Hugh Howey's Blog, page 10

Coronavirus COVID-19: Why The World Isn’t Ending Anytime Soon

Let’s imagine a future dystopia where we live among machines that provide a much-needed service, but through mechanical failures and user error, they kill over one million people per year. ONE MILLION.

Another 20 – 40 million are seriously injured or permanently disabled every year from these machines.

That would be the car. And it would be the world we already live in.

Imagine if you had people on fear-mongering websites tracking each vehicle death, and people sharing the grim statistics every single day. Think you could get people afraid of cars? I bet you could. I bet there would be a ton of people who would never get in them. I know people who refuse to fly, even though it’s safer than getting in a car. Because the rare flights that go down get a lot of press. And because we don’t feel like we’re in control in an airplane.

Now think about this: There was a time before the flu virus affected humans. There was a time before humans and the flu even existed. But along came humans, and along came the flu, and then humans became more numerous, and now 300,000 to 600,000 people die every year from the virus. Roughly half a million! That’s a lot of people.

In 1918, the world was hit by the deadliest flu strain ever. The Spanish Flu killed between 20 and 50 million people. 20 to 50 MILLION! More than the First World War (which helped spread the flu). Back then, medical care was very poor, and governments were so scared of panic that they told people to carry on about their business. The mayor of Chicago said everyone should go shopping and go to the movies. A lot of people died. 20 to 50 million.

That’s a big number. It’s also as many as have died because of cars in the last 30 years. Or regular flu in the last 75 years. The Spanish Flu took out roughly 3% of the world’s population. For every 100 people you knew, 3 of them died.

The Spanish Flu was worse than the bubonic plague (the Black Death). It was a more brutal modern killer of humans than pretty much anything that has come along before or since.

But think about this: In the worlds we enjoy in our dystopic and post-apocalyptic fiction, we often deal with worlds where 95% of people are gone and a mere 5% survive. The inverse of the Spanish Flu. The worst that nature has ever thrown at us wasn’t nearly as bad as our fears of apocalyptic ruin. Our paranoia will always be worse than the reality. Always.

COVID-19, the latest strain of coronavirus, follows on the heels of SARS and MERS. Research on COVID-19 continues, but it appears to be a mix of good news and bad news. The bad news is that it spreads much more easily than SARS or MERS. There are a few reasons for this: It can be spread while the infected are asymptotic; it goes airborne; it can lie dormant for some time. The good news is that it kills at a lower rate than SARS and MERS. MERS kills at an insane rate of nearly 35%! SARS has a mortality rate of close to 10%. COVID-19 appears to be less than 3%.

The total global impact of COVID-19 in the year 2020 will possibly be tens of thousands dead and half a million to a few million infected. But this strain could resurface and live among us for the rest of time. Just like other coronaviruses. Just like regular flu. Just like cars.

The great news, down the road, is that cars will one day drive themselves and possibly only a few thousand people a year will die from them. We will also one day come up with a universal flu vaccine and wipe the disease from the planet. The bad news is that 100% of us are going to die eventually. All of us. And very few of us are going to die of the flu. Even fewer will die of coronavirus.

But that won’t stop us from fixating on this new killer of humans among us. And it shouldn’t stop us from treating these new killers with respect and doing everything in our power to minimize their impact. Follow events with both perspectives in mind: This is a tragedy for the families who lose loved ones, just as it’s a tragedy for those who lose families to cancer, heart disease, and accidents. It’s also just one more of a legion of things that can get us, all of which are unlikely, so carry on with your lives without undue fear. Just maybe shop on Amazon and watch a film at home.

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Open for Submissions: Part 1

Here’s the first part of this series. Like I warned before, this is not going to appeal to a wide swath of people. It’s an hour of talking about writing, which is only slightly more exciting than talking about talking.

Thanks to everyone who tuned in live. Sorry I didn’t get to all your comments as they were coming in. I realized pretty quickly that I could spend the entire time just talking with you all and answering your questions. We’ll do that some time in the future, I promise.

Here are links to the books I recommend in the video:

BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott
EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES by Lynne Truss
ON WRITING by Stephen King

Books I love that inspire my own writing that I recommend as well:

THE AGE OF ABSURDITY by Michael Foley
THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood

Submitted works mentioned in this video that you can’t read anywhere (yet):

THESIS DEFENSE by G.M. Nair

A book by the submitting author that you can read if the tease of the above was too much to bear:

DUCKET & DYER: DICKS FOR HIRE by G.M. Nair

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Open for Submissions

I’ve got an idea. It’s a weird one. Everyone I’ve mentioned it to has had one of two reactions: They either look at me very confused-like and let out a yawn. Or they say, “YES PLEASE DO THAT YESTERDAY.”

The latter are, invariably, writers. That’s who this is for. I want to do something to help inspire writers to put out their best work. I’m saving the details of this project for its first installment, but for now I need to add to my already-growing slushpile.

I need your writing. It can be in whatever form or stage you like. The ideal submission is a short piece that you think is completely done and ready for publication in the hottest new science fiction and fantasy magazine in the land. Even better if you’ve been sending it out on submissions and haven’t had any response. Best yet is a work you’re thinking of submitting but haven’t had the courage to do so yet.

You can also send in the first chapter of your current work in progress. Or a short story you put in a drawer. Or that short story that reading this blog post makes you want to FINALLY sit down and start/finish/polish to perfection.

