2025-10-02 08:12:24
尼维：我们都见过SpaceX火箭的Raptor发动机图片，如果你仔细观察各种版本，它们从易于调整变得难以调整。因为最新版本的发动机部件数量少，你几乎无法对其进行任何改动。
早期版本的发动机有成千上万的部件，你可以随意更改其厚度、宽度、材料等。而当前版本几乎没有多余的部件可供调整。
纳尔：复杂性理论中有一个理论，每当我们在自然界中发现一个复杂系统在运作时，它通常是由一个非常简单的系统经过反复迭代而产生的。
我们最近在人工智能研究中就能看到这一点——人们只是将非常简单的算法与越来越多的数据结合。它们不断变得更聪明。
但反向操作则效果不佳。当你设计一个非常复杂的系统，然后试图用它构建一个功能完整的大型系统时，它往往会崩溃。因为其中的复杂性太多。因此，很多产品设计都是通过不断迭代自己的设计，直到找到一个简单有效的方案。而往往我们会在其中添加一些不必要的部分，之后又必须回过头来从这些杂乱中提取出真正的简洁。
这一点在个人计算领域也能看到，macOS仍然比iOS更难使用。iOS更接近操作系统这一概念的柏拉图式理想。不过，基于大型语言模型（LLM）的操作系统可能更接近——因为它能用自然语言进行交互。
最终，你必须去除一些东西才能实现扩展。Raptor发动机就是这样一个例子。当你弄清楚哪些部分有效后，就会意识到哪些是不必要的，然后去除它们。
这也是马斯克的一个重要原则。他基本上认为：在你优化一个系统之前，这是最后才做的事情。在你开始尝试让某物更高效之前，首先要质疑需求。
你会问：“为什么这个需求存在？”
乔根森新书里提到的埃隆方法之一是，你首先要找到这个需求的来源。不是哪个部门提出的，而是某个具体的人提出的。
是谁说“这就是我想要的”？
你要回去问：“你真的需要这个吗？”
然后你消除这个需求。一旦去除了不必要的需求，你就会拥有更少的需求。现在你有了部件，然后你尝试尽可能多地去除这些部件，以满足绝对必要的需求。
之后，你才开始考虑优化，思考如何最高效地制造这个部件并将其放置在合适的位置。最后，你可能会进入成本效率和规模经济等层面。
将一个优秀产品从零带到一的关键人物，通常是那个能将整个问题装在自己脑海中的单个人——通常是创始人。他们需要能够理解：为什么这个部件在这里？如果部件A被去除了，那么部件B、C、D、E及其需求和考虑又会如何变化？
这就是对整个产品拥有整体视角的体现。
你可以在Raptor发动机的设计中看到这一点。埃隆给出的例子让我印象深刻——他试图让这些玻璃纤维垫片在特斯拉电池上更高效地生产。于是他去了生产线，发现这个过程太慢，就干脆把睡袋铺在地上，留在那里。他们尝试优化用于将玻璃纤维垫片粘贴到电池上的机器人，试图更高效地完成这个任务或加快这条生产线。他们确实做到了一些改进，但速度仍然令人沮丧。
最后，埃隆说：“为什么会有这个需求？为什么我们要在电池上放玻璃纤维垫片？”
电池工程师回答：“实际上是因为降噪，所以你得去和噪音与振动团队谈谈。”
于是埃隆去找了噪音与振动团队。
他问：“为什么我们要放这些垫片？电池的噪音和振动问题是什么？”
他们却说：“不，不——其实没有噪音和振动问题。它们放在这里是因为电池起火时的热量。”
然后他回到电池团队，问：“我们真的需要这个吗？”
他们回答：“不需要。这里没有火灾问题，也没有热保护问题。这是过时的做法。其实是噪音和振动问题。”
他们各自都按照自己被训练的方式做事——按照过去的方法。他们通过测试安全性来验证，用麦克风测试噪音，然后决定不需要这些垫片，于是去除了这个部件。
这在非常复杂的系统和设计中经常发生。
有趣的是，每个人都说自己是“通才”，这其实是他们逃避成为“专家”的一种说法。但真正需要的是“通才”——一种能够掌握各种专业领域、至少达到80%熟练程度的通才，从而做出明智权衡的人。
尼维：我认为人们要获得这种通才能力——能够掌握任何专业领域——的方法是，如果你要学习某样东西，如果你要上学，就去学习那些具有广泛影响的理论。
纳尔：我会进一步简化，只说学习物理学。
一旦你学习了物理学，你就是在学习现实如何运作。如果你有坚实的物理学背景，你就能掌握电气工程、计算机科学、材料科学、统计学和概率学，甚至数学，因为它们都是应用性的。
我几乎在任何领域遇到的最优秀的人，都有物理学背景。如果你没有物理学背景，也别着急。我也有失败的物理学背景。你仍然可以通过其他方式达到，但物理学能训练你与现实互动，而它又是如此严苛，以至于能把你所有不切实际的假想都击碎。
相比之下，如果你在社会科学领域，你可能会有各种荒诞的信念。即使你掌握了一些社会科学中使用的抽象数学，你可能只有10%的真实知识，而90%都是错误的。
物理学的好处在于，你可以学习相当基础的物理学知识。你不需要深入到夸克和量子物理等层面。你只需学习一些基本的物理概念，比如球体沿斜面滚动，这其实是一个很好的入门。
不过我认为任何STEM学科都值得学习。如果你无法选择学习什么，或者已经错过了学习阶段，那就与他人合作。实际上，最好的人并不只是学习物理学。他们是动手实践的人，是建造者，是不断创造东西的人。动手实践的人总是处于知识的前沿，因为他们总是使用最新的工具和部件来打造酷炫的东西。
因此，是那些在无人机成为军事工具之前就制造竞速无人机的人，是那些在机器人成为军事工具之前就制造战斗机器人的人，是那些想要在家中拥有电脑，而不满足于去学校使用电脑的人。这些人真正理解事物，也最快地推动知识进步。
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Nivi: We’ve all seen the pictures of the Raptor engine for the SpaceX rockets, and if you look at the various iterations, they go from easy-to-vary to hard-to-vary. Because the most recent version just doesn’t have that many parts that you can fool around with.
The earlier versions have a million different parts where you could change the thickness of it, the width of it, the material, and so on. The current version barely has any parts left for you to do anything with.
Naval: There’s a theory in complexity theory that whenever you find a complex system working in nature, it’s usually the output of a very simple system or thing that was iterated over and over.
We’re seeing this lately in AI research—you’re just taking very simple algorithms and dumping more and more data into them. They keep getting smarter.
What doesn’t work as well is the reverse. When you design a very complex system and then you try to make a functioning large system out of that, it just falls apart. There’s too much complexity in it. So a lot of product design is iterating on your own designs until you find the simple thing that works. And often you’ve added stuff around it that you don’t need, and then you have to go back and extract the simplicity back out of the noise.
