I. Understanding Others

The first step to relating well to others is understanding them. The first step to understanding others is understanding yourself. Here's How To Understand Yourself. Plus, by leading and modeling your own self-awareness, others will follow suit.

To understand others, read and practice the ideas in Graham Duncan's piece: What’s going on here, with this human? Graham argues that your goal should be to see people clearly. I love his frame on this:

When you see people clearly, you see the transcript of their conversation with reality.

Raise the bar for how much you want to understand people.

It's not just understanding their MBTI. It's being able to predict their sentences, know how their childhood affected their present, and know what their dreams are before they die. Rank how well you understand someone from 1-10. A 10 is how well Jony Ive knows Steve Jobs, or perhaps how well your own mom and dad know each other. Most people understand each other at a 2. Try for a 7.

II. Reflecting Others

Understanding others is the long-term goal. Reflecting their emotional state is an excellent short-term way to achieve that. Here are some guideposts to strive for:

• Seek first to understand, then to be understood
• Be curious first
• Become an excellent reflective listener. Listen for emotions, not events. 
• Don't just play back their statements, try to concisely synthesize their emotional state. 
• Every conversation is an opportunity to practice.
• Don't forget to put yourself into the conversation. Say "what I'm hearing is..."

The most helpful framework I've learned for reflective listening is nonviolent communication (NVC). Read the book. It is short and good.

NVC has two parts: listening empathetically and speaking honestly. Most of NVC comes in the listening part. Listen for emotions. Listen for needs. Your goal is to be present with them. Be a presentist. Be ok with silence. Even when they feel done, ask "is there more?"

To listen for emotions and needs, you need to understand them. To understand emotions, use this emotions 2x2. To understand needs, use the Bentoism needs 2x2. Understanding morals is helpful too. To understand them, use the six moral foundations.

The best leaders listen. When Satya Nadella joined Microsoft, he made the entire executive team read NVC.

Especially when managing people & leading, try to make your ratio of open-ended questions to directive statements around 10:1. In a peer-to-peer relationship, your goal should be to listen 60% of the time and talk 40%. When you're in a group, speak 1/n. If there are 4 people, talk 25% of the time. If there are 10 people, only talk 10%.

Don't focus on your own anxieties. Assume you are liked, and you will be. Your goal when interacting is to make the other person feel more comfortable.

You'll know you've succeeded at all this when someone feels seen.

It feels great to be seen. Some of my most impactful moments have just been friends reflecting my own words back to me. "Wow, that sounds hard." Or: "It sounds like you're comparing yourself to others." Or when they note something about my being that I didn’t see because it's the water I swim in. I still remember when I was 26 and someone told me I was enthusiastic. I was so surprised!

Give that gift to others. Reflect their emotions and see them for who they are. Make the people in your life feel seen.

III. Helping Others

80% of helping others has already been covered: be aware of yourself first and reflect other’s emotional state. One trap people (and more often men) fall into is "trying to solution" when their thought partner just wants to be listened to.

But you can help others by giving constructive criticism.

The best practice for constructive criticism is called motivational interviewing (MI). MI recognizes that all change comes from within. Think about this for yourself—have you ever changed because someone offered you unsolicited advice to do so? No. With MI, your main goal is to support their own self-efficacy and their own desires for change, not yours.

You do this in two ways. First, elicit “change talk” from them by asking what they want to change about their life. Second, build self-efficacy by reflecting how much they’ve already done and saying that you believe in them.

But in the end, the work is theirs to do and you can't control their behavior. You want the best for others but let them #doyou.

The key idea underlying MI and other change techniques is the idea of psychological safety. People need to feel safe around you in order to share their shame, in order to change.

This is shown by the pyramid in the excellent book, 5 Dysfunctions of Team:

• Start by earning trust
• Then you can disagree and commit
• And drive accountability and results

(There's a similar idea of home → edge → groove in the excellent Robert Kegan book An Everyone Culture.)

Once you've built trust, be sure to give the constructive feedback in private while giving positive feedback in public. Then, when you give the feedback, see it as a partnership rather than as combative. As Claire Hughes Johnson notes:

We often envision critical conversations as combative, where the parties stand in oppositional positions. I aim to approach the situation as partners, standing side by side. To do that, you have to be aware of the language you’re using; you want to show empathy and curiosity but also take a bit of a risk.

Don't view feedback as +/- but +/Δ. The delta implies action-oriented change.

Try not to give too much constructive criticism over writing. Instead, record a quick Loom.

When you're considering whether to be honest with someone, almost always do so. Don't walk on eggshells. Often you might hold resentments within yourself, then let them out later all at once. This doesn't feel great for them. Instead of you telling them you were angry when they didn't take out the trash, you held it in, put on a mask, then eventually revealed your true state. This reduces trust because they never know what you actually believe. It's surprising when it eventually comes out.

Lend people ideas that are not yet fully formed. It's ok.

Clear is kind. Say the hard thing.

IV. Conflict

In addition to giving constructive criticism about a person, sometimes you disagree with a person about, well, anything.

Here's how to fight well.

First, start with the advice above:

1. Understand yourself & others. The primary trait to look for here is agreeableness. If you're already agreeable, lean into conflict more. If you're not agreeable, look to open up space for others.
2. Reflect others. Most conflict happens when you think you heard them say something, but they didn't actually mean it. As the poet Khalil Gibran writes, "Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost." Look out for the meant-said-heard delta.
3. Help others. If you've already created trusted spaces, now you can leverage that trust for this conflict.

As you have conflict:

• You don't need to join every argument you’re invited to. Ignore most conflicts, especially on the internet.
• Steelman their perspective, don't strawman it. You'll know you have succeeded when you can pass an ideological turing test for their position.
• As Patrick Collison notes here, see arguments as trying to collectively find the "topology of disagreement." Clarity is the goal, not winning. See the disagreement as an epiphenomenon of some underlying beliefs, and look for those.
• Co-create a shared third rail for the things you agree on (facts, etc.) then understand the disagreement from there.
• And, as always, tune in to your body. Breathe the tension out.

Some reality distortion is good—we want to change the status quo. But too much is bad.

Should we just stop believing in ourselves? No! Instead, build "almost too much" self-awareness. How can we do this?

First, what does it mean to be self-aware? Being self-aware is being mature. Being mature is being a developed adult. Psychologists call this "adult self-development."

Robert Kegan has a framework for adult self-development, which has five stages. (You can mostly ignore stages 1 and 2.)

• Stage 1 — Impulsive mind (early childhood). You're developing your senses.
• Stage 2 — Imperial mind (adolescence, 6% of adult population). You understand your senses but not yet your needs.
• Stage 3 — Socialized mind (58% of the adult population). You know what you need but are still searching for external validation from social groups.
• Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population). You no longer need social validation and are starting to build a clear sense of identity.
• Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population). You are on a life-long journey of balancing your many identities & your social groups.

