You Want To Be Fooled

The Greek comedy guide to making decisions

I'll tell you what I think about the way
This city treats her soundest men today:
By coincidence more sad than funny,
It's very like the way we treat our money.
The noble silver drachma, which of old
We were so proud of, and the one of gold
Coins that rang so true
Throughout the world have ceased to circulate.
Instead the purses of Athenian shoppers
Are full of phoney silver-plated coppers.
Just so, when men are needed by the nation,
The best have withdrawn from circulation.
- Aristophanes

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Sir Thomas Gresham was an English merchant and founder of The Royal Exchange in London, who acted as the financier for The English Royal Family during the Tudor Period. During his time as a banker, Gresham noticed an interesting phenomenon.¹ When Henry VIII decided to change the composition of the English Shilling from completely silver to containing a lot more base metal, people started holding on to their silver Shillings in favour of the metal ones. Even though both Shillings had the same denomination, bought the same bread and butter, the metal ones flooded the market. Why? Because a molten down metal coin was worth less than both its silver counterpart and the actual value it represented. Sir Thomas observed: bad money drives out the good.

The above poem is an excerpt from Aristophanes’ 451 BC play ‘The Frog’, where he compares the phenomenon of Gresham’s Law to the evermore corrupted system of politics. The play is a comedy with Dionysus, the God of pleasure, and his slave, Xanthias, as the main characters. During the initial part of the play, Dionysus consistently makes critical mistakes, forcing Xanthius—who was much smarter and braver—to continuously sweep these under the rug in an attempt to safeguard his master’s image and prevent him from looking incompetent. This, however, allows Dionysus to keep making the same mistakes without any repercussions, derailing the story further. Almost a thousand years before Gresham, Aristophanes recognised a similar phenomenon: good behaviour in any human system will falter if there are no mechanisms in place to keep the bad behaviour from winning. Bad drives out the good.

If you think about it, very few systems are really primed to highlight the bad. Not at first at least. There is a lot of room to be wrong without it having any short-term consequences simply because there aren’t many places where instant feedback loops are a deliberate feature of the system itself. Even free market economies with their informational efficiency frequently fail to effectively, in the short term, litmus test the BS out. It can take decades to shake out stupid ideas. That can sometimes generate expensive mistakes.

We are often convinced that markets, and many other things, work in such a way so that anything that survives is something of value or purpose. But in reality, there’s plenty of room for snake oil and charlatan tricks to exist without it having to have a clear signalling function. Even things that aren’t obvious scams can exist for a long time without it having to be anything of importance. This has an important corollary:

But common human social proof heuristics like “I talked to a guy and he seemed smart and good and he does this for a living” totally fail to function relative to the vastness of the economy. There is room for you to meet hundreds of guys over the course of a few years, all of whom seem smart and good and all of whom do something for a living that will, in the fullness of time, turn out to be of no practical value. — Sarah Constantin

I think this is one of the more confounding realisations I had after working for a while; that the labour theory of value is mostly false, and that a lot of smart people can work really hard on a complex thing that, in the grand scheme of things, turns out to be completely worthless.

All of this converges to the fact that the world is a vastly complex place and being wrong should be an expectation, yet so few of us have systems in place to deal with that reality. Sometimes things can exist a long time because they’re good, but that doesn’t mean that because something has been around for a long time that it is therefore good. People will flood their lives with mediocre decisions, simply because the added rigidity to making an informed one doesn’t seem to pay off in the short run. The bad drives out the good.

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Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication. — Allan Bloom

This creates a terrible affliction that I see often where people take pride in their stubborn insistence to work on something, even if that something isn’t working, or not worth working on. People forget that time can absolutely be wasted on the wrong things, but perseverance and resilience are so fetishised that portraying them is seen as a virtue in and of itself. I think this mode of thought comes from the idea that everything will eventually be alright. That the puzzle pieces of life will automatically fall into their place. But there’s no osmosis mechanism that neatly nets out all that’s good in the world if only you work hard enough. It’s true that good is created and fortune befalls those who work for it longer than any sane person is willing to. But only given that you’re doing the thing that will eventually lead to a favourable outcome. You can smash rocks together all you want, but no flint means no fire. Sisyphean efforts don’t get the boulder to the top. The only way to prevent yourself from working on things that lead to nowhere is by deliberately building in feedback mechanisms that routinely scrutinise the efficacy of your own process.

