Ask Thien-Nam, Episode I

Welcome to the first installment of Ask Thien-Nam. Thien-Nam is one of the most interesting thinkers I know, and I’m excited to share his opinions and musings with you. If you have any questions, ask them in the comments for a chance to appear in Episode II. You can’t find this anywhere else, folks.

What is most positive impact the internet has had on the world, and what is the worst? What about the best and worst impact on your life?

The first part of this question probably has two good answers: the first is the ability to connect people across the world, and the second is the democratization of knowledge. As a proud rational introvert, I think you can guess which one I would pick. The flip side is much more interesting. Superficially, the worst part of the Internet could be any one of over-stimulation, cyber-bullying, social information silos, potential deterioration in critical thinking, and so much more. All equally alarming, but all equally worthy sacrifices on the altar of infinite knowledge. No, the biggest loss in my mind has to be the magic of discovery. I wish I could know what it felt like, just once, to walk into a 19th century library as a 19th century human. I wish I could understand how precious a piece of knowledge must feel when the only two ways to obtain it are either by painfully unreliable word of mouth or personal experience. In a world where the process of learning is really just limited by your attention span, the thrill of discovery just doesn’t seem to have the same magic.
As for something more specific to my own life, the Internet has been an invaluable research tool during every time that I’ve had to reorient my life trajectory either personally or professionally. On the down side, it has made me too independent. Here’s the thing: I think that human interactions are important and worthwhile. I *want* to be forced to seek out learned family friends when I need medical or financial advise. I *want* to be forced meet friends at a coffee shop when I need to talk to them, to meet girls in the real world when I’m looking for a relationship. But I won’t. Not because I don’t want to, but because most of the time it would be unnecessary and therefore socially discouraged. And here’s the interesting thing about these kinds of social phenomena: even if everybody in the world suddenly felt the same way, nothing could really change.

Is there something you think is true about people as a whole(ish), based on your experience, that you think people would disagree with?

I don’t think that the majority of people, say 90%, act with any intrinsic morality in their daily life. Instead, people just do what they think is socially acceptable, always. Note that this is different from the idea that morality is culturally relative, which is probably also true. What I’m saying is that, for most of the population, if you gave them a chance to commit some small “immoral” act without anyone knowing, half of them would do it. The other half aren’t necessarily more “moral” nor do they have better “resolved”, they were just raised to be more scared. To put it another way, if you take some random person and somehow convinced all of their friends and family to suddenly change their moral outlook on some given topic, I think that person would quickly come around as well, upbringing and personal intuitions be damned.
There are some vaguely interesting consequences to this theory. For instance, it would never make sense to criticize somebody for “only being sorry because they got caught”. In my view, getting caught *is* the moral punishment. People are *only* ever sorry because they get caught and, if they can convince you otherwise, it’s just because they are better at acting. Another more philosophical consequence is that it would rarely make sense to think of a person as morally “good”. Instead, you should view the community around that person as morally “good” for actively cultivating their excellent pro-social behavior. Again, this is different from just saying that morality is culturally relative. I’m saying that you can believe in absolute morals, but just make sure that you give credit where credit is due.

Grades: Overrated, underrated, or properly rated?

Underrated. I used to think that school was for learning, a place where you go to obtain knowledge and skills that will make you a better member of society. Grades, in this case, are just an imperfect measure of how much you learned. Although this may be superficially true, it’s also probably the case that it’s not the main function of school. There’s a fascinating model in game theory under the topic of economic signaling that I won’t get into here. But the gist is that school is really just a way for good students to signal to employers that they will be better workers than the bad students.
Imagine if engineering school was a sweatshop in which students sat around and earned grades for solving Sudoku puzzles for four years. The students don’t learn anything at all. However, at the end of the day, employers still know that “A” students are probably hard workers who are good with numbers while “C” students are probably lazy workers who may be bad with numbers. The grading system still works. In other words, grades aren’t just some imperfect means for employers to assess how much you’ve learned, grades might be the end in and of itself.
Now, obviously the real world isn’t as extreme as the Sudoku engineering example. Signaling is important, but students do presumably learn and develop skills to some extent. So which is actually more important, learning or signaling? Here’s some food for thought. The simplest form of grades is a degree, which is essentially a giant “Passing” grade for your entire education. The face value of a Harvard degree is about $180,000 plus four years of lost income. Now, imagine that somebody came to you and offered you the chance to attend Harvard University with one catch: you can keep the knowledge, but you cannot tell anybody about your degree. How much would you pay?

If you were to raise a child with the goal of that child having the biggest possible positive impact on the world (putting aside the questions of whether that is a good goal for a parent), what profession would you hope he or she would enter?

To make this interesting, I’ll assume that I don’t have any good reason to believe that my child will be particularly excellent at what he/she does. So raising them to be the leader of the free world or as a Fortune 500-CEO-turned-philanthropist is out of the question.
As a good engineer, what I would look for is the best bang for my buck. In other words, I want to find a profession in which they can do a lot of good without necessarily needing to compete with a bunch of other outstanding like-minded people. That means that fields like academic research and social work get eliminated; there are already a lot of people working to improve those areas.
Final answer: I would raise them to be a scientifically oriented and rational religious leader, probably a protestant Pastor in the deep South. This seems like a reasonably achievable baseline goal if I raise them the right way. There is also good room for upward mobility and influence in case my child actually *is* excellent at what he/she does. Finally, there is a decent chance that my child would displace a harmful religious preacher. Again, this is much better than in the academic research/social work option in which case my child, no matter how excellent, would just displace a slightly worse researcher or social worker. The benefit to the world is to help bridge our country’s divide between science and religion which, in my mind, underscores much of the political divide in our country today. The evangelical deep South superficially seems like ground zero for this sort of thing, so that’s where I’m going to be deploy my engineered impact child.

I think too much about too few things. What should I think about more often? How can I get myself to think about those things?

Entitlement and insecurity. Thien-Nam’s working theory of Western interpersonal first-world problems states that essentially every issue stems from one of these two sources. Bullying: insecurity. Anger: entitlement. Judgement: insecurity. Envy: entitlement. These themes also crop up frequently at the social level. “Rape culture”, for instance, has everything to do with collective male sexual entitlement. Racism and prejudice of all forms is, ultimately, the manifestation of our ugliest insecurities. Without addressing the root cause of such issues, I think that modern social movements to fix the symptoms will either fail or lead to new problems. Mandating “enthusiastic verbal consent” as a cure for rape culture might reduce sexual assault, but it is also creating a growing generation of confused, frustrated, and potentially violent males. Heavy-handed tactics to squash racial bias, by itself, eventually prompts us to feed our insecurities along “softer” and more socially acceptable measures like appearance, intelligence, and social standing.
To answer the question more concretely, I think that everybody should spend a lot more time reflecting on how their negative thoughts might relate to these two feelings and, ultimately, how to eliminate them altogether. If you succeed, then the next step is to tackle the infinitely more difficult problem of helping other people around you do the same thing. From a purely mental standpoint, there are few goals that are more impactful and rewarding.