Year in Preview

The Protocolist published thirty articles this year. This translated into about five good ideas.

Accidental narrative adoption

In You Are What You Eat, I made the case that many people accidentally join political tribes in their pursuit of an apolitical goal. Body composition (e.g. fat loss, muscle gain, weight loss, etc.) is an aesthetic subject, not a moral one. When the goal is to lose weight, the most obvious and effective strategy is to spend time in a caloric deficit. This means caloric intake (what you eat and drink) is lower than caloric burn (what you expend during exercise and rest).

While easy on paper, losing weight is anything but. Most people underestimate how many calories they consume and overestimate how many they expend. One way to make caloric deficits easier to sustain is by using a rule that, when followed, tends to reduce caloric intake. Intermittent fasting reduces caloric intake by giving you less time to eat. Keto reduces it by eliminating carbohydrates from your diet. 

But these rules are usually associated with narratives. The paleo diet, from my observation, seems to lead people into a rejection of modern food but also the rejection of modernity writ large. Which is a problem. Just because Twinkies are delicious, lab-grown monstrosities doesn’t people who eat them are bad. 

Perhaps coincidental, but this snapshot of popular Google searches indicates some geographical similarities in American political leanings and popular diets:

As effective as narrative-driven diets are at aiding with caloric restriction, their tendency to incept us into vilifying others is a problem. I’m sure this phenomenon is not restricted to the world of nutrition, either.

The Opportunity Cost of Safety

Safety has been one helluva buzzword this year, thanks to worries about AI. Whether or not a computer will gain sentience and run rampant, no one knows. There are several people whose full-time job is to consider those doom scenarios. It is not my job to pontificate about, let alone prevent, an apocalypse. But when safety is the topic, it’s critical to consider the costs.

The pursuit of safety has consequences. In the workplace, continued investments into preventing accidents have diminishing returns. At a certain point, it’s a wiser decision to invest in improving worker health. From The Opportunity Cost of Safety:

“Safety investments suffer from steeply diminishing returns. Yet leaders are pressured to continue investing. The reasons are clear. It looks good, it’s hard to disagree with, and the outcomes are nearly impossible to measure. A virtuous splurge.”

Technological progress creates and eliminates hazards. AI will not prove to be an exception. According to the evolutionary cycle of protocols, our best bet is not to prevent the creation of technology but to increase the speed at which we adapt to it. 

Biofeedback at Scale

The issue of chronic metabolic disease is an issue of slow feedback loops. Cardiovascular disease is the top cause of work-related death according to the World Health Organization. Not explosions or car accidents, but stroke and heart disease. Society has come a long way in solving health problems using vaccines, operations, and antibiotics. 

But our ability to prevent diseases that arise from an accumulation of lifestyle choices is much weaker. It’s my understanding that metabolic diseases can be postponed dramatically via exercise, sleep, and diet. The problem is that our choice to not exercise doesn’t sting. Nor do we naturally flinch at eating a lot of starches and sugars. We don’t receive the negative feedback we receive from these actions for decades.

I argue that we need to artificially shorten these feedback loops. Discipline and faith are too hard. Establishing quick incentives and disincentives for behaviors, based on their likelihood to cause long-term harm, will change lifestyles more effectively. Tools like glucose-, heart rate-, blood pressure monitors, and blood tests are now potent and cheap enough to be put in everyone’s hands. 

Darkly, the goal here is to have a new top cause of death in the world. 

Tech = History

I went on a big End of History kick this year. Francis Fukuyama popularized the term after the Berlin Wall came down. He theorized that History, with a capital H, had come to an end. Liberal democracy was seen by any sane person as the least-bad form of government, and this idea could never be lost. The proverbial cat was out of the bag, and there was no putting it back in.

Technology is a key element of Fukuyama’s theory. Big technological changes could lead to the end of the end of History. Technological stagnation is a prerequisite to political and economic life reaching equilibrium. As I explained in this article, it’s a lot easier to approach the question, “Are we at the end of History?” by seeking to falsify the premise that technology has stopped progressing. 