Whatever you send, make sure you’re okay with it being shared with the public (the entire piece will not be shared — at most a page or two of it will be made public). If you want your name left off, put “ANONYMOUS” in the subject line format that I detail below.

If you are a professional writer, feel free to send me something. If you’re a self-published writer, feel free to send me something. If you’ve never published anything in your life, feel free to send me something.

Be warned, however, that I will be going through these submissions just like my agent does: I will be looking for any reason whatsoever to skip to the next submission. I will also be editing and critiquing your work just like the professional pieces I edit and publish in my bestselling anthologies.

Grabbing or losing my attention is entirely up to you. So don’t hold back. And don’t phone it in. Send me your absolute best.

Click here to send submissions to my super-special email address

Subject line should read: Open For Submissions [Title of Work] [Your Name]

Microsoft Word files are best. RTF will also do.

Happy writing!

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The Inertia of Bad Ideas

Like anyone with impeccable good taste, my favorite comic strips are Farside and Calvin and Hobbes. And my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips usually involve a wagon or a sled barreling down a hill. Calvin is usually waxing philosophically, while Hobbes is asking if they should, perhaps, if Calvin doesn’t mind, consider slowing down or avoiding the cliff/tree/crash at the end.

These strips embody the inertia of bad ideas. The problem with a bad idea is that it persists almost as readily as a good idea. It builds momentum. Like a wagon or a sled headed for disaster, they are difficult to bail from. Fixing a bad idea in our writing requires a little work now to stave off a lot of work in the future. But the idea of taking a small crash immediately when we can put it off is a honeypot for writers. So we forge ahead.

I figured out a long time ago that it’s often better to delete entire chapters and start with a blank page than it is to fix a story that’s gone awry. It’s some of the best craft-level writing advice one can receive: Figure out where you were last excited about your story, go back to that point, and try something radically new going forward. Repeat until you remain excited all the way through to the end.

This lesson was re-learned over the past two weeks in Los Angeles. It was my third time in a writing room, the second time working to adapt one of my novels into a TV show. But this was by far the most dynamic, fluid, creative, and interesting rooms I’ve been a part of. Several times, we came up with very, very bad ideas. Once spoken, these ideas became reality. They were now a part of our plot. Suddenly, we had to find ways to fix the problems they caused, and then fix the problems those fixes caused! The air went out of the room. We would sit in silence. Or we would try to move on, only to return to the mess we’d made.

In each case, it eventually took someone in the room saying, “Let’s just not do that,” and suddenly the dozens of problems disappeared at once. Hobbes prevailed. Cliff averted. The good ideas had time and space to breathe and grow. But I can’t tell you how difficult it was in each instance to pull another writer away from their downhill trajectory. Bad ideas have inertia. Especially when they’re our bad ideas.

One of the best things I’ve ever done as a writer is join a critique group. Not just to have dozens of writers read a sample of my work and give me feedback, but also to do the same for them and to hear how my ideas differed from others’. I also discovered the magic of beta readers, getting feedback before a work is published. My mother became a crucial first reader. The key was to listen to their objections and not be wed to an idea just because it was mine. And to not avoid the work it took to absorb all the small crashes. Revisions and edits can be hard work. Publishing anything less than our best possible story is a disaster.

Overall, inertia is the ultimate killer in the creative world. Inertia is not simply the tendency for objects in motion to remain in motion; it’s also the fact that objects at rest remain at rest. Inertia is the force behind writers’ block and procrastination. It is the force that puts us in the trap of revising the same paragraphs over and over rather than forging ahead into blank pages unknown. It is a wagon without a push.

Look for the inertia of your inaction and your bad writing ideas. Recognizing them and acting on that knowledge is the key not just to productive writing, but to discovering your best writing. Most of all — and the easiest bit — is to recognize when you’re having a blast, when the story is going great, the characters are alive and facing challenges, and the words are flowing. That’s when we get to be our best Calvins: holding on and enjoying the ride.

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We Can’t Destroy Planet Earth

We can’t destroy planet Earth. I don’t think we can wipe out humanity, even with a concerted effort and every tool and resource at our disposal.

This was my biggest challenge when writing WOOL. End-of-the-world scenarios were a popular trope at the time, and when I decided to share my take, my biggest challenge was coming up with a realistic scenario where all of humanity might be put in jeopardy.

All-out nuclear warfare wouldn’t do it. Climate change won’t do it either. Neither will the rise of AI and robotics. The three great existential threats of our time aren’t so existential as it happens.

One of my personal heroes, Stewart Brand, made this same claim recently:

Climate is not an existential threat. Artificial intelligence is not an existential threat.

A nearby nova event or a comet collision could be an existential threat. Their likelihood is calculated to be right next to zero. https://t.co/r0BV3JasjM

— Stewart Brand (@stewartbrand) March 12, 2019

Before I expand upon this and put Earth, mother nature, and humanity into context, an aside here to say that individual life is precious. Individual species are precious. It is worth protecting both. Climate change is already leading to the loss of both individual lives and species, and for that reason it’s one of the most important challenges we face today. But overstating things serves no purpose. We aren’t going to “destroy Earth” or “wipe out humanity.”

