Manifesto
Marc Andreessen says people should write more manifestos.[1] Also, the Unabomber had one, so why shouldn't I? Here goes:
I believe that we live in the best time in human history. Wealth and living standards are higher for more people than ever before. We walk around with supercomputers in our pockets; we have the ability to communicate with anyone in the world instantaneously and access to the entire corpus of human knowledge. At the individual level, this presents an unprecedented opportunity to add value to the world.
Yet we are collectively enfeebled. In an abundant society, we literally and metaphorically face the challenge of obesity rather than the challenge of starvation. With an abundance of information at our fingertips, we are unable to separate signal from noise and instead seek perspectives that validate our own. The vast majority of political action is only coherent when viewed as the signaling of membership in a particular tribe. Societal institutions borne out of World War II are reaching their breaking points. Our economic growth is stagnant.
Everything that comprises the world around us was made up by people no smarter than you or I. As such, I believe that we are trapped at several local maxima: maxima in resource allocation[2], philosophical and moral innovation, and political experimentation. Only by reconsidering the base assumptions that undergird the fabric of reality can we break through to new heights.
I’ve spent the past decade as a semi-professional dilettante.[3] I’ve worked at exponentially-growing startups, founded my own companies, traveled, read, and written. My comparative advantage is using this breadth of experience to draw connections between seemingly disparate areas. Through this process, I attempt to better understand the world and impact it positively.
This website serves three purposes, two selfish and one selfless (or at least a little bit less selfish):
- It is a forcing function for me to write. When I haven’t published in a while, thoughts pile up in my head; notes collect on my devices. This mental and digital detritus clutters my thinking. Writing forces me to clarify my worldview and exorcises anxiety from my mind.
- It allows me to connect with others. By writing and publishing online, I hope to attract like-minded people and opportunities that I would not otherwise have. I also provide literal proof of work that I have thought about a topic enough to put pen to paper and suffer the consequences (censure, embarrassment, loss of social capital) of an ill-conceived opinion or poor argument.
- Others may find these thoughts valuable, and I hope to provide some small contribution to humanity’s oeuvre.
The most important of which, as it non-renewable, is people’s time. ↩︎
Credit to Tim Ferriss for the original use of this phrase. ↩︎