wisdom

minor things I have learned

1. The person who cares less controls the relationship
2. Authority figures always lie for their benefit
3. Official denials are official confirmations (reassurances that "XXX is valued [and not devalued, at risk]" count here as does "We have no evidence" since it just as often means "we did not or cannot look for evidence") [11]
4. Use caution when trusting people who agree with you because you are not testing their beliefs [3] [9]
5. Public accusations are a tacit admission of your own inclinations [24]
6. Time kills all deals [4]
7. Repetition makes lies seem true (neurons that fire together wire together) even if one consciously "knows" it's a lie
8. People as a rule don’t deal with changing feelings. Relationships fade no matter how close they are; your best friend may not even talk to you except when you accidentally encounter one another after a few years.
9. Personality may matter but looks matter first and more [2]
10. "This is the first incident" is only true because the incident is very carefully being defined to be unique.
11. You will not ever feel like doing it (motivation comes and goes - it is fleeting and less effective than habits and discipline; Stephen King's requote of artist Chuck Close “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work” applies)
12. Always ask doctors, lawyers and other experts, "what would YOU do?" instead of "what should I do?"; there is a cognitive bias when people evaluate the situation of others, they are unaware of constraints and other considerations, but when thinking about the situation as their own, constraints are brought to the forefront and they also gain better ability to explain the logic of their feedback.
13. The statistics apply to you, too. e.g., E=PV.
14. No matter how well meaning you may be, or how obvious the situation is, except for disclosing what is patently obvious (what you are doing, visibly, at the time, why you are some place in that moment) and what is required of you (name, driver's license when driving), don't talk to the police. "I am exercising my sixth amendment right to counsel and will not answer questions without my attorney being present."
15. People undervalue that which comes to them easily. Trying to ease someone's way in career, relationships, friendships, money, etc. will often just lead to that help making their situation worse.
16. No action, however innocuous or inconsequential, will not cause a set of crazies to emerge with conspiracy theories.
17. The most cost-effective and least-effort-intensive way to prove merit is by leaving. Employers have trouble re-evaluating people, especially individual contributors, but exiting to somewhere better means that either they re-evaluate you, or they don't, but it no longer matters.
18. Never, ever rely on an addict.
19. All sentences, in all languages, implicitly end with the phrase "for now."
20. If you see an advertisement, story, essay, etc. in any media, especially online media, even if it appears to be aimed at a different demographic, it's actually there for you, specifically, to manipulate you. [5]
21. Be aware that skill at detecting manipulative people actually ends up selecting for a higher class of skilled liars - you will believe the one who fools you. [6]
22. It's not a tribe unless you have the ability to ask the tribe to give back. [7]
23. The most reliable predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
24. Insiders compete with insiders so they spend most of their effort building things for insiders. [8]
25. There's nothing magical about situational awareness. Awareness of where you are at can be neutral, positive or negative. [10]
26. Everything you see in the media is trying to sell you something.
27. When the good people go, go with them. [12]
28. Once people realize they are doomed - that is, their situation is such that they perceive they will be in a bad position no matter what they do - they also realize that authorities have limited ability to punish them and become very dangerous. [14]
29. Most internal political structures exist to preserve status quo for insiders. Trying to do something big by navigating that map will almost never work. [15]
30. No matter what, the previous administration is assigned the blame. [16]
31. Situations where you are going to be someone's learning experience will almost never have a positive outcome. [17]
32. Almost all situational problems in life are easy to address if your terminal goals are clear .[18]
33. When growth stops, even in the absence of decline, everything becomes a zero-sum. [22]
34. Everything you need to know about a person's preferences are on display in their past choices (revealed preferences).
35. Times of chaos are times when the current owners of the gradient from which they draw power are temporarily shaken lose - almost all good things in life and history have emerged from chaos.[25]

adjacent:

