Protect Your Slack, Delay Moloch: Why You SHOULD Defend Yourself With Artificial Rents

Inspired by Behold the Pale Child at Secretorum: "the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards Bakkalon." (or Moloch. Moloch, at the bottom of the Darwinian/economic/political gravity well!)

The point of life is to be happy. How to go about this is mostly biologically determined. Yes, it's good to make others happy if you can, and to have making others happy make you happy as an incentive; for most of us, as social animals, this is also biologically determined. This position is that of a modern-day Epicurus, enhanced with and connected to facts about the natural world and our place in it. Not very controversial, you might think.

But I suspect that many people in the rationalist blogosphere will find it incredibly selfish to think first and foremost of oneself and ones own happiness, instead of the utilatarian (more specifically, Parfitian) long and wide view of everyone's happiness. (This more "selfish" position is not necessarily just individual hedonism, but rather would include having birthday parties for your kids instead of donating that money to dig a well in the developing world.[1]) In a curiously Calvinist-adjacent take, the implied position of the EA world (and tech capitalists telling young people their identify comes from working unhealthy hours and sacrificing the rest of their lives) is that you should de-emphasize your own happiness here and now since it's such a small drop in the ocean of possible conscious experience throughout time.

And yet if people are biologically limited by the link between their happiness and the amount of work they can do - and the kind they can do - and for whom they do it - and they are - what you're asking is many people to sacrifice their own happiness for an uncertain outcome, for an uncertain philosophical position.

The position of working 110% all-out all the time is not just something from the world of Effective Altruism (EA), etc. In a recent post on the Slatestarcodex (SSC) subreddit, in a discussion about the Musk-like approach to constantly fastforwarding everything and having work be eternal crunchtime - a commenter stated that once in a great while, such a push was okay, but it's not sustainable. I would go one step further: I want to enjoy my life, working hard diminishes that, focusing on any one thing to the exclusion of most others diminishes that, and you should avoid crunchtime and working hard wherever possible. (That is, I value slack - see Church of the Subgenius - and I will defend that slack if necessary, even if I have to do it surreptitiously.) Wanting to enjoy your life, and do more things you directly enjoy more often, and fewer instrumental things, is not something to be ashamed of. That's why I'm posting it online and telling you it's good to feel the same way.[2]

It's true that if everyone thought this way, then life-saving and -improving technologies would progress much more slowly. But herein I'm taking the (apparently very hard to grasp position) that I neither want to work that hard, nor do I want to get in the way of people who do want to work hard. I say in all seriousness: good for them, I'm glad we have people built this way![3] But don't feel bad if you're not one of them, and you're almost certainly not. I'm definitely not, and I feel great about it! I've even turned down promotions for this reason. Again, not controversial, I wouldn't think. But it feels very much like an emperor's new clothes position to take.

The opposite of slack is hypercompetition, which I don't have to further describe to anyone living in the developed world in the 21st century, and I would argue a big part of Moloch is hypercompetitiveness (Moloch in the sense of Scott Alexander's synechdoche for a self-perpetuating system with serious and unintentional consequences that benefit nobody.) There is only so much work you can do; you need some slack, and though our modern Molochian culture has trained us to hide our slack-seeking from ourselves, we do it, or we burn out. And part of the outrage at people finding ways to guard slack is a result of hiding our desire for slack from ourselves (read: reaction formation and the predictable reaction to seeing others fulfill their fantasy) when a source of slack protection is noticed. (See: "tears of rent-seekers" regarding taxis, academia, government, or any other area where people have goodness forbid given themselves some extra slack to help them enjoy their lives.

Other strategies: shrouding - which normally means companies trying to avoid competing on price by making their pricing opaque, but works in the labor market too when workers cooperate to obscure measurement of output - outlawing payment for piece work was a major victory. Another: avoidance of direct market exposure, or any situation where your livelihood rests on your having to react in real time to developments - usually the more layers within an organization away from a customer interaction surface or competition with other organizations, the quieter your life is. (Must be balanced against the risk of paroxysmal collapses; the cycle-time of this class of org is relevant to your choices here (nations = centuries, companies = years or decades if already long-established.)

