(2018-12-14) Rao Lets Make Things Boring

Venkatesh Rao: Let's Make Things Boring. The idea of pursuing the direction of maximal interestingness was a key principle in the Season 1 essays. But it recently struck me that the opposed principle -- pursuing the direction of maximal boringness -- is an equally profound idea.

You can adopt both resolutions at once: make some things more interesting, and other things more boring.

The Axios newsletter today has this line about the latest bit of exhausting Trumpery out of Washington, DC: "The bottom line: Norms and precedents are boring. The lack of them is interesting, but almost always at a severe cost."

Seth Godin once said something like "a technology becomes socially interesting when it becomes technologically boring."

If you're running a company with engineering and marketing challenges, you can't make the marketing interesting until you make the engineering boring.

Making things boring is about locking in progress.

If you stop at flouting/breaking old norms, you'll vanish like a flash flood leaving no trace behind. Old norms will just come creeping back.

A real norm is self-enforcing without much coercive energy.

A real norm gets installed in our superegos. The incentives are internal.

The Trump era has numbed us to a lot of things, but it hasn't actually normalized any awful new behaviors that weren't already normalized.

So as you look for opportunities to make things boring in 2019, look at where there are dumpster fires, charged emotions, flaming conflicts, etc. The immediate goal is to put out the fires. The long-term goal is to make things less flammable. A good norm makes it easier to be good than evil, for your value of "good" and "evil."

assuming you have an idea for a norm that seems reasonable (good test: run it by a representative set of the people who would actually have to adopt it), there's a design-and-installation playbook of sorts, with 8 basic rules. Here they are:

If you successfully do these 8 things, it will become part of background social infrastructure that is self-regulating, self-socializing etc. It will also drain the culture-war energy out of the behavior and any counter-behaviors.