Two Quotes from Søren Kierkegaard

I came across two quotes from Kierkegaard recently, from two very different sources. It was quite a coincidence, and I thought that it must have been a sign.

Here’s the first, which funnily enough came from a book on IT leadership, called A Seat at the Table, by Mark Schwartz:

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.

Schwartz had this quote at the top of a chapter on “IT requirements”, which, as he quite rightly points out, are more of a “work item”. Technically speaking, a “requirement” if not met should cause the project to fail or the business to fold. It is required after all.

But in his experience as it was in mine, that seldom is the case.

The second Kierkegaard quote I came across came just a day after the first. This time it was from an Alain de Botton talk, very baitingly-titled Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person. At the end of the talk, de Botton shares this quote:

Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.

This is, I think, one of the most de-stressing quotes I have ever come across.

Came at an important point in the talk too, given how half the audience (myself included) were in deep despair at probably having chosen the wrong mates.

Video of the de Botton talk below – starts at the quote, which he just says so beautifully…

The passionate introvert

This TED talk really surprised me.

The content was great, but it was Brian Little’s delivery that really made me go “wow!”

So many times during the talk it felt I wasn’t listening to him talk on the subject of “personality” but rather his grandchildren. His passion was evident, and his joy contagious. I couldn’t help but give him a personal standing ovation at the end.

It is with this sort of passion that we should approach our careers; our lives.

Deciphering Fake

This was supposed to be a post on radical transparency.

But an article bashing radical transparency just left me feeling so outraged with its lies and misleading statements that I just spent the last four hours of my life writing this warning to all of us media-consumers out there: Don’t trust all you see, even if it says “research”, links to academic papers, and cites its sources!

The first time I heard about radical transparency was from G.

And though I hadn’t heard the term before then, it was something I felt that I could really relate to; something I already did.

Not because I thought that it brought the best outcomes, but because my mind was just wired that way.

I’ll tell you why in the post on radical transparency I eventually do write (maybe next week?), but hint: it’s got to do with having an awful brain for lies.

For today, let’s talk about the article that enraged me.

I found it while reading up on radical transparency for the post I had intended to write: Radical transparency sounds great until you consider the research.

I looked forward to reading it just based on its title, as it was perhaps a warning I needed to heed: maybe I ought to be a little less transparent with my dealings with people?

The word “research” also appealed very much to the scientist in me, giving it more weight than it would have had without.

Almost immediately though, within the first paragraph, a red flag was raised.

Here’s what it said:

Radical transparency is an old management approach with new branding. Previously called micromanagement or snooping, this approach supposedly creates higher performance and trust by letting everyone know what’s on the table.

You see, I’m an amateur rhetorician (well, not really, but I am currently reading Jay Heinrichs‘ book Thank You for Arguing) and smelt a rat: I knew radical transparency wasn’t synonymous with “micromanagement” or “snooping”, or even remotely analogous.

My rhetoricsense tingled. Something was up but I didn’t quite know what. So I did a quick search on logical fallacies, and identified what was wrong: the author was guilty of a false comparison!

Snooping, micromanagement, and radical transparency were qualitatively very different things, and there was no “new branding” apparent to me whatsoever.

  • Snooping to me implies trying to find out information others deem to be private and not expect to share;
  • Micromanagement to me implies a person in authority dictating to a worker how to do a job without giving the worker much or any degree of autonomy;
  • Radical transparency to me implies making what may sometimes be deemed private open to everyone, but making sure everyone knows it is no longer private.

I could live with micromanagement, to a certain extent. I could live with radical transparency (I think). But I would probably not be able to take snooping very well.

You can’t really club them together.

Was the author trying to mislead his readers by saying they were the same except for rebranding?

Whatever the case, I continued, albeit with caution.

Then I came across this paragraph, which appeared filled with juicy insights:

But research about human judgement suggests that relying on such data is a mistake. People are terrible at assessing trustworthiness and most skills. Assessments are driven not by real actions, but by appearance and personal situation. On top of these potential inaccuracies, labeling someone as untrustworthy or poor in certain skills has a corrosive effect on collaboration and morale, perhaps one of the reasons why Bridgewater has in the past had very low retention rates that costed the company tens of millions of dollars a year.

The links in the quote above were found on the original article. I clicked on every single one of them to learn more.

(And boy did I learn. I learned that if you take an author’s word for it at face value, despite the authoritative-looking links you’d be hoodwinked quicker than you can say “radical transparency”.)

