Want to hear a horrifying story?

A middle-class woman and her husband struggle with home and car payments. The woman wants children but feels she can’t afford them.

In a stroke of luck, she inherits $80,000 from her grandmother — enough to pay down debts and even start a family.

She uses it to build a driveway for her father-in-law’s fancy fishing cabin. The reason: “My husband and his father REALLY like fishing…”

I don’t know this woman. Maybe the decision made sense.

But if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be surprised. People make terrible decisions all the time — giving away years of their lives, or tens of thousands of dollars, for very little benefit.

Life would still be hard without this. We’d still have cancer and hurricanes and armed robbery. But much of our misery is self-inflicted.

Terrible decisions

By “terrible decision”, I don’t mean:

• Impulsive acts, like a bar fight that ends in murder.
• Premeditated crime, where criminals improve their lives by hurting others.
• Bad policy, where corrupt politicians and interest groups take our money.

I’m talking about decisions where nearly everyone ends up worse off, including the decision-maker. It’s a fuzzy boundary, but I think the $80,000 driveway counts.

So do these:

• A person tries fentanyl for the first time, at the risk of permanently altering their sense of pleasure.
• Someone with no business acumen uses their life savings to start a restaurant, which fails within five years.
• Parents force their gay child into conversion therapy, hurting a person they love and creating lifelong resentment for an intervention that approximately never works.
• A janitor spends years saving money to fly his daughter to Disneyworld, but never thinks about taking the bus.

There are reasons people do these things. But if they made other decisions, their lives would predictably go better.

How can we reduce terrible decisions?

For the rest of this post, I’m picturing the U.S., but the ideas could apply anywhere.

We have social infrastructure for some of this: drug rehab, small business counseling, legal efforts to stop conversion therapy.

And there are bloggers and podcasters who share good advice widely: the driveway story came from the forum of Mr. Money Mustache, who I’d guess has prevented hundreds of equally terrible decisions.

Nonetheless, people keep making them.¹ How can we stop this from happening?

On its face, this is a ridiculous question. There are a thousand kinds of terrible decision, and you can’t monitor 300 million people. But there are also a thousand ways to commit crimes, and we still try to stop those — at least the most damaging ones.

What would it look like to build social infrastructure for reducing terrible decisions in general, the way we try to reduce crime with police and courts?

“Decision police” aren’t the right approach; people have a right to make (most) terrible decisions.

But what about decision counselors? Here’s a half-baked sketch:

• Once a year, the government offers you $150 to visit a decision counselor, with a small payment to your employer so you can take a half-day. It isn’t mandatory like the DMV or jury duty, but it’s still a normal thing to do.
• It’s the same counselor you saw last year! You talk about whatever’s new — family, health, money, school, career. (You answered a few questions ahead of time.)
• She isn’t an expert on any one topic, but she knows enough, and has enough AI support, to notice issues, ask follow-up questions, and refer you to public resources.
  • “Have you thought about ways to save money on that Disney trip?”
  • “I know a pastor who’s helped families in your situation — want his number?”
  • “You’re thinking about X College? Here’s some data on its job placement rate.”
  • “Starting a family is more affordable than you might think; there are federal tax breaks and our state has a baby bonus program. Want to learn more?”
• If you pay attention and engage in conversation, you get the money. The counselor gets evaluated… somehow.²

Decision counselors are reasonably well-paid state employees. The jobs are taken by the kinds of pleasant, competent people who might otherwise become actuaries, librarians, or social workers. As government jobs go, it’s appealing — at least compared to running a post office or teaching algebra.

Meanwhile, the people who take the $150 will often be those without much access to good advice from peers or paid professionals. They could ignore the advice, but they’ll also know the stories about counselors helping people find apartments or saving them from scammers. If you’re paid to be there anyway, why not ask a few questions?

The service isn’t cheap. But the government already buys you 30 minutes a year with a doctor making $250,000; it can swing 60 minutes with a counselor making $80,000.³

This literal idea probably can’t work. Even with AI help, you’d need to train a few hundred thousand counselors to cover the U.S., and the government would find plenty of ways to corrupt the idea.⁴ But I think we should look for other ways to get tough on terrible decisions, and to raise society’s bar until more of the ideas that ruin lives are safely underwater.

