Personal and cultural principles

These are some of my core operating principles, and a description of the culture I aim nurture within me and around me.

Do real things

“Real artists ship”
Create value for someone, as a checksum.
Invest in yourself, but never go a week without doing something that creates value in the world, external to your internal compounding loop.
Even if the point of your plans is on a long time horizon, create some value today.
Get users. Making something for one other person is a qualitative phase shift from making something for just yourself.
Thinking should result in artifacts of thinking. Be suspicious of any work that doesn’t produce artifacts.
Notice if something you’re doing feels pointless or fake.
Reach out for the telos. Pivot to plans that are connected with telos, as necessary.
Be ready for uncomfortable slogs, but be suspicious of hollow-feeling stories.
Hold your focus on both long term problems, and concrete, practical, initiatives.
On the one hand, you need to be keeping your eye on the world-scale problems that you’re trying to solve, and checking if you are only driving ahead on tractable, but useless, lost purposes.
On the other hand, you have to be constantly moving towards the territory and finding ways to get traction on something concrete and practical, so that you can build skill and refine your understanding of the problem, instead of getting bogged down in abstract impossible difficulties that keep you from getting close contact with reality.
There is a tension between these two things, but you have to be able to do both.
“Do the simple thing first.”

Move fast

Don’t get in the habit of waiting to take action. If there’s a next step, default to “do it now.”
Motivation comes from momentum.
Set 10 minute timers.
Stagger the steps. Try to be working on the next phase of a project in parallel with the current phase, instead of doing everything in sequence.
“No problem is too hard. Many problems are too fast.”
Time is our crucial, limiting, resource. Don’t waste it. Figure out how to make progress as fast as possible.
Spend money for time.
If you notice yourself preparing to do something, try just jumping into doing it. Maybe you can make it work and learn faster that way. If not, you’ll at least have a clearer sense of what kind of preparation you need to do.
Check if steps of your plans are skippable.

Process is powerful

“Everything, not prohibited by the laws of physics, is possible.”
Nothing is impossible, given the right knowledge and skill. Discover the knowledge and Invent the skills that you need.
You are a general intelligence. There’s nothing that you can’t learn, given enough time.
Master the known robustly-valuable methods that are already available in the world.
Learn to code.
Build a GTD system.
Develop a personal practice of Focusing.
Do deliberate practice.
Make Trigger Action Plans.
Communicate your needs with NVC, and find cooperative solutions with Convergent Facilitation.
Develop a taste for simple quantitative reasoning.
The CFAR techniques are pretty great.
“People don’t use the tools they have” — If you have methods that you know work, use them.
Try naive ideas, and iterate on them.
If something doesn’t work, identify why not, and intervene on that blocker.
If something does work, isolate the active ingredient to streamline and simplify your process.
Pay attention to subtle details of your experience. They are pointers to the structure of yourself and of the world. Followed to the limit, understanding of that structure is the lever by which one accomplishes what might have seemed impossible.
Learn and master the contours of your own psychological faculties. Only by knowing how you work can you most effectively make use of your abilities.
Notice, flag, and solve bugs.
Minor frictions are often hints of looming problems. Flag even the small things.
Problems aren’t solved until they are solved forever.
Every problem solved should make you stronger, as you add what you learned from it to your total skill.
Do post mortems and root cause analyses.
Understand the crux of what went wrong before you try to solve a problem.
Then, solve it forever.
Practice is a powertool.
If something is hard for you to do, practice it explicitly, in a simplified offline context.
Design training regimes and training regime sequences.
It doesn’t help you to know how to solve a problem, if you don’t remember to use your knowledge.
Identify triggers, and make well-formed TAPs.
Make checklists, with triggers for using them.
Practice useful mental motion until they are habitual.
Keep logs of what you’ve tried and review them periodically.
Make hotkeys and shortcuts, and make them habitual.
Automate what can be automated.
Build tools.
Set hotkeys.
Write software.
“maximize grounded metacognition.”

