Many people believe that increasing amounts of confidence are worth increasing amounts of money, attention, prestige, deference, etc. You feel better around the friends who most reinforce your beliefs that your choices were the right ones. Some people are still watching TED Talks, which have no obvious other value. Businesses pay for something called, ludicrously, thought leadership, or for research with a better, more representative sample. And on and on.
But from time to time it will be more valuable to create uncertainty.
If one can purchase confidence, of course one can also purchase doubt. Perhaps your mother, spouse, priest, guru, boss, client, senator, etc. is unshakably convinced in her own conclusions, which you are certain are wrong. Unless we introduce doubt into her equation, you won’t find any daylight for your, ahem, much better idea.
Or say she is right in her conclusions but is moving too fast in their application. A moment of self-reflection can cause a well timed delay.
While these are the most obvious reasons for this particular service when you are only just being introduced to it, the most popular request, by sheer volume, either through informal requests or coming in as submissions, is to “change my mind.”
The majority of my clients are not fully aware of the situation or do not have open lines of communication with engineers. However, sometimes, I take on clients who ask for help. And sometimes precipitating the desired changes requires collaboration between engineer(s) and client. I also take on some clients who ask for help.
“On paper this is the best job I’m ever gonna get. Pays well and good benefits and my boss doesn’t care what I do as long as I produce, which I can do with like half my brain tied behind my back. I could spend half the day trading stocks, watching Netflix, at Hooters, no one cares. Something in me just knows I could do better, though. There are jobs with more soul that are more rewarding and I think what if I just peaced out and never came back. I could get one of those better jobs, and yeah it’d be more hard work and less pay but I’d be happier. There’s this nagging bitch voice in me that just knows it. But I’ve got kids and a wife who isn’t ever going back to work. I gotta shut that voice up. Anything you could do to make that voice sound stupid or wrong would be a huge boost for me.”
Even more popular is the opposite plea.
“I sit at this desk all day tweaking spreadsheets on energy futures. I scrape commodity prices from exchanges around the world and input them into a model and fiddle with algorithms to get more and more accurate predictions of when it will be profitable to buy and sell oil, gas, solar, etc. Salary is good but the bonuses are massive because I’m good at this and when they calc up my alpha every year they write me a check for like an extra couple hundred thousand dollars. I’m 29, that’s a shitload of trips to Spain or it can make a weekend supply of coke for 2 people seem like as big a splurge as a nice meal. I basically hate my job. I got into it because they recruited me out of a program that fused an MBA with green energy expertise. I thought I was going to be helping wind and solar get funded more efficiently and instead I’m no different than any other fucking bond quant. But I know about 10 people who burnt out and left and were happy for 6 months because they bought a stake in a bar in Brazil or got super into yoga, but they all eventually ran out of money and it sucked. I know I should stay in the situation I’m in for another 5-7 years until I’ve got enough saved that I can cash out and never worry about money. The problem is I’m good with numbers and probability. I actually know for a fact it’s way more likely I live the long life I want if I stay than if I live the short life I want now. I know it for a fact. But I really, really don’t want to be so sure. I think if it were a tossup I could walk out of here with middle fingers held high. And maybe a month ago this dude slipped me your card and I laughed and he was like, no, dude, these people are dark magicians, man. I’ve been sitting on it for a while but I figured, what the hell. Whatever you charge, I can afford it.
Why not look into it. So here I am.”
In certain cases engineers take on more complex, longer-term requests.
“[name redacted] is one of a handful of potential swing votes…[for what will be] a pretty close vote. [–] has no desire to vote for this. In principle thinks its wrong….Also is convinced we can’t reliably win re-election every 2 years without the support of [redacted]. There’s definitely an argument there, without support from [–] it will be harder to fully fund a warchest if we get primaried, and more importantly if they stop supporting us it means they threw their money and their influence behind whoever challenges. But I think it’s crazy to throw a vote away on something we don’t support for the possibility that 1 or 3 years from now we’re going to have more uphill than we thought. [–] won’t hear it though, says fighting [–] is worse for us and party and nation (crazy) than conceding on this vote. Can you guys soften him up a little? If he’s on the fence he’ll throw it to senior staff, and it will be an in-stereo chorus of nays. He’s not an unreasonable guy at that point. I think we have the polling data to convince him. What do you say? I’m a staffer, don’t have much money, if I had to I could try to get others to chip in, but I’m not sure how many people you want aware of your involvement. If you get involved. Which I hope you do, assuming you exist at all, but [redacted] says you’re legit and helped out with a thing a while back.
So here’s a coin in the well, I guess.”