{"id":15172,"date":"2023-04-23T15:47:38","date_gmt":"2023-04-23T07:47:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=15172"},"modified":"2025-07-24T02:23:26","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T18:23:26","slug":"math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/math\/","title":{"rendered":"it’s just math"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

this post is a collection of tweets and notes I’ve accumulated about thinking through the numbers, doing the math.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes people who interpret me as an optimist get surprised when i say something that sounds<\/em> pessimistic. but actually in both cases i’m mainly trying to interpret reality as accurately as possible, in a way that allows me to achieve the outcomes i want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have been described as being both really optimistic and really pessimistic, but really I think I just try to make sense of things as accurately as possible. A lot of the time I find myself thinking\/saying “but\u2026 it’s just math?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

imo it’s not pessimistic, for eg, to say that most businesses fail. it’s the truth! if you want your business to succeed you oughta analyze how businesses fail and then not do that! (optimize for survival<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was at 50 or 500 followers if I said I was going to have 50,000, people would’ve said I\u2019m arrogant. (I didn\u2019t say exactly that, but I\u2019ve had enough similar conversations to be sure.) it\u2019s not arrogance it\u2019s just simple math, managing psychology & solving for distribution<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe there are easily 10 million people in the world who are interested in what I have to say. Why? Because there are over 8 billion people in the world, and I have a conversion rate that’s >1%. I mean, if I talk to 100 people, at least 1 person will be “into me”. yeah at that scale we run into things like language limitations and other complications. sure, scale down the thought experiment \u2013 english speakers who have internet access. That’s still millions of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“0.001% chance of upside is worth taking a shot at if the cost of the shot is 0.” Yes, in reality there’s hardly anything with an actual cost of “0”, since there’s the cost of time and effort and so on. But it’s a useful heuristic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A criticism I’ve gotten: “you must think so highly of yourself that’s why you write so much publicly like your opinions matter” \u2013 i actually write publicly so that people can correct me! I don’t entirely trust myself to correct myself in private because my thinking is full of errors and biases. The ‘math’: there’s more intelligence outside of my head than inside of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

my general instinct that’s been sharpening over the years is: if you’re moderately intelligent, perceptive, courageous, etc, you can very likely figure out a way to make more money doing what you love than you might believe. almost everyone’s intuitions are miscalibrated on this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

people don’t really do the math. 0.1% of people is a lot of people. most aren’t willing to take 1000 shots for the 0.1% payoff. they’ll write it off as risky lottery chasing. but you just need to be able to afford those 1000 shots. then it’s just math, and victory is inevitable. (If you wanna get technical about it, 1000 tries at 0.1% chance has a 63.3% probability of success. But in the social domain, tries aren’t ‘independent’. Each person you talk with can help you with your search in finding the person you’re looking for. And there are other domains where you can learn from your failures as you go.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

it was inevitable that I would have an internet audience large enough that would pay my bills. because I was willing to work on it, for fun, for free, every day, for 10+ years<\/em>, and I would’ve gone 10, 20, 30 more years if I had to. talking to a dozen new people every day, with earnestness and dynamism, can’t lose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“oh but not everyone is charismatic, not everyone knows how to adapt and evolve, how to identify mistakes in their own thinking, ask for feedback-” yea if you wanna argue for your limitations you get to keep them. you could either learn to address each of those things. otherwise stick to the existing paths. this is for the wildhearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the bulk of the payoff\/reward isn’t really not for your intelligence but for your courage, your willingness to stomach uncertainty and deal with social illegibility and status regulation and so on. if you endure past that the rewards are disproportionate. but going offroad hurts<\/p>\n\n\n\n

once you go far enough off the beaten path, past the arid zone where most casual experimenters give up (and there’s no shame in that btw), things start to become clear. you start to see who the other serious players<\/a> are and you develop a kinship with them. it’s quite beautiful<\/p>\n\n\n\n

but actually even that’s not the cool thing. the cool thing is realizing that you can trust yourself to figure shit out, and take care of yourself, whatever the circumstances. that you are resourceful and adaptable. when you feel this in your bones, your entire vibe shifts<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can kind of tell when someone has this, I’d say to ~80-90% degree confidence, almost entirely based on the way they carry themselves, from their body language and their tone of voice, the muscular tension. I crossed this threshold at ~28yo<\/p>\n\n\n\n

sometimes people ask about the “do 100 thing<\/a>” riff\/mantra like, “what if I do 100 thing but I don’t get any better?” that means you’re not learning from your experience. you’re not present. you’re running a mindless script as an absentee person<\/em>. then u can’t grow\/win, yea!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Q: How do we ensure that we’re learning from experience? Some sort of journalling?

A: journalling can help make it clearer, but the critical thing is really that you’re asking questions, examining how things go, and trying differently. all practice should be deliberate. if you’re asking earnestly what’s working and not working and why, and trying different things accordingly, by definition you are going somewhere with every practice session)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conventional wisdom is so narrowly constrained. reality can be so much weirder, wilder than most people<\/a> tend to think. “truth is stranger than fiction” because fiction has to ‘make sense’, ie correspond to our existing assumptions about how things work. But what if our assumptions are wrong? They’re almost always wrong. and so we live in such tiny boxes without realizing, constrained by our imaginations. We don’t have to live like this! Do the math and figure out what is actually possible!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

it\u2019s pretty wack how if 9 in 10 people think a \u2018motivational speaker\u2019 is a fake\/fraud\/\u201cmere entertainer\u201d, and 1 in 10 are actually motivated to then go on to do cool things, past some threshold, even the downstream economic output of that person\u2019s act can be > \u201cmedian real job\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making bets on myself (thread<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are several things about my behaviour that feel super glaringly obvious to me that I\u2019ve come to realize aren\u2019t obvious to other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One is that I make big bets on myself because I believe in me. I\u2019m not some kind of self-sacrificial altruist type. I expect to succeed. For eg I spent ~5 years writing two books, when I could have say, worked a job instead. part of it is passion, yes, but I also expect to make more money from those books over the rest of my lifetime, than I would\u2019ve made in any job(s) I might\u2019ve had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

that said, I\u2019m not optimizing for money. FAN<\/a> and Introspect<\/a> are books about how to be kind, how to be useful, how to be encouraging, how to be a good person. If I wanted to make maximum $ I\u2019d have used language like \u201cwinners and losers\u201d, defined an outgroup\/enemy, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

people- especially driveby critics on Twitter – tend to evaluate what they see, based on their preexisting assumptions, without stopping to consider the map of possible choices. If you think I\u2019m Bad, sure, but I\u2019d like you to consider how easily<\/em> I could be Worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

those people also tend to scoff at what appears trivial in the moment. when I had 50 followers and I talked like I\u2019d have 50,000 someday, people laughed and said I was delusional. 50,000 to 50,000,000 is a different game, but also not? Anyway I\u2019m not optimizing for follow count<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would say I am \u201cjust a twitter poster\u201d the way Walt Disney was \u201cjust a cartoonist\u201d. I don\u2019t know what my Disney World is going to be precisely yet, but I can promise you (me) I won\u2019t stop or quit until I manifest it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

a big source of confusion is that many people tend to think of the internet, and of twitter, as a place of procrastination, a dark place, a wasteful place, etc. if you truly think that, you shouldn\u2019t be here. if you think that and you\u2019re here anyway, your internal conflict will manifest in ugliness in your interactions with others, and you will in fact become part of the problem that you imagined in the first place. in my case, I have always thought of the internet as a a place of possibility, a magical global intertwingling of some of the greatest living minds. Twitter is a particularly high-collision coffeehouse in this paradise. And almost every moment I spend on here is a compounding delight for me. I am having such a great time even writing this long tweet that will annoy some people. And I will have a great time sharing it with others in the future. And it will make me friends with wonderful people I haven\u2019t even met yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Someone was oddly troubled by my use of the phrasing of \u201cmaking big bets on myself\u201d. I stand by it. I contextualized it above with \u201cspend 5 years working on something with no guarantee of reward\u201d. that\u2019s a big chunk of time, with a lot of opportunity cost. it\u2019s a big bet. And I intend to spend the rest of my life doing this. the first few years are the hardest. Consider how different the world would look if the vast majority of people saved up for 10 years to then do whatever made their heart sing for 5 years. For starters I want to assemble a cluster of ~100 people who do this for themselves, on their own terms, for their own reasons The payoff for this is basically impossible to calculate in advance; it has to be done on faith. It\u2019s a big bet!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(2024dec24) This section was a standalone 2020dec19 post titled \/risk\/, but I think it makes more sense for me to put it here. let me see how quickly I can speedrun<\/a> this: <\/p>\n\n\n\n