Another aside here to point out that every human alive today will die. And every species that exists today will go extinct. That’s as near-certain as any claim can be. The sun will run out of energy. The universe will collapse into a single black hole or expand and turn into a frozen wasteland. All known life will end in billions of years, but not at our own hands or by our own doing.

So when we talk about the “end of the world” or “the end of humanity,” both are assured. Both are natural stages of progression. But our hubris in thinking that we can cause either is a misrepresentation of both our power and our fragility. The former is weaker than we imagine and the latter is far stronger.

Kevin Kelly once asked me to write a science fiction novel about a group of people who need to unplug the internet. It’s a fun thought exercise, trying to imagine how one might go about trying to shut the entire internet down. Kevin’s point is that something we imagine to be easily disrupted is actually so robust as to be nearly impossible to end. Life is like this. Humanity is like this.

Two points that drive this home:

Point one: About 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was a molten ball of lava and boiling water. Formed from a disk of material accreting around the sun, impactors were striking every second with the force of thermonuclear explosions. From this steaming inferno all life today arose. And rather quickly. It turns out that planetary life is a downhill chemical process if you have sunlight and liquid water.

Point two: At some point the population of our ancestors dipped down to around 2,000 members. And at some point further back we would find that our common ancestors broke off at the size of an individual pack or tribe. From this small number of early Humans, nearly every manufactured thing was created. And it was created out of stuff we dug out of the dirt. Your cell phone, my laptop, were made out of mud by a very small group of hominids who came down from trees.

A molten ball of lava. A small tribe of apes. Those are the very real origins of the bounty of life around us and the miracle of all our inventions. Whatever disaster we concoct that might put an end to all life, or all of humanity, must be creative enough to pound us back further than the point from which we actually came.

We forget our origins when we predict our doom.

So how could we wipe out all life on Earth? One idea would be to carve up Earth into individual chunks the size of small moons and tow them with rocketry far enough apart that they’ll never accrete again. That would suffice. Perhaps we could create black holes near Earth’s orbit and steer our planet gravitationally into the sun or out toward Mars. Now we’re talking.

What about wiping out every last human being? A global pandemic; nuclear winter; global warming; caravans of migrants. Again, we can imagine a doomsday scenario where hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of lives are destroyed, but getting to every last pocket, and taking out the 200 here, or 200 there, in every corner of every jungle and on every remote island … it’s not feasible.

I have a short story in an upcoming anthology inspired by this point. The third entry in the fantastic WASTELANDS series by John Joseph Adams will have a story by me about a place where our worst case scenario has already happened. The story takes place on the island of Fulaga in the remote Lau group of Fiji. This is an island almost completely cut off from civilization, and it’s one of the most beautiful spots on Earth that I’ve seen after years of sailing. If nuclear war broke out across five continents, it would be a very long time (if ever) that the people of Fulaga learned of the collapse of civilization.

The daily routines and existence on Fulaga are what we imagine life to be like in the apocalypse: People constantly hunting and foraging for food, surviving day to day, generation to generation. People living in primitive conditions in small groups. Guess what? The worst thing that preppers fear is a place that I’m dying to sail back to. Not that we should ever wish for the collapse of civilization, but we should be reminded that humanity will not collapse along with it.

There are hundreds if not thousands of islands just as removed as Fulaga. All of human civilization would arise again from any one of them, or from any of the remote tribes far up rivers and deep within forests. There’s an island in Vanuatu I visited where each year another person wanders into town from the jungle to discover human civilization. They see what we’ve built for the first time. Uncontacted tribes living a few days walk from an airport with a direct flight to Brisbane. That shit blows my mind.

When we talk about disasters, we should be more precise in our language and more honest about our concerns. Honesty and precision are the bedrocks of discourse and science. We should protect and prolong individual human life. We should protect and preserve existing species and their habitats. The reasons are simple and selfish: Our own lives and the lives of our loved ones are precious to us, so policies that extend individual lives will likely extend those lives as well. And we benefit from the bounty of nature’s diversity, not just in what we eat and the medicines we discover, but the aesthetic pleasure of being immersed in Earth’s flora and fauna.

You won’t meet many people who love our reefs as much as I do, or spend as much time swimming among them. But I’ll be honest with you: I want to preserve our reefs because they’re beautiful. That’s it. That’s my reason. Because I enjoy looking at them. I’m not remotely alone in this. And that reason should be enough.

I want to limit the impact of global warming because I like the islands we have which means keeping them above water. I like reducing poverty and war, because their reduction lifts the global economy and makes travel safer and more enjoyable, and limiting climate change will help in these areas as well.

What I don’t like is when we exaggerate and undermine our good intentions. Or when we obfuscate those intentions by not being honest about what it is we hope to achieve. Life is no less miraculous for being a downhill chemical reaction; it only happens under just the right circumstances. The big ball of congealed lava on which we live will enjoy these circumstances for billions of more years. We will evolve or engineer ourselves into something unrecognizable to us today, but we will continue to exist for perhaps as long as our sun holds out. Maybe even longer.

It won’t be forever. But it won’t end by our machinations either. Even though it makes for a great fiction.

Stewart Brand and yours truly in Cuba, talking about life not ending anytime soon

(If you want to read my solution for how to wipe out all of humanity, check out WOOL and the Silo Saga. Spoiler: it ain’t pretty)

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The Tao of Writing a Novel

I love a good paradox. A paradox is a statement that on its face cannot possibly be true; it contradicts itself. The most famous and simplest paradox is:

This statement is false.

