Safety And Danger

Why not both?

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to spend time, both in my career and my hobbies. And I particular question I’m still trying to figure out the relative amount of time spent doing what.

I read a lot of books to try figure this out, from histories of 18th century England, biographies of American scientists during WWII, and modern texts on causality and probability. It’s pretty scary now that lots of people are saying that there will be no more work to do since AI will be able to do everything, so I’ve decided to think more about how to spend my time better!

After much procrastination on reading this particular text, I decided to read Taleb’s The Black Swan. A crowd favourite, sure, but I’ve realised that there are indeed many nuggets of wisdom in the book that are still relevant today. The first main point is that we always underestimate extreme events and their impact, spoken through Taleb’s eyes from the frame of Lebanon’s numerous idealogical revolutions. The second point is that we should be careful assigning narratives when things happen to us - most of the times, things are noisy, especially with long term predictions of the future.

But in terms of how this book helps with actual life stuff, well, it starts getting good in the second half. In particular there is a section about how you should spend your time between risky and safe activities. And Taleb espouses one method called the ‘barbell’ strategy.

Thee key idea is that you don’t have to choose between being a risk averse person or someone that is trying to do crazy shit all the time. Rather, it’s that you should spend most of your time doing something super safe and low risk, but then around ten percent of the time doing things that don’t cost much but have very high potential upside.

So in something like scientific research, I’m guessing that this would involve maybe 90% of what Thomas Kuhn might call normal science (improving the standard paradigm of some science) and, mixed in with 10% revolutionary science where you try to hunt for a paradigm shift. I’ve roughly tried to structure my own personal research in this way but with a more egalitarian split. I spend around half of my time focusing on safer spectroscopy projects and the other half trying to do more riskier things like DMD on biological datasets.

I think this idea works well for socialising as well! I love hanging out with my core group of people. In fact, I’m quite lucky to say that most of my friendships and have gotten better with age, as I build a more detailed mental model of who my friends are and who likes what. But I also have set times where I really try to stretch myself out of my comfort zone by zooming strangers, having open chats, hosting things with the Independent Science Society or just trying new things.

Usually I (maybe falsely) seem to categorize people into being somewhere on a spectrum of being risk averse and risk seeking. I also maybe falsely and uncomfortably tried to put myself in that kind of box too. But I hate the thought of being locked into either. I don’t want to be fully risk averse, nor fully risk seeking. I want the benefits of both - so this book chapter was pretty validating in that I can actually… just do both. This aligns with the general mindset of the book - you can have multiple eggs in multiple baskets, just size it accordingly.

On the non-financial side, Taleb views high upside stuff as publishing things, writing about high risk ideas, and reading. But I want to add to this list. Another thing that I like that increases potential upside is to try and increase your lifespan. After all, the longer you live, the more chances you get to win big. My strategy for longevity has probably boiled down to two things - exercise and vegetables. I try to at least do an hour of exercise a day after work, and crucially I don’t put any requirements on quality. It can be as chill or intense as I like, as long as I do something. Laugh as you may, I really do believe in the ‘in you can’t beat them, outlive them’ trope, and having more opportunities for high upside things is one of the reasons I am trying to live healthily.

Now, for people on social media, you might counter me with some rationale that everyone successful online seems to be highly risk taking - from sports people to San Fran tech lords. My counter to this is that this is probably just survivorship bias - you’re just only seeing the fraction of people who took the risk and made it. And to convince yourself of this, that taking risks actually does sometimes lead to failure, just think back to a time where you tried something and it didn’t work out. I can think of many times!

And if that’s the case, maybe playing safe isn’t a bad thing! Maybe taking a few risks isn’t bad either… Who knows, don’t oversimplify life guys!