What even is creativity? I think it's to do with taking steps that other people haven't taken, going somewhere others haven't gone. Taking more steps, taking steps that other people haven't yet or couldn't take, maybe using knowledge or experiences unique to you. And then you get to that result, that success, that product that stands on its own, and if you don't show the steps that led to it, it looks like something that just appeared out of the blue.

The chapter titles are sometimes quite opaque, but here they are, 13 each for spring, summer, fall, and winter:

1. Push the idea until it breaks
2. Start a revolution
3. Use new
4. Exaggerate
5. Be brave
6. Allow time for shoots to flourish
7. Double the resources available
8. Prompt the unconscious
9. Change direction
10. Make it iconic
11. Give it purpose
12. Random link
13. Spring forward and be more dog
14. Indulge your gut instinct
15. Re-express with a different language
16. Be more pirate
17. Be bored
18. Give into your worst impulse
19. What won’t you do? And why?
20. Do nothing
21. Use an old idea
22. Work against your better judgement
23. Build back better
24. What would someone else say?
25. Take a trip
26. Be more Wimbledon
27. Organize for medium-term success
28. Make it famous, fast
29. Build communities
30. Make the team happy
31. Be generous
32. Build bridges
33. Make people’s lives better
34. Deliver outstanding teamwork
35. What is missing?
36. Harvest
37. Listen hard
38. Do things in the wrong order
39. What would your worst enemy do?
40. Uproot and destroy
41. Burn bridges
42. Go outside
43. Deliver long-term success
44. How can you get people to want much more?
45. Plan to get it up and running in six weeks
46. Spend a million
47. Be extravagant
48. Strip it back
49. Quick win
50. Push the idea until it scares you
51. Give the past a vote (but not a veto)
52. Hibernate

Sure enough, China (or the CCP, anyway) has a set of values. Looks like they were put together in 2012!

The "Moral Code of the Builder of Communism" was part of the the 1961 Third Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The core of the new approach to building communism was an attempt to replace Stalin's harsh administrative "pressure from above" with socialist self-government based on the principles of communist morality.

Thanks to Nick Aristov for pointing me to this! Here's the relevant page from the long PDF of the 1963 English translation, from which I copied the Moral Code above. (Wikipedia has slightly different text somehow.)

On my honor, I will try:
To serve God* and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.

*Members may substitute for the word God
in accordance with their own spiritual beliefs.

Girl Scout Law

I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong,
and responsible for what I say and do,
and to respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place,
and be a sister to every Girl Scout.

This is the version, down to the line breaks, current online for the Girl Scouts of the USA. (Equivalents elsewhere are often called "Girl Guides.")

The explicit flexibility for different spiritualities is not unique to Girl Scouts of the USA. For example, UK Scouts publishes eight versions of each of its promises covering Atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Humanists, Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs.

Juliette Gordon Low’s original Promise and Law from 1912 was very similar to Baden-Powell’s. It included, for example, that "a Girl Scout keeps herself pure," instead of that "a Scout is clean in thought, word and deed."

I was reminded of the Three Laws while looking at Scout Laws. They're not so different, in many ways, from a lot of these codes. Apparently Asimov was explicit in thinking that humans should follow the Three Laws as well.

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

Scout Law

A Scout is:

• Trustworthy
• Loyal
• Helpful
• Friendly
• Courteous
• Kind
• Obedient
• Cheerful
• Thrifty
• Brave
• Clean
• Reverent

Since 1907 and 1908 with the writings of Seton and Baden-Powell, there have been many forms and evolutions of Scout Laws. The version here is current for Scouting America (formerly Boy Scouts of America) and somewhat distinctive in its focus on single words. (Explanatory sentences are also included but omitted above.)

Here's Baden-Powell's 1911 version:

Promise

On my honour I promise that I will do my best:

1. To do my duty to God and the King.
2. To help other people at all times.
3. To obey the Scout Law.

Law

1. A Scout's honour is to be trusted.
2. A Scout is Loyal to the King, and to his officers, and to his country, and to his employers.
3. A Scout's duty is to be useful and to help others.
4. A Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other scout no matter to what social class the other belongs.
5. A Scout is Courteous.
6. A Scout is a friend to animals.
7. A Scout obeys orders of his patrol leader or scoutmaster without question.
8. A Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties.
9. A Scout is thrifty.
10. A Scout is clean in thought, word and deed.

These eight verses are Matthew 5:3-10 in the NABRE (New American Bible Revised Edition) translation used in Catholic churches in the US, and the most famous part of the Sermon on the Mount delivered by Jesus.