Empiricism: get contact with reality

A mantra, to ingrain as a persistent feature of your experience: “…according to my map, which is not the territory.”
Always be moving towards the closer contact with the territory, with every motion.
When you are uncertain about something, ask how you can observe it.
When you’re in a disagreement, ask if you can test it.
“If it matters, it can be measured.”
Rapid Prototyping: Test things immediately.
Ask yourself if you can get data sooner, and even sooner.
Do user interviews.
Write down your plans, in detail, so that you can notice your assumptions.
Ask yourself how you could tell if those assumptions were false, and how you would tell if they were true.
Getting traction on an iterative process can be faster than doing correct careful thinking.
If you can get rapid feedback from the world, and steer by that, you don’t have to have landed on the exact right idea.
Choose plans and projects that get you entangled with the world, over those that don’t.
Most value is value of information.
Build out systems iteratively.
Assume that your initial vision of how a system or process should work is wrong, or a first draft to be extended and improved. Make design choices that maintain flexibility and avoid lock-in.
Write down predictions, so that you can check them later without hindsight bias.
Get to the right answer as quickly as you can.
Don’t wait for reality to update you. If you're playing out a narrative arc, jump to the end of the story.

Get your philosophy right

Disposition and Philosophy -> Culture -> Choices -> Destiny
One’s doom is often secretly the result of the faulty, but unseen, assumptions of their orientation to the world.

Aim for robust self-leadership

Be a good leader to all parts of you.
Listen well to all your needs and attempt to serve them all. Strive to earn justified trust in yourself.
Neither be a pushover, ruled by your immediate urges, nor be a tyrant, crushing parts of you that are inconvenient to your dominant goal / narrative.
Take your own needs seriously, while also being willing to ask much of yourself.
Hold tradeoffs in your mind, and aim for compassionate austerity.
Be friends with yourself.
You are sovereign.
There’s nothing that gets you to choose what you do, other than you. If someone or something demands something of you, remember that your choices are yours and yours alone.
If it feels like a “have to” or a “should” or anything external to you is driving you, ask what there is, in you, to which the external force appeals such that it compels you at all. Attempt to serve that impulse, rather than the should.
All your values get to speak. When there are conflicts between them, reaffirm your commitment to serve them all to the absolute limit of your ability.
There may, ultimately, be fundamental tradeoffs between your deepest values. If so, assess those tradeoffs, and choose. Some things are worth sacrificing for. However, all the values in you deserve respect and dignity, even if (especially if) you decide that it is worth it to give up on their satisfaction for something that matters even more. Honor all parts of you.
Never ever lie to yourself. Self-honesty is an indispensable asset. We cannot steer without it.
Flag when you’re making a case or telling a story, instead of stating your best guess.
If you notice yourself rationalizing, ask what need or desire that rationalization serves, and see if you can own it as a part of you, one of the things to strive for.
Habitually leave lines of retreat.
You’re allowed to have cloaks.
Let your actions flow from your highest values, the ideals that resonate with what is deep and bright and Good.
Have compassion and curiosity towards the impulses in you that seem less than-good. Be gentle with them, while also holding to your ethical standards. Connect to your ideals and to your base impulse, together, looking for how the later are also an expression of life.
Have steel, robustness, and determination. Have it be a matter of pride that your circumstances don’t control you. Enjoy the feeling of agency.
Want, and choose, to be strong, instead of weak.
Notice fear and have courage.
Don’t be a wimp.

Hold yourself to a standard of impeccable integrity

Be relentlessly high integrity. Never hide or hide from the consequences of your beliefs or of your actions.
Be honest.
A temptation to lie is a flag that you’re not in integrity with your values. Either your actions are out of line with your values and standards for yourself or other people’s expectations of you are out of line with your values and standards. Either way, this is indicative of a bug.
Find people who you trust enough to share your aspirations and values with. Let them help you hold you to your own standards, and no others. Help them hold to their own standards, in turn.
Lean into the hard conversations. Don’t let things fester.
“The amount of progress that we make is directly proportional to the number of hard conversations that we're willing to have.”
Represent yourself so that others aren’t surprised by your actions.
Pass the onion test.
Be upfront about your weaknesses, and the costs you are likely to impose on others.
Keep your commitments and be careful making commitments that you can’t easily keep.
Take responsibility for your actions.
Be willing to decline to do things that seem bad, even if others disagree.

