Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 56

Maximizing Appreciation of Life

Lots of things have combined to help me capture and articulate what I believe is my ultimate life purpose:

I enjoy finding patterns in how people pursue meaning, constructing models for how said meaning works, and then creating, discussing, and sharing possible frameworks for improving it.

My About Page

I think the main factors for arriving here were:

My study of Stoicism over the last few years
My practice of meditation
A re-evaluation of what I’ve written about over the last 20 years
Lots of thinking and self-reflection

I mean, I had basically captured this many times over the last 10 years or so, in multiple forms, but I’d never said to myself and others that this is what I’m about. So that’s been nice to have that out of the way.

That’s my ultimate mission. It’s a path and a destination all in one.

But over the last week I’ve figured out a central thread that runs throughout, which is the Appreciation of Life.

Again, this also comes from stoicism and meditation and all the other stuff I’ve been studying all these years. But it also comes from the pandemic, where I’ve been forced inside to self-reflect.

But it’s not like we’re in the 1700’s stuck on the side of a mountain in a pandemic. We have streaming music. We have Netflix. We have Zoom. All pandemics being equal, it’s been a pretty great time to be stuck at home.

Somehow, thinking about all of this, I started thinking about practical and tactical ways to spend time that maximize appreciation of life. Here are some that I came up with:

Telling your family how much you care for them, and trying to improve their lives
Telling your friends how much you care for them, and trying to improve their lives
Spending quality time with family (phone and zoom, for now)
Spending quality time with friends (phone and zoom, for now)
If you think of someone, text them and tell them so
Reading great books and sharing what you learn from them, or how they make you feel
Watching great shows and sharing how they make you feel, or what you learned from them

Watching great movies and sharing how they make you feel, or what you learned from them
Look for people who are hurting, and try to help them
Notice people who are hurting, and try to help them
Listening to great music, and investing in ways to do that better
Learning and practicing meditation (Vipassana)
Learning about art, finding your favorite stuff, and learning how to make it
Cultivating a feeling of gratitude for what you have, at any given moment

At a more shallow and more immersive level, I’ve been thinking a lot about physical sensation. So like audio and video.

I invested massively in audio in 2020, and I’m doing even more in 2021. I just plan on being in the house for the time being, and even after we have COVID under control I am still going to spend most of my time at home. More cooking. More music. More creation. More exercise. More thinking.

It’s possible to get massive pleasure from music, and from watching shows, and that can be maximized by investing in the various accouterments of the hobby. Speakers, DACs, AMPs, screen, seating, etc. Some of this can turn into materialistic masturbation, of course, so you have to watch the line between that and enhancing an activity by improving your tools.

Like buying new cooking knives, or a new cutting board, when you love to cook. Sometimes the tools are a distraction; other times they’re an enhancement. Shoot for the latter.

Anyway, this sense-enhancement stuff doesn’t have to be expensive electronics. Bedding. Sheets. Mattress. A better pillow. Maybe a bidet toilet seat, or an eye-cover and earplugs for when you sleep.

The point is trying to enhance and appreciate every single thing you do, to the maximum.

Friends, family, sound, light, stories, fiction, learning, laughing, crying, smiling, eating, sleeping.

Maximizing Appreciation.

That’s what I’m on about.

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Some Thoughts Going Into 2021

I wanted to lay out some random thoughts going into 2021.

First, like most people, I’m just happy 2020 is over. I know the quip that January 1st is just one day after December 31st, but it doesn’t feel that way. We’ve all been waiting for a sign that recent events have ended, and the calendar flip does that job.

That being true, the experts are saying pretty clearly that the next 2-3 months will be the worst months for COVID that we’ve ever seen, so it’s not like we’re clear of danger now.

Then there’s the small matter of Trump (hopefully) leaving the White House, and how that will actually go down. No point in trying to predict what will happen. Everything near him is resistant to prediction because prediction requires the behavior of rational actors. It’ll just have to be something sitting in our cognitive memory waiting to resolve, until it does.

Meanwhile, the stock market is thriving and people are wondering how long that will continue. Many think this K-shaped recovery (the rich get better, the poor get worse) will continue, while others think all the combining factors of COVID, mounting debt, evictions, unemployment, etc., will all finally explode. Again, no way to predict, but I feel like the stock market will continue to grow because optimism in the future is all we have left right now.

It’s like people are taking every last drop of positivity and pouring it into some distant future, in the form of the stock market. It doesn’t seem too terribly logical, using, well—numbers—with Tesla’s valuation as a case in point.

The thing I’m most concerned about for 2021 is an escalation with China. Not just militarily, but economically and just overall. I think we might be heading into a more serious general conflict. Not war, but strong hostility in the form of escalating all the various open fronts we already have with them. That means propaganda, cyber, tariffs, military maneuvers, etc.

What I’m specifically worried about is something I’ve not heard talked about before, which is the effect this might have on relations with Chinese people in the US—both recent immigrants and Americans.

In the Bay Area, because of the economic downturn in recent years, I’ve seen many shopping centers be taken over completely by Chinese businesses. Well, not so much a takeover as snatching up cheap stuff nobody else wants (or can afford). But the result in a lot of neighborhoods I see in the East Bay is that many shopping centers have like 20 businesses in them that are 100% Chinese.