"Beatitude" is from a word meaning "blessed" and not any breakdown like "be" followed by "attitude." Interpretations vary, with at least one being that the Beatitudes are not just reports about who is blessed but a step-by-step guide to becoming more blessed.

Buddhism has Four Noble Truths: There is suffering, suffering is caused by desire, freedom from suffering can come from ending desire, and the path to do this is the Noble Eightfold Path.

English versions vary; I like the version quoted above which comes from Tricycle. Interpretations vary somewhat as well, but one reading is as a step-by-step guide.

The UK's Committee on Standards in Public Life was created in response to issues of corruption in the government and published its Seven Principles, also known as the Nolan principles after the committee's initial chair.

The U.S. Army defines "honor" as being "a matter of carrying out, acting, and living" the other six values in the list.

These are taken directly from DoorDash. I don't know much about the history of their development. It is interesting that they arrange their 12 values into sections this way; I haven't seen that elsewhere yet.

Quakers are interesting. The list here is the SPICES list of Testimonies, or values, which appears for example on the DC Quakers site. A list of four items (Simplicity, Truth, Equality, Peace) is also common, for example appearing on the UK Quakers site.

As the two versions suggest, Quakers don't have to agree on much. Different "Yearly Meetings" put together their own books. Here's a selection from the Faith and Practice of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting:

Baltimore Yearly Meeting has no binding creed. Its principles of belief are based on its Judeo-Christian heritage and adherence to the Spirit of Christ (the Inward Light, the Divine Seed, That of God in Everyone). The testimonies spring from respect for truth; for peace, harmony, and a settled intention to practice love; for simplicity, community, and the equal worth of all people.

No fixed list of Testimonies, then, is official. Some Quaker Friends even object to them:

Human beings need words to communicate. But when we codify, make creeds, and canonize a few words, we limit our vision, as well as the possibility of God’s work through us. Walking away from such deified virtues, where might we go instead? What if we were to start with fresh, personal experiences and then shared them in a manner that was as mediated as little as possible by advance expectations?

It's an interesting and characteristically Quaker objection.

(I am a fan of the variance sum law.)

In the book's phrasing, "system noise" is variance in outcomes, distinct from bias. System noise is the sum of "level noise," which is stable differences in average outcomes per person - "strict judge vs. lenient judge" - and "stable pattern noise," which is stable differences in how individuals are overfit, in the ML sense, - "Bob's generally strict but always lenient with young mothers" - and "occasion noise," which is true repeat-performance noise based on randomness from somewhere (conditions, etc.).

while the existence of occasion noise is surprising and even disturbing, there is no indication that within-person variability is larger than between-person differences. The most important component of system noise is the one we had initially neglected: stable pattern noise, the variability among judges in their judgments of particular cases.

(Note also that "level noise" can be properly thought of as just an average over "pattern noise" - I'm not sure it's correct to treat it separately.)

The challenge, not sufficiently addressed, in my opinion, is that removing this "noise" requires not just choosing one answer to be the right one, but convincing the people involved. This is a societal challenge. Whatever level of strictness or leniency you choose, for the judges, some judges will disagree.

I think Kahneman neglects the extent to which systems exist through false consensus: It isn't possible to get everyone to agree on the details, so the system has to be made vague enough that everyone can think it says what they want. Then they can go on having differences of opinion.

Not that this is good, exactly. It's politics.

And Kahneman does talk about naïve realism and the illusion of agreement, so this idea isn't totally absent from the book. But just like hand-washing took (and takes) surprisingly much effort, there's a big gap between having a Gawande-style checklist and getting it accepted and followed, for example.

There were interesting bits about how groups can have opposite effects: Averaging independent outcomes can decrease noise, but discussion can actually amplify noise. They recommend techniques like "estimate-talk-estimate" to try to get positive effects.

Kahneman also emphasizes "percent concordant" and always includes it with correlation coefficients. This is exactly the Common Language Effect Size which goes by many names. I'm a fan! Glad to have Kahneman supporting this here. It sure would be nice if it went from zero to one though.

Another interesting topic is what Kahneman calls “objective ignorance” and is very tightly related to the Bayes error rate or "irreducible error." It made me wonder, when we're talking about variance explained, if 60% is "irreducible," then maybe explaining 20% is quite a strong result, actually. Unclear how to be quite confident about this kind of thing though. Bad news for psychohistory too. (How much is chaos?)

