(abandoned substack draft)
“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
sometimes I want to make observations and the problem is that people think I am trying to make prescriptions or recommendations about what i think they should do
What is ‘the dynamism problem’?
Man is born dynamic, and everywhere he is in stasis. We live in a reality that’s substantially dynamic: things change. The underlying nature of reality seems to be more dynamic than static. “Change is the only constant.” Yet we tend to assume that things are static. And we tend to behave in aways that are static. Like, literally, we tend to sit in chairs for hours and then we get back pain as a result.
Consider earthquakes. For the most part, it doesn’t seem like the earth is moving all that much. But this is a bit of an illusion. There’s always tension underneath the surface. And from time to time that tension erupts. To appreciate and understand dynamism is to not be shocked by earthquakes. This does NOT mean that you can predict precisely when and where an earthquake happens. It’s hubris to think so. And when it comes to talking about chaotic complexity, earthquakes are one of the better understood phenomenas. We have seismographs and an understanding of plate tectonics and such, and most earthquakes tend to happen in ‘hot spots’. So earthquakes are almost “rugpulls on easy mode”. The real shocking rugpulls are the ones that we don’t see coming, particularly because we haven’t encountered anything like them in living memory. A global pandemic, for example.
Andy Grove: “You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.”
Rugpulls
A useful bit of vocabulary from the world of crypto is the idea of the ‘rugpull’. Which is just a condensed form of an older idiom, “to pull the rug from under someone”. Sooner or later, everyone gets rugpulled in life. You find out that your parents lied to you. Santa “isn’t real”. You get betrayed by someone you trusted. You made some assumptions that you didn’t think to question, and then those assumptions get violated in a painful and ugly way. This is an emotionally distressing experience.
Static frames
We are raised and conditions in systems that presume reality to be more static than it is. I often use the concept of “frames”. A frame is a lens through which we observe reality, make sense of reality. “Go to school, study hard, get a degree, get a good job” – all of that is downstream of a fairly static frame, which was largely downstream of, depending on how you want to look at it, post-WW2 frames, or post-Industrial Revolution frames. They’re not immutable laws of how the world works, they’re just… long habits. (Sir Thomas Browne: “The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.”)
And for the purpose of living well, in the broadest sense, it’s not actually super important that you understand precisely where our inherited frames come from – that can be interesting, and it can be useful in some surprising ways that you cannot foresee, but the point isn’t to know everything – the point is to appreciate the limitation of knowledge. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing if you fixate on it, generalize beyond it, think every problem is a nail because you have a hammer in your hands.
New ways of seeing become blinders
When I was a teenager I was delighted to learn about the MBTI framework, which is a system of dividing people up into 16 personalities. Prior to learning about the MBTI, I was confused by how different people could be. Without realizing it, I had a habit of assuming that people must be like me, and that they would appreciate what I appreciate. Turns out most people aren’t really a fan of receiving unsolicited criticisms. Who knew? Not 16-year-old Visa! Anyway, discovering MBTI gave me a way of appreciating that different people care about different things. Some people are more extraverted, some people are more introverted, some people are more or less decisive, different people have different relationships with their thoughts and emotions, and so on. I’m now describing this from the perspective of someone who has “climbed up the ladder and discarded it” – I no longer use MBTI as a framework for making sense of people. This is because each new way of seeing becomes a new set of blinders. I wrote a post about that 10 years ago if you want to read it. I’ve since come to notice that .
I’ve been on similar journeys with concepts like “ADHD” and “trauma”. They can be incredibly useful to consider something that hadn’t been considered before, but eventually they can become ‘overexposed’ (wrong word?)
Be wary of totalizing ways of seeing the world.