I also know a number of real estate agents in the Bay Area who deal heavily with the Chinese population (because they’re Chinese American), and they have been describing this increased Chinese purchasing activity for years. And, anecdotally, I know many people renting in the East Bay who say most of the landlords they know are Chinese. A number of analysts have seen similar trends.

Anyway, the reality of how much this is true doesn’t matter as much as the perception. What I’m worried about is all these cases of Chinese espionage, Chinese cyberattacks, and then the increasing understanding that China’s CCP is moving to a vastly more aggressive stance towards the world will turn into a new narrative, which is something like:

Chinese from the mainland are infiltrating the US, buying everything up, hacking everything, etc., and the Chinese government will do anything—including applying pressure to Chinese-Americans’ families back home—to force them to act on behalf of the Chinese government.

You combine that with already-triggered Trump supporters who are looking for enemies anywhere and everywhere, and we could have a problem. And since we have tons of those Trump supporter types in government, we could actually see anti-Chinese legislation—or at least an attempt at it—if the narrative takes hold.

Racists have never been great at telling their targets apart.

We have a precedent for this of course, in World War II, where a group of Asians was rounded up because they were considered dangerous during an ongoing conflict. I don’t think we’ll see anything that extreme of course, but given what we’ve seen from the right I wouldn’t be surprised to see Red Scare language from some extremists, which could flare up relations between both newly-arrived and Americans of Chinese descent.

And the worst part of all this is that the Chinese government is actually probably thinking about how to somehow weaponize all the Chinese in the US. So it’s not like it’s total fantasy that they’d want to do this. We’re blessed there by the fact that so many Chinese are here because they fled China’s way of life in search of something better.

Anyway, not a huge likelihood that this will happen, but something I could see unfolding if Biden is not able to defuse things with China.

The other thing I wanted to mention was a comment I got from my last newsletter. A reader reached out and said that I was being rather negative lately, talking about how bad AI is, how bad the privacy situation is, surveillance, Drake’s equation, etc.

I thanked them for the comment and have thought a lot about it.

First, I think I could be forgiven for being a bit negative in 2020. It was a rough year. And I’m also in security so I see risk in many places. So, yeah, I do surface a good deal of issues, and I think some of that is part of providing what I provide in terms of discovery and curation.

But not completely.

I took the comment to heart because I am purposely trying not to be overly negative in the show. There is a ton of horrible shit happening in the world that I deliberately don’t surface. I also avoid politics, not just because that’s polarizing but also because it’s negative.

But—to get to the actual point of this post—here’s where I am with overall outlook. And this is going to be super freeform, so I apologize for the looseness. I think this really calls for a more stream-of-consciousness approach.

On one level I think we might be super screwed. As a race. As humans. As homo-sapiens.

The doomsday clock has been running since 1945, tracking how close we are to destroying ourselves. It’s never been closer to midnight than it is right now, at 100 seconds away.
Many countries with nuclear weapons are becoming less stable, adding to the doomsday situation
The US is drowning in debt
Democracies are struggling while authoritarians are rising in power
China is becoming more aggressive, as a strategy
Russia is becoming more brazen
We’re sprinting towards AGI with no regard of what will happen if we succeed
Our progress with modifying biology could be getting us closer to democratized bioweapons
Inequality is growing, which is dramatically increasing social tensions

I’m sure I’m forgetting some, and these are all bad things.

But I am actually optimistic.

Why?

Which is rich given my lack of belief in free will.

I can’t give full attribution, but I think it’s largely tied to stoicism, and simply choosing to be positive.

If you look at Pinker’s last two books there really is data that things—at many important levels—are getting better.

And this is highly unscientific, of course, but I feel like there’s massive pent-up frustration with lockdown and mediocrity. Like everyone wants to just explode and be happy and kind and extra.

Even the Roaring 20’s were only roaring for some people though.

Some are talking about a ‘Roaring 20’s”, where people are thriving and happy. I can’t call it, honestly. Nobody can.

I can see it going hard in either direction.

I could see democracies falling, America declining, continued hacks, Russia and China partner to snipe and salvage everything the US has built over the last 70 years, China starts colonizing much of the world, dystopian levels of social bifurcation and unrest in Europe and the US, the possibility of kinetic conflict between the US and China, and the possible dissolution of the United States.

Dark shit.

Or I could see an eruption of happiness resulting from Biden returning normalcy to US Leadership. Russia takes out Putin and replaces him with some sort of moderate billionaire, the world turns its back on China because they showed their malicious hand too early, and China’s best and smartest accelerate their exodus to Europe, Canada, and the US to get away from the regime—forcing the CCP to collapse or shift into something much more western in terms of representation and human rights.

Like I said. I can’t call it.

Perhaps the more likely outcome is less extreme. The US continues a gentle decline, Russia fades into the background, and China rises slowly.

One larger trend that I think will continue regardless is millions of people opting out of reality.

As our tech gets better, and as more effort is spent on making games immersive, most people will switch their Life Loop system to be game primary / reality secondary.

