https://x.com/david_perell/status/1894143267878703562

But the benefits of writing aren’t because of their comparative advantage. Writing is a skill that leads to self-improvement.

I responded:

I've been a part of the last seven cohorts of David’s course. And he's underselling his course and overselling LLMs.

First, because his course emphasizes the type of writing that he himself says will last - personal writing and unique perspectives.

Second, because the outcome that will be undermined the most (audience building) is not among the four best outcomes of Write of Passage.

1. The process of writing is a gateway to introspection. You will learn more about yourself when you develop a practice of writing than in any other experience save meditation.

2. Write of Passages teaches and fosters an iterative process, which is transferable to learning any future skill. And mastering this process is the clearest path to cultivating agency that I've found.

3. "I love the community!" is the universal response to "What's the best thing about WoP?" WoP alumni are more enthusiastic and proud than Cross-Fitters, Texans, and Bitcoin-maxis.

4. Write of Passage gave me permission to publish my writing. There's nothing better than telling someone that their writing belongs out in the world - and I've been on both sides.

The metric system is a tool, and should be used when it’s the most useful. Fahrenheit is a better system for everyday life. 0F is around the lowest temperature in a person’s experience and 100F is around the highest. 0-100 is an intuitive scale, everyone has a feel for where any data point is on that scale. That same range is -18 to 38 in Celsius. Which is more intuitive?

When I was a kid, I came up with a metric for time. It did not work and it’s obvious why. There are at least two fundamental time cycles. 24 hour days and 365 day years. One is not a factor of 10 from the other, so any time metric system could not involve both cycles. The metric system is not universally useful and should only be used when it is.

But the larger population can also destabilize so you need to keep focus on expansion. The story of the Byzantine general Belisarius is an example of the tightrope rulers walk. He was imprisoned because he was too effective in subjugating the empire’s enemies. The emperor feared he would become too popular and return to the capital to take power.

Now, it’s discouraged to overtly exert power over your neighbors. Power is applied indirectly. Since the populace’s energy can no longer be redirected toward foreign enemies, governments now discourage fertility to maintain internal control.

Since the Gettysburg address, Americans believe that democracy is “of the people, by the people, for the people.” But this is a myth. Like any relationship between any groups of people, government is subject to the principal-agent problem. There is no incentive for the government to look out for the welfare of its people. Not even re-election (The congressional approval rating is 17% and congressional incumbents are re-elected over 90% of the time).

To get alignment in government, you must have self-government. You must be responsible for as many choices as possible. The default must be less government overreach.

Competition is baked into standard economic dogma, in part because perfect competition results in equilibrium dynamics, which are easy to model. - Bilal Chughtai

There’s an old joke about a guy looking for his keys under a streetlight. Another guy comes along and helps him look. After ten fruitless minutes, the second guy asks the first guy where he dropped them. He points twenty feet away and the second guy asks him, “Why are you looking here then?” He answers, “It’s where the light is.”

All of undergraduate economics is focused on modeling equilibriums (I don’t know if this is true or not for graduate level). If any state changes, it’s assumed that a new equilibrium will be found. The normal world, where every variable is constantly in flux, is waved away.

A paradox is when two assumptions lead to a self-contradictory conclusion.

I’ve been working on the idea that two contradictory thoughts can lead to something greater but I’ve been having trouble formulating how it works or even what to call it. But when I read Why Gregory Bateson Matters, the idea of the double bind was exactly the opposite of contradictory thoughts that cause growth.

Borrowing from the similarity to a paradox and the paranoia/pronoia relationship, I present “prodox” - when two contradictions lead to growth.

Some examples: two finance tropes, first “Let your winners run” vs “You never lose money taking a profit.” I always thought that this demonstrated that financial advice was trite but if you follow both simultaneously you’re forced to examine the facts more closely.

Explore vs exploit: The tension between the two facilitates your curiosity.

Learning vs trying: I’ve found that the most effective way to learn is by alternating book learning with real life experience. The experience gives context and allows you to explore the nuances and the book learning can lead you to new areas. It’s the same as alternating first principles with experimenting.

Conservative vs liberal: status quo vs change. Change is the only way to grow but unchecked change can lead to chaos. Likewise, the status quo may be effective now, but the world is constantly changing so stasis will eventually lead to failure.

Evolution: an animal’s environment changes over time. Evolution is the survival of the fittest - the most adaptable survive. But changing too much will also decrease survivability.

The common thread is tension. Tension between two poles creates stress and dynamism. Edge cases get discovered and explored.

If we decide what time to wake up, do we care if the sun rises at 6am or 7am?

Authoritarianism doesn’t work over curious people. Curious people naturally question the whys and hows and no centralized authority will have a 1.000 batting average. There is always room for improvement. Curious people can become authoritarian, but at that point they’re moving away from their curiosity.

If you’re curious, you will tend toward decentralization. Your curiosity will lead you into exploring alternative perspectives and solutions.

You can’t simultaneously support authoritarianism and curiosity.

This shows a lack of understanding of statistics. The average age of death was that low because infant mortality was much higher. If you survived into childhood, the average age of death was not much lower than now.

But I hear so many people use “ancient people died in their twenties” as an assumption in their arguments. When I hear this, I immediately discount the speaker as a serious person. They are either intellectually dishonest, incurious, or lacking in logic.

Another approach is to take the negative. Anything that goes against a First Principle must be wrong. You don’t have to expand on the idea of conservation of energy, if you hear an idea that violates conservation of energy, it must be wrong. This feels like an easier application of First Principles.

We know that incentives drive behavior, I would say this is a principle of human behavior. So when you don’t take into consideration how humans are incentivized, you’re not going to get the behavior you expect.

