Andreessen Optimists, Pinker Utilitarians, Growth mindset, and other actual luxury beliefs

Otherwise known as Bimodal Beliefs

Introduction: Recently I made the mistake of turning 30.

Which has got me reflecting — particularly, as to what this blog is about.

I maintain my description of “general incoherence” remains accurate, a perusal of my previous posts reveals some running themes:

1. A lot of social science is founded on bad data:

   1. The Gerrymandered Gen-Z Gender Graph

   2. Dubious Data

   3. Meaningless metrics

   4. The boy who cried nuke

   5. Money vs happiness, and the state of social psychology

2. Incentive structures matter:

   1. My very first post about perverse incentives

   2. This unhinged post about speed bumps and ancient chinese war generals

3. The unacknowledged importance of status in our society:

   1. No Balconies in Vegas, Or How to Deal with Being a Low Status Individual

   2. Seething Monkeys, Striking Writers: Let's Make Data Taboo Again

4. People are reliably bad at transferring knowledge:

   1. You needed to be taught how to use a can opener

   2. It's sequel, You forgot how to use a can opener

   3. Good information still pollutes the epistemic ecosystem

There’s also a fifth theme which lingers in the background of the majority of my posts: luxury beliefs, and how the progenitors of such beliefs are blissfully ignorant of they might be perceived to other groups of people.

No, not those luxury beliefs.

Despite being a perpetually online gremlin with no actual friends, I don’t read a lot of Substack posts; like most other Internet platforms, the majority of power users here tend to become enamored with the smell sound of their own farts ideas, believing themselves to be the new intelligentsia. That’s how you end up with an unironic analysis of Sydney Sweeney’s “anti-woke boobs.”

Which is to say, I was a little bit late to the party in learning about luxury beliefs, originally put forward by Rob Henderson in his book Troubled.

In fact, the first post I read about this concept was entitled “Shut Up About Luxury Beliefs." This particular passage was hilariously ironic:

This muddying of the delineation between different concepts is what ends up making the term “luxury beliefs” more confusing than useful. And, ultimately, it is guilty of what I call "Culture Inceldom”

Ah intelligentsia, you never fail to deliver.

Nevertheless, the author makes a good point; the term is usually a front for anti-woke stuff: defund the police, free speech — and also Canada Goose jackets for some reason?

The luxury beliefs that I’m referring to are more mundane, subtle — and yet they are just as impactful, considering the effects they have on the knowledge economy, academic institutions, and society in general.

In fact, I think to call them “luxury beliefs” only partly captures the phenomenon, since these beliefs are not stratified by class. Rather, I prefer the term bimodal beliefs, where the progenitor of these particular beliefs usually sit at the top of one local proxima of a distribution, while blissfully ignorant of any potential negative effects these ideas might have for people who sit at some other proxima.

Some examples below.

Bimodal Belief # 1: The Steve Jobs School of Middle Management™

For consumers, Steve Jobs will best be known for creating the most valuable company that has ever existed. For knowledge workers at the bottom of any org chart, he will be known for creating a generation of middle managers who have all of Jobs’ pompousness without any of the requisite talent.

The Steve Jobs School of Middle Management™ generally produces two types of graduates: “Idea guys” and Farquaad Facilitators.

Idea guys represent a swath of overly educated MBA's who have convinced themselves that having a good idea and yelling at engineers in order implement that idea constitutes a tangible skill set. These are the people who look at movies like “Whiplash” as a tale of inspiration rather than mental illness. Though they can be found in every corner of the knowledge economy, they are heavily concentrated in the finance sector.

By contrast, Farquaad Facilitators (yes, the Shrek character) represent a portion of the org chart who believe that creating Jira tickets, confluence pages, and excel trackers of timelines constitutes leadership. Just as the titular Lord Farquaad stands behind the parapets and cries out: "A lot of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make" the Farquaad Facilitator cries out: "These timelines are extremely tight, and you’ll have to work many unpaid hours in order to meet them, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make."

“You better have 5 code changes merged into main by next Tuesday or I burn your village.”

Of course, in real life, Farquaad Facilitators usually go about it in a more passive aggressive preppy manner: “Hiya! Looks like we have to bump up TASK X to the current sprint — but don’t forget about TASK Y, because that’s also really important! K byeeeeee!”

Farquaad Faciltators are not bad people; rather, they simply suffer from a delusional “1+1 = 3” sort of ideology that they learned from business school. What they fail to grasp is that the extra 1 that seemingly materialized out of nowhere from their perspective is actually just a STEM grad engaging in endless hours of tedium and drudgery at the cost of her health and sanity.

Bimodal Belief #2: The Silicon Valley Mindset

This also comes in two flavors, although they usually come hand in glove: First, the techno-libertarians who oppose any sort of regulation; second, "Andreessen Optimists."

I’ve previously deconstructed Marc Andreessen's essay on AI, considering it is a beautiful orgy of motivated reasoning, cognitive biases, and strawman arguments. Nevertheless, I feel a sort of kinship with Andreessen; at bottom we’re both dumb guys pretending to be smart guys pretending to be dumb guys.

Both techno-libertarians and Andreessen Optimists generally use a hyperutilitarian framework to justify their “move fast and break things" mentality. But real life is not an abstracted trolley problem; the moving fast and the breaking things happen to actual groups of people — usually, two completely separate groups of people.

A more appropriate term would be "I move fast and break your things." Sweet, Instagram has reels now! Whoops, 12 year old girls are more depressed than ever.

