👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
The best way to have good ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.
It means, don’t try to think of good ideas. Instead, look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
The very best ideas tend to have three things in common: they’re something the creators themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realise are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.
How do you tell whether there’s a grand path out of an idea? How do you tell whether something has the germ of becoming a giant, or just a niche product?
Often you can’t.
The founders of Airbnb didn’t realise at first how big a market they were tapping into. Initially they had a much narrower idea. They were going to let hosts rent out space on their floors during conventions. They didn’t foresee the expansion of this idea; it forced itself upon them gradually. All they knew at first is that they were onto something.
That’s probably as much as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first.
So, if you can’t predict whether there’s a path out of an idea, how do you choose between ideas?
The truth is disappointing but interesting.
If you’re the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you’re at the leading edge of a field that’s changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you’re more likely to be right.
In short, you have to become the sort of person who has good ideas.
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Q: If we can always do a bit more good, where does this lead us to?
In 2006, the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine called “What Should a Billionaire Give — and What Should You?”
At the time, Bill Gates had pledged nearly $30 billion to his charitable foundation, making him (by the numbers) one of the greatest philanthropists of all time.
Singer applauds Gates for his work to eradicate diseases like malaria that ravage villages in sub-Saharan Africa. But then he says this:
Gates may have given away nearly $30 billion, but that still leaves him sitting at the top of the Forbes list of the richest Americans, with $53 billion. His 66,000-square-foot high-tech lakeside estate near Seattle is reportedly worth more than $100 million.… Among his possessions is the Leicester Codex, the only handwritten book by Leonardo da Vinci still in private hands, for which he paid $30.8 million in 1994. Has Bill Gates done enough? More pointedly, you might ask: if he really believes that all lives have equal value, what is he doing living in such an expensive house and owning a Leonardo Codex? Are there no more lives that could be saved by living more modestly and adding the money thus saved to the amount he has already given?
Singer wants us to think about Gates differently: not as a man who gave $30 billion to charity, but rather as a man who still has $53 billion, none of which he’s giving to charity.
What would we think of a man who has $53 billion and gives none of it away? We’d start with “What an ass,” and probably not move much beyond that. But is that fair to Gates? Given, you know, the $30 billion he did give to charity?
Today, let’s talk about morality. More precisely, let’s discuss how much should we care about morality so that we are self-aware about our actions, and neither get paralysed by the pressure of doing the most good, nor fall into apathy and not care about doing any sort of good at all.
The people at the top of the human food chain are basically aliens — they live lives we can’t possibly imagine.
Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle Corporation, got bored a few years ago and bought an entire Hawaiian Island.
Point is, the people at the far end of the “crazy rich” bell curve don’t inhabit the same planet as you and I, so on the rare occasion when they emerge from their outer space mansions and interact with the real world, their actions draw intense scrutiny.
For example, when wildfires ripped through Australia in 2019, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the then world’s richest man, announced that his company would pledge $1 million AUD ($690,000 USD) in aid.
For this he was roundly, and appropriately, dunked on — people pointed out that Bezos had made that much money every five minutes for the entire year. Then, predictably, people began to review what else Bezos had recently spent his money on.
For example, he’d shelved $42 million to build a clock in a hollowed-out mountain in Texas that was designed to last for ten thousand years. So, $42 million for weirdo futuristic alien super clock, and $690,000 to save a whole continent, huh?
It’s correct for us to demand that the people who can do the most actually do the most. But what’s “the most”?
And if we ignore these crazy rich space aliens for a minute and point the moral shotgun towards us not-so-rich meagre earth dwellers, what’s “the most” we can do?
To explain his idea, Peter Singer offers a compelling thought experiment.
Imagine we’re walking by a shallow pond, and we see a drowning child. Most people agree that we have a moral responsibility to act — we should rush into the knee-high water and grab the kid so he doesn’t drown.
But what if we saw the drowning child, and we thought to ourselves, “You know what, I should save that child, but I just bought these new Italian loafers, and I really don’t want to ruin them. So… good luck, kid!” And then we just walked on by.
We would, of course, be considered horrible, awful people — worse even than a guy with $53 billion who gives none of it to charity, probably, because what was required of us was so basic, and our reason for not doing it was so callous.
Choosing to save our loafers instead of a human being means we’re either sadists, or sociopaths, or objectivists.
But again, most people aren’t monsters. Most of us would instantly calculate that a human life is worth more than a pair of Italian loafers, and we would jump into the pond to save the poor kid.
But here’s Singer’s point: We know for a fact that there are children drowning in ponds, literal and metaphorical, all over the world, right now. We see advertisements asking for thirty cents a day to help a starving child in Yemen, or get emails from an organisation telling us that a dollar a week can save a human life in Syria, and more often than not we ignore them.
