine all events because they are inexorable. The fact is, that is not the case in any part of physics. To get a specific physics measurement, we need to set up the initial conditions; otherwise, there is no output to the laws of motion. These initial conditions cannot be derived from the laws, and they need to be subjectively determined.</p>
<p>We could say that what physicists call an objective model is a very restrictive type of subjective model common to us all by its variance, by virtue of the symbols in the model.</p>
<p>As Born said, “thus it dawned upon me that fundamentally everything is subjective, everything without exception. That was a shock”. At the extreme, one could say all our models of reality exist in the heads of individuals.</p>
<p>Once initial conditions are imputed, the laws of motion do not include alternatives: we get a complete picture of the laws of motion that tell us the system’s state. In contrast, biology needs constraints in decision making to be able to distinguish alternative behaviors of the system and use rules to pick one from all.</p>
<p>The laws of motion are said to do a one-to-one mapping whereas the hereditary process performs a one-to-many mapping which transmits traits from a larger set of alternatives. This entails a classification process. Symbolic concepts like genetic memory or code are not really expressible in terms of physics’s elementary laws.</p>
<p>Pattee was interested in the physics of symbols, as manifested in the DNA. He argued (building on work Von Neumann had done on logical requirements to create an automaton) that the hereditary process worked like a language: the genetic code is the rules of syntax while the protein foldings that resulted from those rules are its meaning or semantics.</p>
<p>This symbolic description can be read two ways: syntactically to be transmitted, or semantically to control the constructions of enzymes and proteins.</p>
<p>For Pattee, matter can function as a symbol insofar as an agent uses it to constrain dynamics that follow the laws of physics. For him, a symbol is a local and discrete structure that triggers an action, usually related to a system more complex than the system itself.</p>
<p>The concept of the symbol has no meaning outside the system of symbols to which it belongs, and the material organizations that work with these symbols read them and build from them.</p>
<p>It is easy to assume that since these symbols and rules need physical structure to take effect, they must obey physical laws. This assumption fails because rules and symbols are not interpreted in the same languages as physical laws.</p>
<p>Think of a computer: clearly, physical switching networks both follow physical laws and execute symbolic, logical rules, but that does not mean that the rules of logic are predictable from these laws. Both the physical laws of the switch and the symbolic rules of logic are complementary explanations of the same system.</p>
<p>Another important property of symbols like measurements, codes, rules, and descriptions is that by selecting one of many things, they ignore most aspects of a system. Von Neumann pointed out how a measurement or description that operates at the same detail as the system is describing becomes indistinguishable from the system itself.</p>
<p>In complex systems like our cells and our brain, we see hierarchies delineated by the rules by which they interpret or give meaning to a lower layer. The better the rule, the more selective it is in measuring the element its constraints. Following an example by Pattee, a good stoplight does not measure all the details of traffic patterns, but only the minimum to make traffic flow faster and safer. As Pattee points out, this simplification or loss of detail of the rule also makes it hard to understand its origin.</p>
<p>We don’t know yet how matter becomes symbolic. But we know two things: first, matter can embody symbols which can, in turn, unlock dynamics that are perfectly lawful from the perspective of physics. We also see that symbolic representation of heredity, in the separation of the phenotype (the description in symbols) and genotype (the actual build-up of those instructions)t is a logical and physical requirement for life and evolution.
<br />
<br />
<strong>VII</strong></p>
<p>Pattee argued that the symbol-matter problem, which required a clean cut between object and subject, exists on all levels, from the origin of life all the way to the human mind. From phenotype to genotype, to the symbol reference problem in cognitive science, to the mind-brain problem we are interested in here.</p>
<p>The argument here is that the key sign of biological activity is the existence of efficient and stable codes. Pattee model sees the cell as an agent that uses or interprets information for its survival. His point is that this process suggests a cut between subjective and objective, way before human consciousness and the experience of the mind.</p>
<p>For starters, brains have gradually evolved from cells. Material structures and functions have evolved together. The brain itself has continued to evolve. Given that we can claim to see subjectivity at the cellular level, it is possible that concepts like intentions, meaning, thoughts, which associate exclusively with the mind, might have primitive precursors in the cell.</p>
<p>From this perspective, the brain is the most complex set of coordinate symbols rules and resulting constraints coming out of billions of years of natural selection applied to many individuals.</p>
<p>We can also see hierarchical levels of organization in all biological systems, from the cell to the brain. In all we see discrete switch modes that are associated with the informational, programable, linguistic functions (e.g; a linear sequence of nucleotides in DNA or pulses generated by a single neuron), and the continuous dynamics with the folding or patterns of these sequences we associate with semantics or interpretation.</p>
<p>For the brain, the hierarchical structure and evolutionary process mean that the brain does not need to build explicit meanings for everything from scratch. Like the cell, the brain is already endowed by evolutions with hierarchies of functions that only need to be constrained or harnessed to acquire meaning.</p>
<p>For Pattee, the self, whether a cell or a human, is an individual thanks to the symbols that serve as memory patterns in its genes and its brain. These subjective memories (subjective in that they are a selection by a subject from a pool of many options) define the self.</p>
<p>Another critical aspect of the biological self: it needs to be able to change. For evolution to work, the symbolic instruction needs a material structure that contains all the processes for the construction of enzymes but also it needs instructions to copy the symbol itself, all following the laws of motion.</p>
<p>We don’t know how these patterns or symbols come about. Francis Crick called the DNA a frozen accident, and there is evidence the symbols are fairly arbitrary. The same is likely true with the brain, and its formidable plasticity seems to corroborate this.</p>
<p>Yet, the brain is categorically different than any other collection of cells. For all its similarities, the brain is very different from the DNA and the hereditary process in many ways.</p>
<p>In the cell, we go from symbol to dynamics, following the laws of physics. The brain goes the other way around: a complex dynamic neural network produces discrete symbols and the subjective experience we are calling the mind or consciousness.</p>
<p>Another important difference is that, with the cell, variation in genetic information must be expressed before selection can begin. Natural selection can only operate through the phenotype. With the brain, we can acquire, evaluate, and select information before expression.</p>
