Underrated ways to change the world

How to get a good heart unstuck

photo cred: my dad

A lot of people would like to make the world better, but they don’t know how. This is a great tragedy.

It’s tragic not only for the people who need help, but also for the people who can help, because good intentions start to rot if you don’t act them out. Well-meaning people who remain idle end up sick in the heart and the head, and they often develop exquisite ideologies to excuse their inaction—they start to believe that witnessing problems is as good as solving them, or that it’s impossible to make things better and therefore foolish to try, or that every sorrow in the world is someone else’s fault and therefore someone else’s responsibility.

We get stuck here because we assume that there are only two paths to improving the world. Option #1 is to go high-status: get rich so you can blast problems with your billions of bucks, or get into office so you can ban all the bad things and mandate all the good things. Only a fortunate few are powerful enough to do anything, of course, so most of the people attempting to improve the world through the high-status route will end up either begging our overlords to do the right thing, or trying to drum up the votes necessary to replace them.

Option #2 is to go high-sacrifice: sell everything you have and spend your life earning $7/hr to scrub the toilets in an orphanage. Only a virtuous few will have the saintliness necessary to live such a life, of course, so most of the people attempting to improve the world through the high-sacrifice path will end up writing checks to the martyrs on the front lines.

These paths aren’t wrong. They’re just too narrow. Money, power, and selflessness are all useful tools in the right hands, but the world is messed up in all sorts of ways that can’t be legislated against, bought off, or undone with a hunger strike. When we focus on just two avenues for making the world better, we exclude almost everybody, leaving most of us with a kind of constipated altruism—we’ve got the urge to do good, but nothing comes out.

I don’t know all the ways to get our good intentions unblocked. That’s why, whenever I spot someone changing the world via a righteous road less taken, I write it down on a little list. I glance at that list from time to time as a way of expanding my imagination, and now I’m sharing it in the hopes that it’ll do the same for you.

1. BE THE SECOND-BRAVEST PERSON

Between 2004 and 2016, a Kentucky lawyer extracted $550 million from the US government via bogus disability claims. He used shady doctors to fake the forms and a crooked judge to approve them. That lawyer’s name, in a perfect example of nominative determinism, was Eric C. Conn.

The fraud might have gone on forever if Jennifer Griffith, a paralegal working in the Social Security Administration, hadn’t noticed the brazen fakery. She did the brave thing and told someone about it.

But here’s the part of the story that really gets me: the person she told also did the brave thing—she listened. Griffith’s friend and coworker Sarah Carver was immediately like, “This is really bad, we need to do something about it.” Carver and Griffith attempted to expose Conn’s con for years, filing complaint after complaint, which were all ignored until a Wall Street Journal reporter happened upon the story. The duo eventually testified before Congress and in court. Conn went to jail, as did the judge and at least one of the shady docs.¹

Whenever a scandal breaks—a CEO has been embezzling money, a Hollywood producer has been sexually assaulting people, a scientist has been faking data—people are always like “wow, crazy that no one spoke up about it.” But there’s always someone speaking up about it. They whisper it to a friend, they try to bring it up to their boss, they write an anonymous post on Reddit about how they’re working at a scam company and they don’t know what to do. Wrongdoing often goes unchecked not because we’re missing the bravest person, but because we’re missing the second-bravest person, the one who hears the whistleblower and starts blowing their own whistle too.

2. MAKE A SCENE

Nobody’s heard of Samuel Hartlib, Henry Oldenburg, or The Right Reverend John Wilkins, but modern science might not exist without them.

The ten-second history of science goes like this: for about 1200 years, people scribbled in the margins of Aristotle. Then one day Francis Bacon said “hey guys let’s do science” and people were like “sounds good.” But that only happened because a handful of folks made science into a scene.

Hartlib, Oldenburg, Wilkins and their friends established societies, wrote pamphlets, edited journals, and trained apprentices. Hartlib sent approximately one bajillion letters to budding scientists and inventors, hounding them to put their knowledge to practical use. Oldenburg convinced his friends to stop hiding their results—a common practice back then—and publish them instead. Wilkins was a friend to everybody and ensured that science didn’t become just an Anglican thing or a Catholic thing. If not for him, science might have ended up on one side of the English Civil War, and if that side lost, science could have stopped in its tracks for centuries.

Wilkins’ own Wikipedia page notes that he was “not one of the most important scientific innovators of the period”—ouch—but that he “was a lover of mankind, and had a delight in doing good,” aww.

Look at him, he just loves mankind! (source)

I meet lots of idealistic folks who think that all they’re missing is money, or credentials, or access to the levers of power. More often, what they’re really missing is friends. Only a crazy person can toil alone for very long. But with a couple of buddies, you can toil pretty much forever, because it doesn’t feel like toil. That’s how you end up with what economic historians call “efflorescences” and Brian Eno called “scenius“ (“scene” + “genius”): hotspots of cool stuff. And for that, we need not just a Francis Bacon, but also a whole gang of Right Reverend Wilkinses.

