Farnam Street

For books, something that has helped me in getting the best of the stuff in them has been this. For every new book, create a google doc with three sections:

1. Before
2. During
3. After

The first "Before" section is to list down your preconceptions about the topic you're going to read about. What do you think you already know about the topic? What do you feel about the topic? And so on.

Next, as you go through the book page by page, contrast whatever you encounter with your preconceptions. Is there anything new or interesting there? Actively seek interesting-ness or novelty. Or is there a fact that contradicts or supports your preconceptions? Note all of those down.

And once you're done with reading, spend some time listing down your thoughts in the "After" section. Have you become wiser due to the book? Do you feel better at knowing more? Have you clarified your understanding of the world or yourself? Or at least, do you have more questions on the topic with you for further study?

If you have additional time, restructure everything you store into a blog-post. I modified this idea originally from Farnam Street (https://fs.blog).

In the long run, this sort of delta-maximization framework can become powerful and addictive and a great addition to your life.

> It would be nice to suspend reality and solve problems with magic, but until then, we would do well to consider https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

This seems disingenuous. Yes, there are times when you don't know what's wrong, and this all gets uncovered along the way. I don't think that's what is being discussed here.

There are plenty of times when you do and the situation is the same. When dealing with some medical issues for my son, we had a diagnoses more or less right away - everybody knew what we were dealing with. The process we were following (and follow up treatment) was well established - everyone was able to tell us what was going to happen next, out to weeks (or even years) in advance.

Yet the bills still kept rolling in for months after the fact, and certainly nobody was able to tell us up front what all of these known treatments would cost.

For me, an American, the work ethic comes from reading Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography after being inspired by a passage found in an American Literature textbook in 10th grade. [0]

edit: Of all the different philosophies a young person can subscribe to, entering in the middle of my life, I'm lucky to have chosen one of the better ones. I remember at the time really wanted to embrace an identity of being American and here is a founding father who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and signed the Constitution who was born and raised with the institution of slavery owning slaves himself and evolving into an outspoken anti-slavery advocate working to abolish the practice. That is what it means to be an American, to grow, change, and become better, just.

[0] https://fs.blog/the-thirteen-virtues/

Well, maybe the best example is this: https://fs.blog/tgmm/

I have physical copies of these books. They are really well quality material, well layouted, and the content is similar to what is found at fs.blog website. All the "mental models" for thinking they include are kind of p*rn for this kind of stuff, but it is nearly impossible to apply these mental models consciously in real life, especially ad-hoc real life situation. There is no time to think each different mental model for every situation/task/problem/matter. The most effective thinking is the real-life "quick math/no BS" style of thinking, and the real superpower is if you have made your own expedition to the matter, because then you can just recall the stuff you need from your own brain quicker and better than any LLM.

Luke Smith's article on the 4 causes is great and captures an important idea about what modernism lacks.

if you like melting asphalt (probably the best blog I've ever read) you'll probably also like:

- Venkatesh Rao's https://ribbonfarm.com (it's very much a diamonds-in-the-rough type blog imo)

- the farnam street blog https://fs.blog/ consistently puts out good content

- /sometimes/ lesswrong puts out good ideas when they're not busy modelling spherical cows in a vacuum - https://www.lesswrong.com/

- if you're really into systems theory and don't mind reading strongly management-consultant oriented prose (can't abide it myself but the content is good), https://thesystemsthinker.com/

The answer is twofold 1) Network effect combined with 2) coordination problem. One or few figures dropping off is just net loss for them, does not affect the X at all. Only way to do the change is to coordinate and do it with critical mass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game

https://fs.blog/coordination-problems/

Individual action can't solve problems effectively when the cost of changing behavior is too high when others don't follow immediately. Many public figures started their mastodon/bluesky/threads accounts but came back to Twitter when they didn't get following there.