<p>The hereditary process shows us that to make a self; we need parts that implement descriptions, translations of these descriptions, and its construction. You also need to describe, translate, and construct the parts that describe, transcribe, and construct. This infinite loop is, in effect, the definition of self.</p>
<p>Pattee gives us a framework that helps us see how symbols can be embodied in matter and how symbols and matter can cooperate in a complementary fashion in the same system. With this framework, we can say the mind’s subjective experience does not violate physics laws. At the beginning of life, we can also say that at the core of what differentiates living and non-living matter, the break between the objective and subjective takes place. Symbols are at the root of all that is living.</p>
<p>So the self at the cell level is a type of loop. Douglas Hofstadter believes that the “I” or The self or consciousness we experience subjectively is also a type of self-referential loop. He called it a strange loop.</p>
<p>The “I,” according to Hofstadter, is the brains’ strangest and most complex symbol. He thinks of it as an infinite feedback loop. The same way a camera hooked to a TV and pointing at it would generate an infinite self-referential loop that somehow stabilizes into a new image, the multiple layers of our brain creating rules and symbolic representations of lower layers created a feedback loop that is self-referential and stable.</p>
<p>Or think of the feedback loop and echo in an auditorium. The “I” is no more physically identifiable than that auditory feedback loop, and yet, it feels very real.</p>
<p>Of course, the “I” does not come about in the brain due to video of audio loops. To Hofstadter, it comes about thanks to our ability to think. For Hofstadter, thinking is a way of possessing and being able to manipulate an extensive repertoire of symbols.</p>
<p>So to Hofstadter, symbols in the brain are perceived by symbols, until it becomes a stable, self-referential symbol.</p>
<p>In a multi-layer system, where each module generates its own set of symbols, higher-level cortical modules create symbols to manipulate symbols, turning into a self-sustaining self-referential loop, which becomes our mind’s experience.</p>
<p>So, one way to think about the mind is as an infinite, self-sustainable loop. Layered modules bubble up symbols to be used by other modules, moving up a layer in the stack.</p>
<p>The duality between the brain and the mind is complementary since we can’t explain one with the other. Not because the mind exists outside of physics, but because symbols and the laws of motion speak different languages.</p>
<p>We can’t tell how DNA came about, and we know even less about how the mind emerges from the animal brain, but at least we know that is perfectly reasonable, and likely necessary for a break between object and subject, and in our case brain and mind, to co-exist.</p>
Remote work compensation2020-07-12T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2020/07/12/Remote-Work-Compensation<p>How should companies compensate team members for comparable work, done in different geographies?</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Context:</strong></p>
<p>There are two main arguments: the first one is: equal work, equal pay (known as EWEP). The second argument is to provide different pay to ensure a comparable standard of living. Formally that’s called cost of living adjustment compensation (known as COLA).</p>
<p>Proponents of equal pay for equal work argue that compensation should depend on output; if the quality and quantity are similar, so should be the payment. To do otherwise implies that one person is worth less than another, which is unfair.</p>
<p>And if someone dislikes their high cost of living, they can always move to somewhere cheaper.</p>
<p>Others prefer compensation to equalize standards of living, irrespective of location. If the company values a person based at a specific location, it should pay a competitive compensation. If this company works with people at different locations, it will offer different compensations for the same work to ensure a comparable standard of living.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Employee Incentives</strong></p>
<p>The employee living at low-cost geographies will favor being compensated according to contribution,or to have the compensation anchored to the most expensive location possible.</p>
<p>The person living in an expensive location is happy being compensated according to each location’s needs. As to how they feel about compensation according to output or contribution, it will depend:</p>
<p>if the cost of living on cheaper places averages down the payment for everyone, then they will be against it because it will make it harder to live in an expensive location. But if the watermark is the compensation for their geography, they should be fine with it.</p>
<p>Defendants of COLA located in expensive locations could argue that if someone else wants the same pay, they should move to the more expensive location. But given the constraints on labor mobility and visas, that might not be realistic.</p>
<p>Proponents of EWEP would respond that people in expensive locations are there out of their own volition, and point out that it may be perfectly rational to choose a higher cost of living (and the smaller apartment and savings rates that comes with it) because there is something else of value they are getting at that location: culture, weather, more job options, etc.</p>
<p>EWEP people could make parallel arguments as COLA defendants: if you don’t like making the same and having a lower standard of living you could move to a cheaper location. But again, is that a strong enough argument? Sure, they could move, but once you have a family and lay roots, it is not always easy.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Employer Incentives</strong></p>
<p>The employer wants to pay as much as needed to attract the best talent, but not more. Employees are critically important constituents for the employer, but so are customers who want good, affordable products and shareholders who want run-rate and profits.</p>
<p>Of course, people who run companies often do it for more than profit maximization, and sharing on the wealth created, doing the best you can for others are often strong motivators. Still, companies must set limits to salaries for the obvious reason that employees are not the only constituents.</p>
<p>There are several ways a company can decide to compensate the people they work with.</p>
<p>The company can decide to pay by the estimated value of an output (or the capacity to generate that output) and set up a price. People can apply and whoever passes the bar, will get that compensation.</p>
<p>Basecamp is a pioneer of remote work, and favors this model. According to its co-founder DHH: <a href="https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp/#:~:text=There%20are%20no%20negotiated%20salaries,Equal%20work%2C%20equal%20pay.&text=Our%20target%20is%20to%20pay,role%20or%20where%20they%20live."> Everyone in the same role at the same level is paid the same. Equal work, equal pay(…) This means everyone has the freedom to pick where they want to live, and there’s no penalty for relocating to a cheaper cost-of-living area. We encourage remote and have many employees who’ve lived all over while continuing to work for Basecamp.</a></p>
<p>As we saw, this is clearly better for people in cheaper locations, and only works for people in more expensive locations if the compensation is competitive in their location (Basecamp says it anchors to SF, likely the most expensive location).