If the statement above is true, then its contents tell us that it’s false. But we’ve established that it is true! On the other hand, if the statement is false it admits that it is false, which makes the statement true. It hangs in the balance between true and false, tipping one way or the other depending on your gaze, daring us to make a choice.

The beauty of a simple paradox is that it forces us to grapple with the nature of truth and falsehood. What seems wrong on its face forces us to parse each word, or challenge our assumptions, or see a common idea from a different angle.

Taoism embraces the paradox as a path toward truth. One might say that the surest way to truth is by falsehood. I know this is true of my writing. If I’m stuck writing a novel, it’s often because I’m scared that when I start writing I’ll head off in the wrong direction, writing a novel that’s not meant to be. So I stare at a blank page, paralyzed. I know that if I write, I’ll write what is wrong.

And that’s precisely what we are meant to do. Heading down the wrong path allows us to close off that avenue from further exploration. If focuses our attention on what might be true. Repeat this process a few times, and you’ll find the way.

Chapter 63 of the Tao Te Ching, one of the foundational works of Taoism, is a bullet list of what appear to be paradoxes:

Practice non-action.
Work without doing.
Taste the tasteless.
Magnify the small, increase the few.
Reward the bitterness with care.

Never has perfect writing advice been so cleverly hidden in plain view. I could break each of these lines down into entire chapters of writing advice until I had a novel about writing a novel. The more you dwell on them, the more depth and truth leaks out, which is how paradoxes often work. The chapter goes on…

See simplicity in the complicated.
Achieve greatness in little things.

Everything you need to know to be a better writer. It’s all right here.

Make your plots easy to understand, for all their twists and turns. Distill them to their pure meanings. But find details and elegance in the smallest of descriptions — the song of porcelain on porcelain as a teacup is lifted from a saucer, the brush of hair on a bare shoulder. Taste the tasteless: give the reader a sense of what it is to be there, even in pitch black. And do this all by embracing the strenuous effort of sitting still, alone with your thoughts, doing nothing, which is by far the most herculean thing anyone does these days.

Most of all, reward the bitterness with care. Bring tension to your story and within your characters. Don’t let your worlds be perfect, nor your grammar, nor your characters. And don’t you dare pretend to be flawless yourself, especially as a writer.

Which leads me to the Tweet that inspired this blog post. It was a tip from my friend Wesley Chu, who has advice for anyone contemplating writing a novel:

Hey guys, #protip. If you don't think you can write a book, you're probably right.

— Wesley Chu (@wes_chu) February 28, 2019

Occasionally a good paradox cloaks itself in tautology. What Wesley is saying here appears true by its very construction. Writing is an act of doing. You must sit down and put words together. If you don’t think you can, it’s because you aren’t. And if you aren’t, you won’t.

The paradox hidden in Wesley’s simple truth is a very personal one for me. I never thought I could write a book. For twenty years I tried to write a novel and gave up every single time. Twenty years! I probably left fifty or sixty book ideas to die barely completed. I didn’t think I can, and I couldn’t.

But I also didn’t think I could when I did. I wrote my first novel in a flurry of self-discovery and self-doubt. The more the novel grew, the more the weight of my inadequacy mounted. It was like that tractor pull device that slides up over the roof as the truck makes progress … the very act of progress serving as an impediment to progress.

Such is writing.

With every novel written, the way of writing novels grows more cloudy. The doubts only increase. Finishing a novel often feels just as mysterious to me as starting a new one. How had I done that? I’ve written sequels with more mystification than the novels that proceeded them. I’ve gone into every novel thinking that I couldn’t do this. So it seems Wesley is wrong. I don’t think I can, and yet I do.

It would seem that Wesley is wrong in another way: In my experience, the people with the most talent have the most crippling self-doubts. The people with the least talent are the most confident. Talent in art grows by absorbing great art, and there is no way to be a student of art without being humbled by the self-made comparisons. We will never be as good as the things we admire. That’s the nature of admiration.

When I see people say as Wesley does here that self-doubt should be the end of trying, a part of me wants to shout and rebel. It wants to rise up and say Fuck That Noise! The people with doubts are the very people who should be writing! They are the only people who should be writing! No one should ever write but without confidence!

And here is where simple truth leads to paradox and back to truth, because Wesley Chu is of course right in every possible way.

What changed for me — and ended twenty years of failure — was a writing conference in Charlottesville Virginia. I was there as a blogger, covering the conference and nabbing interviews with some of my favorite crime writers for a website I’d started with a friend. At the time, I was reviewing books because I was incapable of writing them. The more I reviewed them, the more I knew I shouldn’t be writing them. I was full of admiration.

One of the writers at the conference that I admired was Charles Todd, which is actually a writing duo of mother and son, Caroline and Charles Todd. I attended a panel they were on, and at one point, a member of the audience asked how they could go about writing their first novel. Caroline practically leapt out of her chair and slapped her hand on the table with great force, near-shouting: “You stop thinking about writing a novel. You stop telling people you’re writing a novel. You stop dreaming of writing a novel. And you write!”

My hair was blown back. Seriously. I went home from that conference and didn’t write my next review. I didn’t read my next book. I sat down and wrote my first novel. In a week. Seven days. 75,000 words. Twenty years of failure gone, poof, just like that. Because I stopped not just thinking that I couldn’t do it… I stopped thinking about it at all. I concentrated on doing it.

