The virtuous art of the impatient
The enigma of democracy, business, art and even life is the ineluctable drama between patience and impatience. Patience gets gussied up with the unctuous sheen of the virtuous, one of the chosen seven in Christian and particularly Catholic faith. The bedrocks of democracy are laws, rules, norms and due process, patient systems for adjudication and redress. Business is a function of regulations, contracts, memos, and strategies, all a careful collaboration to transmute work into profit. Great art takes time, as the dozens of articles on Robert Caro and the fiftieth anniversary of The Power Broker have noted the past weeks. Patience is stability, strong and firm.
Yet, isn’t impatience the stronger virtue? When we see injustice, it’s not the patient and passive observer who is lauded, but rather the impatient and tireless advocate who demands change today. When there’s a new need demanded in the market, it’s the frantic and impatient entrepreneur who will crescendo to greatness, not the languid corporate leader who sets up a steering committee to debate contingencies on a regular cadence. Impatience is aggression, of hauling the future bareknuckled to the present to be enjoyed by all.
Recently, Paul Graham ignited a discussion around “founder mode,” which he described mostly by what it is not: professional management. Founder mode is about holistic involvement with a business and its needs, not unlike Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman in which a manager becomes so attuned to the needs of her store, her body tingles when the temperature of the sushi isn’t exactly right. There’s pain when something is going wrong, an impatience to fix it. “There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is,” Graham writes.
I want to intensify his point though, since it’s not just the avoidance of specialization and organizational politics that sets founders apart. It’s their calibrated balance between patience and impatience. The best founders I have worked with know when to charge forward hard and when to retreat, when to spend more cycles perfecting a product and when to let go. Perfectionists failing to ship are just as imperfect as giddy hustlers slinging dreck. Balancing between the extremes is a form of taste, cultivated over the life of building a company.
Why are founder like this? In short, to survive. Under pressure, under-resourced and under-estimated, founders don’t have the flexibility to overspend on the wrong priorities or overthink their product roadmap. Most of the systems holding up an early-stage startup are nothing more than scrap metal welded into a patchwork structure that wouldn’t pass muster with the slightest investigation. Yet, every startup has that one user experience, that one feature or capability where they really shine.
The impatient resourcefulness of the survivor isn’t unique to startups. We see it in certain individuals, sports teams, laboratories, armies, nations, and more, usually with some sort of “surprise competitor” sobriquet. Survivor mode is a culture that can and should be engrained in the sociology of any group of people, because it’s essentially the pathway to success.
Last week in “The Productivity Precipice,” I wrote that “America’s eccentricity is that its economy is nonpareil, even as it squanders that dynamism with some of the most comparatively mediocre institutions and infrastructure in the industrialized world.” None of our institutions fear survival, or really fear much of anything at all. Certainly not accountability.
Take the progress of medical science. I was at a party this week debating the bioethics of unproven experimental treatments. The Food and Drug Administration allows for compassionate use through its Expanded Access program in cases involving “a patient with a serious or immediately life-threatening disease or condition.” The rule is strict, in line with the norms of American bioethics around informed consent.
Should this access be further expanded? My interlocutor highlighted the “invisible graveyard,” a phrase developed by Marginal Revolution economist Alex Tabarrok to describe the FDA’s misincentives for approving new therapies. Why can’t a patient — informed and consenting — just enroll in an early trial with the hope of offering data for the furtherance of human progress?
I proffered the typical deontological arguments around the Hippocratic oath, the challenge of verifying consent, the dangers of economic and societal incentives that must be avoided. But that metaphor of the invisible graveyard stayed with me. The GLP-1 hormone was characterized in the 1980s and the first drugs targeting it were launched more than a decade ago. How many millions of people suffering from obesity, diabetes, and hypertension could have been saved the past few decades if we were impatient enough as a society to deliver Ozempic from conception to drug on a survivor mode timeline?
It’s not just invisible graveyards, but invisible neighborhoods, invisible subways, invisible jobs and factories and moon bases and so much more that never arrived. If we ran on survivor mode just a bit more often, how much more enriched and safe could all of our our lives be?
I read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian this week, a novel that narrates the fight for survival in a hostile world to a spare extreme. The book’s ultimate villain Judge Holden describes war as central to humanity’s identity:
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
War isn’t incidental but central, and it’s also not exactly as it seems:
The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
War becomes flow, in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s sense of a sublime quality of human experience. For the judge and Glanton’s ragtag gang he’s partnered with, violence isn’t a tool but rather a form of play. Violence begets violence, and as we deepen our yearning for the next battle, we become ever more impatient to reach the zenith of oblivion.
McCarthy’s views in Blood Meridian are ambiguous, but the destinies of his characters are not. The ones that don’t self-destruct eventually manage to civilize their atavistic urges, seeking patience against the impatient forces that compel them. They slow down, the better to speed up their own development. Survivor mode isn’t a game, and it’s not a thrill to seek. It’s simply a mode of being, and a balanced one at that.