For the company’s customers and its finance, it seems worse since it’s paying the most expensive possible rate. Even if a company can afford the most expensive rate, it is part of its mandate to limit the cost.</p>
<p>Another option is to look at market compensation for every location they are hiring in, and decide what compensation to offer. In theory, anything better than the best available rate for local talent should work well. Similarly, the company can let the applicant submit their desired compensation, negotiate if it is too high, and meet it if the person is accepted into the company.</p>
<p>COLA makes financial sense for companies. For an employer, comparable talent at cheaper locations allows them to maintain quality, and improve margins. If the business is materially richer than other companies competing in that location, it can slightly better than the best rate, and dominate the labor market there.</p>
<p>Gitlab and its CEO Sid Sijbrandij are also leaders of remote work, and big proponents of COLA.</p>
<p><a href="https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/">If everyone is paid the same role-based salary, the company would not be able to hire as many team members, and those that are brought on would not be as widely distributed, according to Sid. Ultimately, this approach would cut away at GitLab’s ability to produce as well as be geographically diverse, he argues. </a></p>
<p><a href="https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/">“If we pay everyone the San Francisco wage for their respective roles, our compensation costs would increase greatly, and we would be forced to hire a lot fewer people. Then we wouldn’t be able to produce as much as we would like,” Sid explains. “And if we started paying everyone the lowest rate possible, we would not be able to retain the people we want to keep</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>The game</strong></p>
<p>The pricing dynamics are fairly dependent on how important and prevalent remote work is, both within a company, and their ecosystem at large.</p>
<p>If a company wants people in a certain location, it needs to incentivize them to be there. If this place is costly, then it must pay more than in other locations the company might also hire.</p>
<p>If it pays the same compensation to someone at another cheaper location, it will encourage people to leave for the cheaper location, and reduce its margin.</p>
<p>If the same company also hires at a cheaper place, and in that place, there are not many remote jobs available, then offering marginally better than local market rates should give them the right candidates. Now, if many remote companies are competing, and if there are big savings on the local rates, then prices for remote work in that location will naturally go up.</p>
<p>If this hypothetical company needs to compete for talent against fully remote companies, then the dynamic changes.</p>
<p>If these fully remote companies don’t care about expensive locations, then the rate can be lower than needed for such location, but much higher than other, cheaper locations. That way, they can win against companies that need to take expensive locations into consideration.</p>
<p>As an employee in a relatively cheap place, the best possible employer would be a company hiring at an expensive geography and at yours, but setting a flat rate that works for everyone. But as we have seen, that is financially suboptimal for the company, and, as long as the fully remote market is not deep enough, they likely don’t need to do that.</p>
<p>The second-best option for such a person is to work for a fully remote company that pays everyone the same, somewhere between local rates and expensive rates. Some of these exist, but still, there are plenty of remote-only companies that see adjusted cost of living as the right fairness metric, and do so accordingly.</p>
<p>It is very hard to predict how important certain locations will be in the future, and how much they will anchor top rates for certain jobs.</p>
<p>In a world where locations do not matter, compensation will tend towards the local rate at cheaper places with a large pool of talent. If in the future certain expensive locations continue to matter, then for those companies there will likely always be an adjustment for the standard of living.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Fairness, and markets</strong></p>
<p>Let’s assume it is equally possible to move from an expensive place to a cheaper one, and vice versa. For the person making less, assume they can move to the place that pays more. For the person living in a more expensive place, assume they can move to a cheaper location.</p>
<p>Is it fair for a person doing the same job as someone else to get paid less because of its location?</p>
<p>Is it fair for a person to do the same job as someone else but to enjoy a lower standard of living because of its location, even if there are other benefits to living in an expensive location?</p>
<p>These are difficult questions to answer. Think about this hypothetical scenario:</p>
<p>Assume there is a company that adjusts for cost of living. It pays you less than someone living somewhere more expensive, but it also pays you more than a fully remote company paying EWEP. Which job should you take? Is the company paying you more than any other option, but less than other co-workers, being unfair to you?</p>
<p>I don’t personally think one set up is inherently more just than another. Different companies respond to different world views and incentives, and benefit different people.</p>
<p>There are many reasons why companies are exploring remote work: some have specialized needs which are scattered across the globe, others can’t make their business work with say Silicon Valley or London salaries. Plenty want to explore if remote will work, but are not convinced yet what to make of it, and yet others believe that remote work setups yield better outputs and are fully committed to working that way.</p>
<p>These and many other reasons are mixed in different degrees and different combinations, yielding different ideal strategies for each company. And within these companies, there are leaders who feel COLA is fair, and some that believe EWEP is the right ethical decision.</p>
<p>The same applies to people: some think EWEP is the fair setup, because location is a decision that includes cost of living as one of many variables, while others think COLA is fair because salary should secure a certain standard of living, regardless of where you are.</p>
<p>I believe better labor markets are a net positive to society.</p>
