14 ms·

Moral Competence

297 points by flaque 6y ago

jan_Inkepa 6y ago
I wish he related it to the product(s) in question, how it changed from before to after, and maybe say if there's 'good' being done with the new, more morally-neutral, product. Reading their documentation of both projects, it's not clear how they relate to each other. It went from an app that doesn't seem like it'd need a multi-player infrastructure (some kind of CBT self-help app) to a library for multiplayer apps? It seems less like a pivot and more like a full startover.
- peter_l_downs 6y ago
  Agreed - my guess is probably making money and donating it, as 80k hours recommends.
- flaque 6y ago
  > It seems less like a pivot and more like a full startover. This is a pretty good description of what we did. The path went something like CBT Journal => Regular Journal => Notion Clone => Notion Clone with an API => API for "Notion Features" => Real time collaboration as a service, within the course of a month or so.
  - spIrr 6y ago
    This is really insightful - thanks for sharing that path! And good for you for not sticking to the sunk cost fallacy through the pivots.
- strofcon 6y ago
  I think they're using the "3P" version of "pivot", as in "Pause, Pivot, or Persevere". Pivot definitely seems to soft a word to describe what is, generally, exactly what you said - a full startover. At least, in the context of a startup. But then I dunno what other "P" word would work, and heaven forbid we break the catch alliteration... :-)
nerdponx 6y ago
A related concept/tool is Theory of Change: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change An organization that intends to "help people" or "make a difference" needs to specify how it plans to do so, how it defines change in the first place, and how it plans to measure change.
jzemeocala 6y ago
If you do something right; no one can tell if you've done anything at all - Futurama
- inakarmacoma 6y ago
  If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
russnewcomer 6y ago
I have been thinking about this basic idea a bit, trying to reason how to design durable institutions that can help function as crisis mitigation organizations while also working on problems in a community, or put in terms of the article, how to structure an institution that is morally competent. One problem to this is that many institution that have a morally competent start soon struggle with many of the problems that plague institutions, things like nepotism, political players attempting to coopt the organization for their own good, institutional survival over problem solving, and the like. While these problems can be mitigated by strong boards of directions who adhere to a larger mission, I think the better idea is to have many small organizations that promote problem solving while being part of a larger network that has the goal of solving the problem, and hope that the morally competent people can be spread about the network enough to encourage the solving of the problem, instead of the working on the problem.
aerovistae 6y ago
Fantastic essay. Articulates a thought I've long (in some oblique sense) had but never found the words for. I hope this term enters the mainstream, because I find the mere fact of there being a term for something helps to anchor the concept in society's mind and help them to be mindful of it. Because we have a term for the Dunning-Kruger effect, we know to be aware of it, etc. Of course only a small selection of society (the sort that like reading and digesting concepts) ever learn these terms, but that slice of society is very high-impact and arguably the most important slice for where such concepts need to take hold.
- yrimaxi 6y ago
  > Because we have a term for the Dunning-Kruger effect, we know to be aware of it, etc. Or rather, we are more accutely aware of how everyone else might suffer from it.
yboris 6y ago
If helping people is something you're interested in, please read about Effective Altruism and consider joining in! [0] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
- yrimaxi 6y ago
  No wonder Singer didn’t end up liking Marx. EA is the most alienating code of ethics that I’ve seen.
  - yboris 6y ago
    What's alienating about EA for you?
    - yrimaxi 6y ago
      A scenario: you want to help people. You have the opportunity to get a very well-paying job on Wall Street (finance or whatever). You reckon that you would optimize your good-output by working more rather than helping directly (you don’t have the skills or know-how to help directly, you also reckon). So you get a well-paying job, work 60 hours a week in order to earn more money and advance your career, live frugally and donate 70% of your income to charity. At this point you are spent: you cannot do more good than working those hours without burning out and thus hurting your career long-term. Now you are alienated from your charity: your work in finance indirectly helps other people, but you have no way of experiencing or connecting to that other than looking at statistics and numbers; the lifeworld of your charitable work is just some numbers that you get every quarter from the various charities that you donate to. You have no direct involvement in them.
      - IHLayman 6y ago
        That is the point though... would you rather “feel good” doing charity, or have a positive effect on society? Donating cash instead of physically participating in charity can be alienating, sure... but certainly more effective. Note that many food charities for decades now but even in the past year are like don’t send cans of food, send cash, because it has the most effect.
motohagiography 6y ago
Thought this was going to be about how competence is a moral virtue, which is a more common use of the phrase. However, if you aren't helping anyone, you aren't doing any good, so it's tangentially related.
waynesonfire 6y ago
this was hard to read nothing of substance. the author is defining terms to attempt some philosophical justification for their pivot and falls flat. good for you, one of many.
hodgesrm 6y ago
Great essay. The key is to judge yourself on visible outcomes that make the world better for others rather than progress metrics like delivering releases, passing laws, holding conferences, etc.
draw_down 6y ago
This is really an amazing point, though unfortunately couched in the world of startups. Thanks for posting!
gnarbarian 6y ago
With the exception of regressive products like drugs and junk food, making a profit from a product or service is a good sign that you are helping people and improving their lives. Otherwise they wouldn't pay you for it. You've hit on the reason why capitalism has successfully raised billions out of poverty over the last century.
- yrimaxi 6y ago
  What about bananas? Referring to banana republics.
  - gnarbarian 6y ago
    Without competition it's easy to end up in a situation where a monopoly can accrue too much power and exploit their customers or their workforce. With sufficient economic freedom competition can arise naturally. Unfortunately when a company becomes very powerful You will start to see behaviors like rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and cronyism. These artificially raise the barriers to entry for plucky startups. This is more a reflection of poor or corrupt governance than capitalism though.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- thundergolfer 6y ago
  So if I gain a monopoly on a nation's water supply, and then charge the population exorbitant but enormously profitable prices for a litre of water, I must be "helping people and improving their lives" because without my activities they'd literally die? Water certainly can't be in the category of "regressive products". People paying someone for things they need isn't an indication that the seller is a moral/ethical actor. It's just an indication that they own valuable goods, and ownership has really nothing to do with personal ethics, unless you subscribe to a seriously flawed ethical belief system like Prosperity Theology.
  - 6y ago
rriepe 6y ago
Markets force you to this conclusion, which is why governments are so morally incompetent.
hectorlorenzo 6y ago
I'm unsure I've understood the premise: does it all boil down to "the morally incompetent considers problems as personal challenges, while the morally competent considers them as a societal responsibility" (which of course it includes him/herself)?
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  My reading was: - the "morally incompetent" views working on a societal problem as "good thing" - the "morally competent" views solving a societal problem as "good thing" i.e. success at solving the problem is important.
a-dub 6y ago
i believe this is not specific to social good, but instead is an implicit trait in human nature. an excellent piece was run by the wapo recently that examined this very issue within the us cdc in the early days of the pandemic. other countries turned around testing programs in short order based on the specific testing methodology distributed by the who, where the us cdc wasted 41 precious days trying to improve on it. where it gets interesting is trying to tease out where it went wrong. is it simple vanity? do people feel obligated to live up to some standard created by the environment they operate within? is good enough ignored in light of exceptionalism? where does that come from and how do you (and should you) dispel it? https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/cdc-covid/2020/12/25/c2b418ae-4206-11eb-8db8-395dedaaa036_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/cdc-covid/2020...
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  > is good enough ignored in light of exceptionalism? I think this is the larger issue. The FDA/CDC standards seem way too high, hindering provably useful solutions, and are actively harmful especially in the context of a fast-moving crisis. Watch Lex Fridman interview Michael Mina about cheap rapid testing that's not available because of regulatory roadblocks. It's an infuriating listen. But not only is it a very real substantive issue, it's a characteristic issue of the academic/expert institutional class. An obsession with the theoretical that ignores pragmatic reality. These are the experts that suggest a plan that requires 100% compliance and works against every human instinct. That's intelligent? It's a group of people divorced from the experience of average people. E.g. all these advisors forcing everyone into isolation but breaking the rules for themselves and their own family (look at Birx, Newsom, etc., the list is horrendously long).
