The variation in subjective experience, between people and within one life, is immense. You may get stuck without realizing, or change without realizing. Nobody warns you that your inner state drifts silently. Do not take your inner self for granted. Take up journaling as a practice; take photos; take videos.
The wolves and vampires are among us. You are either schizo/autist, normie, or psycho. The wolves often run on borrowed desire — mimetism in the Girardian sense: weak intrinsic ends of their own, so they mirror everyone else’s, and they fake affect and cooperation well enough to pass. Moral positions and positions of power attract the wolves more than most. Normies cannot easily spot psychos.
Do not be incapable of violence, boundaries, or meanness.
A credible capacity for force, held by someone who doesn’t want to use it, reduces the total amount of force in the world. The point isn’t to be evil; it’s that deterrence requires a credible move: tit-for-tat only stabilizes cooperation if you can actually retaliate (see Nicky Case’s The Evolution of Trust).
In many environments, displaying the inability to be mean — or running a default policy of niceness — attracts evil toward you and the people around you. The reliably nice are legible, and predators go where the prey is predictable; always-cooperate gets farmed no matter what it’s hiding.
Calibrate yourself correctly to the risk of failure.
In some domains failure is forgiving and even the fastest teacher (fail early, fail often). See: Antifragile, Black Box Thinking.
In others, you’ll usually be fine but a single failure wipes you out — never play these on repeat (Black Swan, irreversible decisions).
Then there are bets where ruin is likely, but you should still take them: because the upside accrues beyond you, and because if enough of you try, one gets through. Sometimes these bets are what makes life worth living- YOLO!
For SpaceX Elon put essentially everything from PayPal into SpaceX and Tesla, and by 2008 was borrowing money for rent with the last of it riding on Falcon 1’s fourth launch — three had already failed. If that ship had blown, he was done, dead broke.
90% of everything is shit. Worse: 90% of everything is mislabeled. (F*ck numbers). And most of the knowledge that matters was never written down at all (intellectual dark matter); the best book on a subject is very unlikely to have been written by the best possible author, because the best practitioners mostly don’t write. Think about selection pressures, incentives, and loops, always.
Almost everything is possible within the laws of physics — everything else is knowledge and constraints; you either need to know more, or you need to push a lever (David Deutsch).
Also, the conventions that look crazy are usually adaptive responses to genuine threats: when something seems irrational, find what spurred it (Chesterson’s Fence).
Techno-optimists are surprisingly fence-blind, because the fences they’ve personally met were mostly bad ones.
Intelligence is and will always be systematically underpriced.
Most people are not smart themselves and therefore unfamiliar to it. They severely underestimate intelligence because
a) mostly they’ve met abstraction jockeys (classical nerds) — and since capacity for abstraction doesn’t imply intelligence (and intelligence, for that matter, doesn’t always imply agency), they come away unimpressed.
b) when they do meet the real thing, they attribute it to charisma or luck — because real intelligence is very good at optimizing how it’s received. It optimizes outcomes including its own presentation: the hard thing looks effortless, the weird bet looks obvious in hindsight, the right call looks like timing. The better it works, the less it looks like intelligence. The signal destroys itself.
Even smart people don’t experience themselves as smart. Intelligence implies a better theory of knowledge — you see exactly what you don’t know — so from the inside it doesn’t feel like being smart. It feels like everybody else being inexplicably dumb.
The dose makes the poison. Past a threshold, more of a good thing becomes a different thing.
Ivan Illich: every tool has two watersheds, and past the second it starts producing the opposite of its purpose. Almost everything comes back to limits and quantities.
If you can’t be a good eater, be good food. (The mitochondria lost the eating contest and won eternity. See also Blindsight.)
Fields have founding eras, when the giants get minted cheap— after that, it doesn’t matter how much of a genius you are, you’re unlikely to change much. The low-hanging fruit grows back only when new tools arrive: computation reopened mathematics, AlphaFold reopened structural biology… and unfortunately this tends to happen unpredictably to outsiders. So be aware of timing: there was a founding era for math, for physics, for chemistry, for biology, for half of computer science. My bet is that this is complexity science’s. (Hawking thought so too.)
Just because you are right doesn’t mean you will survive. Solve for distribution and endurance. Make beautiful things scale.
Be very careful about situations where being in a bad state leads to getting less and less feedback from the world. Kings and the homeless both tend to go crazy for the same reason: people stop telling them what’s real. Power, wealth, sickness, isolation…each can quietly sever the loops that keep a mind calibrated.
Rational, long-horizon, positive-sum, and coordinative: each trait is common alone; the conjunction is vanishingly rare— orders of magnitude scarcer than anyone tells you. When you finally meet one of these people you’ll be surprised how good they are. Hold on to them.
America A — the building, functioning half of the two Americas — is one of the highest-trust societies ever in the sense that matters for making things. It runs on generative trust — strangers funding strangers, immigrants handed capital and payroll on a term sheet and a handshake. That’s why the innovation happens there.
