In a conversation about innovation with Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel made the point that we can always do more with more and conversely, less with less. Innovation is when we can do more with less. For example, finding more oil in the ground and extracting it is not innovation, producing more energy per barrel is.

In order for an economy to prosper, there must be a high degree of trust in the system. For instance, without trust that someone will uphold their side of a contract, only limited kinds of transactions can occur. If there is trust that a contract will be enforced then there is higher assurance the other party will make good, making it possible for more complex arrangements and entities outside the system can more easily participate.

See also:

• In trust models, contract enforcement would be 1 of 1 there is reliance on the legal system (judges, lawyers, courts) to act as expected.

There are two different kinds of fun. Type I fun is when you are having fun and know you are having fun while doing it. Type II fun is when you are miserable doing it, but in hindsight it was fun.

Building something, startups are an example of type II fun.

See also:

• Hn comment thread about building a cabin in the woods
• We don’t know what the good news is and what the bad news is

Capitalism has gone through several phases 1) local markets bounded by limited mobility 2) globalization where markets expanded beyond borders now 3) markets saturated bounded by consumption.

Universal basic income increases the overall level of available consumption by providing everyone with the ability to participate in the demand side of the economy.

Read the blog post from Tim Robinson.

A policy of providing regular income to people who are not working or are unable to work to meet basic needs.

People who recently uncover an idea tend to be the most zealous in promoting and defending it because it becomes part of their identity and identity is a powerful motivation for behaviors.

For example, an engineer that recently learns and implements a microservices architecture that is outspoken that it’s the one true way for building large systems, but has only used it to implement their personal blog.

See also:

• Spiritual materialism where adopting something can also lead to change in identity

Something you focus on seems more important than it actually is. This is apparent if you consider that at any moment there are many problems to solve, but the one you are thinking about is the one that tends to get solved.

This is a form of availability bias and can cause you to over value something when making a decision.

See also:

• Trading money for time is leverage on focus
• Schedule time every day to work on your top goal

In plate tectonics, all of the interesting effects like mountain formation, earthquakes, happen on the edge of the plates. This is also a useful analogy for any field where the more interesting work happens on the bleeding edge.

See also:

• The Incomplete Guide to the Art of Discovery which talks about advances in plate tectonics that led to a flurry of new discoveries at the edge of the field.

The conceptualization of long periods and how they fit into our lives which was originated from studying geological strata.

Realizing that time is longer than we think was problematic in the 18th-19th century–the earth is not ~6,000 years old, there are no artifacts of humans in geological strata that were uncovered during the industrial revolution, even the dinosaurs had to be conceived of.

Darwin once said time is inconceivable, yet articulated evolution as the product of small changes over long stretches. It can be powerful to grasp inconceivable lengths of time.

See also:

• Long now blog post on deep time
• Silurian Hypothesis which imagines an advanced civilization before ours and whether we could tell or not.

A product team or organization that moves slowly (e.g. reviews, gatekeepers, heavy process) in introducing changes moves slower over time. As slowness increases and the chance of success remains constant, then each failure is more expensive. This leads to a negative feedback loop where more slowness is introduced to try and guarantee a positive outcome.

Make a little progress on your most important goals every day, even if it’s something small. Any time you let things slip, it’s easier to slip again and eventually it becomes a habit. The rule of no zero days prevents that and provides evidence of your changing identity every day.

See also:

• This reddit thread where the phrase ‘no zero days’ originated
• Atomic Habits talks about ‘showing up’ as an important factor for initially forming a positive habit and how actions reinforce one’s identity.

There is a tendency to write a problem statement as the problem you want to solve (i.e. the solution). For example, “We give users no guidance on X” is unlikely to be the problem statement rather than “users are confused”. The former is a solution disguising as a problem and the latter is actually the problem which may have many other solutions.

A solution described as a problem is self-referential and can be used to justify anything.

See also:

• SCQA makes space between describing what’s going on and the problem
• Problems are conflicts between ideas
• When to write a brief

In a note taking practice, the act of publishing and reviewing notes helps to visualize progress of growing your knowledge. It’s difficult to quantify your intelligence or thinking at any moment, but seeing the list of files added/modified when doing a git commit makes it more tangible.