It looks like this:

The goal, of course, is to reach stage 5. It should feel something like this:

• You're socialized in childhood (Stage 3)
• You understand that was just a lens, developing your own identity (Stage 4)
• You then integrate both: holding your childhood lens along with new identities (Stage 5)

The result could be called Coherent Pluralism. You hold many lenses (pluralism) but integrate them into a whole (coherence).

Here's a self-assessment you can take to understand which stage you're at.

What are some specific tactics to move up to Stage 5? There are two big pieces:

1. Decouple yourself from stage 3: Become aware of your childhood & your socialized ways of thinking & being.
2. Couples yourself to stage 4: Become aware of your identity separate from your childhood.

For #1:
To become aware of your natural way of being (to move from stage 3 socialization to stage 4 identity), I recommend a few things:

• Go to therapy. Therapy is understanding childhood moments, then decoupling yourself from them. What you perceive as your own thoughts are mostly your parents' words, incepted and masked as your own.
• Train your awareness. Instead of being your thoughts, see them.
• Meditation is the best for this. Use a meditation app to learn basic meditation skills like "noting". Make it a 10-minute daily habit for at least a month.
• CBT is good too. Become aware of your thought distortions.
• Psychedelics can help but are possibly more dangerous. Before you do them, read How to Change Your Mind and make sure you have a safe set and setting.
• Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a good frame to recognize the different parts within yourself.
• Do a 360 life review. Ask a few friends & family to give you explicit feedback. (See my 360 form here.)
• In addition to socialization (by your parents), we've all been institutionalized (by school, laws, and society). If you grew up in the West, you're likely WEIRD and are more individualistic and analytic. Read this summary of The WEIRDest People in the World to understand the different psychologies of East and West.

To decouple yourself from your socialization, you need to see the water you swim in. See it as an idea maze. You'll know you've made progress when you have texture on how you were built.

For #2:
As you become aware of your social environment and how you were built (stage 3), begin to develop your own identity outside that (stage 4). Here's how:

• Start by taking the most scientifically-backed personality test, the Big 5. Test here.
• Use it as a seed to create your own How To Work With Me Manual. Mine is here. Here's the template.
• To understand other personality tests, read What’s going on here, with this human? Take the ones that resonate and use them to construct a sense of self.
• Use I am statements to construct your identity, and become aware of your superpower-shadow dynamics.
• Travel. Be independent. Be alone. Be ok with being alone. At first it's scary to be by yourself but then it's empowering.
• Be yourself. Go against the crowd. Know what things people would find weird, then do them anyway. It's fine.

To be proud of your self & identity, you'll need to take in constructive feedback. Here's how:

• No one is built perfectly. We're all messed up. It's your job to integrate those sides of you into a more pro-social person.
• Become world-class at searching for feedback and accepting it. Always ask people "how was that for you?"
• Treat feedback as a gift. Don't see it as an antagonistic act from another person, but rather with you two as partners trying to improve some aspect of your behavior.
• Decouple yourself from your behavior. Just because you did something bad doesn't mean you are bad. Treat yourself as clay, ready to be molded. All feedback is hard to hear.
• Try not to be defensive. Instead, breathe, feel your body, own your negative emotions (annoyance, sadness, surprise), then look to be curious about the feedback.
• Know that most of your shadows are also your superpowers.

You'll know you've developed a strong sense of identity when you aren't affected by peer pressure, when you feel comfortable alone in foreign places, when you can share what you're most ashamed of, and when you have both a healthy distance & a healthy closeness with your parents.

Finally, you begin the lifelong process of entering Stage 5.

Stage 3 was about embracing your social scene. Stage 4 was about rejecting childhood as you embrace your identity. Stage 5 is being in a fluid relationship to your childhood & identities. From my experience, it mostly comes by:

• Embracing your superpowers and shadows
• Valuing your parents & childhood friends as much as you value your present & future self.
• Learning How To Think in Systems so you can deftly move between perspectives.
• Pilling yourself into different worldviews, then understanding that life is just one long Grey Pill.

Finally, a reminder that self-awareness isn't the final goal. You want to have lots of self-awareness and lots of self-belief.

I like to think of this as being a Level 5 Leader (a different framework). Level 5 leaders balance personal humility with professional will. They manifest their vision in the world, all while repping others and taking a beginner's mind.

Deep self-awareness is yet another 10-year overnight success. Start building your awareness muscles today.

Compounding is everything.

Compound interest dominates financial markets, compounding network effects dominate business, and compounding yourself dominates all other self-work you can do.

So how do you compound yourself?

We know what compounding looks like—an exponential curve in the red line below:

But what is it? Compounding yourself is best understood as a success spiral, which is a feedback loop where success begets success:

In a success spiral:

• Competence begets confidence
• Momentum begets motivation
• Curiosity begets learning

Once a success spiral starts, your spiral expands and you can tackle larger and larger problems with confidence:

Anyone who has done anything started with a success spiral.

Arnold Schwarzenegger won his first bodybuilding trophy, then won hundreds more. I coded my first TI-83 calculator game in high school, then studied computer science in college. (I'm just as impressive as Arnold, I know.)

Startups like AirBnB, Ethereum, and YIMBY are 10-year overnight successes. Behind their victory is a decade-long grind. Behind the grind is a kernel of belief.

Success spirals are quite powerful, so let's understand them. First, understanding why they don't naturally spark. Second, how to start them. Third, how to judge their health. Fourth, how to magnify their impact.

I. Releasing self-limiting beliefs

Often, if your success spiral hasn't begun already, it's because you have a self-limiting belief. These beliefs are (untrue) negative stories in your head that stop you from taking action and keep you in a bad orbit. Your beliefs become your future.

Some examples:

• Perfectionism: "I need to be perfect." (Why?) "If I mess up, bad things happen."
• Imposter syndrome: "Others are capable. I am not." (Why?) "My parents didn't believe in me."
• Fear of commitment: "I can't commit to that." (Why?) "Things I love have left me."
• Need to control: "I get stressed when things are outside my control." (Why?) "I've lived in unsafe places without control."

Everyone has self-limiting beliefs. Find them by: a) Asking yourself where you want to be in 1 year, then b) Locating the internal thoughts that keep you from taking action.

It's often some kind of fear. Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of what others think of you.

For me, I had a fear of success. My parents often told me to "stay in the background" and so I did. I wanted to be ambitious, but I had a self-limiting belief that I wasn't allowed to be. I changed this belief, and now feel more free to live up to my potential.

Remember, you are allowed.

Understand where the fear and negative self-limiting beliefs come from, curiously question why they exist, then build positive beliefs (+ habits & evidence) in their place.

To start your success spiral, release your limiting chains first.

II. Starting a success spiral

The main way to start a spiral is by celebrating small wins.

Note that I said "small" wins. Why? There's a cold start problem here. How can you believe in yourself if you haven't done anything? How can you be confident if you aren't already competent, have motivation without existing momentum, and curiosity without a life full of learning?