Some concrete examples are in order, of how you can and should protect slack and benefit your life by erecting artificial rent structures.


SITUATION 1 You're the leader of Organization A. You believe in what the organization is doing, genuinely care about the people there and want them to have good lives, and as a result you "leave some money on the table" by not expecting them to work that hard or otherwise sacrifice their well-being to the organization, as long as they keep the wheels turning.

Then Organization X comes along (for the Parfit-style calculators out there, let's say it has the same number of people), which does NOT care about its people this way, and they are constantly sacrificing themselves, or at least on a sort of psychological Malthusian frontier (of stress rather than starvation.) This might well be an Elon Musk company. Organization X eats Organization A's lunch, and Organization A is destroyed or absorbed, along with the lifestyle of the people in it.


SITUATION 2 Same as above, but you're the leader of Organization B. You know it is likely that if you do NOT drive your people to self-sacrifice, then a Muskite will drive theirs in such a way, and then they'll come for you. So for your organization to continue existing, you have to work them to the point of self-sacrifice. You do this, and keep existing, but the people who work at your organization are now miserable.


SITUATION 3 You're the leader of Organization A, same as Situation 1. Except you have a plan. You want your employees to have a good life but you know that the Muskite misery engines out there like Organization X will come get you. So you make a couple calls to a governor or legislator, take them golfing and make some arrangements, etc. Organization X now finds you have an administrative or legal moat - an artificial rent protector - for example, to do what your org does they have to be in a certain consotrium and no one will let the Muskite org join, or Organization X can't operate in a certain business in a certain territory, unless the workers within Org X get lots of protections. You know this can't work forever, but it will work for a while, and benefit the people you care most about. Organization X loses its advantage in being willing to essentially trade personal slack for victory. People on SSC read about this, and cry their eyes out talking about Rents, and how you're immoral for depriving the rest of the world of the fruits of your labors (invisible tragedies, etc.)


I used to join in with the "ha ha, rentiers dying, suck it taxi drivers" until I realized that within a few years, AI will be able to do all of our jobs, and the value of labor will race to zero. Of the strategies I've mentioned, only legal artificial rent structures have any chance of lasting for any length of time. So I'm unashamed to admit I would rather work for Organization A in Situation 3, and unless you're the 1% of the 1% in productivity, you would too. (I hate to be the one to tell you, but if you think you are a 10x 1% of 1% superstar, you are much more likely to be delusional than an actual superstar, and the angrier that statement made you, thr more likely you're delusional.) Of course, sometimes the rents come "honestly" from an innovation - but then again, even patent protection is an artifical rent, since it's not just the innovation itself. Mostly rents come "artificially" from barriers like the ones I've described. Taxi medallions, medical licenses, etc. although in most cases there's usually at least some non-bullshit reason for the certification, or guild membership, whatever it is (e.g. it's a quality signal)

Note that I've written these thought experiments with you in the position of the leader. But you're almost certainly not. If, in a true Rawlsian approach - if you fell out of the sky at random into these thought experiments - you'd probably be a rank-and-file employee. In that spirit:


SITUATION 4 You're an employee (not the leader) of Organization A. You believe in what you do and what the organization stands for. Your leader seems to genuinely want everyone to have good lives and doesn't work anyone too hard. As you smirk and murmur to your colleagues at pool parties, this is because the leader is friends with the governor, and got a law passed artificially protecting you from competition, which is why you have a good income without working too hard.

