Worldviews, altruism, and embracing variance (with Emmett Shear)
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Emmett Scheer about intersubjective concepts, distributed systems, optimism bias, and leading successful tech startups, exploring his nuanced worldview and practical lessons from entrepreneurship.
Deep Dive Analysis
25 Topic Outline
Emmett's Worldview: Complexity and Nuance
Ideology vs. Worldview: Key Distinctions
Standard Silicon Valley Worldview Stereotype
Personal Journey: Understanding Money's Role
Personal Journey: Re-evaluating Democracy's Purpose
Intersubjective Concepts as Coordination Mechanisms
The Essential Role of Middle Management
Democracy as a Safety Valve, Not Policy Aggregator
Proposal: No Confidence Voting for Legislators
Critique of Utilitarianism and Global Solutions
Importance of Local Knowledge and Humility in Aid
Optimism Bias and Active Inference Explained
Why People Consistently Miss Daily Goals
Variance: When It's Good, When It's Bad
Entrepreneurship's Biggest Challenge: Problem Identification
Startup Near-Death Experiences and Rapid Change
The Problem with General Startup Advice
Effective Learning from Users and Customers
Riding Technology Waves vs. Blind Trend Following
Y Combinator's Evolution and Enduring Strengths
Experience as OpenAI Interim CEO
Reflecting on the OpenAI Board's Decisions
Critique of the Effective Altruism Movement
San Francisco: A City Embracing Variance
Approaching AI Dangers: Tools vs. Self-Improvement
5 Key Concepts
Worldview vs. Ideology
Worldviews are complex, messy gestalts that are absorbed over time and stretch across multiple domains, reflecting how someone truly engages with the world. Ideologies, in contrast, are fundamentally simpler, single-lens frameworks that offer a more compressed and often less nuanced perspective.
Intersubjective Concepts
These are concepts like money or democracy that derive their meaning and function from collective human belief and agreement. They are coordination mechanisms where information and value reside within the network of people, rather than being inherent in the individual components themselves.
Coordination Mechanisms
Systems such as money, democracy, or management structures that enable multiple independent agents to cohere and move in a common direction. They solve the problem of how individual components can act effectively without full global information, creating good global results from local coordination.
Optimism Bias (Active Inference)
In the context of active inference, agents anticipate their own survival and desired future states (like maintaining homeostasis) and take actions to make those expectations come true, as they dislike being surprised. This bias is crucial for motivation and persistence, as failing to anticipate positive outcomes leads to learned helplessness and inaction.
Variance in Outcomes
The degree of deviation from an average outcome. While sometimes undesirable (e.g., in precision engineering), variance can be beneficial in situations with power-law returns (like startup investing) where the greatest gains are at the extreme positive end. Exploring novelty inherently generates both failures (negative variance) and disproportionate successes (positive variance).
9 Questions Answered
An ideology is a simpler, single-lens framework, whereas a worldview is a complex, messy gestalt that encompasses a broad array of topics and is absorbed through extensive interaction, reflecting someone's general approach to things.
Middle management is crucial for propagating information both top-down (fragmenting vision) and bottom-up (abstracting details), reconciling gaps between strategic vision and ground-level reality, and enabling coordination in large organizations that cannot be run as pure democracies.
Democracy primarily serves as a safety release valve, allowing citizens to remove bad leaders when conditions become sufficiently poor. It is not designed to aggregate people's opinions about specific policies, as most citizens lack well-informed opinions on a broad range of issues.
People often set goals (like productivity or healthy habits) that are above their current point of homeostasis, meaning they are constantly fighting against a gradient pulling them back. This leads to consistent underachievement because they are aiming for a higher state and will typically fall short rather than overshoot.
Founders should approach user conversations with an open mind, seeking to deeply understand users' problems and their world *before* formulating a solution. This 'learning' approach is more effective than merely 'validating' a pre-conceived idea, which cannot make the idea better.
Yes, riding major technology waves (like the internet or mobile phones) is often a good strategy because it indicates a large, emerging opportunity. However, this differs from blindly following second-order trends, which involves copying what everyone else is doing and increases the risk of failure.
It was a very high-stress but exciting experience, where he focused on understanding the chaotic situation, identifying OpenAI's best interests, and navigating towards the best reachable outcome, which was ultimately unwinding the initial board decision.
His main critique is against the idea that one can rationally determine and rank globally 'most important' actions or charities in a context-free way. He argues this approach underweights uncertainty, the dramatic need for humility, and the importance of local, embodied knowledge.
Society should separate AI dangers into two categories: for AI as a tool, wait for actual harms to arise before regulating; for AI approaching recursive self-improvement, establish a 'sensor network' to track progress and be prepared to slow down or stop development if that critical threshold is neared without clear understanding of its dynamics.
29 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Local Impact
Focus on making your personal community and immediate connections good, then invest in your neighborhood or city, and only expand efforts to state, country, and global levels once local spheres are thriving due to the dramatic need for humility and groundedness in local information.
2. Anticipate Success Actively
Cultivate a deep, rich anticipation of success to drive action, skill acquisition, and hard work, as this belief is causally linked to achievement because you expect the effort to pay off.
3. Learn Before Ideating
To succeed in problem-solving (especially startups), engage with users in an open-ended way to deeply understand their problems and build an accurate model of their needs before developing solutions, rather than validating pre-conceived ideas.
4. Identify Worthwhile Problems
In entrepreneurship, recognize that the harder and more critical task is figuring out what problems are truly worth solving, rather than merely solving problems efficiently.
