Building for others by building for self - Economic Asymmetry and Mimetic Density

Reading vs Writing, The Occupation of Philosophy, The Densest Worthwhile Field

I've been struck by how bold and how humbling it is to make something that people want just by making something that you want. Paul Graham readily puts forward this mode - working on a project you care about - as a good way to make something people want. I feel a distinct tension in this that I’d like to unravel in a few ways. Here are the poles of the tension:

How flattering is it that your aesthetic/functional taste is good enough to delight/help someone?

While your tastes aren't necessarily bad if someone doesn't like something you made for yourself, when people do like your work, that's a pretty strong signal. Beware shaping your tastes based on what you believe others' tastes to be though.¹

How humbling is it to realize that your tastes aren't so different from anyone else's?

The act of making the thing is what makes you different, but flip the roles (since you would presumably use the same thing it if someone else made it²) and, just like that, you're part of the masses!

Economics - Asymmetry

At first glance, the situation appears a bit like economic chicken, where you can benefit from waiting for others to do the work.

Of course, value can accrue to the creator in terms of wealth or reputation, but the ratio of value created to value captured varies widely and can be pretty extreme.

Taking the value capture efficiency framing in terms of the consumed value makes it appear that the creator has hugely missed out. The fact that so many people create without material gain is clear evidence of how valuable the act of producing something is.

Thinking about what ratios favor the creator, I thought of the total effort input vs. the effort input of the creator. In a successful company, the founder's work becomes an ever smaller fraction, and yet they keep claim to all of it in some ways. This can be true of artists whose work is imitated, open source coders whose projects grow beyond their initial contribution, educators who inspire others to educate, etc.

Exemplifying the asymmetries

Here are just a few cases that interested me in how creation and consumption can be so asymmetrical.

Writing and Art

Central to the tension of the value from producing vs. consuming is the fact that consumers rarely have a view into the the production process. While the making of sausage and law may not be great to watch, I wonder how creative producers think and work.

Livestreams sharing the raw process of creating or practicing have grown in popularity, but I honestly don't watch much because it's so drawn out. I would rather learn the takeaways, or if I’m going to spend time learning in real-time, it’s best to be doing the work myself. Also, I can watch highlights of the process of things I’m unlikely to try myself.³ That said, I would love have to watched Escher work start to finish or endlessly doodle, but most of us simply wouldn't be able to spend the time reading Dostoevsky writing Dostoevsky (though now it does sound interesting!).

While it may be useful in most cases that creators do filter to show off their best work, you have to wonder what great work the best artists are filtering out.

If your perfectionism has filtered your output to nothing, then don't fear and create! Produce and filter later! I’m late to publicly posting my writing due to an overloaded undergraduate, though I've been thinking and writing all along. In retrospect, I should have started posting my notes raw or at least some highlights regularly.

Philosophers

Philosophy may be the occupation with the most extreme ratios of public consumption value capture to private production value capture.

A philosopher who writes little and seldom shares their thinking appears to have created and captured no value. But would you criticize someone for reading thoughtfully? Most people's philosophy accrues value only to the individual doing the work in their own mind. Agnes Callard explains that those expecting the field of philosophy to deliver the answers have totally missed the point that this framing clarifies.

Meanwhile, a few philosophers, despite spending their lives writing, spill out and influence the whole world! Some do so after their death when they can no longer capture any of that value. Some do it through their death. Perhaps only one of those was so confident that he had to come back to watch it play out.

Publishing

If the private production value often outweighs the captured consumption value, why share at all?

Of course, publishing your work opens it to criticism that helps you grow, but I’d bet a different factor weighs more. Putting out work lets you take some credit for the work you did. I wonder how much of the personal gain from producing something comes from being externally validated?

I’ve been writing in personal notebooks for ages, and I think I resisted posting publicly to avoid any goal beyond processing my own thinking. The privacy is helpful and quiet progress is satisfying. But now I feel glad to be seeking discourse, curious readers, and the accountability of an external audience. Most of my notes aren't published and likely never will be. Realizing that ideas can do more when activated in more minds is exciting. A company or song or novel acts much less strongly in the world if it lives in only one mind.

If the process is useful, but livestreams are too slow, I imagine a writing timelapse. To watch word by word would be impossible to follow, so an idea level map could guide you along the text itself. I proposed Autolinking to do just this in my first post. With no additional technology, stepping one level out is where every reader resides. Slowly, the evolution of the whole blog is this kind of revealed presentation.

Now seems like a good time to mention that this section so far has been rather conversational and almost livestream-like. Did you make it this far? Did following the mental path teach anything? What is the difference between learning from reading and learning from writing?

Open-Source

This one stands out because it is just so cool. Labor is converted into capital and multiplied indefinitely.