You need to manufacture belief. You do this by celebrating small wins:

• Start by celebrating process goals, like learning a new email or coding hotkey.
• Then transition to outcome goals, like celebrating a demo you shipped or an article you published.
• At the end of every week, reflect on your success, be grateful, and create more of it.

To spark a success spiral, you need to meme it into existence.

Once you've started a success spiral, you need to continue it. Spirals only work when they're repeated. Build good habits. Write weekly. Read a few books every month. Use Anki. Exercise. Sleep. Go to therapy.

In 30 years, you'll look back in awe of what you've accomplished.

III. Judging the health of your spiral

There are three ways to judge the health of your spiral: 1) Do you believe in yourself? 2) Are you learning? 3) Is it fun?

First, and most importantly, success spirals come from believing in yourself. Do you believe? Are you proud of what you're doing? Do you have self-efficacy, self-esteem, and an internal locus of control? If not, celebrate small wins and become aware of negative self-talk. You get to choose whether to believe in yourself. Choose to believe!

Besides belief, the second best metric to judge the health of your spiral is your rate of learning. Are you being a sponge, drinking from the information firehose? If not, surround yourself with sharper & more ambitious people & ideas. Are you spending time and money on books, coaches, and lessons? If not, start working on yourself, like sculpting a piece of clay. Bet on yourself—$1,000 today will be worth $10,000 in a year. (Here are some tools for learning that have worked for me.)

Third, and finally, make sure your success spiral is pointed in the right direction. Don't put good effort toward a bad goal. Like the great pyramids, success spirals are only recognized after decades but are built minute-by-minute. You take thousands of actions per day that add up: reading, writing, coding, facilitating, listening. Because spirals are built from lots of micro actions, any amount of friction will build up.

Check in with yourself to ensure you're on the right path. Are you aligned with your Ikigai? Are you doing what comes easily to you? Are you following your relief? Are you doing what others see as your strengths? Are you excited? Are you having fun?

It's hard to continue a success spiral when you don't want to succeed at that thing. If you're unsure what to work on, spend more time learning about yourself and the world, then double down on a direction. Search for low friction, then simplify simplify simplify.

Trust yourself and surrender to the complexity of the world.

IV. Increase your leverage

Once you have a great success spiral, look to magnify it through leverage.

Leverage is a multiplier that takes a unit of goodness and spreads it as widely as possible. If success spirals are finding a good thing, leverage is scaling it.

As Sam Altman notes: "there are many ways to get leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people." Leverage comes by productizing your strengths, creating impact while you're asleep.

You'll know you're ready for leverage once you feel comfortable but unsatisfied. When you’re in a healthy success spiral, but want more. At the beginning of your career, each unit of your time should build more and more belief. But by the middle, each unit of time should generate more and more impact.

With a spiral, success begets success. With leverage, each success begets larger success.

To summarize:

Dents in the universe are the result of leveraged success spirals that come from kernels of belief, sparked by small wins.

To start: Release your self-limiting beliefs, celebrate small wins, believe in yourself, follow your energy, and increase your leverage. Then, at the end of life, you'll look back without regrets.

P.S. Thank you to Daniel Gross who first brainwormed me with this framing.

P.P.S. Self-belief must be coupled with self-awareness. Here's How To Build Self-Awareness.

• Crypto
• Cryptography
• Machine Learning
• YC
• NoCode
• Indie Hackers
• Product Management
  

Finance

• Venture Capital
• FinTwit
  

Open Tech

• Open Data & Open Government
• Sharing Economy
• Open Science
  

Social Sciences

• History
• Anthropology
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Economics
• Libertarianism
• Behavioral Economics
• History of Science
  

Sciences

• Mathematics
• Physics
• Nueroscience
  

Applied Sciences

• Climate Science
• Synthetic Bio
• Longevity
• Psychedelic Research
• Science Journalism

Complex Systems

• Network Science
• Data Visualization
  

Niche Twitter

• Effective Altruism
• Rationalism and TPOT
• Buddhism
• Integral
• Personal Knowledge Management
  

Cities

• Cities and Urbanism
• Smart Cities

Use the Twemex and Hive.one extensions. Get Twitter Blue and read Top Articles.

The most important step of in-person networking is choosing the right niche for you. If you're into synthetic biology, go to SynBioBeta. If you're into metascience, go to Metascience Conference. Because you're searching for a specific niche, it's likely that these events will be less than 1,000 people. Avoid massive events like CES.

Choose places where you'd be excited to chat with 50% of the attendees, then just go hang out.  This allows you to treat everyone there as a person instead of fawning over the speakers or always conversation-hopping because you're bored.

Here are 9 tips once you're actually in the room:

1. Treat people as people first. Mostly just be curious about people & their brains. To be curious about people, ask them how they're doing. To be curious about brains, ask them what they've been thinking about recently.
2. Be aware of how much each person is talking. Roughly equal for everyone in a group. If just you + one other person, try for 75% them.
3. Try not to spend more than 15min per group, even if the convo is good. Your goal is to chat with lots of folks, not just a few. Leave by thanking them, then saying you're going to get food or go to the bathroom.
4. If it was a good convo, ask to connect. Start with Twitter, and then move to other ways to connect if need be.
5. When hunting for a new group, look for groups of 1 or 2 people and just jump in. Say "hey, can I join?" Shake hands. Then say "what were you just talking about?"
6. Remember, this isn't high school. People are excited to chat and meet new folks! If they aren't, they wouldn't be there.
7. Only try to talk to "important people" if they aren't surrounded by others. Also,  a reminder that 90%+ of the value in networking comes from the long tail, not just the few folks we all follow on Twitter.
8. Spend 5min every 30min to just take a break, look at the group, snack, hang at the side.
9. Have fun! Follow your energy! Connect! It's really about finding folks that you vibe with and then vibing with them. If you're not vibing, get out. If you are, stay and connect.

• Beyoncé:

As a child: "When some of us wanted to go to the movies, when we did have our off time, she was in the studio sitting there by herself writing a record. I’ll never forget, were at an indoor gym situation having our fun like kids are supposed to and she sat out in the hot ass car and was writing to a track."

As an adult: "When you guys see a show, just know that every day that we’ve rehearsed, she’s gone in before us and left after us. And we’re working 14-16 hour days. There’s breaks in between. Because she’s creative, and sometimes it never stops…she’s up! But she’s not just up, she’s in it. She’s present."