1. Sudden, forceful, detailed denials without lag tend to indicate the assertions that triggered them are correct [1]
2. A conflict-avoidant personality type in a leadership position can only lead to ruin.
3. At some point, your best case scenario and your worst case scenario basically will blend together. [13]
4. Nihilism as a fallback position when confronted with a moral assertion is a dodge.
5. The things you own and interact with amplify your pre-existing personality traits. This can be mild to the point of invisibility or can be extreme: cars, dogs, guns, bicycles, etc. tend to bring with them, for some people, high levels of aggressive entitlement and stubborness. Aggressive (not in the good way), entitled people will have that trait amplified. [20]
6. Self-image is often projected onto other actors in a very unhelpful way. [19]
7. By the time you are aware of a {trend, device, software app or tool, ... } it is probably at least halfway through it's lifespan. [21]
8. People who believe themselves "above politics and game playing" almost always end up at the bottom of a hierarchy of politicians, most mediocre. A little effort would go a long way towards a better life experience.
9. When people are done - that is, when they conclude they've reached the end of the road, whether due to retirement, illness or just looking to spend their remaining years doing something else, or they've concluded that they're won the game and it's time to stop playing - they aren't exactly dangerous in the way doomed people are, but they are no longer constrained and "new" behaviors and attitudes start to dominate their interactions; these aren't new, they're just unburdened by the rules. (rule 28)

high level takeaways

The key common factor across these observations is that a realist slant - they rely on the ability of the person trying to apply them to see the world as it is (how it really operates, and how the people in it actually behave) and not the way they want it to be or how it is portrayed. It requires that one see through the smokescreen of propaganda, self-promotion, groupthink, religion, and so on. This is hard because people want to engage with the thinking of their in-group, probably because they are biologically inclined to do so. [23]

Some other conclusions:

1. Relationships are often a power struggle

Rule #1 suggests a control dynamic in relationships, but almost all the rules relate to how interpersonal relationships actually work. Rule #28 explains how people with their backs against the wall will react even to someone to whom they have pledged loyalty. Rule #22 is about the big picture.

2. Trust is difficult

Rules #2, #3, #4, #7, and #14 all suggest that trust is difficult to establish and maintain because they enumerate the many ways that lies and deception are commonplace. People in positions of authority are not always truthful, official statements are often misleading, repetition has unfortunate influence, and even agreement may be a sign of untrustworthiness.

3. Change is constant

Rules #8, #19, and #33 suggest that change is a constant in life, albeit for different reasons. Relationships, deals, and situations all have a finite lifespan and will eventually come to an end. Even language implicitly acknowledges the impermanence of things. The takeaway is that we should all be adaptable and prepared for change.

4. Manipulation is ubiquitous

Rules #5, #20, #21, #26, and #30 (in a way) suggest that manipulation is everywhere. Deflecting blame or making misleading statements is common. Advertisements and media are designed to manipulate our behavior, and even people skilled at detecting manipulation may be more likely to fall for it under some circumstances. This suggests that we need to be vigilant and critical of the information we receive, moreso if we want to believe it.

5. Self-preservation is key

Rules #13, #15, #18, #28, #31 and #33 suggest that self-preservation is important. Helping others can sometimes lead to negative outcomes, leaving a job can be the best way to prove your worth, addicts are not reliable, and doomed individuals may become extraordinarily dangerous. We must prioritize our own well-being if we want it to exist at all, even if it means making difficult choices.

footnotes:

[1] An example regarding the Nikola "not a pusher" pusher truck fraud and Trevor Milton is summarized well by this tweet about how the moment the story became visible, Trevor immediately posted denials to twitter and the press: "Most companies will at least take 20 minutes to run the placeholder press release by legal. Milton did not pass go on this one, so yea, this is probably the record for vehement and ad hominem denials cc: HindenbergRes $NKLA" https://twitter.com/muddywatersre/status/1304051845111844864 ; the behavior was, exactly as suggested, perfect evidence of guilt: Nikola was a massive fraud. The same happened with Holmes and Theranos with Holmes also using her access to "female entrepreneur" venues to deny the stories emerging about the fraudulent nature or Theranos.

[2] It doesn't matter if the importance fades. Things that function as gatekeepers have primacy. First impressions matter.

[3] "It is better to fall in with crows than with flatterers; for in the one case you are devoured when dead, in the other case while alive." Antisthenes (Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 4)

[4] this is common wisdom among people who have been in sales; it's a stronger assertion than its complement, which is that interested customers will just get the buying over with and if a deal is taking too long, they were never really going to buy. the assertion here is that without inertia and energy, no deal will get done, and both of those inherently fade, no matter what. Another variant of this shows up in investing: "if you don't have the right timing, you don't have the right trade."