<p>The marvel and beauty of remote work is that it makes labor markets more efficient. It opens job opportunities that would not be available otherwise. It allows companies to hire talent that otherwise it could not get. It makes it easier for labor to be allocated in the optimal positions.</p>
<p>Each person and each company has a myriad of values to optimize for, at different degrees, yielding a likely unique and different setup from everyone else. Different compensation schemes, geographical weights, and even conceptions of fairness create a marketplace of companies and people that makes it easier for each one to find their best match.</p>
<p>Remote work makes the labor market more liquid and efficient. With a more functioning labor market, opportunities are better distributed, and companies and employees get better matches.</p>
<p>It becomes easier to know what the right price for a product or service is. The more people join the remote workforce, the easier it will be for the next person to find the right job, at the right compensation.</p>
<p>In my opinion, the number one reason labor is at a great disadvantage with respect to capital is because capital markets are deep, liquid and efficient. A more efficient labor market gives more power to those who own competitive labor, improving economic justice.</p>
Time2020-03-29T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2020/03/29/time<p><em>Intro: these lines are a mix of summary and notes from a couple of books from Carlo Rovelli on modern physics and time, Bertalanffy on General systems theory</em></p>
<p> <br />
</p>
<p>We all experience the passage of time. We can’t touch time and we can’t see it, but it is evident that it is there: the cake will burn if it stays for too long in the oven; later today the sun will set and night will come and in time, we will grow old and our kids will grow up. Time always flows from the past to the present.</p>
<p>Time passes, that is a certainty. And yet, universal time is an illusion. There is robust evidence that time is not objective and universal, but rather subjective and conditional.</p>
<p>We have suffered many illusions in the past, and science has cast plenty of those away. Consider the daily illusion of the sunset: Today, as the sun sets, realize it is you who is moving, not the sun. The reality is that we are on board an organic spaceship turning backward, and as the sun hides behind us, we are shifting to an upside-down position, relative to the sun. The sun does not set, we do a backflip. Like the sunset illusion, universal time is also an illusion.</p>
<p>To understand time, we first need to realize a peculiarity of space: things fall, not because there is some force at the center of the earth pulling things down, but because space curves around big chunks of mass.</p>
<p>Mass is not so much attracted to bigger mass but rather it falls towards big mass because space has bent by its weight. Things that seem to fall into empty space are really picking up speed going down a slope.</p>
<p>There is one curiosity about bent space, that affects time: No matter if you are going super fast down the hill of bent space, or slower on the flatlands of the universe, the speed of light remains constant. No matter how fast you go, the speed of lights is and is perceived as the same. How is it possible that lights look the same regardless of whether we are stationary or going super fast?</p>
<p>That’s because time slows down where gravity is stronger. Running down a slope in space, you go faster, but time goes slower, so the speed of light stays constant. Experts call this gravitational time dilation.</p>
<p>Space affects time because both are intertwined in a mesh known as the space-time continuum. Let’s see how that plays out.</p>
<p>If time is slower around curved space, when you move away from a source of gravity, time speeds up. Clocks at the beach tic at a slower rate than the clocks at the top of Mount Everest and that clock tics slower than a clock on the moon. There are super high precision clocks that verify this.</p>
<p>This also applies if you are moving. the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When we say <em>Here</em>, that is clearly a subjective statement. <em>Here</em> in California is different from <em>Here</em> in my hometown in Venezuela. They have Different lat-long coordinates. <em>Now</em> is also a subjective statement. Time is relative to where you are in space.</p>
<p>Past, present, and future are subjective and circumstantial.</p>
<p>If I see a light of a star that is millions of light-years away, the light I see <em>Now</em> is the light that emanated from its source many years in my past. By the time is see the lights, the light source is years into the future.</p>
<p>Another example: Astronauts age a bit slower than us on earth. If time near strong gravity goes faster than away from it, then an astronaut’s present can be my future, here on earth.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It is interesting to note that time is also relative to those sharing the same <em>Here</em>. For starters, not all animals experience time in the same way. There are slow-motion animals and fast motion animals. The Betta fish only recognizes the reproduced image of an opponent if presented in 30 frames per second. Show it slower, and it can’t see it.</p>
<p>A snail is a fast time animal: if a stick vibrated at a rate of 4 times per second, the stock would appear at rest to the snail. The perception of time depends on physiological conditions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Even among humans sharing the same <em>Here</em> and the same _Now, _time is experienced differently. If two people are focused on the same event, but only one finds it exciting, the passage of time will be perceived differently.</p>
<p>One reason might be that while you are focused on the exciting event, you lose sight of all the other regular events that cue you in the pass of time. And then later, perhaps time feels like it took longer because there were tons of little details worth remembering, which gives you the sense of longer time passing.</p>
<p>There however one universal statement that can be made about time: it goes from past, to present.</p>
<p>Our universe came to being in a super-ordered and dense state, and since then everything has been moving slowly from there into more and more disorganized states. That disorganization of space is evidenced in the presence of heat.</p>
<p>Time is not a monolithic and universal arrow moving in one direction, experienced in the same way by everyone. Rather, it is a local experience, defined by the physics of the location, the physiological conditions of animal perception, and the psychological conditions on which all of this takes place.</p>
