Board

When trying to make sense of why humans can be ruthless and greedy, it helps to watch a brainless, thoughtless, emotionless plant ruthlessly destroy everything around it. Nature is ruthless and greedy.

Lots of things work like that. Take brands, relationships, and reputation. There are things that, once lost, will likely never be regained, because the chain of events that created them in the first place can’t be replicated. If you realized how valuable those things are you’d be more careful about risking their loss.

Critical period (linguistics): There is a period from early childhood into adolescence when people can master new languages without difficulty and without a foreign accent – after puberty, it becomes much more difficult. There is a window when the language-learning part of your brain is malleable and open to new information; afterwards, it tends to lock into place. I think it’s similar for so many life experiences: Your views on politics, economics, religion, and relationships are heavily influenced by what you learned and experienced between childhood and your mid-20s. It’s not impossible to re-learn in your later adult years; just much harder.

This is not an accident. It’s an inevitability. Not all Bad tech companies are successful, but almost all successful tech companies are Bad.

You can’t know in advance whether your path leads to success. If you could, successful paths would become overcompetitive and change the maze. There is an idea observer effect.

Since you can’t know up front which path will lead to success, without competition, you should simply pick the least risky path. If no-one else is navigating the maze, take as long as you need. Just don’t die.But competition changes the maze.

A competitor taking a faster, riskier path can turn your safer path into a literal dead end. A definitely legal version of Airbnb might have worked, but the possibly illegal Airbnb took that path away.

Founders will forever accidentally build Theranos, Zenefits, and Naspter. Because, for founders, being Good doesn’t pay if it’s not on the Fastest Survivable Path.

But I haven’t retired yet, probably won’t anytime soon, and have almost no savings. Like most people I have a remarkable talent for spending whatever I earn.

Usually, your actual, phenomenological experience is not positive. At best, it’s day to day bad, month to month good.

If you plot your experienced happiness over time, the area under the curve will often be negative. Hence the cliche, ‘if I knew what it’d be like, I’d never have started’. <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c99f1fefd67931df8317924/1553599788640-3OWRVSED4RS29YCMLAF2/1_OZm43H4l0aeuQB81cV4CwQ%402x.png" alt="1_OZm43H4l0aeuQB81cV4CwQ@2x.png" />

When I left university, most people did one of three things.Some friends got ‘normal jobs’, which weren’t extremely well paid or traditionally ambitious. These friends explore their preferences outside work and, if they’re lucky, have a job they’re interested in.Other friends got ‘good jobs’, which paid more and were considered ambitious. They usually weren’t interested in the work itself, except insofar as it made the job prestigious. These jobs have taken up most of their time since — how else could they be ambitious?A few friends (I studied philosophy, so you know the type) tried to abstain from both normal and good jobs, but have largely caved by now.

They don’t come with an idea worth spending a decade on. They don’t know who they’ll spend a decade with. They don’t know about the area under the curve. They discover it, and then it’s too late to do anything else.

If you’re able to go far, think hard about where you’re aimed: the farther you can go the longer you’ll spend getting there.

Pick your trap, or someone else will pick it for you.

It will probably never be practical to run the really large-scale general purpose models (GPT, etc.) in the browser, because by the time end-user hardware catches up, the definition of what “large-scale” means will be adjusted proportionately