taming geniuses

When I hold a book by a genius, I feel the weight of a lifetime of obsession. (Works of geniuses are always based on one single fundamental idea that is obsessed over and revisited in various forms across time.) Then I thank the author for going through such pain and prize the book like a treasure.

Geniuses should not be allowed to go to psychologists. Their obsessions are way too important to be tamed.

“[My troubles] are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and [treatment] would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.”
- Edvard Munch

success as abnormality

Normality does not breed success, extremity does. This is essentially due to the fact that every activity favors certain character traits and the people who have extreme doses of these traits end up being extraordinarily successful. Of course, not all mentally sick people gain crazy amounts of fame, power or wealth, but those who do are often mentally sick.

Here are some traits I have noticed over the years:
 

Autism

As brain science unravels the roots of investors’ underlying behaviors, it may well find new evidence that the conception of Homo economicus is fundamentally flawed. The rational investor should not care whether she has $10 million and then loses $8 million or, alternatively, whether she has nothing and ends up with $2 million. In either case, the end result is the same.

But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain, an evolutionary hand-me-down that encourages organisms to preserve food supplies or to weigh a situation carefully before risking encounters with predators.

One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested, autistics often demonstrate strict logic when balancing gains and losses, but this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior. “Adhering to logical, rational principles of ideal economic choice may be biologically unnatural,” says Colin F. Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech. Better insight into human psychology gleaned by neuroscientists holds the promise of changing forever our fundamental assumptions about the way entire economies function—and our understanding of the motivations of the individual participants therein, who buy homes or stocks and who have trouble judging whether a dollar is worth as much today as it was yesterday.

Gary Stix - The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts

Assuming that rational investors always beat the irrational ones in the long run, we can conclude that fortune favors the autistic. On a related note, being successful in business also requires a lack of empathy to the degree of being autistic.
 

Obsessive Compulsiveness

This disorder can fake passion when it is absent and fuel grit when it is low, and thereby tremendously help a budding entrepreneur. Obsessing over details can sometimes cause dead-locks but can also act as a pillar for the kind of perfectionism that distinguishes the best entrepreneurs and designers.
 

Narcissism

"Appear as you are. Be as you appear." said Rumi. Good advice for humans, but horrible for corporations. There is an entire department called brand management, dedicated to make sure that this does not happen. Same goes for modesty etc. In fact, ideal corporations are expected to display all the defining features of narcissism. (e.g. an inflated sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy for others, a fiercely independent attitude)

According to object relations theory, narcissistic people find the experience of need and dependency to be unbearable; as a result, they develop a set of psychological defences that embody an extreme form of anti-dependency. I don't need anyone. I can take care of myself because I already have what I need.
The Narcissist You Know - Joseph Burgo (Page 106)

That is why narcissist CEOs are the best. They envisage the whole company as an extension of themselves and do their best to minimize their dependency on employees so that no one can exert independent political power. To achieve this, such CEOs employ all sorts of operational software to suck any remnants of unique and valuable information the moment they are generated, meanwhile using all sorts of tricks to ease employees' existential anxieties and fool them into thinking that they are unique and valuable.
 

Bipolarity

It is no surprise that bipolar disorder is very common among successful entrepreneurs. It is the biological embodiment of the following two best-practices in business: 

  • Growth periods (manias) should be followed by pruning periods (depressions).
  • Every important decision should be evaluated from both a best-case (manic) and a worst-case (depressive) perspective.

Also bipolarity gives one an ability to freely trade energy across time. One can enjoy additional bouts of positive energy today by creating equal amounts of negative energy in the future. (Imagine an asynchronous version of the matter-antimatter creation process in physics.) Bipolar entrepreneurs can better navigate the highs and lows of the business landscape because they can gear up during the low periods and gear down during the high ones. (Entrepreneurs absorb external variations to create internal constancy for their team members who can then build the necessary functionalities.)
 

Psychotism

Apparently there exists some studies backing the common belief that insanity and creativity are closely associated. If so, why are so few of the successful scientists psychotic? After all science is a very creative discipline, isn't it? Here is a possible explanation:

Why are so many leading modern scientists so dull and lacking in scientific ambition? Answer: because the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people. At each level in education, training and career progression there is a tendency to exclude smart and creative people by preferring Conscientious and Agreeable people. The progressive lengthening of scientific training and the reduced independence of career scientists have tended to deter vocational ‘revolutionary’ scientists in favour of industrious and socially adept individuals better suited to incremental ‘normal’ science. High general intelligence (IQ) is required for revolutionary science. But educational attainment depends on a combination of intelligence and the personality trait of Conscientiousness; and these attributes do not correlate closely. Therefore elite scientific institutions seeking potential revolutionary scientists need to use IQ tests as well as examination results to pick out high IQ ‘under-achievers’. As well as high IQ, revolutionary science requires high creativity. Creativity is probably associated with moderately high levels of Eysenck’s personality trait of ‘Psychoticism’. Psychoticism combines qualities such as selfishness, independence from group norms, impulsivity and sensation-seeking; with a style of cognition that involves fluent, associative and rapid production of many ideas. But modern science selects for high Conscientiousness and high Agreeableness; therefore it enforces low Psychoticism and low creativity.

Bruce G. Charlton - Why are Modern Scientists so Dull?

necessity of dying

Cancer is agelessness achieved at cellular level. We want to defeat it in order to achieve agelessness at bodily level.

How ironic.