  - a-dub 6y ago
    i think the ivory tower argument is related but somewhat separate. i think in the cdc case, you have scientists of status who feel compelled to justify their status and in doing so they skipped over simpler solutions. in the OP case, you have people chasing status perhaps at the detriment to their stated goal. i think there may also be a flavor of this in the vaccine race. there are tried and proven vaccine technologies but it seems most of the attention is going to the more experimental (and difficult to deliver!) approach that has potential nobel prizes and wall st upside tied to it.
piazz 6y ago
Jeez, this strikes me as such an unnecessarily harsh and critical self analysis. The biggest issue I have with this take is that the author's distinction between moral "competence" and "incompetence", from what I've read, doesn't really have anything to do with a moral or ethical system. It seems like his morally incompetent have admirable moral intentions (help depressed people with CBT), but suffer basically from implementation failures. They don't know how to help effectively, and are taking all of wrong lessons from working in tech (searching for direct & measurable impact, searching for technological solutions etc) and could probably be gently taught how to help more effectively. Dividing the world of people who want to help into binary 'competent' and 'incompetent' groups will just serve to discourage people who want to help but don't know how. I also don't feel like I have a sense of what a 'morally competent person' actually does, or how they design strategies to help effectively. The article feels like a lot of unfortunate self-flagellation for being 'morally incompetent' and not as much constructive dialog about how to actually help better. Edit: To OP - maybe there is a perspective where you don't have to be so down on yourself here? Maybe this idea 'failed' from a cashflow & user acquisition perspective, but if it helped all of the people who downloaded and used the app, didn't you do good in the world? Maybe you didn't do good at billion dollar scale, but does that matter if you improved people's lives?
- gopalv 6y ago
  > The article feels like a lot of unfortunate self-flagellation for being 'morally incompetent' That's an acceptable thing to do for catharsis, but not so much fun when your diary entry lands on hacker news. The problem is that the person reading the blog (like me), reads it in our own voice and the division between "working to cure cancer" vs "curing cancer" seems to be one of consequence not intention or effort (merely "wanting to" is weird). Because being congratulated for trying-so-hard sucks, when you know you are failing instead. So much harder on your ego to tell people "I can't do this", while they're patting your back for almost doing it. Or maybe, I read it like that because as a parent of a newborn + working from home, I'm going through this somewhat. I read the "morally incompetent" as just short hand for "not being honest about current state of mind". But y'know what, that sort of honesty can kill things because everyone who succeeded knows the dark times where everything seems hopeless until something out of your control drops in to give you a push forward. To broadcast "I don't have it in me" usually prevents such serendipity.
sweetheart 6y ago
Why such an extreme dichotomy between the morally competent and morally incompetent? The article makes it seem like have an ego _at all_ makes one morally incompetent. We can genuinely strive to help, and we can also want to glean an egotistical sense of self-worth/importance at the same time. I think that one is morally incompetent when they _only_ strive to advance themselves through acts of kindness/helping, or when their shallow act of do-gooding harms those who need help more than it helps them. But certainly we should be allowed to like helping because we feel good about ourselves, right?
strofcon 6y ago
This is a weird one for me... It's odd that we're proxying competency by way of intent. Would it make more sense to consider the actual actions of individuals? If I work on a problem with the intention to solve it, I've done both, and thus (by this essay) am competent for my intent to solve the problem, but also incompetent for my intent to _work_ on solving the problem. I don't know that I entirely disagree with the author's core points, but I don't think this was a very effective piece. Mostly because I have to take a wild guess at what those core points might be, and then try to tease them out myself.
gregw2 6y ago
The author casts this in moral terms which is useful in grabbing attention (moral competence vs moral incompetence!), but I'm not sure how those two labels and concepts as he describes them are any different than the neither-moral-nor-immoral standard management practice of trying to focus oneself and others on outcomes rather than effort. I am not sure "moral" is truly the right word for what the author is discussing... morality is not just about the outcome, it's about what you are aiming for. If you aim for the wrong thing, that is a moral failure, moral incompetence if you will. But that is not what the author is talking about. True, it is good to be effective and obtain a desired outcome, particularly one that you or others think is good, but I'd point out that this "moral competence" and what another early poster mentioned, "effective altruism", are not that dissimilar from earlier concepts and discussions of ... "wisdom".
gipp 6y ago
The author is making a fantastically insightful point that more people need to understand, but the whole thing is ruined by the strange choice to use a massively loaded and judgmental term like "morally incompetent". I know it's cast as self analysis and so is supposed to be somewhat self-effacing, but it also means that folks who really need to hear it won't.
- musingsole 6y ago
  Personally, I love the judgmental tone of 'morally incompetent'. It's what the term needs. Those behaving in morally incompetent systems deserve some judgment. They may deserve a pat on the back for their efforts, but just because you're pursuing a feel-good dream doesn't mean you get to ignore the reality around you. I've seen nonprofits ruined by such mindsets. Working on the mission at all is the moral component. Being effective, neutral or making things worse through naivety is the competency component that needs to be weighed in any effort -- regardless of the effort's moral imperative.
stakkur 6y ago
A bit harsh, but the explanations of the 'morally incompetent' remind me of a great article I read a few years ago, titled The Reductive Seduction of Other People's Problems: https://brightthemag.com/the-reductive-seduction-of-other-people-s-problems-3c07b307732d https://brightthemag.com/the-reductive-seduction-of-other-pe...
xyzelement 6y ago
Competence and practicality are severally underrated among many people who believe they are doing good. This belief seems to often short circuit critical thinking and the person ends up diminishing their impact or having an adverse effect. Examples: Habitat for humanity - for the cost of sending one incompetent american to build a house in the third world, an army of local builders can be hired. If you really want to make impact, donate rather than going in person. Talented and capable people who end up working low impact non profit jobs at low pay. If you had a real job and donated half your income to the cause, both you and the cause would be better off. Stupid advocacy. People who get excited about feel good slogans like "cancel rent" without considering impact on the medium and long term supply of housing, and thus end up amplifying the problem they believe they are fixing. These are just a few examples where not doing the seemingly good/moral thing can be much better than doing it.
- jsmith99 6y ago
  The perfect is the enemy of the good. Many of these charities are technically irrational but realistically people are likely not to get involved at all otherwise. For example, many people donate food to collection bins for food banks, despite the food banks being able to buy food wholesale for a tiny fraction of the price. Being aware of this I smugly refrain from donating overpriced retail food but I haven't yet gotten round to actually sending them some cash yet instead and I suppose not many other have either.
  - thimkerbell 6y ago
    What % of the calories that food banks buy are junk food?
- nmca 6y ago
  I think this analysis is a bit oversimplified. If your goal is to build houses, then local labour is clearly better. But if it's to recruit lifetime donors, then perhaps shipping out incompetent (but fabulously wealthy) Americans is the way forward. Similarly for advocacy, our model should perhaps be that seemingly extreme proposals serve to stretch the Overton window before the middle-ground wins out. Naively disregarding approaches that don't myopically optimise for first-order impact seems likely to have harmful reprocussions. That said, lots of donations are deeply ineffective, and if you want to prioritize I'd suggest the excellent guides from https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ , who reach many of the same conclusions as you do, after more detailed reasoning.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
> Last year, we pivoted our YC startup from a socially-good mental health product (Quirk), towards a socially-neutral software infrastructure product > It's more important [...] to improve mental health than to be working on improving mental health. How is this pivot effective? How is it improving mental health?
anonyfox 6y ago