The advice problem
Let’s talk real quick about ‘the advice problem’, which is arguably a subset of ‘the dynamism problem’. The problem with advice is that all advice is context-dependent to a degree we do not realize until we encounter a different context. And it’s not always obvious in advance to both the advice givers and the receivers how precisely their contexts might be different. For advice to work for everybody all the time, it would have to include so many caveats and exceptions that it would vastly exceed the giver’s bandwidth of expression as well as the receiver’s bandwidth of acquisition. It would take too long to explain everything, and even if someone were capable of that god-like task of explaining everything, we lack the god-like capacity to receive and understand everything. So the dynamism problem and the advice problem are both correlated with something like, the problem of being finite beings in an infinite universe. Grappling with this and really understanding this as best as we can, while pricing in the imperfection of our understanding, I think is the true nature of actual humility. It’s not about thinking of yourself less, it’s about seeing that even the smartest, most powerful person alive is just a human being and will struggle with bandwidth problems.
All advice-giving, and really, all communication, is a good-faith act of compression, with the hope that the receiver of the message will take the set of magic symbols and use it to generate a useful model of the world. All models are wrong, some are useful, and some will ruin your life. It’s hard to know in advance which is which.
Nassim Taleb: “I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.”
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Dynamic self-image
I wrote a self-help book called Introspect. I’m very proud of it. It’s helped a lot of people. I have many different ways of describing what it’s about– in the context of this essay, I would say it’s “going from a static to dynamic self-image”. It’s a big book with lots of ideas in it and I have struggled to summarize it into an essay
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Run fast, stand still
“Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jump, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam. Here this instant, gone the next – life teems the earth. […] What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought, in delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-tapping.” – Ray Bradbury, Zen In The Art of Writing (199)
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(rework this part)
From time to time people ask me to write something more substantial about how to do good replies but I’ve always kinda procrastinated on it partially because, a bunch of it seems kinda obvious and trite, and a bunch of it requires dynamism– which is hard to put into words, since people will then copy the letter of your suggestions rather than the spirit of it. I think my main hesitation to write something about this has been because of the dynamism problem. Actually maybe all of my essay drafts remain locked behind in the drafts because of the dynamism problem. If I can figure out how to communicate the idea of dynamism more dynamically such that people will actually follow the spirit rather than the letter, then I would be happy to publish. Huh, fuck, this might succinctly express the single main thing I have been chewing on for the past year. How to convey dynamism?? Storytelling obviously is a big part of it. But anyway this is supposed to be a draft about doing good comments so maybe the dynamism thing will have to wait for another essay.
ecology of thought
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sometimes when you have 2 beliefs that seem contradictory, it’s not that one belief is correct and one is wrong, but rather they’re each context-dependent, and you haven’t quite precisely figured out what the respective contexts are. One of my favorite examples to point at for this is the yak collective’s chart of the stages of creative work:
What’s tedious and frustrating is when people fail to appreciate how different stages of development, ie different contexts, require different approaches. And you might hear someone saying “we need more anarchy!” and someone else saying “we need more dictatorship!”.
Or take the following example, where both Balaji and Benedict have context-dependent perspectives. That should be a tautology: all perspectives are context-dependent. But generally speaking this has not yet become truly common knowledge. And so essays like this are my way of contributing towards better understandings of the…
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it’s silly to worry about problems of getting too beefy when you’re still skinny
but it’s not so silly imo to worry about problems of getting too famous/successful when you’re not there yet. it’s good to plan for success, how you will be misinterpreted, misconstrued. you can go too far with this, but a bit of it is good. thiel said it’s easier to disown a child than to disavow a piece of writing
should be able to just start every post with “first read the dynamism problem”’
when everyone zigs, zag
what would i do if i were new on the scene and visakanv already existed as some other guy? i wouldn’t try to be visakanv 2. i’d play the countermelodies, fill in the missing nuance. good replies is adding nuance without being condescending. does condescension matter? i kinda wish it didn’t. i can hypothetically imagine a context where everyone is very cool with attacking each other – actually 4chan is a good eg of this. but what helps is everyone is anon so nobody feels attacked personally
“the only thing that guarantees pain is not moving enough” –embryosophy
What is my conclusion?
I think it’s probably true that we need dynamic players and agents more than ever, because we seem to live in a world where the rate of change is going to be accelerating. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove said, “You can’t be optimistic about the future until you have survived the crucible of change.”