Basically, I believe evolution requires us to focus primarily on one major Life Loop, with a life loop being a goal and reward system.

So if you’re a dedicated parent above everything else, then your life loop is parenting. Your job is your secondary because it supports your family and children. And if you play ultimate frisbee or World of Warcraft those are distant N-tiers away.

What that means is it’d be really hard for a dedicated parent to dedicate their entire life to World of Warcraft if it requires 30 hours a week of dedication. What about working? What about time with kids? What about self-improvement to improve your work performance, which in turn improves your kids?

My belief is that we can only really handle one primary life loop. If it’s World of Warcraft, everything else starts at a distant second. If it’s parenting, or your work, everything else starts at a distant second as well.

I think what’s happening now, and what we’re going to see accelerate, is more people switching their life primary life loops from the real world to game worlds.

I wrote here why alternative meaning loops can be dangerous.

Their goals, their relationships, the work they put into their domiciles and their gear—all that will be on their character, not on their life on the outside.

They’ll work just to have money to escape reality and play their game. And increasingly, they won’t be able to do anything better than robots and AI that’s worth a paycheck, so the government will have to give them money for rent and gaming fees.

Much of humanity’s meaning will move to the virtual world. And gaming companies will move more towards infinitely sized, constantly-evolving game worlds that mimic reality in many ways. You’ll be able to be a criminal, the police, a porn star, a marine biologist, a professional athlete, etc.

Anyway, bottom line is many people in the bottom 80% of socio-economic happiness will opt to disconnect from the real world. And the better automation and AI become, the fewer good jobs there will be for people to get into that top 20% in the real world, and the faster that will go.

Same with the gaming immersion tech. The better that gets the better a person’s reality will have to be to compete with it.

Anyway, just some random and raw thoughts as we get ready to start January of 2021.

I hope they bounce around in your head and interact with your own in a useful way.

I’ll see you out there.

Hey you.

…

Yes, you.

…

It’s going to get better.

You’re going to be awesome in 2021.

I know it.

— ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ (@DanielMiessler) January 1, 2021

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An Audio Quality Primer

Basics


Sound is the vibration of something within air that causes waves, or pulses, of that air that can be measured by the number of waves per second.
This is measured in Hertz, which is one wave per second.
The human theoretical limits for hearing are 20 hertz (20 waves per second), and 20khz (20,000 waves).
There isn’t much musical information beyond 10-15Khz.
Most humans can’t hear much beyond 15Khz anyway, although our theoretical limit is 20Khz.
When you listen to a live band you’re hearing analog sound, meaning the mechanics of your ear are being directly influenced by the air coming off of instruments and vocal cords.
When you listen through technology there’s a necessary analog to digital conversion that takes place, because computers can only do 1’s and 0’s.
The trick is that when you go from analog to digital, you have many options.
The main two options are how often you take a sample from the analog (real) thing, and how much dynamic range is possible within each sample.
CD Quality is known as 16/44, which is shorthand for 16-bit samples taken at 44Khz, meaning the samples are taken 44.1 thousand times per second. This level is considered very high quality compared to most music streaming services from before 2018 or so, because most of them were encoding down to much lower quality to avoid buffering over mobile internet connections.
A very super-high quality file or stream sits around 24/96, which can be found in offerings like MQA on Tidal.
The extremes here are quality levels like 32/192 and beyond.
You need to sample at twice the rate of the frequency, so if you want to sample 20Khz you need to sample at 40Khz or higher, hence 44.1 or 48 Khz.
Ultimately these are resulting in a dynamic range, which is how quiet and loud something is, and specifically what the distance is between the quietest and loudest sound in a file.
A 16-bit recording has a dynamic range of 96 decibels (DB), and a 24-bit file has a dynamic range of 144DB.
Contrary to what many believe, a higher bit-rate than 16-bits, or a higher sample rate than 44.1Khz does not give you better sound by itself. Those numbers already exceed the capabilities of human hearing, so going beyond them does nothing for the sound quality during playback.
There are production reasons for tracking and mixing at a 24 or 32 bitrate, however, which basically come down to giving yourself room to make mistakes.

Human ear sensitivity is 10-12 w/m2

Decibels are measures of loudness, and they’re logarithmic, meaning they scale by the exponent, hence DECI-bel (10).
Humans can hear between 0 and infinite decibels, but the scale is extreme.
A whisper is 40 db, normal voice is around 60, a playground is around 80, 90 is where you start damaging your hearing, a loud concert might be around 100, a plane taking off is around 130, and you can evidently kill someone with around 160 to 180 decibels.
There is tons of confusion in comparing audio sources, streaming Music sources, etc., and many of the different file types.
Encoding is the process of converting from one format to another, including from analog to digital.
Whenever you encode you have the possibility of losing data, and this is especially true if you’re trying to make a smaller file.
If you’re trying to go from CD quality (16/44) to a smaller file—for example because of limited bandwidth—that is why we came up with encoding like mp3, which has different levels of quality.
Low-quality mp3 files are very small, but sound worse because they strip away data from the original
As you get higher and higher quality of mp3, such as 256 and 320, you end up with less audio quality reduction, but larger file sizes
The highest quality comes from super high-quality recordings of the analog experience, which happens in the original studio recordings, and quality there can be as high as 32/192 (and higher). But again, these don’t give you better playback by themselves; they just help with production.
It’s good to have this level of original to work with, which you can then encode downwards from for various uses, such as streaming.

