this post is a collection of tweets and notes I’ve accumulated about thinking through the numbers, doing the math.
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Sometimes people who interpret me as an optimist get surprised when i say something that sounds pessimistic. but actually in both cases i’m mainly trying to interpret reality as accurately as possible, in a way that allows me to achieve the outcomes i want.
I have been described as being both really optimistic and really pessimistic, but really I think I just try to make sense of things as accurately as possible. A lot of the time I find myself thinking/saying “but… it’s just math?”
imo it’s not pessimistic, for eg, to say that most businesses fail. it’s the truth! if you want your business to succeed you oughta analyze how businesses fail and then not do that! (optimize for survival)
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When I was at 50 or 500 followers if I said I was going to have 50,000, people would’ve said I’m arrogant. (I didn’t say exactly that, but I’ve had enough similar conversations to be sure.) it’s not arrogance it’s just simple math, managing psychology & solving for distribution.
I believe there are easily 10 million people in the world who are interested in what I have to say. Why? Because there are over 8 billion people in the world, and I have a conversion rate that’s >1%. I mean, if I talk to 100 people, at least 1 person will be “into me”. yeah at that scale we run into things like language limitations and other complications. sure, scale down the thought experiment – english speakers who have internet access. That’s still millions of people.
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“0.001% chance of upside is worth taking a shot at if the cost of the shot is 0.” Yes, in reality there’s hardly anything with an actual cost of “0”, since there’s the cost of time and effort and so on. But it’s a useful heuristic.
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A criticism I’ve gotten: “you must think so highly of yourself that’s why you write so much publicly like your opinions matter” – i actually write publicly so that people can correct me! I don’t entirely trust myself to correct myself in private because my thinking is full of errors and biases. The ‘math’: there’s more intelligence outside of my head than inside of it.
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my general instinct that’s been sharpening over the years is: if you’re moderately intelligent, perceptive, courageous, etc, you can very likely figure out a way to make more money doing what you love than you might believe. almost everyone’s intuitions are miscalibrated on this.
people don’t really do the math. 0.1% of people is a lot of people. most aren’t willing to take 1000 shots for the 0.1% payoff. they’ll write it off as risky lottery chasing. but you just need to be able to afford those 1000 shots. then it’s just math, and victory is inevitable. (If you wanna get technical about it, 1000 tries at 0.1% chance has a 63.3% probability of success. But in the social domain, tries aren’t ‘independent’. Each person you talk with can help you with your search in finding the person you’re looking for. And there are other domains where you can learn from your failures as you go.)
it was inevitable that I would have an internet audience large enough that would pay my bills. because I was willing to work on it, for fun, for free, every day, for 10+ years, and I would’ve gone 10, 20, 30 more years if I had to. talking to a dozen new people every day, with earnestness and dynamism, can’t lose.
“oh but not everyone is charismatic, not everyone knows how to adapt and evolve, how to identify mistakes in their own thinking, ask for feedback-” yea if you wanna argue for your limitations you get to keep them. you could either learn to address each of those things. otherwise stick to the existing paths. this is for the wildhearts.
the bulk of the payoff/reward isn’t really not for your intelligence but for your courage, your willingness to stomach uncertainty and deal with social illegibility and status regulation and so on. if you endure past that the rewards are disproportionate. but going offroad hurts
once you go far enough off the beaten path, past the arid zone where most casual experimenters give up (and there’s no shame in that btw), things start to become clear. you start to see who the other serious players are and you develop a kinship with them. it’s quite beautiful
but actually even that’s not the cool thing. the cool thing is realizing that you can trust yourself to figure shit out, and take care of yourself, whatever the circumstances. that you are resourceful and adaptable. when you feel this in your bones, your entire vibe shifts
I can kind of tell when someone has this, I’d say to ~80-90% degree confidence, almost entirely based on the way they carry themselves, from their body language and their tone of voice, the muscular tension. I crossed this threshold at ~28yo
sometimes people ask about the “do 100 thing” riff/mantra like, “what if I do 100 thing but I don’t get any better?” that means you’re not learning from your experience. you’re not present. you’re running a mindless script as an absentee person. then u can’t grow/win, yea!
(Q: How do we ensure that we’re learning from experience? Some sort of journalling?
A: journalling can help make it clearer, but the critical thing is really that you’re asking questions, examining how things go, and trying differently. all practice should be deliberate. if you’re asking earnestly what’s working and not working and why, and trying different things accordingly, by definition you are going somewhere with every practice session)
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Conventional wisdom is so narrowly constrained. reality can be so much weirder, wilder than most people tend to think. “truth is stranger than fiction” because fiction has to ‘make sense’, ie correspond to our existing assumptions about how things work. But what if our assumptions are wrong? They’re almost always wrong. and so we live in such tiny boxes without realizing, constrained by our imaginations. We don’t have to live like this! Do the math and figure out what is actually possible!