Ethics

Take responsibility for your shit. Your unhandled neuroses are going to leak into the world. Whether you want it or not, everything you make will be a reflection of you, so you have a responsibility to have your own house in order.
Have courage to do what seems right, even when it is awkward.
“Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles.”
Practice doing the awkward thing.
“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”
Carefully think through moral arguments, and then act from your convictions.
Be prepared to be ethical in an unconscionably immoral society. Have a plan for operating in Nazi Germany, in case it turns out that your own context is similarly evil.
Choose actions that universalize well.
As a minimal standard, act such that, if everyone adopted your policy, the problems would be solved.
Consider that you might be in the wrong.
The point of morality is to help make you better. The fundamental mental motion of morality is effectively asking if maybe you’re in the wrong.

Double down on cooperation

Commit to passing ITTs.
Look for and reach for same-sidedness.
Search for ways for everyone to get their needs met. Win all the games.
Solve conflict with abundance
If you're in a conflict with an ally, assume a deficit of cooperation and creativity. Attempt to unilaterally redress that deficit by creatively optimizing for and serving their needs, as well as your own.
When you notice yourself in a tug of war, take a breath, and reconnect with your desire to cooperate.
Do better than consent: Strive for those you work with and near to feel excellent about their interaction with you.
Always leave the physical spaces that you use at least as clean and as tidy as you found them.
Be wary of adversarial environments. Don’t be taken advantage of.
Be ready to effectively defend against maleficence, without spite or hate. No one’s deepest soul is your business, except for your own, but that doesn’t mean being soft toward bad behavior.

[As it sits in me, the last three principles are all the same thing: living in integrity with your values and attempting to serve living needs, inside and out.]

Stay healthy, stay stable

Performance starts with physiology.
Sleep well.
Exercise intensely. Be physically fit.
Regularly connect with what is spiritual, meaningful, and alive, for you.
Stay grounded.
Be fast to respond to the world, but move from centeredness.
Manic or panicked activity doesn’t serve us well. We need stable clear-headedness.
Make space away from the forces that are aiming to hack you.
Take breaks from screens, and from systems that induce urgey dopamine loops.
Journal. Meditate.
Make sure that your thinking sometimes has space to follow slower rhythms than that of the ever-accelerating memetic Molochean red-queen race for your attention.
Be wary of AI trained on human feedback.

Live in Reality

The litany of Gendlin
The litany of Tarski
Make space for your fear about what might be, and have courage.
Habitually make lines of retreat.
Allow your own emotions to impact you and propagate through you. That’s how updating happens.
If the world is ending, allow yourself to live in a world that is ending. Do the best you can in that world, whatever that may be.

Appendices

Books and resources that have some part of the spirit

Principles by Ray Dalio (I read the document that was circulating around the internet in the 2010s. I don't know how different the published book is.)
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutch
Squirrel in Hell (Chris / Mya Pasek)’s Superhuman Meta Process
Tom Chi's videos on rapid prototyping
The Sequences, by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Planecash by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Kelsey Piper
Many of Nate's Minding Our Way posts (but not the ones on self-deception)
“If” by Rudyard Kippling
Logan's writing on Naturalism
Anna Salamon's episode of The Clearer Thinking Podcast
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Lying by Sam Haris
Scout Mindset by Julia Galef ??

Sources for specific, necessary, skills

Getting Things Done by David Allen
*Nonviolent communication* by Marshall Rosenberg [or other NVC training]
Focusing by Eugine Gendlin [or other Focusing training]
Highest Common Denominator [or other Convergent Facilitation training]
How to Measure Anything by Doulgas Hubard