If you sample at double the frequency you get the crest and the trough, so you can recreate the rest of the wave perfectly. There is no need whatsoever to go higher.

When you go down from those super high quality levels to 16-bit, you do actually lose data in the various ranges, especially at higher frequencies. More
The part that is controversial is how much REAL WORLD effect the various encodings have on the actual listening experience.
This is why there are so many philosophical debates within the music and audiophile communities, and this is also why I wrote this primer.
The truth is this: there are so many variables in play in the equation of listener experience here are some of them:


The quality of the original recording
The quality of the encoding of the file you’re listening to
The quality of the equipment and environment that you’re listening on
Your own personal biases and psychological priming that’s currently in effect as you listen

It’s established science that the human mind can easily be tricked into thinking something is better or worse based on what the person was told beforehand, or what they just experienced right before.
So if you hear a horrible recording encoded into a tiny mp3 file, and go from that to a halfway decent situation, the jump might sound far more dramatic than a jump from decent to extraordinary.
The human brain is a major factor in this equation, and it’s too often discounted as an explanation for differences


Analysis and takeaways


When you are doing comparisons, as a human, between two different musical audio experiences, you have to consider the full stack of variables.
Are you listening on the same equipment?
Are you listening on the same app?
Do those apps have different EQ settings built in that can radically change the sound?
Do the two apps have different versions of the actual song, i.e., different recordings?
Is one a different mastering of the song than the other?
And finally—are you primed psychologically to hear one thing or the other?
You should always suspect bias in yourself, and look for ways to reduce it

TL;DR: Optimize your entire chain, and be suspicious if you hear someone say that the difference in an experience comes from bit/sample rates above 16/24. It’s probably one or more of the factors above.

Notes


Logarithms take super large or super small numbers and turn them into nice numbers. A log(10) of 100,000 is 5 because 100,000 has 5 zeroes. The log(10) of one billion is 9 because it has nine zeroes. The cool part about this is that you can deal with massive numbers like 100K and 1 billion by working instead with 5 and 9.

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News & Analysis | No. 261

I spend my time reading 3-6 books a month on security, technology, and society—and thinking about what might be coming next. Every Monday I send out a list of the best content I’ve found in the last week to around 40,000 people. It’ll save you tons of time.

SECURITY NEWS



FireEye has published additional details about the SUNBURST backdoor, including anti-analysis mechanisms, domain generation algorithms, C2 behaviors, and malware modes of operation. Kevin Mandia says the true target for the operation was probably around 50 companies, even though thousands were affected. More



CERT says there’s a SolarWinds Orion API authentication bypass that allows RCE. More



Google has disclosed a newly-unpatched Windows 0-Day in the print spooler API. More



Palantir just got a contract with the UK’s NHS. Every time people think Palantir is dead, they spring back to life. They’ve been around for 17 years, have never been profitable, and said they might never be. Most of the income they do have comes from just a few customers. But somehow they keep getting interest and contracts. I think we truly have moved from a multiples-of-earnings valuation model to a narrative model, as others are saying. But how sustainable is that? Seems rather 2000’ish to me. More



TECHNOLOGY NEWS



DeepMind’s latest AI can master games without being told their rules. First they created AlphaGo, which beat the best human players at Go. Then they created AlphaZero which beat that one with no input except the rules. Now MuZero can beat all those without even being told the rules. Cool. Not scary at all. More



Facebook Engineering has created a mobile network connectivity system called Supercell that gives 15-65x the range and coverage of traditional mobile towers. They’re publishing it as a standard for various players in the industry to use. Looks like cool tech. Now if they can just control the conspiracy theories on Facebook about how dangerous these things will be. More



Square is supposedly trying to buy Tidal. Coincidentally, I just got back into Tidal over the last couple of weeks. The app is way better than I remember, and I’m absolutely loving the MQA content, but that still leaves me no clue as to why Dorsey would try to acquire them. Twitter, Square, and a music service? I’m not hating or skeptical, just genuinely curious.



HUMAN NEWS



Korea set the new world record of a 20-second-long artificial sun running at 100 million degrees. In ‘unfortunately probably not unrelated’ news, a new paper from NASA’s JPL says the other civilizations in the Milky Way probably killed themselves off through “progress”. More More



The British Centre for Economics and Business Research says that China will pass the US in economic strength in 2028—which is 5 years earlier than previously forecasted—largely due to its superior handling of COVID. More



A study has found that people taking Acetaminophen (Tylenol) are more open to taking risks, such as bungee jumping or being outspoken in an important meeting. More



There is clear data on which majors make the most in industry, but very few students are aware of the data or following their advice. More



The Chinese producer of Netflix’s ‘The Three-Body Problem’ series has been killed by poisoning. This series is being run by the producers of the Game of Thrones TV series. That’s two bad omens for me. More



Salmon are spawning in the upper Columbia river for the first time in more than 80 years. More



IDEAS & ANALYSIS



3 Metrics That Will Indicate We’re Taking Security Seriously — What would be the metrics we tracked if security was taken seriously within our society?. Essay



Whose Life Are You Living? — Are you living the life you imagined or the life that happened to you? Essay



MY UPDATES



I finished Anna Karenina. I’m not sure what to do from here. Are there forums where I go talk about my thoughts? Literature departments at colleges? Not sure how to process it. TL:DR: Deeply insightful about a certain kind of people that existed then, and that still exist in some places now. A bit depressing, with a glimmer of nebulous hope. Anyway, already on to the next one.