You can see this in personal computing where macOS is still quite a bit harder to use than iOS. iOS is closer to the Platonic ideal of an operating system. Although an LLM-based operating system might be even closer—speaking in natural language.
Eventually, you have to remove things to get them to scale, and the Raptor engine is an example of that. As you figure out what works, then you realize what’s unnecessary and you can remove parts.
And this is one of Musk’s great driving principles where he basically says: Before you optimize a system, that’s among the last things that you do. Before you start trying to figure out how to make something more efficient, the first thing you do is you question the requirements.
You’re like, “Why does the requirement even exist?”
One of the Elon methods in Jorgenson’s new book is you first go and you track down the requirement. And not which department came up with the requirement; the requirement has to come from an individual.
Who’s the individual who said, “This is what I want.”
You go back and say, “Do you really need this?”
You eliminate the requirement. And then once you’ve eliminated the requirements that are unnecessary, then you have a smaller number of requirements. Now you have parts, and you try to get rid of as many parts as you can to fulfill the requirements that are absolutely necessary.
And then after that, maybe then you start thinking about optimization, and now you’re trying to figure out how can I manufacture this part and fit it into the right place most efficiently. And then finally, you might get into cost efficiencies and economies of scale and those sorts of things.
The most critical person to take a great product from zero to one is the single person—usually the founder—who can hold the entire problem in their head and make the trade-offs, and understand why each component is where it is.
And they don’t necessarily need to be the person designing each component, or manufacturing or knowing all the ins and outs, but they do need to be able to understand: Why is this piece here? And if Part A gets removed, then what happens to Parts B, C, D, E and their requirements and considerations?
It’s that holistic view of the whole product.
You’ll see this in the Raptor engine design. The example that Elon gives that I thought was a good one—he was trying to get these fiberglass mats on top of the Tesla batteries produced more efficiently.
So he went to the line where it was taking too long, put his sleeping bag down, and just stayed at the line. And they tried to optimize the robot that was gluing the fiberglass mats to the batteries. They were trying to attach them more efficiently or speed up that line. And they did—they managed to improve it a bit, but it was still frustratingly slow.
And finally he said, “Why is this requirement here? Why are we putting fiberglass mats on top of the batteries?”
The battery guy said, “It’s actually because of noise reduction, so you’ve got to go talk to the noise and vibration team.”
So he goes to the noise and vibration team.
He’s like, “Why do we have these mats here? What is the noise and vibration issue?”
And they’re like, “No, no—there’s no noise and vibration issue. They’re there because of heat, if the battery catches fire.”
