What the blue pushers don’t understand is that if you want to minimise total deaths you should push red. You should understand that 50% would never choose blue even though you really want them to. Base decisions on real world human nature rather than ideals
A matter of trust.
Every year, Finland tops the World Happiness Report. Economists point to welfare systems. Sociologists cite education. But having visited Finland — and eventually bought an apartment in Vantaa — I think the real answer is something harder to measure.
It's trust. Not as a value on a poster. As the actual foundation of how society works.
From the very first trip, it struck me. People trust strangers. Institutions trust citizens. The state trusts its people to make good decisions, and people trust the state not to abuse that. It sounds simple. It is anything but.
When I went through the process of buying property in Finland, the contrast with other places I know was almost surreal. The system assumed good faith — at every step. No one treated me like a potential problem to be managed. That trust wasn't naive. It was structural, built over generations into laws, culture, and everyday habits.
And here's the thing about trust: it's self-reinforcing. When people trust each other, they cooperate. When they cooperate, things work. When things work, trust deepens. Finland isn't happy despite its challenges — it's resilient through them because the social fabric holds.
Happiness reports measure outcomes. Trust is the mechanism. That's what Finland quietly taught me. 🇫🇮
Great men of history had little to no introspection.
The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself.
@pmarca and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about:
David: You don't have any levels of introspection?
Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible.
David: Why?
Marc: Move forward. Go!
I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home.
David: So I've read 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection.
Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self.
He just woke up and was like:
I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again.
Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective.
All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s.
Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff.
The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology.
And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual.
We need to criticize the individual.
The individual needs to self criticize.
The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past.
It never resonated with me.
@chico_ray I’ve lived there for 2 years and it’s rough to see but very safe. No one ever speaks to you or interacts with you which is very different to the rough areas of London where I’ve come from. I haven’t noticed it getting worse and it’s also worth noting there’s always police around
In 1976, 92% of high school seniors said that they had consumed alcohol in their lives.
In 2022, that was 53%.
Smoking cigarettes went from 76% to 17% during the same time period.
Marijuana use is down by 26 pts.
Oh, and teen pregnancy is down 75% since the early 1990s.
By extension, photographs or recorded video should not be able to be edited using AI. If we do not enforce this, how will we ever know what is real? Why ever engage with any media if you cannot tell its real?