In hostile and dynamic environments, adapting to a new environmental pressure is often crucial to a gene’s chances of continuing through time.

Species currently have four means of adopting new behaviors, with trade-offs between speed of adoption and speed of active use.

Speed of adoption is how quickly a species, or an individual member of a species, can learn a new behavior. Speed of active use is how quickly an individual can carry out a behavior when it is called to do so.

Here are the four means of adopting new behaviors, by speed of adoption:

1. Positive selection for genes encoding new innate behaviors (slowest adoption, fastest active use). It took many millennia for animals to adopt behavior to respire using oxygen from the atmosphere. Barring some major disability or injury, anyone can breathe in quickly without conscious thought.

2. Pavlovian reinforcement mechanisms (slow adoption, fast active use). The organisms of many species can be induced to quickly act a certain behavior when it has been strongly associated, over a period of its lifetime, with a reward or punishment. Pavlov demonstrated how ringing a bell in the presence of a dog feeding can, after several repeat incidents, induce a dog to start salivating upon hearing the ringing of that bell. Nature has allowed for the shortening of the reinforcement learning mechanism from generational timescales to the timescale of an individual organism.

3. Imitating the behavior of others (medium adoption, fast active use). Humans are (probably) unique in imitating the behavior of others to learn new behaviors. Nature again speeds up the reinforcement learning mechanism by allowing for the transference of learnings by other organisms.

   Most of our skills are learnt from copying others. Children learn from adults how to tie their laces. This is much faster than each child having to use logic to deduce a knot that will keep their shoes firmly attached to their feet, or to go through the entire Pavlovian process of randomly trying knots until they learn that a certain knot keeps their shoes on.

4. The application of conscious logical thought (fastest adoption, slowest active use). Behaviors that are the consequence of logical thought have the fastest adoption. They do not need any historical examples to be learnt; they can be deduced from first encounter. They have the slowest active use. It can take a lot of time and brainpower to deduce, in a novel scenario, the desired behavior.

What has catapulted the human species to its current dominant position in the earth’s ecosystem is its ability to accelerate the adoption of new behaviors. It does this by the synthesis of conscious logical thought and the innate imitation of the behaviors of others.

Behavioral imitation is especially powerful. As soon as one individual can, either by random experimentation or the application of conscious logical thought, perform some new behavior that leads to a great increase in utility, others can imitate and also benefit from this successful behavior.

Humans further leverage the mimetic instinct by mimicking what are perceived as higher-status individuals. Teenage Napoleon devoured the biographical accounts of the life of Julius Caesar, who idolized Alexander the Great. Teenage Erling Haaland modeled his football game on Cristiano Ronaldo. Teenage Coco Gauff modeled her tennis on Serena Williams. Oprah Winfrey modeled herself on Maya Angelou.

To see why this is so, consider that being high-status is typically associated with wealth: that is, the ability to command resources. In our evolutionary history it was often the case that the behaviors the high-status person enacted are probably what allowed them their advantage in their command of resources.

In a sprouting agrarian society, anyone who could imitate the farmer with the bountiful harvest’s use of the first primitive plough would accrue for themselves the same advantage. Similarly, in our modern world, Erling Haaland, by following the techniques of Cristiano Ronaldo, is able to leverage these techniques to score many goals, providing value for himself and his team.

This instinct is so powerful in humans that we have even displayed the capacity to learn from other species. There are incidents of feral children walking on all fours and eating raw meat after being raised by wolves.

Next week I will write about what culture is and how it spreads.

From March to April 2022 I took part in a 6 week stand-up comedy course for beginners at The Comedy Store in Central London. At the end of the course, myself and the other comedians performed a 5 minute set in front of an audience of over 150 people. Here are some of the things that I learnt from taking part in the course.

1. Writing Jokes is Hard, but Surprisingly Logical

Most of what is funny in conversation with friends is not funny in stand-up.

A few months ago I took my girlfriend across town by bus to collect a takeaway delivery rucksack from a colleague. It was an adventure.