Adding publishing to note taking makes it more satisfying and makes it more likely you will continue (see Atomic Habits ‘make it satisfying’).

The act of writing notes of self contained ideas and facts leads to deeper understanding. The feeling of not understand something you write is unpleasant and motivates taking a closer look. If writing is thinking, then note taking is encoding.

Thomas Malthus was an 18th-century economist who stated in ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ that population growth is exponential, but the production of food is linear. Once the population exceeds the production of food there would be mass famine and to combat that his solution was population control. This was debunked by the industrial revolution where production since also grown exponentially globally.

Energy and growth are tightly correlated. The more energy consumption a society has the greater their GDP. Producing more energy does not grow the economy, but the relationship shows that, while there has been tremendous growth globally, we are not any more efficient in using energy.

This is an important relationship that needs to change if we are going to be effective at combating climate change.

Recent research shows that Machu Picchu was purposely constructed on top of two intersecting fault lines. The area is very remote, even from the nearest city where the emperor lived, that the location seems like an overly difficult choice. However, the fault lines provide convenient access to granite and channels that carry fresh water from the mountains (convenience is king).

See also:

• Research Suggests Machu Picchu Was Purposely Built on Top of Intersecting Fault Lines via the Smithsonian

Long term work on inter-generational problems (e.g. climate change) requires inter-generational partnership. Fostering these relationships is difficult because thinking long term is undervalued compared to solving short term problems and those in positions of power tend to be from the previous generation (Planck’s principle) which tends to favor themselves (i.e. in-group favoritism).

One way to promote this inter-generational partnerships is through shared heirlooms. Another is to provide legal rights to a future generation and empower them through existing systems (e.g. suing the government for climate change action on behalf of a future generation).

Caring for an object for the purpose of passing down to a future generation helps people think long term. Being and heirloom means it can’t be consumed or depleted and it instills a sense of duty to grow or preserve for successive generations. This helps to combat a tragedy of the commons. As good example of a shared heirloom that promotes long term environmental conservation is the US National Parks.

See also:

• The Long Now podcast episode with Bina Venkataraman

It’s unfortunate American values and belief systems are incompatible with successfully managing the COVID-19 pandemic. We resent or measures that are effective, but inhibit our freedoms or are even mildly inconvenient (social distancing, wearing a mask).

Wearing a mask is the perfect example. All of the ‘rugged individualism’ that people identify with as being distinctly American is counter to thinking communally and putting the good of others above yourself. It’s telling that wearing a mask is more to protect others than it is to protect you and so many are unwilling to wear one.

Charlie Munger calls the lollapalooza effect a combination of several elements all acting in concert to create an even greater outcome. In investing, you are looking for outsized gains and you should look for these effects.

Richard Hamming gets at a more specific example in You and Your Research–in order to make important contributions you need the right problem, with the right approach, at the right time.

In rust, a variable is declared as mutable or immutable and all of it’s fields (in the case of a struct) are declared the same–you can’t mutate a field while also making a borrow of another field.

This presents a problem for self-referential data structures. For example, in game programming it’s typical to have a top level GameState object that is mutated each frame which often requires reading from a field while mutating another which would cause a borrowck error (trying to take multiple references of GameState).

The solution to this access pattern is interior mutability, wrapping fields you need to mutate in a RefCell. This provides runtime borrow checks with the ability to mutate a field while holding a reference to the struct.

See also:

• Blog post on interior mutability that recreates Cell to explain how it works
• Splitting borrows is a similar method for mutating multiple parts of a list

The stock price of a corporation being added to an index fund increases along with it’s competitors that are also included in the index fund. There is less motivation to compete with each other because the owners across all the competitors are the same.

See also:

• Testing the Theory of Common Stock Ownership

Prominent investor and founder of Berkshire Hathaway, known for thoughts about good decision making and applying a ‘latticework of mental models’ from a wide range of academic fields.