I started The Salmon of Doubt, a collection of essays by Douglas Adams.



I’m also starting Homeland, which is January’s UL Book Club of the month.



I, unfortunately, watched the new Wonder Woman movie. It was horrendously bad. Like, unspeakably horrible. The plot was atrocious, the CGI was abysmal, and the acting just caved to peer pressure. I normally don’t get bothered by bad movies, but I wanted a little gem to cap the year, and I really enjoyed the other WW movies. This one completely trashed what they had built. 1/10. 



I’m re-adding the ‘UL Supporter’ designation to any product in the Discovery section that is supporting the show in any way. I explained why I didn’t want to do this here, but I’ve decided to side with radical transparency over design aesthetic. My long-term audience gets me, but not everyone reading is part of that group. I think if it’s ever a question, just side with transparency. So that’s what I’m doing.



DISCOVERY  



Social Analyzer — A local tool for finding a person profile across 300+ social media websites. More



Canary Tools — A high-signal and low-effort way to find out who’s poking around your network without permission. More (UL Supporter)



Kenzer — Automated web asset enumeration and scanning. More



100 Tips for a Better Life More



There’s a new version of the TRON: Legacy soundtrack, including a MASTER (MQA) version on Tidal. It’s an expanded release, and in higher quality as well. More



Platforms, Bundling, and Killzones More



A realistic and healthy way to become a 10x developer. More



Ask HN: What’s the best Paid Gmail Replacement? More



RECOMMENDATIONS



Make a commitment to call a couple of friends instead of just texting. Texting is great, and way better than nothing, but hearing each others’ voices is a serious upgrade.



APHORISMS



“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”



~ Seneca

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3 Metrics That Will Indicate We’re Taking Security Seriously

A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that computer security isn’t really a priority in most companies, or for our society in general. I captured this in my piece Why Software Remains Insecure, which basically comes down to security being precisely as good as it needs to be.

Or 100 years.

Before you squint at that, ask yourself how many homes are broken into every year. How many front doors are kicked in? How many locks are picked? A lot. So ask yourself why home locks haven’t improved much in the last 50 years.

That question rhymes with all the internal security people screaming at full volume about how their companies aren’t doing the basics. They’re not tracking assets. They’re not logging. They’re not hiring competent leaders. They’re not taking security seriously at the C-level.

Both situations have the same answer: the amount of damage caused—so far—has not been enough to take serious action.

Security people wonder why nobody listens, and this is the unpleasant answer.

In other words, our current level of security is acceptable to us. We know this with certainty because we’re accepting it. Hence, it’s acceptable.

The current ransomware plague might be serious enough.

I don’t think this will always be the case. I think we’ll see a number of cybersecurity events that will change our behavior, and I wanted to answer the question of how we’d know this had happened.

Here are four metrics we’ll see rising if and when we start taking cybersecurity seriously:

Number and Amount of Fines Issued to Companies For Producing Insecure Software: Imagine if Microsoft or Oracle started getting serious fines when their software was part of a vulnerability chain that lead to losses. This is the equivalent of old Roman practice of having bridge builders sleep under the bridges they built for a period of time. In short, those who built things had Skin in the Game, which Nassim Taleb talks about extensively in his book of the same name.
Number of Employees Fired for Ignoring Security Rules: We’ve all seen security awareness programs in our copmanies. There are videos. There are classes. There are certifications. Lots of green checkmarks. Who has seen people actually getting fired over this? Like actually terminated. Very few, if any. The punishment tends to be having to sit through more videos, which is admittedly pretty horrible. But until people start actually losing their jobs, the training doesn’t have a second hand to clap with.
Number of Company Executives Serving Jail Time for Security Breaches: You want to see new life in a security program? Start sending some millionaires to jail when their companies cause damage. Keep in mind, I’m not saying we should do this right now. The industry is not mature enough to place blame on a bunch of hapless executives who barely understand the risks. The point is that once we do have that maturity those executives will no longer be able to hide behind this ignorance. They will be held responsible, and that will result in more change than you can imagine.

You can’t start counting Porsches in your driveway to get one to appear.

Let me be very clear: I’m not saying we need to put these metrics in place to make ourselves more secure. What I’m saying is that if we ever do start taking it seriously, these numbers will start incrementing naturally.

Amd the more ridiculous these events sound to you, the further away we are from security being a priority.

So ask yourself: how close are we to seeing these three things happening?

Yeah. Pretty far.

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News & Analysis | No. 260

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Whose Life Are You Living?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to live the ideal life.

