Nat Friedman

Some things I believe:

• As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences

  • Technology, which is really knowledge, enables this

  • You should probably work on raising the ceiling, not the floor

• Enthusiasm matters!

  • It's much easier to work on things that are exciting to you
  • It might be easier to do big things than small things for this reason
  • Energy is a necessary input for progress

• It's important to do things fast

  • You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently
  • Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit
  • "Slow is fake"
  • A week is 2% of the year
  • Time is the denominator

• The efficient market hypothesis is a lie

  • At best it is a very lossy heuristic
  • The best things in life occur where EMH is wrong
  • In many cases it's more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion
  • "Most people are other people"

• We know less than we think

  • The replication crisis is not an aberration
  • Many of the things we believe are wrong
  • We are often not even asking the right questions

• The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful

  • Great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment
  • The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension
  • The downsides are worth it

• Smaller teams are better

  • Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun
  • No need to chop up work for political reasons
  • No room for mediocre people (can pay more, too!)
  • Large-scale engineering projects are more soluble in IQ than they appear
  • Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed

• Where do you get your dopamine?

  • The answer is predictive of your behavior
  • Better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than from having them validated
  • It's ok to get yours from "making things happen"

• You can do more than you think

  • We are tied down by invisible orthodoxy
  • The laws of physics are the only limit