Kahneman chastises people for feeling they're 80% confident about a given decision if they'll only be right 60% of the time. But there's a difference he ignores, I think: You could be 80% confident that you made the best possible decision given your information at the time, and still be right just 60% of the time. Those can be consistent.

The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making (just give everything equal weight) is interesting. I wonder whether some big chunk of AI "success" will essentially come from this kind of effect, just the benefit of statistical instead of clinical judgement, but the fanciness of AI will make it more palatable.

There's bits on incorporating the base rate, which feels like being Bayesian. Don't overfit, etc. And be actively open-minded.

What is the right way to average predictions of superforecasters? Is it just simple arithmetic mean? Or is it some other mean that works best?

Long ago I was in a start-up that didn't do annual performance reviews. I thought it was radical and great. So it was interesting to hear that apparently more companies are moving away from annual performance reviews.

And if your goal is to bring out the best in people, you can reasonably ask whether measuring individual performance and using that measurement to motivate people through fear and greed is the best approach (or even an effective one).

The book finishes out with some discussion of rules vs. standards, where rules are more mechanical and standards still allow some discussion while being more prescriptive than just principles.

Six principles of decision hygiene

1. The goal of judgment is accuracy, not individual expression.
2. Think statistically, and take the outside view of the case.
3. Structure judgments into several independent tasks.
4. Resist premature intuitions.
5. Obtain independent judgments from multiple judges, then consider aggregating those judgments.
6. Favor relative judgments and relative scales.

The blog post and book are structured similarly enough that I think it's interesting to compare them.

The blog post was a list of 20 items. I think 7 of them don't really appear in the book at all, perhaps because they're too wonky or specific:

• (9) Attachment to social proof in a field that demands contrarian thinking to achieve above-average results.
• (10) An appeal to academia in a field that is governed not by clean rules but loose and unpredictable trends.
• (12) A tendency toward action in a field where the first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.
• (15) An attachment to financial entertainment due to the fact that money is emotional, and emotions are revved up by argument, extreme views, flashing lights, and threats to your wellbeing.
• (17) A preference for skills in a field where skills don’t matter if they aren’t matched with the right behavior.
• (19) Political beliefs driving financial decisions, influenced by economics being a misbehaved cousin of politics.
• (20) The three-month bubble: Extrapolating the recent past into the near future, and then overestimating the extent to which whatever you anticipate will happen in the near future will impact your future.

The book, then, has 18 items: 13 from the blog post's list, and 5 that are new (at least new as whole sections). The book has an intro, and two other chapters in which are a summary and a breakdown of the author's personal money choices, and then there's a postscript with his "brief history of why the U.S. consumer thinks the way they do," which is something like "after WWII people got used to a little bit of equality and a little bit of debt, and now they're using too much debt to try to get back a little bit of equality".

Here are the book's chapters, with blog equivalents (original blog post numbering in parens) and notes:

1. No One's Crazy: Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what's happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.
   • (5) Anchored-to-your-own-history bias: Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.
2. Luck & Risk: Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.
   • (1) Earned success and deserved failure fallacy: A tendency to underestimate the role of luck and risk, and a failure to recognize that luck and risk are different sides of the same coin.
3. Never Enough: When rich people do crazy things.
   • This is the first new section, and it's about greed, in fairly extreme cases where successful people were found to have committed fraud even when you wouldn't think they'd need to. I think the section has noble intent but fails because (a) you have to believe that these people's earlier success was non-fraudulent, which is suspect (Madoff's earlier "success" was based on payment for order flow, it seems, which is illegal in Canada and disliked by many in the US) and (b) the general theme of avarice need not go so far as fraud to be worthwhile. See, for example, Your money or your life. On the other hand, maybe it's easier to talk about greed with extreme cases so that the reader can safely revile them without finding them familiar.
4. Confounding Compounding: $81.5 billion of Warren Buffett's $84.5 billion net worth came after his 65th birthday. Our minds are not built to handle such absurdities.
   • (8) Underappreciating the power of compounding, driven by the tendency to intuitively think about exponential growth in linear terms.
5. Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy: Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It's about consistently not screwing up.
   • (16) Optimism bias in risk-taking, or “Russian Roulette should statistically work” syndrome: An over attachment to favorable odds when the downside is unacceptable in any circumstance.
   • This one is tangled up with 13, and indeed includes "the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan" here too. The distinction, perhaps, is about not actively doing things that risk ruining you, as opposed to defensively protecting yourself from outside forces ruining you.
6. Tails, You Win: You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.
   • This is a new one, about making lots of bets. Assuming no bet can kill you, you only need a minority of them to do really well in order to win.
7. Freedom: Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.
   • This appeared in the blog post in passing ("A key use of wealth is using it to control your time") but it's grown into a whole section and maybe even a theme in the book.
8. Man in the Car Paradox: No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are.
   • (3) Rich man in the car paradox
9. Wealth is What You Don't See: Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.
   • (11) The social utility of money coming at the direct expense of growing money; wealth is what you don’t see.
10. Save Money: The only factor you can control generates one of the only things that matters. How wonderful.
    • Also new, and quite explicitly advice.
11. Reasonable > Rational: Aiming to be mostly reasonable works better than trying to be coldly rational.
    • There's some of the "avoid Russian roulette" idea here, but this is mostly new... It's a little bit like how the "snowball method" of paying off small debts first is often a bad idea financially - unless doing it that way makes the difference between paying off debt and not doing so. Also sort of related to the idea of knowing the price of things: there can be a psychological price, which can be meaningful for an individual.
12. Surprise! History is the study of change, ironically used as a map of the future.
    • (6) Historians are Prophets fallacy: Not seeing the irony that history is the study of surprises and changes while using it as a guide to the future. An overreliance on past data as a signal to future conditions in a field where innovation and change is the lifeblood of progress.
    • Vonnegut: “History is merely a list of surprises,' I said. 'It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.” Housel has written it down.
13. Room for Error: The most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.
    • (13) Underestimating the need for room for error, not just financially but mentally and physically.
14. You'll Change: Long-term planning is harder than it seems because people's goals and desires change over time.
    • (4) A tendency to adjust to current circumstances in a way that makes forecasting your future desires and actions difficult, resulting in the inability to capture long-term compounding rewards that come from current decisions.
15. Nothing's Free: Everything has a price, but not all prices appear on labels.
    • (2) Cost avoidance syndrome: A failure to identify the true costs of a situation, with too much emphasis on financial costs while ignoring the emotional price that must be paid to win a reward.
16. You & Me: Beware taking financial cues from people playing a different game than you are.
    • (14) A tendency to be influenced by the actions of other people who are playing a different financial game than you are.
    • He's talking about bubbles. People driving up bubbles are not long-term investors, he says.
17. The Seduction of Pessimism: Optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.
    • (7) The seduction of pessimism in a world where optimism is the most reasonable stance.
18. When You'll Believe Anything: Appealing fictions, and why stories are more powerful than statistics.
    • (18) Denial of inconsistencies between how you think the world should work and how the world actually works, driven by a desire to form a clean narrative of cause and effect despite the inherent complexities of everything involving money.
19. All Together Now: What we've learned about the psychology of your own money.
    • This is just a summary, as the heading suggests.
20. Confessions: The psychology of my own money.
    • And here the author describes his own money choices, which I find reasonable.

It's not all great, but it's not bad. Mostly reasonable advice, I think. I feel like I agree with this guy. The repeated focus on survival, for example, fits well with my ongoing vendetta against expected value as the be-all and end-all of decision-making.

Most of the reason why, I believe, is that we think about and are taught about money in ways that are too much like physics (with rules and laws) and not enough like psychology (with emotions and nuance).

Someone else agreeing with you is like evidence of being right that doesn’t have to prove itself with facts.

Money has competition, rules, upsets, wins, losses, heroes, villains, teams, and fans that makes it tantalizingly close to a sporting event.

Everyone just believes what they want to believe, even when the evidence shows something else. Stories over statistics.

The New York Times wrote in 1955 about the growing desire, but continued inability, to retire: “To rephrase an old saying: everyone talks about retirement, but apparently very few do anything about it.”

Mr. Madoff’s firm can execute trades so quickly and cheaply that it actually pays other brokerage firms a penny a share to execute their customers’ orders, profiting from the spread between bid and ask prices that most stocks trade for.

The End of History Illusion is what psychologists call the tendency for people to be keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but to underestimate how much their personalities, desires, and goals are likely to change in the future.

Jason Zweig, the Wall Street Journal investment columnist, worked with psychologist Daniel Kahneman on writing Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Zweig once told a story about a personality quirk of Kahneman’s that served him well: “Nothing amazed me more about Danny than his ability to detonate what we had just done,” Zweig wrote. He and Kahneman could work endlessly on a chapter, but:

The next thing you know, [Kahneman] sends a version so utterly transformed that it is unrecognizable: It begins differently, it ends differently, it incorporates anecdotes and evidence you never would have thought of, it draws on research that you’ve never heard of.