Copying2020-03-17T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2020/03/17/copying<p>Copying is a great way to learn new things.</p>
<p>Sometimes you can learn by copying the entirety of the work, or just a part of it. A good example is copying the drawings of others to learn how to do it yourself. Copying drawings works both when you replicate every line of the drawing to get a sense for how the whole piece came together, and also when you focus on one aspect (say, the eye of a portrait) and learn from it, even if you don’t replicate the whole thing.</p>
<p>There are situations however where copying a painting is counterproductive. If I learn how to draw eyes from a certain painter, but that style does not jive well with how I paint faces, it won’t help me draw better portraits. Another failure mode of copying someone else’s painting could be to limit my merits to being good at imitating.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Let’s look at another example: investing.</p>
<p>To be a great stock trader you need to consistently have one more good trade than bad. That means almost half of all your trades can be a loss, and still be great at the job.</p>
<p>To be a great VC, you need a few of your investments to return +10X. What happens with the rest matter little to your performance. for VCs, bad decisions are the vast majority.</p>
<p>Unless you copy all the decisions (or have the luck to copy only those that matter), you can find yourself copying most decisions from an excellent trader or VC and still lose all your money.</p>
<p>Yet, on bull markets, there is a self-fulfilling cycle that can make copying investments a sound strategy. People are flush with cash, and FOMO led to rising valuations (markups in private markets), without much regard for fundamentals</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The challenge then is to know if you are in a situation where copying is advantageous, or not.</p>
<p>One clear way to benefit from copying is to use it as a way to understand how the thing was done, the output being useful only as a reference for the end of a process, not as a goal in itself.</p>
<p>Another way to benefit from copying is to do it in order to get a missing piece of a bigger thing you are building. If you are sculpting a marbled goat, and you are struggling to chisel the goat’s beard, you might benefit from seeing how someone else did it. Then, you can integrate it into your work.</p>
<p>Related to these two points, copying is most useful when you are copying a ton of different people. It is easier to understand different techniques and to judge different ideas when you can put one next to another.</p>
<p>It also follows from there that, there is a certain amount of productive copying; doing work without copying is equally important.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Copying has a lot of negative connotations. I think they are mostly misunderstanding about stealing.</p>
<p>To steal means to take from someone so that that person can no longer have the thing. With physical objects, that is straightforward. With art, code, or ideas, is a bit fuzzier, but the core remains: if you copy what someone else did, and use it in a way such that the original creator cannot longer use it (you copy exactly and claim to be the original, or copy and the respect explicit rules the owner of the original imposed, etc) then you are stealing.</p>
<p>Saying “copying is good” or “copying is bad” are fairly empty statements. How you copy someone else’s work, and what you do with what you copy makes it either a great thing or a terrible thing, or anything in between.</p>
<p>These sorts of distinctions are very important when sharing concepts and ideas with others. To value copying other people’s work or being opportunistic to add another example, can mean very different things depending on how you define the activities and their purpose.</p>
The will of the people2020-03-03T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2020/03/03/will-of-the-people<p><strong>Will of the people</strong></p>
<p><em>Intro: my former professor and friend Albert Weale wrote a succinct and insightful book on this topic: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Will-People-Modern-Myth/dp/1509533273">the will of the people, a modern myth</a></em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>People care about an ever-expanding list of political issues (fiscal, monetary, migration, identity, etc). As a result, political parties mushroom to capture the ever-growing combination of political convictions. The will of the people, understood as what the majority wants, can be logically set as a majority in <em>many</em> configurations. As a result, on first principles, one majority == one will of the people does not exist.</p>
<p>So, the will of the people is a myth on first principles. It also ontologically impossible: what questions we ask from the people, affect what people vote on, and hence what the wants made explicit.</p>
<p>Also, As anyone who has ever undergone a remodel at home knows, what people say they want cannot possibly represent the full complexity of what it takes to get it done. So, knowing what people want to the level of specificity required for implementing such want, is something impossible to fully know upfront.</p>
<p>Finally, even if there was an intelligible will of the people, it could be mistaken. Yes, majorities can be in the wrong. So, if you disagree with a decision, it’s your moral obligation to dissent. The notion that dissent is anti-democratic because the will of the people is sacred assumes people, under no circumstance, should change their minds, which is crazy.</p>
Market holes2020-02-26T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2020/02/26/market-holes<p>Asking why some technology or business model does not exist in a specific market is one of the most common but often unfruitful ways to get business ideas. I think of this as trying to fill holes in the market. For the most part, it does not work.</p>
<p>It typically goes like this. You use a service - say dentists, taxis, hotels, banks, etc - and realize it could work much better if they applied a piece of technology or a business model used somewhere else. You find a hole in the market offering, a piece missing in the system, which you believe could be filled and represent a startup opportunity.</p>
