Hello there, friend!

The above quotes and all other restatements of the core idea grow more relevant by the day. From nuclear war through engineered pandemics to unaligned AI (which in my opinion easily trumps all the other threats), we seem to be playing on the edge of an abyss. And obviously, it's not an overnight development – we have been racing toward this cliff for... well, probably at least centuries.

The causes for this are many, and I'm completely incapable of unpacking them (though I really enjoy Harari's attempt to at least give an outline of them in Sapiens) but there is one that I've been thinking about lately – the profit maximization ethic of capitalism. More specifically, why does it go wrong?

Sure, profit maximizers don't care about negative externalities like degradation of the environment or unleashing a dangerous super-intelligence, and because their more ethical competition is likely slower and/or more expensive, they either end up overtaking them, or the competition realizes it has to drop its lofty ideals if it wants to stay in the business. But this is clearly bad even for the winner of such a race, so why can't they see it and decide against participating?

A first-order explanation is that businesses have this myopic view forced upon them by the shareholders demanding maximal quarterly earnings, but that only leads us to ask the same question about a different group. "Short-termists all the way down" isn't really a helpful explanation. If we then inquire about deeper causes, we'll basically end up with either ignorance or foolishness, where ignorance is a lack of knowledge (for example about the systemic forces at play, or about the consequences of our actions in the system) while foolishness is a lack of wisdom, i.e. engaging in a self-deceptive self-destructive behavior, in the words of John Vervaeke.

Unfortunately, (and perhaps paradoxically, given Asimov's quote) ignorance is here to stay. Even though a better understanding of complex systems could benefit everyone, even with a perfect systems-thinking education we'd still run into our bounded rationality. No one can understand everything, no one can grasp all the consequences of all their actions. The way we deal with this limitation is through a process called relevance realization – we're able to ignore almost everything and somehow zero in on only the relevant information, allowing us to act. However, it's also impossible for us NOT TO ignore almost everything. And as Vervaeke points out it's exactly this ability and imperative to ignore what's not relevant that also makes us perennially susceptible to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior, because we often end up ignoring something crucial. Wisdom then is the ability to optimally realize relevance and to get continually better at it.

The problem is, such recursive realization is hard. Thinking and decision-making are hard. And we're biologically programmed to conserve energy and look for ways to make difficult things easier. That's how we end up offloading a lot of our cognitive processing outside ourselves: we offload it to heuristics, with two key subgroups being algorithms and metrics, or we offload it to other people.

And there are very good reasons for doing that. Metrics and algorithms allow us to simplify the world, compress it into numbers and use those to make effective decisions in the face of overwhelming complexity. Division of labor allows us to specialize, to unlock economies of scale with all of us doubling down on our strengths and letting other specialists take care of our weaknesses, of what's difficult or aversive for us. And because such differentiation then also requires integration, managers emerged as specialists in coordination for organizations, while profit emerged as a metric of coordination for entire economies.

And because we need relevance realization to shape our heuristics and division of labor, but we also use heuristics and division of labor to guide our relevance realization, both of these offloading mechanisms suffer from the same risk – that we end up ignoring something crucial. That's why Goodhart's law warns that a metric shouldn't become a target – because we end up optimizing for a simplification that was only meant to provide guidance. And that's why Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil passes right through every human heart – because if we want to live in a wise and moral society, we cannot offload wrestling with foolishness to anyone or anything. Not to a manager telling us we don't need to worry about the impact of the product we're working on, not to an ideology that guarantees a place on the right side of history. We all have to struggle for ourselves.

However, that doesn't mean we have to struggle alone. In fact, [[Vervaeke]] emphasizes the importance of dialectic for the cultivation of wisdom, of participating with others in a joint search for understanding, and overcoming our ignorance and self-deception. And because most adults spend at least half their waking hours at work and because organizations, not individuals are the prime movers of history, I believe that helping organizations shift from optimizing for profit to optimizing for the cultivation of wisdom of their members is the best way I can help bring about a wiser society. After all, improving medieval institutions seems more tractable than getting rid of paleolithic emotions.

And even though the challenge is enormous, I believe there are already signs of hope. Though technology is dangerous, it also enables easier coordination. This enables organizations to stop relying on managers for coordination and switch to self-management, which returns agency and responsibility to all their members. This then enables the people to "bring their whole self to work", which maximizes their idiosyncrasy and helps organizations be more adaptive and innovative because they can benefit from much more diverse perspectives.

So self-management is not only possible, it's also deeply rewarding and as the innovativeness shows, it's even very feasible. What's more, people working in self-managed organizations often find it to be a great facilitator of personal growth – because they can no longer offload conflict resolution to managers, they have to engage in a dialogue with their colleagues when they disagree. Clearly, this dovetails perfectly with dialectic and cultivation of wisdom, which people also find deeply meaningful – as Socrates said "An unexamined life is not worth living." Self-management and a philosophical way of life are in my opinion deeply synergistic, and as the effectiveness of self-management shows, this creates an opportunity for philosophy to "piggyback" off it and spread faster than ever. Perhaps even fast enough to steer us away from the abyss and towards universal flourishing.

It's definitely worth a shot.

Last week’s dig-ups

Collective metawork

One key requirement for self-management and for any close relationship is open communication. To make it constructive and honest without damaging the relationship, a good rule of thumb is “You can only be as courageous as you are caring.”

Entrepreneurship

So far, the only content I’m creating is this newsletter. I’m fine with that for now, but I know that once I really start caring about growing an audience, I’ll need to get much more active. A standard recommendation for growth on Twitter is 3 tweets a day, 2 threads a week, and as many replies & DMs as possible. And for that, I’ll need systems. It was thus great to learn a bit about how Justin Welsh uses systems and how he generates ideas.

Philosophy & Sense-making

An interesting take on why the birth control pill ended up being bad for society and a discussion of its consequence – unplanned childlessness.

Reflection

• Last week wasn’t my best – somehow I was fighting distraction A LOT. I need to remind myself that my every action is a vote for the kind of person I want to be and stick to the rules I set for myself, like no social media or Netflix before dinner.

So that’s it for this week. I ended up spending waaay more time on the essay than I planned to, but it’s a kind of kick-off for a topic that’s central for me right now, so I would really appreciate your feedback! To facilitate that, I pasted it here.

See you next week

Chris