The rucksack was so big, on our way back home it was bumping everyone on the bus; it was hitting all the bus handles; and, I got stuck climbing the staircase trying to twist my body towards the landing on the upper deck.

Before getting off we overheard a group of teenage girls giggling to themselves that the bus is a very slow way to deliver takeaway.

Telling that story to friends in casual conversations got a great reaction.

I prepared this and other embarassing stories to deliver in one of the classes expecting to get a lot of laughs. Instead I got stone wall silence.

I was told the stories "were engaging but not funny".

The best responses were from jokes where I thought about something in my life and tried to relate it to something obscurely related and/or silly. From this I learnt that my stories were not funny because they didn't have punchlines.

Most jokes have a three part setup. The classic rule-of-three is “Monday, Tuesday, Banana”. The first two components, which create an expectation, are the set-up; and, the third that confounds the expectation is the payoff, or the punchline.

To take an example from Jimmy Carr.

1. A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day.
2. She said, "Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?"
3. I said, "All right, but we're not going to get much done.”

This is a "taking things literally" type of joke that incorporates the Rule of Three. The payoff comes from the inexact fit of the last part of the joke. It's not expected and it can be fit into the context of what was said previously. This final confoundment of expectations is often the key component of funny jokes.

Having finished the course I was expecting to be much wittier in general conversation. But, conversations are so quick that it's difficult to think of punchlines in the moment.

2. First Impressions can be Deceiving

In the first week of the course myself and 14 other comedians arrived at the London Comedy Store for our first lesson. The aim of the first lesson was to get us all used to being on stage. We each had to stand up, introduce ourselves and tell a truth and a lie about ourselves.

Most of my fellow comedians came up on stage and had a very confident presence. I couldn't help but feel slightly inadequate in comparison to the ease with which they could express themselves on stage.

As one does I started ranking who I thought would be the funniest comedians at the end of the show. I predicted that myself and one other very shy and nervous comedian, Rajesh (not their real name), would be the least funny comedians in the final show. I was completely wrong.

After the show everyone I spoke to felt that Rajesh was the funniest out of the 13 comics who performed in the final show, and that I was in the top three.

Me and Rajesh were similar, we were awkward and nervous but enjoyed the limelight of rehearsing in front of our peers; simultaneously competing instincts to hide and be seen. We were always the most eager to try out new material.

In the end it was a great show. But, some of the comics I was certain had natural stage presence, and who I couldn't help but find most intimidating, put on some of the more average performances.

3. Fail Fast and Fail Often, but Failing Hurts

As a programmer I'm really inspired by the IDEO cofounder David Kelly's mantra "Fail fast, fail often"^[1]. I think the approach of rapid iteration is integral to the development of good products, and is useful also in a lot of other areas of life.

But it can be a very hard process to go through. Failure hurts.

There is often a very mechanical logic to what makes a joke funny; but, it's often unclear how funny something is until you perform it to an audience.

Often I was surprised; some jokes were much funnier than I expected whereas others got no response at all.

Some of the most successful stand up comics like Chris Rock still perform at small clubs. They're testing new material to gauge how funny it is so that they can continue iterating before an upcoming big show.

However, the beginning of this process is painful. In week 3 and 4 of the course we started testing jokes on the instructor and our fellow comics. We were all taken aback by how difficult it is to get a response from our audience. It was a brutal experience for us all.

One comedian remarked to me how these lessons felt like being "run over by a car."

Another was very close to tears after testing his material in the fourth week. He gave up testing his new jokes on us, saying that "it knocked his confidence". His final performance was one of the worst out of all of the comedians.

It was a shame as he understood comedy, his analyses of what was funny about other acts were good. But, his inhibition to test new material had stopped him from meeting his massive potential.

4. People's Stereotypes About You are Important

In the second week of the course each comedian had to get on stage and have their persona evaluated by their fellow comedians.

People are sensitive though and it really showed among some of the stand-up comics.