“When I asked Danny how he could start again as if we had never written an earlier draft,” Zweig continued, “he said the words I’ve never forgotten: ‘I have no sunk costs.’”

Bubbles form when the momentum of short-term returns attracts enough money that the makeup of investors shifts from mostly long term to mostly short term.

And since big events come out of nowhere, forecasts may do more harm than good, giving the illusion of predictability in a world where unforeseen events control most outcomes.

We’re so far committed to the independence camp that we’ve done things that make little sense on paper. We own our house without a mortgage, which is the worst financial decision we’ve ever made but the best money decision we’ve ever made. Mortgage interest rates were absurdly low when we bought our house. Any rational advisor would recommend taking advantage of cheap money and investing extra savings in higher-return assets, like stocks. But our goal isn’t to be coldly rational; just psychologically reasonable.

The independent feeling I get from owning our house outright far exceeds the known financial gain I’d get from leveraging our assets with a cheap mortgage. Eliminating the monthly payment feels better than maximizing the long-term value of our assets. It makes me feel independent. I don’t try to defend this decision to those pointing out its flaws, or those who would never do the same. On paper it’s defenseless. But it works for us. We like it. That’s what matters. Good decisions aren’t always rational. At some point you have to choose between being happy or being “right.”

One of my deeply held investing beliefs is that there is little correlation between investment effort and investment results.

Benedict Evans says, “The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.”

Lots more detail on Amazon's page.

Former:

• Innovation (added to the initial core principles, circa 1998)

I don't know any company that's as into a set of principles as Amazon is. See Working Backwards, for example, on how they're deeply integrated into hiring and performance review processes.

The Leadership Principles started as company core principles in 1998, part of spreading Amazon culture across newly acquired companies. ("Customer Obsession" might be considered to precede even this list, as it was sort of a founding ethos of Amazon.)

Amazon’s purchase of Telebuch in Germany and BookPages in the UK in 1998 gave Bezos an opportunity to articulate the company’s core principles. Alison Algore, a D. E. Shaw transplant who worked in human resources, pondered Amazon’s values with Bezos as he prepared for an introductory conference call with the Telebuch founders. They agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation. (from The Everything Store)

The Leadership Principles appeared with that name at some point in the early 2000s, though I haven't been able to lock down precise details on this. It seems they were fairly stable as a list of 13 principles from the early 2000s until 2015.

Leadership Principle 5 was added in 2015.

In 2021, Amazon added Leadership Principles 15 and 16 as Andy Jassy was becoming CEO.

It sounds like teams at Amazon also often have around five or six "tenets," which are about what the team aims to be and do. This article includes Amazon HR's tenets, for example.

Amazon often accompanies tenets with the phrase "unless you know better ones," which is a neat way of trying to keep them evolving.

That same article has a list of ways that Amazon is peculiar, in their parlance. (There's a mascot named Peccy!)

1. Figure out how much money you've earned in your whole life, and your current net worth.
2. Figure out your "real hourly wage," and track all your income and spending.
3. Catalog monthly spending into custom categories for you.
4. Evaluate how you feel about your spending, by category.
5. Make a monthly chart tracking your income and spending.
6. Minimize spending.
7. Maximize income.
8. Accumulate money toward a crossover point where you can live on investment income.
9. Invest in fairly boring ways to generate income you can live on.

It's reasonable advice and I generally agree. I was a little surprised by the extent to which the book is really "degrowth," in the sense of Rushkoff. It's really not about "fat FIRE," but about simple living, or voluntary simplicity, not just as an expedient for retirement, but as a moral-environmental imperative.

I liked how We've got you covered was very clear about the decision inherent in health insurance about what to cover versus not cover. This book is clear about the decision regarding how much is "enough" spending for life in general.

I think the choice about how much is "enough" is interesting as a personal choice, and also an interesting topic in connection with Fully Automated Luxury Communism. (What level of luxury?) I don't think this figure ("The Fulfillment Curve") is super great though:

The justification in the text is that people report similar "fulfillment" across a wide range of incomes, and that at some point you get more "clutter" than real fulfillment. I don't think it's completely wrong, but it's close. I feel like there could be something here about finding fulfillment in better ways, living in community and participating in the work that supports that community, equality being healthier than subjugation of the poor by the rich, that kind of thing. But at the very least this kind of claim needs more evidence and fewer headstones tossed on the graph.

It's a fine book with a distinct voice. It talks about "consciousness" and "life energy" constantly. It says that since you spend time earning money, money is equivalent with "life energy," which kind of works in the framework of the book but doesn't raise to the next natural level, as a critique of the conditions of capitalism.

