12 - What's your impact on the world, obsolete human behaviour, hammer fetish
What's your impact on the world, obsolete human behaviour, hammer fetish
My recent thoughts in <400 words
What's your impact on the world?
- Writers who publish their work in academic journals can receive an 'impact' rating. This rating suggests the usefulness of their work, being based on the number of later papers that refer to the author's original paper.
- I am interested by the idea of a personal impact score. How many people do you benefit by what you do?
- I calculated this basic number for me based on the number of people that use products that I have created.1 If part of a team, you could calculate your score by dividing your customer/client number by the number of people in your team. My personal impact score surprised me by its nakedness: the number suggests how much value you are adding to the world.2
Obsolete human behaviour
- Evolution gave us many behaviours that helped when our ancestors were hunter gatherers, but which are now counter-productive.
- Some obsolete human behaviours:
Eating as much as possible
Hoarding possessions3
Being shy (I like this essay from Chapin on the overwhelming benefits of extroversion)
Buying cheap things.4
Doing something that you don’t want to do because family/friends want you to do it. This might include: a social event, a legal career, or a marriage
Being suspicious of strangers. (In reality, most people are friendly and honest).
- Extra question: Are we still evolving? Maybe there are selection pressures that mean that people who are better at Fortnite or Tik Tok are more likely to have children. Perhaps their descendents will have faster reflexes and dance extravagantly.
A fetish for hammers
- When making something, there is the danger of becoming so interested in the tools you are using that you neglect what you’re actually making.
- This has happened to me before. The thought process is: if only I had this music synth/software/plugin, making a great melody/essay/product would be so much faster.
- This 'tool-fetish' is common among programmers. Because there are so many options, it is easier to be carried away by the idea of getting the very best hammer for the job.
- Spending time optimising your tools to gain a small amount of extra efficiency can worsen your product by taking time away from it. Tools (whether Pycharm or PowerPoint) help you to build something for a user. Your tools are not your product.5
Outro
- I don’t use Instagram, but I enjoyed reading the below article about using Instagram to practise the Buddhist virtue of loving kindness (Mettā).
- I watched this video of an AI chat bot passing the Voight-Kampf empathy test.
- This week, I have been focusing on growing the muscles in my knee. I had surgery last week. Here is a blog article that I wrote about the previous bonus surgery.
- To aid muscle growth, I am sitting in the leafy suburbs of Hamburg, enjoying watching the red squirrels gather their last nuts before Autumn.
- One question for you. If you were recovering from surgery and had 6 weeks where you were banned from working on your current project or work, what would you do?
- I hope that you are having a great week.
Tom
Of course, different products have different effects. I haven’t thought of a simple way to quantify the different effects of products (this would be a very interesting product in itself. Email me if you have any ideas about this).
For me, a quick calculation based on the number of connections is a useful heuristic to show impact. I would be intersted in any ideas to refine this.
My view is that keeping things because they might be useful at an unidentified future time is common. This reduces your thinking ability by crowding your mind. It also creates a lot of time-consuming friction: e.g., where is my mechanical pencil in this mountain of stuff?
Cheap things (excluding consumable things like food or an experience, like tickets to a botanical garden) are normally more expensive in the long term because they are likely to be lower-quality. Cheap things last for a shorter time, deliver less value during their lifespan, and provide more user friction (e.g., this friction might manifest in low quality laptop screen that prevents you from enjoying the detail of your friend’s wedding photos, or a bad keyboard that decreases your writing speed).
Unless you are running Homebase, Bauhaus, or otherwise supplying tools for others to build a product for an end user.