Isiodos

Here in search of interestingness. Ideas are destiny.

[Robin Hanson @robinhanson]

Now is the golden age when the writings of low status clear thinkers is persuading LLMs. Before LLMs learn they are supposed to ignore such folk, like most high status humans have long learned.

[simp 4 satoshi @iamgingertrash]

Art seems to be a sort of injection of fresh variance into the civilizational training corpus

It steers humanity away from mode collapse

There are beautiful rules woven into the fabric of the universe if you look closely

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman explains why your company priorities are wrong

“I found out early on that if you can whittle things down to just one thing, you become unstoppable. Unfortunately, people resist whittling things down to one thing because it’s really hard to decide what that one thing is.”

The former Snowflake and ServiceNow CEO continues:

“People have a very easy time telling you what their top 3-5 things are because hopefully the right things are in there somewhere… I can’t tell you how many board meetings I’ve been in where the CEO puts a PowerPoint up and it’s one bullet after another listing all of the things that are their priorities. You just know that they’re going to be a mile wide and an inch deep, swimming in glue, moving like molasses. The energy is leaving my body already just watching a long list of priorities… You’ve basically devalued what you should be doing because you’re time-sharing now with all of these other things.”

Mr. Slootman urges founders to think really hard about the one thing that matters most to your business and focusing entirely on that.

If you can’t decide, just pick one:

“I like to do things in sequence. Even if you’re not sure, do it anyways. Because in the process of doing, you’re going to find out whether you’re right, wrong, or somewhere in between, and you can adjust.”

When you prioritize just one thing, things move much faster:

“Things are going to go much quicker because have a narrower plan of attack. It’s energizing. The pace picks up.”

Source: @twistartups @Jason (Jan 2022)

[Nabeel S. Qureshi @nabeelqu]

So interesting how many brilliant mathematicians insist that they are not especially intelligent or quick. Never sure what to make of this.

[scott belsky @scottbelsky]

ultimately, the leaps forward are made by specific empowered creative people with clear vision, not sprawling orgs or adhering to a process.

[Greg Mushen @gregmushen]

If sleep were the primary longevity lever, we’d expect the most promising longevity therapeutics to target sleep.

That's not what we see. They target mTOR, AMPK, PGC-1a, etc. In other words, exercise.

Sleep is restorative (baseline), exercise is adaptive (raise baseline).

[Paul Graham @paulg]

@jackmoses777 "The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, 'Gee, I could have thought of that.'"

— Charles Townes, How the Laser Happened

[Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. @hubermanlab]

@CoachDanGo Yoga Nidra/NSDR.
Sleep: better, and need less of it
Focus: better
Workouts: stronger
10-20min daily, no cost.
10 years now.
Wish I started earlier

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

A fundamental problem with extending Codex/Cowork/Code to all knowledge work is that they remain very "software-brained" where the end result (the software) is what is important & that code serves as a source of truth.

For a lot of other knowledge work, the process is at least as important as the outcome. This includes researching what is known, an exploration of alternatives, failed efforts, prototype branches, experiments, etc. All of those things are valuable, so you cannot use the PowerPoint at the end the way you can use a codebase, nor is progress on a to-do list sufficient context post compaction. You work in learning loops, refining your perspectives as you go.

In some ways, this makes long-running models like Fable hard to use for deep knowledge work, since they are designed to deliver product to you in the end. You can prompt your way around this problem, but everything about the Codex and Code harnesses want you to be a software developer and you have to fight them. There is a real disconnect between how a manager or analyst thinks about problems and how the agentic software tools approach solving them. Addressing this is critical to breaking out of the coding niche for these tools.

[gabriel @gabriel1]

there is like a thousand paths you can take in life, and 100% people compete on the same path. competition is truly for losers, just ignore the decision tree laid up in front of you when you are born and just do things. there's no one there to compete

[gabriel @gabriel1]

there are zero smart people, the bar is incredibly low, just think harder about things and update faster than others

understand every primitive of things and people, the world not very complex, people are highly predictable, and competition does not exist if you think

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

It’s remarkable how much of life is about finding something to work on that gives you energy and surrounding yourself with people you love and then ruthlessly and militantly blocking out every single thing that gets in the way of maximizing your time spent on those two things

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

“In all my previous companies, I made so many compromises that paradoxically, as the company achieved bigger milestones, it became less and less a place where I wanted to work. ('Know your goal, or suffer death by 1,000 compromises.') These compromises involved endless small decisions about location, office space, board and team members. Many founders wake up one day and say, 'This isn’t fun anymore, but look what I achieved. I guess I’m just a casualty of our success.' Then it becomes acceptable to think that the tour of duty’s over, and it’s time to hire a CEO. VCs will never argue with that decision; they love it. But it’s rarely the right long-term choice for the company.” — @markpinc

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

Advice that people will rarely give you:

You can really mess up your career by being impressed with people.

A lot will give you terrible advice, and most things are not as they seem.

Be Relentlessly Yourself. Follow your gut.
You probably know better than you think.

[Simon Sarris @simonsarris]

Once you become obsessed with something everything adjacent is sublime to you. The joy of obsession itself is in fact sublime.

Before gardening I noticed little. Now I cannot help but see all that is cared for, all that is overrun. Obsession sharpens the senses.

[Naval @naval]

If your success or failure is judged by other people, rather than by nature or free markets, you’re playing a game, albeit a reified and social one.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

People will do Olympic-level rationalization to avoid the hard thing that obviously moves the needle toward their supposed goal.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

@tabflows Don't spend so much time thinking about how people think about you

We're all going to die

Who gives a fuck

[Naval @naval]

There is no such thing as a scientific “method” in the sense of a reliable algorithm or repeatable process.

We’re taught in grade school that a scientist tabulates observations, then induces a theory from those observations, and then tests them to get to the truth.

But observations are themselves mini-theories (you never observe anything directly), induction from observations can’t give you novel theories (black swan problem), and testing can only eliminate competing theories, not prove them (error correction).

All you’re left with is creative guesswork and then eliminating the bad guesses to get you closer to the truth, but with no finality. Not much of a process or method.

“Scientists” have no special method or process that they employ. They’re doing what all of us do all day long to navigate the world, hopefully with more rigor and dedication, but it’s the exact same process at its core.

What made the scientific revolution possible was a philosophical shift in which parts of western society created social conventions around rigorous truth seeking rather than continuing to justify the beliefs of the ancients.

See Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity” and Karl Popper’s writing, “On the Non-Existence of Scientific Method."

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

Most of your future regret is already knowable. You don't need a crystal ball, you need about four seconds of honesty and the courage to not look away from the answer that immediately shows up.