3. SWITCHBOARDING

Mahzarin Banaji, one of the most famous psychologists alive today, originally planned to be a secretary. Then this happened:

I was traveling home from New Delhi to Hyderabad. At a major railway juncture, I stepped off the train to visit a bookstore on the platform where I bought a set of books that changed the course of my life. Five volumes of the Handbook of Social Psychology (1968) edited by Lindzey and Aronson, were being offered for the equivalent of a dollar a piece.

[...]

I bought the Handbooks out of mild interest in their content, but mostly because it seemed like a lot of book for the money. By the time I reached home twenty hours later, I had polished off a volume and knew with blunt clarity that this form of science was what I wanted to do.

I sometimes wonder: who put those books there? The Handbook is not exactly light reading, and that bookstore could not have been moving a lot of units. And yet a chain of people all decided it was important to put that knowledge on a shelf at a train station somewhere between New Delhi and Hyderabad—and they did this 40 years ago, when that was much more complicated.

I think of this as switchboarding, trying to get the right information to the right person. Someone’s got an empty seat/someone needs a ride. You’re getting into the history of plumbing/I know exactly the book you should read. Your cousin is moving to San Diego and doesn’t know anyone/my former rugby teammate lives there, maybe they can be friends. No two people have the same constellation of connections, nor the same trove of information, and so each of us is a switchboard unto ourselves, responsible for routing every kilobyte to its appropriate destination. Whoever put the Handbook in Banaji’s hands, they were damn good switchboards.

The internet makes it seem like switchboarding is obsolete, but it’s more important than ever. When you’ve got instant access to infinite information, you need someone to show you where to start. And the most important info is still locked up inside people’s heads. If we can unlock it and send it where it needs to go, we can turn it into friendships, marriages, businesses, and unlikely psychologists.

4. CRACK YOUR KNUCKLES

Here is an exemplary scientific paper:

During the author’s childhood, various renowned authorities (his mother, several aunts, and, later, his mother-in-law [personal communication]) informed him that cracking his knuckles would lead to arthritis of the fingers. To test the accuracy of this hypothesis, the following study was undertaken.

For 50 years, the author cracked the knuckles of his left hand at least twice a day, leaving those on the right as a control. Thus, the knuckles on the left were cracked at least 36,500 times, while those on the right cracked rarely and spontaneously. At the end of the 50 years, the hands were compared for the presence of arthritis.

There was no arthritis in either hand, and no apparent differences between the two hands.

People often think they can’t do research because they don’t have a giant magnet or a laser or a closet full of reagents. But they have something the professional scientists don’t have: freedom. The pros can’t do anything that’s too weird, takes too long, or would raise the suspicion of an Institutional Review Board. That kind of stuff has to happen in a basement or a backyard, which is why the “paper” above is, in fact, a letter to the editor written by a medical doctor on a lark.

Independent investigators can thus explore where others fear to tread. For instance:

• Lots of people would like to lose weight, and lots of people have unwarranted certainty about how to do that. It takes an internet weirdo to run self-experiments on popular-but-unverified hypotheses like “maybe we should eat more coconut oil” or “maybe the problem is we’re all carrying an electrical charge all the time.”

• Joy Milne, a Scottish nurse, realized she could smell when people had Parkinson’s Disease. She convinced a medical researcher to take her skills seriously, and now there’s a growing effort to detect Parkinson’s early via the stinky stuff that oozes out of humans.

• This guy on Reddit claims to have cured his wife’s 20-year migraine by cleaning their HVAC system. If even one other person heals their headaches by dusting their ducts, this is way more impact than the average scientific paper.

(See also: An Invitation to a Secret Society)

5. POST GOOD, QUEEN

Culture is everything. If our culture says it’s cool to chase a wheel of cheese down a hill, we will. If our culture says it’s important to dress up in colorful clothes and douse people with buckets of water, we’ll do that. If our culture says that we should use an obsidian blade to cut people’s hearts out of their chests and offer them to the god Huitzilopochtli, we’ll do that too. So it’s pretty important to get our culture right.

We act as if culture is a thing that happens to us, rather than a thing we all make together. That used to be true, of course. When only a few people could read and write, they got to make all the culture themselves. All that started to change as more people got literate, but it really changed once most people got an internet connection. For the first time in history, we all have some say in whether we’re more of a cheese wheel culture, an obsidian blade culture, or, you know, something else.

And yet, to borrow what Douglas Adams said about the creation of the universe, “this has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” Most people think that social media has made things worse:

If you don’t like how culture is going, that’s a huge opportunity, because culture is us. You can move the needle just by showing up to the places you like to be, posting and promoting the kind of stuff you’d like to see, ignoring the things you don’t like, and vacating the places you think are bad. I’ve personally been inspired and influenced by the people who do this well, like Visa Veerasamy, Alice Maz, Sasha Chapin, Aella, and Defender of Basic.