This was prompted years ago by David Brooks who talked about résumé virtues vs. eulogy virtues in The Road to Character:

It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

David Brooks, The Road To Character

One piece of research here is that people rarely regret what they did, but rather what they didn’t do.

In my experience the way this happens to most people is they connect with others—through friendship, marriage, family, etc., and they take on the goals of that group.

So they meet a bunch of friends who go into finance, so they go to school for that and get great careers, but in their 30s or 40’s they remember that they’ve always loved to paint, and they wanted to be a painter. But they’re not a painter now, and it’s pretty hard to switch.

Or someone wants to be a writer, or an artist, or a stand-up comedian. But he meets a girl from a conservative family, and pretty soon he’s got a Masters’s degree in civil engineering and four kids. And one day he wakes up and realizes his wife and his wife’s family would never respect an artist of any kind. So he’s stuck.

This kind of pressure can come from your parents, from your wife, from your friends, and yeah—even from yourself.

But try it. Just ask yourself: what did you want to be when you were growing up? Did you have something you knew you wanted to do, or that you wanted to be?

Was it a scientist? An actor? A chef? A lawyer?

Did you give that up somewhere along the way. Did you convince yourself that it was an unrealistic goal? Did you let other people convince you of this?

I have a name for this. It’s called, “Letting life happen to you.”

If you’re in this situation—which only you can know, and which might take some time in self-reflection—let me be the friend you didn’t have that tells you the truth.

Don’t let life happen to you, and…
It’s never too late to move toward your ideal life

You are not truly alive unless you’re being your true self.

Is your true self packing boxes in a warehouse? Is your true self looking at source code? Is your true self being a parent? Is your true self being a high-paid lawyer who hates her job?

Look at what you wanted to be. Look at what you are. How far apart are they? If there’s a big difference there, look at how to close it.

There have never been so many options for online education. There have never been so many ways to learn about any particular subject.

There’s never been a better time to become who you are.

Don’t live someone else’s life. Don’t surrender. Don’t do it.

Fight.

Become yourself.

I believe in you.

Notes


Keep in mind it’s fine to give up on a goal if you genuinely change, and you just don’t think that was what you wanted after all. In other words, if it was a false goal. Just don’t trick yourself into thinking that was the case when you really just settled.
I’m not talking about reliving your youth in some sort of mid-life crisis mode here. I’m not talking about, “I never slept with enough people.”, or, “I’ve always wanted a BMW.” Those are not likely to bring you fulfillment. I’m talking about if you have always been a Marine Biologist and you simply convinced yourself not to become one. Go fucking do it.

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It’s Becoming Easier to Fail and Succeed

A number of forces are simultaneously pushing people towards two sides of a socioeconomic barbell. And the question of where you will go is increasingly coming down to your parents and your peers.

There are many reasons for the shrinking of social mobility.

Those close to you have always had an impact, but social mobility is falling in the United States, and I believe there are three dynamics playing on this effect.

Safety-net Democracies as an enabler.
Technology as a magnifier.
The pandemic as an accelerator.

Let’s look at some of the impacts of these three forces.

Video game usage is booming
Cannabis use is being mainstreamed
It’s easier than ever to start a business online
Online education is available for free, but only for those with the discipline to pursue it
Misinformation is rampant online, but it’s consumed and believed mostly by people who are struggling
Apps like Robinhood are gamifying investing, which affects young investors most
It’s easier than ever to use automation and AI to hire fewer people at a business
More young people are living with their parents than ever
Social media is a way to market your business—or to become depressed through overuse

Through the advancement of our society—with more tech, better video games, more online education, and the decriminalization of recreational drugs, we’re seeing much more impact from parental guidance.

In the Bay Area, for example, there are millions of young Chinese and Indian families—who range between being new immigrants to third-generation Americans—who have the same access to cannabis and video games as Americans who’ve been here for much longer, but they generally don’t partake.

Why is that?

Because they have been set on a success track by their parents, and they generally associate with peer groups with similar aspirations. These families are focused on making sure their kids get a good education, get a high-paying and high-status job—all so they can raise their own families that do the same.

Technology and the pandemic are magnifying peoples’ advantages and disadvantages.

For them, social media is a valuable tool. They get to share college experiences, vacations, and advertise their various projects. For them, automation and AI are wonderful because they make it easier to get high-quality services. They are able to get their food faster, they spend less time waiting for customer service, and they can even see their doctor and get prescriptions online.

Temptations like video games, social media, and cannabis (which is now legal) are not a significant risk to them becasue they are on a mission.

This is not the case for many multi-generational Americans who were not given the immigrant mindset by their parents. For them, staying at home with their parents, playing around on social media, using cannabis, and playing video games is becoming a new default state.

Parents without the immigrant mindset see that life is hard, and it’s ok that their kids still live at home. And is it really that bad if they use marijuana? It’s legal now anyway, right? And video games can be educational too, right?

And pretty soon their kids are 40, with no marketable skills, and no prospects. And suddenly Fox News is starting to make a lot of sense. There has to be some reason that they are suffering, and their kids are suffering, while some people seem to be doing better than ever.

In short, forgiving societies combined with high-tech are forcing people to the extremes, and COVID is accelerating the trend.