As Yoda says: There is no try.

Hey guys, #protip. If you don't think you can write a book, you're probably right.

— Wesley Chu (@wes_chu) February 28, 2019

My first reaction upon seeing Wesley’s Tweet was to disagree with the simplicity of his truth. I don’t want to dissuade artists from trying. I want the reluctant greatness in every artist to be expressed and tested on the open market. I want those with doubts to fill worlds with characters who are consumed by their doubts. The more you think you can’t write a novel, the more reason you should. The more qualified you are. The more you have something worth saying.

But that’s not what Wesley is saying. He’s one step past this. He’s at the act of sitting down in front of your keyboard, that blank screen rising before you, years of mocking — decades of mocking — turning now into nothing but sweet potential. It’s okay to think you can’t write a novel. Live there, grow there, learn there. But at some point, stop thinking. If you’re thinking you aren’t doing.

Do.

Chapter 63 of the Tao Te Ching, and everything you need to know on writing a novel, ends with this:

In the universe the difficult things are done as if they are easy.
In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds.
The sage does not attempt anything very big,
And thus achieves greatness.

Easy promises make for little trust.
Taking things lightly results in great difficulty.
Because the sage always confronts difficulties,
He never experiences them.

I know you think you can’t do it.

Wesley knows that too.

And we both think you’re wrong.

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The Long Road to Oz

I made a dash for the garage as soon as the van pulled to a stop. Behind large wooden doors turned gray by the beating sun was a musty room that smelled of fish and sea salt and rust. Beach bikes hung from the ceiling; surfboards stood in a rack; there were fish gigs like Neptune’s scepters, nets, buckets, and rods. But all I cared about what was on the trailer.

The doors leading out the back of the garage were held in place by a timber resting in two metal brackets. Lifting this out and jumping back as the timber crashed to the concrete, I would throw open the doors and let in the North Carolina sunshine. Two weeks of summer vacation on Figure Eight Island. I grabbed the hitch of the small trailer and wrestled the sailboat back toward the sound. Most of my two weeks would be spent sailing in circles, pretending that I was sailing around the world.

At nine or ten years old, setting the mast of a little Sunfish sailing skiff was like raising a flag over Iwo Jima without any buddies to throw their back into it. Trial and error. It’s been a year since I remembered which lines went where. Invariably, I made a mistake or two. Fouled something up. Wondered if maybe my memories of sailing the year before were nothing but fantasy. Why had this seemed so easy once?

Pale skin had to burn again. Calluses had to remember where to go. By the end of the week, the rail was dipping in the water, the rudder thrumming, the keel groaning. I was all bare feet, freckles, and smiles. And an earlier fantasy of digging through the sand to reach Australia — the other side of the world — was replaced with more audacious dreams: sailing there.

Some years ago I visited Australia for the first time on book tour. I remember standing under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, looking over at the Opera House, and imagining sailing there by boat one day. This was after ten years of working in the yachting industry, five years of living on my first boat, and several aborted attempts to get across the Pacific on various freelance jobs. At the time of my visit to Oz, I was neck-deep in a writing career I’ve always dreamed about. I was putting out two or three novels a years and a handful of short stories. More than half my time was spent on the road as I said “yes” to every opportunity that came my way. I was living one dream, but I never let go of the other. As fate would have it, one of my dreams would help make the other possible.

I write this from Bundaberg, Australia. Yesterday afternoon I completed a passage from New Caledonia. Greeting me were three humpbacks who breached a dozen paces from the boat as we sailed by. It marked the end of my Pacific crossing, nearly two years spent sailing the islands between here and Panama, easily the best months of my life. Milestones are great times for reflection, and I can’t help but think back on my time learning to sail on a little dinghy, dreaming of getting to the other side of the world, as far from where I was as possible.

I could fill a book with all I’ve learned thus far on this adventure. The biggest lesson would have to be one of perspective, a lesson on scale. The world is far smaller than I ever imagined. You can traverse the globe at a walking pace, and you’ll run into familiar faces thousands of miles from home. I’ve learned that we are far more alike than we are different, and that we seem to know this, which is why we seize on our small differences and attempt to amplify them for reasons both good and bad. I’ve learned a weird sort of humility that is tinged more with shame than pride. I remember a boastful humility from college days, where we bragged about how little we knew, the subtext being “see how much I know?” Now it’s just an embrace of ignorance. I’m wrong more often than I’m right. I’m getting cool with this.

Maybe the best thing I’ve learned is that the learning never stops. There are so many people to sit and have kava with, a glass of wine in the cockpit of a stranger’s boat, a house in Cuba to be waved into, another language to fumble over, someone else’s adventure which is so much more insane than anything I’d ever dreamed for myself. Every corner and over every horizon another dose of awe. The green flash of a setting sun or the blur of maybe an insight, but it’s too early to be sure.

Along the way, I’ve stopped sharing my thoughts and opinions as much. I got off Facebook last year, stopped logging onto Twitter this year, very rarely publish anything on my blog. I haven’t stopped writing those thoughts; I’ve just stopped hitting the “publish” button. There’s an irony here I’m still trying to understand, coming from a history of self-publication and hyper connection with readers. My best guess is that writers are like sponges, and I fear spending too much time wringing for that last drop and not enough time absorbing all the experiences that made me want to express something in the first place.

