MACHINA

by Sebastian Marshall

  3. Beware of max-ordinal people. One of the most damaging things in life comes when you assess a friend or colleague as trustworthy and they turn on you. This is well-proven by both common experience and the history books. People that need to be better at everything, who are unable to maintain friends and good relationships with people who go up in the world, who gossip and speak ill of those who are succeeding – this is a very reliable predictor that they’ll turn on you and start sabotaging you if you come into more success than them. The smart move is to slowly distance yourself from those people before the stuff hits the fan.

  4. Pick your reference groups carefully. There’s probably some inbuilt ordinal tendencies in all of us – thus, pick your reference groups carefully. I’m not into rah-rah motivation very much, but it seems like one of the most correct things said by people in motivation and personal development is to “raise your standards” – it’s easy to compare yourself to people who are around you and to judge yourself against them. But I think it’s also a surefire way to underperform your theoretical cardinal potential, and to be miserable and a worse friend in the process.

  On a personal note, these days I don’t swagger as much as I used to, but I still compare myself as a writer and thinker and doer to people like Ben Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill – as such, the inclination is to push myself in accord with historical figures; everyday things happening around me are mere blips on the radar.

  I don’t compare myself to any of my friends – I see their successes as entirely appropriate and correct, because if you want to make a huge impact on the world, of course you have to have friends that are performing at the highest levels. I’ll learn from my friends, emulate their successes, help them and ask for help in return – but I don’t compare myself to them. They’re not my reference group – the maximum human potential across historical lines is my reference group. It can be a little daunting, but in a strange way, it actually makes things much easier for me.

  You might not want to go that far – it comes with its own set of neuroses and tradeoffs – but you definitely shouldn’t compare yourself to someone nearby like a cousin, coworker, or roommate. C’mon, you really can’t find a better reference group than that?

  ***

  A FINAL NOTE

  As a final passing note, Milton made Lucifer an ordinalist in Paradise Lost –

  Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce

  To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

  Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.

  Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven?

  I believe the opposite. Cardinal, not ordinal! But that’s not universally true, either – ordinalism where appropriate.

  But in Hell, no, not so much. Reigning in Hell is not something to be so proud of, eh?

  Dubious Battle #3: The Burden of Proof

  NYET, COMPRADE PICASSO, THE CCCP APPROVES OF THIS NOT

  “Soon after Stalin’s death, the French poet Louis Aragon invited fellow communist Pablo Picasso to create a tribute to the late dictator. On 12 March [1953] a small charcoal drawing by the artist was featured on the front cover of the French communist publication, Les Lettres Francaises. The comical appearance of the youthful Stalin, with a bushy peasant-style moustache and thick, raised eyebrows which gave him a look of surprise, infuriated the leaders of the French Communist Party. They announced that they ‘categorically disapproved’ of the drawing, which was rebuked for failing to adhere to the heroic ideals of Socialist Realism.”

  -- “Stalin by Picasso (or Portrait of a Woman with Moustache)”

  ***

  TEMPORARY WOUNDS, PERMANENT SCARS: 36 YEARS EARLIER IN BELGIUM

  The campaign is officially listed as having lasted 3 months and 6 days, from 31 July 1917 to 10 November 1917.

  In my opinion, it was three of the most important months for the history of Western civilization.

  At the end of “the Great War,” the “War to End All War,” – at the final closing of this march of horror, over 17 million would be dead and 20 million would be wounded.

  The casualties of the Third Battle of Ypres – the Battle of Passchendale – were “only” between 200,000 and 450,00 for the Allies, and between 215,000 and 410,000 for the Germans.

  Under 3% of the World War I casualties happened at Passchendale.

  But with the sheer horror of how it happened, the legacy of that battle is far greater than blunt statistics could define.

  From “The Battle of 3rd Ypres (Passchendaele)” by Geoffrey Miller –

  “The Ypres salient occupied a lowlying, gently undulating pastureland, which had been reclaimed from marsh over the years by an elaborate drainage system. The water table was near the surface, even at the height of summer, and this reclaimed land was extremely vulnerable to shellfire that would destroy the drainage system and allow the land to flood. There was no layer of gravel and flooding would rapidly turn the whole battlefield into mud once the shelling started.

