From Nat Friedman’s personal site (former Github CEO)
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 physic
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