Ok, but now what?

The Bifurcation of America

So what is one to do about this?

Well, it depends on who you are. Are you a parent trying to raise a kid? Are you in high school and wondering what’s in your future? Are you in your 30’s or 50’s wondering why you got left behind?

No matter what you are, I think you can benefit from seeing our advancement as a fulcrum for self-discipline.

Those who value education, planning, and sacrificing their short-term enjoyment for long-term position are going to thrive. And those who don’t have a plan, aren’t getting an education, and aren’t able to ignore video games and recreational drugs, are going to be left behind.

Their few job prospects will increasingly be replaced by automation, their romantic options will continue to dwindle, and they’ll become even more vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories.

One group will benefit from a super-fast turnaround of a COVID vaccine, the other will abstain because they’re anti-vax
One group will use social media to market their influencer business, the other will doomscroll until they need therapy
One group will go to work designing and making video games, the other will spend all their time playing them
One group will do tons of online courses like Masterclass and Udemy to constantlly improve themselves, the other will use the internet for pure entertainment
One group will use virtual personal trainers and interact with their doctor remotely, the other group won’t exercise and will only use urgent care clinics and emergency rooms

So which are you? And which are your friends and loved ones? This is the question you should be asking yourself.

If you don’t like your answer there is good news. You only need two things to pull yourself into the successful group.

A decent helping of intelligence and luck are also helpful.

Knowledge that this is how the world works
The discipline to create a path out of your situation, and to follow that path

If you are someone who sees this, it’s your responsibility to help others see it. Don’t let your friends and other loved ones become part of the Suffering Class by default—just because you didn’t want to have an uncomfortable conversation.

Summary


People are confused about the effect of technology and the pandemic on the Suffering and Thriving classes
It’s not that technology or the pandemic is pushing people up or down
These forces are acting like a magnifier to what already exists, pushing society into a barbell shape
If you’re in the Thriving class, help people who are on the Suffering by Default track to see the other option


Notes


This model is a bit simplified, obviously, as there are many fulfilling professions that don’t require a great education and don’t command a great salary. I’m not saying that if you don’t have a degree and aren’t making lots of money that you’re necessarily going to become part of the underclass. What I’m saying is that if you don’t have a plan to avoid that outcome, it is very likely to happen. Again, you can avoid that in multiple ways: the immigrant approach is just the safest with the highest chance of success.

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Summary: Atlas Shrugged

8/10

My One-Sentence Summary

Only people who manage their lives according to reality and reason, and who strive to be productive on their own—with no help from others—are worthy of love (or assistance when they’re in a bad spot).

Spoilers below.

Capture


Reality is the backstop to everything
Reason is how we go about finding the nature of reality
Selfishness is natural, and therefore not bad
Selfishness is not only ok, but it’s the natural state of healthy individual
There’s no such thing as doing something—in a healthy way—for someone else, unless you’re getting something in return
The “something” you get in return can be direct and monetary, or it can be something less tangible like the satisfaction that you’re seeing them grow up and become responsible and productive
You can also give to someone in this way knowing that they will pay you back later, but only if you truly believe that
Charity is considered a bad word in this work, but it’s ok to give to someone in need
The distinction is all about whether the person is deemed worthy or not
She doesn’t believe in throwing money after someone or a problem unless they are worthy of that assistance, which means they’re likely to be productive and able to reciprocate in the future
She believes love is also an exchange
She believes that if a woman adores her man, and loves him, and treats him like some kind of ubermench, then she is providing value that he can then respect and love

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love—because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

Ayn Rand

She is very anti-feminist in this way, believing that woman’s highest calling is adoring a man, and believing that man’s highest calling is being someone worthy of that adoration
But the main character of the book was actually a woman, and she was just as competent as any of the other heroes in the book. In fact she was more competent than 99% of men she met
So as a public intellectual herself (Rand) it seems that she’s saying women are just as capable as men, but that romantic happiness comes from being a sub to a worthy man, and that true happiness cannot be reached without that
At the end of the book she’s obviously going to be his woman, but also obviously to be the head of the new railroad as well, so it’s not as if she’s going to stop being a productive member of society (I don’t think?)
At the end someone is sitting and writing a new constitution, and instead of saying we won’t go against people’s human rights, it says we won’t infringe on people’s ability to make money (or something to that effect)