• Patrick Collison

• Buckminster Fuller: Despite only practicing true polyphasic sleep for a period during the 1920s, Fuller was known for his stamina throughout his life. He was described as "tireless"  by Barry Farrell in Life magazine, who noted that Fuller stayed up all night replying to mail during Farrell's 1970 trip to Bear Island.
• Queen Elizabeth II: In 2017, at 91 years old, the queen attended 292 public engagements.
• Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan studied folk and blues music obsessively since he was a teenager, and he has put out dozens of albums over a period now stretching almost sixty years, mastering both folk guitar and lyrics, and experimenting with a variety of styles ranging from folk to rock to pop to gospel to blues and American popular standards. He has starred or played in several movies, worked as a DJ for satellite radio (picking excellent material), written a compelling memoir, won a Nobel Prize for literature, published eight books of drawings and paintings and had exhibits in major art galleries, and it seems he has been on tour constantly for decades (the “Never Ending Tour”), in the 1990s and 2000s often playing a hundred or more dates a year. (Excerpt from Talent.)
• Elon Musk: Famously works 80-hour-plus weeks, while running multiple companies.
• John le Carré: The spy thriller author. Washington Post reporter John Leen spent two weeks with him in Miami, investigating the local crime scene with le Carré’s assistance. At the end of that temporary partnership he wrote: “I was astonished by his energy, his drive, his ability to go out there every day and trundle through the hours of interviews, lunches, dinners. I was a little more than half his age and I was exhausted. He never appeared tired, never was less than sharp and penetrating. He already had half a dozen No. 1 bestsellers and more money than he could ever spend. Why did he want or need another one? What kept him out there, what was the engine that drove it all?” (From Talent.)
• Karl Friston: Friston isn't just one of the most influential scholars in his field; he’s also among the most prolific in any discipline. He is 59 years old, works every night and weekend, and has published more than 1,000 academic papers since the turn of the millennium. In 2017 alone, he was a lead or coauthor of 85 publications3—which amounts to approximately one every four days.

Please send me more entries. (Preferably with sources.)

• I like to think of these folks as "energizer bunnies."
• Robin Hanson reflects on stamina's importance:

“It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I finally got to see some very successful people up close for long enough to notice a strong pattern: the most successful have a lot more energy and stamina than do others.… I think this helps explain many cases of ‘why didn’t this brilliant young prodigy succeed?’ Often they didn’t have the stamina, or the will, to apply it."

• One of the Thiel Fellowship's interview criteria was: "Do you feel more energized after talking with this possible fellow?"

You might be unconsciously following the path of your parents like a doctor or lawyer. Don't.

Optimize for rate-of-learning and consciously reject the paths given to you.

Patrick Collison gives this advice:

If you're in the US and go to a good school, there are a lot of forces that will push you towards following train tracks laid by others rather than charting a course yourself. Make sure that the things you're pursuing are weird things that you want to pursue, not whatever the standard path is. Heuristic: do your friends at school think your path is a bit strange? If not, maybe it's too normal.

Compare leads to despair. Instead...

2. Create a Path For Yourself

Ask yourself: what do you value? Where do you want to be when you're 30, 50, and 80? Compare yourself against that.

I like to think of a few questions:

a. What is your life mission?
Where are you pointing? For me, this is co-creating the Wisdom Age.

b. What do you love to do? How would you like to contribute?
This is your day-to-day. What are your superpowers? For me, this is teaching, synthesizing, and community-building. This an -ing verb.

I like to think of this as a vector.

The direction is your life's mission. It's where you're pointed.

The magnitude (or the arrow line itself) is what you love to do. It's how you get there.

3. Compare Yourself Against New Models

Find new models to compare yourself.

Your brain will naturally compare. Instead of comparing to old models, find people who you respect and have your brain compare against them. This shows you that your path is normal.

An example for me: Tim Berners-Lee "sat out" of the web gold rush to build things like WWW and W3C.

Will Macaskill has these models:

On MacAskill’s desk in Oxford are portraits of three people: Mozi, the ancient Chinese moral philosopher who taught that morality should involve equal, impartial concern for all; Benjamin Lay, the Anglo American Quaker who was a prominent early opponent of slavery; and Irena Sendler, the Polish humanitarian who rescued Jews during the Second World War.

4. Increase Your Surface Area For Serendipity

From Evie Cottrell in Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic:

Increase Your Surface Area For Serendipity

This basically means increasing your exposure to new people and opportunities: deliberately setting yourself up for spontaneous stuff to happen. It’s really hard to predict when life-changing moments will occur – one conversation can drastically improve the trajectory of your life. However, you can increase the rate at which these types of conversations happen by increasing your surface area for serendipity.

This Twitter video is the best explanation of this idea, and I encourage you to watch it. I’ll summarise the key ideas below though.

1. You can increase your surface area for serendipity by creating ‘serendipity vehicles'. A serendipity vehicle is a thing that is out there in the world that allows you to manufacture serendipitous events.

2. It’s often hard to see the explicit benefits beforehand – putting yourself out there doesn’t have explicit CV points.

To me, creating serendipity vehicles looks like:

1. Having a low bar for sharing what you’re doing online. For example, if you are confused about an idea, consider writing a blog post about it.

2. Having a low bar for reaching out to people (e.g. by actively using Twitter and sending cold emails – see below!). For example, if you read a blog post that resonated, consider reaching out to the author and letting them know.

I like to think of this as creating microCollabs.

• microMorts are a one-in-a-million chance of death. (Bad!)
• microMarriages are a one-in-a-million chance of marriage. (Good!)
• microCollabs are a one-in-a-million chance of a great working collaboration.

You want to live your life in a way that increases your luck space for microCollabs that can turn into amazing collabs.

Patrick Collison gives similar advice here:

Figure out a way to travel to San Francisco and to meet other people who've moved there to pursue their dreams. Why San Francisco? San Francisco is the Schelling point for high-openness, smart, energetic, optimistic people. Global Weird HQ. Take advantage of opportunities to travel to other places too, of course.

These days, Twitter is also Global Weird HQ. Whether it's digital or physical, surround yourself with folks you might want to work with.

Hope this helps! Lmk if you have advice that has helped you find your path.

1. Understand your why. Why do you want to remember anything? For me, it was reading lots of books but forgetting them. What's your goal? For me, it was "remembering books better." I remember specifics now in order to have a more textured view of the bigger picture.
2. Spend 10min understanding how spaced repetition works
3. Download Anki for your computer and phone.
4. Spend a week just experimenting with adding notecards. Add 5 notecards every day. Some from books, from a YouTube video, a podcast, a tweet, or a friend. Don't worry too much about the form. Just add things you're already excited by and want to remember. Add from your phone or computer.
5. Spend that first week also developing a habit of studying. Study every day. Don't break it. Get a 7-day streak. I highly recommend waking up 15min earlier than normal in order to set a study time. Study with your coffee. If you don't already have good habits you do every day, learn how habits work and how to make new ones. My daily habit is: meditate 5min, gratitude 5min, Anki 15min. Only study from your computer. If you'd like help forming your habit, join this group.

These are the key steps: understand your why, add cards, and study them. It's simple. Don't do anything else until you have done these three and have achieved a 7-day streak.

A few example card types below:

After you've developed an Anki habit for a week, read Augmenting Long-term Memory. These 5 tips:

• Make most Anki questions and answers as atomic as possible.
• Anki use is best thought of as a virtuoso skill, to be developed.
• Anki isn't just a tool for memorizing simple facts. It's a tool for understanding almost anything.
• Use one big deck.
• If memorizing a fact seems worth 10 minutes of my time in the future, then I do it. If a fact seems striking then into Anki it goes, regardless of whether it seems worth 10 minutes of my future time or not.

