Robert Greene's third law of power is to "conceal your intentions." To use red herrings and smoke screens to distract your enemy and hide your aims. So their attempts at sabotage will hit the wrong mark.

Sure, if you're starting a business, you'll probably want to keep your proprietary technology secret.¹ And you shouldn't leave your hand out in the open while you're playing cards.

But what Greene gets wrong (and it's the same mistake over and over again) is that intentions are not as mutually exclusive in daily interactions² as on Greene's contrived battlefield.

1 Projects/Rationalia/LW/Concepts/Game Theory

The kinds of games we usually play are not zero-sum. Both players stand to win.

When you do find yourself at an impasse, first consider whether you can change the rules. If you stumble into a game of prisoner's dilemma, your optimal outcome is the worst possible outcome for your opponent and vice-versa. It would seem your intentions are opposed. But if you change the rules so you're playing iterated prisoner's dilemma, well, suddenly, the stable strategy, tit for tat, allows for mutual cooperation.

Rather than conceal our intentions, our first effort should be to align them. That requires us to be honest³ about what we want.

This isn't just some romantic drivel about needing world peace and unity. Real-life games are in constant flux. The rules are not set in stone, and we have some say in which rule book we choose to play by.

Of course, you won't always be able to align your intentions. If you're competing for the same finite, indivisible resource, only one of you can come out on top.

When you find yourself in such a situation, unless you already have a decisive advantage, your first reaction should be to flee. Quit the game. The world is probably big enough for the both of you if you just get out of each other's way. Because conflict is for suckers.

In ecology, "conflict is for suckers" is formalized as Gause's law or the 12th law of cooperation: Be radically honest. It's why you won't find "perfect competitors" in nature. If two species start out occupying the same niche, then the slightest advantage in one will compound over millions of years to become a dominant position. The pressure pushes the other species to differentiate or go extinct.

Beyond ecology, a corollary is that we should preemptively avoid competition through specialization. In entrepreneurship, this becomes the competitive exclusion principle's advice to build a monopoly (because, as he puts it, "competition is for losers")⁴. In families, Gause's law might explain why siblings drift into different subjects. In academia, why disciplines fracture into ever more specialized fields. In management, why Thiel recommends that every employee take on a unique role:

"The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict." — Peter Thiel ⁴

When your intentions conflict with those of another–the two of you are stuck in a zero-sum struggle—take a step back. Consider whether the prize is really worth it. Rather than conceal your intentions, change arenas (or inspire the other to leave). Better to differentiate your intentions.

Sometimes you can't run. Because the stakes of quitting would be too high. That's the moment when Greene's battlefield tactics start to make sense. When maybe, just maybe, you should consider concealing your intentions. But these tactics of deceit and insincerity should be your last option. Don't stoop low until all other options are exhausted.

---

Summary

If you find yourself in a conflict of intentions:

1. Try to align your intentions. Change the rules of the game you're playing.
2. If that doesn't work, differentiate your intentions. Quit the game or get the other player to quit the game.
3. If all else fails, resort to Greene and conceal your intentions.

---

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. There are exceptions, notably Tesla. ↩

2. Between family, friends, coworkers, etc. "Politics" is going to have to wait for another post. ↩

3. Radically honest, as I'll argue for Peter Thiel. ↩

4. Peter Thiel, Literature Notes/Books/Self-improvement/Zero to One (2014) ↩ ↩²

Review & Planning

---

• Since there has to be first time for everything, I figure 2020 was as good (or bad) a year as any for a first yearly review. I figured I'd make it public to clarify my aims for the coming year.

  A note about goal-setting

  Communicating your goals may decrease your likelihood of achieving them (Gollwitzer et al. 2014)¹, so the conventional advice is to keep your goals private. I'm doing the opposite because I believe that having a public ledger of my intentions will hold me accountable. I don't want to be the sanctimonious productivity proselytizer who doesn't heed his own advice.

  Still, I'll prefer focusing on habits over goals. The former are more sustainable and compound over the long term.

The short

For those who can't be bothered to read an essay on some other guy's goals for 2021 (which I hope is most of you) and who don't really care to relive 2020 (which I know is most of you), here's the plan for 2021 (habits in italics; goals without):

• 🍄 General
  • Move back to North America.
  • Start following the GTD workflow.
• 🧠 Mind
  • 🧘 Mindfulness
    • Meditate daily. Try a (≥) week-long meditation retreat.
  • 👫 Relationships
    • Find a community of friends and professional acquaintances wherever we end up moving. Engage in local politics.
  • 🎓 Learning
    • Continue growing my SRS and second brain.
    • 1 book a week. Read through the works of Twain, Orwell, and the Stoics. Read ≥5 non-English books.
    • Italian to B2; German to B1
• 🫀 Body
  • 🏊 Movement
    • Continue daily mobility and flexibility exercises. Reach at least 6 months without injury.
    • Experiment with breathing techniques (Wim Hof, Buteyko, etc.) and find one that works for the daily meditation practice.
    • Start jump-roping daily (or do some other cardio). Bring my resting heart-rate down below 70.
  • 🥗 Consumption
    • Do a prolonged fast every 3 months. Start with 2 days and work up to a 5-day fast (or with a fasting mimicking diet).
    • Write about the environmental and health consequences of my eating patterns. Adjust accordingly.
• 🏭 Output
  • 🎓 Masters
    • Get a ≥9.0 (out of 10.0) on my thesis and an award (any award).
  • 📬 Blog
    • Write weekly and develop a course (likely about workflows for academic research) for passive income.
  • 💟 Health Curious
    • Achieve consistent growth with Health Curious. Get into YC S2021.

The long

If you're the kind of person who gets off reading other people's reviews/plannings, this next part is for you.

**🍄 General **

The biggest anticipated change of 2021 is that my partner and I are planning to move back to North America after we finish our masters. The particular location will depend on COVID, whether we get accepted to a startup accelerator, and the whims of our wills. We might end up anywhere between San Francisco or Costa Rica.

Perhaps the second largest change I hope to make is to be less of a spaz when it comes to organizing my time. To adopt a workflow like the GTD to make sure that reviews like this one are part of a regular and self-reinforcing practice.

🧠 Mind

I'm no mind-body dualist, but the distinction can be useful enough in practice. Let's further subdivide "the mind" into:

1. 🧘 Mindfulness
2. 👫 Relationships
3. 🎓 Learning

🧘 Mindfulness

Unfortunately, "mindfulness" has been appropriated by the juice-cleansing-horoscopist yogis of yuppiedom. But I've sampled enough of the psychedelic spectrum to know that there really is something in "mindfulness" worth pursuing—a simple presence of thought and awareness of self, the opposite of distractedness and muddled thinking. It's about training the ability to focus.

And I've listened to enough Sam Harris and co. to know that meditation is the most direct path to this mindfulness thing. So I've been on and off meditating between 10 and 20 minutes a day for the past two years.

The problem is that meditation hasn't really stuck yet.

Of the mindfulness arsenal, I much prefer the more dynamic yoga and cousins (pilates and calisthenics) to standard Vipassana meditation. I can't say the thought of more sedentary time excites me. Still, I'm not quite ready to give up on meditating.

This coming year I'd like to try a meditation retreat—COVID allowing. Maybe even a silent retreat. I'm not too excited about the anti-scientism endemic in mindfulness circles, but I can put up with it for the benefits of the digital and dopaminergic fast.

👫 Relationships

I was pretty antisocial this year but then so were most. It's just that I didn't really mind being antisocial (and even encouraged the introversion). But that's probably because mine was not a true isolation. COVID provided the impetus my partner and I needed to move in together, so oxytocin and vasopressin still flowed pretty liberally.

But I could be a little more social this year. And once we're there it'll take active effort to rebuild a social network. Needless to say, I'll take the renewed sociability way too seriously (e.g., draw up timetables so that I stay in touch with my friends at the right intervals, put people's names in my Anki with pictures I've lifted from LinkedIn, and organize cult-like bonding dinners).

More broadly, I'd like to become more civically active. To know the elected representatives of my community and lend a helping hand.

But let's avoid setting too many social expectations because COVID is still in full swing.

🎓 Learning

This year, I drank the second-brain Kool-aid. And I've had a serious relapse of Anki addiction after being clean for almost two years. My main hope for this coming year is to feed those addictions.

But we can be more tangible. Much of my learning is oriented towards output (the last of my three major life themes). E.g.: learning for a masters thesis, for this blog, and for business. We'll come back to those subjects at the end of this review. But there remains a part which I pursue more for the pure pleasure of learning. Particularly learning languages and reading fiction.

🗣 Languages

This year, my language-learning focus was Italian. Though it's speculative, I'd say I've gone from beginner to about B1. My aim for the coming year is to get to B2 in Italian, then reach B1 with German. I made a bet with a friend two years ago that I'd read Faust in the original language by my 25th birthday (and hand him a book report in the same). Time's ticking.

📚 Reading

In 2020, I averaged a book a week if you include audiobooks. In 2021, I'd like to average the same excluding audiobooks (because my brother's critique that audiobooks shouldn't count to my goodreads total hit a sore spot). As for what I'll be reading, my next projects are the complete works of Orwell, Twain, and the Stoics. And I'll be trying to up my non-English reading.

🫀 Body

As for the body, we'll subdivide into the food that goes in and the movement that comes out.

1. 🏊 Movement
2. 🥗 Consumption

🏊 Movement

You can reach a contented mind with a broken body, but it's easier when your body complies. My body's doing alright, but it's a little more injury-prone than I'd like. Over the years, it's suffered a runner's knee (though I've never been a runner), a tennis elbow (though I've never been a tennis player), an emacs pinky and something like carpal tunnel (I have been a heavy emacs user), and a sprained right shoulder. It probably has something to do with the horrible sedentariness of the information economy. And my general aggressiveness at the keyboard.

Some of my interventions have been material: a standing desk, a laptop stand, an ergonomic keyboard, an ergonomic mouse, barefoot shoes, and most recently a set of foot pedals. Which have had some effect on my injury susceptibility (and considerable effect on my intimidation factor at the computer). But the real difference has come from interventions in movement.

Instead of focusing on strength- and muscle-building, my only concern has become well-being and injury prevention. That has shifted my regimen to more work on mobility, flexibility, stability, and balance. I'm in it for the long haul: strengthening the connective fascia, tendons, and ligaments takes much longer than strengthening the muscles. So I have many more months in store of recuperative exercise before I'll again entertain vain thoughts of muscle growth.

My biggest corporal hope for 2021 is that the saunas reopen. I find the whole meditating thing easier when you're up against 80ºC. Sort of the same way that minor distractions while walking bring out the most creative thoughts. In the same vein, I'm interested in trying a wider range of breathing techniques to see what kinds of meditation work best for me.

The other aim for this year is to adopt some kind of cardio. I worry about dying earlier because I'm tall (and every 10 cm of height increases your odds of cancer by 10%, Nunney 2018) sometimes to hypochondriac proportions (my resting heart rate is above average, 80-90, and every 10 bpm increase in resting heart rate is a 10 to 22% increase in mortality, Jensen et al. 2013; knowing this generally increases my heart rate even more). Not to mention the increased risk of chronic lower back pain (Hershkovich et al. 2013).

🥗 Consumption

The same longevity paranoia plagues my eating patterns. In pursuit of immortality, I've been intermittent fasting (16/8) for three years. This past year, I tried my first (successful) one-day and two-day fasts (a past attempt while traveling led to me fainting in front of the TSA, but that's a different story). This coming year I'm interested in pushing the limits further, and maybe even try something like Dr. Valter Longo's five-day fasting mimicking diet.

As for what I eat, nutritionally I'm pretty happy. Still, I get antsy about aflatoxins in my peanut butter (Alam, Anco, & Rustgi 2020), mercury in my fish (EPA), rainforest destruction (UCS) and phytoestrogens (Cederroth & Nef 2009) in my soy, greenhouse gas emissions and animal cruelty in my meat (WRI), glycemic spikes in an occasional rice cracker, and candidiastry in my fruits (Samaranayake & Macfarlane 1982). My aim for 2021 is to better inform myself of the sources and impacts of the food I eat. To feel a little less overwhelmed by it all.

🏭 Output

I've always gotten a large amount of satisfaction from making things from LEGO as a kid to writings as an adult. So my last life theme is the work I create.

We'll into the three major projects that eat up almost all my time:

1. 🎓 Masters
2. 📬 Blog
3. 💟 Health Curious

🎓 Masters

If all goes according to schedule, I'll have my masters degree by the summer. Even though I'm not necessarily planning to continue with a PhD, I'd like to at least close with a bang. So that I can safely criticize the educational system from an authoritative position. I'd prefer wondering what I could have been to knowing that I couldn't have. It'll also make it easier to return to a PhD should I want to.

That means I'll be vying for the traditional forms of validation: a high grade and my university's thesis prize(s). Of my physics classmates, I'd wager my odds pretty good: my interests are at the perfect intersection of hype (deep neural networks) and interdisciplinarity (statistical physics + information theory + dynamical systems theory). It's just easier to win recognition with general subjects than niches like "Chern-Weil Global Symmetries and How Quantum Gravity Avoids Them" (no offense intended to the authors).

But that is going to require a few weeks/months of obsessive attention. More, I'll admit, than I've given in the last few months. But no worries, I've been here before, and intense spurts are my kind of thing.

📬 Blog

I've already detailed my reasons for starting a blog. After finishing my masters, I'll be taking at least a year off from higher education to work on Health Curious (below) and other projects. As a financial padding and back-up to enable this year "off," I'm interested in using this site to generate passive (and active) income.

That probably means some combination of tutoring and courses, to which this this site will serve both as resume and as traction channel. Fortunately, I like teaching, and I don't feel too guilty about selling out to rich parents who are trying to raise their kids' SAT scores, so they can brag about the high-class colleges their kids got in to, then consent to ridiculous tuitions that fuel a student debt crisis that only fosters more of the inequality tearing society apart, while continuing the elite overproduction responsible for the demise of cooperation, etc. At least, I don't mind selling out for now. That's because I hope to inspire students to make a lasting difference of there own. And I think that's still possible within an educational system that's totally fucked up.

💟 Health Curious

Finally, I hope to grow the fledgling product of my partner and mine, Health Curious. Health Curious aims to be Strava for coaching and health.

I agree with Justin.digital that social networks are fundamentally about building social capital through signaling. That what social networks provide is a distribution channel for signaling messages in combination with proof of work. Proof-of-creative-photo-making for Snapchat and Instagram, -video-making for Vine, and TikTok, -witty-writing for Twitter and Facebook, etc.

We want to build a social platform that hijacks our primal desire for recognition from peers to take care of our bodies and minds. Call me a romantic, but I still think we can use social networks to do something positive for people. For now, we have to keep our secrets to ourselves. But as we progress, I'll occasionally share details.

My goal for Health Curious this year is not a X number of users or X amount in valuation; my goal is a consistent rate of growth, if even 0.1% on 5,000 users.

To help us get to this stage (and also to turbocharge the transition from university to entrepreneurship), we'll be applying to YC for their 2021 summer batch. If we get in, we'll come in contact with a large number of inspired people who can help us realize our vision. And if we don't, well, we'll figure something else out.

Conclusion

There it is. I doubt anyone has the attention capacity to read through another person's review/planning, but, who knows, maybe it'll inspire you. In any case, good luck this year!

If you're inspired, then join me this first week of the new year in converting these year-long plans to regular milestones throughout the year. So we actually have a chance of making the big ones.

---

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Note that these studies typically have abysmally small sample sizes, short durations, and unrealistic motivations. Make sure to discount appropriately. ↩

Review & Planning

---

• Since there has to be first time for everything, I figure 2020 was as good (or bad) a year as any for a first yearly review. I figured I'd make it public to clarify my aims for the coming year.

  A note about goal-setting

  Communicating your goals may decrease your likelihood of achieving them (Gollwitzer et al. 2014)¹, so the conventional advice is to keep your goals private. I'm doing the opposite because I believe that having a public ledger of my intentions will hold me accountable. I don't want to be the sanctimonious productivity proselytizer who doesn't heed his own advice.

  Still, I'll prefer focusing on habits over goals. The former are more sustainable and compound over the long term.

The short

For those who can't be bothered to read an essay on some other guy's goals for 2021 (which I hope is most of you) and who don't really care to relive 2020 (which I know is most of you), here's the plan for 2021 (habits in italics; goals without):

• 🍄 General
  • Move back to North America.
  • Start following the GTD workflow.
• 🧠 Mind
  • 🧘 Mindfulness
    • Meditate daily. Try a (≥) week-long meditation retreat.
  • 👫 Relationships
    • Find a community of friends and professional acquaintances wherever we end up moving. Engage in local politics.
  • 🎓 Learning
    • Continue growing my SRS and second brain.
    • 1 book a week. Read through the works of Twain, Orwell, and the Stoics. Read ≥5 non-English books.
    • Italian to B2; German to B1
• 🫀 Body
  • 🏊 Movement
    • Continue daily mobility and flexibility exercises. Reach at least 6 months without injury.
    • Experiment with breathing techniques (Wim Hof, Buteyko, etc.) and find one that works for the daily meditation practice.
    • Start jump-roping daily (or do some other cardio). Bring my resting heart-rate down below 70.
  • 🥗 Consumption
    • Do a prolonged fast every 3 months. Start with 2 days and work up to a 5-day fast (or with a fasting mimicking diet).
    • Write about the environmental and health consequences of my eating patterns. Adjust accordingly.
• 🏭 Output
  • 🎓 Masters
    • Get a ≥9.0 (out of 10.0) on my thesis and an award (any award).
  • 📬 Blog
    • Write weekly and develop a course (likely about workflows for academic research) for passive income.
  • 💟 Health Curious
    • Achieve consistent growth with Health Curious. Get into YC S2021.

The long

If you're the kind of person who gets off reading other people's reviews/plannings, this next part is for you.

**🍄 General **

The biggest anticipated change of 2021 is that my partner and I are planning to move back to North America after we finish our masters. The particular location will depend on COVID, whether we get accepted to a startup accelerator, and the whims of our wills. We might end up anywhere between San Francisco or Costa Rica.

Perhaps the second largest change I hope to make is to be less of a spaz when it comes to organizing my time. To adopt a workflow like the GTD to make sure that reviews like this one are part of a regular and self-reinforcing practice.

🧠 Mind

I'm no mind-body dualist, but the distinction can be useful enough in practice. Let's further subdivide "the mind" into:

1. 🧘 Mindfulness
2. 👫 Relationships
3. 🎓 Learning

🧘 Mindfulness

Unfortunately, "mindfulness" has been appropriated by the juice-cleansing-horoscopist yogis of yuppiedom. But I've sampled enough of the psychedelic spectrum to know that there really is something in "mindfulness" worth pursuing—a simple presence of thought and awareness of self, the opposite of distractedness and muddled thinking. It's about training the ability to focus.

And I've listened to enough Sam Harris and co. to know that meditation is the most direct path to this mindfulness thing. So I've been on and off meditating between 10 and 20 minutes a day for the past two years.

The problem is that meditation hasn't really stuck yet.

Of the mindfulness arsenal, I much prefer the more dynamic yoga and cousins (pilates and calisthenics) to standard Vipassana meditation. I can't say the thought of more sedentary time excites me. Still, I'm not quite ready to give up on meditating.

This coming year I'd like to try a meditation retreat—COVID allowing. Maybe even a silent retreat. I'm not too excited about the anti-scientism endemic in mindfulness circles, but I can put up with it for the benefits of the digital and dopaminergic fast.

👫 Relationships

I was pretty antisocial this year but then so were most. It's just that I didn't really mind being antisocial (and even encouraged the introversion). But that's probably because mine was not a true isolation. COVID provided the impetus my partner and I needed to move in together, so oxytocin and vasopressin still flowed pretty liberally.

But I could be a little more social this year. And once we're there it'll take active effort to rebuild a social network. Needless to say, I'll take the renewed sociability way too seriously (e.g., draw up timetables so that I stay in touch with my friends at the right intervals, put people's names in my Anki with pictures I've lifted from LinkedIn, and organize cult-like bonding dinners).

More broadly, I'd like to become more civically active. To know the elected representatives of my community and lend a helping hand.

But let's avoid setting too many social expectations because COVID is still in full swing.

🎓 Learning

This year, I drank the second-brain Kool-aid. And I've had a serious relapse of Anki addiction after being clean for almost two years. My main hope for this coming year is to feed those addictions.

But we can be more tangible. Much of my learning is oriented towards output (the last of my three major life themes). E.g.: learning for a masters thesis, for this blog, and for business. We'll come back to those subjects at the end of this review. But there remains a part which I pursue more for the pure pleasure of learning. Particularly learning languages and reading fiction.

🗣 Languages

This year, my language-learning focus was Italian. Though it's speculative, I'd say I've gone from beginner to about B1. My aim for the coming year is to get to B2 in Italian, then reach B1 with German. I made a bet with a friend two years ago that I'd read Faust in the original language by my 25th birthday (and hand him a book report in the same). Time's ticking.

📚 Reading

In 2020, I averaged a book a week if you include audiobooks. In 2021, I'd like to average the same excluding audiobooks (because my brother's critique that audiobooks shouldn't count to my goodreads total hit a sore spot). As for what I'll be reading, my next projects are the complete works of Orwell, Twain, and the Stoics. And I'll be trying to up my non-English reading.

🫀 Body

As for the body, we'll subdivide into the food that goes in and the movement that comes out.

1. 🏊 Movement
2. 🥗 Consumption

🏊 Movement

You can reach a contented mind with a broken body, but it's easier when your body complies. My body's doing alright, but it's a little more injury-prone than I'd like. Over the years, it's suffered a runner's knee (though I've never been a runner), a tennis elbow (though I've never been a tennis player), an emacs pinky and something like carpal tunnel (I have been a heavy emacs user), and a sprained right shoulder. It probably has something to do with the horrible sedentariness of the information economy. And my general aggressiveness at the keyboard.

Some of my interventions have been material: a standing desk, a laptop stand, an ergonomic keyboard, an ergonomic mouse, barefoot shoes, and most recently a set of foot pedals. Which have had some effect on my injury susceptibility (and considerable effect on my intimidation factor at the computer). But the real difference has come from interventions in movement.

Instead of focusing on strength- and muscle-building, my only concern has become well-being and injury prevention. That has shifted my regimen to more work on mobility, flexibility, stability, and balance. I'm in it for the long haul: strengthening the connective fascia, tendons, and ligaments takes much longer than strengthening the muscles. So I have many more months in store of recuperative exercise before I'll again entertain vain thoughts of muscle growth.

My biggest corporal hope for 2021 is that the saunas reopen. I find the whole meditating thing easier when you're up against 80ºC. Sort of the same way that minor distractions while walking bring out the most creative thoughts. In the same vein, I'm interested in trying a wider range of breathing techniques to see what kinds of meditation work best for me.

The other aim for this year is to adopt some kind of cardio. I worry about dying earlier because I'm tall (and every 10 cm of height increases your odds of cancer by 10%, Nunney 2018) sometimes to hypochondriac proportions (my resting heart rate is above average, 80-90, and every 10 bpm increase in resting heart rate is a 10 to 22% increase in mortality, Jensen et al. 2013; knowing this generally increases my heart rate even more). Not to mention the increased risk of chronic lower back pain (Hershkovich et al. 2013).

🥗 Consumption

The same longevity paranoia plagues my eating patterns. In pursuit of immortality, I've been intermittent fasting (16/8) for three years. This past year, I tried my first (successful) one-day and two-day fasts (a past attempt while traveling led to me fainting in front of the TSA, but that's a different story). This coming year I'm interested in pushing the limits further, and maybe even try something like Dr. Valter Longo's five-day fasting mimicking diet.

As for what I eat, nutritionally I'm pretty happy. Still, I get antsy about aflatoxins in my peanut butter (Alam, Anco, & Rustgi 2020), mercury in my fish (EPA), rainforest destruction (UCS) and phytoestrogens (Cederroth & Nef 2009) in my soy, greenhouse gas emissions and animal cruelty in my meat (WRI), glycemic spikes in an occasional rice cracker, and candidiastry in my fruits (Samaranayake & Macfarlane 1982). My aim for 2021 is to better inform myself of the sources and impacts of the food I eat. To feel a little less overwhelmed by it all.

🏭 Output

I've always gotten a large amount of satisfaction from making things from LEGO as a kid to writings as an adult. So my last life theme is the work I create.

We'll into the three major projects that eat up almost all my time:

1. 🎓 Masters
2. 📬 Blog
3. 💟 Health Curious

🎓 Masters

If all goes according to schedule, I'll have my masters degree by the summer. Even though I'm not necessarily planning to continue with a PhD, I'd like to at least close with a bang. So that I can safely criticize the educational system from an authoritative position. I'd prefer wondering what I could have been to knowing that I couldn't have. It'll also make it easier to return to a PhD should I want to.

That means I'll be vying for the traditional forms of validation: a high grade and my university's thesis prize(s). Of my physics classmates, I'd wager my odds pretty good: my interests are at the perfect intersection of hype (deep neural networks) and interdisciplinarity (statistical physics + information theory + dynamical systems theory). It's just easier to win recognition with general subjects than niches like "Chern-Weil Global Symmetries and How Quantum Gravity Avoids Them" (no offense intended to the authors).

But that is going to require a few weeks/months of obsessive attention. More, I'll admit, than I've given in the last few months. But no worries, I've been here before, and intense spurts are my kind of thing.

📬 Blog

I've already detailed my reasons for starting a blog. After finishing my masters, I'll be taking at least a year off from higher education to work on Health Curious (below) and other projects. As a financial padding and back-up to enable this year "off," I'm interested in using this site to generate passive (and active) income.

That probably means some combination of tutoring and courses, to which this this site will serve both as resume and as traction channel. Fortunately, I like teaching, and I don't feel too guilty about selling out to rich parents who are trying to raise their kids' SAT scores, so they can brag about the high-class colleges their kids got in to, then consent to ridiculous tuitions that fuel a student debt crisis that only fosters more of the inequality tearing society apart, while continuing the elite overproduction responsible for the demise of cooperation, etc. At least, I don't mind selling out for now. That's because I hope to inspire students to make a lasting difference of there own. And I think that's still possible within an educational system that's totally fucked up.

💟 Health Curious

Finally, I hope to grow the fledgling product of my partner and mine, Health Curious. Health Curious aims to be Strava for coaching and health.

I agree with Justin.digital that social networks are fundamentally about building social capital through signaling. That what social networks provide is a distribution channel for signaling messages in combination with proof of work. Proof-of-creative-photo-making for Snapchat and Instagram, -video-making for Vine, and TikTok, -witty-writing for Twitter and Facebook, etc.

We want to build a social platform that hijacks our primal desire for recognition from peers to take care of our bodies and minds. Call me a romantic, but I still think we can use social networks to do something positive for people. For now, we have to keep our secrets to ourselves. But as we progress, I'll occasionally share details.

My goal for Health Curious this year is not a X number of users or X amount in valuation; my goal is a consistent rate of growth, if even 0.1% on 5,000 users.

To help us get to this stage (and also to turbocharge the transition from university to entrepreneurship), we'll be applying to YC for their 2021 summer batch. If we get in, we'll come in contact with a large number of inspired people who can help us realize our vision. And if we don't, well, we'll figure something else out.

Conclusion

There it is. I doubt anyone has the attention capacity to read through another person's review/planning, but, who knows, maybe it'll inspire you. In any case, good luck this year!

If you're inspired, then join me this first week of the new year in converting these year-long plans to regular milestones throughout the year. So we actually have a chance of making the big ones.

---

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Note that these studies typically have abysmally small sample sizes, short durations, and unrealistic motivations. Make sure to discount appropriately. ↩

Robert Greene's second law of power is to never put too much trust in friends and to learn how to use enemies.

Specifically, Greene warns us to be wary of mixing "friendship" with professional relationships. Even among the preeminently reasonable, "friendship" can fester into cronyism: you're more likely to hold those you like to lower standards or to avoid healthy confrontation in order to curry favor. "Enemies," in contrast, have something to prove to you. Bring them under your wing, and they will fight twice as hard to redeem themselves.

As with all of Greene's laws, there's a hint of truth here. "Friends" really can encourage the worst in each other. It might explain why, when corporates hire consultants for "rebalancing human capital" (or whatever euphemism for "firing people" happens to be in vogue), useless executives are safe while those on the work floor are sacrificed en masse. Why, at the end of it all, the bosses get to take home a restructuring bonus. Management really can suck.

However. . . .

You've probably already realized, by my use of quotes, that I take issue with Greene's definition of "friend." Excuse the ad hominem, but Greene seems to be using "friend" the way somebody might who's never actually had a "friend."

Here, we can take a lesson from the ancients, and go all the way back to Aristotle who described three types of friendship:

1. Friends of utility: those who "love each other . . . in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each other.”"
2. Friends of pleasure: those whose company we enjoy "not because of what they are in themselves, but because they are agreeable to us"
3. Friends of good: those who "wish each alike the other’s good in respect of their goodness."

Greene's "friends" fall almost solely in the first category with perhaps a few stragglers in the second. His nihilism doesn't recognize anything so abstract as virtue. His cynicism doesn't recognize anything so sappy as loving an other for the sake of the other.

It is, of course, this "truer" friendship, we romantics have in mind when we speak of "friendship." The friendship of an Aristotle or a Seneca:

A man makes a friend, not "'for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains,' but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose bedside he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands. Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake." — Literature Notes/Books/Philosophy/Letters from a Stoic

While Greene's followers are busy magnifying their egos, the rest of us are busy trying to do the opposite: to shrink our heads and silence the incessant whining of our inner voice. Friendship is an exercise in ego death—in separating ourselves from ourselves.

A friendship out of appreciation for each other's virtue, built around the pursuit of mutual improvement, does not corrupt. It welcomes harsh truths and demands hard work.

But you don't need to have this perfect ideal of friendship to get the benefits. A Gallup study in the late '90s found that "I have a best friend at work" is a consistent correlate with employee retention, productivity, and profitability.¹ It pays to mix friendships with professional relationships. Even normal (non-"best") friendships correlate positively with job productivity. Up to a point that is: too many friendships and your emotional exhaustion will offset the gains (Methot et al. 2015).

For anyone trying to build healthier relationships, "not putting too much trust in each other," is just about the worst advice you could give.

To build healthy relationships in any domain requires trust. With married couples, trust is a strong correlate of level of commitment, and it's reciprocated more often than expressions of love (Larzelere & Huston 1980). So too, trust is indispensable in professional relationships. Here it is especially trust between different occupational layers that matters (Cho & Park 2011).

All this may sound trite and obvious, but it's always harder to act it out in practice. Many of us have a natural reticence to trusting others. Though we obviously should not put our trust in everyone, we might do well to grant our closest companions yet more.

The importance of sacrificing the semblance of security for trust helps explain the cult of vulnerability of Brené Brown and collaborators. We need to be proactively vulnerable.

Larzelere & Huston (1980) identify two key parts of trust:

1. Believing the other to be benevolent and truly want what is best for the other.
2. Believing the other to be honest.

Over the long run, you can't fake either of these. Either you really do want what is best for the other, or acts of selfishness will slip through. Either you really are honest, or your lies will eventually contradict themselves and come tumbling down. You have to want what is best for the other before you can expect the other to want what is best for you. You have to be honest to get honesty.

It comes back to Seneca . . .

"If you wish to be loved, love." — Seneca

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Footnotes

Footnotes

1. The insertion of "best" was necessary to differentiate between "highly productive" and "mediocre" workgroups. ↩

Robert Greene's first law of power is to never outshine the master. Humans are petty and quick to envy, he reasons. So if you give your superior an unadulterated taste of your potential, they will feel jealous at best and threatened at worst. Better if you stay out of the spotlight to avoid conflict. You can revenge yourself when the tables turn.

Of course Greene has a point. There are envious and incompetent people out there. Some of them happen to be bosses. But not all bosses happen to be envious and incompetent.

Even if the manager class appears to be more envious and incompetent than the general population,¹ that's hardly enough evidence to justify groveling before every superior.

Choose Your Boss

Ultimately, you choose where to work, who to work for, and what kind of culture to belong to.² So if you can, choose to work with a boss who doesn't have the kind of insecurity that requires them to put everyone else down.

If you can't choose your boss (because you've applied to a faceless corporate) and end up having a problem with them, well, that's what HR departments are for. And if both your boss and the corporate checks and balances are dysfunctional, go look for a new job because you've found rot at the company's foundations.

A great boss gets their employees to go beyond what they expected from themselves. They take pride when you flourish. Choose a boss with the confidence to let you shine.

Now, I hate to admit it, but I don't have a long career of working in corporate yet, so much of this is romantic hypothesizing. I'll make sure to come back to this when I've had more hours in the field.

Beyond what the individual can do, there's a lot that an organization can do to avoid paltry squabbling among its members:

Squash the Hierarchy

Hierarchies are not evil. They are inevitable consequences of the need to bring information together in one place so that important, long-term decisions can be made with sufficient oversight.

But overly rigid hierarchies are fragile and corruptible: 2 Areas/Principles/Laws/Peter principle. In retaliation, we've seen a few companies try out "2 Areas/Principles/Laws/Dilbert principle".

There are different philosophies, but they generally generally share:

1. A restricted selection of job titles (2 Areas/Principles/Laws/Putt's law has two kinds of managers, when the rules for rising become clear, the nefarious begin to game the system eschews titles of all kinds).
2. Self-organizing "squads" or "circles" (with self-elected project leads). Think Google's flat organization but 100% of the time.
3. A short-term, piecemeal take on problem-solving (much like in agile development).

The success of companies like Zappos, Valve, and 20% time show that this structure can work, especially with smaller companies and predictable business models (e.g., retail). But it's an open question to what extent these structures can scale. And how well they can translate to markets that require longer-term planning (e.g., building a rocket that can get to Mars). And there's a separate question as to whether these organizations are truly "flat":

"[Valve] is a pseudo-flat structure where, at least in small groups, you're all peers and make decisions together . . . . But the one thing I found out the hard way is that there is actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company and it felt a lot like high school. There are popular kids that have acquired power in the company, then there's the trouble makers, and everyone in between." — Jeri Ellsworth

Hierarchies emerge naturally because of cumulative advantage (among other reasons). Small differences in reach and influence compound over time, so power centralizes. With money, "Zappos" (the Matthew effect"). So too with influence in organizations.

There's a balance between the extremes of rigid military hierarchy and hippy pseudo-flatness. To reach that balance, perhaps the most important thing to develop an active disrespect for chain of command.

In a 2018 memo to Tesla's employees, Valve had the following to say:

"Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere."

Musk's main complaint is that chains of command distort information (think the telephone game). And "[t]he way to solve this is [to] allow free flow of information between all levels." In addition, an overly strict chain of command carries the risk of eroding accountability: your chance at promotion becomes solely determined by how you appear to your superiors and not how you act to your underlings.

When an employee is welcomed to bring complaints about a boss to the boss's boss (and is actually heard), hierarchies avoid becoming too rigid. This aim is also why many companies engage in some form of regular peer review. So that employees' opinions about bosses are formally brought into decisions about promotions.

Separate Concerns

Next to subverting hierarchies and conducting peer reviews, another way to limit bosses feeling threatened is to draw a clearer separation of concerns between technical and managerial employees (and with any other relevant categories). To separate "boss" from "manager". This disentangles promotional ladders, which prevents the managers from feeling directly in competition with their best employees.

Take a lesson from Patagonia's in the rich get richer and the poor get poorer:

"The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict."

As companies get bigger, some redundancy in roles will be inevitable. But this principle of Thiel's (a corollary of 3 Resources/Rationalia/EA/Topics/Elon Musk) continues to apply: clear role definitions prevent conflict.³ Say I'm a project lead whose highest hope is to one day reach C-suite. And I've just taken on a mid-level dev who is scarily competent. With a clear separation of concerns, promoting this dev to senior dev, then tech lead, etc. no longer means creating a rival for my next promotion. I feel safer.

Manage Expectations

Even if you have the most competent manager in the world, they may still have a good reason to be unhappy when you outshine them.

Managers aren't just about managing and organizing people; a core part of their responsibility is to manage and communicate expectations. When you outshine, you fail to meet your expectations. You fail towards the more positive direction of the two, but it remains a failure in communication—in keeping your manager informed of where you are and what you're capable of. Enough of these failures, in either direction, and you make the manager's job unnecessarily difficult.

An organization's ability to match expectations to reality is largely function of its development strategy (e.g., Scrum, Kanban, Extreme programming). So if you exceed expectations, it usually also means you're not cooperating with the development workflows. For people to come together to do more than they could individually, they have to sacrifice some autonomy. If you can thrive individually but fail to make the sacrifice so you can thrive collectively, you probably should be on your own.

The other risk with "outshining", in the sense of you taking the spotlight, is that you may present a fragmented image of your team when the situation calls for unity. This is probably why strict hierarchy remains the structure of choice where the cost of internal discord is high (such as in the military). The seemingly minor disagreement between you and your manager, once out in the open, may grow into dissension. And dissension metastasizes.

When you set high expectations for yourself and meet them, that's not outshining. It's shining, but it's not shining any more than you ought to.

Summary

When you choose a new job, you choose your boss. So choose someone who has little envy and enough self-assurance to let you shine. And if you can't choose, make sure the company has checks and balances to handle petty managers.

If you are the boss, think about ways to make protect your employees from less savory managers. You have three main options:

1. Squash the hierarchy: Experiment with flatter structures, trim the bureaucratese job titles, and try out Peter Thiel.
2. Separate concerns: Establish clearer role definitions and disentangle the promotional ladders to prevent managers and workers from competing with each other.
3. Manage expectations: You want your employees to shine, not necessarily to outshine. To that end, make sure your systems of planning actually match reality. Sample a variety of agile development methods and find what works.

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Footnotes

Footnotes

1. A few possible explanations for this phenomenon:

   1. The [[Zero to One]]: employees rise to their "level of incompetence"
   
   2. The [[The competitive exclusion principle|the competitive exclusion principle]]: companies *strategically* promote incompetent employees to management to get them out of the workflow.
   
   3. [[20% time]]: "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand"

   ↩

2. I'm assuming that you belong to a privileged group that has some choice in employment. ↩

3. This may actually provide a critique of flat organizations: more flexible roles can lead to more frequent overlap of concerns and, in turn, conflict. ↩