What Makes Harmful Stuff Stay On
Or, why absinthe was outlawed but lead is still readily being used
đ 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.
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Q: Why things that are harmful to the society often stay on?
Let me tell you two stories, one of lead and one of absinthe.
Even before there was gunpowder, there were strong indications that exposing ourselves to a lot of lead had severe side-effects.
But, over the next millennia, lead has been added to makeup, gasoline, and paint. Itâs also part of many manufacturing processes such as printing.
Even though people kept noticing a high correlation between death and exposure to lead, it was readily used to dilute wine, to manufacture pipes that carried drinking water, and was often added to face creams.
A millennia later, despite definite evidence from strong research, lead still crops up in all sorts of places despite its proven dangers. Lead is still added to paint to prevent cracking. Itâs used to paint toys even though nontoxic options are available. Even the govt. didnât ban rule fuel laced with lead until the 1980s in the USA.
The story of lead has a stark contrast with that of absinthe.
In the 1860s, absinthe became a wildly popular aperitif â an alcoholic drink taken before a meal to stimulate the appetite. Whole districts of Paris were said to have a faintly herbal smell of absinth in the evening between 5 and 6, a time that became known as lâheure verte or the green hour.
But 50 years later absinthe was being compared to opium and being considered a major social ill. People were reporting hallucinations and permanent insanity. Doctors began to suspect that it was a poisonous drug.
In 1905 Switzerland, when a man killed his pregnant wife and two young daughters, after he had been drinking absinthe, the case was dubbed âthe absinthe murdersâ and the drink was outlawed completely there three years later. France followed suit in 1914.
Within 50 years absinthe was used, abused, and abandoned. Interestingly, subsequent tests have shown that much of the supposed effects of absinthe were nonsense. It was no worse than any other alcoholic drink of the same strength. Yet, despite being absolved of all responsibility, absinthe was outlawed and remains unobtainable in many liquor stores, whereas lead, known to be poisonous for over 2000 years is still being readily used. Why this difference?
Mass matters. Lead and absinthe had different societal masses. Lead had high penetration and performed a number of highly useful functions in multiple manufacturing processes. Absinthe got people drunk, not the best value-add for society.
The results of lead poisoning isnât instant, and giving up using lead-based products would mean abstaining from using a lot of useful products. Also, the cost for retooling manufacturing systems that relied on lead is too high. Whereas absinthe stood on its own, and thus it would take far less effort to remove absinthe that it would take to remove lead.
This is part of the reason why the proof of something being harmful is not always enough to produce a change in behaviour. The inertia of a product, a habit, or an idea increases the longer it is around, harmful or not. Think cigarettes.
Sometimes it can seem monumentally frustrating when reliable information doesnât seem to change an erroneous popular opinion, but the rule is: the longer a product has been used by a society, the more society mass it has racked up, and the harder it is to change to a new one, even if there are obvious benefits.
What is true for societies is also true for individuals. The effort required to change a habit is proportional to the length of time weâve had it.
For example, we use the QWERTY keyboard despite more efficient keyboard layouts being available out there. Since weâve put so much of efforts to learn this layout, itâs too much of friction to put additional effort on something thatâs completely new.
As the the creator of Farnam Street Shane Parrish writes, âKeeping things as they are requires almost no effort and involves little uncertainty.â This is why some products hang around for centuries, even when better and cheaper ones come on the market, why we stay at jobs we hate, and (almost) never change the religion weâre born with.
Timeless v Timeful
Adhering to timeful advice is outsourcing a certain part of your life strategy to recent history. But when you outsource decisions that change your life trajectory, do you want to bet the house on the wisdom of yesteryear?
Silicon Valley was once uniquely good at identifying timeful advice. This power weakened as the tech industry scaled, but it is more important than ever to distinguish between timelessness and timefulness.
There are many types of advice you should follow more, so come to your own conclusions on which advice is timeless versus timeful.