Here’s my commentary on each of the links in the paragraph shared above:

  • “terrible at assessing trustworthiness”
    • This link brings you to a paper talking about assessing trustworthiness from facial cues. The experiment involved asking strangers to play a game to see if people would invest more money in faces that appeared more trustworthy. If radical transparency involved asking you to rate your colleagues, an hour after you got to know them, on trustworthiness based on how their face looked, then yes, this is relevant.
  • “most skills”
    • This link brings you to a paper talking about the JDS or Job Diagnostic Survey tool, which basically assesses the fit between workers and their jobs. The paper surmises that the tool works, though warns that it is easily faked. But for it to support the premise that “people are terrible at assessing most skills” is ridiculous, because the paper actually doesn’t say that.
  • “appearance” and “personal situation”
    • These two links are paywalled, but based on the abstracts these are related to people assessing people in TV commercials (for the first link) and strangers (for the second). Like the experiment in the “assessing trustworthiness” link above, this is about assessments of people whom you know very little about. Radical transparency isn’t about assessing strangers one-off. Again, I don’t see the relevance.
  • “has a corrosive effect on collaboration and morale”
    • Paywalled. The first sentence of the abstract? “Four studies examined the relation between trust and loneliness.” I’m curious to know what the article is about, but given I don’t know enough I’m not going to judge on this one.
  • “very low retention rates”
    • This link brings you to an interview with an author who wrote about Bridgewater’s radical transparency. The author actually praised its implementation at Bridgewater and was extremely supportive of it. Though it was mentioned that there was a 25% turnover rate, there was no mention of it costing “the company tens of millions of dollars a year”. Also, assuming that it does cost the company tens of millions of dollars a year, could the benefits outweigh the costs? If being radically transparent brings in more than the “tens of millions of dollars a year” that it  hypothetically costs, it’d still be worth it.

I’d always been extremely curious as to the effect of knowing my peer’s salary, and them knowing mine.

I’d even considered moving to a company that did just that for just this reason because I personally thought it was a great idea.

So when I came across the following that the author wrote, it came as quite a surprise:

Publishing individual salaries has negative consequences. While companies should never prevent people from sharing their compensation (and in many states it’s illegal to do so), publishing these numbers for all to see psychologically harms people who are not at the top of the pay scale. Research shows that this directly reduces productivity by over 50% and increases absenteeism among lower paid employees by 13.5%, even when their pay is based exclusively on output.

The first link talks about income disparity and its negative effect on happiness, a common finding in psychological research.

That the author worded it in this way (i.e. “top of the pay scale”) seems deliberately misleading. There’s a lot of dependence on the “reference group” – e.g. a junior employee, despite earning far less than the CEO, would generally not be too concerned. Also, full individual salary disclosure isn’t necessary for radical transparency; compressed payscales and other forms of salary disclosure could be used instead.

The second link was the one that I was more interested in: could salary disclosure really lower productivity and increase absenteeism, even when pay was based on output?

The author said yes.

I read the paper and found otherwise.

What the study found was that it was perceived fairness that had the greatest negative effects, not the disclosure of salary information per se. Where there was wage disparity and output was not easily observable (i.e. there was no way to tell which worker “deserved” the most), those who were paid less than their peers were the most negatively affected, as they would have perceived it as unfair.

And in a world of radical transparency, I’d think that “output” information would also be something that would be freely shared, reducing any perceived unfairness.

I don’t know what led the author to write what he wrote. I was very close to just taking what he wrote at face value, and if it wasn’t for me being a little perplexed and curious at some of the claims that were cited I’d never have uncovered the deceits.

To be clear, I’d just like to add that there is a chance that there was no malice involved, just sloppy research and misinformed conclusions.

But whatever the case, it made me realise how much we take good, honest writing for granted.

We shouldn’t.

And for me, not any more.

Doing what’s right – pasta and the lizard brain

I cooked pasta for lunch today.

Though it turned out pretty good, the pasta was a little soft, far from the al dente I was aiming for.

This despite me checking every couple of minutes or so to see how it was doing, and taking it off the stove the moment I found it to be oh just right.

But you know what? When I had found that perfect al dente, it was already too late; the pasta was destined to be overdone.

Because even away from the flames, the pasta was still being cooked.

The funny thing? I knew this was going to happen, I just lacked the courage to stop cooking before it was done.

The lizard brain won.

Taking the pasta off the stove long before it was properly cooked just felt wrong, regardless of what my head was telling me.

Sometimes we just gotta do what we know what’s right, despite what it feels like.

Getting the most bang for your charitable buck

I just received a mailer from Effective Altruism, via which I do a monthly donation to charity. The mailer asked me to rate from 1 to 10, with 1 being least likely and 10 being most, how likely I would be to recommend Effective Altruism to a friend. I gave it a 10.

And since we’re all friends here on edonn.com… I recommend Effective Altruism if you’re looking to make your charitable dollar do as much as it can.

Effective Altruism is an organisation that’s, in their own words: about answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most?