With AI and continued medical advances, it doesn’t seem like it's stopped. This list of advancements from 2023 is pretty crazy.

Maslow’s Pyramid has no ceiling

The article Akshually, Maslow was one of my better ones. The visual representation of Maslow’s hierarchy is, in the face of abundance, painfully misleading. A narrowing pyramid is not an accurate portrayal of our searches to satisfy our basic needs. 

I think Self-Actualization is a boundless component of the pyramid. There is, as far as I can tell, no set way to go about achieving it. You could play hockey, build Lego, or collect photos of deep sea creatures. And for some reason a lot of us like to differentiate ourselves; to be seen as unique. 

This desire for uniqueness may be a bad thing. Or it could be completely benign. Or virtuous. It does seem to fall into my “live-and-let-live” category of subjects, so I don’t think I’ll ever form a strong opinion on it. This also holds for those who desire sameness. One of the best essays I read this year, Being Basic as a Virtue, talks more about sameness.

The Year in Review and Preview

Pushing my thoughts out the door regularly was uncomfortable. I felt every awkward sentence, portmanteau, and half-baked joke. But, in sum, I guess I’m glad I wrote in public. It was not life-changing, but some of the resulting conversations I had with readers were pretty great. Also, the sensation of a quick win from publishing an article helped me “imagine Sisyphus happy” during my larger research projects. You can see the full list of articles here.

Constantly analyzing the silliness of the world created a flywheel of curiosity. While a few of my articles were interesting, the other 25 left me sufficiently frustrated with my sensemaking ability to motivate me to keep looking for patterns. 

I have a few predictions about what will be the major themes of the zeitgeist in the year(s) ahead, based on what I saw in 2023:

1. Trauma

2. Narratives and Main Character Energy

3. Degrowth vs. E/acc

4. “Artificial Intelligence”

5. Protocols

6. Ecological Thinking

7. Wellness, Health, Longevity

Trauma

Pandemics, wars, cultural bifurcation, the meaning crisis, and social media. High rates of depression, anxiety, and chronic disease. We have all been through a lot in the past two decades. Individual strategies for dealing with trauma might combine to create some interesting dynamics at a social level. Keep in mind that people are processing things, and the world will make more sense.

I hope we take advantage of the fact that we see the world more clearly through teary eyes. 

Narratives and Main Character Energy

“Official Narratives” are dead and modern narratives are proving to be complicated and powerful. Humans think in stories. We use stories to change our behavior, as mentioned in the discussion about diet narratives. Stories carry all sorts of ideas and can be tools of inception. Subliminal messaging was banned from the theatre. But it’s alive and well in the world of narrative. If you want to learn more about narratives, Epsilon Theory is my go-to.

Any good narrative, or plot, needs a protagonist. The term “main character energy” is a top-tier compliment to receive. It means you look badass and unique and have an unusual level of agency. I think the phrase is a component of a common sensemaking analogy in the zeitgeist today, which is videogames. Main characters can optimize or maxx their stats, create different builds, explore worlds, and interact with NPCs. 

Narratives are the macro, protagonists are the micro. 

Degrowth vs. E/acc

Not a battlefront that I’m overly interested in nor an expert on, but one that I see a lot. On the one hand, Degrowth – a movement to abandon GDP growth as the overarching goal of our economies. With the economic pie no longer growing, it necessarily becomes more important to share existing wealth in an egalitarian fashion. On the other hand, E/acc – Effective Accelerationism – a pro-technology philosophy, based on the idea that technological progress will continue to grow the economic pie.

Both stances assume that our current trajectory leads to nowhere good. The Degrowth camp wants to cut losses and reduce the pain in the case of a big slowdown. The E/acc camp wants to double down on investing in tech, hoping that something will stick. As with most modern political orientations, these are progressive rather than conservative ideals. 

I think both movements will continue to grow in 2024. 