Takeaways, Questions, and Ideas


I think this book is full of solid wisdom, but that wisdom is perverted and maligned in a way that makes it impractical and negative if actually turned into policy
I am 100% for teaching people that THEY must strive and excel and chase their dreams, and that they should not look for help outside of themselves
I’m also for the messaging that you need to be WORTHY of love to expect it, and that if you want it you should work on yourself first
This rings similar to a lot of Jordan Peterson stuff as well, clean your own room, take responsibility, etc.
I see a lot of contradictions and hand-waving in this philosophy
There’s a disconnect between telling a woman to be great like the main character, but also telling her to submit to a worthy man. When do you make the transition? Can you do both at the same time? What if you sub for too long and lose your ability to provide value in industry?
There’s a disconnect between unrestrained capitalism and good outcomes. Phillip Morris wouldn’t have stopped advertising cigarettes to kids because they wanted to, because Capitalism somehow made them moral. No, the government had to stop them.
Strong people who have a business can and will do things to stop competitors from entering their market, and that doesn’t require any physical violence, which is the only thing she says the government should protect us from
This means Walmart or EvilCorp—and the one guy at the top—could simply turn the knobs and pull the levers to keep everyone out of business, which would then harm the competition and Capitalism that she so adores
In short, all her points have some sort of merit, and some have a lot, but many of the main tenets seem to break at the extremes
Another example is how Francisco, Hank, and John all seem just fine with her being with any of them. Again, as if this worship of exceptionalism (which they all three have) will somehow conquer natural human jealousy
That idea is just as nice and impractical as Communism in the real world (it’s an ideal that doesn’t work in reality) and the fact that she has these blindspots is problematic
I think this book deserves a lot more respect, but not the religious worship it gets from some fans
I think nearly anyone can take something to support their own philosophy from this
There are feminist teachings (she’s a badass), anti-feminist (she wants to submit to a strong man), Capitalist, Libertarian, but also compassionate (she and Hank help a number of people they deem worthy)
I think this should probably be read along with Brave New World and 1984 as a different type of dystopian novel.
Brave New World warns against people being controlled by their desire for pleasure
1984 warns against authoritarian governments and what they can do to your mind
Atlas Shrugged warns against the dangers of accepting weak people as a symbol of success, against rewarding or celebrating failure, and against growing an impotent government that reinforces those behaviors
She’s absolutely right about those things being bad, and you can see a lot of those dangers in today’s society. But just like Marx she nails the problem but misses on the solution
The solution is not to slide the slider from weakness to unbridaled Capitalism
The solution is a composite, something like what exists in Germany or Sweden or some European nation. I tend to think we need more of both Capitalism and SMART regulations. In other words, the better the regulations (like brakes) the more free the Capitalism can be
This is something I’m thinking a lot about right now, pursuit of ideal hybrids
The image I have is a giant shell of spherical magnets holding a molten core of plasma at the center
The plasma is selfless love, pure capitalism, and the belief in complete human autonomy and responsibility
The magnets are the knowledge that free will is an illusion, that we must invest in people and society’s infrastructure if we want thriving individuals, the regulations that require capitalism to remain benign, and the truth that love requires bi-directional value
This is highly congruent with my thoughts on General Absurdism, which is all about maintaining two understandings of reality in one’s mind (nearly) simultaneously
We must be the plasma while maintaining the magnets
We must love unconditionally while maintaining conditions
We must tell young people to take all the blame and all the responsibility, and to strive to be their ultimate selves
But we must also make sure they have as many of the tools as possible to make that happen
That means they have good families that help them learn these lessons, they get the education they need, they have healthcare, etc.
But we have to provide these things as the magnets, not as a negation of the plasma

8/10

BROWSE MY OTHER BOOK SUMMARIES

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Google is Getting Left Behind Due to Horrible UI/UX

I’ve been writing for probably a decade about how bad Google’s GUI is for Google Analytics, Google Apps, and countless of their other properties—not to mention their multiple social media network attempts, like Google+ and Wave.

Of course today they had a massive outage across multiple services.

Back then it was super annoying, but kind of ok. They’re a hardcore engineering group, and their backend services are without equal.

But lately it’s just becoming too much.

This interface only makes sense if you’re on the dev team or have been a long-time captive

Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch.
What happened to Google Docs? Why does it not look and behave more like Notion, or Quip, or any of the other alternatives that made progress in the last 5-10 years?
What college course do I take to manage a Google Analytics property?

I’ve attempted to upgrade to the theoretical GA4 like 7 times already

Google just rolled out Google Analytics 4—I think—and the internet is full of people asking the same question I am.

Is this a real rollout?

They have a button that says, “Click here to upgrade to GA4”, but all it does is have you create a new property, which I guess you link to with your old one.

This immediately resulted in my hits getting counted twice when I did it, and the new analytics interface didn’t have any of my old data. So it really wasn’t an upgrade. It was the creation of a new one. I thought it had to be me being dense, but then saw that the whole internet was saying the same thing.

Google DNS management is probably the cleanest interface I can think of.

But that’s just one example of dozens, and the examples spread across all their various properties.

The real question

My question is simple: how the hell is this possible?

I get it 10 years ago. But then they came out with the new design language. Materialize, or whatever it was. Cool story, and cool visuals.

But it’s not about the graphics, it’s about the experience.

How can you be sitting on billions of dollars and be unable to hire product managers that can create usable interfaces?
How can you run Gmail on an interface that’s tangibly worse than anything else out there?
How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?

I’ve heard people say that Google has become the new Microsoft, or the new Oracle, but damn—at least Microsoft is innovating. At least Oracle has a sailing team, or whatever else they do.

I’m being emotional at this point.

Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces.

Focus on the experience. Focus on simplicity. And use navigation language that’s similar across your various properties, so that I’ll know what to do whether I’m managing my Apps account, or my domains, or my Analytics.

You guys are awesome at so many things. Make the commitment to fix how we interact with them.

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