[5] the essay at the defunct site "The Last Psychiatrist" talks about this with regard to branding and advertising, but it's a universal rule - https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_future_lea.html ; the relentless ingroup branding and view-reaffirmation of sites like The Washington Post (which I read regularly) is no different than your run of the mill crazy conspiracy site. Once you recognize how ugly, manupulative and mean-spirited it is, especially because it naturally appeals to people like me in the in-group, it's kind of hard to get past.

[6] Back when we were hiring a CEO, I spent time fretting about the issue that I was effectively a selection function for skilled liars/manupulators, a trait for which the people in the candidate pool are known (with good reason). There’s a problem in that context, though, which is that on some level the limit of liar is successful "reality distortion field"-type CEO. The kind that screwed over his cofounders and even his own child but was one of the most successful CEOs in history might be a better choice than that nice non-psychopath that just doesn't get you there. The huge middle ground is the problem: scheming and self-serving, yes, but also ineffective. Anyway, an element of randomness can be used to help manage skilled liars.

[7] Put another way, the fake team membership (team Xbox vs. team PS3, "home team" sports teams, etc.) is just a kind of fantasizing of membership that people fall into. In reality, you are not on anyone's "side" or "team" if there isn't some kind of real reciprocal relationship. Or, tersely, don't love something that can't or won't love you back and may not even know you exist. hat tip: danM

[8] https://twitter.com/shaarsh2/status/1324730934147588098

a lesson I’ve learned by @nntaleb is that journalists write to impress other journalists. 
Architects to impress other architects.
The gym equivalent of this is bodybuilding.
Instead of building body for life, we now build bodies to impress others that build bodies

[9] An interesting, related, and perhaps even true anecdote I came across - https://www.viewofchina.com/fan-zhongyan/ Fan Zhongyan:

I heard Confucian knew how to keep a distance from cunning men, as those are not the people the sage would like to work with. 
They have no concern for the nation, hold no vision for the future, but relentlessly pursue their personal interest, and chase after fame and wealth. 
They would say what their boss likes to hear, desire what their boss fancies to obtain, praise what their boss wishes to honour and censure what their boss wants to condemn … 
by so doing, they win trust from their boss to the point that they get a free hand to conduct their own wretched business.  

When these people gain access to power, the country will either be in trouble or meet a doomed fate.  

Fortunately, there is an easy way to identify such creatures. 

*If someone is forever agreeable with you and help you to screen out opinions that you don’t like to hear, there can be little doubt that this person must be a sinister schemer.*

[10] Tracking the days you have left in your expected lifespan (see #13 if your response is "but I {am a vegan, exercise, have good genes, ...}!") can be extremely motivating as you get older, but as a young man it was meaningless to me. Now, each year is 2.5+% of my remaining left and 4+% of my remaining "health span"; the same observation was once an observation that I had plenty of time and shouldn't worry, then gradually became the observation that it was time to get serious, and has evolved into the present day observation that I don't have time to waste.

[11] "Omnis determinatio est negatio" = Every determination is a negation - an interesting adhacent rule: official assertions are unofficial admissions of the opposite. See: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/hegel-bulletin/article/abs/determination-is-negation-the-adventures-of-a-doctrine-from-spinoza-to-hegel-to-the-british-idealists/80AF0919E86130F800FDB2A127AD862D ("‘Determination is negation’: The Adventures of a Doctrine from Spinoza to Hegel to the British Idealists") or, hell, https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1496535331260321801?s=21 ; this is different from the interpretation "Every determination gives rise to a contradiction" and is more a direct contrast to rule 3. once again hat tip: danM. Another example: On 2022-09-29 Google killed Stadia, which many people believed was imminent in June - enough people that Google felt the need to deny it on 2022-07-29 ("Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions."). Google's constitutional inability to stick with things aside, this is a great example. They had to know at that time it was over.

[12] this has been my mantra for at least 22 years and I honestly can't remember where I picked it up nor believe that I forgot to list it here.