Hope this helps and good luck learning! By 2200, all 11B people will Anki every day and it will be good.

Example Cards

1. Graph taken from a Youtube video.

2. Specific Number

3. Examples pulled from Wikipedia

Let's look at the Wikipedia definition. That should be helpful, right? (Right?!?)

1. Information can be thought of as the resolution of uncertainty that manifests itself as patterns.

2. The concept of information has different meanings in different contexts.

3. Thus the concept becomes synonymous to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, education, knowledge, meaning, understanding, mental stimuli, pattern, perception, proposition, representation, and entropy.

Woof. That doesn't help much.

Today we'll look at:

1. How information theory defines information
2. How science (physics, chemistry, biology) defines information
3. How popular culture defines information

1. How Information Theory Defines Information

Claude Shannon is the father of information theory. Like all fathers of theories, he birthed his theory through a pdf, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948).

Shannon was trying to understand how messages like Morse code were created and transferred from one place to another. Questions like: How does the information of • • • (the letter "s") compare to the information of – – • • ("z")?

To answer this, Shannon proposed his definition of information:

Information is a measure of the surprise of a given message.

In the Morse code example above, "s" is less surprising than "z", so it contains less information.

Let's look at another example.

Imagine your grandmother is in the hospital and could die any day now. Depressing example, I know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You receive a text from your dad. But your dad is a dad, so he isn't great at texting. He sends it to you one word at a time. It says:

• Hi
• Son.
• Your
• Grandma
• Is
• ...

Is WHAT?!? Dead or alive, Dad?!?

How much information is contained in this message? Not much. You still don't know if your grandma is dead or alive! All of his words were expected.

But then he sends you the final message:

• Alive.

Ah, now you received information! There was a 50/50 chance your grandma would be alive today. And now you know she is. Hooray. Go grandma.

However, 50/50 is probably giving her too much credit. It was more like a 1% chance she'd still be alive today. So seeing "alive" was actually more information.

A low probability event gives us more information. While a high probability event gives us less.

Seeing Morse code of • • • ("s") gives us less information than – – • • ("z") because s is more common than z.

How do we measure this information? Shannon invented a new fundamental unit of the universe. (You can do that?) He called it a "bit".

A bit of information cuts the probability space in half. This is why computer bits can be 0 or 1. There is a 50-50 chance of being either.

When you flip a coin and it turns up heads, you receive 1 bit of information.

Let's look at a more complicated example.

Solving Wordle Using Information Theory

We can apply this concept of "receiving information" and "cutting down the probability space" to solve guessing games like Wordle.

If you don't know how Wordle works, please try it here. I monetize this blog through NYT affiliate links 😉.

I'll be drawing heavily from ThreeBlueOneBrown's amazing video on "Solving Wordle using information theory" here:

ThreeBlueOneBrown's idea is that you can look at how good a guess is by seeing how much it reduces the possibility space—how much information you gain from each guess.

As an example, let's say the secret word is "myths" and we guess the word "scale". We learn that our secret word has an "s" but nothing else.

If roughly half of the words have s's, then that would give us 1 bit of information. It decreased the probability space in half.

But let's say we guess "yield" and learn that our secret word has a "y" instead. Y is much less likely to occur than S, so this information cuts down the possibility space more and we receive more information from this guess.

If we cut the space down by 1/4, that's two bits of info.

The image below shows how:

• 1/8 is 3 bits
• 1/16 is 4 bits
• 1/32 is 5 bits
• 1/64 is 6 bits

And so on.

So what's the mathematical definition of information?

We could start with something like:

Information = 1 / probability.

The amount of information we gain is the inverse of how probable that observation is.

• So if something is improbable, like learning our secret word has a "y", then we get more information.
• If something is probable, like learning our secret word has an "s", we gain less information.

This math definition is almost right. But actually we need to add a "log" because bits represent cutting the space in half over and over. It's an exponential relationship not a linear one.

The information in a 1/64 chance event is not 64 bits, but rather 6 bits (2^6 is 64).

So Shannon's equation for information is:

Information = log(1/p)

Entropy

One other annoying part of defining information is that information is always connected to a definition of entropy. But entropy is easy to understand, right? Let's look to trusty Wikipedia again:

1. Entropy is a scientific concept as well as a measurable physical property that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty.

2. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, to the microscopic description of nature in statistical physics, and to the principles of information theory.

3. It has found far-ranging applications in chemistry and physics, in biological systems and their relation to life, in cosmology, economics, sociology, weather science, climate change, and information systems including the transmission of information in telecommunication.

Oh no, not again!

Let's break it down. What is Shannon's definition of entropy?

Entropy is how much uncertainty is left.

As a first example, a single coin flip doesn't have much entropy. It'll either be heads or tails. We'd say there's only 1 bit of uncertainty left.

We can visualize this entropy as a probability distribution. There's a 50% chance we get a heads and a 50% chance we get a tails.

As a second example, we can look at the entropy of rolling five dice. This probability distribution is wider, which shows that there's lots of uncertainty left.

We can generalize this in the probability distributions below. If we're sure about the outcomes, we'd say entropy is low. If we're unsure, entropy is high.

Coming back to our Wordle example, the amount of entropy is how many words are left. That's how much uncertainty remains.

So in the example below, we've guessed "other" and "nails." There are four words left: chard, charm, graph, and wharf.

How much entropy is left?

Intuitively, we wouldn't expect the entropy to be something large like 6 bits. That would mean there were 64 equally likely options still left. (2^6 = 64)

We also wouldn't expect something too small like 1 bit. That would mean there are 2 equally likely options left. (2^1 = 2) There's more uncertainty left here than a single coin flip.

Indeed, there are 2 bits of entropy here. There are four options left, which is two coin flips left of uncertainty. 2^2 = 4.

To conclude this section:

Shannon's information is a measure of how surprising a given outcome is among all possible outcomes.

While entropy is the amount of uncertainty left in the system.

You receive information when observing the world. What's left is entropy.

Let's now move to the second set of definitions: How do the natural sciences define information and entropy?

II. How Natural Sciences Define Information

For the sciences, let's actually start with entropy instead of information.

In physics, entropy is a measurement of how disordered a substance, like water, is.

Do you think a glass of ice cubes has more or less entropy than a glass of water? Which one is more disordered?

Counterintuitively, a glass of ice cubes might look disordered, but at the molecular level it's quite ordered. Meanwhile, a glass of water might look ordered, but at the molecular level it's quite disordered.

A glass of ice cubes has low entropy and high information because it's highly ordered.

When it melts into water, it has high entropy and loses information because it's more disordered.

We can think of this like rolling dice.

The ice cube is like rolling all sixes, while the glass of water is like rolling an average roll.

