Accidental Adler: A Random Act of Interestingness
I love random acts of interestingness.
Those little things that happen when you’re somewhere for one reason, paying attention to something completely different, and somehow a completely unrelated idea sneaks in through the side door and follows you home.
This one happened on a yacht. Because apparently that’s where we’re doing psychology now. I was out with Rolf on a little yacht-industry recon mission. Walking around, talking to people, looking at boats, generally poking around at some things that may become interesting later.
Everybody had name tags. One of the guys with us had the last name Adler.
That kicked off some little side conversation about Adler. There was a brief Adam/Alfred/who-the-hell-was-it thing, somebody looked it up, and suddenly Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychologist, had somehow entered the chat.
I wasn’t really paying attention. I was in my own little bubble thinking about something else.
Then Montserrat, a woman I had just met, started explaining Adler.
And somewhere in the middle of what she was saying, my brain snapped back into the conversation. Wait. That’s retardmaxxing.
So naturally I said that out loud.
At a yacht event. Which got roughly the reaction you’d expect.
But Montserrat wanted to know what I meant, so I explained it.
And she immediately got it. Yeah. That’s basically what she was talking about.
And that was it. That was the little collision.
Except I kept thinking about it afterward.
I wrote about retardmaxxing after seeing this ridiculous video that gave a ridiculous name to something I’ve probably been doing for most of my life.
The crude version is just:
Stop thinking so much and do the thing.
The more interesting version is that sometimes intelligence itself becomes part of the problem.
I used to travel with one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known.
Brilliant guy. Accounting background, but genuinely freakishly smart. One of those people whose brain was always running farther ahead than everyone else’s. He was also a little bit of a weirdo. There was definitely a recommended daily dosage. And you absolutely did not want to fly with him.
He hated airplanes. The funny thing was, he didn’t hate them because he knew nothing about them. He hated them because his brain was capable of thinking through everything that could possibly go wrong.
Every sound meant something. Every vibration had a possible explanation. Every little change gave his brain something else to chew on. And then he would share all of that with the person sitting next to him.
There were coworkers who basically treated flying with him like getting Mr. T onto a plane in The A-Team. A little pharmaceutical assistance, hopefully timed correctly, and maybe everybody got to sleep through the experience.
I’ve always thought that story was funny. But it’s also kind of the entire point.
His intelligence didn’t make the plane more dangerous. It made him better at imagining danger. And that’s not really an airplane problem.
That’s life.
The smarter you are, or maybe just the more imaginative you are, the easier it is to see all the ways something could go wrong. And eventually that ability can turn around and bite you.
We usually call it paralysis by analysis.
The original retardmaxxing video basically lands on the same thing in considerably less respectable language: people can overthink themselves into doing nothing, while somebody who just starts gets information from actually trying.
That’s the part that resonated with me.
Not being stupid.
Being able to temporarily ignore your own ability to talk yourself out of something.
Because there’s a difference between thinking and knowing.
You can sit there and model something forever.
Eventually you have to touch reality.
Try it...Build it...Call somebody...Walk in...Hit publish..See what happens.
Then you know something you couldn’t know before. And that’s where the Alfred Adler thing became interesting.
Adler spent a lot of time thinking about inferiority, compensation, striving, and what people do when they’re confronted with the distance between where they are and where they want to be. And apparently, more than a hundred years ago, he was poking around some of the same basic human machinery.
Sometimes the feeling that we aren’t good enough at something pushes us forward. Sometimes we defend ourselves against it. We find ways not to have the test. Not to take the shot. Not to expose ourselves to the possibility that maybe we fail. And if you’re really smart, you can be really good at that. You can make the case sound excellent.
That’s the part that got me. Maybe some people don’t fail to act because they’re incapable. Maybe they’re exceptionally capable of imagining why they shouldn’t. That doesn’t mean the concerns aren’t real. My airplane guy wasn’t wrong that airplanes can crash. He just had a brain that could turn a tiny possibility into a two-hour immersive experience. And I think we do that with all kinds of things.
At some point you have to decide whether you’re evaluating reality or just running increasingly elaborate simulations inside your own head.
Which makes AI kind of hilarious.
Because we have now built a machine that can help you do either one at a completely unreasonable scale. If you want to overthink something, holy shit, have we got the product for you.
You can analyze an idea forever now. Ask for every possible downside.
Have it critique itself. Ask another model to disagree. Run scenarios.
Build forecasts. You could construct an absolutely bulletproof intellectual argument for never leaving the couch.
Or you can use the same thing to get yourself moving faster.
That’s much closer to how I think about it. I don’t need AI to remove uncertainty. I need it to get me to enough. Enough understanding. Enough information. Enough confidence that we’re probably not doing something catastrophically stupid.
And then: Fuck it. Let’s find out.
That’s retardmaxxing. At least my version of it.
Not stupidity, not recklessness... It’s recognizing the point where your intelligence has stopped helping you move and has started helping you stay exactly where you are. And apparently Alfred Adler had been wandering around somewhere near that idea a century before a guy on YouTube drew a bell curve and gave it an offensive name.
I find that fascinating. Not because I’ve suddenly become an Adler scholar.
I hadn’t even heard of the guy twenty minutes earlier. That’s probably my favorite part.
I went to look at yachts. Somebody happened to have Adler on a name tag.
That caused a completely insignificant little conversation.
Somebody looked something up. Montserrat started explaining a psychologist who died almost ninety years ago.
I wasn’t listening. Then I was. And suddenly this stupid thing I’d been thinking about collided with something people have apparently been thinking about for a hundred years.
Then everybody went back to whatever they were doing. That’s it. No revelation. No great epiphany.
Just a random act of interestingness.
Those might be my favorite ones. The ones you never would have searched for because you didn’t know there was anything to search for. You just accidentally bump into them. And every once in a while, one sticks.
Rich Washburn is a technologist, strategist, and Founder & Chief AI Architect of ARIA AI Labs, working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, communications, and capital. He also serves as Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.
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