It’s tempting to end an essay like this with a rousing call-to-arms. Arise, good readers, and henceforth be more dynamic! Well, yeah. Sure. But that doesn’t feel correct to me. The thing to note is that dynamism does hurt. It’s costly. It means choosing some pain now, in order to avoid massive pain later. And maybe people need to experience pain before they “make better choices”, which is a phrase I’ve never liked
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ecology of mind – idk if this should be in the same post as dynamism or a separate post entirely, but writing it here feels temporarily like the right thing to do
people sometimes ask me for book recommendations. I tend to hesitate to recommend a book out of the blue to someone I don’t know. I think books are very personal, subjective things. Sometimes when I’ve had a lengthy conversation with someone, something clicks and I can say, oh you should totally check out X book
// abandoned for now
additionally, here are a couple of twitter threads that I had marked as “dynamism”
how about this for my maybe spicy-ish late night take
to be successful as a bad mf feral free agent you need to be able to hold about 4-7 things in your mind simultaneously
and if you can’t do that then you either need to expand capacity or probably be a follower of some sort
i dont usually like pointing directly at this but i get annoyed/frustrated sometimes when I talk about one of the variables and people are like “but what about the other variables” and I’m like yea bro you need all 7 variables at the same time
- you need to understand the nature of dynamism (ayy)
- you need to understand constraints
- you need to optimize for survival
- you need to be well-prepared
- you need to know how to allocate your limited resources in a way that gets you to win
- you need to practice good reply game
- there’s lots and lots of things you gotta do in concert in a dynamic way and you have to be able to fail gracefully and adapt and iterate and survive
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tiago: if you’re avoiding a todo it’s probably a project and not a todo
visa: great injustice how we’re trained to be so rigid in such a dynamic world
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Second Thread (2023jul26)
if you understand dynamism (as opposed to static-ness) well enough you almost don’t need to “know” anything else, because you can just re-derive almost everything you need in almost every scenario
one way of talking about it is, dynamism is just how reality is. everything changes, nothing is permanent, everything is temporary. each moment turns into the next moment. days turn into night. seasons change. people die. hunger sates and returns. everything in cycles, contrasts
things are defined in relations to other things. everything is a remix. everything is relational. things are made up of other things. we define the thingness of a thing by its boundaries, how it affects/influences other things— and really all thingness is/are fictitious concepts
everything i’ve said so far is kind of vague and abstract, and really the way to learn any of this is to start with a domain that you personally care about, have an investment in, skin in the game in, etc. maybe you like basketball or music or writing or drawing or art, whatever
it should be fairly easy to quickly see how performance in whatever domain you care about is bottlenecked by constraints. what do you do when your battery runs out? what do you do (or not-do) when you get tired, frustrated, depressed, overwhelmed? (constraints thread)
what do you do when the price of a commodity you rely on to produce your thing goes up? what do you do when your peers quit? sometimes the best answer is “nothing”. until it’s not. there are phases and windows to everything, since everything is dynamic and always changing
this whole thread isn’t particularly good in its current context/frame lol its just me vibing out my feelings since it’s cheap/free/natural/easy for me to do but i do it in part bc i enjoy it, in part bc i know this is a topic i care about, may want to reference/revisit later
while everything is ultimately temporary, some things are more or less temporary than other things. knowing how things persist is a useful bit of knowledge that you can make some reasonable plans around. but for eg i shouldn’t assume that twitter will last forever; it wont
i think what i wanted to try and say with this thread was sth like: if you get sufficiently deep into anything, with enough stakes and seriousness, there’s something about it that will tell you about everything. like how everything in the universe looks like trees and rivers
eg you start researching the history of a packet of garlic chilli sauce u you find yourself learning about the age of discovery, industrial manufacturing processes, etc. something of this fractally nature is mirrored in.. how you fit in your social reality
if you have the correct “domain-switching” module, then you can see for eg that music, painting, writing, filmmaking are all sort of the same thing across different domains — and getting better at any one thing, in some sense shows improvement in all of the things
borges said the artist is working even when he is dreaming and he was so goddamn right
in some ways the goal is to be thoroughly haunted in musical terms this is less spooky, we say things like being inspired, being in the zone, embodied, in the moment. the mind switches off and you’re “channelling”. the conscious filter withers and the subconscious attunes
yea the static vs dynamic thing can also be framed as conscious vs subconscious. while you’re busy still building your conscious model of a particular state (fighting the last war), the rick rubin type who is deeply attuned with his feelings is already surfing the next wave
when i talk about this sort of thing, from time to time people show up asking for advice and instructions etc etc and all of that is the wrong thing to do, lol. it’s subordinating your judgement to mine. but the point is to practice using *your* intuition
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dynamism again, II
while frustrated with some tedious twitter misunderstandings, i had the thought that “one day i will explain dynamism properly and then everything will be better”. of course, “everything will be better” is a bit of hyperbole– but the moment I think that, I also think about how there have actually been threshold crossings in my life after which everything was better. everything has been better since i moved into a place of my own. everything has been better since i published my books and grew my audience and got a tattoo. everything has been better since i visited friends halfway across the planet in san francisco and new york. everything has been better since I got my tattoo.