But now I’m in Oz with my boat, and it’s a great time to express my thanks to everyone who made this possible, who made both of my dreams possible. With every story we shared together, you made it possible for me to make a living as a writer, and then to attempt to sail around the world. I’m more than halfway there thanks to you. You may not hear from me every day, but know that I think about you every single day. I’m in awe of what you made possible. Thank you.

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The Absolute and the Relative

One of my favorite game theory experiments is the Ultimatum Game. It involves two participants and a sum of money, let’s say a hundred dollars. Participant A gets to choose how the hundred bucks is divided. Participant B can choose to accept this offer or reject it. If they accept, both participants keep the cash as allotted. If Participant B rejects the offer, they both get nothing.

What tends to happen is that Participant A is more generous than you’d expect, because a split that’s too unfair will be rejected. You might think A could offer a dollar and keep 99 bucks for themselves, because something is better than nothing, but most participants know in their bones that B will punish this unfairness. After all, a dollar is a small price to pay for a dollop of revenge.

The problem with this experiment is that the absolute wealth involved is paltry, and it’s too expensive to do this experiment for real in a way that would test absolute vs. relative gains in wealth and fairness. Let’s say we asked two people to divide a hundred million dollars. Participant A offers 1 million and wants to keep 99 million for himself. Do you turn down a million dollars to teach someone a lesson? Not as quickly, right? Probably not at all. The injustice will be keenly felt (the relative wealth), but the life-changing absolute wealth will win out. Most people would choose to go home and cry into their stacks of cash.

Researches have found a clever way to test this theory without going broke: They conduct the Ultimatum Game in poor countries where hundreds of dollars have higher absolute value. One study found that a mere four weeks’ wages was enough to move the rejection rate almost to zero. It didn’t matter the percentage offered. This was too much money to pass up. Absolute wealth won. But these victories are bitter ones. The participants doing the splitting seem to understand that they have the power to abuse the needs of the poor to take more than their fair share. And get away with it.

Game theory experiments like this get at something in our DNA, something deep in the marrow of our bones. We make these calculations on the fly, and across cultures we seem to arrive at the same general solutions for very complex calculations of fairness, relative wealth, and absolute wealth. One of the outcomes of this research is the discovery that relative wealth is more important for feelings of overall social justice and injustice than absolute wealth. A common refrain these days is that the poor have never had it so good. You can be poor and not starving, poor and have a cell phone, poor and have a place to live, poor and own a car, all of which used to not be true.

We confuse being poor with absolute wealth. But how we measure our status and wealth are relative. Forgetting this has led to revolutions in the past. Ultimatum Games are played all the time across entire economies, with tax rates and rising inequality testing the power difference of absolute and relative wealth to see just how much people will take.

Yesterday I got to thinking about the same differences, but with morality instead of wealth. The germ of the idea came when I saw Mike Godwin himself temporarily suspend the law that bears his name. Godwin’s Law states that if an argument continues for a sufficient length of time, the chance that one party with compare the other to Hitler approaches 100%. Put another way: the longer we disagree, the more certain we can be that someone is going to call the other one a Nazi.

At this point in the discussion, it is often said that the Nazi-namer has lost or given up on the argument.

As children and infants are being held in cages along the US border, and comparisons to Nazis and Hitler run rampant, Godwin announced on Twitter that in this case, the comparison was apt. Whether or not this was meant to be taken literally is up for debate. Which is precisely the debate I began to have with myself. And it got me thinking about Nazis and these frequent comparisons. My conclusion is that comparing people to Nazis is quite often more rational than Godwin’s Law would lead us to believe. And the reason for that has to do with the difference between relative differences of morality and absolute differences of morality.

To understand this, we have to understand that Nazi ethics weren’t as far outside the mainstream of the 1930s as they are today. That is, the delta between the average human and the average Nazi was smaller then than it would be now. This is why comparisons to Nazis fall flat on their face. Nothing short of rounding up and killing six million people based on their ethnicity will work for an argument. So why do we often find ourselves comparing people to Hitler and Nazis, and feel justified in doing so? I think it’s because some people and behaviors are as outside respected norms as Nazis were in their day. And so the comparisons not only feel apt, they are apt.

Morality has changed rapidly in the last few centuries. Steven Pinker has done amazing work in this area, with his 2011 book THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE. He describes the norms of past ages in gruesome detail, because those norms were gruesome. People nailed cats to trees and set them on fire for entertainment. Regular folk, not sociopathic killers. People went to public executions and had a ball. They brought their kids. The rates of murder and rape were far higher in the past, and this appears to be true for as far back as we can measure.

As the 20th century opened, talk of eugenics (a fancy word for mass murder) was on the lips of politicians and intellectuals in high society. Germany’s T4 program to rid Germany of the mentally disabled was outside the norm, but only slightly. Similar programs were debated in the United States. Euthanizing the mentally disabled was roundly discussed, but only in Germany was it practiced. Other countries had to be satisfied with involuntary castration or lobotomies. Barbarisms such as this were not in short supply a mere generation or two ago. Anti-semitism was also socially accepted in way that it isn’t today (not to say it’s gone away, not by a long shot). All of this is to say that regular folk back then were a lot more like Hitler and the Nazis than we pretend to believe. The moral delta wasn’t as great as it seems. Godwin’s Law points out the absurdity of  comparing the worst of that earlier time to the best of our time, a comparison that makes little sense.

