Advice and Agency

When to knock down Chesterton's fence

On advice

If you’re trying to do things that most people aren’t, you will have experiences that most people don’t. Keep this in mind when receiving life advice.

How should you approach taking life advice? It can be helpful to understand the personal context that drives the suggester. That’s often enough to know how much to weight person X’s opinion on topic A.

There’s also the more implicit kind of “advice”, the kind that is never stated out loud, but embedded in cultural and societal norms. Most of the advice we receive are implicit signals downstream of society’s values.

How do you decide when it’s best to follow the societal rulebook, and when to ignore it?

We live in a society

We are born into civilization - society and the values and norms du jour, but also millennia old norms and technologies. Traditions are constantly evolving and being uprooted, but a lot of societal and material infrastructure has been around for a while. For example: clean water, electricity, universal suffrage, sliced bread, democracy, computers etc.

You can live your entire life without questioning the script - going off of analogies and remixing templates (NPC). Not only is that the default thing to do, it’s actively reinforced as the correct thing to do, because we live in a society. Society is a self-perpetuating meme - of course it’s going to shill its norms and cultures as the best way to live! Society is a meme that is incentivized to self propagandize. Society is composed of cultural memes, and the more resilient memes are most likely to survive, so we usually encounter memes that are anti fragile (Lindy effect). Societies are designed to be predictable and minimize dissent. The collective consensus to follow the law, transact in the same currency, and abide by norms is what allows societies to exist as stable, high-trust entities.

Since you also live in a society, don’t knock down Chesterton’s fence. But it helps to have a clear sense of what it is that you want to get out of life, accept by default (but question to stress test why things are done a certain way), and make conscious decisions on when to deviate.

Choose your battles wisely.

What it feels like to do your own thing

Doing your own thing feels like insanity. The onus is on you to prove your worth to society.

Deviating is uncomfortable because reassurance comes from society, and of course society would want to minimize dissent! (There’s no top down command, it’s just how emergent Molochian systems self-maintain).

When you leave the frames of an institution, you have to define your own frame. No one will hand you your persona on a golden platter. If you’re not used to self-advocating, you’d better get used to it. Having a cohesive ego and identity is crucial. At least one you can present externally (regardless of how you feel internally). People want handles, and if you don’t give them something to hold onto you, you just won’t register as a playable character.

All of this explains why credibility matters so much especially when you’re trying to do something new.

Signals

The more legible you are, the easier it is for others to remember you.

Heuristics for competency are often useful and minimize risk. The failure to match against is not a definitive indictment of your ability to achieve the same outcomes. Make no mistake - it will however make it harder for you to do your quest. The allocators of capital and their associates will keep applying their heuristics. So you can either generate real proof (through proof of work), or play their game. I recommend doing both. But maintain a stable identity identity, your value system doesn’t have to be visible, but it does have to be respected, otherwise you will go insane.

This is why other people want to see your track record. It makes perfect sense given their incentives.

Judging self-potential

This creates a bit of a paradox.

How much should you weigh this when evaluating your own ability to see a particular opportunity that no one else has seen before (startup, research idea, any failure of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, really)?

It’s very context dependent.

There’s a lot of good advice on evaluating ideas, and how to organically improve this ability. Paul Graham’s How To Get Startup Ideas is a classic.

• If you are working on the edge of science or technology, it’s plausible that you have spotted an opportunity that is yet to be capitalized by others, since there are only so many people who are aware of the frontier, and personality traits and life circumstances filter out the set of people who would even pursue ideas even if they do notice it.

• Developing your own competencies and working on interesting projects, thinking really hard, and being around other competent, creative, courageous people are good general tips

Emulation

If you are reaching for greatness (examples: build a billion dollar company, make fundamental progress on open questions, etc), how much attention should you pay to the lives of those who came before?

Although this has its limits, you can glean some instincts from studying past lives.

It’s mostly inspiration porn but interesting to see “proofs of existence” patterns of commonality (e.g. relationship with parents, alma mater, traits, aptitudes), as well as anti-patterns. Where this is helpful or actively misleading depends on how good your epistemics are (e.g. if you’re competent but underconfident seeing inspo porn is good, if you’re easily hyped up and fail to see the bigger picture this is overall riskier).

Here are the sources I’ve turned to in the past:

• YouTube interviews/talks. But even successful people themselves don’t have a very mechanistic sense of how they got to where they are. Worse, because of cognitive biases eg survivorship bias they can be actively misleading. Also reporting and self belief biases in rags to riches further compound this issue. So while there are some patterns that can be gleaned, they are largely black boxes.

• In-depth profiles/biographies of historic figures, such as the LBJ bios. I haven’t read these personally, not sure how domain agnostic they are, but I have read Steve Jobs/ Elon Musk and there’s a lot of hindsight and selection bias and privilege but mostly inspiration porn. To be fair they were both by Walter Isaacson and it’s possible this is biographer dependent. I’m meaning to pick up the LBJ books at some point, curious to hear from those who have

• There’s a lot of variety in routine though, especially in creatives, e.g. see Daily Rituals, where some artists/authors/musicians maintain strict schedules others are indulgent (but nonetheless dedicated to their craft and hardworking!).

How do you know when to deviate?

It’s helpful to develop the following traits:

• Being able to think, and having the courage to act according to them without being unencumbered by unrealistic fears, while still having the humility to update beliefs and decisions without taking an existential hit to one’s identity and ego, is a non-negotiable to win in undefined environments (0->1 building a startup, independent research, philosophy). This is a huge filter! No wonder few people try. There are other prerequisites: having enough assets/safety net to even try (and keep on trying - repeated trials), not be in debt, etc.

• Learn how to discern truth from propaganda in news headlines and watercooler conversations. Learn to think and reason, inspect why your beliefs are what they are. And apply this to other minds as well: what incentives does X person/institution have? How does that lead them to their beliefs/statements?

Fin

This is a living, breathing document that I will be revising over time.