And then he goes back to the battery team like, “Do we need this?”
And they’re like, “No. There’s not a fire issue here. It’s not a heat protection issue. That’s obsolete. It’s a noise and vibration issue.”
They had each been doing things the way they were trained to do—in the way things had been done. They tested it for safety, and they tested it by putting microphones on there and tracking the noise, and they decided they didn’t need it, and so they eliminated the part.
This happens a lot with very complex systems and complex designs.
It’s funny—everybody says “I’m a generalist,” which is their way of copping out on being a specialist. But really what you want to be is a polymath, which is a generalist who can pick up every specialty, at least to the 80/20 level, so they can make smart trade-offs.
Nivi: The way that I suggest people gain that polymath capability—being a generalist that can pick up any specialty—is if you are going to study something, if you are going to go to school, study the theories that have the most reach.
Naval: I would summarize that further and just say study physics.
Once you study physics, you’re studying how reality works. And if you have a great background in physics, you can pick up electrical engineering. You can pick up computer science. You can pick up material science. You can pick up statistics and probability. You can pick up mathematics because it’s part of it—it’s applied.
The best people that I’ve met in almost any field have a physics background. If you don’t have a physics background, don’t cry. I have a failed physics background. You can still get there the other ways, but physics trains you to interact with reality, and it is so unforgiving that it beats all the nice falsities out of you.
Whereas if you’re somewhere in social science, you can have all kinds of cuckoo beliefs. Even if you pick up some of the abstruse mathematics they use in social sciences, you may have 10% real knowledge, but 90% false knowledge.
The good news about physics is you can learn pretty basic physics. You don’t have to go all the way deep into quarks and quantum physics and so on. You can just go with basic balls rolling down a slope, and it’s actually a good backgrounder.
But I think any of the STEM disciplines are worth studying. Now if you don’t have the choice of what to study and you’re already past that, just team up with people. Actually, the best people don’t necessarily even just study physics. They’re tinkerers, they’re builders, they’re building things. The tinkerers are always at the edge of knowledge because they’re always using the latest tools and the latest parts to build the cool things.
So it’s the guy building the racing drone before drones are a military thing, or the guy building the fighting robots before robots are a military thing, or the person putting together the personal computer because they want the computer in their home and they’re not satisfied going to school and using the computer there. These are the people who understand things the best, and they’re advancing knowledge the fastest.
2025-09-30 05:47:07
海军：我认为跨所有不同学科阅读德鲁伊特的著作非常有用。即使他谈论迷思和迷思理论——这些源于进化，但直接延伸到认识论、推测和批判。
它超越了他对财富的定义：你能实现的一系列物理转变。这同时考虑了资本和知识，并清楚地表明知识是更大的组成部分。然后这种理解可以应用于商业，并融入到你的日常生活中。它既适用于国家的财富，也适用于个人的财富。
因此，有很多部分是相互连接的。
他说好的解释很难被改变。当你回顾一个好的解释时，你会想：“好吧，它本来可以是其他样子吗？这似乎是唯一能让这个事物运作的方式。”
所有这些不同的部分以一种相互约束的方式结合在一起，产生了一些你意想不到的涌现特性、复杂性或结果——一种能够完美解释一切的解释。
这不仅适用于好的解释，也适用于产品开发。
好的产品很难被改变。
看看iPhone：这是一款光滑、完美、美丽的宝石。自第一代以来，其外形尺寸几乎没有太大变化。它围绕着单屏、多点触控、内置电池、使其适合放入口袋、使其在手中顺畅滑动——基本上创造了真正个人、便携式计算机的柏拉图式理想。
因此，这款产品很难被改变。苹果及其竞争对手在16代iPhone中都尝试对其进行改变，但未能实质性改变。他们只能改进组件和一些底层能力；但实质上，外形尺寸很难改变，他们设计了正确的东西。
有一句著名的说法，我认为来自安托万·德·圣埃克苏佩里，他说飞机机翼是完美的，“不是因为没有可以添加的东西，而是因为没有可以去除的东西。”
这飞机机翼很难被改变。
当我们确定前往火星的航天器的正确设计时，我打赌在高层次和细节上，它在相当长一段时间内都将很难被改变，直到出现某种突破性技术。
基本的内燃机设计在我们获得足够好的电池之前很难改变，之后我们创造了电动汽车。现在电动汽车也很难改变。
事实上，现在一些设计师抱怨说，在现代社会，产品和物品开始看起来都差不多了。这是不是因为Instagram？为什么？
至少在汽车案例中，它们看起来都经过风洞设计，因为这是最有效的设计。它们之所以看起来流线型、光滑，是因为它们都经过风洞测试，试图找到在空气中阻力最小的形态。因此，它们最终都看起来一样，因为这种设计在不失去效率的情况下很难改变。
优秀的作家以如此高的密度和互联性写作，以至于他们的作品具有分形特性。你会在准备好接受知识的层面遇到它。
你不需要理解全部。这就是学习的本质。你读了，你理解了20%。然后你再回顾一遍，你理解了25%。你一边听布雷特·霍尔的播客，现在你理解了28%。你再去格洛克或ChatGPT上提问，深入探讨某个部分，现在你理解了31%。
所有知识都是作者与观察者或读者之间的交流，你们双方都必须达到一定的层次才能吸收它。当你准备好接受不同的片段时，你会接受不同的片段，但无论你处于什么层次，只要能够进行交流和阅读语言，你总会从中得到一些东西。
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Naval: I think reading Deutsch across all the different disciplines is very useful. Even when he talks about memes and meme theory—that comes from evolution, but crosses over straight into epistemology, conjecture, and criticism.
