some beliefs:

• technological progress is the most important and perhaps sole driver of human flourishing

  • apparent shifts in social norms, political systems, etc. are ultimately driven by technological change

• the world is undergoing enormous change, driven by demographic, technological, and socio-cultural factors

  • fundamental historical forces are driving the world toward a period of instability
  • 20th century political formulas are running on fumes, nothing has yet emerged to conclusively replace them
  • instability creates both risk and opportunity
  • some of the main players are already on the board, others are yet to appear
  • intra-elite competition sets the direction of change

• civilization is not guaranteed

  • our current era of economic surplus is predicated on facts which can change
  • previous historical eras were horrific beyond imagining for most people who ever lived
  • some social structures and cultures are more likely to preserve civilization and are better to live under than others

• people are mostly insane

  • people confuse fiction and reality all the time; e.g. most people’s understanding of the second world war is from movies
  • by presenting historical events in the same medium as popular fiction, the events become fictionalized in people’s minds
  • it’s really easy to be delusional, thinking is hard
  • people easily delude themselves into believing they’re rational

• the ‘low hanging fruit’ hypothesis regarding scientific progress is obviously wrong

  • in every era of scientific progress, the ‘low hanging fruit’ are the easy problems that are solved first
  • kuhn’s model of puctuated equilibrium fits the historical facts
  • science is mainly suffering from managerialization

• more opportunity exists for more people than they are aware of

  • absent illness or obligation, many people would be much happier doing something completely different than what they’re doing now
  • reasonably intelligent people can learn how most things work
  • the world is much wilder than you think

• elite is better than non-elite is really capable of understanding

  • a large fraction of elite performance is the ability to sustain obsessive focus for a very long time
  • ‘everyone is winging it’ is cope, but most people will never experience elite performance so don’t believe it exists

• human cognition is very weak relative to the complexity of the physical world

  • mathematics is far from universal
  • we have enormous gaps in our understanding of even basic, classical physical phenomena

somewhat inspired by nat friedman