Principles

I believe that as a human, your most prized asset is your set of principles. Regardless of how consciously aware of it you are, this small set of values forms latent representations of fundamental aspects of the world’s dynamics model, as seen and understood by you. While not directly observable, these representations drive how you perceive, reason about and manipulate the world. What is observable by others (words, actions, decisions) can be altered at runtime as desired, but over the long run, they will out your principles. So be intentional about the principles that you adopt, be disciplined about their evolution and ensure you would not mind if they were revealed to the world, because in time, they will.

• Mathematics is your only language. If you cannot express an idea mathematically, do not claim to understand it.

• Incentives drive behavior. Do not manage, control, or manipulate humans (including yourself) - design the right incentive structure and let the desired outcome flow.

• Make people smile. Your brain likes seeing other humans happy.

• If you feel the need to prove to someone you’re good at something, you need to become better at it.

• Believe, trust and always give people benefit of the doubt, but never be critically dependent on a single person or a single group of people.

• Always treat sentient beings as ends and never a means to an end (an extension of Kant’s second Categorical Imperative)

• Never kill someone’s excitement no matter how misguided they are. Help them re-channel it or do nothing at all.

• Most people have gone through types of pain for which you have no analog. Be kind, seek to understand (but expect to fail), and let them teach you to empathize.

• You are simply an information processing machine. Every bit of information that you expose your brain to (by reading, hearing, speaking, thinking) will alter that machinery. “Forgetting” something is not in your control; once an idea is pondered, it may become an integral part of how you model the world, regardless of how strongly you may disagree with it. Be careful about what you read, hear and see, and intentional about what you say and how you think about events.

• Protect your ground truth (principles) and ensure total consistency within it. All other (secondary) beliefs should be easily mutable at runtime when presented with new evidence.