I like this Sam Bishop guy. I like his writing style. I like that he thinks about his writing. He certainly sounds very smart, and he links out to a lot of smart stuff like Frame Control and the Nash Equilibrium and neutralisation theory and Survivor within the first couple of paragraphs of one of his latest pieces.

The whole idea of this essay that he’s written is that a lot of political and social narratives are presented as totally one-sided. Think politicians and their famous positions like My Viewpoint Is Definitely The Right One and the perennial favourite My Opponent Doesn’t Know What She’s Talking About. Now consider: this is the wrong way of going about things if you’re actually trying to Improve Your Life.

The more helpful framing is to think in terms of trades, facing drawbacks in your own stances and accepting that sometimes The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point, and that’s OK.

Sam does say rationalisty things like:

By subjecting our media diet to the dialectic and denying it the unipolarity it desires, we can really take the edge off the cognitohazard that is a compelling narrative. I intend to write more about this later.

which I am less a fan of and which might be rephrased as if your food comes prechewed then probably it is not what you think it is.

But then he wraps basically the whole thing up in the tidiest little sentence that he possibly could, leaving me wondering why I read the rest of the post in the first place, besides defining “upgrades” as “prechewed food” and “trades” as “you really gotta think about it”:

But to you dear reader I can heartily recommend this: stop looking for strict upgrades and start looking for advantageous trades. You will find trades are everywhere, just waiting for someone canny enough to pay their price.

Aaaaand then as a bonus he includes a bunch of Effective Trades, which is the Sam Bish way of saying Unsolicited Advice On The Internet, which is my favourite genre of Content:

1. Offset your schedule by an hour or two to avoid having to wait for things when everyone else wants those things.
2. Get off your phone, especially around sleeping time.
3. Drink water from a bottle that you carry about.
4. Practice extreme scepticism around Skittles.
5. Avoid clutter, under which dust and grime lives.
6. Opt out of common assumptions.
7. Write.

OK now that I write these down they all seem pretty obvious.

Advantageous Trades Vastly Outnumber Strict Upgrades by Sam Bishop