the time you spent on this paid off :) compelling piece. i really enjoyed your relationship/thoughts about your dad especially. and love that this newsletter is becoming official!! congrats!!!!!!!
i found it interesting the point abt ur dad having no regret despite claiming a lot of responsibility as a person. perhaps the key there is to try your best and claim the responsibility, but ultimately be unattached to the way things actually unfold
also did you feel fascination or pressure lol you didn’t tell us?!?
Enjoyed the feeling of being gently pulled along interconnected stories of different people -- makes for an easy read and appeals to my shortening attention span :-)
This got me thinking of the relationship between agency, leverage, and responsibility. Widening your sense of responsibility only seems healthy to the degree that you can reasonably fulfill it. On the other hand, it feels inappropriate to have (and use) high agency and leverage without a matching level of responsibility.
Perhaps a framework for personal growth could be to always have a sense of responsibility that just outstrips your capability -- the gap creating the motivation to grow. As you become more capable, you increase your scope of responsible, and thus the cycle continues (forever)!
This reminds me of a Tiktok I saw about a man explaining how life is inherently meaningless, but we decide what *we* want to get out of it. Like any other sub-category of life (relationship, work, fitness), we set our own goals based on what we value. In the same vain, we have free-will over the things we wish to be responsible over... And perhaps that sense of responsibility creates more meaning because it mirrors to us our own capacity to affect the world around us.
You should give the Huberman episode series on mental health and relationships a listen! They talk a lot about agency + gratitude being the 2 key items in any relationship (with self, with others, with world, etc). Responsibility may tie in somewhere there just as a byproduct.
You're a great writer! I appreciate you sharing this.
I'm on vacation with my parents, and am reading the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson. When I mentioned the book to my parents, they expressed that he was a bad guy, a narcissist, an anti-semite. We started discussing whether having an acerbic personality is a prerequisite to doing something as disruptive as starting a private space company, and whether the net positive of that company on humanity outways the negatives of his interactions with others in the meantime. Typical "do the ends justify the means" question.
My dad (who has been in public service / government / politics for many years) responded that it is the *responsibility* of someone in the public eye to do the right thing. Specifically if you have a platform where you can influence how people think and feel, to not use that platform to push hateful or propagandist messages. In essence to follow your heuristic of doing what "makes sense." It's hard to argue with that, because obviously tweeting anti-semitic remarks is not a prerequisite to innovation. But there is probably some middle ground between wanting to be kind and wanting to affect change, which will inevitably involve stepping toes, and probably hurting people.
A clear example of this is eminent domain. If China wants to build a new super-highway, they can simply take control of the houses in the way and bulldoze right through them. This might not "make sense" to us, or seem very responsible. The builders and politicians in charge of that highway are probably not getting their own houses bulldozed, and those whose houses are getting bulldozed are just cells in a spreadsheet to them. Not a great show of responsibility or skin in the game. But the method is effective for highway building.
Contrarily, in the USA we wouldn't be as obtuse around our home seizures for highway building. But we also wouldn't think twice about paving over the home of a squirrel or butterfly. So, we're still somewhere on that spectrum.
Being kind, doing the right thing, being a "responsible" human to your tribe and planet are very inefficient paths to growth and societal "progress." But if we were to act according to that ruthless mantra of growth and innovation, we would simply be paperclip maximizing AI.
The questions is, are you trying to be a good human or a good computer? I guess the conclusion I'm drawing is that we as people can't be in the business of acting like computers, we have to prioritize humanity, because that's ultimately what this is all about. It's okay to be biased towards humans, even if it is illogical according to the frameworks we've been given. That's why it "made sense" for your dad to vouch for his friend, even though it wasn't going to optimally lead towards more productivity, more money, etc.
We all have to draw the line for ourselves...where will we be ruthless and logical, and when will we be biased towards humans and empathy. I'm not sure where I am drawing my line yet.
There's a fantastic conclusion here beyond what I wrote. A sense of responsibility, no matter to what, is what's important at the end of it all. Whether that's rooted in a responsibility to individual relationships or humankind or something else. The world was built by people with responsibilities and opinions, not those floating through life without principle or purpose. And sometimes, there are tradeoffs. *Real* responsibilities have tradeoffs.
