The life-changing Sarah Paine framework
This is super unedited! Quantity and speed over quality today, just wanted to serve these pancakes while they’re still hot. Thanks to Anna and Nancy for the Dwarkesh event drop last night and to my high school English teacher for teaching me that sometimes the best writing comes when you get out of your head and just start putting words on paper. Thanks to all my readers for your continued support. Love you xoxo
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“Life-changing”
I describe many things as “life-changing”. Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! was life-changing, as was Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, as was learning that Akbar and Orange “[traded pages] every Friday [while writing these books], and… called it band practice”. This Rolling Stone Australia feature of a relative newcomer to the indie scene (Borderline) was life-changing. So was Khruangbin’s Fender Signature Session (yes! I’m so basic and I love it!) that reminded me of the meditative power of improvisation and letting an instrument of choice carry you forward (guitar here, but can also be freeform writing, walking meditation, etc.). I once repeated the phrase to describe a salad so many times over the course of one dinner that it was presented at the next one as Life-Changing Salad (the life-changing ingredients are insiders-only but I’ll tell you if you DM me).
I say that things are life-changing, that I’m obsessed, that I’ve fallen in love with something, about once a week. It’s true every time, which is why I’ll continue to say these things whenever I want. Naturally, after two hours listening to Professor Sarah Paine and Dwarkesh Patel last night the first thing out of my mouth was “I’m literally in love”. “With what?” our OG Dwarkesh lecture series attendee asked, to which I said “all of it, everything, everyone”. As much as I stand by these statements, it also means I struggle to communicate the gravity and intensity of this life-changing moment, which is why I’m writing about it now.
Yesterday’s session (“Why Russia Lost the Cold War”) was the last of six in-person lectures and interviews organized by Dwarkesh Patel featuring Professor Paine. At the time of this post’s publication the recording isn’t yet published on Dwarkesh’s YouTube. I typed up my lecture notes last night for anyone looking for a high-level overview of Professor Paine’s talking points and an outline of what to research next.
I considered adding a personal section to my takeaways, but to be completely honest the LaTeX was not giving ‘personal’, so here I am using Substack as God intended (to share my personal reflections with my 1.5 dedicated readers).
The Paine Meta-Framework
Professor Paine is very good at frameworks. Specifically in the context of analyzing history, such a framework might look like:
Thesis/Starting Argument
Counter-Argument (paper requirement from Naval War College)
Rebuttal (different perspective, not your starting argument)
I noticed early in last night’s lecture that this framework to outline and trace through parts of history, to approach a problem from different angles and offer supporting evidence for each part, then synthesize a consolidated picture of events and interactions, was remarkably logical and thorough.
Why I’m calling this a “meta-framework”: at risk of sounding like Tim Ferriss, Professor Paine’s lecture was my “aha” moment for realizing the common thread that pulled together a few previously disparate fabrics of productivity and life optimization I’ve been exploring for approximately the last year. I’ll break down this “meta-framework” into three pieces: 1) Questions you want to answer, 2) Research methods to answer them, and 3) Sustaining lessons.
1) Questions you want to answer
In Professor Paine’s lectures, these questions are things like “Why did Russia lose the Cold War?”; “Does America Have a Crisis of Strategic Thinking?”; which we can then begin to answer by going through the combinations of actors and interactions in the system and synthesizing into a thesis, counter-arguments, and some form of conclusion. In historical analysis, the correctness of a thesis is inherently subjective; historians analyze evidence and form arguments that define the discourse.
Since designing resilient, scalable software systems has been on my mind for years, especially last night, I couldn’t help but extend this analysis framework to conversations engineers have on how to build systems to a set of business requirements, where the questions might be “How do we build this system in a maintainable, traceable way?”; “Are we happy with how our system is built? Is it serving our current business needs in an operationally, developmentally-streamlined way?” (almost always no); “How the actual fuck does this system work?” etc. etc.
If we insist that engineers chart out their systems design paths in the same way Naval War College students are required to structure their papers, this might look like (hypothetical engineering problem that is totally not inspired by a recent end-user experience I had with a ticket booking system):
Question: How do we design a system to persist a customer’s hold on a ticket in our backend for longer than a few seconds without requiring them to manually re-enter all their credit card information if the page decides to randomly re-load or stall at payment?
Thesis: We should implement a local state store and webhook listener that’s always receiving page events so we can write local state to a persistent database if we get any flow-disrupting event notification.
