What's Tim Urban's problem?
March 13, 2023
This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My executive coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention, and learn how our unconscious patterns are holding us back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or let them know they can set up a free intro chat with me.
I was a fan of Tim Urban and his page Wait But Why, and have been supporting him for years on Patreon. So I was excited to read his new book “What’s Our Problem?” subtitled “a self-help book for societies” which finally came out after years of waiting. Alas, I was very disappointed with it, so disappointed that I ended up writing a 1400 word ranting blog post about it. Key excerpt:
…this is a several hundred page defense of why Urban (and his professor friends) aren’t racist. He builds the whole book towards claiming that “wokeness” and “cancel culture” are the biggest threats our society is facing. But I feel they are the biggest threats to his own sense of himself as a good person, because in his mind, good people aren’t racists (actual quote: “Growing up in a progressive suburb, I would have rather been labeled almost anything other than “racist” or “sexist” or “homophobic”. In a progressive environment, these terms described the worst possible kind of person.”). Rather than engaging with the structural arguments being made by the social justice movement, he withdraws to “Science is good!” and “Free speech!” (which somehow only white people complain about, because people of color have always had their speech and actions limited in this country).
I can’t recommend the book, especially if you have any social justice leanings. I got so angry reading this book that I was yelling at the page, and didn’t sleep well for a couple nights because I was constructing arguments in my head for why Urban was deluded and out of touch. But you might be amused by my rantings.
And now for the normal personal development content…
LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience.
Embrace the politics. Many technologists get frustrated when they get to the executive level and feel like they spend all their time on politics and diplomacy rather than “real work”. Politicians have a bad reputation, as many people employ political skills to compensate for their lack of functional competence. But if you avoid engaging with the politics as a leader, you are just leaving the field open for those self-serving players to take more resources. Stand your ground and embrace the political work of leadership.
Who, not what. If you are struggling to figure out what to do next in your career, because you have a lot of options and could do a lot of things, then flip the question to look for who you want to work with. Meet lots of people with an eye towards finding people you admire and who appreciate the same things. Find the right people, then figure out what to do.
Celebrate the behavior you want, and you’ll get more of it. This applies both to ourselves in building habits, and to others we work with. If you’re a leader, and you want people to do less of something, start celebrating what you want them to do more of, and you’re likely to get it, so it crowds out the undesired behavior.
Similarly, love the process, not the outcome.
Articles and resources I’ve found interesting on the topics of ChatGPT and AI:
“Sydney absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant. I wasn’t looking for facts about the world; I was interested in understanding how Sydney worked and yes, how she felt. … This is truly the next step beyond social media, where you are not just getting content from your network (Facebook), or even content from across the service (TikTok), but getting content tailored to you. And let me tell you, it is incredibly engrossing.”
ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, by Ted Chiang. Chiang’s science fiction short stories are thought-provoking and challenging, and I appreciated his take on these AI chatbots.
“The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.”
Farnam Street offers their take on “Why write?” when an AI could do it for you.
“Many things can be done by tools that write for you, but they won’t help you learn to think or understand a problem with deep fluency. And you need deep fluency to solve hard problems. … In the future, clear thinking will become more valuable, not less.”
Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks!