You're totally right tho, Elon really doesn't have to say that kind of shit because certainly it's not a pre-requisite to multi-planetary civilization or protecting humanity's free speech institution. But he does have a real sense of responsibility to those missions, and maybe in his wacky brain simply he can't untangle those from his impulses, and we just have to judge him for that.
the time you spent on this paid off :) compelling piece. i really enjoyed your relationship/thoughts about your dad especially. and love that this newsletter is becoming official!! congrats!!!!!!!
i found it interesting the point abt ur dad having no regret despite claiming a lot of responsibility as a person. perhaps the key there is to try your best and claim the responsibility, but ultimately be unattached to the way things actually unfold
also did you feel fascination or pressure lol you didn’t tell us?!?
🫢
Enjoyed the feeling of being gently pulled along interconnected stories of different people -- makes for an easy read and appeals to my shortening attention span :-)
This got me thinking of the relationship between agency, leverage, and responsibility. Widening your sense of responsibility only seems healthy to the degree that you can reasonably fulfill it. On the other hand, it feels inappropriate to have (and use) high agency and leverage without a matching level of responsibility.
Perhaps a framework for personal growth could be to always have a sense of responsibility that just outstrips your capability -- the gap creating the motivation to grow. As you become more capable, you increase your scope of responsible, and thus the cycle continues (forever)!
Woohoo!! Celebrating reps > perfection!!!
This reminds me of a Tiktok I saw about a man explaining how life is inherently meaningless, but we decide what *we* want to get out of it. Like any other sub-category of life (relationship, work, fitness), we set our own goals based on what we value. In the same vain, we have free-will over the things we wish to be responsible over... And perhaps that sense of responsibility creates more meaning because it mirrors to us our own capacity to affect the world around us.
You should give the Huberman episode series on mental health and relationships a listen! They talk a lot about agency + gratitude being the 2 key items in any relationship (with self, with others, with world, etc). Responsibility may tie in somewhere there just as a byproduct.
You're a great writer! I appreciate you sharing this.
I'm on vacation with my parents, and am reading the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson. When I mentioned the book to my parents, they expressed that he was a bad guy, a narcissist, an anti-semite. We started discussing whether having an acerbic personality is a prerequisite to doing something as disruptive as starting a private space company, and whether the net positive of that company on humanity outways the negatives of his interactions with others in the meantime. Typical "do the ends justify the means" question.
My dad (who has been in public service / government / politics for many years) responded that it is the *responsibility* of someone in the public eye to do the right thing. Specifically if you have a platform where you can influence how people think and feel, to not use that platform to push hateful or propagandist messages. In essence to follow your heuristic of doing what "makes sense." It's hard to argue with that, because obviously tweeting anti-semitic remarks is not a prerequisite to innovation. But there is probably some middle ground between wanting to be kind and wanting to affect change, which will inevitably involve stepping toes, and probably hurting people.
A clear example of this is eminent domain. If China wants to build a new super-highway, they can simply take control of the houses in the way and bulldoze right through them. This might not "make sense" to us, or seem very responsible. The builders and politicians in charge of that highway are probably not getting their own houses bulldozed, and those whose houses are getting bulldozed are just cells in a spreadsheet to them. Not a great show of responsibility or skin in the game. But the method is effective for highway building.
Contrarily, in the USA we wouldn't be as obtuse around our home seizures for highway building. But we also wouldn't think twice about paving over the home of a squirrel or butterfly. So, we're still somewhere on that spectrum.
Being kind, doing the right thing, being a "responsible" human to your tribe and planet are very inefficient paths to growth and societal "progress." But if we were to act according to that ruthless mantra of growth and innovation, we would simply be paperclip maximizing AI.
The questions is, are you trying to be a good human or a good computer? I guess the conclusion I'm drawing is that we as people can't be in the business of acting like computers, we have to prioritize humanity, because that's ultimately what this is all about. It's okay to be biased towards humans, even if it is illogical according to the frameworks we've been given. That's why it "made sense" for your dad to vouch for his friend, even though it wasn't going to optimally lead towards more productivity, more money, etc.
We all have to draw the line for ourselves...where will we be ruthless and logical, and when will we be biased towards humans and empathy. I'm not sure where I am drawing my line yet.
There's a fantastic conclusion here beyond what I wrote. A sense of responsibility, no matter to what, is what's important at the end of it all. Whether that's rooted in a responsibility to individual relationships or humankind or something else. The world was built by people with responsibilities and opinions, not those floating through life without principle or purpose. And sometimes, there are tradeoffs. *Real* responsibilities have tradeoffs.
You're totally right tho, Elon really doesn't have to say that kind of shit because certainly it's not a pre-requisite to multi-planetary civilization or protecting humanity's free speech institution. But he does have a real sense of responsibility to those missions, and maybe in his wacky brain simply he can't untangle those from his impulses, and we just have to judge him for that.
i like it!