The author is also into "conversation cafés," which seem like they could be neat.

I learned about China's "Industrial Party," which is interesting. Sort of techno-optimism as a nationalist prescription.

Does anybody else remember Vonnegut's Slapstick? In which "Western civilization is nearing collapse as oil runs out, and the Chinese are making vast leaps forward by miniaturizing themselves and training groups of hundreds to think as one. Eventually, the miniaturization proceeds to the point that the Chinese become so small they cause a plague among those who accidentally inhale them, ultimately destroying Western civilization beyond repair."

There's some interesting stuff about process knowledge and encouraging communities of practice. I don't know whether this is what makes Shenzhen successful, or whether the lack of it is what's troubled Boeing, but I agree that process knowledge is something and that it's too often ignored or undervalued.

Is Boeing's problem really loss of process knowledge, or is the problem too much belief in the Friedman doctrine, too much blind focus on near-term profit?

I tried to find where Heidegger said that philosophy was dying, to be replaced with cybernetics, and it seems to be The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking. How could anyone ever be taken seriously who wrote like this?

Only a country ruled by engineers could be so single-minded about pursuing a number. (page 123)

This reminds me of The Tyranny of Metrics, and the kind of cynical "data driven" perversions you can find in industry.

In the United States, physics and mathematics PhDs hardly have a chance to consider working in their field before a tech giant or hedge fund picks them up at the sidelines of a conference, flashes them with a humongous pay package, and folds these eager minds into their glamorous embrace. Senior government advisers have more or less stated that Beijing intends to block these temptations. Yao Yang, a dean at Peking University, has remarked with satisfaction that salaries have fallen in the financial industry after regulators imposed a salary cap of $400,000 on the financial sector. Its idea, Yao said, “is to reduce the attractiveness of finance and to increase the development of manufacturing.” (page 162)

This reminds me of Jeff Hammerbacher's quote, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

I was very pleased that Klein explicitly references Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Breakneck turns out to be substantially similar to Abundance as well, and references it. The general vibe has been in the air.

The vibe is: Regulate less, build more. Less restriction, more expansion. Less red tape, more research.

This requires giving government more room to act, which makes sense if the government is going to do the right things. Power is needed to do big things, but its tendency to corrupt may still be an issue.

Some interesting references: Homelessness is a housing problem. WTF Happened In 1971? Apparently the US has four times as many lawyers per capita as France.

There are hints of Why greatness cannot be planned in Thompson's second half on science and technology. It makes me wonder about the limits of fully federated action, as opposed to central control. What truly requires the power of a government, a university?

Just as feudalism blocked production that only capitalism could unleash, so did capitalism constrain an abundance that a new paradigm might unleash. Core to this analysis of the economy was an idea that has come to be called the “fettering of production.” Marx observed that many companies’ obsession with profit kept the entire economy from exploring ideas that threatened incumbent margins or failed to produce immediate returns. Among capitalism’s many sins, Marx wrote, was that it prevented the most wondrous and useful technology from being invented and deployed in the first place. An economy run amok with useless fettering serves the rich few at the expense of the poorer many. (page 127)

My personal philosophy has some affinity with this nondualism stuff. My starting point is that experience is the only thing we have direct experience of. Nondualists seem to argue that this should be both starting point and ending point. I'm all about living in the moment and all, but I tend to feel that just because we can't prove things exist, it doesn't mean we shouldn't believe that they do. But it's okay to grant that this is a leap.

There's some cute discussion of how trying too hard to live in the moment is a good way to take yourself out of the moment. I think this is kind of like falling asleep: trying to make yourself fall asleep is stressful. You have to relax, and again, you don't relax by trying hard to relax. Also like meditating, where you aim to let thoughts come and let them go, not by trying hard to do this, but by not trying. So we have a "philosophy of not-philosophy," and a perfect practitioner doesn't need to read this book. I'm not sure the comparison is perfect, but it reminds me of Star Wars: "I don't know; fly casual."

Thinking about this more, I wonder if what Four Thousand Weeks is really trying to offer is a time management of not-time-management. The idea that you shouldn't be trying to manage time, but that you should be living and doing things without worrying about the time management. I think there's something here: getting in the flow of doing something, not focusing on planning but on doing, etc. This feels like a better interpretation of Four Thousand Weeks than I had previously given it. (Maybe better than it really deserves...)

Anyway, sure, cute short book.

Life is the most incredible mystery.

