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Naval Ravikant on the importance of following your intellectual obsessions
“If I look back on my life, almost everything great that I’ve managed to pull off - great by my own definition, not the world’s definition - has come from following my own natural intellectual obsessions.”
Naval continues:
“If you can get obsessed over something, dive into it, and just let yourself go and learn everything about it with no motivation other than you just want to know the answer… you can figure it out to a detail that other people don’t.”
He gives the examples of Bryan Johnson’s obsession with not aging or Balaji Srinivasan’s obsession with the Network State. He believes it’s the foundation for all so-called ‘self-improvement’ and ‘success’:
“[It] really just comes from letting you be yourself, follow the things you really want to follow. Figure out the things you really want to figure out - not worrying about what other people want or think - and you’ll find yourself in the same place at the end, no matter which route you take.”
Source: @balajis@naval (Sep 2024)
Sam Altman reveals his favorite Naval quote:
"Naval Ravikant used to say this thing that I loved, which is, if you had a fast-forward button on a remote for your life, your life would be over."
"The boring parts, the bad parts, they're still much better than no experience. It’s all part of the interestingness and the kind of emotional depth and range. And I don’t know, I find it fairly easy to be grateful for the bad days."
It doesn’t matter if open source software is developed by the CCP, the NSA, the Jews, ISIS, MAGA, ANTIFA, or the Illuminati.
It’s open source - just audit and run it yourself.
They can send me gold bricks too, as long as they’re at it.
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.
https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb
@Gyan49485 “objectivity” argument is fair, but “no opening prep” isn��t. He’s clearly avoiding his main lines right now to keep them hidden before facing Sindarov. Deliberate surprise-prep strategy, not lack of prep
@IsaacKing314 Jensen Huang (NVIDIA CEO) had a nice view on this. While he was on the Joe Rogan Podcast he said that only tasks will get automated/replaced by AI. BUT the purpose of the people is going to stay.
I.e. Code wont be written by Hand but the general ideas will come from Programers.
Why Classical Chess May Matter More Than Ever
Every few years, someone predicts the end of classical chess.
The arguments are familiar. Games take too long. Audiences want faster entertainment. Rapid and blitz are easier to watch, easier to broadcast and better suited to a world built around shorter attention spans.
It sounds convincing.
But I think we may be looking at it the wrong way.
The question is not whether classical chess can compete with TikTok. Nothing can. The real question is whether everything should.
Technology has made our lives faster and more efficient, but it has also changed the way we use our attention. We rarely spend hours focused on a single task anymore. Notifications interrupt us, AI answers our questions instantly and every app competes to keep us moving to the next thing.
Classical chess does the exact opposite.
For four or five hours, you sit across from another person with no phone, no AI, no distractions and no shortcuts. Every decision is your own. You calculate, you doubt yourself, you recover from mistakes and you keep thinking.
That experience is becoming increasingly rare.
Ironically, I think AI strengthens the case for classical chess rather than weakens it.
Engines have long surpassed humans at finding the best moves. But that is no longer the interesting part. What remains fascinating is watching people think. How they solve problems, handle uncertainty and make decisions under pressure without outside help.
The game is no longer just about the moves. It is about human cognition itself.
That does not mean classical chess should stand still.
I would actually like to see more tournament formats that reward ambitious play. The Grand Swiss is a good example. Open Swiss tournaments create natural incentives to play for wins because the standings are constantly changing. A few victories can launch you into contention, while too many safe draws often leave you behind. That encourages fighting chess without changing what makes classical chess unique.
I think that is a healthier direction than simply making the games faster.
Rapid and blitz deserve their place. They are exciting, accessible and great for spectators. But they should complement classical chess, not replace it.
As the world becomes increasingly optimized for speed, activities that reward patience become more valuable.
The greatest strength of classical chess is no longer simply that it is slow.
It is that it remains one of the very few places where deep, uninterrupted human thought is still the entire point.