What we do not see is that agelessness achieved at bodily level will in turn destroy agelessness we achieved at societal level by destroying the most important circuit breaker of societal positive feedback loops. Without death, we will have power concentrations of catastrophic magnitudes. Intergenerational transmission mechanisms will become pointless as the need to hand over anything to younger generations disappears. We will become like cancer cells, endangering the survival of our very society by refusing to die.

How tragic.

emerging junior gap

Artificial intelligence will destroy most of the junior white collar jobs.

Senior jobs will remain, but the question of how to train people for these positions without the availability of junior positions will be a dilemma. Private industry will offload this burden onto the government, as it always does. Junior jobs will get subsidised and public education system will absorb the ever increasing depth of our nonproductiveness.

startups as social movements

A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.
It is usually an advantage to a movement, and perhaps a prerequisite for its endurance, that these roles should be played by different men succeeding each other as conditions require. When the same person or persons (or the same type of person) leads a movement from its inception to maturity, it usually ends in disaster. The Fascist and Nazi movements were without a successive change in leadership, and both ended in disaster. It was Hitler's fanaticism, his inability to settle down and play the role of a practical man of action, which brought ruin to his movement. Had Hitler died in the middle 1930's, there is little doubt that a man of action of the type of Goering would have succeeded to the leadership and the movement would have survived.*
The True Believer - Eric Hoffer (Pages 147-148)

Successful disruptive startups go through the same three stages that all successful social movements do. (This is not surprising since both involve a desire to change the status quo by advocating the possibility of a different future.) Sicknesses like the founder's syndrome arise when the leadership refuses to change as a startup passes through its natural phase transitions.

* Hoffer is not endorsing Fascist or Nazi movements here.

Another apt sociological metaphor is "startup as a tribe". The small can defeat the big by its sheer solidarity and dynamism.

Here is a delineation of some thoughts of Ibn Khaldun:

Concerning the discipline of sociology, he conceived a theory of social conflict. He developed the dichotomy of "town" versus "desert," as well as the concept of a "generation," and the inevitable loss of power that occurs when desert warriors conquer a city... Muqaddimah may be read as a sociological work: six books of general sociology... The work is based around Ibn Khaldun's central concept of 'asabiyyah, which has been translated as "social cohesion", "group solidarity", or "tribalism." This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun's analysis looks at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds - psychological, sociological, economic, political - of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion... Perhaps the most frequently cited observation drawn from Ibn Khaldun's work is the notion that when a society becomes a great civilization (and, presumably, the dominant culture in its region), its high point is followed by a period of decay. This means that the next cohesive group that conquers the diminished civilization is, by comparison, a group of barbarians. Once the barbarians solidify their control over the conquered society, however, they become attracted to its more refined aspects, such as literacy and arts, and either assimilate into or appropriate such cultural practices. Then, eventually, the former barbarians will be conquered by a new set of barbarians, who will repeat the process. Some contemporary readers of Khaldun have read this as an early business cycle theory, though set in the historical circumstances of the mature Islamic empire.

desirability of sudden death

When we witness people dying slowly under painful conditions, we wish for our future selves some form of a sudden death. A beautiful heart attack for instance.

This desire is baseless though since sudden death is always available in the form of suicide. The entities doing the dying always prefer a slow death, while those doing the witnessing always prefer a sudden death.

Same holds for companies. When a company goes suddenly bankrupt, people working for it feel very disappointed. Their years of work is gone without an explanation, without being given a proper chance of failure. Same people, when faced with a competitor refusing to die despite repeated close calls, will feel agitated and murmur to themselves "Come on, just give it up."

herds and trends

Apparel retailers herd around emerging fashion trends in order to minimise their piles of unsold garments. Venture capitalists cluster around emerging technology trends in order to maximise their chances of catching extreme returns.

Both cases are driven by fear and uncertainty. Both result in sameness and competition. While retailers are shaken by the volatility of taste, investors are befuddled by the complexity of creation.

philosophy of dockerization

To persist you can either be inflexible and freeze your local environment into constancy or be flexible and continuously morph along with your environment. Former is the direction digital entities pursue and latter is the direction biological entities pursue. (Either way, at the extreme end, complete correlation with the environment results in complete diffusion of identity.)

Non-adaptive entities like pieces of code can only survive via dockerization. Adaptive entities persist in a weaker sense but they can do so by themselves. Non-adaptive entities on the other hand can only persist with the help of adaptive entities whom they need for the execution of the dockerization processes.

Going back to our childhood neighbourhoods and seeing them completely changed is so sad and destabilising. I wish we could dockerize our moments so that we can visit them later.

Dockerization in this sense is the ultimate form of nostalgia.

artists and gentrifications

How does a gentrification process start off? It starts off with the artists of course.

Land becomes expensive. Artists get displaced and search for cheaper options. They move in droves since their profession is very much ecosystem driven. It does not take long for the newly colonised area (e.g. Brooklyn in New York, Woodstock in Cape Town) to become cool and attract non-artist youngsters as well. At some point, everybody becomes aware of the new cool and the average appreciation (among the colonisers) of local cultural texture and old buildings etc decreases, and gentrification accelerates and starts to become more visible.

Gentrification often results in the destruction of what is beautiful. But that too is ironically caused by the artists' decisions. When artists look for new lands, they not only prioritise cheapness but also seek authenticity and vibrancy. In other words, they unintentionally cause the death of what they desire to feed on without disruption.

In short, gentrification is the process of the cool killing the genuine.