The probability of rolling a 30 with five different dice is quite low. You need all sixes! It has high information and low entropy.

But rolling an 18 with five dice is more likely. You can have 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 like below. Or 1, 2, 3, 6, 6. Or 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6. And so on.

There are lots of ways to skin a cat, er, roll an 18.

Rolling six dice makes the probability distribution below. 18 is quite probable while 30 is unlikely.

Now let's play God and roll the H2O particles instead. The odds that you were to roll the particles and they'd line up perfectly as ice cubes is quite low. It's like rolling all sixes.

But the odds that you roll the H2O into the jumbled mess of water is more likely.

This is what physicists mean when they look at one possible microstate (a dice roll) among all possible microstates (all possible dice rolls).

Low entropy microstates give us a lot of information. We didn't expect the dice to be all sixes or the H2O to be in a perfect ice cube, but it was! We were surprised to see it.

High entropy microstates give us little information. We expect the dice to be jumbled around, just like we expect the H2O molecules to be jumbled. We don't get much info because it was expected.

This should look familiar to Shannon's definitions of information and entropy above. In fact, although the physics definitions of entropy are from the late 1800s, we now understand them as a specific manifestation of Shannon's more abstract definition from the 1940s.

There go humans again, moving up the ladder of abstraction. 🙂

To Shannon, we gain a lot of information from the binary string 11111. That was unexpected, just like rolling 66666 is unexpected, and just like a bunch of water molecules looking like this cube is unexpected:

💧💧💧
💧💧💧
💧💧💧

Shannon's information is a measure of how surprising a given outcome is among all possible outcomes.

Physical information is the same: a measure of how surprising a given physical arrangement is among all possible physical arrangements.

Meanwhile, Shannon's entropy is the amount of uncertainty left in the system.

But wait! Lots of uncertainty means lots of entropy. Rolling five dice has lots of uncertainty and lots of entropy.

So how is disorder (not uncertainty) tied to entropy?

The glass of water has more disorder because if you choose a molecule from it, it could be going at a variety of speeds. Although it looks smooth, there's actually lots of sloshing around happening. Some molecules are standing still, some are going really fast. They're all bumping into each other.

Versus with an ice cube, where all the molecules are doing the same thing—just sitting there. You know what you're going to get, a boring still H2O molecule not going too fast.

This is mathematically formalized in something called the Boltzmann distribution (below).

If it's really cold (73K, -200 C, the grey distribution below), then most of the particles (of an "ideal gas") are all going the same speed, around 500 m/s.

But it's it's really hot (1273 K, the red color), then distribution is much wider. There are molecules going all kinds of crazy speeds. Fast, slow, and in between.

The wider the distribution, the more disorder, the more uncertainty, the higher the entropy. So:

Shannon's entropy is the amount of uncertainty left in the system.

Physical entropy is the amount of physical uncertainty left in the system.

Now that we understand a general natural sciences definition of entropy and information, let's apply it in a variety of fields: physics, chemistry, biology, and quantum.

A. Information in Physics

Most of the definitions above are taken from physics, specifically from "statistical thermodynamics", which asks the question: What are all the particles doing?

I'd also add this interesting piece: where is information in one of the most important equations, E = mc² ?

It's not there! There's only energy (E), mass (m), and the speed of light (c).

Very curious indeed.

If you can tell me more about how information relates to these fundamental units, I'd love to know!

B. Information in Chemistry

How does chemistry think of information and (especially) entropy?

Chemistry often looks at the change in entropy (in a chemical reaction), while physics looks at the current state of entropy.

For example we can look at how our body turns glucose sugars into energy for our body. This chemical reaction requires a bit of activation energy to get started, but eventually produces energy, just like a ball turns potential energy into kinetic energy by rolling downhill.

To determine whether a reaction will occur, chemists use an equation called Gibbs Free Energy, which looks at

• How much potential energy exists in the chemical bonds. Enthalpy or ΔH
• How much more disordered the molecules are after the reaction. Entropy or ΔS

A reaction will spontaneously occur if you have lots of potential energy that also increases the amount of entropy/disorder in the system. The universe wants to go in that direction! (As foretold by our friend the 2nd law of thermodynamics.)

C. Information in Biology

Biologists often think of entropy like chemists do: to see if certain reactions will spontaneously occur in our bodies.

But biologists also look at a different form of information: information about something, rather than information as a measure of uncertainty.

The neuroscientist Peter Tse explains it like so:

Physics is often concerned with the magnitude and frequency, of, for example, light:

But biologists are concerned with phase, not magnitude or frequency.

Two events can be in-phase with each other or out-of-phase.

For example, when our brain sees a red traffic light, all of the cars stop. Red lights and cars stopping are in phase with each other.

Or when we smell our grandmother's cooking and it triggers a neural cascade that helps us remember a childhood memory of sitting on her couch. That is a phase relationship.

The world is full of patterns (or phases). Biologists are interested in understanding how organisms and brains exploit those patterns.

This is what we mean when we say that organisms contain information about their environment, rather than talking about the inherent nature of how their particles are arranged in a probability distribution.

D. Information in Quantum Stuffs

I don't totally get this, but two notes:

1. Von Neumann entropy is the quantum equivalent of Shannon entropy
2. There's something special to how quantum physics relates to information. Quantum information is a "thing". Qbits are all about probability distributions. It almost feels like quantum is a version of classical physics that gives the "correct weight" to information as a first-class citizen.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now that we've understood:

I. The information theoretic defintion of information

II. The natural sciences definition of information

Let's now turn towards the common use or information technology definition of information.

III. How Information Technology Defines Information

We now come to our final definition of information. In many ways, this is the one we're most familar with. Information is this text on the internet. It is the cat picture your friend texts you.

In this context, information will often show up as the DIWK pyramid:

Raw data gets processed as information with meaning, which then turns into contextual knowledge, which is then applied to the future as wisdom.

Because this DIKW definition of information is much more intuitive to us, I will not go deeper into how information scientists (librarian types) define information. (Though of course they do so in many other ways.)

Information is a crucial primitive that determines how society evolves.

In the end, I simply think of information as pattern.

Still, I hope this article has given you an overview of:

1. How information theory defines information
2. How science (physics, chemistry, biology) defines information
3. How popular culture defines information

To learn more, check out my book here or join my Interintellect series.

If you have feedback or clearer definitions of information, please let me know! Thanks.

Notes:

• I didn't cover computation but would like to (see Why Information Grows)

In the last few months, I've beaten procrastination. I'm proud of this! ❤️

Here's how I did it. I hope it helps you.

1. Procrastination Is A Harmful Positive Feedback Loop

Procrastination happens when you don't start a task because you "aren't ready" and then you "feel guilty" about it, which leads to more feelings of "not being ready", which means you feel guiltier. It's a feedback loop:

Guilt 🔁 Procrastination

Just like "action proceeds motivation" guilt proceeds procrastination.

As Wait But Why notes, we get stuck in the Dark Playground instead of getting into flow.

