Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

People are notoriously ineffective at predicting their behavior under different conditions. In late December they spend thousands of dollars for gym memberships they abandon by February. They say they'll never smoke or drink again before quitting many times. Psychologists call the effect empathy gaps.

We respond to our environments in the moment, not how we think we will. As we tune our environments to our situation, we create environments we like and get rid of parts we don't.

When lockdowns end, unless we consciously choose to lead ourselves, we'll revert to our old wasteful ways. Companies seeing opportunities to regain market share or fearing losing it will send people flying again. People who have found ways to get closer to loved ones remotely will start flying again, ironically probably not bonding as well by choosing convenience over shared effort and struggle. We'll waste again when marketed convenience.

That is, we'll revert to what marketers promote to us if we don't consciously choose to keep our lives simple and sustainable. That's the value of leadership -- personal and of others. I see virtually no leadership around the environment, which is why I work on it. It takes effort, but I find the rewards more than worth it.

> People are notoriously ineffective at predicting their behavior under different conditions. In late December they spend thousands of dollars for gym memberships they abandon by February. They say they'll never smoke or drink again before quitting many times. Psychologists call the effect empathy gaps.

That's not so much ineffectiveness of prediction as it is living through hopes and ideals. And that's human.

> I see virtually no leadership around the environment, which is why I work on it. It takes effort, but I find the rewards more than worth it.

Are there any people that you consider the least worst at it, even if they don't make the cut?

Are there any personal things you do that you could share in some detail, or any other good ideas you might have to improve the general situation?

My TEDx talks and podcast address your second question, both on leadership and the environment.

TEDx talks: http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-del...

Podcast: http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast

A couple episodes on my podcast strategy

- Clarifying My Strategy: https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...

- My Modified Tesla Strategy: https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...

It'll take me a while to get through all this, but right off the bat:

"I used to think that carbon dioxide caused global warming. Carbon dioxide is a molecule, it has no volition of its own. It can't make choices. We can. It reacts to us, to our behavior."

Such a simple idea, so simple that the significance is easily overlooked. I've had my eye open for people who have this perspective (and take it seriously) for quite some time, but it's rare to encounter such people, at least in my experience.

I'm going to go through the rest of your material today, but I'll throw out some questions in the meantime, if for the sake of conversation if nothing else:

- it seems you've kind of identified beliefs as kind of the root cause problem - have you tried going a bit deeper?

- do you think some improvements may be possible in your strategy/approach (setting aside pragmatism for the time being)? For example, I sense some imperfections (unnecessary restrictiveness) in the MART in SMART[1], although if we add back in pragmatism, it's probably a good place to settle. (EDIT: the same, to a much larger degree, applies to "301: Does it scale" - I think there are significant improvements that could be made, and also some risks that should be taken into consideration.)

- have you played around with the idea of pointing this strategy at other problems? If so, do you find that you'd want to make some alterations depending on specific domains?

You have a rare combination of skills: good/novel ideas, the ability to articulate them persuasively, the gumption to go out and make it happen.

[1] Rough summary of your strategy:

1. What does the environment mean to you?

2. Is there something you can do to act on that?

3. Make a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) goal

4. Accountability

EDIT: if anyone's having trouble figuring out how to listen to the podcasts, there is a player embedded at the bottom of the page.

Lots of questions, which I love. I developed my technique with lots of leaders, my podcast guests, and friends, and find more input helps.

Regarding beliefs as the root, once I reach beliefs I try to learn where they come from, especially very common ones like "If I act but no one else does then what I do doesn't matter." It's an belief in many places, especially entrepreneurial communities where people want to act quickly before others react. I also want to learn other motivations to learn how to help people act on their motivations to help others.

I describe and teach my leadership style in my book Leadership Step by Step http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-step-by-step. My environmental work mostly applies that style to the environment. The four-step strategy you outlined is Unit 4 of that book applied to this field.

Do you have ideas on going deeper?

I see huge gaps I'd like to improve on -- for example, engaging community on a wide scale. I believe people would want a community like Mr. Money Mustache's https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com (which I found through Hacker News five or ten years ago), I just haven't started it. I expect I have many blind spots.

I welcome constructive criticism, recommendation, and most of all help. Volunteers have contributed to major developments in the podcast. Actually, most of all, for others to start their versions of the podcast, applying it to their fields, like Leadership and the Environment Entrepreneurs or Leadership and the Environment Silicon Valley or wherever someone wanted to meet the top people in their field, talk to them on a podcast, and help them become role models.

I apply the technique in my teaching, coaching, and public speaking -- also in my personal life since it is based on helping people do what they care about.

Did I answer most of your questions? I'm answering publicly so anyone interested in helping grow the podcast into a movement can see what's happening and how they can make a difference while advancing their careers and lives. I'm also happy to follow up somewhere with higher bandwidth. My email is at http://joshuaspodek.com/contactconnect.

