90% Indifferent

There are a lot of things I don't care about, and I care about a lot of things.

We have a fish tank, and I try to keep the chemicals and pollutants balanced as best I can. Every two weeks I replace one-third of the water. I add water conditioner and various mixes of pre-blended bacteria to keep the ecosystem somewhat balanced. When the filters are dirty, I replace them. Right now, I'm trying to get the pH rebalanced after having let it drift for far too long.^[1]

All the steps I take might as well be magic to my wife. She's an adult just like me, but if she were in charge of the tank I expect she would add gravel and water, feed them daily, and hope for the best. Why do I feel this way? Well, first, I had a roommate whose strategy for her fish was almost exactly that. Second and more importantly, there are a thousand things in my life that I treat with the same lack of regard as my wife would treat the fish.

Caring power laws

Everywhere you look, there are power laws.

Zipf's Law^[2] observes that when you sort all the words in the English language by frequency, the most common word is roughly twice as common as the second most common word, three times as common as the third most common word, and so on. That is, "the" constitutes 7% of all words in English texts, while "of" (the second most common) constitutes 3.5%.

We can find power laws all over. The largest city in a region is some multiple greater in size than the second largest, the largest company in an industry has a value that is usually some multiple greater than the second most valuable, and so on.^[3]

We also see power laws in how much people care about things: I care about my mark on the world intensely, and my family quite a bit... but when you get down to matters of local elections or sports or any number of topics, I just can't find room to care. No matter how often well-meaning people have told that it is easy to change my own oil, I continue to pay the dealership $50 once every couple thousand miles to do it for me. I could not even tell you where the oil pan is in my car.

I have only worked for startups in my software career, and startups are where you go if you want there to be a straight line from inputs to outputs: what I do today affects the quality of the product tomorrow. One of my perennial frustrations is that people who have joined after me don't seem to care. They don't bother learning about our customers, or don't have their tools dialed in to maximize their productivity, or they don't stay abreast of relevant changes in the ecosystem that would help them excel at their jobs and, by extension, excel at delivering a product that's worth caring about. Many of the people I have worked with are happy to get a paycheck, and don't, in their professional lives, care about pursuing excellence. And that's okay.

For a founder, anything less than total commitment to their company is akin to saying you want to be out of a job soon. Similarly for early engineering hires. But it would take heroic effort and value alignment to be able to hire 10, 20, 50 employees who care as intensely as a founder without either a huge equity pool, or a clarity of vision that makes applicants beat their way to your door to get hired.

However, we live in a world with a lot of things that need to be cared about, and the optimal strategy for each person does not scale to the level of a society.

A case study in caring: recycling

Our town recycles. Optimal recycling involves sorting and cleaning materials so they're as close to optimal raw inputs as possible. Remove labels, sort plastics by resin type, make sure everything is washed, don't let plastic bags get in the waste stream.

Many municipal recycling programs are what is called single stream. There is one can for paper, and one can for "everything else," and when it gets carted away, recyclers break the inputs down into lots of similar materials, which are shipped to buyers. Ferrous metals go one direction; aluminum goes another direction; glass gets separated from the remainder; and plastic goes into a landfill.

That's right, plastic goes in a landfill. This comes as a surprise to many people, who were sold propaganda (largely funded by the plastics industry) that told them that recycling was saving the earth. In reality, plastic is so dirty, and so cheap, and so often mixed with other things, and so uneconomical to sort into useful sub-streams, that something like 80-90% of all plastic waste goes straight to a landfill.^[4]

Knowing what "we" know now, we see in the world a continuum of people's investments in recycling: Those who...

... actively recycle "the right way" expansions of the recycling system.
... sort and clean waste religiously, and "fix" others' recycling mistakes in public.
... sort waste dutifully, because it's the "right thing."
... sort waste lazily. They are vaguely aware of the rules for recycling, but maybe they bag their recycling in the can. (In extreme cases, recycling centers will reject entire truckloads of single-stream waste if there is even one plastic bag in the truck.)
... sort waste casually. Nothing is rinsed out; rules are followed poorly, if ever.
... don't bother sorting recycling at all. (Look inside the trash cans in any sort of shared environment, like restaurants, airports, and offices if you want to see examples of this.)
... actively do not recycle out of malice.
... actively do not recycle out of enlightenment: "the plastic goes in the trashcan so we can save a few steps."
... actively do not recycle and advocate to others not to, as well.
... actively do not recycle and fight for the end of wasteful and cost ineffective single-stream recycling programs.

I've tried to draw a complete continuum here: from intensity, to indifference, and back to intensity again. If you think about people in your life, how many fit into each of these buckets? Odds are that almost everyone you know falls in the middle of the continuum here: they recycle (or not), and they don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.

There was a brief age of recycling evangelism of the 90s and early 2000s, and now everyone has settled into their ways, to care about other things that matter.

Distributed decision-making and the perils of power laws

Our lives are filled with thousands of tiny things, each of which could expand to fill all of someone's intensity. And the things we each care about very rarely overlap.