“Artificial Intelligence”

The story of the year, without a doubt. Generative text, image, and video models are overturning the playing table in several major respects. First, the proliferation of (mis)information will be tremendous. Second, they’re valuable productivity tools for knowledge workers. Third, these models are shining light on the nature of knowledge in mind-boggling ways. To this last point, Venkatesh Rao’s essay A Camera, Not an Engine is one of the best essays of the year.

The path forward for AI is hotly debated. Will it be the scourge of white-collar workers? Will it fizzle out as it begins to eat its tail? Will it cause an apocalypse? Will it allow us to communicate with whales?

Regardless of its fate as a technology, these questions are on many people’s minds. Personally speaking, I’m a bit nervous. If AI reveals new truths about the world, that could rattle us – an already shell-shocked species – into an even greater existential rut. On the other hand, the promise of generative models in the fields of medicine, chemistry, and materials science could usher in a new technological golden age. 

Protocols

Protocols are a first-class concept in the arenas of health, technology, and politics and quickly spreading to other fields. They’re better adapted to the new, quasi-end-of-history world that we live in. With progressive worldviews as the norm in the zeitgeist, protocols are mutating at high speeds. 

David Deutsch’s treatment of mathematical proofs in The Beginning of Infinity made me think that there are two different classes of protocols: protocol processes and protocol objects. Protocol processes are fluid – it is the following of a protocol, an exchange of information, and the disappearance of the path not taken. Protocol objects are physical instantiations of protocols. Either written instructions, like the Ethereum protocol, or material guardrails, like bike lanes. 

Protocols are voluntary constraints that improve downstream performance. Because we have more choices today than at any prior point in history, protocols are a strong approach to increasing agency. You could think of it as a negative, rather than positive approach to behavior. 

Just yesterday, I watched Rory Sutherland’s lecture on the myth of loss aversion. He explains that our natural tendency to avoid risk is not a failure of evolution, but the opposite. In other words, we have an innate protocol for assessing our likelihood of ruin. Ruin, which can be bankruptcy, reputational destruction, death, etc., is the ultimate worst-case outcome in a given situation. 

Therein lies a lesson: long-surviving protocols generally exist for a reason. The loss aversion problem is a classic example of Chesterton’s Fence, which is an idea that anyone seeking to tinker with protocols should keep in mind. Selection and mutation, the forces of evolution, might have already created something that fits your use case.

Ecological Thinking

In a similar vein, the forest is becoming a fountain of excellence for management science. Rafa got me onto the idea that next-generation leaders will look more like foresters than engineers. This comes on the heels of the ecology movement, which I kind of missed. The gist is: that the world is more complex than it seems, and overzealous efforts to introduce order can backfire dramatically.

Gardening is also an impoverished lens. A garden is too sterile. It’s an amalgam of parts imported from a hardware store, garden centre, and genetically modified seederies. A forest still contains secrets. Forestry is an art and a science – a calling that takes a lifetime to master. But the lessons learned from it are, in my estimation, nearly universal.

This is my longshot prediction for 2024, but I believe anyone interested in getting ahead of the next wave of management science should be picking up a couple of forest management textbooks. And learn about the failures of Scientific Forestry around the globe, from the Soviet Union to Thailand, for lessons on what not to do.

Wellness, Health, Longevity

The confluence of trauma, new technology, and progressive attitudes are combining to create some tailwinds for health trends. Both mental health and physical health are becoming popular objectives. Alcohol is losing popularity, and new-age cannabis is receiving flak for its intensity. The rise of Bryan Johnson is further testimony to the fresh appeal of longevity-as-a-goal. 

A comedian, Vanya Usovich, had his standup act about death go viral on YouTube. Comedy can be a good cultural litmus test. This act – to much applause – posed the question of why we aren’t trying harder to stop death. The health renaissance will continue 

Fin, Resolutions

Lots of projects are in the pipeline for 2024. Nothing revolutionary, but hopefully some good stuff.

My resolution-making protocol for the new year: i) take stock of the past year’s successes and failures, ii) think of ways to increase the former and decrease the latter, and iii) do the things. 

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