In the persona evaluations the other comics were told to be brutally honest. Comics were told they look like an "arrogant c**t"; an "oxford educated media t**t"; and that they had an "ugly face".

This experience of having their persona evaluated was one of the most brutal for a lot of the comics. We all knew it would hurt to get up on stage and receive that feedback from our fellow comics, but it didn't soften the blow. A few managed to keep their composure but most of us visibly struggled with the feedback.

This was a necessary process, however, as it's more difficult for a stand-up comic to get laughs if their jokes and delivery don't match the audience's perception of who they are as a person. For instance, I experimented with a joke that started "I love stuffing food inside my f**cking face". The other comics felt that I shouldn't use the word "f**king" in an aggressive manner in my set as it did not fit in with my character.

Also, if a comic has been blessed or cursed with a prominent feature it's best for the comic to address it at the beginning of the set. Otherwise, the audience will fixate on it and pay less attention to the comic's jokes. Addressing the feature relieves the tension about it in the audience.

One of the comics on the course, who we will call Angela, had a large birthmark on her cheek. Our instructor asked if she was going to address it and she answered that she preferred not to. The following week Angela had prepared an opening joke about it that got a great reaction.

5. Don't Underestimate the Ruthless Competitiveness of Your Peers

We all secretly hope that we won't be seen to be the worst at things we do. Some of us will even betray others to look better by contrast.

Many of the comedians saw big improvements in their sets in the penultimate week. Unfortunately one very eccentric and funny character missed the penultimate week of the course. He turned up to the final rehearsal on the day of the show and delivered an unfunny somewhat, uncomfortable & absurd routine.

His set was terrible and there was no time to improve it before the show. As he rehearsed to us some of the other comedians were in "hysterics", laughing louder than they had for other rehearsals.

Ultimately, his performance was as funny as a dead dog. Backstage after the show he was lamenting that he felt his performance had been so much funnier in rehearsals. Some of the other performers might have been relieved that he didn't get cold feet about performing as they weren't much better.

6. Have a Weirdness

Robert Greene's 46th law in his book The 48 Laws of Power is to never appear too perfect. "It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to... appear more human and approachable."

Part of the reason why my set and Rajesh's were so well liked is that we tapped into our defects and harmless vices.

People can't help but find eccentrics ammusing. It's reassuring to see people so much odder than us embarass themselves by openly displaying their eccentricity in public. They put us at ease and we take pleasure from their unusual viewpoints and weird behaviours.

In my set, I leveraged my nerdy interest in London Buses. The many unusual aspects of my interest - such as my knowledge of different bus vehicles, something most people barely register - were easily exploitable for joke writing.

Playing into my weirdness made for one of the most memorable acts. Everyone remembered the "bus guy".

7. Let the Audience Laugh

As inexperienced comedians many of us had a tendency to dive right into the next joke as soon as we finished delivering the current joke. We had to be constantly corrected by our instructor to let the audience laugh and wait for the right moment before initiating the next joke.

Leaving the audience to laugh drastically reduces the amount of material that you need for your set. When I started writing I worried that I wouldn't be able to find enough material to fill what was meant to be a 5 minute set. In order to estimate how much I would need I watched a set of one of my favourite underground comedians and found that he was burning around 10 seconds on each joke.

The time in which the audience is laughing is useful to allow yourself to remember the next joke. But, it felt like cheating that I would spend so much time of my set doing nothing.

Ultimately the audience are there to laugh and it's what you the comic and the audience will enjoy the most, so let them laugh.

Final Thoughts

I had a great time learning how to do stand-up comedy and performing. I met some really interesting people and put myself out there in a way that I had never done before. Performing in front of a big crowd was terrifying but exhilirating. And, I was flattered to receive so much positive feedback about my performance.

I'm still no funnier now in general conversation than I was before the course. But, it was fascinating to learn more about how to be funny.

Friends and family tease me for my obsessions with how to prepare for a potential zombie apocalypse. Guns, tinfood and land are the conclusions I've come to.

