Grant Application for Jordan 11s

Dear committee members,

I am requesting a grant of $250 USD to purchase myself a pair of Nike Air Jordan XI sneakers for day-to-day wear. Of this amount, approximately 95% will go toward the cost of the shoes themselves, and the remainder will cover shipping. Products in this line are typically available on resale sites such as Flight Club and StockX for prices in the $150-$300 range; the grant amount will cover a pair of Black/White Concord low-tops or similar in respectable condition.

Background

Several years ago, I saw a guy at a bar in a pair of Jordan 11s and thought, those go hard. Recently, I saw a different guy at a different bar also in 11s and once again thought, those go hard.

Members of the committee, in this spirit of aesthetic exuberance, I humbly request funding to cop.

Track record

For decades I have maintained possession of two feet in good condition, and I plan to hang onto them for the foreseeable future. I treat my existing sneakers pretty okay and even store the nice ones in the original box with the little cardboard inserts still inside.

To be sure, I do not claim to be goated with the sauce. Nevertheless, I feel I have cultivated a passable sense of drip.

Justification

There are many things two hundred and fifty dollars can achieve on the margin. They can be exchanged for an hour of a brilliant alignment researcher’s time, offered as a bribe to a malicious superintelligence intent on simulating the torture of its enemies, or stashed under a mattress to prevent you from taking a stranger of dubious scruples up on her offer of a nonzero probability of 250 quadrillion dollars tomorrow in exchange for the $250 in your pocket today. They can buy your first through 125th malaria bed nets, your 876th through 1,000th malaria bed nets, or your 25,626th through 25,750th malaria bed nets. They can also snag you the shoe that Boyz II Men famously wore with white tuxedos and that longtime Nike designer Tinker Hatfield revealed in a 2018 interview to be his favorite from the entire Air Jordan line.

It is never easy to compare two ways to spend your money, and as I pore over sneakerhead forums weighing the relative merits of the newer Cool Grey and classic Bred colorways, I do not envy you the task. One grantee might maximize quality-adjusted life years on expectation, while another might trade off expected value to avert more risk of utter failure. A third might compromise on both fronts to achieve more immediate results. Of the earnest and noble endeavors you are asked to evaluate, one may generate an explosion of new beings with lives just barely worth living; another may send the per-capita hedonometer off the charts by judiciously purging the afflicted; and still another may sacrifice all of those interests toward the eternal rapture of a very, very, very, very delightable creature.

By my calculations, the Jordan 11s will generate only 0.01 expected counterfactual acts of reproduction. They will not manage to kill any sad people. And if the plot of Space Jam (1996) is any indication, they will leave the amusement-seeking monster utterly disappointed. Yet in the event that I encounter a flailing child struggling to extricate himself from a pond, the 11s’ lightweight patent leather mudguard, a departure from the heavier genuine leather on earlier models, will allow me to swim unencumbered to his aid. Should this predicament somehow recur three billion times, the durable ballistic mesh upper will ensure the shoes survive one rescue mission after another. At the least, it will keep them in serviceable condition until the day my urban commute lands me in the vicinity of a pond.

Justification: take two

I really like these shoes.

I’m not some kind of six-sigma sneaker enjoyer. As far as I can tell, I have about the same capacity for pain and pleasure as everybody else. But as much as any casual footwear appreciator can, I like seeing Jordan 11s on other people, and I like seeing what they wear them with, and I’d like seeing them on me, and I’d like picking out what to wear them with. There are a lot of boring shoes out there. There are uncomfortable shoes, tacky shoes, artless shoes, grabbed-them-and-ran-to-the-checkout-because-you-couldn’t-stand-another-minute-in-the-mall shoes. Then a shoe comes along that is inspired, by virtue of being designed not by committee but by one man for one other man, after which an enchanted public imbued both men and the shoe with immortality. Is it just a piece of mesh and leather? Sure. Is it mass-produced by a multinational corporation? Of course. But damn it, the things look clean.

Of course, I like a lot of other stuff. I like hugs and rescued puppies and crowds cheering for little kids. I like saving for a house and a family and retirement. I like feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and caring for the sick. I like personal glory. I like randomized controlled trials of health interventions, worlds without killer robots, and humanely-run fish farms. I also like rigor, so sometimes I try to multiply and exponentiate these things. But if I go rigorous enough, I end up proving that the warm feeling I get from compliments and kittens, raised to the power of the projected fertility rate in 2100, comes out to tiling the Milky Way with sentient prediction markets and using the resulting efficiency gains to get the gazillion crickets we discovered in the Andromeda galaxy hooked up to a steady MDMA drip. And that makes the warm feeling go away, which leaves me puzzled about why I raised it to a power in the first place.

If you’ve ever taken real analysis or abstract algebra, you may have had to prove that one plus one really does equal two, and more generally, that under a set of axioms, certain operators really do produce a particular outcome when applied to objects of a given type. Frequently the outcome you get isn’t the intuitive one; you may even run into trouble with the axioms. I got burned enough times that I eventually stopped making assumptions about how familiar rules work on any new domain. Not everything adds in the obvious way. Not everything is a total ordering.

Which is all to say, members of the committee, we are sailing finitely on a big blue lump through the voids that will someday be sentient cricket-utility-measuring prediction markets. A minute is a lifetime. An eon is the blink of an eye. A clock chimes every millennium. A tail wags every second. And some of us prefer to traverse those voids carrying the wings of Icarus in our carbon fiber spring plates, the transcendence of human ceremony in our shining mudguards, the contours of rivers in our wavy uppers, and the ancient glaciers in our frosty soles.

On the day the abyss gazes back into me, I want only for it to look me up and down, observe itself reflected in the gleaming leather on my feet, and, as with the NBA to Michael Jordan in 1995 (”dress code violation”), have no possible response but a $5,000 fine.

But that’s a grant application for another time.