<p>You may notice how prevalent faxes are in health care and feel enthusiastic about digitalization, or see the opportunity of machine vision to replace security guards. You notice these and say: other industries have been fully digitalized, the medical market has not: that system has a hole, and I can fill it. Or you say: Google Photos is organizing all my pictures with machine vision, the same technology could be used to replace security guards; the physical security market has a hole, and I can fill it.</p>
<p>Another example is when we see the opportunity to replicate successful models in different industries: Airbnb may lead us to think of a marketplace to provide room and boarding for pets, and Uber may lead us to think of a dog walking service. A more perfect market reveals a hole in another market, and here again, you see an opportunity to fill it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Market holes don’t necessarily map to business opportunities</strong></p>
<p>This approach rarely works because voids in the market don’t always reveal the need for new products and companies. Some of those voids are there for a good reason. It may not matter enough to change them, or they might not be changeable with a product (they may need public policy changes, for example).</p>
<p>Filling holes in a market is, in a way, an effort to make the world more coherent, to make it more sensical. But building successful companies is not about completing a picture, it is about solving people’s needs.</p>
<p>The goal is to find a burning need from real, specific people. Once you do, finding out where it fits in the larger market will trace the path forward, but is rarely a good place to start.</p>
<p>Market holes are rarely a good place to start because they tell you about how you think the world should be and may blind you from seeing the present clearly enough to build something people will want, today.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Market holes often conflate the interesting with the necessary</strong></p>
<p>Market holes are often conceptually attractive not just to you, but also to your potential customers. Wouldn’t it be cool if all those medical faxes were just a tab on an app? Or if you didn’t need a security guard because the cameras would do all the work?</p>
<p>The customer will likely love those ideas because they describe a more ideal world where all the pieces fit together and everything makes sense, but when the time comes to put dollars and time against it, if they don’t have a burning need for it now, they will kill your company in slow waiting.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It is very easy for potential customers to falsify their preferences when it makes them feel good about themselves. Everyone loves the idea of a more perfect market, but not everyone needs it.</p>
<p>For example, if you have a lot of pilots signed enthusiastically that don’t turn into contracts or have potential customers that tell you they would love to have your app and then never use it (and have no complaints about how it works), your company may suffer from <em>market holeitis</em>.</p>
<p>There is a big gap between a customer who would pay infinite money for a magical solution and a customer who is willing to commit to a solution today.</p>
<p>Selling a market hole makes it easy for people to lie to themselves, and in turn, for them to lie to you.</p>
<p>Weight loss is a good example: A lot of people will pay millions for a magical pill that will make them lose weight immediately and permanently, but few will pay a couple of dollars to make the hard work of losing weight, 10x easier. The reason? 10x better, in this case, would still be hard work. The idea of a magical solution is way more attractive than the commitment needed for the solution to work.</p>
<p>And, as it turns out, in many cases the ice cream in front of the TV is more valuable (is soothing, relaxing, rewarding, and can help me socialize with a partner, etc) than the potential weight loss.</p>
<p>Your product is forcing the real preference to light, which the customer won’t enjoy.</p>
<p>Products that meet strong consumer demand succeed despite requiring some commitment and effort from customers: Twitter was successful despite its fail wale and no edit button, Uber is still incredibly good despite getting ETAs consistently wrong. If the product only works with perfect uptime and perfect ETAs from day one, these products would have not gotten off the ground.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Focus on market holes blindsides you to other opportunities</strong></p>
<p>Another challenge is that, once you focus on market holes, you miss all the opportunities to improve on the existing offerings. For someone looking to fill holes, Zoom or Stripe would have made no sense. These were not filling a hole in the system, but something that already exists, 10X better.</p>
<p>You also miss crazy good ideas like Snapchat or Bitcoin: these could not be found looking at holes in the market. They can only be found by discovering an unmet need.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Finding market holes is fun</strong></p>
<p>One clear value is that it is a really fun activity. It can be intellectually stimulating and help you build models about the world that makes it more intelligible.</p>
<p>Still, I would insist: If you play the find a hole in the market game, remember to think long and hard about why the hole is there in the first place. Poke the hole and see if you can find different, unexpected reasons why it exists.</p>
<p>People who tend to enjoy system thinking (and enjoy finding holes in markets) often fail in a trap of their own making.</p>
<p>Sure, Uber and Airbnb make perfect sense once you look at taxis and hotels, but a ton of other things make sense in this way and are still crappy startup ideas because there is not pressing demand for the product you envision, at the price you can deliver it.</p>
<p>I would even argue that Uber starting with limos and Airbnb starting with couches are signs of being need driven, not filling a hole in the market driven; that comes later.</p>
<p>For all the avid system thinkers out there, it is essential to tell the difference between a customer who likes the idea of what you do, and one who needs what you do, and needs it now.</p>
What to expect2020-02-10T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2020/02/10/what-to-expect<p>Expectations are important, hard to set, and even harder to manage.</p>
<p>Expectations are important because they drive positive change in us and the world around us. Expectations are powerful because they feed on themselves: the more we want something to be a certain way, the more likely it is it will happen.</p>