In fact, we’re annoyed by them. Yet a dollar a week is a lot less than we would’ve spent on those Italian loafers. Why do we value a life over there less than we value a life over here? Why does the pond have to be literally in front of our faces in order for us to act?
The thousands of decisions we make every day come with a forced accounting of our Moral Opportunity Cost. Opportunity cost is an economics term describing what we give up when we spend our resources. For example, the opportunity cost of a company putting more money into research and development is that it can’t hire as many workers. Similarly, the opportunity cost of spending more on advertising is that it has less money to buy supplies.
Moral opportunity cost, then, would be the good we miss out on doing when we choose to do something else.
Singer asks us to take the logical next step: collect all the money we were going to spend on Italian loafers, or new jeans, or a new iPhone we don’t really need, and send it to someone else, somewhere in the world, to help that person live a better life, or possibly, live at all.
He asks us give up the small amount of pleasure we get from a new car or whatever, and dramatically decrease the amount of pain being felt by someone facing challenges we can hardly imagine.
Truth is, a lot of us buy tons of things we don’t need, and the simple act of pointing out how much more we could do with our money spotlights our own excessive consumerism. In fact, when we start looking at all of the dumb crap we’ve accumulated in our houses — all the unnecessary throw pillows, and extra jackets we never wear, and that $2,000 iPad we hardly use — we realise that Singer is offering us the deal of a lifetime: We can be heroes!
I mean, we’re just sitting around watching Netflix all day (probably some documentary on how corrupt the filthy rich aliens are) when we can literally save people’s lives. All we have to do is cancel Netflix, send that money to a mosquito net charity in Africa instead, and then wait for Netflix to make documentary about our sacrifice and bravery.
But, from a logical point of view, where does this end for us? Who defines “the most” that we can do? Does Singer expect us to be sitting in an empty house, eating food out of a can, with no savings whatsoever in order to do good?
Suddenly we’re back in that grey area, wondering at what point we’re allowed to just buy dumb stuff we want and not feel guilty because we aren’t using the money for something more important.
Singer believes that there is a certain amount of money we need for a basic life — food, shelter, a modicum of entertainment or leisure, and so on. That amount varies depending on our circumstances — how many family members we have, where we live, etc. — but it isn’t impossible to calculate.
Singer wants us figure out how much we actually need, build in a little pad for savings and medical emergencies and the like, and any amount of money we make beyond that we should give to someone less fortunate.
But for most people, paying for necessities, adding a bit for entertainment, and saving a little extra for a rainy day doesn’t feel very safe.
Every one of us will at some point confront a Black Swan event — a car crash, a job loss, an illness, a business deal gone wrong, a friend or relative in extreme need. We also (if we can) want to save for eventual retirement, or to help our future kids and maybe grandkids with their lives.
If we give all our money away, and then suddenly need some for a dire personal situation, we probably won’t be comforted by the knowledge that our money was used to deworm a river in Malawi, improving the health of thousands of children.
But, this isn’t the point of this exercise. The point is that you are at least considering what you owe to other people, especially those who are less fortunate than you, and that is what I think the gift of Singer’s philosophy is for us.
It’s incredibly easy for people living in even modest comfort to become complacent — to forget that the great majority of people on earth live in some degree of poverty or distress, and have daily problems and dangers that far surpass our own.
Air-conditioning, heat, food, clean water, a washing machine, a refrigerator, electricity all day, medicine, safety from war or crime — these are things many of us take for granted, while most people can’t count on.
Singer is like a complacency alert system. He’s here to tap us on the shoulder and remind us how fortunate we are, and to ask if we might consider doing a bit more to help a few more.
When COVID-19 happened in 2020, the minimum requirements for all of us — the rules no reasonable person would reject — were easy to determine and non-negotiable: we need to limit our travel to the best of our ability, maintain social distancing, wear masks, and so on.
After that — and this is where Singer comes back into the picture — our responsibilities scale up depending on our socioeconomic situations. As one example, if we have people who work for us in some capacity — maids, cooks, babysitters, and so on — and we can afford to pay them (whether a whole or partial salary) even if they aren’t actively working for us during a lockdown, we should. And many did. In a crisis, people lucky enough to have money to spare ought to give it to people who need it. That’s basic human sense!
Now, at the top of the food chain we find people like Jeff Bezos who, given their wealth, have the greatest responsibility to help other people which, when COVID-19 hit, they often did not.
Early in the crisis, Amazon started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for its workers, which went over about as well as it had when Bezos tossed $690,000 at Australia to help fight wildfires.
A basic calculation shows that Bezos could personally pay all of his 250,000 minimum-wage employees their full yearly salaries and still have about $175 billion left over.
When you are the world’s richest man, and you employ hundreds of thousands of people who are in harm’s way, your responsibilities extend far beyond “pay your house help.”