Isn‘t this just the typical oscillation from virtue ethics (mindset is most important) to consequentialism (results are most important) and sometimes deontological ethics (acting itself is most important). This seems to swing like a pendulum every few decades into the „mainstream“. Depending on how/where/when you grew up, one of these is your „moral compass“ (which lead to preferential world views like individualism, utilitarism, ...). This „moral compass“ often changes over time and your own kids will probably have a different starting point. „Moral“ is just an ordered set of values that feels „obvious“ or „innate“ to you, but other people (especially from different ethical axioms, see the three above) have other ordered sets. All of them have their downsides and have been en vogue since Aristoteles, still societies (or political parties) basically argue over the exact same stuff for millenia without any progress whatsoever. Why the long intro? I basically consider the concept or even discussion about „moral“, especially „which would be better“ not only pointless but actually harmful. (not a perfect analogy: asking „what was before the (original) big bang“ makes no sense assuming our concept of time started with the big bang. But this question probably killed/tortured less people in history than confrontations resulting from conflicting sets of moral values). Escape hatch from here? Nietzsche actually saw that coming, dont just stay at nihilism/absurdism but maybe read „beyond good and evil“... :)
- xikrib 6y ago
  Part of the "trap" is implicit assumption of the subject / object distinction, which we are stuck with so long as we use language to think and communicate. But all human expression is generated from an initial non-verbal intention. So I think "trying to do good" is actually fundamentally important, because it's the precursor to good things happening
curiousllama 6y ago
I love the idea, but competence isn't the right word here. Competence doesn't have an intrinsic ethical dimension. It's not unethical to sincerely try and fail, while the author does ascribe a pretty clear ethical dimension to moral incompetence. I think humility is the better idea here. The examples of moral incompetence all center around egoism. Moral competence seems to follow from removing oneself and focusing on outcomes over personal validation. It's a call for helpers to serve and be humble. I've had this thought before many times. Having gone down this path a bit, I would caution the author: deciding "I'm going to solve a big problem" is at once incredibly important (to get to the solution) and deeply arrogant (what, _you're_ gonna solve poverty?). Don't let the necessity for arrogance get in the way of your willingness to do good.
- scrozier 6y ago
  I think you're on to something, but "humility" doesn't seem to quite get at it. Maybe "focus"? It seems that the author is saying that to be moral and morally effective, one needs to be ends-focused, as opposed to means-focused. IOW, if a morally focused person hears of a way to provide the same results that they are, at half the cost, they should rush to implement that method, or join that effort. A means-focused person might tend to recruit more people or money to their cause, seeing the better method as competition.
  - flaque 6y ago
    Focus is exactly the word and tone I was looking for.
- dgb23 6y ago
  > Don't let the necessity for arrogance get in the way of your willingness to do good. I like this! Though there are other ways to describe the state of mind necessary. For example "crazy" and "naive" are used this way often. Typically, to advance in drastic ways, one has to break out of the mold, think outside of the box, dream big... Essentially act abnormal in some way. Most of these attempts fail, the few that succeed are worth it all, because without outliers things can't change and ultimately progress.
- 6y ago
JoshTko 6y ago
Travelling to Haiti to building homes on the surface may seem like a very inefficient way to build homes, however perhaps the experience helps them truly understand the local needs and come up with a much more efficient solution. At the very least they could become a lifetime advocate that donates to more efficient programs.
- erosenbe0 6y ago
  You are entirely correct that this is helpful. But you don't need to go to Haiti. 3000 W. Madison in Chicago is two miles from the nation's second most important financial district and it is still burned out exactly as it was three days after Dr. King was assassinated. OP's use of the term incompetence is correct. It certainly rises to that level when kids in Cambridge, MA and their senator think 50k student loan forgiveness is somehow progressive and moral. I mean compare the per capita benefit in Cambridge to that block of Chicago or to rural WV, MS, or some Reservations.
themacguffinman 6y ago
However sound your epistemology may be, this feels like unhelpful gatekeeping. Saying a one line disclaimer "That doesn't mean that trying to help people is bad" falls flat when you spend the entire article constructing a special category of personal failure for people who fail to effect change: "moral incompetence". This doesn't help anyone learn anything except that apparently if you fail, it might be because you didn't actually care about succeeding in the first place! Your failure likely involved concrete issues that can be learned from and changed, chalking it up to "oh well it turns out I was the problem" is an unproductive take-away and only serves to discourage people who can't or won't have the right intentions as you define them. Let's leave the mental purity tests aside, modern society works because people have the space & incentive to do good regardless of their intention.
neilk 6y ago
I'm glad you recognized that your business model (VC-backed startup) wasn't compatible with your goals. For-profit health has a lot of the same issues, from top to bottom. But it seem like you built something that did good for some users. I see you've open sourced it, but did you consider pivoting the business model instead, to a non-profit or delivering the app through therapists and health providers? Therapists have the same incentives, and yet they seem to make a business of it. They are happy when clients don't need them any more.
sb1752 6y ago
The term competence seems to be throwing people off, which I can understand but I think the point here is very insightful. It's important to separate those with a hero complex from those that are more morally sincere. Greater moral sincerity means you're more concerned with solving the problem than being the one to solve the problem. It's not about you, it's about the problem and seeing it solved. I think this is an especially relevant point in today's culture.
antonzabirko 6y ago
This article is wrong. Moral good comes from moral incompetence as much as competence (as per the author's definitions) because morality is intention, not result.
legerdemain 6y ago
If I can read between the lines: 1. Start a "socially-good mental health product." 2. Pivot to a completely unrelated, non-"socially good" product. 3. Write an essay to defend your decision to pivot by describing it as the act of a "morally competent person."
tunesmith 6y ago
I've thought about this in terms of heroes and helpers, how we often have a hero worship problem in society and jobs, and how it's usually better to try instead to be a helper rather than a hero.
currymj 6y ago
i tend to think that the approach here described as "incompetent" isn't necessarily bad as long as you maintain honesty about it. for instance, it might be more effective to just donate money but there's nothing wrong with wanting to volunteer hands on, as long as you don't fool yourself. of course from a very, very strict utilitarian perspective, making a somewhat less effective choice is in fact morally evil. but I don't think that viewpoint actually holds up to scrutiny -- few people would agree that volunteering at a food bank rather than donating money is morally equivalent to taking food away from hungry children.
ajb 6y ago
What is most interesting to me is that the business model he rejected[1] is not just the one of his app, but essentially the one used by almost all therapists. [1] https://github.com/Flaque/quirk https://github.com/Flaque/quirk: "Unfortunately, in order for the business to work and for us to pay ourselves, we needed folks to be subscribed for a fair amount of time. But that wasn't the case and we honestly should have predicted it given my own experience: as people did better, they unsubscribed. Unfortunately, the opposite was true as well, if folks weren't doing better, but were giving it a good shot, they would stay subscribed longer. So in order to continue Quirk, a future Quirk would need to make people feel worse for longer, or otherwise not help the people we signed up to help. If the incentives of the business weren't aligned with the people, it would have been naive to assume that we could easily fix it as the organization grew. We didn't want to go down that path, so we pivoted the company."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- flaque 6y ago
  Not at all! Therapists make more in a single session than a consumer subscription app would in an entire year, and they're limited to the amount a single therapist can accomplish. Most therapists have an entirely booked schedule; they don't have nearly the incentive to keep people longer that mobile apps do. They literally cannot handle more clients, so from a business perspective, they're much better off helping people, getting good reviews, and then charging more for the limited time they have.
  - ajb 6y ago
    Although you are probably right that the situation is worse for apps, in my experience the incentive of actual therapists is still sufficient to prevent them admitting that their client would be better served elsewhere. Limited sample size, of course.
  - jimkleiber 6y ago