  […]

  “The Germans were well aware of the strategic importance of Flanders and that is why this was the most heavily fortified part of their line. British security was very poor and the Germans knew all about the forthcoming battle and had taken their countermeasures well in advance.

  “It was no coincidence that they four days before the battle was due to begin they had carried out a tactical retreat from their front line back to the Passchendaele ridge. This left a zone of real and potential marshland in the low lying land between their new front line and the British.

  “Their new positions, the Hindenburg line, were a defence in depth of three lines, the third being beyond the range of the British guns. Between these lines was barbed wire, scattered concrete pillboxes and machine gun nests. The barbed wire funnelled the attackers into killing zones swept by machine guns and carefully registered by the artillery so that the attackers could be annihilated by a crippling concentration of shells.

  […]

  “These effects of the geography and the weather were made many times worse by [General] Haig's insistence on a preliminary bombardment of the German lines, even though he had been warned about this. Many shells fell short and the result was to turn a very difficult battle ground into an absolutely impossible one because it created a quagmire of quicksand-like proportions!”

  All war is hell, to be sure – but there are differences in degree and kind.

  Throughout history, it’s generally regarded that defense in war is stronger than offense, but the balance goes back and forth over time.

  World War I was the absolute height of defensive warfare having superiority over offense. Defensive weapons – artillery, machine guns, trench warfare, barbed wire – were newly invented, and the offensive counters of tanks, radio, and modern aircraft had not been invented at the start of the war.

  On flat ground, infantry would be absolutely annihilated by machine gun and artillery positions.

  That same artillery, though, made huge explosive craters in the ground when it hit. The convention, if wounded during an artillery barrage, was to try to scramble or crawl into one of the craters the artillery had carved into the Earth. Being “below” the battlefield, thus, would allow a chance for a wounded man to recover, and for medics to get to them after the fighting stopped.

  A British volunteer private, A.M. Burrage, wrote of his experience during Passchendale –

  "Dawn reveals to us a sight which nobody could visualize without having actually seen it. We can stand up and see the round of the horizon. It is like being on the sea, but our sea is a sea of mud. There is not a blade of grass nor a spot of colour anywhere. Only the least undulations tend to relieve the monotony of complete flatness. In the middle distance there is something which might by exaggeration be called a 'hill'. We imagine that this must be the celebrated Passchendaele Ridge.”

  On such a flat landscape, the only place to take cover if wounded was in the craters formed by artillery.

/>   This flat muddy landscape would be hell enough for the men fighting on it… before it started to rain.

  Burrage –

  “Several of our men, most of whom had first been wounded, were drowned in the mud and water. One very religious lad with pale blue watery eyes died the most appalling death. He was shot through the lower entrails, tumbled into the water of a deep shell-hole, and drowned by inches while the coldness of the water added further torture to his wound... our C. of E. chaplain - who went over the top with us, the fine chap! - was killed while trying to haul him out.”

  Passchendale accounted for less than 3% of the casualties of the First World War, but there was a unique sort of horror in drowning in inches of rainwater as those artillery shell craters filled with rain and mud.

  British Captain Siegfried Sassoon wrote his poem, “Memorial Tablet,” covering the horror of the battle –

  “Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,

  (Under Lord Derby’s Scheme). I died in hell—

  (They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,

  And I was hobbling back; and then a shell

  Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell

  Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.”

  It might not be an exaggeration to say that Passchendale led to the destruction of classical Western civilization more than any other single event.

  ***

  DUBIOUS BATTLE #3: THE BURDEN OF PROOF

  In 1521, Magellan arrived in the Philippines; he died there at the Battle of Mactan. In 1565, the first Spanish colonies were established in the Philippines. Missionaries and military authorities encouraged the conversion to Roman Catholicism. The Philippines is still a Catholic country to this day.

  Islam spread slower through Southeast Asia – mostly through India. There’s evidence of early conversion of Southeast Asian monarchs to Islam in the 1100’s, and conversion via missionaries began in earnest in 1419. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei are still Muslim countries to this day.

  As soon as a large body of people accept a particular set of societal organizing principles – a religion, a philosophy, a set of traditions – the “burden of proof” to switch to another set of organizing principles is very high.