Example, assuming that a politician is looking out for the good of the people.

Charlie Munger has a list of twenty-five human misjudgements. What if we take this list as First Principles? What if we eliminate all of our assumptions that violate these misjudgements?

“I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.” - Joseph Conrad

Eating shit can be good and bad. Good? Surfing. Bad? Working for someone else.

There's two ways of eating shit when you surf. One is when you're physically capable of riding the waves. The other is when the waves are physically challenging. When you're physically capable of riding the waves but you can't catch them, the shit you're eating is mental. I'm not at the point where I realize what's going wrong. Am I too far forward? Am I too far backward? Am I not going fast enough? Doing more reps when you're not sure why can be mentally taxing. When waves are physically challenging, you also need mental strength to keep going out there. Getting crushed and knowing you have to paddle back out just to get crushed again.

Either way, you know you need to eat the shit to get better. You won't improve without the reps.

When you work for someone else, you eat a lot of shit. Pointless work, the wasting of time, unless you have a great relationship and communication skills you will eat shit. And it's not productive. You can be productive despite the shit eating, but the actual eating of shit is useless. It's inevitable because everyone has different values and priorities. Your boss does not value your free time as much as you do.

Repetition is necessary to learn because repetition builds taste. You develop a sense for what quality is and how to recognize it and how to express it. The difference in the surfing and job examples is that in the job you are doing reps on something that you don't care about. You're developing taste in eating shit, not in something you actually value. The exception to eating shit at the job is when you are perfectly aligned with the work that you're doing - you're in it for the work itself not for downstream effects.

However, what is useful from eating shit, good or bad, is that you learn more about yourself. You can learn what you care about. You can learn how you respond to adverse conditions. You can learn how much you can suffer. But these are all "cans." You won't unless you're introspective.

Teachers are always present and willing to teach. But they don’t want to waste their time. I’m reminded of Derek Siver’s story, There’s No Speed Limit. His mentor, Kimo Williams, offers to help many aspiring music students and tells them to show up at 9AM. But only Derek did.

A better saying might be, “Students will see teachers when they are open to learning.”

But when you buy baby stuff, it’s not for me. I can’t see how the baby would use or enjoy it.

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) are the essential point of a solution. Remember that marketing story about you don’t need a drill, you need a hole? The hole is the JTBD, the drill is the tool to accomplish it. The basic JTBDs for babies are feed them, get them to sleep, keep them clean.

But the marketing for baby items doesn’t address JTBDs and it’s hard to find parents who think like this. I don’t care what pattern a burp cloth is, I want to know if it’s absorbent and easy to clean.

It’s hard to tell the functionality from a website and even in person it’s hard because I’m the one trying it out, but I’m not the one that’s going to be using it. And even if the one who’s going to use it was here, he won’t be able to tell me what qualities he values for years.

Practical delusions are “things that are useful to believe, even if they're unlikely to be true.” Examples are “treat every gun like it’s loaded,” or “I can determine my own destiny.”

This definition of liminal spaces is focused on truth, while practical delusions are focused on usefulness.

I thought there was a contradiction between them, but you could still be a truth seeker but still use practical delusions. And what’s to stop you from thinking of yourself to be in a liminal space when you really aren’t?

Liminal space is bordered by opposing forces. Supply and Demand create dynamics that reach the most useful equilibriums (pareto points). Liberalism and Conservatism create evolution, but with checks.

Finance is full of contradictory aphorisms. Let you winners run. No one went poor taking money off the table. I used to think that this showed that no one knew anything and people wanted to look smart but just were demonstrating recency hindsight. But now I think you should assume both are true. If both are true, what does that mean? Under what circumstances is one true and what circumstances the other? Where is the flipping point?

On Jim O’Shaughnessy’s podcast Infinite Loops he often says, “the opposite of a truth can be a truth. The opposite of a virtue can be a virtue.” Often, when this happens, it’s a greater truth and a greater virtue.

This seems odd. Why would you change philosophies? But power and magic can also be called agency. Identifying as a Saruman is the fastest way to becoming agentic. You try to do something no one else thinks you can do, it works, you think you can do more things. But at some point you realize that this works because you were pushing mental boundaries, not reality boundaries. The limits that you were overcoming by bullshitting were self-imposed limits. When you hit reality your realize you can’t accomplish something by yourself. You can push in another direction, you can keep hammering away, you can see yourself as a failure, or you can give up ownership and help other people reach the goal. The last is becoming a Radagast.

Let’s shift from a fantasy metaphor to a science-fiction metaphor. Saruman is the Dark Side of The Force and Radagast is the Light Side. The Dark Side is “quicker, easier, more seductive.” But it’s not more powerful. It’s just faster to get results. The Light Side, you need to be “calm, at peace. Passive.” Not a great metaphor because the Dark Side is not a great starter set for learning the Force. In Star Wars, Jedis fall from the Light Side because they get impatient and want results. Redemption is rare.

The Saruman/Radagast metaphor is to become agentic and then realize that more can be accomplished through the efforts of other people. But you can’t support other people without being agentic yourself. Saruman personifies gaining agency, Radagast personifies the limits of ego.

In real life, the maligned Landmark program is a way through this progression. You first learn to be agentic by realizing all the limitations that are self-imposed. Eventually, you start a project, only to be told to hand off that project to someone else. That handoff teaches you to prioritize the project, not your ego. And if you want that project to succeed, you need to support the new leader.

When I don’t do something that I say I want to do it’s because I’m subconsciously waiting for permission.

Imposter syndrome and permissioning is the same thing