And it reaches far beyond his definition of wealth: the set of physical transformations that you can effect. That takes into account both capital and knowledge, and it clearly shows that knowledge is a bigger component. And then that can be brought into business and applied into your everyday life. It can apply to the wealth of nations and it can apply to the wealth of individuals.
So there are a lot of parts that interconnect together.
He says that good explanations are hard to vary. So when you look back on a good explanation, you say, “Well, how could it have been otherwise? This is the only way this thing could have worked.”
All these different parts fit together and constrain each other in such a way that there’s now some emergent property or some complexity or some outcome that you didn’t expect—some explanation that neatly explains everything.
That doesn’t just apply to good explanations. It applies to product development.
Good products are hard to vary.
Go look at the iPhone: this smooth, perfect, beautiful jewel. The form factor hasn’t really changed that much since the original one. It’s all around the single screen, the multi-touch, embedding the battery, making it fit into your pocket, making it smooth and sliding in your hand—essentially creating the Platonic ideal of the truly personal, pocketable computer.
So that product is hard to vary. Both Apple and its competitors have tried to vary it across 16 generations of iPhone and they haven’t been able to materially vary it. They’ve been able to improve the components and improve some of the underlying capabilities; but materially, the form factor is hard to vary. They designed the right thing.
There’s a famous saying, I think from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, where he says the airplane wing is perfect “not because there’s nothing left to add, but because there’s nothing left to take away.”
That airplane wing is hard to vary.
When we figure out the proper design of the spacecraft to get to Mars, I will bet you that both at a high level and in the details for quite a long time, that thing will be hard to vary until there’s some breakthrough technology.
The basic internal combustion engine design was hard to vary until we got batteries good enough and then we created the electric car. And now the electric car is hard to vary.
In fact, there’s a complaint now among some designers that in modern society, products and objects are starting to look all the same. Is that because of Instagram? Why is that?
Well, at least in the car case, they all look like they’ve been through a wind tunnel design because that is the most efficient design. The reason they all look swoopy and streamlined is because they’re all going through a wind tunnel and they’re trying to find the thing that cuts through the air with minimal resistance. And so they do all end up looking the same because that design is hard to vary without losing efficiency.
Good writers write with such high density and interconnectedness that their works are fractal in nature. You will meet the knowledge at the level at which you are ready to receive it.
You don’t have to understand it all. This is the nature of learning. You read it, you got 20% of it. Then you go back through it, you got 25% of it. You listen to one of Brett Hall’s podcasts alongside it, now you got 28% of it. Now you go to Grok or ChatGPT, you ask it some questions, you dig in on some part, now you got 31% of it.
All knowledge is a communication between the author and the observer or the reader, and you both have to be at a certain level to absorb it. When you’re ready to receive different pieces, you will receive different pieces, but you’ll always get something out of it no matter what level you’re at, as long as you can even just communicate and read the language.
