I love multidisciplinary perspectives. My writings explore the intersection between tech, philosophy, finance, history, culture, productivity, and life—as well as a better medium of writing, because often form matters as much as the content.
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Check my Notes—for atomic insights (most of them still being rewritten).
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Check my Essays—longer but deeper than notes.
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Check my People—for summaries and quotes.
My favorite thinkers include Paul Graham, Naval Ravikant, Charlie Munger, Balaji Srinivasan, David Deutsch, Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Mark Spitznagel, Nassim Taleb, Michel de Montaigne, Seigow Matsuoka, and Daniel Everett.
I started taking these notes to clear my head, and to create my second brain. The cognitive offload was huge—writing still feels like a meditation to me. But my notes started to take on a life of its own—writing my ideas down resulted in more ideas being discovered, with writing them down also begetting more ideas, ad infinitum. Although future self is enough of an audience, I’m making these notes public because forwardable insights can lead to network effects—I’m trying to find like-minded people on the internet.
I’ll be sharing my micro insights on Twitter and Farcaster. Your follow would mean a lot to me, especially if you have mutual interests.
For those wondering, the numbering at the beginning of each title (e.g., 7-1a) is a manually implemented Zettelkasten system. It’s how I keep track of each note in my mental palace, but you can disregard them.
Why all these ‘atomic’ notes instead of blog posts?
- Because there is nothing absolute and necessary in the connections I make between ideas
- Because nothing is necessary = everything is contingent
- Because meaning is often in relation with other things
- Because connecting ideas is a way to create knowledge
- However, there is no minimum idea
Some good starting points if you are interested in any of these fields^:
- Philosophy (epistemology)
- “What counts cannot be counted” – Einstein
- No theory can exhaust reality
- You have to solve problems, including the problem of what problems to solve
- History
- Tech
- You don’t really have to decide. You can let the tech decide.
- Tech and the problem-situation is reflexive.
- Evolution
- 3.8 billion years. Life and evolution’s superpower is its time horizon.
- Humans influence everything. Explanation of ‘other life-forms’ and their evolution must evoke the influence of human existence.
- Evolution doesn’t care about you. Its sample is beyond any human lifetime, let alone your experiences.
- Information
- Perfect replication is impossible.
- Information is in the difference. No difference, no information.
- Semiotics
- Symbols are universal. Being arbitrary and contingent means it can represent anything, and do everything.
- Infinite semiosis: there is no beginning or end to symbols because it is recursive.
- Negotiation
- Look at the whole of conversations, including how things are being said as well as what’s not being said (e.g., taboos)
- Culture
- Culture is an implicit theory for its members. It dictates what to look at and how they reason about the world.
- The question is what’s the brain in, not what’s in the brain
- Be the outsider, but not too outside. Stay at the edge.
- Media
- Language
- Productivity
- Constraints in the form of consistent style leave space for creativity and progress
- You can replace the ‘self-discipline’ with the 4 laws of habit formation: make it visible; make it attractive; make it easy; make it satisfying
- Life
- Use the Fun Criterion
- Love bad news. Always question to falsify your idea and theory. How fast you can invalidate matters as much as how fast you can build them.
- Investing
- Investment is expression and you need methods and techniques (i.e., knowledge)
- Money is our time and energy in an abstracted form
- Blockchain
- Longevity
- You have to realign the incentives of capitalist entities you are outsourcing your health, or you have to take care of yourself
^It’s important to use categories, but the reality doesn’t have categories. ‘Academic subjects’ are social constructs. Always prioritize solving your own problems.