We can not get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life, which would steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside where. (page 27)

Perception is the very fabric of experience! How could it exist in a head? (page 44)

“You could think of this book as an extended argument for the empowering potential of giving up hope.” (page 231)

Burkeman's subtitle is "Time Management for Mortals," but the book is mostly (though not entirely) opposed to time management. Some advice is decent, but the core focus on mortality is dead on arrival. The book is fairly incoherent as a whole, but it has made me think.

The author has many critiques of (other) productivity books. These critiques are mostly wrong or exaggerated. One that I did find meaningful was that often productivity is tied to the false belief that things that aren't measured aren't valuable, as in The Tyranny of Metrics. This makes "productivity" sort of self-centered, often; it isn't "productive" to volunteer, or engage in civic life generally, to know local issues, to vote. This kind of measurement-obsessed productivity, usually implicitly career-oriented, becomes a misdirection of energy.

Burkeman accuses productivity advice of being unsustainable, but comes down too far in the other direction, as if noting that it isn't possible to sprint forever before concluding that all attempts to cover distance are futile. This feels like the common tension between accepting things exactly as they are as opposed to hating things as they are and pushing to change them at all costs. As usual, neither extreme is really great.

Burkeman wants you to live in the moment, which I tend to support as well, but I don't agree with the reasoning having to come from mortality. Fear of death can't really make you live in the moment; death is in the future. Infinite life also wouldn't mean that choices become meaningless; you would still have only one walk through the garden of forking paths. Yes, value every moment—but not out of fear. Not out of a scarcity mindset.

Burkeman references Seneca's De Brevitate Vitae on page four. I think at some point he mentioned How to Live on 24 Hours a Day as well.

On page eight Burkeman mentions three productivity books: The Four-Hour Work Week, Smarter, Faster, Better, and Extreme Productivity. I've read the first two, and after looking briefly into the last, it looks like all of them in fact do talk a lot about prioritizing and saying "no" to things. Burkeman's characterization of the productivity literature as somehow ignoring this seems unfair.

Burkeman says on page nine that productivity works but makes us feel busier. This has not been my experience. I feel less stress when things are managed, and I'm able to confidently know that I've taken care of what I needed to.

Some large chunk of good time management is just memory aids, I think: Ways of organizing things so that they don't fall through the cracks and create stressful problems later.

This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call "neurosis," and it takes countless forms, from workaholism and commitment-phobia to codependency and chronic shyness.

Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from the same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality. (page 30)

This is an interesting characterization of neurosis, especially when considered along with psychosis, in which neurosis is sort of fighting against (or worrying about) reality, while psychosis is instead a clear break with reality.

I'm not sure that's what people usually think of when they think "neurosis," but it's kind of neat.

... I wrote this book for myself, as much as for anyone else, putting my faith in the words of the author Richard Bach: "You teach best what you most need to learn." (page 33)

This Richard Bach and his books including Jonathan Livingston Seagull were apparently quite big in the 70s.

Think of it as “existential overwhelm”: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you'd ideally like to do and what you actually can do. (page 45)

The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you'll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things. Adopt an ultra-ambitious time management system that promises to take care of your entire to-do list, and you probably won't even get around to the most important items on that list. Dedicate your retirement to seeing as much of the world as you possibly can, and you probably won't even get to see the most interesting parts. (page 48)

This is ridiculous. Maybe this is where his whole argument falls apart. It's just not true that you have to do everything, and I think this passage illustrates the silliness of it. Who would literally aim to see "as much of the world as you possibly can" and have that mean devoting equal time to every square inch? For his claims here to make any sense you have to imagine both having overwhelming and indiscriminate FOMO and absolutely no sense of prioritization. Both are problems to resolve, not axioms to reason from.

The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world, Heidegger asserts in his magnum opus, Being and Time, is how bafflingly astonishing it is that it’s there at all – the fact that there is anything rather than nothing. Most philosophers and scientists spend their careers pondering the way things are: what sorts of things exist, where they come from, how they relate to each other, and so on. But we’ve forgotten to be amazed that things are in the first place – that ‘a world is worlding all around us’, as Heidegger puts it. This fact – the fact that there is being, to begin with – is ‘the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our toes’, in the splendid phrase of the writer Sarah Bakewell. But instead, it almost always passes us by. (page 58)

I sometimes think a related thing, paraphrasing Descartes, "I think, therefore something is going on." I tend to identify with this Heidegger snippet. Existence is a miracle.