2025-09-27 06:05:38
Nivi认为，对于知识哲学（即认识论）的最新研究，可以直接跳到大卫·德鲁克（David Deutsch）。Naval表示赞同，认为如果想了解认识论，直接阅读德鲁克的著作就足够了。不过，他补充说，对于某些人来说，了解相关的历史背景、反论点以及德鲁克的理论来源可能有帮助。传统知识理论，如“被证实的真信念理论”或“归纳理论”，深深植根于我们的教育和日常经验中。例如，归纳似乎很直观：每天看到太阳升起，自然会认为明天太阳也会升起，这看起来像是常识。因此，许多人可能认为这些理论是稳固的，但德鲁克的理论却会挑战这些观点，让人意识到它们并不牢固。他建议读者先从德鲁克开始，如果对某些内容不确定，可以再阅读其他相关著作，然后再回到德鲁克的书重新理解，这样能更好地体会他如何解决这些问题。
Naval还提到，德鲁克本人会引用卡尔·波普尔（Karl Popper），但认为德鲁克的写作风格比波普尔更易理解。他觉得波普尔的著作较为晦涩，而德鲁克则面向更广泛的读者，不是专门写给哲学家或科学家的，而是写给普通大众的。德鲁克更像是在阐述自己的思想，并解释它们如何相互关联。他指出，虽然阅读德鲁克的著作可以让人看到其理论的整体性，但仅阅读认识论部分可能无法获得最大价值。不过，所有人都应该从认识论部分开始，因为这是《无限的开始》（The Beginning of Infinity）一书的前几章。有趣的是，这本书的开头和结尾部分相对容易理解，而中间部分涉及量子计算、量子物理和进化论等内容，较为艰深，需要一定的科学概念基础。德鲁克在提出多重宇宙理论时，需要设计实验来证伪该理论，因此他发展出了量子计算理论，这反过来推动了量子计算领域的发展。这体现了量子物理与量子计算之间的紧密联系。
Nivi: For the state of the art on the philosophy of knowledge, which people call epistemology, you can basically skip everything and jump straight to David Deutsch.
Naval: I think that’s right. If you just want to know epistemology, read David Deutsch—full stop.
That said, for some people it helps to know the history, the counterarguments, where he’s coming from.
The existing theories of knowledge—like the justified true belief theory or the inductive theory of knowledge—these are so deeply embedded into us, both by school learning, but also by everyday experience.
Induction seems like it should work: You watch the sunrise every day, the sun is going to rise tomorrow. That just seems like common sense.
So many people believe in that, that if you just read Deutsch, you would see him shooting down these things, but you yourself would not have those things on solid footing. So you might imagine some counterexample exists.
When I first read Deutsch a long time ago I didn’t quite get it. I treated it just like any other book that any other physicist had written. So I would read Paul Davies and Carlo Rovelli and Deutsch, and I would treat them with the same level of contemplation, time, and respect.
It turned out I was wrong.
It turned out that Deutsch was actually operating at a much deeper level. He had a lot of different theories that coherently hung together, and they create a world philosophy where all the pieces reinforce each other.
It might help to read others and not just skip to Deutsch, but I would definitely start with Deutsch. Then, if you’re not sure about it, I would read some of the others and then come back to Deutsch and try again, and then you’ll see how he addresses those issues.
Deutsch himself would refer you to Popper. He would say, “Oh, I’m just repeating Popper.”
Not quite true. I find Popper much less approachable, much harder to read, much less clear of a writer. Although I think here both Deutsch and Brett Hall would disagree with me—they find Popper very lucid; I find him very difficult to read.
For whatever reason, I find Deutsch easier to read, maybe because Popper spent a lot more time elucidating core points. Popper was writing for philosophers. Deutsch is not writing for philosophers. Deutsch is not even writing for scientists. Deutsch is not writing for you. I get the feeling Deutsch is writing for himself. He is just elucidating his own thoughts and how they all connect together.
I also don’t think you’re going to get maximal value out of Deutsch just reading the epistemology, although that is absolutely where everybody should start. That’s the first three chapters of The Beginning of Infinity.
Ironically, in The Beginning of Infinity, the first few chapters and the last few chapters are the easiest and the most accessible. The middle is a slog because that goes into quantum computation, quantum physics, evolution, et cetera.
That’s where I think people struggle because it does require—not necessarily a mathematical or scientific background but at least a comfort level with scientific concepts and principles. And he’s making a strong argument for the multiverse, which most people don’t have a dog in that fight. They haven’t thought that far ahead. They’re not wedded to the observer collapse theory of quantum mechanics because they don’t really care about quantum mechanics. It doesn’t impact their everyday life.
What I got out of reading all of Deutsch was I got to see how his theory all hangs together. Every piece touches upon and relies upon another piece.
He actually came up with the theory of quantum computation and extended the Church–Turing conjecture into the Church–Turing–Deutsch conjecture when he was trying to come up with a way to falsify his theory of the multiverse—which was a quantum physics theory. And to do that, he had to invent quantum computation, because to invent the experiment for how to falsify the multiverse theory he had to—in his mind—imagine an AGI, get inside the AGI’s brain and say, “If that AGI is observing something, does it collapse?”
“But now I need to be inside the brain.”
“Well, how do I get inside the brain of a quantum AGI? How do you even create a quantum AGI? We don’t have quantum computers!”
“Okay, we need quantum computers.”
So he came up with the theory of quantum computation, and that launched the field of quantum computing.
That’s an example of how quantum physics and quantum computing are inextricably linked.