Then the leader dies or steps down, and a new CEO takes over - one who reads SSC and Marginal Revolution. "Enough with this laziness! Company X has their own lobbyists, and we can't wait for them to get the law repealed and be caught off-guard. 80 hour weeks! No vacation or weekends if you want to be considered serious around here! Constant aggressive deadlines! Do it 10x faster! We're depriving the rest of the world and future generations of the fruits of our labor, how selfish that is, think of all the hidden tradegies! Don't like it? Emigrate/quit and go to our competitor, who will probably have to do the same thing to keep up anyway." Would you say "Yes! Finally, our new leader is high-agency, and this is the moral thing to do instead of collecting rents"? Yeah, sure you would.[4] If you do, you burn out, ruining your health and family life, plus you have no more time to read SSC.


Certainly it's a difficult balance to find, and often you're just surfing a temporary inefficiency wave until that wave breaks and you're back in the same Molochian world as everyone else - but you should try to find it and ride it as long as you can. In the long run, we're all dead anyway. If you can have 5 or 10 more years of slack instead of zero more years, you are not being immoral to take it, and (for the Parfitians in the back) you can't be sure that the only thing you'd do by missing out on the slack is making yourself miserable with no other impact, thus doing the immoral thing of increasing the suffering of the universe on net.


[1] I've noticed that the tech world in general and EA especially is a haven for those who in the abstract, are horrified at the existence of slack (or at least that's the non-revealed preference.) In general consequentialists tend to neglect deontology - the role of duties in what decisions are moral. Consequentialists tend to look for abstract principles for actions to adhere to, but actions are not disembodied principles, they occur in time, and space, and social space - that is, in the context of whatever history and relationships, if any, you have with the people affected. Deontology clears up a lot of the confusion about what to actually do and when to do it, and who to do it with/for. I've also noticed conscientious younger people tend to be consequentialists, and older people season their outlook with more deontology as they age.

[2]Maybe this whole essay is just my own psychotherapy, justifying the following to myself: as a physician, every time I go home at the end of the day or take a day off, I am depriving people of potentially life-saving treatment. Some physicians, more in previous decades than today, kept this in mind and worked ridiculous hours; many modern healthcare organizations are more than happy to take advantage of this mentality of self-sacrifice to make another cent, and then when you start making mistakes because you burn out, they kick you to the curb. Not unique to medicine of course, but I'm very comfortable protecting my time so I can have slack and enjoy my life, and what's more, I limit my responsibilities to my established patients, and not some abstraction of "possible humans in the universe". If you're a naive consequentialist (who doesn't understand deontology or respect the limits set by biology) you've probably dismissed me as Jeffrey Dahmer by this point.

[3]To beat a dead horse: this is not an anti-hard-work screed. If you like to work hard, focus on one thing and one thing only, you find it rewarding, great! Part of civilization's success is that we've set up a system that rewards you, and where the rest of us also by diffusion get the benefit of the wealth and technologies you create. But if your choices start taking away my slack - I'll ask my guild to take our Congressman golfing, after which an artificial moat may mysteriously appear. For a relevant culture-wide take on the same: I once read an account of an American traveler in Japan who said it's great to be a foreigner in Japan - because it's a safe, clean, beautiful, quiet place, due to the crushing social obligations of Japanese culture that keep it this way, and as a foreigner you can free ride on this. But you obviously shouldn't do anything to make it harder to keep the country that way!

[4] SSC surveys have consistently shown that oldest siblings are more likely to be readers. Though it's a stretch, it does make me wonder if an oldest-sibling-rich group concerned about these topics might tend to lack a healthy level of resource anxiety (no older siblings to finish all the dessert before you, hog the TV or soccer ball, etc.) This would lead them to always assume that protecting slack can only be about stupidity or laziness - "Aw, we ALWAYS have to stay on the little kid playground because of them!"

On the Good of Young Men Having Their Asses Kicked

I recently visited a martial arts school for kids, and was immediately impressed by - something. It took me a minute to put my finger on what I liked about the place. It was that they were serious, and firm. The instructors wanted these kids to get better, and they didn't need to crack a joke every minute to diffuse tension, or even be especially kind about criticizing someone's technique. And the kids responded well to it, and were focused, and improving. I found myself wishing to see more of this approach, and then wondering why.