If you were born before 2010, give this post to a child instead.

Just kidding, you can read it! But know that I wrote it for Generation Alpha. It was meant to be a bit cringe but funny; I’m not sure it wound up being funny.

Hey, kids!

Have your parents or teachers ever shared a stick figure comic like this one?

This is XKCD, a webcomic that helped define online culture from 2005-2015.

The author, Randall Munroe, is one of his generation’s great communicators. He wrote the best memes about multiple social phenomena. He invented nerd sniping and ten hundred words. And some of his work reveals important truths about human existence.

The other day, I met a teenager who hadn’t heard of XKCD and had one of these moments:

I wanted to say “go read it!” But then I remembered that most of the comics riff on culture and technology from the late Aughts, and might not appeal to modern teens.

So I used this post to create a canon: the comics people reference most often, and the ones I’d consider “essential” for someone willing to spend 15 minutes on XKCD.⁷

Someone is wrong on the internet

When the Internet first emerged, people rarely argued with strangers who lived thousands of miles away.⁸ If they won an argument, they got to rub it in someone’s face right up close, and that would’ve been their only argument that week.

The Internet exposed us to an infinite supply of arguments, and made it harder to end them. When they don’t have to show their face, or hear the crowd’s laughter, one person can argue forever. And even if you forced them into retreat, you’d get bogged down debating other people with the same dumb idea. (Meanwhile, they’d be losing sleep over your dumb ideas.)

To cite an even older nerd meme, the trick to winning that game is not to play. So you might hear us use “someone is wrong on the Internet!” to make a friend abandon a hopeless conversation, or as a reminder to ourselves not to crash out because our opps were giving delulu.

See also: Real winners quit

Standards

Many smart people see chaos and assume that no one has tried to organize it. They yearn to create a single, perfect system that everyone will use.

This usually doesn’t work. It’s not impossible — one of Munroe’s examples, charging ports, is close to solved already — but it’s harder than it looks. This goes for standards, databases, rulesets, and any other attempt to systematize how things are done.

Signs someone is about to encounter this:

• “Let’s put everything into a Wiki!”
• “We’ll use this tagging system to organize all of our content.”
• “These five categories will cover all possible examples.”

If a new standard involves our social lives, see “Drama”:

See also: Everyone will not just, “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names“

Password Strength

Most Gen X-to-Z-ers who use multi-word passwords are probably thinking about this comic. The advice is good.

Just don’t use it the way my wife and I did — setting our wifi password to “HorseBattery” because we’d already memorized it.

Dependencies

This comes out whenever a single company’s service outage collapses the Internet for a day. Now that AI systems are becoming elite hackers, you might see it a lot more often.

Extrapolating

Useful whenever you see someone use current growth rates to reach absurd conclusions.

After all, if past growth really predicted future growth:

• A single Bitcoin would sell for $73,000.
• COVID would have been a pandemic.
• We’d be marching toward an AI singularity.

(Just playing with you, Randall — it’s a great comic, no cap.)

Ten Thousand

Everything you know came from somewhere. There was a day you went from ignorance to knowledge. Those days should be celebrated, not mocked.⁹

When you go the opposite way and give people too much credit for knowing things, you get “Average Familiarity”:

Sheeple

When you care a lot about issues that most people ignore, those people may seem broadly ill-informed. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t thoughtful or complex. Everyone has their own collection of cares and worries; we’re all conscious of something.¹⁰

If you find yourself thinking of average people as “sheeple” or “NPCs” or whatever label your generation uses, you’re probably underestimating them. Reading Working or watching Life in a Day makes it harder to fall into this mindset.

Free speech

This is correct, but the devil is in the details. Sometimes:

• Most people agree with you, but enough people think you’re an asshole to make your life miserable.
• Someone you like disappears through that door.
• The door you show the assholes opens into an equally crowded room, where they discover a gigantic audience you weren’t aware of.
• The other room’s audience is big enough to let the assholes take over the government, claim that their opponents are the real assholes, and start arresting them for what they say.
  • But the comic says they can’t do that!
  • The comic is right. But if people get used to showing other people the door, it’s easy to lose the distinction between “the government tacitly supports it” and “the government actively participates”.