2025-09-25 02:30:53
Nivi认为，与叔本华不同，Naval是一位面向大众的工业哲学家，他的哲学更像工业设计师的作品，适合大众阅读。她提到，人们常建议阅读像亚里士多德和维特根斯坦这样的“伟大著作”，但她读过之后收获甚微。相比之下，她更喜欢在Twitter上看到的哲学思考，比如Naval的。她建议那些想读哲学的人直接去读大卫·德克斯（David Deutsch）的作品。
Naval赞同这一观点，表示他无法忍受那些传统哲学家的著作。他认为这些书大多是在琐碎问题上进行晦涩的争论，试图构建包罗万象的世界理论。即使是叔本华，当他涉及科学、医学或政治等话题时，观点也显得过时。但他在探讨人性时的见解却具有永恒价值。因此，他建议在涉及人性主题时阅读那些经得起时间考验的经典著作（即“Lindy书籍”），而在追求具体知识、实用价值时，则应关注前沿领域，因为这些知识更及时且更容易过时。
Naval认为，现代人更倾向于阅读高密度、有深度的内容，而不是低密度、冗长的书籍，比如历史书。他喜欢威尔·杜兰特（Will Durant）的《历史的教训》，因为它是对杜兰特12卷《文明的故事》的浓缩，但不会去读那12卷完整的系列。他强调，当前的读者更重视智慧和普适性原则，而非单纯的知识积累。他列举了德克斯、博尔赫斯、特德·奇昂（Ted Chiang）以及早期的尼尔·斯蒂芬森（Neal Stephenson）等作者，认为他们都是高密度思想的代表。他最后指出，真正优秀的作者都尊重读者的时间，而叔本华正是这样一位作者。
Nivi: Unlike Schopenhauer, you are an industrial philosopher. Like an industrial designer, your philosophy is designed for the masses. People suggest you read the great books—Aristotle and Wittgenstein and all the supposedly great philosophers.
I’ve read almost all that stuff, and I’ve gotten very little value from it. Where I have gotten value is the philosophizing of people on Twitter, like you. Anybody who wants to read philosophy, I would just tell them to skip it and go read David Deutsch.
Naval: You’re not wrong. I can’t stand any of the philosophers you talked about. I don’t like Plato either.
Every other piece of philosophy I’ve picked up and put down relatively quickly because they’re just making very obscure arguments over minutiae and trying to come up with all-encompassing theories of the world. Even Schopenhauer falls into that trap. When he tries to talk to other philosophers, he’s at his worst.
When I like him is in his shorter essays. That’s where he almost writes like he’s on Twitter. He would have dominated Twitter. He has high density of ideas—very well thought through; good, minimal examples and analogies. You can pick it up, read one paragraph, and you’re thinking for the next hour. I think I’m a better writer, a better thinker, and a better judge of people and character thanks to what I read from him.
Now, he’s writing from the early part of the 19th century. Whenever he wanders into topics that are scientific or medical or political, he’s obviously off base—that stuff doesn’t apply anymore. But when he’s writing about human nature, that is timeless.
When it comes to anything about human nature, I say go read the Lindy books—the older books, the ones that have survived the test of time. But if you want to develop specific knowledge, get paid for it, do something useful, then you want to stay on the bleeding edge. That knowledge is going to be more timely and obsolete more quickly.
Those two make sense. What doesn’t make sense to me is just reading stuff that’s not Lindy, or that’s not about human nature, but is old. I also shy away from stuff that’s low density in the learnings, like history books.
I like The Lessons of History by Will Durant because it’s a summarization of The Story of Civilization, which was his large 12-volume series. But I’m not going to go read the 12-volume series. I’ve read plenty of history. I know he’s referring to these kinds of things, so I’m not just taking his word for it on high-level concept.
But at the same time, at this point in my life, I want to read high-density works. You can call it the TikTok Disease or the Twitter generation, but it’s also just being respectful of our time. We already have a lot of data. We have some knowledge. Now we want wisdom. Now we want the generalized principles that we can attach to all of the other information we already have in our minds.
We do want to read high-density work, but I would argue that Schopenhauer is very high-density work.
All my favorite authors are very high density. Deutsch is extremely high density. Borges is very high density. Ted Chiang is very high density. The old Neal Stephenson was very high density (then he just got high volume, high density, high everything).
But the best authors respect the reader’s time, and Schopenhauer is very much in that vein.
2025-09-23 00:27:33
Naval 的观点：
承担责任与努力的重要性
对群体反馈的批判
对叔本华的解读
行动与真实反馈的关联
核心结论：
Naval: You have to take responsibility for everything bad that happens to you—and this is a mindset.
Maybe it’s a little fake, but it’s very self-serving. And in fact, if you can go the extra mile and just attribute everything good that happens to you to luck, that might be helpful too. But at some level, truth is very important. You don’t want to fake it.
From what I have observed, the truth of the matter is: People who work very hard and apply themselves and don’t give up and take responsibility for the outcomes on a long enough time scale, end up succeeding in whatever they’re focused on. And every success case knows this.