In his 2019 book, This Life, the Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund makes this all a bit clearer and less mystical by juxtaposing the idea of facing our finitude with the religious belief in an eternal life. If you really thought life would never end, he argues, then nothing could ever genuinely matter, because you’d never be faced with having to decide whether or not to use a portion of your precious life on something. ‘If I believed that my life would last forever,’ Hägglund writes, ‘I could never take my life to be at stake, and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.

This Hägglund may have some worthwhile things to say, but I think that like Burkeman he's wrong to focus so much on death as the most important thing, and wrong that without death nothing would matter.

I hear Hägglund is critical of capitalism, but I can't help but think that the focus on finitude is a capitalist economic argument: if supply (of time) is unlimited, then price (value) goes to zero. (I don't believe this.)

It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives. (page 63)

No, no, no. This might be one path of reasoning that helps a person become more present, but it isn't the only or necessary path.

The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. (page 72)

There's a section with these three principles:

• Pay yourself first
• Limit your work in progress
  • Personal Kanban suggests limiting to three things.
• Resist the allure of middling priorities

This all seems like basically good advice.

So this Bergson guy wrote Time and free will (mentioned on page 83) and, I mean, cool title, but otherwise doesn't seem that good, especially if the thinking is similar in quality to Bergson's ideas about motivated evolution.

Machine for misusing your life (page 94)

Burkeman mostly tries to avoid the appearance of value judgments by framing the objective as spending time on what you value (whatever that is) but he does come out clearly against social media. So you better not value social media!

There's an interesting sort of story about a monk's experience with ice water, the point of which was that trying to ignore or deny the experience of cold was worse than focusing on the experience and accepting, living the experience.

You're obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it. (page 106)

He's trying to connect boredom to finitude in the sense of limited lifespan, but he accidentally gives the lie to it. It isn't that you're upset that you're using your limited time on Earth in a way that isn't fun; it's that it isn't fun "in this moment."

He does talk about living in the moment, but doesn't seem to resolve the conflict with the lifespan view.

The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, ‘a plan is just a thought’. We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is – all it could ever possibly be – is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply. (page 123)

This makes sense. What's the quote I think of... Eisenhower: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." The plan has no influence over the future, but it does help you make decisions in the moments you encounter.

Burkeman mentions Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, which is more nondualist, the-moment-is-all-there-is stuff.

Trying to live in the moment is like trying too hard to sleep. Trying to force it pushes you further from it. But on the other hand, you have no other option but to be here now.

Burkeman mentions Lafargue's The right to be lazy.

"According to Lafargue, wage labour is tantamount to slavery, and to fight as a labour movement for the extension of slavery is preposterous. In the book, Lafargue proposes the right to be lazy, in contrast to the right to work, which he deems bourgeois."

Fully Automated Luxury Communism!

‘Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness,’ writes the philosopher John Gray. He adds: ‘How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?’ (page 154)

I think Burkeman also talks about instrumental use of time and tourist photography, the "stop taking pictures and experience it" argument.

I think of my "Is it worth doing even if it fails?" which I think is somewhat related... value the act itself regardless of the outcome.

The publisher and editor Karen Rinaldi feels about surfing the same way that I do about cheesy piano rock, only more so: she dedicates every spare moment she can to it, and even wiped out her savings on a plot of land in Costa Rica for better access to the sea. Yet she readily admits that she remains an appalling surfer to this day. (It took her five years of attempting to catch a wave before she first managed to do so.) But ‘in the process of trying to attain a few moments of bliss’, Rinaldi explains, ‘I experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to suck without caring is revelatory.’ Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later – and later is always too late. (page 160)

Burkeman talks about a painting called "Boy with a Squirrel," but that painting is "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel." Flying!

It depicts Copley's teenaged half-brother Henry Pelham with a pet flying squirrel, a creature commonly found in colonial American portraits as a symbol of the sitter's refinement.

How cool is that!

There are "Three principles of patience" (around page 180)

• Develop a taste for having problems
  • This reminds me of my first "thinking card," embrace problems.
• Embrace radical incrementalism
• Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality

Burkeman has this idea, "cosmic insignificance therapy," which is intended to be a relief. It reminds me of the total perspective vortex from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but of course there it was supposed to be a method of torture.

There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people). The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today. (page 222)

Burkeman mentions this documentary, A Life’s Work.

What's it like to dedicate your life to work that won't be completed in your lifetime? Fifteen years ago, filmmaker David Licata focused on four projects and the people behind them in an effort to answer this universal question.

To me this is about caring about something, whether it makes sense or not, making meaning for yourself, and not really at all about death.

You could think of this book as an extended argument for the empowering potential of giving up hope. (page 231)