We need a greater sense of crisis, of debate receding toward action. It’s not about optimism — many of the problems we confront may indeed never be solved. But like Sisyphus’s rock that Albert Camus wrote in his famous essay, it’s the fight against gravity, against stagnation, against the status quo that makes the game of life all worthwhile. We are here to do something — and we won’t be here forever to do it. Survivor mode is securing that perfect balance between patience and impatience, and offering the world that wisdom and its fruitful abundance.
Podcast: The how and why of the most successful supply-chain attack in history
This week, Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon were injured and killed by the thousands across two waves of attacks when their pagers and walkie-talkies exploded. Presumably orchestrated by Israel, it’s one of the most complex and successful supply-chain attacks in world history, and it has mesmerized the global espionage community.
I wanted to go deeper into supply-chain risks, and so we brought Nick Reese onto the Riskgaming podcast to talk more. Nick was the inaugural director of emerging technology policy at the Department of Homeland Security, where he developed policies across cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and more. Today, he’s the CEO and founder of his own business, Frontier Foundry Corporation, as well as a faculty member at New York University.
Nick and I talk about the attack on Hezbollah and consider the networked challenges of securing supply chains for the United States. We then swing wider to the national security challenges inherent in emerging technologies and how public-private partnerships are mitigating some of those risks.
🔊 Listen to “The how and why of the most successful supply-chain attack in history”
The Orthogonal Bet: The Art of Naming
In this episode, Lux’s scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman speaks with Eli Altman, the managing director of A Hundred Monkeys, a company that specializes in the art of naming. A Hundred Monkeys works with clients to come up with the perfect name for a company, product, or anything else that requires a name.
The art of naming is a fascinating subject. Throughout human history, the power of names has been a recurring theme in stories and religion. A well-crafted name has the ability to evoke emotions and associations in a profoundly impactful way.
Sam invited Eli to the show because he has been immersed in this field for decades, growing up with a father who specialized in naming. The conversation explores the intricacies of this art, how experts balance competing considerations when crafting a name, the different types of names, and what makes a name successful. They also discuss the importance of writing and storytelling in naming, the impact of AI on the field, and much more.
🔊 Listen to “The Art of Naming”
Lux Recommends
- My new essay on the use of artificial intelligence in government just launched in the summer issue of City Journal, entitled “United States of Algorithms.” “Rather than enter a technological cul-de-sac, federal, state, and local governments must stay competitive with the private sector’s best practices. That means taking more humans out of the decision-making loop. Humans and machines are both ultimately black boxes; decision systems can be intentionally designed for optimal transparency and due process. Far from a computational dictator usurping the powers of free citizens, AI, properly implemented, is just another extension of a well-functioning republic.”
- Sam recommends The Expanse author James S. A. Corey’s brand-new novel, The Mercy of Gods. “With a noble but suicidal human rebellion on one hand and strange and murderous enemies on the other, the team pays a terrible price to become the trusted servants of their new rulers.”
- Our occasional columnist Michael Magnani chimes in with a new article in The RUSI Journal on “Russian Sabotage in the Gig-Economy Era.” “The gig-economy model of sabotage has also considerably driven down the cost of running agents. The Russian intelligence services pay structure was disclosed in some of the recent cases of sabotage or strategic vandalism, confirming this trend. High-risk activities such as arson and assassination were paid at a rate of several hundred dollars, an extremely low figure given the nature of the work. Other, simpler gigs had been subcontracted for similar rates–placing coffins under the Eiffel Tower brought in €400 for each of the workers, while painting 250 Star of David graffiti in Paris was priced at $53 per person. It appears that just as in other areas of the gig economy, the benefits generally accrue to the employer. In the case of Russian intelligence services, the costs are so low that they are incomparable to either a full-time intelligence officer or running an agent.”
- Sam enjoyed Sara Tillinger Wolkenfeld’s essay in The Atlantic on “Productivity Is a Drag. Work Is Divine.” “Modern technologies such as generative AI threaten to make 21st-century Americans like the woman in the Mishnah: Deprived of purpose, convinced that our creative output is useless because a computer can produce a result that is sometimes just as good, or even better. Much of the debate around AI hinges on the question Can a computer do it better? But Jewish texts insist that the most important question is about process, not product.”
- Our summer associate Gustavs Zilgalvis wrote on “AGI and Political Order.” “In a world with an indefinite number of AGIs, there will perhaps be AGI agents, AGI organizations consisting of AGI agents, and AGI states consisting of coalitions of AGI organizations and AGI agents seeking to maintain political order.”
- Sam enjoyed Franz Lidz’s “Who’s the Dodo Now? A Famously Extinct Bird, Reconsidered.”, a review of new science on the famous bird. “The lack of scientific observations and a definitive specimen type led to decades of misidentifications and misclassifications, including the naming of several nonexistent species such as the Nazarene dodo, the white dodo, the hooded dodo, the solitary dodo, the white solitaire and the Réunion solitaire, the latter of which is actually an ibis.”
- Finally, I absolutely loved this pseudonymous essay on “The Potemkin Village of NatSec Policy.” “There are few things more gut-wrenching to me than losing not because we were bested by the enemy, but because we were bested by our own incompetence. [continuing resolutions] are our version of the neutrality acts that neutered the United States before WWII and history will certainly see them as such if we do not act.”
That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.
