Three Things #2: Jan. 23, 2022
On Identity, Governance, and Writing About Hard Things
The theme of this week has been small questions about big things: how to keep your identity small, how a small idea might have a very big impact on society, and how to write a few words about a very big topic.
Thing #1: Keeping your identity small
A few years ago, I was in a meeting where a number of smug, self-important people took turns introducing themselves. They were full of pride as they shared the remarkable things they’d done: I built such-and-such company, I work for such-and-such billionaire. Then one person smiled and, with quiet confidence, gave an intro that I still remember: “Hi, I’m <name>, and I build things.”
I didn’t understand at the time why someone would introduce themselves that way, and I assumed that they were trying to be vague or falsely modest. But I heard an idea on a podcast this week that shed some light on it. Naval Ravikant said that he does his best to keep his identity small so that it doesn’t get in the way. Here’s the full quote:
I try to keep a very low level of mental activity for anything other than what I’m directly dealing with in the moment. One of the ways… is by stripping away layers of identity. So, I don’t want to overly identify as Indian or American or Libertarian or Democrat or any of those kind of things because… that sort of keeps me from actually engaging in thinking… it’s all preconceived beliefs. It makes me more defensive… if you want to be rational and open minded, you should not have an identity. And the less of an identity you can adopt, the better.
Keeping your identity small reduces your “level of mental activity” and lets you focus on the ideas and people in front of you. Focus is harder and more important now than ever. And a small identity reduces your preconceived beliefs. I think this is very wise advice.
We don’t often think about it this way, but identity is complex and it can be quite burdensome and constraining. We carry this baggage with us into everything we do and every encounter. We worry about how we should behave, how we’ll be perceived, and whether it will agree with our own self identity.
By contrast, the idea of just being ourselves and just being present in each moment is quite beautiful and powerful. It dovetails nicely with important Buddhist concepts like not-self and beginner’s mind. The Buddha called this bundle of preconceived notions “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views” and pointed out that it causes “suffering and stress.”
On the same podcast Naval also shared the delightful anecdote of Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti meeting the Pope. When the Pope asked who he was, Krishnamurti replied, “I am nobody.” On this topic, Krishnamurti writes:
“It seems so impossibly difficult to be simple, to be what you are and not pretend. To be what you are is in itself very arduous without trying to become something, which is not too difficult. You can always pretend, put on a mask, but to be what you are is an extremely complex affair; because you are always changing; you are never the same and each moment reveals a new facet, a new depth, a new surface. You can’t be all this at one moment for each moment brings its own change. So if you are at all intelligent, you give up being anything.”
It’s not easy to maintain a small identity, with integrity and modesty, in this day and age when we’re constantly encouraged to “flex” a big ego. But I think ego is the biggest stumbling block to both success and happiness, and keeping your identity small is a good first step towards shrinking it.
Thing #2: DAO governance
DAOs are the first thing I got excited about when I joined the Ethereum community a few years ago, and the idea of a DAO has always been more interesting and exciting than DeFi and expensive JPEGs. Ethereum to me has always been an operating system for building better human institutions, and DAOs are the first such institutions. The idea of a DAO flows directly from foundational ideas such as smart contracts and social scalability. Bitcoin and the ideas it embodies—decentralizing money and separating money and state—is a great starting point but these ideas are means to an end. That end is reimagining and rebuilding society in a fairer, more transparent, more open, more participatory fashion.
Last year was a massive year for DAOs and I was blown away by the explosion of interest they generated. It was exciting to see projects like ConstitutionDAO attempt to do big things in the real world. The best event I attended last year was hosted by a DAO and dedicated to DAOs. The platforms, tools, and apps I’m the most excited about are building things for DAOs. I contribute to several DAOs today, as well as to initiatives focused on improving DAO governance, tooling, etc.
And yet DAOs are struggling. They’re running into predictable questions and problems around governance and culture that have plagued companies and cooperatives forever. Most DAOs are run by amateurs with little to no management experience, and DAOs are almost universally poorly governed. Roles aren’t clearly delineated, there’s little to no accountability, culture isn’t prioritized, and they’re slow and ineffective. They don’t scale. They’re noisy and difficult to keep up with.
My greatest fear in Web3 has always been that we set out to rebuild everything with grand intentions but end up reinventing all the broken things that existed before, but immutably on chain. I worry that DAOs have not learned the lessons of the past and that they are heading to a dark place.
As Austin Hill put it recently, in their present form DAOs combine the worst parts of nation states and corporations: like democracy, they’re messy and inefficient; like companies, they tend to be run by unaccountable, autocratic boards.
I do think, and hope, that DAOs can do better. It will take time, and that’s fine. Better tools and ideas are emerging every day, and that will help. Organizations and projects like Token Engineering Commons, MetaGov, DAOist, and Other Internet are doing the hard work of building tools, defining standards, and sharing best practices. But we also need to be ruthless about combining new approaches with the best old ideas from corporate governance and other fields. We must be careful not to throw the “good governance” baby out with the “broken system” bathwater.
Thing #3: Writing about Covid
I intended each “thing” I write about here to be short and to the point. I expected each of these posts to be no more than 2-3 pages and take 2-3 days to draft and edit. Whereas my previous stint writing long form blog posts felt extremely stressful and heavy, as an experiment I wanted to try a different approach and format that feels lighter, less burdensome, and more fun.
The first “Three Things” took over a week to write and felt like a slog. I intended to write just a few paragraphs about Covid, vaccines, and censorship, but it turned into three “things” and over five pages. It’s inherently difficult to write about Covid. I found this to be the case for a number of reasons.
First of all, it’s complex, touching as it does upon health, truth, science, medicine, technology, history, sociology, ethics, social justice, and of course politics. It’s difficult to do the subject justice without examining it from several or most of these angles.
Secondly, it’s inherently controversial. The easiest way to write (or talk) about Covid is to pick a camp, toe the party line, and write off the other camp. This is precisely what almost everyone does: when you read an article or listen to a conversation, you can almost always categorize it right off the bat and predict where it will go.
I understand why people do this. Covid is extraordinarily complex and multifaceted, and it takes a long time to do research and understand the issue from so many different perspectives. It’s much easier to throw your lot in with one camp or the other. Exploring the subject with nuance is difficult, not least because in this polarized climate you risk making enemies on both sides and friends on neither. It’s difficult, but I refuse to subscribe to one camp, I won’t self censor and I’m not concerned with being canceled. Nuanced analysis is critical, as there’s a lot of nuance to explore.
Third, as I discovered, it’s very hard to get accurate, complete information. The vast majority of the sources I found were heavily biased one way or the other. The search results I found on Google were very different than the results I found on other search engines. It’s genuinely hard to know who and what to trust. I kept finding myself down deep, dark rabbit holes reading wacky stuff and having to dig myself out after an hour.
Fourth, it’s constantly changing. There was literally news coming out every single day that I had to factor in. And that news had the effect of causing me to update my priors and change my opinion, which made writing even harder.
I’m torn about what to do about this. On the one hand, topics like Covid are hugely important and there’s a dearth of reliable, moderate information on them, so I feel obliged to talk about them. On the other hand, I have limited time to write every day and I’d rather spend more time writing and reflecting than going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes, so I’m tempted to write about easier topics. This new format is an experiment and the experiment continues!