    I really appreciate you openly talking about these struggles. I built an app back in 2012 called iFeelio for emotional micro-journaling and one of the goals I set for it was for me (and then others) to get better at expressing how I felt so I didn't have to use the app anymore. As you expressed on Quirk's Github readme, that doesn't jive with a subscription-based model: if people improve, they stop paying. I also didn't want to make the app addictive, another thing that seems to clash with the subscription model. One thing I contemplated but didn't have the courage to do was to charge a very high initial price to use the app. It was on Android at the time and I wanted to charge the max price, which I think was like ~$200, to download the app, one time. Did you think about doing something similar? What alternatives did you contemplate to the subscription model? Is there a way to price it with an anticipated 3-month retention or other time-limited retention? Would love to hear any thoughts you have on this!
protomyth 6y ago
If you want to do good, you actually have to help people. Yep. Its a hard thing to look at the actual data coming out of something and see your good idea didn't translate into actually fixing a problem. Sadly, a lot of people, particularly in government, would rather die on that hill instead of moving on. There is a fine line to walk though. Just because you didn't fix everything doesn't mean chuck it all in the trash. Being able to see the positives is important and will help with refining your strategy.
yters 6y ago
One reason may be that there is sort of an existential question hanging at the edge of moral actions, namely does anything really matter? Moral action is the epitome of the belief that at least something matters, and matters a whole lot. And perhaps it is precisely through moral action that we get an experiential understanding of moral value. So, if through 'moral competence' we disengage from moral action, then we may lose the very reason we seek to make a moral difference in the first place.
Arete314159 6y ago
I'd summarize his essay by saying that true service is about doing what's best for the situation, regardless of ego, while shiny silicon valley "service" is about getting paid in praise and adulation rather than the usual currency, money. When you're doing real service it's usually largely thankless, anonymous for a good long while, and you work really hard and maybe move things 1 millimeter towards the goal. If you're traveling around doing photo-op's, then except in rare cases (like, you're a celebrity bringing attention to an under-recognized problem), you're not doing the right work.
tylermenezes 6y ago
> The signature move of the morally incompetent is to be told about existing solutions that they were previously unaware of and then soldier on without any critical examination of any added value they're providing. Others working on the problem are ignored entirely or seen as a threat to their own solution. Really hit the nail on the head for the non-profit industry (of which I am a part). A lot of non-profit leaders are totally insufferable because they take anything less than fawning over them to be an attack on their identity as savior. You get some of these people everywhere, of course, but there's a way higher concentration in non-profits.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
I like this a lot more than I expected to. A lot of social ills are rooted in "The world doesn't work." And then we try to find the right feel-good pill or the right talk therapy when what we really need is a jobs program or a bridge or store that sells a thing that works and if you come up with a real solution, no one will connect the dots and say "Homelessness is down because someone built a better mousetrap." Instead they will turn their baleful eye to the latest earthquake or the latest revolt or the latest political drama and continue to complain that the world is broken. Doing things super well is hard. Heroics make headlines and headlines have something of a tendency to actively interfere with problem solving. Problem solving tends to be done quietly at your desk, in your lab, in some back room and people who love good press tend to be better at playing to the crowd than at actually solving anything. If you want to make the world a better place, make a business that solves a real problem and be decent in how you deal with people. Don't be a hero. Don't focus so much on the social and emotional stuff. Build a better widget instead and build it with an awareness of the social and emotional stuff and a sensitivity to the current state of the world which is always high drama and lots of pain points. Doing anything well is really hard. There are lots of ways to do things badly while getting lauded for it in certain circles.
ggm 6y ago
Hella pivot.
tonymet 6y ago
I've done many charities, and noticed that most of the people are very caring but not very competent. I'll share an example A group of 50 of us were planting young trees from seedlings which looked like weeds. First step was to remove weeds, second was to dig the hole, third was planting the seedlings. One group removed the weeds, another dug the hole, another planted the seedlings, and another removed the seedlings thinking they were the weeds. In the end we drank a lot of bottled water, ate snacks, made a lot of trash, and very few if any trees were planted. I think if the dozens of us just donated a few bucks, hundreds if not thousands of trees would have been planted by 5 competent people.
indymike 6y ago
Entrepreneurs, and not just those doing things for social benefit, often find themselves in a situation where they are doing things, but not delivering value. Some of it is because they are building something new and don't know if the value is there, sometimes the solution just doesn't work correctly... yet. The problem all entrepreneurs have is knowing when to stop working on a dead end. There's a line between business failure and Theranos like fraud. Realizing you are crossing it is really hard.
whistlerbrk 6y ago
This reminds me of the concept of "karuna" in Bhuddism. To me what the author is discussing is the difference between the direction translation of the word, often taken as "compassion" vs. the intention to seek truth and deeply act upon it. What Jay Garfield (Smith College) referred to as "sloppy sympathy" is what I think the author here is referring to as moral incompetence.
SebastianFrelle 6y ago
I exchanged some 20 e-mails with Evan over the course of just 2 hours over an unfortunate bug with Quirk that nearly cost me everything I'd entered into the app up until that point. This was some 18 months ago. He struck me as absolutely forthcoming and genuine. He fixed the issue and gave me a year's subscription for free for reporting the bug and helping him figuring it out. I really wish Evan wouldn't be so hard on himself. His product actually helped me a lot, and he seemed to me like he was both empathetically capable and morally competent.
rendall 6y ago
I liked the disclaimer/preamble because it really did help me to read it as kinder and less harsh than I would have. I would like to know what, specifically, led to this insight. Not generalized "people who..." description, but how Quirk itself was an example of moral incompetence
nojvek 6y ago
I saying I like to say is “outcomes, not effort”. It’s so easy to chase busy work that feels like real work, get praised to be in meetings, write fancy docs, ship code, fight self inflicted incidents, work late nights and weekends. The thing that ultimately matters is adding value to customers. Understanding what they want to get done and removing enough friction that they’d rather pay to your product than go to a competitor or do it themselves. Surely docs and meetings are necessary but you have to ask yourself “how does this add value to the customer? Can we have avoided this and still achieved the same outcome?” Ask that week over week. I spent 2 years of my life working insanely hard but at the end, customers didn’t really get value out of it and it was a dud. Then I spent another 6 months deprecating and killing the feature. It was a very hard lesson.
imtringued 6y ago
There have been a lot of "water from air" dehumidifier projects that basically amount to scams whether intentional or not. No, people in arid locations have water problems, precisely because there is not enough water in the air. Nature already built a large scale dehumidifier called rain. They only reason these "projects" are done is because they appear to be directly producing the solution (water in this case) without having to fix the underlying problem. The most perverse thing about them is that they never work out in the end. It's just a money pit and conversation starter. The reason why even the poorest members of first world nations are wealthy relative to developing countries is because of infrastructure. Without roads, schools, electricity and internet we would be doing just as badly as them. Imagine living without indoor lighting. We take so many easy things for granted. Everyone benefits from infrastructure. It doesn't matter if you are poor or rich. But that's the crux. People only want to help the poor. Once they cease to be poor nobody wants to help anymore but how is that supposed to work? If you remove support too early those people will fall back to poverty. It becomes a privately funded welfare trap in the end.
fpig 6y ago
When I click on a website and the first thing I see is a claim that, by using their product, I can build something in 15 minutes, I consider that company socially negative, not socially neutral. I don't have a problem with the article itself, but this kind of stuff is really annoying. Instead of making me think "Wow!! How??" it just made me think your product is useless garbage and close the page.
tpoacher 6y ago
This sounds very similar to the Shirky principle: “Institutions will inevitably act in a way that preserves the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky (PS: thanks Doreen for introducing me to it!)
helloSam43 6y ago
Are you kidding? Habitat builds in the US - local people helping others in their same town to build a house. It's an Amish barn raising for our disconnected atomized individualistic society.
gitowiec 6y ago
So if I properly understood this article, Bill and Melinda Gates are morally incompetent?
lcall 6y ago
In case it's useful: one site to find local volunteer opp'ties, or for orgs to post them is https://justserve.org https://justserve.org . No fees, I believe.