[13] As you age, you will almost certainly experience periods where the best case outcome for your current situation is not materially better or more palatable than your worst case outcome. When you are very, very old this will become true - death or another day? I've had people directly tell me they would be happier if death would finally come, not because they're sad or whatever, but they're just done, and another day trapped at age 95 with failing vision, etc. and mostly living in memories of the past is indistinguishable to them from not-another-day. More generally, a lot of people find themselves in this kind of death-like-stasis when they've allowed themselves to get stale. These are those moments where you ask yourself - what's the worst case? I get fired? Or is it actually worse to not do whatever it is and not ot get fired and continue to be bored our of their mind and trapped by inertia? They wonder, "is it maybe better to just get fired or passed over or whatever and no longer endure it?" When you've been in the wrong role or position too long, all of these cases just blend together and it is not even possible to even tell which path would be better or worse. People in this situation are well advised to shake things up and challenge themselves again - move on, in whatever form.

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng - "Chen Sheng was born in Yangcheng (陽城; in present-day Fangcheng County, Henan). In 209 BC, he was a military captain along with Wu Guang when the two of them were ordered to lead 900 soldiers to Yuyang (漁陽; southwest of present-day Miyun County, Beijing) to help defend the northern border against Xiongnu. Due to storms, it became clear that they could not get to Yuyang by the deadline, and according to law, if soldiers could not get to their posts on time, they would be executed. Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, believing that they were doomed, led their soldiers to start a rebellion." - Well, if I'm going to be executed anyway, ... And in addition, there is one of the most impactful events in history: January 49 BC Julius Caesar is asked by the Roman Senate (due to support for Pompey) to give up his army and return to Rome to explain himself. Realistically, Caesar knew he was doomed: had he returned, he would be at least disempowered, probably assassinated (politically or literally), and ruined. And so, in what is probably the most important historical moment for the western world short of the emergence of Christ, Caesar and his legions crossed the Rubicon River.

[15] The political landscape's goal is to prevent big, threatening, unpredictable changes but to allow small, beneficial changes that have a very clear line of ownership from which specific individuals can lock in benefit for themselves without weakening their position relative to rivals. It is better to just sidestep fortifications instead of going up straight up against the Maginot line - figure out what you can, and then ignore "the way things are done" by pretending you didn't know. The problem with trying to be fully calculating about the political map is the unknown unknowns that are invisible to most of the players but which can be a killing field for action.

[16] The three envelopes joke applies to real life. Also, a side effect of this is that in interviews, honest feedback is almost completely pointless. Even a cursory examination of the idea of exit interviews should make it clear that their only purpose is to catch late disclosures of unethical behaviors or liabilities such as sexual harassment. Beyond that, no one cares about the opinion of someone who is leaving. Replace "company" with "cult" and then ask how much an ex-cultist exit interviews would matter. For most people, the company didn’t care about their opinion when they were there. If they were a person with influence with opinions that anyone cared about, the exit interview is not where their feedback would be given. They would have expressed their opinions all along, with many opportunities to expound on their ideas, and so nothing they say at exit can have additional merit. The company knows this so even the best people are ignored upon exit. (three envelopes - https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/rv0one/prepare_three_envelopes/ and about 10,000,000 other places)

Morris had just been hired as the new CEO of a large high tech corporation. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three envelopes number 1, 2 and 3. "Open these if you run up against a problem you don't think you can solve," the departing CEO said.
Things went along pretty smoothly, but six months later, sales took a downturn and Morris was really catching a lot of heat. About at his wit's end, he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, "Blame your predecessor." Morris called a press conference and tactfully laid the blame at the feet of the previous CEO. Satisfied with his comments, the press, and Wall Street, responded positively, sales began to pick up and the problem was soon behind him.
About a year later, the company was again experiencing a slight dip in sales, combined with serious product problems. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, "Reorganize." This he did, and the company quickly rebounded.
After several consecutive profitable quarters, the company once again fell on difficult times. Morris went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope. The message said, "Prepare three envelopes."