Richard Feynman used to say that he wasn’t a genius. He was just a boy who applied himself and worked really hard. Yeah, he was very smart, obviously. But that was necessary, but not sufficient. We all know the trope of the smart, lazy guy.
And I like to harass all of my friends—including Nivi—that one of the problems I notice with these guys is you’re just operating way below potential. Your potential is so much higher than where you are. You have to apply some of that into kinetic.
And ironically that will raise your potential because we’re not static creatures.
We’re dynamic creatures. And you will learn more. You will learn by doing. So just stop making excuses and get in the ring.
Nivi: You also like Schopenhauer. What have you learned from Schopenhauer, or is there anything surprising in his work?
Naval: Schopenhauer is not for everybody and there are many different Schopenhauers. He wrote quite a bit, and you could read his more obscure philosophical texts, like The World as Will and Idea, where he was writing for other philosophers. Or you could read his more practical stuff like On the Vanity of Existence.
He was one of the few people in history who wrote unflinchingly. He wrote what he believed to be true. He wasn’t always correct, but he never lied to you—and that comes across. He thought about things very deeply.
He didn’t care that much what people thought of him. All he knew was, “What I am writing down I know to be true.”
He also didn’t put on any airs. He didn’t use fancy language; he didn’t try to impress you.
People call him a pessimist. I don’t think that’s entirely fair. I think his worldview could be interpreted as pessimistic, but I just read him when I want to read a harsh dose of truth.
What Schopenhauer did uniquely for me is that he gave me complete permission to be me. He just did not care at all what the masses thought, and his disdain for common thinking comes out.
Now, I don’t necessarily share that—I’m a little bit more of an egalitarian than he was. But he really gives you permission to be yourself. So if you’re good at something, don’t be shy about it. Accept that you’re good at something.
And that was hard for me because we all want to get along. If you want to get along in a group, you don’t want to stand out too much. It’s the old line: The tall poppy gets cut.
But if you’re going to do anything exceptional, you do have to bet on yourself in some way. And if you’re exceptional at something, that does require you acknowledging that you’re exceptional at it—or at least trying to be—and not worrying about what other people think.
Now, you don’t want to be delusional either. Anyone who has been in the investing business is constantly hit by people who say, “I’m so great at something,” and they’re a little delusional. No, you don’t get to say you’re exceptional at something. Other people get to say you’re exceptional at something, and your mom doesn’t count.
Feedback from other people is usually fake. Awards are fake. Critics are fake. Kudos from your friends and family are fake. They might try to be genuine, but it’s lost in such a sea of fakeness that you’re not going to get real feedback.
Real feedback comes from free markets and nature. Physics is harsh: either your product worked, or it didn’t. Free markets are harsh: either people buy it, or they don’t. But feedback from other people is fake.
You can’t get good feedback from groups because groups are just trying to get along. Individuals search for truth, groups search for consensus. A group that doesn’t get along decoheres. It falls apart. And the larger the group, the less good feedback you’re going to get from it.
You don’t want to necessarily rely on feedback from your mom or your friends or your family, or even from award ceremonies and award systems.
If you’re optimizing your company to end up on the cover of a magazine, or to win an industry award, you’re failing.
You need customers. That’s your real feedback. You need feedback from nature.
Did your rocket launch?
Did your drone fly?
Did your 3D printer print the object within the tolerances that it was supposed to, in the time it was supposed to, in the cost budget that it was supposed to?
It’s very easy to fool yourself. It’s very easy to be fooled by others.
It is impossible to fool Mother Nature.
2025-08-26 14:10:26
Nivi 提到，她喜欢一些在初次看到时便觉得有共鸣的推文，甚至可能转发。她认为人们转发推文是因为他们心中已有某种想法，但尚未找到合适的表达方式。例如，她提到1月17日的一条推文：“为一切负责，以保持你的代理权。” 她认为，承担责任的过程本身就是创造和维护解决问题的自主权。如果不为问题负责，就无法真正解决它。
Naval 表示，Nivi的观点很准确，即某些想法人们早已知晓，但被以一种更优雅的方式表达出来。他引用爱默生的名言：“在每一项天才的成就中，我们都能认出自己曾拒绝的念头；它们以某种异化的庄严姿态回到我们身边。” 他强调自己在推特上的写作方式是表达真实且有趣的观点，同时这些观点必须具有强烈的情感分量，且源于近期的个人经历和深刻感受。否则，他不会随意发布。
他进一步指出，尽管社会存在现实的障碍（如财富被掠夺、出身限制等），但世界并非完全由运气决定。每个人都能通过自身努力改变结果，尤其是当时间跨度越长、活动越深入、迭代越多时，运气的影响会逐渐减弱。以硅谷为例，20年前他遇到的所有年轻天才最终都取得了成功，这说明长期坚持和愿景的重要性。
他提到，像埃隆·马斯克追求火星、山姆致力于发明AGI（通用人工智能）、史蒂夫·乔布斯设想将电脑缩小到书本大小（即iPad）这样的远大目标，能够支撑人们在漫长过程中持续努力。而一种消极的信念（如“你无法成功”）会让人不自觉地走向失败，因此必须保持对自身能力的信心和自主权。
总结：
Nivi: Let’s talk about one more tweet which I liked when I first saw it, or I might have retweeted it. I think people retweet things when they see something that they haven’t figured out how to say yet, but they knew in their head, but it’s just implicit—it hadn’t been made explicit.