But relatively speaking, these comparisons do feel true. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump might be the Hitlers of our age. Not because they kill in the same numbers, but because their actions and philosophies might be just as outside the norm of tolerable as Adolf’s were in the 30s. How to measure this is difficult. The fact that many feel it in their bones is significant. It’s like the Ultimatum Game. The mental calculus is opaque; what we see are the results.

Perhaps this has been a feature of the human condition for millenia. Abhorrent sociopaths come along who prey on our xenophobia and fear and rile up a segment of the tribe in order to assume power and enrich themselves, and many in the tribe can see that this person is wrong and must be stopped. They remind us of Ogg, that asshole our grandparents used to talk about. Ogg got us in that war with the Feather People, and that got damn ugly. We don’t need another Ogg. Okay, sure, this person isn’t literally doing the same things Ogg was doing, because we all decided that shit won’t be tolerated ever again, but you get the sense that if the rules were laxer, we’d have Ogg V2 on our hands.

I think this is what we mean when we make these comparisons. Hitler has become a mental representation of a repeated archetype. Separating this from the atrocities of the Holocaust are difficult. But today’s atrocities might have similar moral deltas, as we live in gentler times (measurably, despite what you might think). Godwin’s Law does not take these relative measures into account. It looks only at the objective measures. It makes the opposite assumption and commits the opposite error as the Ultimatum Game.

Donald Trump is not 1930s Hitler. There will hopefully never be another 1930s Hitler. But Donald Trump may very well be the 2018 Hitler. Future generations and comparisons will make that determination. My opinion is that the long view of history will not be kind to him or his followers. One day, we might need a new Law to make fun of those who compare the assholes of the future to Donald Trump. Because everyone in the future knows that nobody is that big of a dick anymore.

 

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El Dorado and the Meaning of Life

What would happen if all the agnostics, skeptics, and atheists out there were open and vocal about their secular lives? Would would happen if the vast majority of people admitted that their sense of morality came from internal and communal reasoning rather than from a religious text?

My best guess is that we’d recognize the United States as not very different from parts of the Middle East. A religious war would break out.

We saw what people did to America’s #1 sport just because players wouldn’t kneel to a flag and song. Imagine people no longer pretending to kneel to others’ made-up god.

I think most of our politicians pretend to have religious beliefs because of this fear. It means that many of us participate in a great ruse because we are scared of a minority of heavily armed theists who have a history of promoting and celebrating violence against minorities and women. We’re scared of what they might do if we stopped giving fealty to their deities.

Imagine if we taxed their houses of worship. Or if we demanded that they follow the Constitution by getting religion out of politics (no more mention of gods by elected officials, and no more national religious holidays). Imagine if we started treating all religions as equals in this country. Again, I think we’d see massive outbreaks of violence. These are people who lose their minds over Starbucks cup designs and the harmless words “Happy Holidays.”

If it’s true that violence would erupt if we pushed Christianity to the side, then it means we are living among an ISIS-like group of crazy people who only remain calm because we go along with their fantasies. We are in thrall to this minority of hardcore true believers. We are their intellectual captors.

It’s something to think about as demographic trends point toward a more secular future. Kids aren’t as religiously affiliated as their parents, who weren’t as religiously motivated as their parents. We lag behind Europe in our secularization, but it’s still happening.

Monotheistic religions are necessarily violent. They begin with a claim that there is only one god, which leaves little room for other beliefs. Look at the first four Christian commandments:

You shall have no other gods before Me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything.
You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

These are rules from an insecure God, not rules about being kind to one another. You have to get to number 5 on this list before you touch upon morality. That’s crazy. And it’s even more crazy that this doesn’t seem crazy to everyone all at once.

While polytheistic religions have historically been more welcoming by simply adding new gods and beliefs to their pantheon, true moral progress has come from outside religion altogether. Religious beliefs tend to lag behind cultural movements, only catching up when membership numbers are threatened. Gay marriage is just one recent example. Religious leaders fight moral progress until they are too far on the wrong side of history, and then they slowly, begrudgingly relent.

When you look back at the course of human history, it is one of moral progress. Our spheres of empathy keep expanding, wrapping around larger segments of the population, and more recently to non-human members of the population. Animal rights and environmental protections were fringe concerns in my lifetime; now they are mainstream. Looking back, we can see how many white populations of immigrants were considered terrible minorities to other established whites (the Irish, for instance). Our hate keeps narrowing while our love expands, however haltingly this progress seems.

The same subset of people seem to be on the wrong side of history on many issues, all having to do with an inability to expand spheres of empathy. Often, these people point to religious texts as justification for their backwards beliefs, which makes sense; those beliefs were written a long time ago. When a child molestor was running for Senate, they pointed to Mary’s similarly young age when she was forcibly impregnated by their god. The same group use the Bible to justify persecution of homosexuals. Before the two American political parties flipped sides (due to race relations), these same people pointed to the Bible to justify slavery.

The same people who get their morality from a dusty book, which was a poor translation from a poor translation, also get their political ideas from an old parchment. There may be a reason that the twin loves of god and gun go hand-in-hand.  A recent study into the difference between conservatives and liberals found that there is a high correlation between conservative views and fear. If you reduce a person’s fear, their opinions become more liberal. Makes sense. Conservatives want walls, guns, prisons, the death penalty, Gitmo, and they fear Muslims and immigrants (who combined kill fewer Americans than lightning). These people are afraid. Their religion spreads through fear, starting when they are in the crib.