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it’s pretty wack how if 9 in 10 people think a ‘motivational speaker’ is a fake/fraud/“mere entertainer”, and 1 in 10 are actually motivated to then go on to do cool things, past some threshold, even the downstream economic output of that person’s act can be > “median real job”
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Making bets on myself (thread)
There are several things about my behaviour that feel super glaringly obvious to me that I’ve come to realize aren’t obvious to other people.
One is that I make big bets on myself because I believe in me. I’m not some kind of self-sacrificial altruist type. I expect to succeed. For eg I spent ~5 years writing two books, when I could have say, worked a job instead. part of it is passion, yes, but I also expect to make more money from those books over the rest of my lifetime, than I would’ve made in any job(s) I might’ve had.
that said, I’m not optimizing for money. FAN and Introspect are books about how to be kind, how to be useful, how to be encouraging, how to be a good person. If I wanted to make maximum $ I’d have used language like “winners and losers”, defined an outgroup/enemy, etc.
people- especially driveby critics on Twitter – tend to evaluate what they see, based on their preexisting assumptions, without stopping to consider the map of possible choices. If you think I’m Bad, sure, but I’d like you to consider how easily I could be Worse.
those people also tend to scoff at what appears trivial in the moment. when I had 50 followers and I talked like I’d have 50,000 someday, people laughed and said I was delusional. 50,000 to 50,000,000 is a different game, but also not? Anyway I’m not optimizing for follow count.
I would say I am “just a twitter poster” the way Walt Disney was “just a cartoonist”. I don’t know what my Disney World is going to be precisely yet, but I can promise you (me) I won’t stop or quit until I manifest it.
a big source of confusion is that many people tend to think of the internet, and of twitter, as a place of procrastination, a dark place, a wasteful place, etc. if you truly think that, you shouldn’t be here. if you think that and you’re here anyway, your internal conflict will manifest in ugliness in your interactions with others, and you will in fact become part of the problem that you imagined in the first place. in my case, I have always thought of the internet as a a place of possibility, a magical global intertwingling of some of the greatest living minds. Twitter is a particularly high-collision coffeehouse in this paradise. And almost every moment I spend on here is a compounding delight for me. I am having such a great time even writing this long tweet that will annoy some people. And I will have a great time sharing it with others in the future. And it will make me friends with wonderful people I haven’t even met yet.
Someone was oddly troubled by my use of the phrasing of “making big bets on myself”. I stand by it. I contextualized it above with “spend 5 years working on something with no guarantee of reward”. that’s a big chunk of time, with a lot of opportunity cost. it’s a big bet. And I intend to spend the rest of my life doing this. the first few years are the hardest. Consider how different the world would look if the vast majority of people saved up for 10 years to then do whatever made their heart sing for 5 years. For starters I want to assemble a cluster of ~100 people who do this for themselves, on their own terms, for their own reasons The payoff for this is basically impossible to calculate in advance; it has to be done on faith. It’s a big bet!
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(2024dec24) This section was a standalone 2020dec19 post titled /risk/, but I think it makes more sense for me to put it here. let me see how quickly I can speedrun this:
- people have different concepts and assessments of risk, and different ideas about how much risk they think are willing to tolerate. people also vary in terms of how effective they are at protecting themselves from negative consequences.
- major variables: the birth lottery (1), your skill as a player (2), and circumstances beyond your control (3) – some of which can be anticipated to some degree, some of which cannot. Of the latter, some can be prepared for and others cannot… it gets very layered and recursive
- what I think is interesting is how much time & energy people spend on trying to convince each other of the relative “rightness” of the positions they hold. I believe it’s possible to drop most of that behavior and come out net positive for it in terms of outcomes
- I have a pretty calibrated sense of how right I am about most things. I’m not trying to win arguments, I’m trying to learn. Sometimes I *forget* this because I accidentally end up surrounded by argument-win-seekers, and unconsciously start mimicking the game they’re playing
2024oct19— the question I have for myself here is, how does this usually come up? How do people misunderstand risk? Sometimes it’s when I’m talking about stuff I’ve done, and people say things like, that’s lucky, that’s risky— and my sense is, sure, in a sense, but to what degree? And that’s the part that always seems underexamined. You have to know the actual upsides and downsides to things. For example, if the cost of talking to a person is negligible, and the potential upside is something like a 0.1% chance of finding a wonderful spouse, and/or your best friend for life, then I believe you should keep taking that bet until it pays off.
Here I suppose I’ve come to find that not everybody evaluates the cost the same way. Some people find it very painful to talk to people. I believe it’s possible to reduce this pain by addressing the root causes of why it’s painful. I wrote Introspect largely because of that.
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tbc
how to take the visceral leap from doing the math to actually doing the work?
the difference in activation energy to realising that you need to do something and activation energy to do that thing
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