immediately afterwards I also had the thoughts “I also will explain wretchedness, and the art of writing one’s way out”. I could continue to think more thoughts along those lines, but really it was just those three things. In this moment I seem to be able to discern between “thoughts that usually arise” and “the actual thoughts that did arise: which in this case were ~3 out of the usual 12 suspects”.
which is fine, actually? it’s so funny to revisit the idea that my writing is a kind of meditation practice. and i don’t just mean, it’s a way of sitting, but it’s a way of centering myself and getting myself together, shedding the layers of scaffolding and expectations. right now, i do wish i had explained dynamism. would be nice to also explain wretchedness and writing one’s way out, but really maybe let’s just do dynamism? or am I getting tired already? my wife’s taking a nap and she’s going to be awake soon.
this is starting to look less like a substack post and more like a wordvomit. why? because i haven’t yet gotten into the meat of the thing. what is the meat of dynamism? the way to talk about it is not to talk about it by pointing at it, but to point at it by talking about something else. what’s a domain? uh, movies? media? i was just watching some stuff, maybe we can go with that. the dungeons and dragons movie is pretty good.
why does dynamism need explaining? it doesn’t need explaining. nobody has a “i need to understand dynamism” problem. which is maybe part of the problem, lol. what’s my problem right now, anyway? life is pretty good. i’d like to have some fun. my main actual problem is that i have too much stuff, too much mess, too much clutter. clutter is a confusion of intentions.
“I gotta publish something today, I can feel it in my body. I have a lot of material on my whiteboard and maybe I will talk you through it. I also have a lot of material in my roam graph and maybe I will talk you through that . I could go through my 15 drafts. I could attempt to write the essay on puzzles. I could try closing all of my tabs, which is generally a good idea, but if i’m not careful I can end up spending all day sorting things. I could go through my archives and tidy that up. I could tidy up my desktop.”
All these possibilities for tidying, all of which don’t feel super compelling, maybe because they don’t seem like they’re going to clear up the mess of intentions
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the longer I go without publishing something, the more I feel like ditching all of my drafts and notes and just improvising my way through something. the thing that’s been on my mind the last couple of days is, “I believe it is possible to solve problems by thinking.” There’s a fun anecdote about this from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! (1985) – when Feynman was a little boy, he once helped someone fix a radio – by thinking.
I think about that general class of thing a lot. I’ve always liked thinking for the sheer pleasure of it, but I also think that good thinking is often consequential.
Life is full of problems. I feel like the word “problem” has come to have certain negative emotional qualities associated with it – it takes some finesse to use it in a way that doesn’t evoke those associations. In this case I think I’d prefer to use different words (in other words!!), and say that life is full of puzzles and mysteries. Puzzling mysteries, mysterious puzzles.
The most mysterious central puzzle of life, to me, is that we don’t typically see or feel that we are surrounded by puzzles…
tbc