Carragee Consulting

An ode to Brian Christian and reflection on Jonathan Boymal’s review

I loved this book so much I emailed the author directly to tell him!

By far the most fulfilling part of rejoining LinkedIn about 18 months ago has been the opportunity to engage with intellectuals and have an exchange of ideas and exposure to their reading lists.

Beyond the comments section of an article published from a syndicated source, LinkedIn is a medium which encourages the author and audience to become directly familiar with one another in a way I imagine the enlightenment intellectuals would have felt quite familiar with.

When my dad passed away in 2011 one of the deepest voids I felt from losing him was the discontinuation of our years of debates on variety of topics. We used to email articles back and forth and he’d find brilliant quotes or poetry to make his points sussinctly. He was able to thread concepts together across disciplines, bringing evolutionary biology into business or linguistics into politics.

In the absence of one person who influenced a big portion of my weltanschauung I’ve spent the last 12 years cultivating relationships, reading and now even writing to contribute to other’s thinking.

Often, we are faced with some of the downsides of democratizing communications broad reach – e.g. the rise of demagogues and the rapid spread of misinformation.

Perhaps even more significant to our daily emotional well being our posts sometimes get responses from vicious and malicious readers who we’ve let into our lives, unfiltered in the hopes that on balance the exchange of ideas and words will enrich our lives.

I find it’s usually easier to curate a positive circle of influence in person — choosing a climbing partner or my child’s daycare — but those are highly intentional decisions that are focused on achieving a predictably high quality outcome. For many of the smaller influences in our lives an element of randomness is desirable to keep exploring and retaining the possibility of uncovering a connection or an idea more brilliant than all the rest of our past experiences lets us envision.

Brian Christian introduced me to the thought framework of the Explore/Exploit optimizations and now I see them everywhere. Choosing to double down on reading everything by your favorite author is almost certainly a rational exploit decision, but it does come at an opportunity cost.