Low Potential Upside Courage

I used to go through a lot of frustration, heart ache, and plain crying alone with Max. 

Overtime, I understood the world a little better but never thought to phrase my longing properly. My longing had no selfish interests, zero upside for me while alive or dead but I knew and know that is the right thing to do. 

Trust me on this, once you drank that honestly shot from a glass of knowledge - there is no turning back. It's an addiction we all should have.  I am still learning to be a master addict of this. 

When talk about crying alone with Max, I am talking about what humans put animals through, destroy ecology, and so much for their sheer pleasure. It is not a necessity and not even a want. but for the pure fun of it. 

This guy captures it brilliantly (in another context) and coins a phrase: 

The two types of courage

It is popular these days for a certain type of anon account to post memes beginning with the sentence: “Men used to go to war and now [insert lame thing that happens in the modern world].” This kind of meme almost takes it for granted that there was a time when people (or in this case, men specifically) were courageous, a time that has irreversibly passed.

But were we ever brave?

It seems to me that there are two types of courage: high potential upside courage and low potential upside courage. Going to war or taking part in any form of physical confrontation, at least for the nobility, was a high potential upside endeavour: one would be showered in glory if they succeeded. Yes, there was a lot of risk involved, but also, much to gain. And what was to be gained was tangible and widely reinforced by society: status, something we all crave. It was not some subjective thing dependent on deep conviction. I think we still have that type of courage in our society. It’s rare, indeed, but not impossible to find. And while it does not manifest itself in people going to war, it shows up in those who take risks to pursue ideas with low probability of success but huge upside in terms of status. If you follow me, you probably recognize that I am talking about the world of start-up founders. Quitting your cushy job to pursue the life of a founder requires a lot of courage, with a lot of comfort to lose, but also with the promise of very tangible rewards for success. Our start-up founders are the warriors and kings of old.

What we do lack though is courage that has low potential upside: that is, not much to be gained from it. And I am increasingly convinced this type of courage has always been even more rare than the high potential upside type. It requires one to not only have high risk tolerance, but also ignore one’s self-interest — two traits are already rare to begin with, and even rarer together. It requires one to be a sort of Joan of Arc of intellectual life.

Being intellectually honest about a topic your academic (or journalistic, or any other type of intellectual) colleagues disagree with falls into the low potential upside courage bracket. There is stuff to be lost but relatively little to be gained. What’s worse, you will most likely not even be awarded the dignity of being openly cancelled: most likely, your career will become a bit shittier with each open disagreement you have, a dreary slog you cannot even wear as a badge of honour. You’ll become that which most ambitious people fear the most: a no-name. And you won’t even be able to tell where this comes from, to point to a culprit. If you are even a tiny bit ambitious the calculus is clear: shut up and agree. You need to be a bit mad to do it.

This makes me think that if we want more intellectual courage we cannot just assume it will spontaneously emerge from nothing. We need to actively incentivize it and nurture it, to nudge towards it looking more like the “high potential upside” type of courage. The question is: how?