[17] More broadly, if possible take advantage of the assymetry of experience in the opposite direction - try and find a win-win where the other person has experiences you can learn from and/or which contribute a likelihood of success to what you are trying to do and your own experience and efforts will do likewise for them. While shared experiences make for interesting times and long term friendships or alliances, it's almost always worth avoiding being someone else's learning experience at something new - it's not going to work and you shouldn't have the belief that it will. This goes for a lot of things - don't be someone's relationship standby/backup plan, don't be someone's exit liquidity, and so on. These are all cases where even if you win you lose.

[18] People often confuse terminal, waypoint-instrumental, and purely instrumental goals. There aren't many terminal goals in life, but there are many waypoints. Things like "make money" are instrumental goals, it's just people don't actually think of them that way.

[19] If you make a habit of thinking about whether something is unnecessary, necessary-but-not-sufficient, or sufficient in and of itself, you start getting a lot of clarity about how your perceptions of your own motivations and image color, in a very misleading way, how you evaluate what someone else thinks. In 2014 or so, I realized that being good at teams, execution, business etc. fits this. They are necessary but not sufficient. A critical thing funders seek in “founders” is that the “founders” are willing to trade everything in their lives for a shot at getting to a successful company, which means prestige (for some) and an exit/wealth. The filter is “someone who can operate at scale, is broad enough to see both business and technical aspects, is very good at what they do, and willing to embrace a completely unbalanced life for some imagined future reward.” Alone, each of those are necessary but not sufficient. I have met almost no one who has done their own startup who has brought up this aspect, though they have brought up the side effects and impacts of it without really conceiving of where they come from.

[20] The extreme trolling that emerges online in forums (whether anonymous or not) is probably related to this.

[21] Sure, some people are leading edge/early adopters/... but for most people, they only hear about things when they are approaching saturation - the odds are you are in the second-to-last or last generation of new adopters. This is why the rot seems to set in so quickly for things you adopt but takes so much longer for things you create - your view of the timeline is truncated: it didn't go bad overnight, it was already on the brink of going from ripening to rotting when you picked it.

[22] the transformation from the rising tide of growth and success making life easy for everyone to the zero-sum no growth/decline situation brings with it brutal politics. for anyone to gain in that situation someone else needs to lose. infinite growth is impossible. this has many implications for the future of society - for a time people dying will offset it, but not forever. a lot of people who have known only good times of growth on all fronts - technology, agriculture, governance, economy, ... - will enter a new, harsh world that will last generations. This happens to everyone and it. is quite amusing to watch companies like Google succumb to it prematurely (before growth has even actually stopped).

[23] As I was writing this I am reminded of a conversation I had in the mid-2000s with a friend (hat tip: Sandro) about how he believed that everyone walks around with a model of the world their brain has built up on their behalf as they grew up through trial & error and informaiton gathering/interactions and so on and that this basically dictated their ability to make sense of their world. Roughly, every person has something analogous to an n-parameter configuration of what they thing the world looks like, and if one imagines that there is a singular true world parameter set, then you could imagine calculating the distance between a given person's established parameters and the real world's true (secret) values, and his belief was that the distance between the two would have outsized impact on success that was not otherwise explained by luck. I think this is right.

[24] Sometimes stated "Every accusation is a confession." This comes up over and over again - public figures who spend a lot of effort fighting CSAM only to be found to be molesters or otherwise involved in it. Powerful people working on certain causes that who then turn out to be insanely sexist/racist/homophobic/etc., religious-focused personalities focused publicly on "family values" who turn out to be swingers or cuckold fetishists, and so on. It happens over and over, and yet people never seem to learn.

[25] All living things exploit energy gradients for life, and that's as true in organizations as it is in the wild. There is an exchange in Game of Thrones (the show, not the books) that captures this:

Lord Varys : But what do we have left, once we abandon the lie? Chaos? A gaping pit waiting to swallow us all.

Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish : Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.

This is a common sentiment but hard to cite so bluntly. One of the most direct is by Milton Friedman: "Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change." Napoleon said, "The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies" which gets to the nature of chaos and controlling it, but not to the inherent sense of opportunity. There is a (very likely) fake quote in The Art of War, "In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity" - fake or not, that is the sentiment. Nietzsche has a quote about it (among many terrible quotes - Nietzsche was a dumpster fire): "I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star" but that is about one's own internal chaos.