Approaching Death. Grants for the future of humanity.
Talking about death. Sangam poetry. Major grants for the future of humanity. The challenges of boycotts. My podcast on policy. Sustainability labelling.
Future of Humanity, $100m+ grant prizes
Sangam Poetry
The challenge of artistic boycotts
Progress policy podcast, Alec Stapp
What is a “sustainability label”, investments
My show on 11 March, London: what music at your funeral?
Links: Andrew Gelman (nerdy stats), politics of passive investing; how SWIFT (finance) works; how Airbnb developed; theatre Unconference; contagious tics; ASD policy jobs (London).
This is my last call out for my show on 11 March. If you are in London do please come. I think it will sell-out so thanks to everyone who has already booked. I’m uncertain whether I will put it on again but I have recently been refreshed by a reader, they write:
“...I always love reading you about theatre and topics such as death and autism.
In particular, I wish we could be more open about the topic of death and our own mortality.
I was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer last year and I don’t feel I can talk about my fear of dying with anyone. Or what this could look like and how this could feel.
As a society, or at least in the western world, we’re encouraged to always focus on the positives and see the ‘bright side’ of everything when faced with bad news. In particular, it seems to be a very English thing. People just say, “well at least your young and in good shape!”, or “it could be worse!”
But I find this very unhelpful, because quite frankly, sometimes the situation is simply crap and there’s no other way of looking at it!
I think we deny people the opportunity or moment to focus on their dark fears and explore what this means to them and to us?
I sometimes feel shameful for thinking about my funeral and not being more positive, but my logical mind knows that this is quite normal.
Don’t get me wrong, some days I feel absolutely fine and empowered to live every day like it’s my last. Others, I think about what music I’d like at my funeral and how I’d want people to wear bright colours. I think about receiving the results of a bad scan and how I would relay this information to friends and family. But I can’t tell anyone about this because, well, we just don’t do that! Thank you for making this an approachable topic. …”
If you want to contribute or have a think but can’t come to the show, feel free to give an answer to some of the questions below.
What song(s)/music would you like at your funeral?
What would you like someone to say about you or read at your funeral?
Do you have something unsaid? If you were to die this week, is there something you have unsaid to someone ? Or if someone else were to die? Would you like to write it here now?
Is there anything you’d like to confess?
Here: https://forms.gle/q4M82WNneSHKocPJ7
I’ve also been adjusting the show and I think this has dropped out as a possible reading (via Michael Rosen, Epitaph - By Merrit Malloy) :
When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.
I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.
Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on in your eyes
And not your mind.
You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.
Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.
It’s that or one that an AI bot has created!
Drifting in poetry, I’ve been dipping into exploring Sangam poetry.
This is Tamil poetry from around 100 BC about 2000 years ago. It had fallen into oblivion for most of the second AD millennium.
How much other human culture have we lost over time?
The culture of time seems as rich as anything we have now and yet we know so little.
Here is the wiki on the Sangam literature.
My poetry teacher, Forrest Gander, has written poems influenced by Sangam.
He also first posed to me the difficult question of cultural boycotts. The problem of if you can separate the poetry from the poet. Many challenges were raised at the time, although the one that stuck with me was Ezra Pound. Typically acknowledged as a great poet but with a politics that was evil and cruel. And was evil and cruel at the time (not only looked through a distorted historic lens).
I have no answer. There is a little historic distance now with Pound so we may consider the problem. That tension is still very much present. I know poets who will not read Pound knowing his ugly politics. Pound was institutionalised (but escaped the death penalty, in part based on the defence that his [celebrated] poetry was a sign of mental disorders). But, if you have no idea of his politics and you stumble across his poetry and they uplift you - do those works of art get to have a life of their own?
Taking the side of complexity. Tyler Cowen writes an opinion warning of cultural boycotts.
We also know that - like almost everything - sanctions hurt the poor and ordinary more that the rich and elite. So I am very unsure about the extension into creative Russians, or ordinary Russians living anywhere.
I have no answers but to repeat the observations on the ordinary tragedies of war.
On a note thinking about progress, this is my podcast with Alex Stapp.
Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress. The IFP is dedicated to to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future.
An excerpt:
How non-profits should be run and conceived differently, why, and why the world has been so slow to adjust. Why are there so few "internet first" non-profits?
“... a lot of it's just inertia and institutional momentum. So the reason that all the biggest names in think tanks in DC have been around for decades is because once you get a core donor base, it's very hard to lose them or you reach a certain equilibrium where as long as you're doing a decent job, you'll keep getting the same donors to give you more money a year by year and the brand awareness is worth it in the DC community - people know what Brookings is. Brookings will be here. Brookings was here 10 years ago. They'll be here 10 years from now. Right. So that kind of stability has its own value, but we looked at it and we said, this is highly inefficient. The way a lot of these organizations are structured we think there are probably two main components to why think tanks need to change. One's on the personnel side and one is on the information distribution side.
