Life can be confusing, full of mysteries and unknowns. And yet, many things are knowable.
Here are some posts about knowing things.
- things I learned from my ex-boss Dinesh — I often share this one, probably because it’s people-shaped
- it’s just math — I’m often surprised to have to bring this up, to point out things like “it’s worth doing things with low probability of success if they’re cheap to do and the expected payoff is high”. I share this much more often than /risk/, so I’m merging that second post into this one.
- the world is big — related to ‘it’s just math’, this one is about how people tend to fixate on their inherited frames, generalize from their own limited experience, underestimate how many people there are, how different those people can be, and what opportunities arise from those differences
- Constraints – understanding constraints is a great way to learn how anything works. A more extreme form of this claim might be, you only understand something to the degree that you understand its constraints. See also: bottlenecks
- optimize for survival – a recurring talking point. You can’t do anything else if you don’t survive.
- don’t be gullible — a variation of “optimize for survival” — I remember writing this in a bit of frustration at people being gullible regarding things like substack and NFTs. might alternatively phrase this as “don’t be unserious”, particular about consequential things, ie don’t put all your savings into something risky
- problems are solvable — define, solicit, integrate — this post includes mention of ‘mario castle problems’ and ‘reconceptualize’, which maybe should be separate posts…
- troubleshooting arrogance — (2025jan9– I should reorganize the humility section into a few coherent paragraphs)
- the 4 kinds of luck — elsewhere I have drafts of posts titled ‘luckmaxxing’ and I feel like they should be merged here, probably
- thinking – transcript for youtube video “how I think about thinking”. see also: systems thinking
- when arguing, strive to understand context – or, how to have interesting disagrements. I feel like the post on low-res models should probably be merged here
- write your memoirs – to get to know yourself better
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(original thread) since i was kid i always wondered why things weren’t better. i’ve probably spent thousands of hours thinking and reading and talking about this. my current assessment is something like, there first needs to be a healthy culture where people can openly discuss how to do better
most “how to do better” conversations happen in private. this is the part of ~nepotism that’s hard to talk about, and harder to do anything about. even if you took away successful people’s assets, they can still discuss/practice habits of success with their peers, kids, etc
as a kid i felt very deprived and shut out of such conversations. my parents hardly taught me anything on purpose. most of what i learned, i learned from books, music, artists, and internet strangers. people who chose to demonstrate and discuss “how to do better” in public
i swore to myself, made a pact, that i would do whatever it took to figure out how to do better, and then share that openly, honestly, as a gift to my isolated/alienated childself. that kid deserved better. many kids everywhere deserve better
doing even a cursory version of this revealed to me in more detail and nuance why so few people do it. you’ll receive pushback and vitriol for it, (some) people will be mean, cruel, uncharitable, assume malicious intent. no good deed goes unpunished, etc etc. still worth it imo
this is going in a different direction than i intended… the inciting thought was still about returning to the center of, why aren’t things better? we could talk about how people are tired, overwhelmed, etc-
but that’s also not what i wanted to focus on… i’m avoiding the thing lol. the thing is that so many people so often are resistant to consequential conversations at all, by which I mean conversations that take seriously the idea that change is possible, that better is possible
i have so often been called delusional, overconfident, arrogant, etc for talking about such matters, that i’ve accumulated a flinch response around it. and to persist i have to work through that response, like massaging out knotted muscles. lots of ppl in my shoes surely quit
i’m committed to this path for life, so threads like this are typically me sorta doing a bit of that massaging, reorienting myself, seeing the big picture, putting out micro-beacons for people to rally around. part of it does get easier with the right sort of companions around
“disincentives that hit almost everyone except frauds”, hence the overrepresentation of frauds in the public commons, which leads to mistrust in the commons, which discourages good actors…
wait i STILL havent said the thing i wanted to say lmfao. i’m so shy in this regard. ok so when i was ~7 i logged on and i knew the internet was the future and now i make a living from it. people said i was naive, ignorant, foolish etc when i was 14 i started dating a girl and i knew i would marry her and i did. people said i was naive, ignorant, foolish, etc now at 33 i talk casually about like what sort of parent i intend to be and people similarly say the same things and the thing is… ok people assume that such things are just not knowable. but i think that’s an errenous assumption. things are quite knowable. and here people will say luck blah blah survivor bias blah blah but you can optimize for both in your favor!! you can do the reading, do the math, cultivate the emotional resilience, learn to manage your psychology, maximize your luck surface area, avoid the things that will kill/ruin you. yes, despite all of this there’s always a *possibility* that things won’t work out, but probabilities do matter, even if we can’t be ultra-precisely correct about them, we can be correct enough to git gud and do better it’s possible to know stuff. it’s possible to get good at stuff. it’s possible to be competent, skilled. it’s possible that some people are good at the things you are bad at. many things are possible. to make things better we have to imagine that they are, and live into those possibilities, even if there are chances that we might be wrong, or we might fail. it might looks arrogant when someone says “this should work”, but it’s actually often even more arrogant to say “that’ll never work”…
it’s probably actually a mistake to even accept the arrogance framing, i bet i’ll end up finding a better reframe. we can probably bypass it and just go straight to talking about possibilities, maybe? idk i’m running out of steam rn but i know i’ll revisit this