This is the same reason Singer asked us to look at Bill Gates as the man who had $53 billion in 2006, but decided to give none of it to charity.
On one hand, Singer’s philosophy is uncompromising. But on the other hand, we often do a lot of dumb stuff that we don’t need to do, such as billionaire media impresario David Geffen posting an Instagram photo of his $590 million yacht sailing peacefully in the Grenadines, along with an unironic caption about the importance of social distancing in the middle of the pandemic.
More important than that, even when we do that dumb stuff, we very rarely think about the moral opportunity cost — the other, better things we could be doing instead.
Singer’s unrelenting focus on our moral responsibility towards others is why I think he is so important.
When you read his book The Life You Can Save, more important than what you will feel about Peter Singer’s philosophy is what you will not feel: complacency. You will not feel like other people don’t matter. You will not blindly scroll past reports of disasters, whether abroad or close to home, without considering — even if just for a moment — the impacted lives of those affected.
Instead, you will have, bouncing around in your head, the thought that there may be something simple you can do to help, something that does not disrupt your life or put you or your family’s well-being in peril.
Today I Learned
Even though we can’t grow new organs at will, many organs do adapt their capacities to demands by responding to stresses as they grow.
For example, if you run around more as a child, you load your leg bones and they grow thicker. Another less appreciated example is the capacity to sweat. Humans are born with millions of sweat glands, but the percentage of glands that actually secrete sweat when you get hot is influenced by how much heat stress you experienced in the first few years of life.
Other adjustments respond dynamically throughout life to environmental stresses, even in adults. If you were to lift weights regularly over the next few weeks, your arm muscles would get tired and then get bigger and stronger. Conversely, if you were confined to bed for months or years, your muscles and bones would waste away.
The capacity for bodies to adjust their observable characteristics (their phenotype) in response to environmental stresses is formally known as phenotypic plasticity.
All organisms require phenotypic plasticity to grow and function, and the more biologists look, the more examples they discover.
It makes sense for your body to develop more sweat glands if you are going to live in a really hot environment, to have thicker bones if you are more likely to break your legs or arms, and to have darker skin during the summer when your skin is more likely to burn.
However, relying on these interactions has drawbacks that potentially lead to mismatches when critical environmental cues are absent, reduced, or abnormal.
As winter turns to summer, you normally develop a tan. This prevents your skin from burning. But if you get on an airplane and fly to a much hotter region (say, Delhi in India), your skin will burn in an instant if you aren’t used to such temperature — unless of course you protect it with clothes or sunblock.
An evolutionary perspective on the body suggests that such mismatches are more common now than ever. In the last few generations we have changed the conditions in which we develop, sometimes in ways for which natural selection never prepared us (like aeroplane travel).
These mismatches can be harmful because they sometimes arise early in life and then cause problems many years later, when it is too late to correct the problem.
But the question is, why doesn’t nature build bodies the way engineers build bridges — with generous safety factors so we can adapt to a wide range of conditions? The primary explanation is trade-offs.
Everything involves compromises: more of one thing means less of something else. Thicker leg bones, for example, are less likely to break, but they cost more energy to move. Dark skin prevents your skin from burning, but limits how much vitamin D you synthesise.
By favouring mechanisms that adjust phenotypes to particular environments, natural selection helps bodies find the right balance between diverse tasks and attain the right level of function: enough but not too much.
Some features, like skin colour and muscle size, can thus adapt throughout life. Muscle, for example, is an expensive tissue to maintain, consuming about 40 percent of your body’s resting metabolism. So it makes sense to let your muscles atrophy when you don’t need them and to build them up when you do.
However, most features such as leg length or brain size cannot adapt continuously to changes in the environment because they cannot be restructured after they have grown.
For these features, the body has to use environmental cues — stresses — to predict the structure’s optimal adult configuration during early development, often in utero or during the first few years of life.
Although these predictions help you adjust appropriately to your particular environment, structures that didn’t experience the right stimuli during early life might end up being poorly suited for conditions you experience later.
To sum up, we really did evolve to “use it or lose it.”
Because bodies are not engineered but instead grow and evolve, your body expects and indeed requires certain stresses when you are maturing in order to develop appropriately.
Such interactions are widely appreciated in the brain: if you deprive a child of language or social interactions his or her brain will never develop properly, and the best time to learn a new language or the violin is when you are young.
Similarly important interactions also characterise other systems that interact intensively with the outside world, such as your immune system and the organs that help you digest food, maintain a stable body temperature, and more.
Timeless Insight
A government or a certain establishment is a system. Interestingly, these organisations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorvehicle.
They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose.
People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way.
There’s no villain, no ‘mean guy’ who wants them to live meaningless lives. It’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.
But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorvehicle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.
The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself — rationality itself — and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.
If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.
There’s so much talk about the system. But so little understanding.
What I’m Reading
Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.
— Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis
Tiny Thought
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