Things I Believe

One of the best ways to get to know someone is to peek behind the curtain, and get a look at the core beliefs that drive their personality — as if everyone had a personal, honest, self-curated Wikipedia entry. Here are some of mine. Many of them I’ve written about in my newsletter, Res Extensa (linked inline):

• Problems should be found and addressed closest to their source
  • Hierarchy, modularity, and subsidiarity allow solutions to develop bottom-up
  • See “Pace layering”
• Decentralizing things solves most complex problems
  • Centralization gets things done quickly (makes it attractive), but results in less durability / resiliency
  • Large, top-down systems are resistant to evolving along with the problem space; they’re resistant to change
  • Decentralized systems create an ecosystem of experiments for finding novelty; they expand the “search space”
• Truly complex systems confound all attempts to control them
  • Especially true when humans are involved — individual agency is a massively mystifying variable
• The only way to resist bad ideas is to create better ones
  • Winning should happen through argument and empirical result, not bans and suppression
  • Free speech causes genuinely bad ideas to be exposed as such: the critique (and quantity thereof) is just as public as the idea itself
  • Bad ideas kept underground don’t go away naturally
• Innovation only happens through experimentation, exploring the “adjacent possible”
  • Stop wondering, start tinkering
• You can just go build things
  • Innovation is permissionless, it only requires your knowledge, agency, and resolve
• Speed is the antidote to many problems
  • The faster you can move or decide, the faster you can eliminate the wrong paths (and find the best ones)
  • Progress is a game of testing out the most “stepping stones”
  • The faster you iterate, the longer you can continue to play
• Reading books is the highest ROI learning tool you have
  • You have access to the collective knowledge of civilization for (essentially) free
  • Building and tinkering a close second (any craft or art counts)
• Writing is the best augmenter of your thinking
  • A forcing function to actually articulate and express what’s inside your head
  • Bonus points for making your ideas public
• Constraints are a blessing, not a curse
  • Truly creative solutions are driven by constraint
  • Unbounded environments aren’t the benefit they appear to be
• On Companies
  • Your company culture is the product of the decisions you make
    • To change culture, start making different decisions
  • Small teams are a superpower
    • Lower decision cost
    • Easier to maintain a bias to action
    • You get to avoid the “work paper shredder”
    • Context is that which is scarce — smallness retains a high signal-to-noise ratio for transmitting valuable context
  • Teams want leadership, not collectivism
    • Even high-performing, creative teams need direction, a point of view, conviction, spiritual motivation — can be from within, not merely above
    • Collectivizing decisions within “The Team” only creates the illusion of progress

The people / writers / thinkers who’ve shaped my worldview

In no particular order or category:

Thomas Sowell, Christopher Alexander, David Deutsch, Ryan Singer, Karl Popper, Vaclav Smil, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Tom Holland, Tyler Cowen, FA Hayek, Matt Ridley, Jonah Goldberg, James Madison, Marc Andreessen, Geoffrey West, Venkatesh Rao, Yuval Levin, Martin Gurri, Rory Sutherland

The bookshelf section gives more insight into my reading habits and what’s resonated with me most.