Predicting the future is near impossible but testing assumptions is easy. Yet you’ll consistently come across people who claim ‘their life is a mess’ when the problem’s really just them. It’s a simple observation; If you’re not churning out the expected results from your actions, adjust course. When the world does the opposite of what you think it’s going to do, it’s not the world that’s wrong. It’s you. Things that don’t make sense are your best learning opportunities. Your confusion is an invitation to recalibrate your model of the world so it better aligns with reality.² In that regard, decision-making is not about making brilliant choices but consistently avoiding terrible ones. In Nassim Taleb’s words:

“You don't do well by trying to be right; it is impossible for humans. You do well by figuring out when you're wrong faster than others do.”

Simple as it may seem, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Bad decisions chisel away at a good life, but it happens so inconspicuously that, by and large, we’re convinced we can get away with it. Nothing is less true. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth, and our deceit tends to mostly fool ourselves. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.³ You mature when you realise that only you are responsible for a life lived, and that the solution to your problems isn’t found elsewhere. Not every decision is equally important, and not every choice pushes the tracks in a bend. But sustained decision making, good or bad, leads to an eventual outcome the path of which is etched out of the hundreds of choices you make each day. Your character is not defined by the big life changes, but shines through in exactly those daily alterations. People who overhauled their life and got lucky, yet don’t seem to be able to replicate that on a daily basis, are useless. Behaviour is sticky and people are reliably consistent, for better or worse. How you do anything, is how you do everything.

What happens in ordinary moments determines your future. We're taught to focus on the big decisions, rather than the moments where we don't even realize we're making a choice. Yet these ordinary moments often matter more to our success than the big decisions. This can be difficult to appreciate. We think that if only we get the big things right, everything will magically fall into place. {...} We don't think of ordinary moments as decisions. No one taps us on the shoulder as we react to a comment by a coworker to tell us that we’re about to pour either gasoline or water on to this flame. Of course, if we knew we were about to make the situation worse, we wouldn't. No one tries to win the moment at the expense of the decade, and yet that is often how it goes. — Shane Parrish

Making a conscious choice means fully bearing the responsibility of the repercussions it creates, and acknowledging the role you play in your own suffering. It means being brutally honest with who you really are, as opposed to who you really want to be. Ava from Bookbear Express has a great analysis on this:

Sometimes what we want is impossible. The life you want to live is not the life that wants to live in you. And to become who you actually are, to honor your calling, your feelings, your joy, requires you choosing the life that wants you back. Which is humbling, and annoying, and difficult in all sorts of ways. Like Shedler points out, I often just want to keep doing what I’m doing but feel better about it. I justify it to myself: this is okay. And then I’m disappointed when I eventually realize that’s impossible. A Cheryl Strayed line I’ve always loved: You can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will always come out.`

All of life is a result of upstream decisions you’ve made a long time ago, and success is a lagging indicator⁴. It takes so long for our decisions to bear fruit that by the time they do, you’ll likely won’t attribute the consequence to the right action anymore and dismiss it entirely as (bad) luck or life happening to you. By default you’re acting on incomplete information while trying to pursue the most optimal outcome, even if the most optimal outcome isn’t one you can see. But that’s always true. The smartest people are those who learn how to navigate the world within their given information constraints. The trick is not to try to source better or more information, but to better deal with the scarcity of it. There is something very human about that. Salman Rushdie puts it beautifully:

But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.

In the face of imperfection, have the good drive out the bad.

1. Although Copernicus had observed this principle decades before, and Christian and Islamic scholars far before him, the phenomenon was eventually named after Sir Thomas.

2. Credits to David Perell

3. Inspired by the undying words of Valery Legasov

4. Term coined from the always great Ryan Holiday