But this isn’t Munroe’s fault. At the time, this was a good contribution to an exhausting debate; you can only do so much with a six-panel webcomic.

The rest of the canon

These aren’t quite as influential, but everyone in certain parts of Twitter has seen them at least once:

• Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.
• Green jelly beans cause acne
• X is just applied Y
• Hit him with a wrench until he tells us the password

Meanwhile, Time and Money are brilliant comics that are too big to share.

In college, I temped for a headhunting firm. They taught me to spam engineers with LinkedIn messages, to recruit for an app called Spoon. I sucked at this, because I hate bothering people. (I didn’t know what headhunting was when I took the job.)

I customized every message for a human touch, ignored anyone who looked busy in their profile picture, and reached a third as many people as the other temp. Together, we convinced about six engineers to let us call them.

Spoon’s CEO was not happy. To make a point, he spent an hour sending his own messages, which were brief and clearly written by an engineer. He got more bites than we did in a week. 

Unfortunately, he didn’t have much time to recruit; he was too busy being a CEO. Someone good enough to impress an engineer through LinkedIn can use their time for better things.

This is what Patrick McKenzie calls “The Sort”:

The Sort is the world’s way of moving people to wherever their talents will produce the most money. It sends mathematicians to Jane Street, Dominicans to the MLB, and Justin Bieber to Universal Music Group.

But it doesn’t just show up in the economy. It’s also there in the curse of cryonics:

If something is important but doesn’t pay well, it’s hard to get people with expensive skills (or even the cheaper skill of “noticing important problems”) to do it. Cryonics could conceivably compete for talent with the tech industry, because it pays in expected utility and the glow of a holy mission — but AI safety crushes it on both fronts.¹¹

My employer, 80,000 Hours, is at war with the Sort. We take people who could earn millions of dollars in a frontier lab or corporate law firm and nudge them toward jobs that pay much less but might save the world.

We also have to fight the internal Sort that misallocates talent even within our AI safety bubble. I’m writing a profile on fieldbuilding — the unsexy work of developing talent and building infrastructure to help the field grow. It’s a lot like tech recruiting: the best candidates are AI researchers and ace networkers, but the researchers want to write papers and the networkers want to write policy. Our current strategy is to yell “please do fieldbuilding — nine out of ten leaders say it’s more impactful!” and hope that people listen.

Ways to get around the Sort:

Pay more money. This is the obvious and most visible answer. You see it whenever the smartest college grads flock to a new field. Trad finance -> quant finance -> AI. 

Unfortunately, doing this requires enough money to outbid the companies that already bought the smartest people and put them to work making more money.

Add a sprinkling of prestige. When 80,000 Hours and Coefficient Giving yell about fieldbuilding, we’re making a rational argument about impact — and also sending a signal that trustworthy, competent organizations will be proud if you run conferences instead of writing papers (in a world where papers are considered “cool”). 

On a grander scale, Teach for America got quite a few Yale grads to take ordinary teaching jobs — though few stuck around.¹²

Make the work more fun. Many professional Magic: the Gathering players also play poker. I’d guess that poker pays between ten and infinity times as much per hour. But Magic is more fun, so the pros trade lucrative time in fancy casinos for sub-minimum-wage time in conference centers with concrete floors.

The best fanfiction is considerably better than Amazon’s top fantasy novels, especially if you correct for the absence of editors. Nonetheless, its authors write for free: HarperCollins won’t let you put Naruto in your story (or show him in a three-way with Hinata and Sakura).

Dig deeper for talent. Every so often, society cracks open a new source of human talent. It sends everyone to school; starts hiring women; builds fútbol academies in Brazil and chip factories in Taiwan. 

For a while, it looked like our next expansion pack would come from ending lead poisoning and giving kids the right amount of iodine. But artificial brains came faster. We’re about to have all the talent we can use; I hope it doesn’t Sort us out of existence.

There are some people the Sort can’t reach.

My wife is a cancer surgeon. Most cancer surgeons do the job because they love removing cancer. As long as the patient survives, they’re satisfied. 