<p>Yet, unfulfilled expectations are painful and frustrating. Constantly changing expectations are tiring, and rob us of a sense of arrival and achievement. Expectations are like a vacuum between reality and what you want reality to be. This Vacuum hurts, but it is also a motivating force, and this force drives change.</p>
<p>This is true in all aspects of life, but particularly clear in our work lives.</p>
<p>We expect our work to be meaningful, fun, and profitable. To be happy, all of these need to be fine-tuned. This is really hard, and as a consequence, many are sad at work because it does not meet expectations in some or all of these aspects.</p>
<p>It is already hard to find one job that just gives tons of meaning, or fun, or money. Perhaps it is a bit too much to ask for all of these at the same time from our work life. In a way, it seems we are asking our jobs to be a church, an entertainment center, and our source of wealth, all in one.</p>
<p>Some people are really good at focusing on only one aspect of work: the idealistic, the supremely creative, the mercenaries. But for most, there are practical considerations (cost of living, sources of motivation, moral standards) that make this type of singular attention, really hard. Very often, some level of expectation is required in all dimensions.</p>
<p>How should we set up and manage expectations? For one, In any domain which elicits multiple expectations (like work), I think it is worth picking one aspect to maximize and find a minimum bar for all other dimensions.</p>
<p>For the aspect where you have high expectations, you benefit from a high bar that can help you get what you want. For everything else where you set minimum expectations, you can still benefit from positive surprises. The less you expect, the more likely you are to discover something new about you or the world around you. This way, you may learn to care about new things more deeply.</p>
<p>The are other tricks that help manage expectations. Let’s use “having fun” as an expectation we want to maximize:</p>
<p> </p>
<ul>
<li>Time-bound expectations: this will be boring for X amount of time.</li>
<li>Task-bound expectations: This one thing I need to do is boring; I’ll get it done and move on</li>
<li>Dependency expectations: this thing is boring, but it will allow me to do this other super fun stuff.</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>It is impossible to avoid doing work that we don’t want to do, the key is to box it (time, task, dependency) to keep us from extrapolating. We don’t want to take a crappy task and say, “this is my work”. We need to put it inside a box, deal with it, and move on.</p>
<p>The last tactic I would suggest is a domain-bounded expectation: It is ok for example, to expect different things from our work life and our personal lives.</p>
<p>A while back, a rabbi pointed out to me that most of the great Talmud sages were farmers. The lesson is this: sometimes, the minimum bar in one aspect of our lives is a high bar in another: perhaps getting a sense of meaning needs to be minimally satisfied in the Rabbi’s farming activity, but maximally satisfied in his theological work.</p>
The other type of technical co-founder2019-09-17T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2019/09/17/the-other-type-technical-co-founder<p>Startups often need more than one core competency to be successful.</p>
<p>For example, an online pharmacy may need expertise with systems integrations and knowing how to run a pharmacy, a consumer app requires UI and backend skills, and a direct to consumer goods company needs to excel at branding and distribution.</p>
<p>In some cases, like Uber or Airbnb, no prior industry experience was required to build huge businesses. In others, Like PillPack or Glossier, the prior experience was essential. Yet, in PillPack, the industry experience was split (one founder had a tech background, the other had a background in Pharmacies) and, in the case of Glossier, all the key elements where inside Emily Weiss’s head (product, brand, distribution).</p>
<p>If you are starting a company, and are thinking about getting a cofounder to supplement some of the core needs of your startup, what can you learn from these disparate examples? Here are 3 ways to think about it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>One vs. a few brains</strong></p>
<p>In the case of PillPack, I would think the partnerships, regulations, and logistics of an online pharmacy can be separated from the software requirements of running it. It is not a clean separation (otherwise it would be both online and a pharmacy), but strong enough that functional roles can be set up. In this case, you benefit from the parallelization and collaboration of two brains.</p>
<p>In the case of Glossier, it is really hard to separate brand, product, and distribution. If you have a vision for the brand than you must be able to articulate it in some form of content. Otherwise, it will be hard to build a business. And if you can articulate it, it will be for specific mediums: you will think of blog posts or Instagram posts. If you can only think of a 500-page book, then it likely won’t work either.</p>
<p>For Glossier, part of the magic is that all key elements are inside Emily’s brain. And they need to be because there is no real separation between the idea, the positioning of the idea, and the marketing of the idea.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Using the tool vs. inventing it</strong></p>
<p>If Uber’s goal was to build a business on top of the taxi network or if Airbnb’s goal was to build a business on top of the hotel network, having co-founder expertise in the domain might have been relevant. For example, Atrium clearly needed a lawyer full time from day 1.</p>
<p>However, if you are trying to think about this space from the ground up, that prior experience may become a liability. That’s why, when you are inventing something new, the newcomer often has the advantage.</p>
<p>So, if prior experience is somewhat of a constant (that is: a given you have to work with), having someone with the right experience early on might be beneficial. But, if you are deliberately trying to ignore it, then it can be detrimental.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Advisor vs. team member</strong></p>
<p>Do you need to talk to someone with specific expertise for almost every decision you make at the company? If you are early enough, a person with that expertise should likely be a co-founder. But, if you can do an hour a week and be ok, and if you need the expertise in only one brain, that perhaps an advisory role would work best.</p>