I see the same behaviours in others too. Friends who insist on getting all of their ducks in a row before major life changes. One old school friend is determined to obtain a certain level of income before he has children so that he can send them to private schools to avoid an unwanted "teenage pregnancy". You might think he's crazy, but many of our school peers became teenage parents.

It's understandable that my friend is so determined to send his children to a private school. Many of our classmates are now in prison, and the teaching was often either preoccupied with behaviour management or downright terrible. One history teacher would spend every other lesson reading her emails and told us how she saw the CEOs of Pringles inside a church worshiping Satan. Yes, you read that right, "CEOs".

It is easy to see why so many of us have a predisposition to worry. Past humans who hoarded food may have survived famines, or worried about how well liked they were by a powerful chieftain who would sometimes kill those who they disliked. There are many places where these worries are justified today. Our ancestors who worried and successfully prepared for dangers will have survived and reproduced, conferring genes that predisposed them to worrying onto us.

Some argue that the chronic (as oppposed to episodic) stress that we face about the future is what sperates us from other animals.

Many of the emotions and behaviours that we have inherited are either too powerful or unsuitable for life in relatively safe 21st century democracies. Our instinct to eat foods that are high in sugars and fats makes sense when food is rare as has historically usually been the case. But today it has led to an obesity crisis in western countries. It's often obvious that we should not eat that second or third Krispy Kreme doughnut brought into the office by a friendly colleague, but it is a real struggle to override that temptation and often we fail to do so. Much of the struggle of modern life is overriding those destructive emotions that implore us to take actions that we would regret.

Many of us build a nest egg that will provide some security in the future. The hard work that we invest to obtain a degree that will lead to a good job; buying a house so that later we won't have to worry about paying rent or a mortgage; or, saving money for a rainy day.

These are all often healthy behaviours, and usually do provide us with a nice nest egg that we can rely on in the future.

However, the world can change and the security which similar nest eggs are providing others today might not be provided by your nest egg tomorrow.

My parents were among many in the last century who made the transition from rural tenant farmers to urban workers. My mum grew up in the 70s and 80s on the side of a mountain in Madeira. Her childhood home still does not have a toilet to this day and electricity only arrived in her teenage years. Her parents stopped her and her sibblings education after only three years of schooling so that she could work hard on the farm. She ran away from home to move to the city at the age of 19.

My grandparents eventually saved enough money to buy a thin strip of land on the steep side of a mountain. This was their nest egg. The security that they hoped to bestow on to their children. Most of their descendants have moved away from their childhood home to the city. It now sits unused and unusable with trees that are so deeply rooted that they're un-fellable because the land is so steep.

The rapid urbanization and improvements in agriculture of the last century led to a loss in the value of the investments that my grandparents viewed as traditionally providing security. They were unable to understand how the world was changing and what it meant for them.

I tell you this cautionary tale, not to make you worry more about how the world can change and what that might mean for your investments, but to remind you and to remind myself to enjoy the present. I'm not saying that we should not prepare for the future, of course we should. But, we should not let saving for the future consume us today, as today's investments are not guaranteed to mean much tomorrow.

Much like the effect of the plague in medieval times, one of the effects of the pandemic has been to perturb the power balance between employers and employees. As an employee, I was initially excited by the benefits of working from home, but slowly realised that complete remote working was an alienating experience that has diminished the boundaries between work and leisure.

I want to make a developer-centric argument that the current state of majority remote working is bad, not because it is bad for your company or for your salary but because it is not best for yours and others mental well being.

The Past & Present

Since the pandemic work life and attitudes for people working in tech have changed significantly. Before the pandemic only a minority of tech jobs allowed for remote working. Now it is considered the expectation and it is rare to find office based roles. Any hybrid roles that are advertised are effectively remote as it's usually unenforced.

Many people in tech profess to really liking the new arrangement. Not having to commute any more; being able to play video games during lunch time (and during work hours for some); waking up just before their first meeting of the day. These were all seen as positives of remote working. In addition, many developers, who tend to be more introverted in nature on average than the general population, have enjoyed not having to socialise so often.