So, since the advent of the internet since become extremely mainstream in the way that most of us consume most of our information and spend tons of our time, think tanks are still weirdly, mostly oriented around long white papers that are PDFs on the internet. We're often even printed out and handed to staffers on Capitol hill or they do in- person events or during COVID they're doing webinars that have very dubious value in terms of actually influencing the policy debate. So, one of our things is being an internet first and a Twitter first think tank. And so it's thinking like, where is the policy conversation actually happening in the US? It's on Twitter with media professionals in New York and DC and policy makers in DC spending tons of time on there. So making sure that your content is formatted and distributed in a way that can be consumed by those internet native users and then on the personnel side, it's really understanding that there's a lot of bloat in think tank organizations and being very careful about how you hire full-time employees. And so we think that the modern policy wonk or policy professional is really like a multi tool athlete, meaning they're really good at a variety of areas. They're really good at research. They're really good at policy communications. They're really good at outreach if they can talk to staffers directly and explain their ideas and fit their idea to be helpful in the context of piece of legislation or particular rule making. And one, those are very rare skill sets. And so, we're looking for all stars who we had to pay them more than they might have made previously and they're hard to find, but when you do find them, really hold onto them and then recognize that the internet has dis-intermediated a lot of the communications shops.
So, a lot of the big old think tanks have dozens of professionals who work in communications, who are supposed to help promote your ideas, but the best people like Caleb and I found this on our own work, the best people to promote your work is - you - the person who wrote it. And if you don't have that skill set, it's really hard to teach or have another person come in to do that for you and similarly with government affairs and government outreach staffers are in their twenties and maybe thirties, they like talking to people who are in their twenties and thirties who have done the research and are experts on the issue. They don't want another person intermediating that process for them, who's another voice in the room. That's how a lot of older think tanks handle this. And so we think by structuring a think tank around the policy experts who again are these multi tool athletes and prioritizing the internet for distribution, you can run a much leaner, much more effective organization. And so we've cultivated a donor base for our organization. Those donors care about policy impact. And so they said, Hey, do what's most effective? Don't worry about cranking out a 40 page white paper if it's not necessary to the process, don't worry about holding a webinar if the webinar is just a deliverable with no value add. … if it doesn't actually help move the needle on policy, don't do it. And so we're highly aligned from top to bottom for that…”
We discuss the competing interests that prevent physical infrastructure such as power lines, or cafe “parklet” structures from being easily built.
Alec explains how using a framework borrowed from Effective Altruism: impact (will it be impactful), tractability (is it possible?), under-researched (are many other people working on the challenge?) - is a useful framing.
Alec discusses why biosecurity (pandemic preparedness), meta-science (understanding how science progresses) and immigration (in particular high skilled) are the initial areas of interest and what other areas, like climate, might be next.
We speculate on what intractable bluesky policies we would potentially pursue.
We play over-rated/under-rated :
Carbon tax
Planning laws
Crypto
Rogue AI
Animal welfare
Charter cities
Innovation agencies
Remote working
On an almost philosophical level, I noted a post from Tom O’Neill on the (im)possibilty of a “Sustainability” Fund label.
Tom writes:
I am taking part in a FCA regulatory sprint this week, tasked with developing ideas the FCA may use. My team is working on a possible ‘Sustainability' fund label. It is a bit of a minefield.
A reasonable definition from the Butlandland report defines sustainability as 'development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'.
So a small wind turbine company could meet this definition. But how could any major corporation once you incorporate climate change, supply-chain issues (biodiversity loss, child labor), waste (i.e. plastic, chemical), etc?
All the former is not inevitable, but it is unequivocally impossible to operate a sustainable complex corporation in an economy powered by fossil fuels in the middle of the sixth mass extinction. …
…Therefore, to consider applying a sustainability label, you have to draw artificial demarcations around what constitutes sustainability. …
Cary Krosinsky argues:
It’s about what investors do (see our work at Real Impact Tracker) qualitatively - not a quantitative exercise, which isn’t useful for investors, hence they don’t use such analysis (no surprise), for all the focus on carbon footprints (useful for corporate decision making only) - it’s important to match labels and data with what they are actually useful for
And Tom responds:
I am sympathetic to this. My preference would have been to work on the labels related to investor impact. I suppose I am looking to be convinced whether there can be value here.
The specifics of a label aside, can one judge the total “net-benefit” of a complex company? I think you probably broadly can in many instances although it does not fit simply into a “label”. Not great for a regulator.
The mere act of living as a human takes away natural and other resources, on a macro level can this co-exist? On this very high level, it’s probably most famously Malthus who argued this impossibility. Yet the last 100 years - so far at least - has proven against this.
In trying to define sustainability, it’s a semantic expression of the tension between degrowth ideas and innovation/growth ideas on the future of humanity.
I think the SEC commissioner, made a similar thing comparing labelling to milk. We can label what is in milk (although actually specific samples can vary alot). In general:
88% water, 5% lactose, 3.4% fat, 3.3% protein and <1% minerals.
That’s all well and good - but is milk good for you ? Could you know from that data whether it is sustainable or not ?
So in one philosophical sense - we really don’t know whether a complex mix for a fund would be “sustainable” - one needs quite a narrow domain of definitions to pin it down.
I see many things through the lens of health. And life expectancy again on an average level still rises but with some significant challenges creeping in even in rich countries (eg US deaths of despair).
This debate also ties in to how much we expect regulators do policy work for us, and how much individual actors/stakeholders will seek to solve problems.
Speaking on the future. I want to highlight a major grant programme and ideas for the future of humanity (plus two smaller microgrant programmes).
Thue Future Fund is going to spend $100m to $1bn. If you have an impactful idea. This is the time to think about going for it! There is a long list of intriguing ideas to work on (eg forecasting institute) plus you can submit your own to win a prize.
And my much smaller grants:
And the ones from Chatham House:
And links this week:
Nerdy, good on stats
Only if you are interested in ESG / stewardship / politics ideas - this from Drew Dickson
Learn about Swift
Learn about airbnb
ASD policy jobs
Theatre conference:
Learn about contagious tics