I contend that our religiosity is more to blame for our outlying violence among modern societies than our guns. Our guns are just a symptom of our religiosity. People need them because they are in constant fear. A small portion of people own most of our guns. They are terrified. It makes me sad to think about what’s going on in their brains. I have family members who used to send me emails about Muslims taking over the world. The thought kept them up at night. Or the idea that white people will be a minority in the United States one day. This thought fills them with anger.

These people don’t know that their guiding superstition will also be in the minority one day, that it is becoming smaller and smaller with every new birth of an open mind and every funeral for a closed one. Despite how news media coverage works, their fear isn’t spreading faster than hope. Their hate can’t win over love. They might have a book full of fear and hate, but we have millions of books and stories that inspire us with hope and love. Our ideas of how to treat each other are objectively better. And they are improving over time because we dare to have a discourse about how to treat each other, rather than looking in an old text for justification for our darkest thoughts.

I am an atheist. A proud one. I think every good action should exist for its own benefit, not out of fear of punishment, or hope for reward. I don’t fear death. I think life is full of meaning, and it’s meaning that we place there, that we build from scratch, not meaning we hope to stumble upon like some El Dorado in the jungle. Rather, the meaning of life is something that we have to build over the course of our lives. It starts on the rubble of an older meaning, just as cities are built upon each other over time. We piece it together terribly at first. Painful as it might be, we have to disassemble large swaths and start over again throughout our lives. But this meaning is more reliably assembled than discovered. It happens quicker the more we discuss our plans and copy from our neighbors. Our designs are far more accurate through discourse.

What we build will be different for each of us. Service to community, the aim to simply do no harm, the herculean task of having and raising members of humanity who are better than their parents in every way, simply paying taxes and living in a just society, voting our conscious, running for office, showing compassion for strangers, loving far-flug tribes more powerfully than our close circles of friends, inventing something of use, solving problems, providing entertainment or laughs or hope. The meaning of life is what we make of it, but it has to make sense; it has to be built where all can see and any can critique.

Most of all, the meaning of life has to be built on level ground and on solid foundations. The tall sharp spires of religion get in the way of that for many. I think one of the upcoming cultural revolutions that will make the world a better place will be a secularization of the two most violent pockets of religious thinking in the world: the United States and the Middle East. Both will gradually lose their gods as we put them in coffins and feed them to worms.

In their place will come heroic non-believers who are courageous enough to be open about their doubts, who approach the accumulation of knowledge with joy rather than see any gap in understanding as an admission of weakness. For these people, blind faith will not be something to celebrate. Nor will blind obedience, or unconditional love, or unwavering fealty to elders. Ideas will have to win people over, just as trust and love are earned.

It will be difficult to do, to admit that we don’t believe what our parents believe. It will be difficult to build meaning from scratch rather than cast about, hoping to find it already built and waiting for us in the jungle. But the reward for our honesty and hard work will be something to be proud of. And it will bring an end to the pervasive and unfounded fears that power backwards, conservative thoughts. It’s only a matter of time. The arrow of history has always pointed this way. Every day is a great day to choose which side of that arrow to be on.

 

 

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The End of Bitcoin

No, I’m not talking about the recent crash in price, wiping out 50% of the value of something that shouldn’t have a lick of sane value in the first place. I’m talking about the very real and inevitable end of Bitcoin. It’s all about entropy and algorithms.

The number of Bitcoin is capped at 21 million. Once the 21 millionth coin is awarded, no more can be mined. That’s it. It’s a limitation built into the algorithm itself. Of course, you can change the algorithm, but then all the arguments of why Bitcoin is different go right away. Now you’re just printing money like the Fed, only you don’t have a continent of land and minerals to back up its value.

What’s more interesting to me is the fatal flaw of passwords. You have to protect your Bitcoin wallet passwords at all costs. Bitcoins are like bearer bonds. If you steal them, they’re yours. The rightful owner can’t get them back. And if you lose your password, you can’t retrieve them. There are already people freaking out because they mined Bitcoins years ago, when they were worth pennies, and now they can’t remember how to get their Bitcoins back. Not only that, but everyone who passes away without leaving their password behind means those Bitcoins are also gone forever. Poof.

Bitcoin was designed to fight inflation. The growth rate is capped by making mining more difficult over time, and the total number of coin is capped at 21 million, so a deflationary period is to be expected. What wasn’t accounted for in the algorithm (or any of the crazy hype about blockchain) is human fallibility. We can’t remember our passwords. We also refuse to plan appropriately for our deaths. We are going to keep losing Bitcoin, and it is going to go to the grave with us, until there is no Bitcoin left. This ratchets in only one direction.

The end of Bitcoin is as sure as the winking out of our sun, only it’ll happen a whole lot sooner. The max cap of Bitcoin, and the entropy of human recollection, mean that Bitcoin’s days are numbered, not just as a bubble, but as a thing with any kind of existence, real or imaginary.

If you write your passwords down, they can be stolen with no recourse. If you don’t, they’ll be lost for good one day. I didn’t think it was possible, but somehow the Winklevosses are going to look even dumber in the sequel.

 

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