Some also took the opportunity to save on living costs and relocate to a completely different city to their office.

Because of these changes, now that the pandemic is over, it's difficult for employers to get employees back into the office. Many people working in tech are adamant that they want to continue remote working. Any attempt to coerce employees might lead to mass resignations in a field where the hiring market is very competitive for employers.

Having been working from home in tech during the pandemic, this saddens me. The initial excitement about WFH has worn off and I've become conscious of the depressing alienation that remote work is causing. I think that this will be affecting many remote workers at a sub-conscious level, in a way that most of us haven't acknoweldged.

The Social Alienation of Remote Working

Nobody likes to do video call hangouts/drinks, but many of us enjoy it in person. There's a reason for this. The social bandwidth in our interactions with colleagues is different in video calls. The stimuli have changed.

If we're lucky, we're confronted with the images (including our own) of several different people all on one screen. If we're unlucky everyone has their camera off, and we speak into a void of muted mics and turned off cameras hoping that someone is actually listening to us.

There are many sub-conscious nuances to conversations that we're missing out on from not having these conversations in person, like lower-body body language. When pair-programming, I often find that unconsciously I am physically pointing at lines of code that I'm discussing with my colleagues. This is of course pointless in a video call as they would have to be facing the same physical location as me to see what I'm pointing at. But, it's an example of unconscious physical actions that we take that facilitate understanding that is lost in a video call.

Video calls add friction to human interactions. The most jarring experience of this for instance is telling a joke while people have their microphones on mute. No matter how funny the joke is the response feels like an awkward silence.

The video call attempts to simulate an in person interaction but it does so imperfectly. This is without even considering the inevitable drops in internet speed; software bugs; and, ominous hidden tasks being processed in the background of a call. In a previous role, one Microsoft Teams update led to calls exceeding 10 minutes turning the fans on my 2 year old Macbook Pro to their highest setting. I'm still curious to know what Microsoft Teams would have been processing in the background of those meetings.

Often the convenience of having access to the internet right at our fingertips makes it difficult for us to pay attention in meetings. Media companies with a digital presence, whether that be social media like Instagram or traditional journalism like The Guardian, spend a lot of people to make their product as engaging as possible. They need you to pay attention to their platform, not your meeting. There is so little friction to accessing these platforms that as soon as our attention wanders in meetings it is hard to stop ourselves. I've seen it myself, even in the casual conversation part of meeting people are often not engaged.

You might say that this is great, meetings are much more efficient now that I have the ability to tune out discreetly when the conversation is uninteresting or irrelevant. A 2021 study of Microsoft employees found that attention is often split in meetings. But, at some point the compulsion to tune out has become so strong that many of us are not bothering to pay attention to our colleagues anymore. Reasearch by Gartner has shown that remote new joiners have a diminished sense of beloging to their organisation. Remote working is making it too easy to stay in our bubbles rather than to engage with our colleagues.

Ultimately, by staying in our bubble we're missing out. Knowing our colleagues on a more personal level makes it easier to communicate and solve problems, making work much more rewarding. It can also lead to many opportunities. At my current company many colleagues have been poached by someone who used to work with them and is now managing a team at a different company. This poacher who has enticed a lot of the Data Science & Data Engineering talent has been offering their former colleagues jobs without interviews. It's because of the meaningful relationships that my colleagues have established with this poacher while working in person before the pandemic that they have been offered this opportunity.

Overwork & Accountability

The lines between work time and home time have become much more blurry with WFH. It is not just us either: a study of real-time data from millions of GitHub users found that work was often being re-allocated from the traditional 9-6pm weekday hours to evenings and even weekends. Life is losing the punctuation points between work and leisure that we have enjoyed in the past.