Sorry I wasn't able to get a reply out today but will sometime tomorrow...

Best to email at http://joshuaspodek.com/contactconnect since my previous posts make this thread hard to find.

Will do!

> When lockdowns end, unless we consciously choose to lead ourselves, we'll revert to our old wasteful ways.

This smacks of trying to exploit tragedy to further one's pet cause. Too soon.

And honestly even the notion that the world during coronavirus should be that different is open to question. I agreed with taking action to delay the virus by a few months to buy time to both work out what was going on and figure out the most effective treatment strategies, but in Western countries people are seriously considering 12 month style lockdowns to protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life.

In hindsight it may well be that the actuarial math didn't make sense - this isn't the first disease humanity has faced by a long stretch and we're potentially looking at severe self inflicted wounds for something that doesn't look like it is going to be the next Black Death or Ebola. The obvious historical precedent I remember is 9/11. Making any changes after 9/11 was a mistake the US never really recovered from. This would be a great moment to be a little hard-hearted and remember that everyone has to die of something.

We don't know what is going to happen from this economically. The economic forecasts are as flimsy and there is a lot of room for unpleasant surprises.

> in Western countries people are seriously considering 12 month style lockdowns to protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life.

Other than being completely calloused, this argument also isn't true. We don't know the exact mortality rates because we haven't seen proper data for it yet. Depending on when you get your numbers, Italy has had up to 34% of their infected die.

Furthermore, this isn't just a Boomer and Silent Generation killer. Asthmatics, immuno-comprimised, and otherwise healthy people without access to decent health care for socioeconomic reasons are at risk.

I'm not arguing for or against such a long quarantine time. I'm only stating that we aren't just trying to save the last holdouts from the 40s.

I have no icdea where you got that 34% from but it absolutely does not at all match any mortality rates for this virus anywhere in any normal setting.

As for the elderly dying more than all others by far (including younger immunocompromoised people), the numbers are plainly available for a variety of regions and countries. They speak for themselves clearly enough.By far and away, the absolute majority of all dead are those over the age of 70. Most of them over the age of 80, and even those with what would normally be comorbidities among younger populations ide so rarely of Covid that they're outliers. Healthy young people are extreme outliers to the mortality count. Even in northern Italy at the worst of its saturation of the healthcare system, the same thing was observable: deaths among younger people are outliers across the board.

At the time of this comment Italy has 181,228 confirmed cases and 24,114 deaths which comes out to about 13%.

Even ignoring the mortality rate, this thing is causing lasting and perhaps permanent damage to the body.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

Could you elaborate on the mistakes made after 9/11? The ones that come to mind are the Patriot Act, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Also erosion of various civil liberties. Terrorism is like a pathogen causing an auto-immune disorder; pretty much all of its damage comes from reaction to it.

However, I don't think it's in any way like COVID-19 situation. In this pandemic, the economy was going to go down anyway, due to simple self-preservation of individuals. Without social distancing and lockdown measures, once you'd seen people around you getting sick and dying left and right, you'd too be reluctant to go to your work, or to run your plant.

That we still have the amped-up TSA infrastructure in place is arguably a mistake. If it were allowed to post selfies of sneaking dangerous objects through security, the whole thing would collapse as an expensive farce.

>to protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life Bold statement. Should it be my mother who deserves to be left to die or yours? Assuming for a minute that most of those affected would be the oldest, there are plenty of people with immunocompromised systems who deserve to live just as anyone else.

The other difficult issue is that an order of magnitude more people end-up in hospital, many in intensive care, for at least 2 weeks.

That's an enormous amount, even if you were to spread out that effect, assuming we lift all restrictions and let the virus loose, we would be talking -at the very least- about more than a million people requiring beds at any given time, in the US alone, just for COVID-19...

Imagine the economic effect of that on medical costs and the economy at large...

A year-long confinement is not workable and no nation can afford it, western or otherwise. However, strong social distancing and hygiene measures, as well as travel restrictions, could/should be implemented until we have a universal solution for this.

> protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life.

That's not what lockdowns are for. The point is to avoid overloading the hospitals. If we didn't slow the pace at which COVID19 spreads, hospitals would become full of COVID19 infected people, leaving no room for people with other kind of afflictions. So we'd still have 1-2% death from COVID, but also a bunch of unrelated death due to reduced hospital capacity.

Arguably the death rate from covid would increase as well, wouldn't it? You'd have a lot more potential survivors not getting proper care.

>...people are seriously considering 12 month style lockdowns to protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life.

"Good years" for who? The accumulation of experience, knowledge, historic context, etc., tend to make a person's life more meaningful with time not less. To insinuate that the good years come and go with youth is either a statement about your own life or a failure of your imagination. Not even getting into the fact that you feel you can measure the worth of millions of stranger's lives and determine they're not worth saving.

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