I care about my job, my family, my personal growth. I hope the products I buy largely contain the things they claim they do, and will serve the purposes I acquire them for. I have never attended a single zoning board or town council meeting in the years I have lived in this town.

I'm at about a 50% success rate buying things off Amazon. They are inevitably counterfeit, materially different than I was led to believe by their listings, break quickly, or are sub-optimal in ways that would not have been easy to determine without much more effort than I was willing to put in. (Quick example: I want to get an electronic pH meter for our fish tank. Professional meters cost $200 or more; the cheapest one on Amazon is $10... and I don't know why, and don't know if it's unsuitable for the task, and I will probably buy it anyway.)

In my ideal world there would be a local store nearby that employed people who were familiar with the sorts of things I want to do, and stocked products that had been vetted for quality, where I could go to ask questions and examine physical good and come away satisfied that I had made a close-to-optimal decision. For most values of X, this simply isn't possible anymore.^[5]

Why is this? Well, for each X that people buy:

0.1% of people could probably run the store
1% of people care intensely about quality, and only want the best
10% of people care about quality but will satisfice with "the best of what's on hand"
90% of people just want something.

While these numbers may not be quite perfect, the general idea holds: if I want stickers for my daughter, I'm not going to spend hours researching the best sticker companies; I'm going to bop down to the store, look at the shelves, and buy the first pack of stickers with unicorns on it.

Consumers vote with their wallets, and what consumers want is Amazon, Harbor Freight, store-brand milk, and $10 pH meters. But that's not quite it: given any 10 customers, customer 1 will buy from the small local store; customer 2 will only buy Knipex and wouldn't be caught dead inside Harbor Freight; customer 3 only drinks milk from a local dairy; and customer 4 knows precisely why the $10 pH meter costs $10. But, critically, when it comes to nine other decisions of what to buy, every one of these people is the "unwashed masses" to the others, and vice-versa. As a consequence, most stores sell lowest-common denominator stuff; in the worst case, the growth of the lowest common denominator forces better products off the market, for lack of oxygen.

Some rare people care intensely about any number of things. The tradeoff here is that neuroticism about everything you buy consumes as much of your life as you'll allow it to, as anyone who's read mommy forums can tell you. (Meanwhile, how much do those same mommies care about getting recycling right, or geopolitics?)

In our world, anything that gets put up in front of everyone gradually trends towards Amazon or Harbor Freight, not just durable goods. Food. Technology. Religion. Politics. Everything. We will always get Kirkland Select political candidates not because people want them, but they want to not have to care about politics, which means that most people aren't going into political careers, or calling their politicians, or attending community meetings, or donating to promising candidates, or doing the research on what candidates actually believe (even as voting day is the absolute worst day to try to exert leverage on the political process).

Most people want to be free not to have to care about most things, and only care about the things they choose. People care intensely about things for two reasons: their life choices, or circumstances have forced them to care. Wars. Disasters. Crises. You start to care intensely about what's in your home insurance policy the day your house burns down, and almost never before.

Luckily, we have systems set up that kind of work to allow people to not care. We regulations, and inspectors, and systems for handling system failures (e.g. product recalls), and a society that has historically been mostly honorable, all helping ease the burden of caring for normal people.

Things fall apart

What happens when systems break down? What happens when people have to start caring very suddenly?

People in crises aren't equipped to make the best decisions. They don't have the best judgment, and haven't done the homework, and are generally trying to fly by the seat of their pants in response to difficult conditions. Bad calls are made. People vote for the "wrong guy."

In order to make the right decisions at time that it matters, you have to have overlapping systems of caring: someone in society needs to be doing the work about knowing about, caring about, doing the quiet, unromantic work of planning and wargaming and setting up emergency supplies, so that if it comes to the moment where everyone cares, there is an answer waiting to be deployed.

Those people need to be skilled, and honorable; they should be handsomely compensated. Their career paths should be dignified and recruited for. Society at large needs to be prepared; people need social networks, and need to have ways to make their concerns heard, and need to have outlets available for their desire to contribute, so they can learn what is actually important to contribute to and how to actually improve themselves.

This isn't sexy, but it is inevitable, and it's core to what makes a society function and continue to function.

The fish themselves cost us 39¢ apiece; everything I have bought for them so far has probably cost $200. There's probably a lesson there. ↩︎
Zipf's Law is one special, named instance of a power law. ↩︎
Early in the days of the website reddit, people were complaining about something or other, and one of the mods popped into the comments to remind everyone that people who care aren't typical users.
I forget the actual breakdowns, but he stated that their analytics showed something like: 90% of people who used the site didn't have an account, 90% of people who had an account never commented, 90% of people who commented didn't post, 90% of posters didn't run a subreddit.
... which is about as clear an example of a power law as I can imagine. ↩︎
Prior to 2008, China took bulk plastic waste back from the West (shipped in empty cargo containers that had been used to move manufactured product from Chinese factories to the West), but they realized that they didn't have a use for it either, and so they stopped. ↩︎
The major exception for us is shoes. My child and I have wide feet, and after having disappointing experiences with most other brands, we simply go to the New Balance Outlet nearby every six months and buy what fits. ↩︎