Things you want to look for when evaluating strategic decisions:
Compounding: If the outcome of your decision will compound, insource it. The dollars in a given financial decision may seem small, but the compounding effect of finance makes the outcomes highly consequential, such that the seemingly small benefit of insourcing is larger than it appears.
Irreversibility: Can the decision, once made, be reversed? If not, insource it. Career paths and partners are hard to reverse.
Stereotype: If youâre making a decision because itâll help you fit in, think twice about it. Not all cultural consensus is bad, but stereotypes are a form of ill-supported consensus, so theyâre worth questioning.
Iteration: If you do something repeatedly, like reading the news, you should think more deeply about how and why youâre doing it.
Magnitude: If the decision youâre making is obviously big, like your choice of career, itâs worth insourcing it.
Owning your future requires questioning âtimelessâ advice, and coming to your own conclusions.
â How Timeless is Timeless Advice?
Argue Better
There are only so many ways you can say âI agreeâ. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. Readers are more likely to comment on an article when they disagree with it, and in disagreement they have more to say.
There are two types of communication culture: high context and low context.
In a low-context culture, communication is explicit and direct. What people say is taken to be an expression of their thoughts and feelings. You donât need to understand the contextâwho is speaking, in what situationâto understand the message.
A high-context culture, on the other hand, is one in which little is said explicitly, and most of the message is implied. The meaning of each message resides not so much in the words themselves, as in the context.
For most of our existence as a species, humans have operated in high-context mode. Our ancestors lived in settlements and tribes with shared traditions and settled chains of command.
But the internet has a low-context culture. Everyone expects their opinion to be heard and, increasingly, it can be. With less context to guide our decisions, the number of things on which âwe all agreeâ is shrinking fast.
Social media users have more diverse news diets than non-users. You are almost bound to encounter opinions that upset you on Twitter; much more so than if your only information source is a daily newspaper. Instead of creating bubbles, the internet is bursting them, generating hostility, fear and anger.
One reason online discourse is so often so furious is because it has been designed to be this way. Content that outrages is more likely to be shared. Users who post angry messages get the status boost of likes and retweets.
Itâs often said that if humanity is to rise to the existential threats it faces, we must put our differences aside. But when we all agreeâor pretend toâit becomes harder to make progress.
Certain parties often play dirty during argumentsâattacking their adversary from unexpected, hard-to-defend angles. Instead of looking for solutions that might work for everyone, they treat every negotiation as a zero-sum game in which someone must win and the other must lose. Instead of engaging with the content, they attack the person as a way of asserting their status.
By contrast, there are those who enter a negotiation expecting to succeed because they are, or perceive themselves to be, in the stronger position. They may well therefore adopt a more relaxed and expansive approach, focusing on the substance of the disagreement and looking for win-win solutions.
When a debate becomes volatile and dysfunctional, itâs often because someone in the conversation feels they are not getting the face they deserve. This helps to explain the pervasiveness of bad temper on social media, which can sometimes feel like a status competition in which the currency is attention.
For parents who refuse vaccines, itâs more about opting in to a group than opting out of a treatment, like getting a gang tattoo. The refusal is more about who one is and with whom one identifies than who one isnât or whom one opposes. This is also true of those who opt in to vaccines: our desire to be associated with mainstream views on medicine is also a way of signalling who we are. Thatâs why arguments between the two sides quickly become clashes of identity.
In front of an audience of colleagues, people are more likely to focus on how they want to be seen, rather than on the right way to solve the problem. The less that people feel compelled to maintain their face in front of allies, the more flexible they feel able to be.
When weâre in an argument with someone, we should be thinking about how they can change their mind and look goodâmaintain or even enhance their faceâat the same time.
â How to Have Better Arguments Online
Albert Camus
Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesnât have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesnât have to be a walk during which youâll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or donât find meaning but âstealâ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesnât make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
â Finding Meaning
Before You GoâŚ
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Iâll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek đ