How Do You Know That?

Welcome to a very special edition of Still Burning, where we talk to geeks who still care and are still doing something about it. And I have a very special geek to share with you. My oldest, Bethany Andres-Beck, who's running for Congress in the 6th Congressional District of Massachusetts, and is also a high-level geek. Beth, welcome so much to Still Burning.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I've known you for a while. When did you first know that you were a geek?

So the first pun I ever made was cheese-related. And we'd gone to the refrigerator — and I said, but that one's cheddar. And I was so proud that you laughed. And that's it. That was the start of all of this.

Okay. So that's word geekdom. How about computer geekdom?

I really enjoyed a game called Widget Workshop — where you built circuits and programs out of anthropomorphized components. A switch was a rail switch, and a timer was dropping an elephant on Mars or something. Piecing together programs out of fun components and making it do the thing that you wanted it to do.

At what point did you know that not everybody shared these interests?

I think for me it was interesting. I met one of our friends' kids who had some learning disabilities. I was trying to teach him something and it wasn't working. And his brother explained — well, he always thinks different. And I realized that there were ways that other people interacted that were different than me. And to interact with them, you have to figure out the puzzle of why do they think differently, what do they find interesting. And that's how I've approached people ever since.

People are fascinating. I think of it as the thing that's most human. The thing that makes us people is the ways in which we're different. And we all bring something different to whatever collective endeavor we're doing. The through line of all my different interests is that there's always a reason — people do things for reasons. There may not be reasons I agree with, there may not be reasons we think of as noble, but there's always something that influences you.

Talk me through your path. You did self-driving cars — how did that happen?

I was actually a theater major — but I fell into software through grad school at MIT and ended up on a self-driving car team working on the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2008. That's where I learned what it means when your software does something you didn't expect at exactly the wrong moment. Our car got stuck at an intersection and relaxed its safety constraints. Then it drove up onto the sidewalk. I understood exactly what it had done and why — the code made a decision in that moment based on rules we'd written months earlier, and we weren't there. The programmers who made that call were absent when the consequence landed.

Why don't people write tests? You spent a lot of time trying to figure this out.

I didn't write tests for the first seven years of my career. I knew I should. The blockers were real: no tooling, no examples in the codebase, no shared identity around testing on the team. When I finally did start writing them — what actually changed things was identity-level framing. We are a team that writes tests. Once that identity was in place, I would go into code reviews and instead of pointing out bugs, I would point out the test that was missing. So every time someone wrote a test, it caught a bug. And that dopamine loop — I predicted red, I got red — is just so powerful. That's what creates the habit.

What do you think about genies and tests?

First, it needs an endocrine system. Genies don't have enthusiasm, excitement. I think right now the thing that exists is us plus the genie — the human provides the motivation, the stakes, the care. The computer is just a lump that sits there. You can't make the genie care about tests. But you can design a system where the human's caring gets expressed structurally — through hooks, through verification layers, through the review process. The entity that cares is always us.

You mentioned the illusion of objectivity as a management problem.

Objective performance reviews are a perfect example. When you call something objective, you make it harder to challenge — anyone who questions the result is questioning the process, which is supposed to be neutral. But the subjectivity doesn't disappear. It gets baked in earlier, when the criteria are set, and those choices go completely unexamined. You get more biased systems by pretending that they are objective than by admitting where subjectivity matters and negotiating it openly.

From your organizing work — you mentioned a "Guild of Guilds" idea.

The idea is guilds organized by function — food, shelter, media, communications, each with its own leadership structure. And then a Guild of Guilds that coordinates them. The key property is that it's self-replicating. New leaders are built into the structure from the start, so the movement doesn't depend on any one person. The reason I got into organizing at all — through Howard Dean's campaign and then Occupy — was that I kept seeing movements with incredible energy collapse because the leadership wasn't distributed. I wanted to learn how to build something that wouldn't.

Tell me the preschool teacher story.

A preschool teacher is watching two kids. One counts to 31 all by herself. The other kid asks the first: "How do you know that?" — and by asking, learns what the first kid just figured out, plus how to ask. That's meta-intelligence. It's the capacity to learn how to learn from others: to look at who's being successful, ask why they're being successful, and use the answer. It's teachable. It's learnable. And in a moment when nobody has a playbook, it may be the most important skill there is. The thing that stops us from doing better the most is just that we don't think we can. Sometimes the reason quit four years ago and nobody has tried since.

Last question. What about this situation scares you? What keeps you up at night?

I have two kids to put through college — that's one thing. But the bigger thing: I'm pretty good at thinking up worst case scenarios, and then sometimes they come true. The case I'm most concerned about is not the robots do whatever they want. It's they do exactly what some people told them to do. Because we know there are people out there who don't care about the vast majority of humanity. We know there are people who care about their own power over other people. And we are building technologies that could be a personal army — where you no longer need to collaborate with other people to commit mass atrocities. You just need enough money to do it yourself.

Sobering thoughts. Thank you, Beth, so much. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

And that's it. Thank you so much for listening.