Remote workers are in a cycle of procrastination and guilt. I have frittered away my time during work hours obsessively reading articles on the internet and then having to work late to catch up with the work that I should have done during the day. At one point it got so bad that I had to cancel my subscription to The Athletic to stop myself reading it during official work hours. Analysing Google searches for "rightmove", Britain's most popular online property portal, we can see a clear pattern where the peaks occur on weekdays between 12pm-8pm. We distract ourselves browsing the internet throughout working hours and then work hard to catch up with what we've missed in a fit of guilt.

One of the advantages of office work is that being surrounded by colleagues pushes us to get our work done during office time. Many knowledge workers are paying to have silent video chats with people who act as their accountability buddies. There has been a rise in companies offering what is essentially "focussing-as-a-service". These companies often match people up for a silent video call with an accountability buddy who monitors that they're working. The penalties for procrastinating on focusmate.com can also be severe: “If your partner goofs off during the session, you can report it using the reporting button on the appointment card in your dashboard.”...“If you are late, your account can be banned.” The feeling of being watched makes us feel accountable and pushes us to work. The rise in these services shows that offices provided more than just workspaces, they provided accountability, a useful service that some are now realising they are willing to pay for.

Part of the human condition is to grow and produce. But, it's often easier to read that next article than it is to work on something hard but fulfilling. YouTube hires teams of very well paid Data Scientists to ensure that you watch that next video. When so many big media companies' bottom lines are so directly related to their ability to capture your attention, of course they would spend massive amount of resources to do so. The urge to procrastinate is so strong that people are paying for accountability buddies to keep them working, something that used to be provided by office working for free. Yes there are many out there who are happy to appropriate the value of your work, but that does not diminish the satisfaction and sense of self-esteem from solving a problem or creating a product. You and your bosses incentives are aligned. Ultimately you will produce your most satisfying work and have the most enjoyable leisure time by working in an office and relaxing at home.

The Future

I hope that this article will start to change the tide of opinion on remote working. As someone who wants to work more in person with our colleagues, it is disappointing to see that my opinion is so contrarian. As a result there is very little choice in jobs that are onsite and even hybrid with shared days onsite.

Ultimately, too many of us are like the unaware sufferer of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder stuck in the well of their debilitating obsessions. Like the unaware OCD sufferer, we don't appreciate that our remote working habit is causing us more harm than good, and we prefer the immediate comfort of our homes to the slight inconvenience but long term communion of our offices.

As such, I don't see much changing anytime soon. Unless companies are highly prestigious, market forces make companies too wary about annoying the majority of their tech departments in one go. The massive knowledge drain could be catastrophic, and there are many companies who are happy enough to entice any potentially disenfranchised tech workers with their own very relaxed remote working policies. I hope though that this starts to encourage enough of us back into the office that we can restore some sense of belonging into our working lives.

Many of the measures to manage the pandemic have been lifted and life, in a lot of aspects, is returning to pre-pandemic norms.

As such, employers are taking the opportunity to incentivise workers back into the office.

My own employer, Just Eat Takeaway, has stopped paying a WFH allowance to help pay for the increase in my energy bills from WFH; and, is piloting an opt-in scheme offering increased lunch subsidies that can only be used in the office.

My employer, a takeaway delivery company, already offers a small subsidy for 3 meals a week and to receive this more generous subsidy would involve giving up the standard subsidy for this more generous subsidy that can only be used in the office. This subsidy is interestingly unavailable on Thursday, when a lot of workers come into the office to take advantage of the open bar that Just Eat Takeaway host after 5pm.

With one poll finding that more than 40% of workers would resign if forced to return to the office and a very tight labour market it's not surprising that my company feels it does not have the power to coerce its workers into the office, and is instead trying to incentivise people back into the office.

This generous subsidy has been structured in such a way that it will be harder for colleagues who have opted-in to the subsidy to stay at home to work when they will be missing out on that day's very generiously subsidised meal. Fear Of Missing Out is powerful.

I expect that big companies will gradually start offering more little incentives or small penalties to induce workers back into the office. Both parties will be better off for it.