My wife prefers the art of reconstruction: putting patients back together with as much function as possible. (This week, she returned an ear to its rightful place and gave someone a new nostril.) Most people like her wind up doing facial plastics, which pays better than surgical oncology and gets you home earlier. But she likes saving lives too much to give up on cancer.

I don’t know what the world can learn from my wife. She’s unrelentingly stubborn and insanely dedicated to healing — the person who helped me found an effective altruism club and then almost boycotted the whole concept because 80,000 Hours told her not to be a doctor. But even if she doesn’t generalize, it’s pretty cool to watch her shrug off one of the century’s primary sociological phenomena through sheer willpower. Love you, Tammy!

On holidays, we all agree to make time for something important.

On Thanksgiving, we visit family (and our families know to expect us, and most people have the day off). On Halloween, we dress up and act silly and roam the streets (and everyone rolls with it, and the streets are safe and well-lit). 

What other important things do we struggle to find time for?

Cleaning comes to mind. We all have clutter; it weighs on our minds and drains our energy. We should take a day each year to beat it back.

On Clean Something Day, everyone takes time to clean. It can be physical or digital. It can be your space or someone else’s — even a public space. You can clean with friends or strangers. The only rule is to end the day cleaner than you started.

Three days of cleaning, years apart, gave me this idea:

San Francisco

I went to visit a friend. He was happy to see me, but clearly distressed by the state of his bachelor apartment. After his third apology “for the mess”, I suggested we cancel our plans and clean the place instead: “I’ve just been reading Marie Kondo and I want a chance to try it out.” (This was true.)

I knew him well enough to think he’d appreciate the suggestion, and I was right. After a couple of hours, his apartment looked much better — the kind of space he could un-bachelor in, so to speak — and I’d learned more about his life in the course of sorting random objects (“Was this book any good? Where did you thrift this shirt?”).

San Diego

I lived at One Miramar Street, which houses hundreds of UC San Diego students. Before they built a bridge, the only way to reach the university on foot was an informal trail through a hole in the fence. A few homeless people set up camp there for a time; they left behind hundreds of cans, bottles, and wrappers, which blew in the wind and wound up covering the entire path.

I used the path myself, and it made me feel a bit sad to see the mess. One Saturday, I got tired of feeling sad and decided to solve the problem. (Most of the problems I face in life are much larger; I felt almost lucky to find one I could handle myself in a few hours.) I bought some gloves and brought a box of trash bags and cleaned. It was a weekend, so there weren’t many students walking; when I saw one, I said something like “just cleaning up!” and no one bothered me. It was also good exercise. That evening, after a shower, I felt cleansed myself.

The path stayed clean as long as I lived there; I felt a bit happy whenever I saw the absence of mess. We didn’t have any more visitors – but if someone had camped out, I’d have cleaned again after they left.

Berkeley

Today, I sorted the last of the 662 post ideas I brought to Inkhaven, many of which expired before they could be written. My shoulders feel lighter, and I can’t stop smiling when I look at my sparkling, well-tagged Notion database. I can’t wait to write 23 more posts this month. If Clean Something Day had existed all this time, I might have restarted the blog years ago.

Ways to celebrate

• Visit someone with a messier house — maybe a parent of young kids? — and help them get it under control.
• Get your friends together for a digital purge party (unused subscriptions, ancient emails, overstuffed folders…)
• Assemble a volunteer army and clean one of your city’s parks or beaches.
• Clean your garage. (Doesn’t have to be fancy!)

Whatever you do, set aside the evening to have fun — either in the space you cleaned or somewhere else rewarding.

This can also be a day to celebrate the people who spend their lives cleaning:

• Leave a tip for the office custodians, or your neighborhood garbage collectors.
• Organize a gift for the janitors at your child’s school.
• Give your stay-at-home spouse a break and take over housecleaning for the week. If you don’t know what that entails, this is a good time to learn.

What’s the date?

I suggest March 20 for the spring equinox. Spring cleaning already exists — what better way to start the new season?

But since many people already clean in spring, a fall date would offer year-round coverage. So my second option is October 9^th — Marie Kondo’s birthday.