I think that’s when people are like, “I need to retweet this.”
So this one was January 17: “Blame yourself for everything, and preserve your agency.”
From my end it’s like: Take responsibility for everything, and in the process of taking responsibility for something, you create and preserve the agency to go solve that problem. If you’re not responsible for the problem, there’s no way for you to fix the problem.
Naval: Just to address your point of how it was something you already knew, but phrased in a way that you liked. Emerson did this all the time. He would phrase things in a beautiful way and you would say, “Oh, that’s exactly what I was thinking and feeling, but I didn’t know how to articulate it.”
And the way he put it was he said, “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” And I just love that line. It’s what I try to do with Twitter, which is I try to say something true, but in an interesting way.
And not only is this a true and interesting way to say it, but also it has to be something that really has emotional heft behind it. It has to have struck me recently and been important to me. Otherwise, I’m just faking it. I don’t sit around trying to think up tweets to write. It’s more that something happens to me, something affects me emotionally, and then I synthesize it in a certain way.
I test it. I’m like, “Is this true?” And if I feel like it’s true, or mostly true or true in the context that I care about, and if I can say it in some way that’ll help me stick in my mind, then I just send it out there. And it’s nothing new for the people who get it.
If it’s not said in an interesting way, then it’s a cliché, or if they’ve heard it too much, it’s a cliché. But if it’s said in an interesting way, then it may remind them of something that was important, or it might convert their specific knowledge, or might be a hook for converting their specific knowledge into more general knowledge in their own minds.
So I find that process useful for myself and hopefully others do too. Now, for the specific tweet, I just noticed this tendency where people are very cynical and they’ll say, “All the wealth is stolen,” for example, by banksters and the like, or crony capitalists or what have you, or just outright thieves or oligarchs.
“You can’t rise up in this world if you’re X.”
“You can’t rise up in this world if you’re a poor kid.”
“You can’t rise up in this world if you are from this race or ethnicity, if you were born in that country, or if you are lame or crippled or blind,” or what have you.
The problem with this is that yes, there are real hindrances in the world. It is not a level playing field, and fair is something that only exists in a child’s imagination and cannot be pinned down in any real way. But the world is not entirely luck. In fact, you know that because in your own life there are things that you have done that have led to good outcomes and you know that if you had not done that thing, it would not have led to that good outcome.
So you can absolutely move the needle, and it’s not all luck. And especially the longer the timeframe you’re talking about, the more intense the activity, the more iteration you take and the more thinking and choice you apply into it, the less luck matters. It recedes into the distance.
To give you a simple example, which most people won’t love because they’re not in Silicon Valley, but every brilliant person I met in Silicon Valley 20 years ago, every single one, the young brilliant ones, every single one is successful. Every single one. I cannot think of an exception. I should have gone back and just indexed them all based on their brilliance. By the way, that’s what Y Combinator does at scale, right? What a great mechanism.
So it works. If people stick at it for 20 years, it works. Now you might say, “Easy for you to say, man, that’s for the people in Silicon Valley.”
No one was born here. They all moved here. They moved here because they wanted to be where the other smart kids were and because they wanted to be high agency. So agency does work, but if you’re keeping track of the time period, you’re going to be disappointed.
You’ll give up too soon. So you need a higher motivator. That’s why Elon goes to Mars, and that’s why Sam wants to invent AGI. And that’s why Steve Jobs wanted to build, 50 years ago, in the eighties he was talking about building a computer that would fit in a book.
He was talking about the iPad. So it’s these very long visions that sustain you over the long periods of time to actually build the thing you want to build and get to where you want to get.
So a cynical belief is self-fulfilling. A pessimistic belief is like you’re driving the motorcycle, but you’re looking at the brick wall that you’re supposed to turn away from. You will turn into the brick wall without even realizing it.
So you have to preserve your agency. You have to preserve your belief that you can change things. You’re born with agency. Children are high-agency. They go get what they want. If they want something, they see it, they go get it. You have to preserve your agency. You have to preserve your belief that you can change things.
