“The ultimate sense-enhancing device is a searching mind.”
You shouldn’t care who I am, but if you do, I’m perhaps just a craftsman embracing a dream who happens to have a thing about AI of all kinds. Below is a collection of principles that chart the path I walk less blindly. The list might shrink or grow as I learn more.
- As much as possible, invert. Most of what we call progress is just the residue of what we stopped doing.
- Life is a colossal local-optimization, constraint-satisfaction problem, enacted solely within the theater of our subjective experience.
- Attention is a cardinal seed. Whatever we become has grown from where we planted it, voluntarily or not.
- I trust the craft practiced while ecstatic, grieving, wired, bored, or half-asleep. Mastery that survives mood swings is the only mastery.
- Repetition rarely makes strenuous activities easier, but those who possess grit often become resilient enough to face any adversity.
- We forget almost everything — yesterday is already fading away. We move toward radical presence as the only adequate gesture to how quickly the richness of now evanesces.
- Money tracks collective belief about value, not value itself. We compete to be a cause it has to price, but it often slips our minds that belief is not immutable.
- Time gives no refunds, and yet “non exiguum temporis habemus, sed multum perdidimus.”
- The big lie of self-help is that we need motivation to get started. Like heat from friction, motivation is an emergent property of action. If we deconstruct any problem until we find a step so small it sits below the threshold of resistance and then start from there, momentum will follow.
- We must actively court luck by preparing our minds and increasing our surface area for opportunities. At the same time, we should never ignore geography’s grip on destiny, but “tempt fate with our own purpose.”
- We must refuse to die where we were born and act as if expansion beyond our inherited worldview were a moral imperative.
- Soft skills are the hard skills.
- An appropriately nurtured brain excels at simulating reality.
- Truest intuition — concerning highly accurate predictions — is somatic and we can train to recognize it.
- Personal growth obeys the Lindy effect: our vices and virtues persist in proportion to their age.
- We often give up due to the lack of an immediate signal of improvement, when in fact we need to persist, firmly focusing on the trust that the process we have designed (or borrowed from others) compounds over time.
- Our bodies are the first and last frontier of experience. We should embrace a lifelong sport to let the wisdom of the body reveal truths that no words can convey. Rather than looking away from mortality, we engage with it daily through sweat, injury, fatigue, aging, and recovery. Physical activity becomes a way of deeply probing the instrument that will eventually fail us.
- We need to cultivate an intimate relationship with our subconscious. A dream is decoded lossy data our brains signal to themselves.
- For a creative mind, fixed choices are a sleight of hand. We should remember Caesar at Alesia and build the wall that no one expects.