297 points by flaque 6y ago

I wish he related it to the product(s) in question, how it changed from before to after, and maybe say if there's 'good' being done with the new, more morally-neutral, product. Reading their documentation of both projects, it's not clear how they relate to each other. It went from an app that doesn't seem like it'd need a multi-player infrastructure (some kind of CBT self-help app) to a library for multiplayer apps? It seems less like a pivot and more like a full startover.

peter_l_downs 6y ago
Agreed - my guess is probably making money and donating it, as 80k hours recommends.
flaque 6y ago
> It seems less like a pivot and more like a full startover. This is a pretty good description of what we did. The path went something like CBT Journal => Regular Journal => Notion Clone => Notion Clone with an API => API for "Notion Features" => Real time collaboration as a service, within the course of a month or so.
- spIrr 6y ago
  This is really insightful - thanks for sharing that path! And good for you for not sticking to the sunk cost fallacy through the pivots.
strofcon 6y ago
I think they're using the "3P" version of "pivot", as in "Pause, Pivot, or Persevere". Pivot definitely seems to soft a word to describe what is, generally, exactly what you said - a full startover. At least, in the context of a startup. But then I dunno what other "P" word would work, and heaven forbid we break the catch alliteration... :-)

nerdponx 6y ago

A related concept/tool is Theory of Change: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change An organization that intends to "help people" or "make a difference" needs to specify how it plans to do so, how it defines change in the first place, and how it plans to measure change.

jzemeocala 6y ago

If you do something right; no one can tell if you've done anything at all - Futurama

inakarmacoma 6y ago
If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.

russnewcomer 6y ago

I have been thinking about this basic idea a bit, trying to reason how to design durable institutions that can help function as crisis mitigation organizations while also working on problems in a community, or put in terms of the article, how to structure an institution that is morally competent. One problem to this is that many institution that have a morally competent start soon struggle with many of the problems that plague institutions, things like nepotism, political players attempting to coopt the organization for their own good, institutional survival over problem solving, and the like. While these problems can be mitigated by strong boards of directions who adhere to a larger mission, I think the better idea is to have many small organizations that promote problem solving while being part of a larger network that has the goal of solving the problem, and hope that the morally competent people can be spread about the network enough to encourage the solving of the problem, instead of the working on the problem.

aerovistae 6y ago

Fantastic essay. Articulates a thought I've long (in some oblique sense) had but never found the words for. I hope this term enters the mainstream, because I find the mere fact of there being a term for something helps to anchor the concept in society's mind and help them to be mindful of it. Because we have a term for the Dunning-Kruger effect, we know to be aware of it, etc. Of course only a small selection of society (the sort that like reading and digesting concepts) ever learn these terms, but that slice of society is very high-impact and arguably the most important slice for where such concepts need to take hold.

yrimaxi 6y ago
> Because we have a term for the Dunning-Kruger effect, we know to be aware of it, etc. Or rather, we are more accutely aware of how everyone else might suffer from it.

yboris 6y ago

If helping people is something you're interested in, please read about Effective Altruism and consider joining in! [0] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

yrimaxi 6y ago
No wonder Singer didn’t end up liking Marx. EA is the most alienating code of ethics that I’ve seen.
- yboris 6y ago
  What's alienating about EA for you?
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    A scenario: you want to help people. You have the opportunity to get a very well-paying job on Wall Street (finance or whatever). You reckon that you would optimize your good-output by working more rather than helping directly (you don’t have the skills or know-how to help directly, you also reckon). So you get a well-paying job, work 60 hours a week in order to earn more money and advance your career, live frugally and donate 70% of your income to charity. At this point you are spent: you cannot do more good than working those hours without burning out and thus hurting your career long-term. Now you are alienated from your charity: your work in finance indirectly helps other people, but you have no way of experiencing or connecting to that other than looking at statistics and numbers; the lifeworld of your charitable work is just some numbers that you get every quarter from the various charities that you donate to. You have no direct involvement in them.
    - IHLayman 6y ago
      That is the point though... would you rather “feel good” doing charity, or have a positive effect on society? Donating cash instead of physically participating in charity can be alienating, sure... but certainly more effective. Note that many food charities for decades now but even in the past year are like don’t send cans of food, send cash, because it has the most effect.

motohagiography 6y ago

Thought this was going to be about how competence is a moral virtue, which is a more common use of the phrase. However, if you aren't helping anyone, you aren't doing any good, so it's tangentially related.

waynesonfire 6y ago

this was hard to read nothing of substance. the author is defining terms to attempt some philosophical justification for their pivot and falls flat. good for you, one of many.

hodgesrm 6y ago

Great essay. The key is to judge yourself on visible outcomes that make the world better for others rather than progress metrics like delivering releases, passing laws, holding conferences, etc.

draw_down 6y ago

This is really an amazing point, though unfortunately couched in the world of startups. Thanks for posting!

gnarbarian 6y ago

With the exception of regressive products like drugs and junk food, making a profit from a product or service is a good sign that you are helping people and improving their lives. Otherwise they wouldn't pay you for it. You've hit on the reason why capitalism has successfully raised billions out of poverty over the last century.

yrimaxi 6y ago
What about bananas? Referring to banana republics.
- gnarbarian 6y ago
  Without competition it's easy to end up in a situation where a monopoly can accrue too much power and exploit their customers or their workforce. With sufficient economic freedom competition can arise naturally. Unfortunately when a company becomes very powerful You will start to see behaviors like rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and cronyism. These artificially raise the barriers to entry for plucky startups. This is more a reflection of poor or corrupt governance than capitalism though.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
thundergolfer 6y ago
So if I gain a monopoly on a nation's water supply, and then charge the population exorbitant but enormously profitable prices for a litre of water, I must be "helping people and improving their lives" because without my activities they'd literally die? Water certainly can't be in the category of "regressive products". People paying someone for things they need isn't an indication that the seller is a moral/ethical actor. It's just an indication that they own valuable goods, and ownership has really nothing to do with personal ethics, unless you subscribe to a seriously flawed ethical belief system like Prosperity Theology.
- 6y ago

rriepe 6y ago

Markets force you to this conclusion, which is why governments are so morally incompetent.

hectorlorenzo 6y ago

I'm unsure I've understood the premise: does it all boil down to "the morally incompetent considers problems as personal challenges, while the morally competent considers them as a societal responsibility" (which of course it includes him/herself)?

richardwhiuk 6y ago
My reading was: - the "morally incompetent" views working on a societal problem as "good thing" - the "morally competent" views solving a societal problem as "good thing" i.e. success at solving the problem is important.

a-dub 6y ago

i believe this is not specific to social good, but instead is an implicit trait in human nature. an excellent piece was run by the wapo recently that examined this very issue within the us cdc in the early days of the pandemic. other countries turned around testing programs in short order based on the specific testing methodology distributed by the who, where the us cdc wasted 41 precious days trying to improve on it. where it gets interesting is trying to tease out where it went wrong. is it simple vanity? do people feel obligated to live up to some standard created by the environment they operate within? is good enough ignored in light of exceptionalism? where does that come from and how do you (and should you) dispel it? https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/cdc-covid/2020/12/25/c2b418ae-4206-11eb-8db8-395dedaaa036_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/cdc-covid/2020...

gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
> is good enough ignored in light of exceptionalism? I think this is the larger issue. The FDA/CDC standards seem way too high, hindering provably useful solutions, and are actively harmful especially in the context of a fast-moving crisis. Watch Lex Fridman interview Michael Mina about cheap rapid testing that's not available because of regulatory roadblocks. It's an infuriating listen. But not only is it a very real substantive issue, it's a characteristic issue of the academic/expert institutional class. An obsession with the theoretical that ignores pragmatic reality. These are the experts that suggest a plan that requires 100% compliance and works against every human instinct. That's intelligent? It's a group of people divorced from the experience of average people. E.g. all these advisors forcing everyone into isolation but breaking the rules for themselves and their own family (look at Birx, Newsom, etc., the list is horrendously long).
- a-dub 6y ago
  i think the ivory tower argument is related but somewhat separate. i think in the cdc case, you have scientists of status who feel compelled to justify their status and in doing so they skipped over simpler solutions. in the OP case, you have people chasing status perhaps at the detriment to their stated goal. i think there may also be a flavor of this in the vaccine race. there are tried and proven vaccine technologies but it seems most of the attention is going to the more experimental (and difficult to deliver!) approach that has potential nobel prizes and wall st upside tied to it.

piazz 6y ago

Jeez, this strikes me as such an unnecessarily harsh and critical self analysis. The biggest issue I have with this take is that the author's distinction between moral "competence" and "incompetence", from what I've read, doesn't really have anything to do with a moral or ethical system. It seems like his morally incompetent have admirable moral intentions (help depressed people with CBT), but suffer basically from implementation failures. They don't know how to help effectively, and are taking all of wrong lessons from working in tech (searching for direct & measurable impact, searching for technological solutions etc) and could probably be gently taught how to help more effectively. Dividing the world of people who want to help into binary 'competent' and 'incompetent' groups will just serve to discourage people who want to help but don't know how. I also don't feel like I have a sense of what a 'morally competent person' actually does, or how they design strategies to help effectively. The article feels like a lot of unfortunate self-flagellation for being 'morally incompetent' and not as much constructive dialog about how to actually help better. Edit: To OP - maybe there is a perspective where you don't have to be so down on yourself here? Maybe this idea 'failed' from a cashflow & user acquisition perspective, but if it helped all of the people who downloaded and used the app, didn't you do good in the world? Maybe you didn't do good at billion dollar scale, but does that matter if you improved people's lives?

gopalv 6y ago
> The article feels like a lot of unfortunate self-flagellation for being 'morally incompetent' That's an acceptable thing to do for catharsis, but not so much fun when your diary entry lands on hacker news. The problem is that the person reading the blog (like me), reads it in our own voice and the division between "working to cure cancer" vs "curing cancer" seems to be one of consequence not intention or effort (merely "wanting to" is weird). Because being congratulated for trying-so-hard sucks, when you know you are failing instead. So much harder on your ego to tell people "I can't do this", while they're patting your back for almost doing it. Or maybe, I read it like that because as a parent of a newborn + working from home, I'm going through this somewhat. I read the "morally incompetent" as just short hand for "not being honest about current state of mind". But y'know what, that sort of honesty can kill things because everyone who succeeded knows the dark times where everything seems hopeless until something out of your control drops in to give you a push forward. To broadcast "I don't have it in me" usually prevents such serendipity.

sweetheart 6y ago

Why such an extreme dichotomy between the morally competent and morally incompetent? The article makes it seem like have an ego _at all_ makes one morally incompetent. We can genuinely strive to help, and we can also want to glean an egotistical sense of self-worth/importance at the same time. I think that one is morally incompetent when they _only_ strive to advance themselves through acts of kindness/helping, or when their shallow act of do-gooding harms those who need help more than it helps them. But certainly we should be allowed to like helping because we feel good about ourselves, right?

strofcon 6y ago

This is a weird one for me... It's odd that we're proxying competency by way of intent. Would it make more sense to consider the actual actions of individuals? If I work on a problem with the intention to solve it, I've done both, and thus (by this essay) am competent for my intent to solve the problem, but also incompetent for my intent to _work_ on solving the problem. I don't know that I entirely disagree with the author's core points, but I don't think this was a very effective piece. Mostly because I have to take a wild guess at what those core points might be, and then try to tease them out myself.

gregw2 6y ago

The author casts this in moral terms which is useful in grabbing attention (moral competence vs moral incompetence!), but I'm not sure how those two labels and concepts as he describes them are any different than the neither-moral-nor-immoral standard management practice of trying to focus oneself and others on outcomes rather than effort. I am not sure "moral" is truly the right word for what the author is discussing... morality is not just about the outcome, it's about what you are aiming for. If you aim for the wrong thing, that is a moral failure, moral incompetence if you will. But that is not what the author is talking about. True, it is good to be effective and obtain a desired outcome, particularly one that you or others think is good, but I'd point out that this "moral competence" and what another early poster mentioned, "effective altruism", are not that dissimilar from earlier concepts and discussions of ... "wisdom".

gipp 6y ago

The author is making a fantastically insightful point that more people need to understand, but the whole thing is ruined by the strange choice to use a massively loaded and judgmental term like "morally incompetent". I know it's cast as self analysis and so is supposed to be somewhat self-effacing, but it also means that folks who really need to hear it won't.

musingsole 6y ago
Personally, I love the judgmental tone of 'morally incompetent'. It's what the term needs. Those behaving in morally incompetent systems deserve some judgment. They may deserve a pat on the back for their efforts, but just because you're pursuing a feel-good dream doesn't mean you get to ignore the reality around you. I've seen nonprofits ruined by such mindsets. Working on the mission at all is the moral component. Being effective, neutral or making things worse through naivety is the competency component that needs to be weighed in any effort -- regardless of the effort's moral imperative.

stakkur 6y ago

A bit harsh, but the explanations of the 'morally incompetent' remind me of a great article I read a few years ago, titled The Reductive Seduction of Other People's Problems: https://brightthemag.com/the-reductive-seduction-of-other-people-s-problems-3c07b307732d https://brightthemag.com/the-reductive-seduction-of-other-pe...

xyzelement 6y ago

Competence and practicality are severally underrated among many people who believe they are doing good. This belief seems to often short circuit critical thinking and the person ends up diminishing their impact or having an adverse effect. Examples: Habitat for humanity - for the cost of sending one incompetent american to build a house in the third world, an army of local builders can be hired. If you really want to make impact, donate rather than going in person. Talented and capable people who end up working low impact non profit jobs at low pay. If you had a real job and donated half your income to the cause, both you and the cause would be better off. Stupid advocacy. People who get excited about feel good slogans like "cancel rent" without considering impact on the medium and long term supply of housing, and thus end up amplifying the problem they believe they are fixing. These are just a few examples where not doing the seemingly good/moral thing can be much better than doing it.

jsmith99 6y ago
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Many of these charities are technically irrational but realistically people are likely not to get involved at all otherwise. For example, many people donate food to collection bins for food banks, despite the food banks being able to buy food wholesale for a tiny fraction of the price. Being aware of this I smugly refrain from donating overpriced retail food but I haven't yet gotten round to actually sending them some cash yet instead and I suppose not many other have either.
- thimkerbell 6y ago
  What % of the calories that food banks buy are junk food?
nmca 6y ago
I think this analysis is a bit oversimplified. If your goal is to build houses, then local labour is clearly better. But if it's to recruit lifetime donors, then perhaps shipping out incompetent (but fabulously wealthy) Americans is the way forward. Similarly for advocacy, our model should perhaps be that seemingly extreme proposals serve to stretch the Overton window before the middle-ground wins out. Naively disregarding approaches that don't myopically optimise for first-order impact seems likely to have harmful reprocussions. That said, lots of donations are deeply ineffective, and if you want to prioritize I'd suggest the excellent guides from https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ , who reach many of the same conclusions as you do, after more detailed reasoning.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

> Last year, we pivoted our YC startup from a socially-good mental health product (Quirk), towards a socially-neutral software infrastructure product > It's more important [...] to improve mental health than to be working on improving mental health. How is this pivot effective? How is it improving mental health?