2. Professionals Don't Wait For Your Feelings. Run The Algorithm

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work” ― Chuck Close

It's good to be aware when your guilt creates procrastination. One option is to breathe into your emotions and really feel them.

Your other option is to stay "screw it", just get to work. Action precedes motivation.

As an aside: Elon Musk "beats" procrastination by simply asking "what would I do if an optimal algorithm was running me? Do that."

But what if just saying "get to work" doesn't work? Time to learn an equation:

3. Learn The Procrastination Equation

As LukeProg writes, motivation is a function of the four variables below:

Let's explore it by using two example tasks from college: 1) an essay on insects due at the end of the semester and 2) a computer science coding project that I love.

For the insect essay, the Expected Value (or EV) is pretty low. It's not Valuable to me. I don't really know if I even Expect to finish it. Plus, the Delay is high. It's due at the end of the semester. This allows Impulsiveness to take over and I procrastinate by watching Starcraft.

For the coding project, the EV is quite high. It's valuable to me because I love coding. Plus the Delay is low. I get a hit of dopamine every few minutes that I make progress. This allows me to keep Impulsiveness at bay because I'm already doing a high EV task with a fast reward loop.

But that was in college. This is now. You're Old and still procrastinating! Here's how to beat it.

4. To Increase EV, Do What You Love

Let's start with the top. To increase EV, do things you love. It's as simple as that. What is easy for you and hard for others? Do more of that.

5. To Decrease Delay, Decrease Time

Once you've started a task, it's easy. But starting is hard. Getting momentum is hard. To beat this, use the 2-min and 5-min rule.

• 2-min Rule: If an action will take less than two minutes, do it immediately. Don't add "ping that person" to your todo list. Just spend 2 min to ping them. The most effective people have inbox zero.
• 5-min Rule: For any larger task, make it more appetizing to start by framing it as "do 5min on this task." You trick your mind into a short Delay, then just continue once you have momentum. The most effective people do great deep work.

Your goal is to break down tasks into exciting bite-sized tasks. Like "spend 5min improving your website homepage!"

6. To Decrease Impulsiveness, Add Friction

Even if you have exciting bite-sized tasks, you may be attracted by Impulsive behaviors like watching Magic: The Gathering. We live in a world of accelerating addictiveness! It's hard.

To stop this, add Friction to make these behaviors harder. This mostly takes the form of apps to protect your time. I use and recommend:

• https://stayfocusd.com/ to block Youtube and Twitter after 10min each day
• https://blocksite.co/ to completely block sites like Twitch
• Nudge to turn off Youtube recommended videos
• On my phone, I use Screen Time to block all apps 7am-9am in the morning and 10pm-11pm at night before bed. I also have a 10min limit on apps like Facebook and have deleted apps like Twitter from my phone.

Your whole goal is to decrease friction by making exciting bite-sized tasks, while increasing friction around similarly exciting and bite-sized procrastination like Youtube.

7. See Your Day As An Exciting Set Of Pomodoros To Fill

I love working in Pomodoros. I recommend Vitamin-R to track them.

Plan your day in terms of pomos. What will you spend your 8 morning pomos on? What about your afternoon pomos? Try to get at least 12 pomos in every day.

Here is a chart I used just to track them for myself. It's like filling in My Life In Weeks but My Day In Pomos with exciting work.

8. Focus Work in the Morning, Repetitive Work and Meetings in the Afternoon

Almost everyone does their most productive work in the 5 hours after they wake up. I block off 8am-1pm every day for this. Take this time as a gift and use it.

Use the afternoon for meetings and easier work. Your Impulsiveness will be higher then.

9. Make "Motivated" Part of Your Identity

I have a morning gratitude and affirmation process (with 5-minute journal). As part of this, I write "I am" statements each morning. For this, I write "I am motivated." This helps ingrain it into my identity and recognize when I'm not doing it.

As James Clear writes, identity-based habits are crucial. Change your identity, change your habits.

In summary:

• Learn the procrastination equation
• Decrease friction by feeding yourself exciting bite-sized tasks with the 2min and 5min rule
• Increase friction by downloading a portfolio of time trackers and site blockers
• Make it part of your identity
• Feel better! You're now doing great work you're proud of.

Some final notes:

• I use rescuetime.com to track my overall time
• I use a productivity coach to keep me on track with daily goals.
• I use Todoist to keep track of todos
• And Streaks to keep track of habits

2023 Update:

1. If you don't love what you do, all of the above is just "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic." Procrastination can be a sign that you aren't working on something you love. Do that first.
2. In the 2010s, LessWrong called this "beating akrasia". Here's a list of how to beat it. I've found monoidealism especially helpful.

• Write for a specific reader.
• Write concisely.
• When editing, look to cut.
• Write in chunks.
• Have fun with it.
• Leverage the computer with tools like Grammarly, hotkeys, and ergonomic keyboards.

1. Alex Danco's 5 Writing Tips

Write in parallel tracks using "meanwhile".

Meanwhile establishes parallel tracks of thought. A, therefore B. Meanwhile, C, yet D is a more powerful way to communicate complex ideas than one-track linear writing. When the punchline eventually comes, and those lines of thought collide into something interesting, you can make a better point than if you only had one track to work with.

Read your own writing.

The most important writing style to master is your own. An hour spent reading your own writing will make every next thing you write maybe half a percent easier and half a percent faster. It won’t feel like much at first, but it pays compound interest.

2. Scott Adams on The Day You Became A Better Writer

Write short sentences. Cut every word you can.

Writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something.

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.

3. Paul Graham on How To Write

Write simply. Remove all friction for reading.

I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.

That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas.

And the further they'll read. Most readers' energy tends to flag part way through an article or essay. If the friction of reading is low enough, more keep going till the end.

And remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your readers won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of ideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English. So you can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can use difficult words.

When editing, focus on cutting words.

The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and that makes simple writing even simpler.

4. Scott Alexander's Nonfiction Writing Advice

A. Break things into chunks.

Divide things into small chunks

Nobody likes walls of text. By this point most people know that you should have short, sweet paragraphs with line breaks between them. The shorter, the better. If you’re ever debating whether or not to end the paragraph and add a line break, err on the side of “yes”.

B. Be funny. Be yourself.

Use microhumor

You’ve heard of microaggressions. Now try microhumor. It’s things that aren’t a joke in the laugh-out-loud told-by-a-comedian sense, but still put the tiniest ghost of a smile on your reader’s face while they’re skimming through them.

Here’s a paragraph from my “about” page:

Topics here tend to center vaguely around this meta-philosophical idea of how people evaluate arguments for their beliefs, and especially whether this process is spectacularly broken in a way that may or may not doom us all.

C. Lead with specifics, follow with abstraction.

See Julia Evans and Grant Sanderson's similar point here.