  It usually only happens following a crisis or disaster.

  There’s a lot of important implications to this – any given set of organizing principles has strengths and weaknesses inherent to it. If a society’s organizing principles are fundamentally flawed in regards to technology, mobilization in wartime, economy, or transmission to future generations, it will die out.

  But oftentimes, a set of organizing principles has enough strength to keep going gradually, but with enough weakness to cripple various parts of development for the members of its society – typically leading to a slow decay and eventual collapse.

  In this chapter, we’re less interested in the macro trends of this, and more the implications for individuals coming from a particular society – and how that will generally effect us.

  ***

  10x Better to Switch

  We start with a simpler, much lower-stakes mental model.

  Many people in innovative technology have written of the idea that any time a customer wants switch products or services, there’s a “switching cost.” Wikipedia –

  “Types of switching costs include exit fees, search costs, learning costs, cognitive effort, emotional costs, equipment costs, installation and start-up costs, financial risk, psychological risk, and social risk. In the marketing literature, customers face three types of switching costs: (1) financial switching costs (e.g., fees to break contract, lost reward points); (2) procedural switching costs (time, effort, and uncertainty in locating, adopting, and using a new brand/provider); and (3) relational switching costs (personal relationships and identification with brand and employees).

  “Some of these costs are easy to estimate. […] On the other hand, the psychological, emotional, and social costs of switching are often overlooked or underestimated by both buyers and sellers.”

  A general rule of thumb among technologists is that your new product or service can’t be merely twice as good or even three times as good to get a customer to switch; it must be 10 times better. This idea has been advanced by the founder of Intel, Andy Grove, and the founder of Opsware and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz.

  The site Agile Startup writes up the common wisdom on getting customers to switch to a new product or service –

  “When entering an established market, you have to worry about switching costs, or the costs required for a customer to switch from a competing product to yours. These costs vary based on the nature of the switch, whether they’re intangible (brand to generic) or tangible (cash spent to switch database vendors). When starting out, think about the switching costs you will ask customers to make, and why it makes sense for them to buy your solution despite the extra expense. Some companies go so far as to pay the switching costs to get customers to change.

  “When thinking about switching costs, one rule of thumb is that your value proposition needs to be at least ten times better than the competition. For example, if you introduce a new email program with better spam technologies, it needs to be 10x better at blocking spam. If you want to start a consulting business, you’ve got to be 10x in your area of expertise.

  “10x can be hard to quantify, so just make sure that your offering needs to be significantly better. If it’s marginally better, people won’t switch. Regardless of the product or service, don’t rest until your value proposition dwarfs your competition.”

  ***

  EMOTIONAL COSTS, COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, AND CONFIRMATION BIAS

  This line stands out to me as very important –

  “On the other hand, the psychological, emotional, and social costs of switching are often overlooked or underestimated by both buyers and sellers.”

  We should add two known failure cases of human thinking to the equation.

  Wikipedia: Cognitive dissonance –

  “In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time; performs an action that is contradictory to their beliefs, ideas, or values; or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas or values.

  “Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance focuses on how humans strive for internal consistency. An individual who experiences inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable, and is motivated to try to reduce this dissonance, as well as actively avoid situations and information likely to increase it.”

  And,

  Wikipedia: Confirmation bias –

  “Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position.”

  ***

  THE SYNTHESIS OF TRAGEDY

  World War I did not live up to its promises.

  Hailed as “the war to end war” – or “the war to end all wars” – it was sold as both a glorious affair and something that would be over very quickly.

  No one was ready for the drownings in mud at Passchendale, the chemical warfare where a man’s lungs would rot from the inside out… no one was ready for the raw carnage on desolate landscapes, young men charging machine gun nests through high explosives across a chemical landscape; getting snagged in barbed wire and machine-gunned down by faceless and merciless enemies.

  Tr
agedies of this sort almost demand a rethinking of one’s core organizing principles and values. It is precisely this sort of apocalyptic level of tragedy that cause people to rethink their fundamental principles.

  ***

  VALUES AND ART DURING CRISIS

  In any given generation, there are always people who are both innovative and deeply discontent.

  The question becomes – what do those people do?