Thursday, September 26, 2019

Response to "Startups need to hire more people from the humanities"

In Science and Tech, you generally need to be Reductionist to get something to work at all. By reductionist I mean that one tries to remove as many aspects of a problem as possible, before attempting to solve it. An example from physics might be to ignore friction and wind resistance to make a model of mechanics. This introduces a limit of the applicability, but it helps us learn something important. If you are Newton or Galileo, then this is an approximation worth making. An example from every-day design is to assume that all people are right handed. If you are one of the first to mass produce scissors or golf clubs, then making this approximation is worth it if it helps you get to market first. 

Startups make new things, or bring old things to new markets. Being first to market counts for a lot. Sometimes, when there are network effects, all that counts is to be the first to market with an okay product. Approximations can hopefully be corrected afterwards, when you have already beaten most of your competitors and try not to succumb to other businesses and institutions attacking you. 

Software in particular involves making 100s of these little assumptions and approximations. Project managers and back seat drivers want to enumerate and catalog these assumptions by interviewing and monitoring the developers. This is the bureaucratic approach to taming the chaos. It makes the whole thing take ten times longer, and it misses the unknown unknowns anyway. Since the top-down approach doesn't work, the number of necessary assumptions need to be kept to a minimum. The solution is to work on a narrower problem, where huge parts of the design space has been sliced away with big, explicit assumptions. That is why reductionism is critical for startups and researchers.

People are hard to make sense of with a reductionist approach, because they put up a fight. I take this as an a priori model, that people will over time develop a psychological resistance to any model that could be used for manipulating them. The only lasting model of human behavior that can be made then, is one that is so useless that it can never be used for exploitation. Advertising, propaganda, predatory economic systems; nothing works forever, they all have expiration dates.

So are 'reductionist tech' and 'irreducible people' mixed? Surely, if tech is supposed to be used by people in the end, surely we need at least one person who is less reductionist on our team? Well, that is not how user-friendliness is solved in the startup world. Successful startups just start with some intuit about what people want, that can be solved with scalable tech, and then work on that problem. The ones who get the intuition wrong simply die. The founders then make a new startup, or go back to working for the Man. Consequently, the "human" part is not solved on the individual startup level, but on the market level. 

My struggle with screen addiction

It has now been 3 weeks since I watched YouTube. It is also 3 weeks since I watched Netflix, reddit, memes, or any kind of moving or image-based media. It’s also been a while since I read the news, social media posts, or any kind of one-way media that stimulates our social nature. I realize now that I was addicted.
Previous behaviour
I did nonsense browsing, or screen-based entertainment, for about 5 hrs per day minimum. Up to 10 hrs per day on weekends. This was mainly video-based as I managed to quit reddit in 2015, although I relapsed for a few months in the autumn of 2018. There were many pathological signs. Disturbed sleep. Feeling of emptiness when removed. Used as a self-sedative to avoid negative emotions. Affected negatively the enjoyment of my work and relationships. Looking back, nonsense browsing has made me live a significant part of my youth at a level below what I could have, if I hadn’t been running the errands of screen addiction. I have wasted part of my potential. I have not wasted all of it, because I was in a sense high-functioning. I could still do my work and develop at a moderate pace as an adult. This makes me believe that there are many others like me, who may not see this as something that could be different.
Boundaries
Does this mean I don’t spend time in front of screens at all anymore? No, that is not possible since my job is to program computers. It is also an essential tool for having any kind of social life these days. I do private messaging and phone calls, but avoid chatting. During work time, I write code, and browse the internet for relevant resources. Do these activities risk becoming pathological in the same way? I think the important difference has to do with active vs. passive behaviour. What passive enjoyment has in common is that it is like a button that can be pressed, that makes you feel good. Whenever one likes, one can press the feel-good button and then lean back. Having unchecked buttons like this is very dangerous. (Feeling bad about having pressed the button too much? Better press a couple more times to feel good again)
Research and work is exhaustive. I must take breaks and make regular pauses. I must make some effort to get started. In the long run, working can be energy-positive as it contributes to one’s sense of self worth and meaning. But in the short run, working takes energy. It is not possible to lean back. With tete-a-tete social activity, it is always conditional on another person. It may be effortless to socialize if that is one’s nature, but the button is still checked.
Society-level
I am of course the one who is responsible for my self-destructive behaviour. As an adult member of a free society, I must be active in caring for my health. But Swedish cities do feature a lot of screens. I have noticed this since moving to a place with less screens, Germany. On my daily commute in Sweden, most people were looking at their phones. So did I at times. In the ceilings of the buses and trains, there are screens that show news and advertisements. In train stations and supermarkets, and all kinds of stores as well, there are screens. These one-way messages are hard to avoid. They are intended to catch one’s attention. It takes a good deal of psychological effort to block these out. Large parts of my field of vision had to be censored out. This cages the imagination. I don’t think it means that I have a certain weakness of character, that I found this very stressful. A person’s mind is their ultimate refuge, and unsolicited messages like this means the integrity of that refuge is being threatened.
Alternative
To quote Taleb: “The mind abhors a vacuum”. Brains hate having nothing meaningful to do. Prisoners who spend months in an isolation cell can develop brain damage that is measurable by MRI. So the brain’s hunger for meaning is certainly real. If one does do nonsense browsing for 5 hrs a day and wants to quit, it is not trivial to find a replacement activity. Screen use is an activity that releases dopamine, and dopamine deficiency can cause depression. Dopamine is necessary for the frontal lobe to do things which are not one’s habit, including kicking screen use. That is the mechanics of a true addiction: the behaviour is the main source of the chemical that is necessary to change the behaviour. So one must find another source of dopamine. As I mentioned before, the best candidate is probably to find active behaviours, rather than passive ones. These pay off more in the long run. Physical exercise can be one option. Eye-to-eye social activity is probably good. However, one’s social life may be conditional on screen activities, which is not a good situation. I take walks. One should have some plan for a replacement activity, preferably several.
Don’t act today
It’s not a good idea to try and quit right after reading this. You should see the addiction as an intelligent opponent, who will put up a fight. A half-hearted attempt may only make it smarter. So you must plan your attack carefully. The course of action that seems more likely to succeed is to start thinking about what you want to change, and how that change might come about. Then, when your life situation changes such that there is an opportunity to do it, you will be ready. Hopefully, the idea of living life without screen addiction will grow in your mind like a little sapling. But it may be awhile before you can sit in the shade of the tree.
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To my friends and family who read this
Please do not send me video recommendations
Please do not send me links to media
If you wish to tell me a funny story, please write it out as a personal message as if you would have told me in person. I realize that this makes communication with me bothersome and I will never blame you saying “forget it, then”. I will lose access to some kinds of information. Well, so be it.
If you do take the time to write out a message, I promise to take it seriously. Or take it as a joke, if it’s funny.