While many a Stack Overflow thread will show the duplicated library thread, it's incredible how well some open-source communities manage to collaborate in making truly giant projects. If you asked each of the individual contributors, many would tell you that it’s chaotic. However, this is true in all human activity of importance.

Thinking about the total value, here’s a very rough estimation from the Linux Foundation from 2008 suggesting that the development cost of Linux up to that point would be $10.8 billion. The total value of the plethora of free software would certainly be underestimated by the production cost due to the enormous userbases.

Comedy

A bit or a joke is funny when you have enough context to understand the references. More references typically make a joke more clever. Everyone knows that jokes are timely, but I’m amazed how well a simple callback lands at the end of a sequence. It shows command, memory, and completes an arc in a way that feels like musical resolution.

A joke can also work when it's something someone wants to hear, but not say. Clearly, the value of production has to be internalized when you risk your image to make people laugh!

The thing that grabs me as strange is what happens when multiple people arrive at the same bit at the same time. This sounds like total overlap of making for yourself and for others. Sometimes a simultaneous arrival makes the joke that much funnier, but I often feel like it’s a catastrophic collision. I wasn't quick enough to get to the end of the line first, and the path clearly wasn't unique enough. This sounds like the quality of a joke is relative to the group, because it is. If you make a surprising connection as a bit and nobody else is surprised by it, people will not be laughing at the bit.

Mimetic Crunch - Optimal Crowding

Much of my thinking, and indeed the title of this blog, comes out of my study of Peter Thiel and his of Rene Girard. Central to the tension of the apparent paradox of this article's subject is the difference between the one who produces the thing and those many who share his/her taste. Why do people have common tastes and yet feel the need to recreate their own versions? Girard hits the bullseye with disquieting precision.

The consumer pleased with a creation feels an honest gratitude and connection with the one who provided it. Then, envy of being that duly appreciated creator wells up. People in need of such a thing imitate each other in their desire to consume the solution, but quickly realize an imitated desire to produce the solution!

Especially among those most able to create an alternative, the smallest differences between their vision and the present solution appear greater and greater. This is especially true while attempting to justify the effort of recreating the solution.

Luckily, we don't all occupy ourselves trying to go out and recreate the newest phones and computers, despite how desirous and socially visible (through no coincidence) they are.

Following this line a ways started to make me appreciate the vast diversity of things that people do spend their lives working on. It’s great that a real diversity of skills and interests keep us from total convergence.

While technology and other sectors of business often flock strongly, the producers are not the main consumers. In this case, consumers benefit from the piling in markets of perfect competition without engaging in the destructive mimetic conflict.

I write to sharpen my thinking, to periodically offload some thinking to make room, but also through a mimetic desire to meaningfully interpret Girard's work.⁴ Was that part to be said allowed?

To give one more exoteric admission, even with my time reading and studying Thiel and Girard, the idea of mimesis is so totalizing that it still hides in plain sight. I had already written much of this article before acknowledging a sense that this sounded familiar, only to realize that the whole thing was textbook-Girard with a ready moral prescription to the address tension.

Still a concern remains- the natural consequence of pursuing creative differentiation, the high goal of the Orthogonalist - discovering dimensions, inventing basis vectors - is to be ensnared in imitation! Even though Girard’s metaphysical desire jumps up a level to analyze Girard’s analyzers, the commentary can still be meaningful.⁵ The world of startups isn’t new and yet new startups can have value. We have art that predates history and yet there are masterpieces unmade. So what is at work?

Luckily, even though mimesis always moves up a step up to swallow an invention, orthogonality is on the same footing to sprout a new direction!

So get out and build! Build what you want to see and be glad when others enjoy it. When someone creates what you want, enjoy it and be glad. Orthogonalism is the densest-possible worthwhile field. It gets monotonically denser and yet still has plenty of space. Emulate invention’s excitement!

ORTHOGONALIST

1. Paul Graham's blog must have an incredible citation graph.

2. I would rather have broken this segment off into a branch going in a different direction to represent the nonlinearity of the ideas in structure as I described in my first post, which covers that topic. But while you're down here in a footnote, here’s some footnote-worthy material: Dilbert explains the engineer's manner of justifying a rewrite of a previous engineer's work. More to come on this later in the essay.

3. I have a very hard time not imagining how I would start working to master everything I come across. In fact, I pretty much always imagine it, and have to forcefully remind myself to focus on a narrower set of pursuits. I'll write about this sometime.

4. Girard’s precise description of metaphysical desire is strong because it is a level-jumping description. Realizing that the urge to redo work is not just perfectionism or envy of the skill deployed, but envy of the person of the mediator frees you to exercise a generous ethic of recognizing good that ironically allows us to be grateful!

5. If not, many papers’ ink and many blogs’ pixels have been spilt in vain.