• Relevant: In Praise of Small Menus

Intro: The Other Kind of Change

• We add more than we subtract
  • Spend more time gathering info than distilling what’s there
  • Start more initiatives/activities than we phase out
  • Add new rules than we take away
  • Think more about providing for the disadvantaged than removing unearned privilege
• We neglect option of subtraction
  • Harder to see, often harder to implement
  • Ex. divesting in apartheid vs donating to anti-apartheid
• The difference between less and subtraction: the former is an end state, the latter is an action
  • Can reach “less” by doing nothing, but the more rewarding kind comes from actively subtracting

Part I: Seeing More

1. Overlooking Less: Legos, the Lab, and Beyond

• Many experiments → we don’t subtract as much as we add. But why?
  • Do we choose to add, or not even see the possibility of subtracting?
  • Is adding the more accessible choice? Yes: giving people more time to think of ideas, or reminding them they can subtract → more likely to do so; decreasing bandwidth w distracting tasks → less likely to subtract

2. The Biology of More: Our Adding Instincts

• Intrinsic need to deal with our environment to feel competent (Richard White, 1959) → easier to show competence by adding
• Have an innate sense of more and less, before know how to mathematically add and subtract
  • We judge differences btw small quantities as more significant than differences btw large ones— more based on relative comparison (analogous to how other senses like vision & hearing work!)
  • When approximating, precision depends not on final amt but on quantity used to get there
• Using set schema limits possibility of subtraction (you can’t have negative items), vs a distance schema (can have negative temps)
  • Can reframe some scenarios to envision more subtractive options, such as with investing/divesting
• Still, many instances of subtractive thinking at play in “nature”
  • First instances of subtractive tool building ←→ development of abstract thinking
  • Synaptic pruning of neuronal networks

3. The Temple and the City: Adding Brings Civilization, and Civilization Brings More

• How civilization both arose from and is defined by the pursuit of more
• Recent theory: development of material culture (building monuments, temples) can before development of civilization (and agriculture, etc.)
• Field dependence: how much the “surroundings” affect our perception of a situation, also shapes whether we think about/choose subtraction
  • Seeing the field → less likely to neglect subtraction
  • Interesting to consider cultural differences, but evidence shows subtraction neglect is robust across groups and situations
  • More important = realization that we each contain multitudes, have independent and interdependent “selves” → can have access to different views of a situation, see the subtractive possibilities
• Goal = be able to view adding and subtracting as complementary, not either-or
  • Many problems arise when we try to resolve false contradictions— confining people/cultures into rigid categories

4. More-ality: Time, Money, and the Modern Gospel of Adding

• Economic forces priming is to add
  • Adding square footage to increase personal weslth
  • Keynesian economics of virtuous cycles of spending
• Time famine: filling our time with more and more; seeing the limit of subtraction as “saying no” instead of actually removing things; getting caught in the business trap
  • Ringing the “no-bell” vs making a “stop-doing” list
• Buying time (eg. by removing unpleasant events) → greater happiness than adding pleasant things

Part II: Sharing Less

5. Noticeable Less: Finding and Sharing Subtraction

• Post-satisficeable less: going the extra mental steps beyond “good enough” (which usually came from adding to not good enough) often involves subtraction and leads to a cleaner, more efficient solution
  • Have to continue to noticeable less (which is perhaps beyond the equivalent amt of addition)
  • Ex. Kate Orff and redesign of Lexington
• Can try to change valence around subtraction by using different words: “carve,” “reveal,” “clean”
  • Loss aversion: losing $100 feels more bad than gaining $100 feels good
  • But less ≠ loss! And reframing it can emphasize this

6. Scaling Subtraction: Using Less to Change the System

• Dismantling racism = prime example of systemic subtraction
  • “Systemic racism” is redundant, as racism is institutional, structural, systemic → subtracting racism = changing the system
• In complex systems, small changes via subtraction → big outcomes
  • All else equal, adding incentives for desired outcome is less effective than removing incentives for the problematic one (increasing vs relieving tension)
  • Kurt Koffka: “The whole is something else than the sun of its parts.”
    • Ex. removing a bridge can increase or decrease traffic, bc depends on so many complex variables like human behavior in addn to capacity
• Subtracting unnecessary detail → helps us clarify places and ways to intervene → get at essence of our goal
• Checklist for subtraction:
  1. Subtract detail before trying to change the system (triage)
  2. Persist to noticeable less (music)
  3. Consider subtracting first (Jenga)
  4. Reuse your subtractions! (donut holes)

7. A Legacy of Less: Subtracting in the Anthropocene

• How to balance physical limits to growth (planetary boundaries) with urge to progress, innovate, improve quality of life?
  • Progress can come through subtraction
• Lessons we can learn from principles of subtraction…
  • Add Remove as first R to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle → zero is not an unbreachable baseline
  • Cannot rely just on climate engineering (ex. geoengineering) without also considering subtractive measures
  • Noticeability challenge: hard to see reduction in emissions! Important to visualize changes (or lack thereof) to get feedback)
  • Move beyond GDP growth as a measure of success — doesn’t account for useful less, and includes harmful more

8. From Information to Wisdom: Learning by Subtracting

• Pandemic of information fatigue… Herbert Simon → “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
• Recent studies showing that poor people do indeed make worse decisions— but because of the mental scarcity from being poor, not leading to being poor
• Strategies of storing, summarizing, sorting can all help, but only selecting is a truly subtractive approach
  • Ex. filtering out unusable data (no use → not information)
• Opportunity cost of information— what to keep and what to get rid of?
• Tips!
  • Take less notes :) Trust yourself to remember the important stuff!
  • Prune concepts down to their essence (mechanics is all F=ma)
  • Subtracting is required to make revolutionary change in ideas— and using analogies can help!