Young men having their asses kicked by superiors genuinely interested in the improvement of those young men, is an individual and social good. I express my concern and record my defense herein because I think many young men today should have their asses kicked more. If you're a young man reading this, know that I was once a young man; also, that I should definitely have had my ass kicked more. Below I define ass-kicking, and explain why I believe this.

By "ass kicking" I don't mean physically, and I also don't mean pointless abuse. What I do mean is this - in second person to help you imagine and identify with it:

1. there is a person with higher status than you
   
   
2. they are training you and/or managing you, and they provide intense, frequent negative verbal feedback and potential consequences for underperformance...
   
   
3. for reasons in your best interest (this is critical)
   
   
4. who you won't avoid - because you recognize that tolerating their very negative feedback will help you improve as a person, at specific skills, and achieve your goals.

Expanding on each item above:

1. "Higher status" means the person has objective, measurable achievements that place them unambiguously above you - money, artistic production, athletics, climbing some ladder - that you are also in. If you're trying to be a better electrician, you don't care if an investment banker or mountain climber gives you critical feedback.
   
   
2. This intense, frequent, negative feedback is unpleasant for many reasons, among them that it concerns something you care very much about - some ability or position that you have chosen as part of your identity. The unfortunate paradox is that meaningful negative feedback hurts, and it has to hurt at least a little, if you actually care about the thing you're getting feedback about.
   
   
3. The person is actually trying to help you improve, often to very high standards - this is why it's not abuse - but their concern in helping you improve takes precedence over hurt feelings. Hurt feelings take time and attention to avoid, so by virtue of your superior not having to consider them, you improve faster. What's more, during ass-kicking, the atmosphere is serious. There is no tension release mechanism other than improving your performance. (As an aside, the ass-kickee often attempts humor is in these situations, to his detriment.)
   
   
4. You choose not to avoid the unpleasantness because you know this experience is in your own best interest, and therefore despite its unpleasantness, you choose to carry on; or you're in a setting you can't leave (e.g. the military) but fortunately your superior is trying to improve you rather than just abuse you.
   
   

Some examples of institutionalized ass-kicking are sports coaching, medical school, the apprenticeship process in certain high-performing high-status industries (e.g. high finance), and military training. (For a first-person account of a military boot camp, and interestingly, a distinction between cult abuse and military indoctrination, go here.) Near-universally, people who've been through an ass-kicking program express gratitude for the experience (after it's over) and recognize both the skills and personal transformation it imparted, but are quick to say they wouldn't want to do it again, possibly along with humorous stories of the most difficult superiors who kicked their ass particularly thoroughly.


Why is ass-kicking a good thing? And why am I focusing on young men?

Why am I specifiying young men? Let's broadly define "young" as 13-30. After this developmental window, it is very difficult to change identity and personality in the way that ass-kicking does, and in particular to obtain the benefits such experiences can produce. And I find that it's usually men who have a personality structure and defenses that most benefit from such experiences. A young man's psychological defenses involve a good deal of narcissism about how tough, strong, and awesome he is. When encountering situations suggesting otherwise, he rationalizes, avoids, or attacks. If anyone tells him he's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, he denigrates and/or retaliates and/or disengages. But when it's his superior (his supervisor in a job he wants to advance in) or drill sergeant doing it and he can't rationalize avoid or attack, he has three choices: a) fail b) be miserable because he can never understand that they're not just abusing him personally or c) he "gets it" and grows up and improves, not just in specific skills but in overall character.

It is my suspicion that, not only is ass-kicking happening less often, but also that option c) is being delayed in men's lives and more often happening during romantic relationships; and romantic partners are not enjoying the expansion of their near-parentified duties. Of course it's not only men who can ever benefit from ass-kicking, and certainly not all men will benefit from ass-kicking based on their constitution, but in my empirical observation, in general young men benefit most from ass-kicking.

