Hi friends,
Greetings from Cincinnati!
Life is quiet on my side. I don't have too much to share at this moment. The weather in Cincinnati has warmed up from 10 degrees to 50 degrees. The NFL playoffs are in full swing. Vivid dreams have been seizing my mornings, so I began to write them down.
Over the last 2 weeks, here are some things that have caught my eye:
Perplexity AI. Earlier this month, my ChatGPT-4 subscription expired, but I found Perplexity AI to be an excellent replacement. (I believe it uses GPT-3.5, but its search capabilities are much better). Website | App
Chef vs Cook. I enjoyed this blog post by Tim Urban. It’s packed with insights that’ll take me a while to digest. Ostensibly, it’s on how Elon Musk sees the world, but it also addresses agency, biology, and mental models.
Elon Musk is a truth-seeker. He's a master at looking at the world, asking “What’s really going on here?” and seeing the real answer.
On Wars: What really is the cause of victory in any particular case, as opposed to what one side or the other claims to be the reason?
On Signaling: What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it, and what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil.
On Being Scared of the Dark: When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength—400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well it’s really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore after that.
Most of the work of solving problems comes down to thinking about the problem correctly in the first place. That means not simply doing what everybody else is doing, but asking "What's really going on here?" or "What are we really trying to do here?"
When the American founding fathers wrote the Constitution, they didn't ask:
Who is our king?
What should the rules be for selecting a king?
What should the limitations of his power be?
Instead, they asked:
What should a country be?
What's the best way to govern a group of people?
By ignoring the established convention of a monarchy, they started at a more fundamental level. By the time they had finished their puzzling, a king wasn’t part of the picture. Instead, their reasoning led them to believe that John Locke had a better plan and they worked their way up from there.
As a reminder, here are some of John Locke's ideas:
Natural Rights: Humans are born with inherent rights to life, liberty, and property, which no government can arbitrarily remove.
Limited Government: Government power is restricted to protecting natural rights. Legitimacy derives from consent, and it can be overthrown if it fails to uphold its duties.
Religious Toleration: Individuals have the right to worship freely (within limits) as long as their beliefs don't harm others.
Typically, we don’t appreciate something until it’s been taken away from us. I find it useful to remember the conventions before John Locke’s ideas, which were:
Precarious Liberties: Individual freedoms were often dependent on social status and subject to the ruler's will.
Divine Right: Many monarchs claimed their rule was ordained by God ("divine right"), making them accountable to no one but a higher power.
Religious Intolerance: Dissenting from the established faith could be dangerous, leading to persecution, discrimination, and even violence. This included punishments like exile, imprisonment, torture, and even execution.
By starting with different questions, you arrive at different, and often better, answers.
Read the Full Post (1 hr 18 min)
Robert Pirsig. One of the reasons I love Tokyo is because— whether it’s a taxi driver or ramen cook, people seem to care about the work they do. I find that admirable.
Care: “an most important part of subject/object relations consisted of an attentional guidance which precedes, in every case, the material which is discussed." In layman's terms, care is how you approach something, your attitude, and the key word is attention.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig advocates a deep concern for the task itself, and a willingness to invest oneself fully in the process. A mechanic who truly cares about the bike will go beyond the minimum effort and take pride in the details, resulting in a higher quality outcome.
This principle extends beyond physical work to other aspects of life, including relationships, learning, and personal growth. True success lies not in external validation or material achievements, but in the quality of experience derived from the process itself. The pursuit of excellence is found in focusing on the "how" as much as the "what."
Indeed, people do better work, feel better about their lives, and generally succeed more often when they care about the problems they address.
Country Life. In today’s information-laden world, many people resonate with the desire to live a simpler life. This YouTube channel centers on a grandmother’s homemade recipes in rural Azerbaijan. Like China’s YouTuber Dianxi Xiaoge from Yunnan or Liziqi from Sichuan, it is raw and exceptionally well-shot.
Book Club. Lastly, I am spending 2024 reading The Power Broker. It is a biography of Robert Moses — the man who moved more Earth than anyone in human history. If you would like to read along, check out the website or join the Discord.
That’s all for today. See you in two weeks!
Love the point about caring deeply about the task we are doing