Use concrete examples

If you’re going to be making a very complicated point, start with a lot of concrete examples. When I wrote Meditations on Moloch, probably the most complicated point I’ve ever tried to express on this blog, I began with fourteen different examples before I even started trying to express the underlying principle.

If you want to convince someone of a meta-level principle, you need to build it up from examples that support it. And if you want the principle to be well-founded and stable under reflective equilibrium, you also need to present the examples that don’t support it and explain why you didn’t make your principle out of those instead.

Free tip for this: use words like “me” and “you” instead of “a person” or “someone”.

D. Use metaphor. Use images. Use memes.

Use strong concept handles

The idea of concept-handles is itself a concept-handle; it means a catchy phrase that sums up a complex topic.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is really good at this. See “belief in belief“, “semantic stopsigns“, “applause lights“, “Pascal’s mugging“, “adaptation-executors vs. fitness-maximizers“, “reversed stupidity vs. intelligence“, “joy in the merely real”.

5. Holden Karnofsky's Honesty About Reading

Make your writing easy to skim. Use bold. Use bullets.

Skimming is necessary, even good. Writers should accommodate it, readers should own it.

There’s way too much to read.

Complementarily, authors should try to make life easy for readers who do not want to carefully read every word of their piece.

They should have easy-to-find sections of their piece that summarize and/or outline their arguments, with clear directions for which parts of the piece will give more detail on each point.

They shouldn’t force or expect readers to wade through all their prose to find a TL;DR on what they are arguing, what their main evidence is, why it matters, and what their responses to key objections are.

6. Hollis Robbins' Writing Advice

Name your reader(s) at the top of the page. You can erase the name(s) later.

Understand that your readers should have a strong understanding of your point simply by reading the first sentence of every paragraph. Think of the first sentence of each paragraph as a headline. You can go back and make this happen in your later revisions if it is slowing your writing.

She also has this amazing list of figures of speech.

Finally, from my godmother, Diane:

Write about things you love. Your readers will be able to sense your passion.

If you are writing to persuade, think about reasons why people act. Do your best to know your audience before you begin.

Please send me other writing advice you've found helpful. I'd love more. Thank you!

See the responses to Michael Nielsen's tweet here for all the other great folks that do this:

What are you waiting for?!? Download Anki today. https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Also see https://www.rhyslindmark.com/native-spaced-repetition/.

As part of that, I wanted to research how important FTX Future Fund is for the longtermist ecosystem more generally.

In summary: It's quite important! Let's learn why.

I. EA Funding Right Now

First, let's look at EA funding over time.

Of all Effective Altruist (EA) funding, 20% comes from GiveWell and 60% comes from Open Philanthropy (Open Phil).

In 2019, here's how much each org processed:

What about GiveWell's giving over time? Their graph is below.

They processed only $2M per year in the 2000s, then started to grow from $10M to $100M per year throughout the 2010s.

And here's Open Phil's estimate of how much they've given per year:

So, taking GiveWell and Open Phil together, here's how much EA money has been given per year throughout the 2020s:

$400M, not bad.

But this is actually going to ramp up a bunch in the coming few years. Open Phil only regranted $100M to GiveWell in 2020, but they plan to grant GiveWell $300M in 2021, $500M in 2022, and $500M again in 2023.

So how much will Open Phil be granting total?

Based on 2021 data, GiveWell granting is roughly 50% of Open Phil's budget:

So by increasing their 2022/2023 GiveWell giving to $500M, we'd roughly expect Open Phil to give $1B by that time:

GiveWell itself wants to direct $1B by 2025. If we take all of these together:

• $$ from Open Phil to GiveWell
• $$ from Open Phil to not GiveWell
• $$ to GiveWell from not Open Phil
• Other Grantmaking

The growth of EA giving into 2025 looks like this:

In other words, we're just at the start of EA funders giving a lot more money.

Still, most of EA granting lies with Open Phil and GiveWell. And much of that is still in Global Health.

...Until now!

II. FTX Future Fund and Longtermism

Meanwhile, Sam Bankman-Fried has been making magic internet money.

He's starting to give it back, mostly towards longtermism. How much of an impact is it having?

We can start by looking at how much money is in longtermism now.

Let's start with Ben Todd's excellent overview of 2019 EA granting categories, which I've slightly modified.

As you can see, longtermism (in red) is roughly 30% of all EA giving. In 2021, it was roughly 15% of Open Phil giving.

So, assuming roughly 20% of Open Phil's giving is longtermist, and assuming other longtermist donors are roughly 20% of Open Phil's longtermist giving, here's what longtermist giving looks like until now:

This is good! It's a reflection of the EA ecosystem accounting for the idea that ~future lives matter.

But FTX Future Fund is about to drastically increase it even more. They're trying to give $100M in 2022 alone. Here's what the graph will look like going forward:

That's a big yellow jump! It makes longtermist giving look like this for 2022:

But even this assumes that Open Phil is going to 2x their longtermist grantmaking in a similar fashion as they're pumping money into GiveWell.

If they keep their longtermist grantmaking at current levels, around $100M, the 2022 pie chart looks like this:

So, yes, the FTX Future Fund is a big deal for the longtermist funding ecosystem.

The EA funding ecosystem has had a shift. Dustin Moskovitz was a Web2 Facebook Money. SBF is Web3 FTX Money.

This means we should add a new player, FTX, (in green!) to our overall EA giving graph below.

Hope this helps give context to FTX's longtermist grantmaking.

Thanks for reading and don't forget to apply for that sweet sweet cash from FTX Future Fund by March 21.

Notes:

• Not quite sure why some numbers don't add up. 1) Ben Todd averaged 2017-2019 to get $260M. I can't quite tell how much Open Phil themselves say they gave in 2019. They just say "over $200M". 2) The graph here shows that Give Well raised $91M from Open Phil in 2020. But then Open Phil says they granted $100M. I'm working with public data and doing napkin math so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• For more on why Open Phil is giving more to Give Well, see this post. Although at the top they emphasize: This post is unusually technical relative to our others, and we expect it may make sense for most of our usual blog readers to skip it. 😂
• As a reminder, other big crypto EA funders include Vitalik and Ben Delo.

One easy heuristic is What Would Stripe Do?

The one I'm most interested in right now is email transparency.

• Here's their blog about it at 31 employees
• At 45 employees
• At 164 employees (and 428 lists!)
• And here's Patrick's answer for why email transparency never led to public leaks

Here's my summary:

• Stripe's strategy is "hire great generalists and give them leverage"
• Leverage is gained through shared context throughout the company
• Which is operationalized as email transparency with Google Groups

We'll start by trying Google Groups, though it's been ten years so I'm not sure if there's a better way.

Email transparency solves for shared context inside a company.

What about shared context outside company walls? We build open-source software, so want to excel at this.

Our first experiments are:

• Public Discord
• #buildinpublic on Twitter.
• Open Github

Long-term, we want to have what Ryan Petersen calls "Conway's Law for parallelization." Max leverage, minimum blockage.

We're hiring: https://www.roote.co/careers