Thankfully, society at large is beginning to recognize how out of touch these beliefs are as they've recently been stress tested; the techno libertarians were suddenly crying out for government intervention when there was a bank run on Silicon Valley bank; the “move fast and break things" crowd pivoted to AI safety, responsible governance, and pauses in LLM development when they realized AI might put them on the wrong side of “creative destruction” for once.

Bimodal Belief #3: Growth mindset

I have previously written about my antipathy for growth mindset; the basic premise is that it suffers from a "motte and bailey" form of argumentation. When it's advertised to the general public, it comes across like this Key and Peele "YOU CAN LITERALLY FLY" sketch, and then when people assert that the effects might be overstated, they retreat back to a more defensible position of "practice makes perfect, duh!"

There's a growing body of literature which puts growth mindset into question (One, Two, Three, Four,  Five) — my personal prediction is that it'll end up another victim of the replication crisis. Much like Girardian memetics or eastern conceptions of enlightenment, growth mindset is one of those ideas that sound good on paper but is essentially unfalsifiable. If someone practises a growth mindset and doesn’t tangibly improve on whatever metric they are measuring, proponents can always say that their mindset wasn’t, er, growthy enough.

Nevertheless, proponents of growth mindset will continue to "No True Scotsman" their way out of ever having to say that they're wrong, and continue to tell me that I just don’t get it.

But I’ll tell you what: I’m willing to put up $10,000 if Carol Dweck can teach a person with late stage multiple sclerosis to become a neurosurgeon via mindset shifts.

Don’t think she can do it? Sounds like you have a fixed mindset.

Bimodal Belief #4: Pinker Utilitarianism™

I've previously written about how Pinker's “better angels of our nature” form of argumentation is correct but annoying.

Steven Pinker himself is relatively faultless — at an object level his reasoning is sound. Nevertheless, his arguments tend to be invoked under the wrong contexts and timescales, which make them incredibly patronizing.

Examples:

1. If one were point out the racial disparities of net worth in America, a Pinker Utilitarian™ might point out how much progress we’ve made since the era of Jim Crow.

2. If one were to point out that it might be a little questionable to make Saudi Arabia leader of the UN's women’s rights council, a Pinker Utilitarian™ might say how much progress the kingdom made over the last 20 years. I mean they're allowed to drive now!

3. If one were to point out that, I don’t know, the holocaust was bad, a Pinker Utilitarian™ might point out that the 20th century was still relatively nonviolent compared into previous centuries.

Again, nothing about his arguments are factually incorrect, but they are bimodal beliefs because it allows Pinker Utilitarians™ to paper over immediate concerns with an enlightened, data driven version of toxic positivity.

"Sounds like a bunch of tone policing."

Yeah, but the tone matters; we're living through a global “vibe-cession”, and both the Brexit and the Trump phenomenon show how the long term progress that we've made can have negative repercussions if we don’t at least attempt to address the more immediate concerns of the moment.

At the end of the day, Pinker Utilitarians™ are the same kind of people who think they’re giving helpful advice to obese people when they say “it’s just calories in, calories out”. In reality they are no more helpful than telling a homeless person that becoming a billionaire is nothing more than “money in, money out.”

"Struggling to afford rent and gas? Um, ahkshualleeey, Gen-Z is unprecedently rich!" 

Bimodal Belief #5: The "Advancement of Science"

One of the more prevalent phenomenon over the last few years has been the number of academics who have start catering their message to a general audience, as part of what I like to call “the ivory tower to TEDTalk” pipeline.

They essentially produce a “revolutionary” finding, publish a book about it, and absolutely slaughter my podcast feed by going on every possible interview in order to market it.

Some of these supposedly revolutionary findings become quintessential examples of bad science, such as Amy Cuddy and her TED talk about power posing. Others become examples of straight up fraud, such as the Harvard scandal including Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely.

The "Advancement of Science" issue is more subtle than this. It’s when an academic gains prestige and status for their initial paper/book, and when their findings are called into question or otherwise debunked, they can gain further prestige for their “open mindedness,” saying that this is merely the scientific method in action.

An example of this was the recent adversarial collaboration by the late Daniel Kahneman and Matthew Killingsworth, where they came together to try to understand the relationship between money and happiness. My full analysis of the data is here, but the punchline is this: at the very least, the adversarial collaboration showed that “MONEY AFTER XYZ DOLLARS PER YEAR DOESN’T INCREASE HAPPINESS” is an oversimplification at best, and that a good deal more inquiry into the topic is required before we can make any definitive conclusions.

And yet it raises the question as to the number of people who have made actual tangible decisions believing this to be true. How many people refused promotions, took early retirements, switched career paths, or otherwise made a momentous decision in their life truly under the impression that the additional income they might gain from moving up in org chart would not tangibly increase their happiness?

In many ways the “advancement of science” has the same sort of motte and bailey structure as the people who defend growth mindset. When you criticize these academics for being wrong, they’re quick to blame you for putting so much credence in a single study. And yet they will also scoff at you for attempting to “do your own research.“

Conclusion

At bottom, bimodal beliefs are failure to understand that certain belief systems can have unintended and potentially disastrous consequences when universalized.

The examples are endless, from Tyler Cowen somehow believing that combining AI with TikTok is a good thing for 16-year-olds, to early 21st century American governments believing that free trade will inevitably turn China into a democracy.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy some LinkedIn garbage: