To a Caveman Very Few Things Are Resources

There was a time when coal wasn’t a resource

There was a story about how much supposed waste Amazon produces, that Amazon was routinely destroying a whole bunch of products. I thought, “Why are these people inserting their opinion into a business that they know absolutely nothing about?” Would they prefer Amazon to have the perfect knowledge of precisely how many products need to be made? In other words, an epistemologically impossible situation to be in.

Making Something Social Destroys the Truth of It

Science’s biggest breakthroughs came from unpopular people

Making something social destroys the truth of it because social groups need consensus to survive—otherwise they fight and can’t get along—and consensus is all about compromise, not truth-seeking. Science—at least the natural sciences—was this unique discipline where you could have an individual truth-seeking on behalf of the rest of society. Other individuals verify that they did, indeed, have the best current model of how reality works, and then that could be spread out through inventions to the rest of society.

Free Markets Provide the Best Feedback

The alternative is feedback from whomever has the most guns

Marc Andreessen summarizes this nicely as “strong opinions, loosely held.” As a society, if you’re truth-seeking, you want to have strong opinions but very loosely held. You want to try them, see if they work, and then error-correct if they don’t. But instead what we get is either strong opinions strongly held—which is the intolerant minority—or we get weak opinions loosely held—which is this compromised model where no one really takes the blame, no one gets credit, no one gets to try the way that they want to, and everybody can then fall back on, “Real communism hasn’t been tried.”

Innovation Requires Decentralization and a Frontier

Technology has swung us towards centralization in the last decade

Innovation requires a couple of things. One of the things that it seems to require is decentralization. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Athenian city-states orthe Italian city-states or even the United States—when it was morefreeform and less federal government controlled—were hotbeds ofinnovation, because you had lots and lots of competition.

Ideas Are the New Oil

All the new fortunes are created with ideas

Humans have a history of conquest because we fight for the same exact resources, but even in human history the first explorers were traders. They were going out there to find spices, gold, silk, new plants to domesticate, new animals. They weren’t going out there necessarily to conquer the land. Eventually they did because of the finite resource dilemma when you’re stuck on Earth.

Rational Optimism Is the Way Out

Pessimism is self-fulfilling

Professions in which you get your feedback from other members of that profession tend to get corrupted. When you see a journalist writing articles to impress other journalists or a restaurant owner trying to impress other foodies and restaurant owners, it’s usually not practical or high-quality. The journalist or restaurant owner may receive accolades within certain elite circles, but that doesn’t reflect reality.

Pessimism Seems Like an Intellectually Serious Position

We'e innovated our way out of previous traps

If you’re an academic, being able to explain all of the problems that are out there and how dangerous these problems are and why you need funding to look at them in more depth appears to be the intellectually serious position; whereas, someone who claims that we can solve it sounds a little bit kumbaya.

Humans Are Unique in Our Ability to Understand Things

Knowledge is in the observer, not the observed

The value is in the knowledge, and the knowledge is inside the observer and the creator, in other words, a human. It’s not inside the thing itself. For example, oil is useless unless you know how to refine it, burn it, and use it for combustion. Information is useless unless there’s a brain there to receive it. There could be a signal broadcasting English into outer space, but if there isn’t a creature capable of understanding what that language is, how it works, and who’s conveying it, then it’s just modulated electromagnetic frequencies that don’t mean anything.

We’re at the Beginning of an Infinity of Knowledge

Progress is inevitable as long as we have good explanations

The difference with The Beginning of Infinity is you’re getting a worldview. You’re not getting the standard take from physicists about how to understand quantum theory. You’re not getting the standard take of how to understand knowledge from philosophers. And you’re certainly not getting the standard take of how to understand mathematics from mathematicians.

This Book Changed the Way I Think

David Deutsch’s book expanded my repertoire of reasoning

I was pleasantly surprised a couple of years back when I opened an old book that I’d read a decade ago called The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Sometimes you read a book and it makes a difference right away. Sometimes you read a book and you don’t understand it; then you read it at the right time and it makes a difference.

Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

If you have to work a “normal job,” take on accountability to build your specific knowledge

'How do I find the time to start investing in myself? I have a job.' You will have to rent your time to get started. But, this is only acceptable when you are learning and saving. Preferably in a business where society does not yet know how to train people and apprenticeship is the only model.

Make Abundance for the World

Wealth isn't about taking something from somebody else

I think there is this notion that making money is evil, right? It’s rooted all the way back down to “money is the root of all evil.” People think that the bankers steal our money. It’s somewhat true in that, in a lot of the world, there’s a lot of theft going on all the time.

Eventually You Will Get What You Deserve

On a long enough timescale, you will get paid

This one is a glib way of saying, “It takes time.” Once you have all of the pieces in place, there’s still an indeterminate amount of time you have to put in. And if you’re counting, you’ll run out of patience before it arrives. You have to make sure you give these things time. Life is long.

Keep Redefining What You Do

Become the best in the world at what you do

If you really want to get paid in this world, you want to be number one at whatever you do. It can be niche—that’s the point. You can literally get paid for just being you. Some of the more successful people in the world are that way.

Specific Knowledge Is Highly Creative or Technical

Specific knowledge is on the bleeding edge of technology, art and communication

To the extent that specific knowledge is taught, it’s on the job. It’s through apprenticeships. And that’s why the best businesses, the best careers are the apprenticeship or self-taught careers, because those are things society still has not figured out how to train and automate yet. The classic line here is that Warren Buffett went to Benjamin Graham when he got out of school.

Arm Yourself With Specific Knowledge

Specific knowledge can be found by pursuing your genuine curiosity

Do you want to talk a little bit about the skills that you need, in particular specific knowledge, accountability, leverage and judgment. So, the first tweet in this area is “Arm yourself with specific knowledge accountability and leverage.” And I’ll throw in judgment as well. I don’t think you covered that in that particular tweet.

Make Luck Your Destiny

Build your character in a way that luck becomes deterministic

For the first three kinds of luck, there’s “dumb luck,” or “blind luck.” That’s first kind of luck. The second kind of luck there’s the cliché that “fortune favors the bold.” That’s a person who gets lucky just by stirring the pot and acting. The third kind of luck, people say that “chance favors the prepared mind.”

Making Money Isn’t About Luck

Become the kind of person who makes money

Obviously, we want to be wealthy, and we want to get there in this lifetime without having to rely on luck. A lot of people think making money is about luck. It’s not. It’s about becoming the kind of person that makes money. I like to think that if I lost all my money and if you drop me on a random street in any English-speaking country, within 5, 10 years I’d be wealthy again.

The Aging Entrepreneur

Can older people be great entrepreneurs?

Generally, productivity and output rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement. This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific. Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked.

Do Animals Laugh?

Almost everything that women like in men seems to have some reproductive fitness signaling value. What about humor? Note that it’s not enough to say that “humor is a stress reliever.” The question is, why would it relieve stress?