I first learned about them through a book called Doing Good Better (loved it; it absolutely changed the way I thought about giving – especially the part talking about the careers we ought to pick for maximum societal impact: should we pick the higher-paying career where we have little opportunity to positively impact society, e.g. an investment banker; or the lower-paying career where we can make a positive, direct impact on society, e.g. a social worker? The book argues that it is the former that we can do more good, if we direct the funds we earn to charitable causes).

Its basic premise is this: all charitable interventions should be scientifically tested to determine how effective they are, and money should only flow to those that are more effective.

The more good an intervention does for a given amount of money, the more effective it is deemed to be.

How much “good” an intervention does is determined by the amount of QALYs and WALYs. This is a very interesting concept that I’d not heard of before coming across Effective Altruism.

A QALY stands for “quality-adjusted life year”, defined as (from Wikipedia):

[A QALY] is a generic measure of disease burden, including both the quality and the quantity of life lived. It is used in economic evaluation to assess the value for money of medical interventions. One QALY equates to one year in perfect health.

A WALY, on the other hand, stands for “well-being adjusted life year” (from the US Institutes of Health website):

[A WALY] is a measure that combines life extension and health improvement in a single score, reflecting preferences around different types of health gain.

In essence, the amount of good relates to how much life and life improvement it brings. The benefit of of using QALYs and WALYs is that they are fungible, and are therefore able to act as very versatile measures of charitable intervention.  A little like good old money.

For example, if you want to take up a new job, it’s extremely convenient to start thinking about the benefits in terms of money, even when some of the benefits are non-monetary. If you get more vacation time, how much more is an extra day of vacation worth to you? If the working hours are less, and you are planning to spend this extra time with your kids, how much more is this worth to you? And so on.

It helps us make apples-to-apples comparisons between two very disparate things, like deworming vs. microfinance.

Effective Altruism thus looks at the quality of all interventions, and aims to focus funds toward interventions that are the most effective. And though it may not be perfect, I find that it gives me peace of mind.

It allowed me to finally get past paralysis by analysis, making me comfortable with giving more money than before.

I still do give to random strangers on the street because it feels good; but for regular and systematic giving, the kind that I think will do far more good, this will be my avenue of choice.

And to those who ask: Is this “too scientific”? Shouldn’t giving be from the heart?

My answer is: No to the first question; and yes to the second.

The science and experimentation behind Effective Altruism helps to ensure accountability – charities that are deemed ineffective tend to be ineffective for very good reasons, and every dollar given to an ineffective charity is one less dollar given to a more effective one. Why should less effective charities, even those with the best of intentions, take money away from those that can do more good?

To be honest, I did have some concerns about how newer interventions or charities would be handled by them – many charities and interventions start out less effective than the most effective ones and need to be given a chance to grow and show their worth, and may eventually become as effective than the most effective ones or even more so. However, Effective Altruism does take care of some of that by having a dedicated allocation of their fund that looks at just these “promising charities”, which introduces a little bit of randomness into their portfolio of current strong performers.

On giving from the heart, to be honest I never really found a “logical” reason for giving, nor have I looked for one. Giving to me has always just been something we should do to be thankful we have what we have, that we are who we are.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I finished reading the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera a couple of day’s back

Loved it (mostly). It reminded me of what it was like to live a life that was lighter, not weighed down by expectations; que sera sera.

Just thought I’d like to share a couple of passages from the book.

Emphasis mine.

On the fact that life only occurs once:

Einmal ist keinmal. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.

On our pursuits and goals:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

On love:

All this time he was sitting up in bed and looking at the woman who was lying beside him and holding his hand in her sleep. He felt an ineffable love for her. Her sleep must have been very light at the moment because she opened her eyes and gazed up at him questioningly.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

He knew that instead of waking her he should lull her back to sleep, so he tried to come up with an answer that would plant the image of a new dream in her mind.

“I’m looking at the stars,” he said.

“Don’t say you’re looking at the stars. That’s a lie. You’re looking down.”

“That’s because we’re in an airplane. The stars are below us.”

“Oh, in an airplane,” said Tereza, “squeezing his hand ever tighter and falling asleep again. And Tomas knew that Tereza was looking out of the round window of an airplane flying high above the stars.

Memory

Just the other day I stood waiting to cross the street. As the cars passed in front of me I started thinking about how odd it’d be if one of these cars were to veer a little to the left. Maybe a crying child; maybe a bad day at work; maybe the shadow of a cat on the road; the causes could be many, the outcome the one. Onto the pavement the car would go.

Violence. Then silence.

Opening my eyes, I might remember, vaguely, that yes I’d gotten off work (what work do I do?) but now I’m here, looking at you looking at me: you who are in the scrubs; you who are telling me you are my wife; you who are calling me papa (I’m a dad?)

How strange it would be. Without memory would I be me?

As I stood waiting to cross the street, I took two steps back. Let that not be today.