Counter-argument: That’s a lot of work to maintain and process for every single user session. No webhooks, let’s just write to a persistent database as soon as the user confirms their information and delete when we know we won’t need the data anymore. [See: why careful data management matters]
Rebuttal: Let’s approach this from a different angle. The frustrating part of the user experience is that the page is reloading unpredictably. Let’s solve that before we over-optimize to solve a symptom rather than address the core problem.
This is of course not a comprehensive set of system design concerns, just a starting example of how this thesis and argument-based framework can be used to structure thought both in historical analysis and forward-looking decision-making scenarios.
Predictably, I started applying this framework to my own life. Here I want to note that Professor Paine’s starting thesis for “Why did Russia lose the Cold War?” was “Reagan won it all!” and the “combined” counter-argument incorporated points from “internal” and “external” perspectives, so if some of my statements seem reductive and silly, it’s because they’re just tools to drive actual, legitimate research and arguments. Put another way, these sub-components need not be strictly delineated.
Question: Why am I stressed?
Thesis: Too much coffee, too little sleep, too much to do
Counter-argument: More coffee, sleep less, so you can finish everything you need to do
Rebuttal: Different perspective. Why is your to-do list stressing you out?
Busywork that you feel like you have to do but don’t have the motivation to do? Do the mental exercise - what happens if you don’t do them?
Chores that you don’t like to do? How do you make them enjoyable or at least more tolerable?
2) Research methods to answer them
I touch on this in 1). In the mapping exercise stemming from any initial question, the first things that follow are usually more questions. For example, in the ticket booking example, the rebuttal is actually a question of “are we solving for the right thing”, and stem out into research topics of what’s affecting the page load volatility and how to test page rendering with different end users. In my personal example, these second-order questions of “Is the grind stressing you out?” “Are chores stressing you out?” lead to research topics as varied as “What happens if you switch back to matcha?” “What happens if you sleep more now for a fresher brain in the morning instead of losing sleep over a problem that won’t change overnight?”
The results of these research topics, personally, are data points collected over time, as I experiment with modifying individual variables in my lifestyle. I’ve collected consistent enough data on myself over the last year to know that I personally respond well to matcha (not coffee), cutting out alcohol, trying to sleep ~1-8 a.m. instead of 3-9 a.m. (+1h of sleep every night), preferring music, film and long-form content over short-form or low-intellectual stimulation media, learning to cook a few go-to meals I’m proud of without overwhelming myself by trying to cook everything from scratch all the time, and physically and intellectually traveling (immersing myself in a new environment, learning something entirely new, and most importantly, reflecting and applying learning back to my life) as frequently as possible.
3) Sustaining lessons
By no means am I presenting this as a silver bullet meta-framework to solve any problem. The last paragraph is me trying to squeeze a year of concentrated learning and personal trial-and-error into a few sentences; each component, especially since I’m naturally verbose, deserves an essay.
Critically, I haven’t been able to consistently apply my own learnings over the last year. I still watch Veep re-runs when I am objectively learning nothing from it, because I love Veep and it makes me laugh. I still let vegetables rot in my fridge. Even as I write this, I have a pressing work deadline to do before tomorrow, I may have to sleep after 1 a.m., I probably won’t need to turn to coffee but I may need a Coke.
The thing that Professor Paine and Dwarkesh showed us last night was that anyone with the interest, attention and time can begin to understand complex history, and that a consistent framework of structuring arguments is an effective way to research and present something. Returning to my own personal meta-framework, I’ve established reasonable frameworks to study components - supporting evidence, if you will - sleep, caffeine, hobbies, routines - but have not achieved an optimal consolidated state of all components and interactions, which is a constant and dynamic process.
Closing notes
I am the last person to buy into a bio-hacking, life optimization, productivity boosting lifestyle. The Paine meta-framework is life-changing to me precisely because it’s oriented around an ever-changing set of arguments and conclusions that are not strict directives. The sheer fact that we SF tech workers filled an auditorium last night to listen to a Naval War College professor talk about the Cold War and sat in rapt attention is enough proof that there is incredible demand for structure and organized learning, that we need to double down on active education for the common person after high school and college, and that frameworks can be an effective way to communicate and encourage that learning to people that think like me. For me, the meta-framework is optimized for a life satisfaction metric which is inherently dynamic, unpredictable, and thus benefits from an often uncomfortable but necessary introspection and reflection framework I’m constantly assessing and formulating.
I have to leave it at that tonight so I can get back to the day job I’ve been procrastinating. Thank you for reading and let’s keep the conversation going.