Why is ass-kicking good? Beyond (obviously) the specific skills and professional identities that are being quickly learned and grown, the general benefits come down to three factors.

• A. We learn to control our negative emotional reactions and decouple them from the person providing the feedback. This is necessary unless you plan to go through life always killing the messenger (which some men certainly try to do.)
  
  
• B. We learn to recognize our flaws and shortcomings and tolerate the distress arising from them, and to turn that energy into something positive by working on them instead of being angry about them, denying them, or avoiding them. We also learn that our position in a hierarchy is not the entirety of our worth and identity. (Note, both B and A are really both forms of "tolerating the distress of being at the wrong end of a hierachical disparity." This both makes young men better able to work in groups, and produces empathy which they might otherwise lack, when they are later at the top of such an imbalance, not to mention improving reality-based confidence.)
  
  
• C. Not only do we decouple our emotional reactions to the person and the message, we learn to respect the person and recognize that they are helping us, even if it wasn't fun at the time.

A, B, and C correspond basically to "I have a long way to go to be a badass, it's okay that I have a long way to go but it's up to me to improve and I can improve, and while it's not fun now, I recognize that my superior did me a favor and that they're in the position where they are for a reason so I will respect and defend them to others." It adds up to the cliche character-building as well as dealing with adversity, being able to function in authority structures and understanding the basis for legitimate authority, i.e. that authority is not synonymous with force. In terms of Kegan and Chapman's hierarchy, ass-kicking is a maturing process that helps young men graduate from level 3 into level 4, and failure to do so has predictable consequences for broader society (see last paragraph.)

To be clear, nothing herein should be taken as justifying abuse. In fact, I think outlining the characteristics of ass-kicking helps us draw a distinction between ass-kicking and mere abuse. And even when an ass-kicking superior intends the ass-kicking constructively to improve the ass-kickee, if the ass-kickee can't tolerate it, they should be able to quit (withdraw consent.) Abuse is non-consensual, and is about pleasing a sadistic abuser, rather than (in the long run) helping the recipient. And even those of us nodding along with this essay and agreeing that ass-kicking is a good thing and was a good thing for us specifically, are usually still able to look back and distinguish between a hardass who you maybe even hated at that time but for whom in retrospect you feel gratitude and respect - versus a bully with an anger problem. (Of course abusers try to trick us sometimes by pretending to be ass-kickers.) Many readers will by this point be thinking of Sergeant Hartmann from Full Metal Jacket (note these links are NSFW and contains slurs) - he is hard but he is fair, directly states you will not like him, but he is trying to help his recruits and he tells them so. He is clearly pleased when they improve. He is an ass-kicker. In contract, Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross is just an abusive bully, and the ages of some of the men in the meeting suggest they are beyond the useful ass-kicking window anyway. He explicitly tells them he doesn't care about them, and just wants numbers for the company, figure out on your own how to do it or hit the bricks pal. Without Good Result A above, young men are more likely to keep thinking everyone who tells them something they don't want to hear is just another Alec Baldwin humiliating them.


Why did I write this?

It's my impression that opportunities for ass-kicking have decreased over the past half-century or so, at least in my country, the U.S. Why? I suspect it's a combination of our decreasing intolerance of direct-speaking authority figures, and constant consumer messaging: that you are special, you are the best, you should never be uncomfortable, don't listen to people who make you feel that way. Those two reasons may or may not in fact be the same thing. (I intentionally use "impression" and "suspect" not as weasel words but as clear signals of how you might weight these claims.) Therefore, as young men's opportunities for ass-kicking decrease, I predict America will face a worsening epidemic of narcissistic, oversensitive, immature, and adversity-intolerant men, who blame everyone else for e.g. why they couldn't finish college or hold down a job, and who can't tell the difference between bullies and legitimate authority. I leave it to the reader to decide if this trend is already visible.