anonyfox 6y ago

Isn‘t this just the typical oscillation from virtue ethics (mindset is most important) to consequentialism (results are most important) and sometimes deontological ethics (acting itself is most important). This seems to swing like a pendulum every few decades into the „mainstream“. Depending on how/where/when you grew up, one of these is your „moral compass“ (which lead to preferential world views like individualism, utilitarism, ...). This „moral compass“ often changes over time and your own kids will probably have a different starting point. „Moral“ is just an ordered set of values that feels „obvious“ or „innate“ to you, but other people (especially from different ethical axioms, see the three above) have other ordered sets. All of them have their downsides and have been en vogue since Aristoteles, still societies (or political parties) basically argue over the exact same stuff for millenia without any progress whatsoever. Why the long intro? I basically consider the concept or even discussion about „moral“, especially „which would be better“ not only pointless but actually harmful. (not a perfect analogy: asking „what was before the (original) big bang“ makes no sense assuming our concept of time started with the big bang. But this question probably killed/tortured less people in history than confrontations resulting from conflicting sets of moral values). Escape hatch from here? Nietzsche actually saw that coming, dont just stay at nihilism/absurdism but maybe read „beyond good and evil“... :)

xikrib 6y ago
Part of the "trap" is implicit assumption of the subject / object distinction, which we are stuck with so long as we use language to think and communicate. But all human expression is generated from an initial non-verbal intention. So I think "trying to do good" is actually fundamentally important, because it's the precursor to good things happening

curiousllama 6y ago

I love the idea, but competence isn't the right word here. Competence doesn't have an intrinsic ethical dimension. It's not unethical to sincerely try and fail, while the author does ascribe a pretty clear ethical dimension to moral incompetence. I think humility is the better idea here. The examples of moral incompetence all center around egoism. Moral competence seems to follow from removing oneself and focusing on outcomes over personal validation. It's a call for helpers to serve and be humble. I've had this thought before many times. Having gone down this path a bit, I would caution the author: deciding "I'm going to solve a big problem" is at once incredibly important (to get to the solution) and deeply arrogant (what, _you're_ gonna solve poverty?). Don't let the necessity for arrogance get in the way of your willingness to do good.

scrozier 6y ago
I think you're on to something, but "humility" doesn't seem to quite get at it. Maybe "focus"? It seems that the author is saying that to be moral and morally effective, one needs to be ends-focused, as opposed to means-focused. IOW, if a morally focused person hears of a way to provide the same results that they are, at half the cost, they should rush to implement that method, or join that effort. A means-focused person might tend to recruit more people or money to their cause, seeing the better method as competition.
- flaque 6y ago
  Focus is exactly the word and tone I was looking for.
dgb23 6y ago
> Don't let the necessity for arrogance get in the way of your willingness to do good. I like this! Though there are other ways to describe the state of mind necessary. For example "crazy" and "naive" are used this way often. Typically, to advance in drastic ways, one has to break out of the mold, think outside of the box, dream big... Essentially act abnormal in some way. Most of these attempts fail, the few that succeed are worth it all, because without outliers things can't change and ultimately progress.
6y ago

JoshTko 6y ago

Travelling to Haiti to building homes on the surface may seem like a very inefficient way to build homes, however perhaps the experience helps them truly understand the local needs and come up with a much more efficient solution. At the very least they could become a lifetime advocate that donates to more efficient programs.

erosenbe0 6y ago
You are entirely correct that this is helpful. But you don't need to go to Haiti. 3000 W. Madison in Chicago is two miles from the nation's second most important financial district and it is still burned out exactly as it was three days after Dr. King was assassinated. OP's use of the term incompetence is correct. It certainly rises to that level when kids in Cambridge, MA and their senator think 50k student loan forgiveness is somehow progressive and moral. I mean compare the per capita benefit in Cambridge to that block of Chicago or to rural WV, MS, or some Reservations.

themacguffinman 6y ago

However sound your epistemology may be, this feels like unhelpful gatekeeping. Saying a one line disclaimer "That doesn't mean that trying to help people is bad" falls flat when you spend the entire article constructing a special category of personal failure for people who fail to effect change: "moral incompetence". This doesn't help anyone learn anything except that apparently if you fail, it might be because you didn't actually care about succeeding in the first place! Your failure likely involved concrete issues that can be learned from and changed, chalking it up to "oh well it turns out I was the problem" is an unproductive take-away and only serves to discourage people who can't or won't have the right intentions as you define them. Let's leave the mental purity tests aside, modern society works because people have the space & incentive to do good regardless of their intention.

neilk 6y ago

I'm glad you recognized that your business model (VC-backed startup) wasn't compatible with your goals. For-profit health has a lot of the same issues, from top to bottom. But it seem like you built something that did good for some users. I see you've open sourced it, but did you consider pivoting the business model instead, to a non-profit or delivering the app through therapists and health providers? Therapists have the same incentives, and yet they seem to make a business of it. They are happy when clients don't need them any more.

sb1752 6y ago

The term competence seems to be throwing people off, which I can understand but I think the point here is very insightful. It's important to separate those with a hero complex from those that are more morally sincere. Greater moral sincerity means you're more concerned with solving the problem than being the one to solve the problem. It's not about you, it's about the problem and seeing it solved. I think this is an especially relevant point in today's culture.

antonzabirko 6y ago

This article is wrong. Moral good comes from moral incompetence as much as competence (as per the author's definitions) because morality is intention, not result.

legerdemain 6y ago

If I can read between the lines: 1. Start a "socially-good mental health product." 2. Pivot to a completely unrelated, non-"socially good" product. 3. Write an essay to defend your decision to pivot by describing it as the act of a "morally competent person."

tunesmith 6y ago

I've thought about this in terms of heroes and helpers, how we often have a hero worship problem in society and jobs, and how it's usually better to try instead to be a helper rather than a hero.

currymj 6y ago

i tend to think that the approach here described as "incompetent" isn't necessarily bad as long as you maintain honesty about it. for instance, it might be more effective to just donate money but there's nothing wrong with wanting to volunteer hands on, as long as you don't fool yourself. of course from a very, very strict utilitarian perspective, making a somewhat less effective choice is in fact morally evil. but I don't think that viewpoint actually holds up to scrutiny -- few people would agree that volunteering at a food bank rather than donating money is morally equivalent to taking food away from hungry children.

ajb 6y ago

What is most interesting to me is that the business model he rejected[1] is not just the one of his app, but essentially the one used by almost all therapists. [1] https://github.com/Flaque/quirk https://github.com/Flaque/quirk: "Unfortunately, in order for the business to work and for us to pay ourselves, we needed folks to be subscribed for a fair amount of time. But that wasn't the case and we honestly should have predicted it given my own experience: as people did better, they unsubscribed. Unfortunately, the opposite was true as well, if folks weren't doing better, but were giving it a good shot, they would stay subscribed longer. So in order to continue Quirk, a future Quirk would need to make people feel worse for longer, or otherwise not help the people we signed up to help. If the incentives of the business weren't aligned with the people, it would have been naive to assume that we could easily fix it as the organization grew. We didn't want to go down that path, so we pivoted the company."

deleted 6y ago
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flaque 6y ago
Not at all! Therapists make more in a single session than a consumer subscription app would in an entire year, and they're limited to the amount a single therapist can accomplish. Most therapists have an entirely booked schedule; they don't have nearly the incentive to keep people longer that mobile apps do. They literally cannot handle more clients, so from a business perspective, they're much better off helping people, getting good reviews, and then charging more for the limited time they have.
- ajb 6y ago
  Although you are probably right that the situation is worse for apps, in my experience the incentive of actual therapists is still sufficient to prevent them admitting that their client would be better served elsewhere. Limited sample size, of course.
- jimkleiber 6y ago
  I really appreciate you openly talking about these struggles. I built an app back in 2012 called iFeelio for emotional micro-journaling and one of the goals I set for it was for me (and then others) to get better at expressing how I felt so I didn't have to use the app anymore. As you expressed on Quirk's Github readme, that doesn't jive with a subscription-based model: if people improve, they stop paying. I also didn't want to make the app addictive, another thing that seems to clash with the subscription model. One thing I contemplated but didn't have the courage to do was to charge a very high initial price to use the app. It was on Android at the time and I wanted to charge the max price, which I think was like ~$200, to download the app, one time. Did you think about doing something similar? What alternatives did you contemplate to the subscription model? Is there a way to price it with an anticipated 3-month retention or other time-limited retention? Would love to hear any thoughts you have on this!