I think of them as the partygoers who are committed to having a good time, no matter how good the party itself is. Yes, sometimes the music is too loud, the food is bad, the beer is warm, and the whole thing is run by billionaires who are trying to turn your attention into money. You could stand in the corner complaining about how bad and stupid and unfair it all is. Or you could join the handful of people hanging out on the couch and cracking each other up. If enough people do that, eventually the whole party is that couch.

6. GO TO A NONDESCRIPT GOVERNMENT BUILDING AND DO A GOOD JOB

Cave-ins used to kill a few hundred miners every year. Now that number is usually zero, in large part thanks to an algorithm developed by Chris Mark, who started out as a union organizer, then became a coal miner, then trained as an engineer, then went to work for the Bureau of Mines and figured out how to prevent coal mines from collapsing.

It turns out there are lots of Chris Marks out there, relentlessly solving problems from nondescript government offices. You’ve got Arthur Allen, who developed a search system that locates people faster when they’re lost at sea. There’s Pius Bannis, who organized the evacuation and adoption of 1,100 orphaned children after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. There’s Tony Mento, Camille Otto, and Hari Kalla, who helped get the I-95 bridge back up in 12 days after it collapsed last year. And there’s Darnita Trower, Wanda Brown, and Gerald Johnson, who updated the government’s IT so that nobody has to physically mail anything to the IRS anymore.

Among the high-achieving crowd, it’s only cool to work in government if you’re leading it. So it’s fine to be a Chief of Staff or the Secretary of Labor, but it’s kinda cringe to be a Associate Administrator for Infrastructure or a Principal Strata Control Specialist. And yet, if you drive on I-95, if you work in a mine or on a boat, if an earthquake hits, or if you just want to file your damn taxes, you depend on folks with unimpressive titles doing impressive things.

I know this might sound rich to Americans because our incoming president has vowed to shutter many of these government buildings. But if you look at someone like Chris Mark, he succeeded not just because he was good at math and mines, but also because he found a problem that everybody agreed was worth solving, so he could continue his work across the inevitable change of administrations. It’s hard to thread that needle, which is why these are underrated ways of changing the world, not easy ones.

7. BUILD YOUR RUNK

I think about this tweet a lot:

Or as XKCD puts it:

Notice they both use the word “maintain”—not “invent,” not “lead,” but maintain. The power of a RUNK is that it works consistently. It was there counting numbers before it was cool, and it keeps counting numbers no matter how cool it gets. That’s why you don’t have to be a tech person to build a RUNK. If you do something even moderately useful and you do it no matter what, then people will realize you’re going to be around a while, and they can start building things on top of you.

Back in high school, I didn’t have a Ronald, but I did have a Peggy. She ran the Youth Grantmaking Council of Huron County, which sounds official, but it was really just Peggy convening a dozen high schoolers in a church basement, and telling us we should should raise money by doing car washes and hosting junior high dances, and then we should give the money away. YGC has been going for over two decades, and now there’s a whole web of people in rural Ohio who depend on getting a check from those teens. And the whole thing runs on Peggy, who has many fine qualities that make her a good YGC mentor, but the most important one is that she shows up every year.

GOD IS BREAD

Sometimes when I think about everything that’s wrong with the world, I get indignant, like: why wasn’t all this fixed out by the time I got here? I mean, really? In 2024? We’re still doing this?

But then I think: why do I, uniquely, deserve to be born in good times? Am I the Most Special Boy in the Universe? My ancestors died in famines and plagues, they suffered under evil kings, they got cut down in stupid wars that were fought because some people thought God is literally a piece of bread and other people thought God is only figuratively a piece of bread.

They all deserved a better world than the one they got. So do I. So do all of us! If only we could convince God to fast-forward us to the future where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. Alas, He cannot hear us, for He is a piece of bread.

So it’s up to us. When I wrote There’s a Place for Everyone a few months ago, I got a lot of messages that were like, “Well, there’s certainly no place for me.” That breaks my heart. Look at the world! See it aching! It’s got so many problems—I promise you, there’s one with your name on it.

If none of these seven suit you, that’s fine; seven is not a lot! Fortunately, they come from an infinite list. (#8 is “make the list longer.”) I doubt any of these folks grew up thinking they would one day bust the largest Social Security scam in history, or that they’d be the ones to make science palatable to Puritans, or that they’d be best-known for cracking their knuckles or updating a government website. And yet they left the world a little bit better, and they did it without the power of a king or the sacrifice of a saint. For that I salute them, and I say, thank Bread that they exist.

1. In exchange for their courage, Griffith and Carver were sidelined, stalked, and eventually forced out of their jobs. It turns out nobody higher up in the Social Security Administration was keen to admit they lost half a billion dollars. Another reason why it’s important to Go to a Nondescript Government Office and Do a Good Job (see #6). Now Griffith and Carver work as Certified Fraud Examiners.