<p>In many cases, those 1-hour a week conversations can help you do two things: (1) get the needed mental model in one brain (your brain) and (2) meet the right person to do the full-time job at the company, when the time to bring them on board is right.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Do you need a cofounder?</strong></p>
<p>There are way more effective ways to get moral support than sharing a big chunk of your company to a cofounder.</p>
<p>You should only have a co-founder of the business wouldn’t work without someone of their ability to augmenting the team from day 1. They know something you don’t, that knowledge and expertise are needed on a day to day basis, and it is OK if it is not <em>your</em> core competency.</p>
Building and working with remote teams2018-08-08T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2018/08/08/building-working-remote-teams<p>I am a big fan of distributed teams. They foster thoughtfulness, reduce drama, improve business economics and help companies and employees find better matches.</p>
<p>If you are building a remote team, there are three important considerations to think about:</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>#1: distributed teams increase the cost of communication. Use it in your favor</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Discourage people from randomly sharing ideas. Encourage people to think things through, and put it in writing</li>
<li>Discourage interruptions. Encourage set times for coordination</li>
<li>Set up clear social rules for comms channels: What to use for urgent comms, what to use for non-urgent comms</li>
<li>Make sure everyone knows what are the top 1-3 priorities so everyone works on the most important thing. It is easy to drift apart in remote settings</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>To run a distributed organization well, it needs to be designed from the ground up for it:</p>
<p> </p>
<ul>
<li>The preferred form of communication must be written</li>
<li>Use voice comms when writing needs disambiguation/clarification OR when working on things that are “on fire”</li>
<li>Use video comms for non-tactical 1:1 and all hands</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>#2: finding great people and organizing them</strong></p>
<p>In the ideal case, you have a co-founder/early team member that is Not based and it is not interested in moving to SV, or equivalent tech hotspot. They could work at FB, GOOG, or any amazing startup if they wanted, but they want to stay close to home. This person is key because it can create a cluster around her (talent attracts talent).</p>
<p>In theory, you want a fully distributed workforce, in practice, talented people create clusters around them and companies are more likely to end up with a decentralized approach (one that accepts nodes).</p>
<p>Still, you should aim to be as distributed as possible the best way is to get more talent nodes going: after one node is blossoming, find another talent-anchor somewhere else, and repeat the process.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Try not to have offices. Offices foment fast, low-cost communication that is not permanent or easy to share. It is hard to sync with different offices.</p>
<p>Having offices threatens most of the benefits of a distributed workforce. If you have few and dense clusters, getting an office will be tempting. Try to resist the temptation.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>#3: Relationship structure</strong></p>
<p>Often people explore some or all of these options:</p>
<p> </p>
<ul>
<li>Full or part-time remote contractors (no equity)</li>
<li>Agencies</li>
<li>Full-time remote employee or contractor (equity or profit-sharing)</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>Remote contractors with no equity, full or part-time are not part of your team and as such, they should only work on peripheral tasks. Agencies are not part of your team. They can own full projects, but they need to be easily run independently of the core product.</p>
<p>The only way to build an actual team is to have them full-time, under contract, or employment, but with equity or some form of profit sharing. Under these conditions, they are part of your team. I don’t see how they can be in any other circumstance.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hopefully, this list helps you think through the decisions you need to make in order to build a remote team.</p>
The Medieval university is the best designed working space2018-01-28T00:00:00+00:00https://www.gheller.co/2018/01/28/medieval-university-best-workplace<p>I have come to believe that a lot of the frustrations at work have to do with office spaces. I believe the monotony of schedules, the mindless “busy” work that happens at the desk, the constant interruptions and the metawork of meetings are all a consequence of our current ideal of open spaces offices</p>
<p>My general take is that, if possible, offices should be avoided. If, however, an office is needed or desired, I think the open space should be avoided.</p>
<p>What do we want in an office? IMO, there are 3 things you are trying to do at work: do coordinated work with others, have random conversations with others, and do your own private, silent work.</p>
<p>My take is that these 3 types of work are sufficiently different that require separate spaces.</p>
<p>I find that the model of the medieval university offers a good example of how to do this: 3 very different spaces with 3 different purposes in one place</p>
<p><strong>The library:</strong> a place to do solo work (and get resources, which today takes place on the internet). Silence is enforced by staff and peers. There is no assign siting. The library is not my office, yet there is no time limit on sitting. There are fewer seats than students; limited supply helps limit the pretext that by sitting on the library you are magically doing work which is a common phenomenon of the office desk</p>
<p><strong>The classroom</strong>: booked on a recurrent basis, mostly by teachers/managers. Emphasis on focus on recurrent meetings, less on one-offs. This setup incentivizes parties to be more conscious of the use of group time.</p>
<p><strong>The courtyard:</strong> a place to meet and socialize. Helps build relationships (which in turn fosters better collaboration) and to encounter unexpected</p>
<p>Classrooms on one end, the library at the other, the courtyard in the middle</p>
<p>Being at the office all day feels oppressive to me. Having my own desk isolates me in place design to get people together. Open floor plans bread interruption. Easy interruption leads to shallow thinking.</p>
<p>Thoughtfulness requires time. Collaboration requires structure if not to be abused. The medieval university layout is a better solution</p>