5. Cultivate Optimism Bias
Develop an optimism bias by anticipating positive outcomes (e.g., survival, comfort) to motivate action towards achieving those expectations, rather than passively expecting discomfort or failure.
6. Embed Before Helping
When assisting a community, spend months immersed within it, talking, learning, proposing small interventions, and doing things by hand first to gain deep, embodied knowledge before building solutions.
7. Utilize Management Structure
Implement a management structure in organizations to facilitate both top-down vision fragmentation and bottom-up information consolidation, ensuring effective communication and reconciliation of gaps between strategy and ground-level facts.
8. Find a Co-Founder
If at all possible, find a co-founder to start your company with, as this vastly increases your chance of success in entrepreneurship.
9. Ride New Tech Waves
Leverage new, impactful technologies as a strategic approach for startup success, as historically, many large winning companies have emerged by riding significant waves like the internet or mobile phones.
10. Prioritize Company’s Best Interest
As a CEO, your fundamental mandate is to be a steward of the company’s best interest, requiring you to quickly understand the situation and determine what actions serve that interest.
11. Gather Diverse Perspectives
To rapidly make sense of a chaotic situation, talk to a wide range of people including those within the organization, those close to it, and anyone with a new or informed perspective.
12. Prevent Burnout with Impact
Prevent burnout by actively anticipating that your work has meaning and will drive change in the world, as failing to do so makes sustained motivation almost impossible.
13. Set Ambitious Goals
To improve, set goals that are at a higher level of abstraction and above your current point of homeostasis, understanding that you will consistently aim for and likely fall slightly short of this higher target, which is the nature of willpower and growth.
14. Evaluate Charitable Impact
When giving money to do good, care about the impact of your donations and do your best to estimate it quantitatively or qualitatively, as effectiveness matters.
15. Contextualize Personal Impact
Determine what is most important for you to work on based on your personal context, including where you can have the best impact, your location, knowledge, and connections, rather than seeking a universal ‘most important’ problem.
16. Eliminate Known Bad Practices
Identify and eliminate predictably detrimental actions (e.g., not fully committing to a startup) to reduce negative variance without sacrificing potential high-end positive outcomes, as these actions are predictably detrimental.
17. Avoid Second-Order Trends
While noticing a real technology trend is good, avoid copying what everyone else is doing within that trend, as this ‘second-order trend following’ is a good way to fail because the median startup dies.
18. Act on Unique Opportunities
Seek out and act quickly on opportunistic charitable work where you have trusted personal connections, an asymmetric information advantage, and can provide support with less oversight for maximum leveraged impact.
19. Pledge Fixed Charitable Giving
Consider taking a pledge (e.g., 10% of income) for charitable giving, as this can be a sufficient contribution and alleviate guilt about not doing enough.
20. Don’t Limit Measurable Good
Recognize that while funding measurable, low-variance charitable work is good, most high-impact good is not easily quantifiable or repeatable, and don’t limit your efforts solely to what is easily measurable.
21. Deepen Understanding Cycle
Approach complex concepts by first believing for simple reasons, then doubting for complicated reasons, and finally believing again for more sophisticated and nuanced reasons to achieve a deeper understanding.
22. Assess Desired Variance
Understand that variance is not inherently good or bad; assess situations to determine if you need to minimize variance (e.g., precision tasks) or embrace it for potential upside (e.g., innovation, power law returns).
23. Reframe Democracy’s Purpose
Understand democracy primarily as a safety release valve that allows for the removal of bad leaders when things get bad enough, rather than a primary mechanism for aggregating policy opinions or setting direction.
24. Regulate Tech by Actual Harm
For new technologies like AI that create powerful tools, adopt a regulatory approach that waits for actual harms to arise before acting to prevent them, rather than guessing what harms might occur.
25. Monitor Recursive AI Progress
Pay close attention to AI development, especially for signs of recursive self-improvement, by registering progress and verifying how close projects are to this critical threshold, to be prepared to slow down or stop if necessary.
26. Reform Legislative Elections
Advocate for a system where incumbents win by default unless a no-confidence vote removes them, leading to an open race, and oppose term limits for legislators as they empower bureaucracy and parties at the expense of individual elected officials.
27. Absorb Complex Worldviews
To truly understand a person’s worldview, spend a good deal of time with them in person or absorb their general approach by reading their extensive writings across a broad array of topics.
28. Cultivate Startup Persistence
Be persistent in your startup endeavors, as giving up will likely lead to failure; persistence is a generally true and good piece of advice for increasing your chances of success.
29. Attend E-Learning Webinar
Sign up for the free ‘How to Build Your Own Clearer Thinking Style e-Learning Tool’ webinar on June 19th at 1 p.m. Eastern Time to learn secrets of creating effective e-learning modules and get questions answered live.
7 Key Quotes
Worldviews are big, complicated, messy gestalts matching the world itself, which is this big, highly detailed thing.
Emmett Shear
Democracy's point is when it gets bad enough, you can evict the bum, right? Like that's, that's why democracy is good is like, ultimately like it allows you to remove the bad leaders.
Emmett Shear
The dangerous thing is when you go in and you inject a bunch of energy into a system where you're not getting reciprocal energy back out because you think it's going to help.
Emmett Shear
Burnout is when you start failing to anticipate that your work has any meaning or that will have an impact.
Emmett Shear
The easy part was solving the problems and the hard part was figuring out what problems were worth solving.
Emmett Shear
There is no good general startup advice. You will not get from us general startup advice. You will get from us startup advice for your startup.
Emmett Shear
The world is full of unknowns, the idea that you'll have the correct answer is like, no, you won't, you don't even want to have the correct answer.
Emmett Shear