Things I Believe
Things I Believe
Res Extensa #72 :: Publishing my personal philosophy
Former GitHub CEO and now-investor Nat Friedman has an admirably bare-bones website. Not only admirable for its zero-design simplicity, but also for its front-and-center featured list of his personal ideology: "Some things I believe":
A personal website is a signpost: a digital representation of a person, their ideas, their experiences. But more people should use one to publish their philosophy. I said as much on X the other day.
Using a personal website as a home base for a resume or a catalog of past performance is great. After all, most people still don't even have a website at all. Creating a blog and practicing writing is another benefit. Therefore, articulating your core beliefs and what drives you as a person would be even better. I haven't seen it done very often.
To hold myself to account, I published my own at /beliefs, where I’ve listed some of the principles that shape me as a person — the ideas that inform my entire worldview.
If a resume is a record of what you’ve done, and a blog is a stream of your ideas, then a list of beliefs is the framework that generates the future resume and idea stream.
In many ways, Res Extensa started as an outlet to think through my foundational beliefs. So hopefully this is just the beginning of something to curate, refine, and expand on over time.
Systems
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 attempts to control them
Especially true when humans are involved — individual agency is a massively mystifying variable
Systems thinking isn’t rocket science, but in many ways it’s anathema to how we learn in school about how things work
Ideas & Innovation
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)
The quality of your output is a function of the quality of input
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 (start a Substack, write online)
Constraints are a blessing, not a curse
Truly creative solutions are driven by constraint
Unbounded environments aren’t the benefit they appear to be
Business
Your company culture is the product of the decisions you make
To change culture, start making different decisions
Lower decision cost
Easier to maintain a bias to action
You get to avoid the “work paper shredder”, where a body of work is sliced into tiny, contextless chunks and divvied up across a team, removing the bigger picture, and it’s hard for individuals to picture the wider “system” in which the work sits
Context is that which is scarce — smallness retains a high signal-to-noise ratio for transmitting valuable context
The Ringelmann effect is a hell of a drag
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 — real progress comes from individual ownership, accountability, motivation
Life
Nothing is more important than family and your children
Even if you're young and/or don't have them yet, you'll eventually realize this
Being part of local / neighborhood level in-person communities works wonders for your mental state
Especially true when you’re a part of multiple non-overlapping circles
This is intended to be a living list, so I'll keep refining and curating over time on the website. And I'd encourage everyone else out there to publish your own!