2017-07-14
Most people like to blame others for their misery. “It’s the government’s fault; they are interfering in the free market”. Sounds familiar? What if it’s not the governments fault? What if it’s your fault? What if it’s the fault of us who claim to love freedom? To say that “it’s not my fault” means I say to myself and others that there are no actions possible to me that can change the outcome of the problem I’m facing. This to me is just absurd. There is no problem that exist where I can have 0 influence. It might be difficult for me to have the impact needed to really change something, but it doesn’t mean that I’m exempt from being at fault. If I don’t like the place I live, I can move. If I don’t like the local government, I can move to another country. If I don’t like the language, I can learn another. And if there are no social system that I like, then it becomes my responsibility to design what I want. As a software engineer I cannot just sit around and complain that nobody has designed a specific software for me. It’s my job to write the software. It’s the same with governments. If it’s not good enough, it’s my job to fix it. Do like me and take responsibility for everything in your own life. You only live once. Make the most of your life.
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After working on Mindshore for some time, I’ve come to the realization that it might be difficult to go the direct route. Some of the more complicated issues that we came up against were the following:
* How to create solid jobs on Mindshore in the short term. People want to build careers for the long term, and with the level of uncertainty that a startup has, what we can provide is not solid enough at this stage. * How to get the right people to travel to Tahiti in small, then large numbers. For what we’re trying to achieve with Mindshore, this one would be extremely difficult. Adding up the probabilities for the different required events to take place, we’re looking at 1:100 chance of success, maybe less. Life is short, and these odds are too low. * We’ll be taking a different route to the same destination, a route that looks like a much higher probability. Does it mean it’s time to give up? Not even close. Sam Altman says that the time to give up is when things are not working and you’re out of ideas. I firmly believe that Seasteading is going to work, it’s just some more issues that needs to be resolved first. In the case of Mindshore, it’s still a car without an engine. We need to build an engine first, and then we can continue assembling the other systems. The engine that is going to drive Mindshore will have to be creation of jobs, and a full economy. So we’ll have to design a system for doing this first, then we can get back to building Mindshore. Hopefully The Seasteading Institute will succeed with their efforts, and they can push the technology forward while we’re building the engine needed for Mindshore. So for some time, probably several years, there should be less activity on Mindshore, and then hopefully we’ll be able to pick it up again later. This week was largely spent on developing software.
You might think that this is mostly a physical project, but that would not be totally accurate. Very good progress was made on the software side, though we're quite secretive about it for now. Have you experienced that many times there is no correlation between how much effort something is, and how much money you make?
Hint; if you have not yet gotten into the investing game, I suggest getting started with just a few dollars. Get in to learn at first, not to make money. As an investor I’ve experienced the lack of correlation between effort and how much I make multiple times. I’ve put in a lot of effort into an investment, only to have negative results. No payoff at all. Other times I’ve put in a little effort, and have very good results. Other times I put in a lot of effort and had very good payoff. What are the properties of the winning investments? Sometimes the upside is dependent on my efforts, other times not. But usually the winners have a large potential upside and a limited downside. That’s what Mindshore has. It has a huge upside, and very limited downside. What if it works to build a community first, then a society, then a nation at sea? What if we long term can start a new country? Instead of changing existing structures, where you’ll have almost 0 payoff if you win, and you’ll probably lose, your effort can go into a project with a decent chance of success and a massive payoff if it works; a new country based on rational values. 2017-07-04
Many people observe that they don't like the way things are going in the US. The values they believe in, rational individualism, is taking a beating every day. Why is that? In physics there is this thing called momentum. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. The bigger the object, the more momentum it has. I think many of the lessons from physics can be applied to other fields. For example how a society works. Take Silicon Valley; they got a lot of momentum going for it when it comes to startups. They have venture capital firms, they have infrastructure, they have the social connections, they got the legal structures. And so a lot of people who think that starting new businesses is a good idea go there. In the same way, I think that western societies got a certain momentum. On the one hand, it's a trend of increasing secularism and less faith. On the other hand, governments are getting stronger. While many like the trends, I have ideas on how things could be dramatically better. And I don't think that I'll be able to change the US or any other country in the near future. So I think it's better to take the lessons from Silicon Valley of starting small, and then see if it's possible to build something radically different and valuable to customers. The US and the west in general is like planets they got so much momentum. It’s going to be next to impossible for an individual to change direction of these societies, except through new technology that introduces unforeseen leverage. I did the math on how long you would have to run a rocket engine to move a planet meaningfully. We’re talking quadrillions of years at full throttle with current technology. Changing direction of the US is an comparable effort. It’s much easier to start small with a different direction. 2017-07-03
Do we need a government? If we need a government, how should it be structured? How could a well-functioning individualistic society be organized? So many people have strong opinions about this, but they are all wrong, including you. The only correct answer to these questions is “I don’t know”. If you think you know, it’s probably because you have not yet started building and implementing this thing. My huge advantage is that I have applied the scientific method in many areas of my life, and any half-good scientist loses arrogance very fast. I have assumptions that I might think have a fair chance of working. I often even assign probabilities to the different outcomes. But I only know something after I have run an experiment, and even then I am open for the possibility that I might have made an error. I know that the only way to find out is by experimenting. But how many experiments do you need? In software we’re used to feedback cycles of seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks at most. In software we know that the possible things you can build are infinite, and for this reason you need to be sure to get feedback very rapidly to avoid getting off course. Customers decide what should be built. When was the last experiment in governance? How frequent are the experiments run; once per decade or century? How can anyone with a serious face claim to know what works in governance when all you have seen is a few hundred experiments? When did your government last ask you “what do you think of our service? Do you see any room for improvements?” It never happened. The internet is awesome because there have been perhaps millions of experiments, and most didn’t work out. A few become great systems that are working well. The fact is, you don’t know what will work in governance, and neither do I. Let's be honest and say so. Then we can experiment and find out. Let’s use science and reason to build an English speaking society of rational individualism, not faith and force. |