protomyth 6y ago

If you want to do good, you actually have to help people. Yep. Its a hard thing to look at the actual data coming out of something and see your good idea didn't translate into actually fixing a problem. Sadly, a lot of people, particularly in government, would rather die on that hill instead of moving on. There is a fine line to walk though. Just because you didn't fix everything doesn't mean chuck it all in the trash. Being able to see the positives is important and will help with refining your strategy.

yters 6y ago

One reason may be that there is sort of an existential question hanging at the edge of moral actions, namely does anything really matter? Moral action is the epitome of the belief that at least something matters, and matters a whole lot. And perhaps it is precisely through moral action that we get an experiential understanding of moral value. So, if through 'moral competence' we disengage from moral action, then we may lose the very reason we seek to make a moral difference in the first place.

Arete314159 6y ago

I'd summarize his essay by saying that true service is about doing what's best for the situation, regardless of ego, while shiny silicon valley "service" is about getting paid in praise and adulation rather than the usual currency, money. When you're doing real service it's usually largely thankless, anonymous for a good long while, and you work really hard and maybe move things 1 millimeter towards the goal. If you're traveling around doing photo-op's, then except in rare cases (like, you're a celebrity bringing attention to an under-recognized problem), you're not doing the right work.

tylermenezes 6y ago

> The signature move of the morally incompetent is to be told about existing solutions that they were previously unaware of and then soldier on without any critical examination of any added value they're providing. Others working on the problem are ignored entirely or seen as a threat to their own solution. Really hit the nail on the head for the non-profit industry (of which I am a part). A lot of non-profit leaders are totally insufferable because they take anything less than fawning over them to be an attack on their identity as savior. You get some of these people everywhere, of course, but there's a way higher concentration in non-profits.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

I like this a lot more than I expected to. A lot of social ills are rooted in "The world doesn't work." And then we try to find the right feel-good pill or the right talk therapy when what we really need is a jobs program or a bridge or store that sells a thing that works and if you come up with a real solution, no one will connect the dots and say "Homelessness is down because someone built a better mousetrap." Instead they will turn their baleful eye to the latest earthquake or the latest revolt or the latest political drama and continue to complain that the world is broken. Doing things super well is hard. Heroics make headlines and headlines have something of a tendency to actively interfere with problem solving. Problem solving tends to be done quietly at your desk, in your lab, in some back room and people who love good press tend to be better at playing to the crowd than at actually solving anything. If you want to make the world a better place, make a business that solves a real problem and be decent in how you deal with people. Don't be a hero. Don't focus so much on the social and emotional stuff. Build a better widget instead and build it with an awareness of the social and emotional stuff and a sensitivity to the current state of the world which is always high drama and lots of pain points. Doing anything well is really hard. There are lots of ways to do things badly while getting lauded for it in certain circles.

ggm 6y ago

Hella pivot.

tonymet 6y ago

I've done many charities, and noticed that most of the people are very caring but not very competent. I'll share an example A group of 50 of us were planting young trees from seedlings which looked like weeds. First step was to remove weeds, second was to dig the hole, third was planting the seedlings. One group removed the weeds, another dug the hole, another planted the seedlings, and another removed the seedlings thinking they were the weeds. In the end we drank a lot of bottled water, ate snacks, made a lot of trash, and very few if any trees were planted. I think if the dozens of us just donated a few bucks, hundreds if not thousands of trees would have been planted by 5 competent people.

indymike 6y ago

Entrepreneurs, and not just those doing things for social benefit, often find themselves in a situation where they are doing things, but not delivering value. Some of it is because they are building something new and don't know if the value is there, sometimes the solution just doesn't work correctly... yet. The problem all entrepreneurs have is knowing when to stop working on a dead end. There's a line between business failure and Theranos like fraud. Realizing you are crossing it is really hard.

whistlerbrk 6y ago

This reminds me of the concept of "karuna" in Bhuddism. To me what the author is discussing is the difference between the direction translation of the word, often taken as "compassion" vs. the intention to seek truth and deeply act upon it. What Jay Garfield (Smith College) referred to as "sloppy sympathy" is what I think the author here is referring to as moral incompetence.

SebastianFrelle 6y ago

I exchanged some 20 e-mails with Evan over the course of just 2 hours over an unfortunate bug with Quirk that nearly cost me everything I'd entered into the app up until that point. This was some 18 months ago. He struck me as absolutely forthcoming and genuine. He fixed the issue and gave me a year's subscription for free for reporting the bug and helping him figuring it out. I really wish Evan wouldn't be so hard on himself. His product actually helped me a lot, and he seemed to me like he was both empathetically capable and morally competent.

rendall 6y ago

I liked the disclaimer/preamble because it really did help me to read it as kinder and less harsh than I would have. I would like to know what, specifically, led to this insight. Not generalized "people who..." description, but how Quirk itself was an example of moral incompetence

nojvek 6y ago

I saying I like to say is “outcomes, not effort”. It’s so easy to chase busy work that feels like real work, get praised to be in meetings, write fancy docs, ship code, fight self inflicted incidents, work late nights and weekends. The thing that ultimately matters is adding value to customers. Understanding what they want to get done and removing enough friction that they’d rather pay to your product than go to a competitor or do it themselves. Surely docs and meetings are necessary but you have to ask yourself “how does this add value to the customer? Can we have avoided this and still achieved the same outcome?” Ask that week over week. I spent 2 years of my life working insanely hard but at the end, customers didn’t really get value out of it and it was a dud. Then I spent another 6 months deprecating and killing the feature. It was a very hard lesson.

imtringued 6y ago

There have been a lot of "water from air" dehumidifier projects that basically amount to scams whether intentional or not. No, people in arid locations have water problems, precisely because there is not enough water in the air. Nature already built a large scale dehumidifier called rain. They only reason these "projects" are done is because they appear to be directly producing the solution (water in this case) without having to fix the underlying problem. The most perverse thing about them is that they never work out in the end. It's just a money pit and conversation starter. The reason why even the poorest members of first world nations are wealthy relative to developing countries is because of infrastructure. Without roads, schools, electricity and internet we would be doing just as badly as them. Imagine living without indoor lighting. We take so many easy things for granted. Everyone benefits from infrastructure. It doesn't matter if you are poor or rich. But that's the crux. People only want to help the poor. Once they cease to be poor nobody wants to help anymore but how is that supposed to work? If you remove support too early those people will fall back to poverty. It becomes a privately funded welfare trap in the end.

fpig 6y ago

When I click on a website and the first thing I see is a claim that, by using their product, I can build something in 15 minutes, I consider that company socially negative, not socially neutral. I don't have a problem with the article itself, but this kind of stuff is really annoying. Instead of making me think "Wow!! How??" it just made me think your product is useless garbage and close the page.

tpoacher 6y ago

This sounds very similar to the Shirky principle: “Institutions will inevitably act in a way that preserves the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky (PS: thanks Doreen for introducing me to it!)

helloSam43 6y ago

Are you kidding? Habitat builds in the US - local people helping others in their same town to build a house. It's an Amish barn raising for our disconnected atomized individualistic society.

gitowiec 6y ago

So if I properly understood this article, Bill and Melinda Gates are morally incompetent?

lcall 6y ago

In case it's useful: one site to find local volunteer opp'ties, or for orgs to post them is https://justserve.org https://justserve.org . No fees, I believe.