Worldviews, altruism, and embracing variance (with Emmett Shear)

Jun 12, 2024 1h 20m 29 insights Episode Page ↗
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Emmett Scheer about intersubjective concepts, distributed systems, optimism bias, and leading successful tech startups, exploring his nuanced worldview and practical lessons from entrepreneurship.
Actionable Insights

1. Prioritize Local Impact

Focus on making your personal community and immediate connections good, then invest in your neighborhood or city, and only expand efforts to state, country, and global levels once local spheres are thriving due to the dramatic need for humility and groundedness in local information.

2. Anticipate Success Actively

Cultivate a deep, rich anticipation of success to drive action, skill acquisition, and hard work, as this belief is causally linked to achievement because you expect the effort to pay off.

3. Learn Before Ideating

To succeed in problem-solving (especially startups), engage with users in an open-ended way to deeply understand their problems and build an accurate model of their needs before developing solutions, rather than validating pre-conceived ideas.

4. Identify Worthwhile Problems

In entrepreneurship, recognize that the harder and more critical task is figuring out what problems are truly worth solving, rather than merely solving problems efficiently.

5. Cultivate Optimism Bias

Develop an optimism bias by anticipating positive outcomes (e.g., survival, comfort) to motivate action towards achieving those expectations, rather than passively expecting discomfort or failure.

6. Embed Before Helping

When assisting a community, spend months immersed within it, talking, learning, proposing small interventions, and doing things by hand first to gain deep, embodied knowledge before building solutions.

7. Utilize Management Structure

Implement a management structure in organizations to facilitate both top-down vision fragmentation and bottom-up information consolidation, ensuring effective communication and reconciliation of gaps between strategy and ground-level facts.

8. Find a Co-Founder

If at all possible, find a co-founder to start your company with, as this vastly increases your chance of success in entrepreneurship.

9. Ride New Tech Waves

Leverage new, impactful technologies as a strategic approach for startup success, as historically, many large winning companies have emerged by riding significant waves like the internet or mobile phones.

10. Prioritize Company’s Best Interest

As a CEO, your fundamental mandate is to be a steward of the company’s best interest, requiring you to quickly understand the situation and determine what actions serve that interest.

11. Gather Diverse Perspectives

To rapidly make sense of a chaotic situation, talk to a wide range of people including those within the organization, those close to it, and anyone with a new or informed perspective.

12. Prevent Burnout with Impact

Prevent burnout by actively anticipating that your work has meaning and will drive change in the world, as failing to do so makes sustained motivation almost impossible.

13. Set Ambitious Goals

To improve, set goals that are at a higher level of abstraction and above your current point of homeostasis, understanding that you will consistently aim for and likely fall slightly short of this higher target, which is the nature of willpower and growth.

14. Evaluate Charitable Impact

When giving money to do good, care about the impact of your donations and do your best to estimate it quantitatively or qualitatively, as effectiveness matters.

15. Contextualize Personal Impact

Determine what is most important for you to work on based on your personal context, including where you can have the best impact, your location, knowledge, and connections, rather than seeking a universal ‘most important’ problem.

16. Eliminate Known Bad Practices

Identify and eliminate predictably detrimental actions (e.g., not fully committing to a startup) to reduce negative variance without sacrificing potential high-end positive outcomes, as these actions are predictably detrimental.

While noticing a real technology trend is good, avoid copying what everyone else is doing within that trend, as this ‘second-order trend following’ is a good way to fail because the median startup dies.

18. Act on Unique Opportunities

Seek out and act quickly on opportunistic charitable work where you have trusted personal connections, an asymmetric information advantage, and can provide support with less oversight for maximum leveraged impact.

19. Pledge Fixed Charitable Giving

Consider taking a pledge (e.g., 10% of income) for charitable giving, as this can be a sufficient contribution and alleviate guilt about not doing enough.

20. Don’t Limit Measurable Good

Recognize that while funding measurable, low-variance charitable work is good, most high-impact good is not easily quantifiable or repeatable, and don’t limit your efforts solely to what is easily measurable.

21. Deepen Understanding Cycle

Approach complex concepts by first believing for simple reasons, then doubting for complicated reasons, and finally believing again for more sophisticated and nuanced reasons to achieve a deeper understanding.

22. Assess Desired Variance

Understand that variance is not inherently good or bad; assess situations to determine if you need to minimize variance (e.g., precision tasks) or embrace it for potential upside (e.g., innovation, power law returns).

23. Reframe Democracy’s Purpose

Understand democracy primarily as a safety release valve that allows for the removal of bad leaders when things get bad enough, rather than a primary mechanism for aggregating policy opinions or setting direction.

24. Regulate Tech by Actual Harm

For new technologies like AI that create powerful tools, adopt a regulatory approach that waits for actual harms to arise before acting to prevent them, rather than guessing what harms might occur.

25. Monitor Recursive AI Progress

Pay close attention to AI development, especially for signs of recursive self-improvement, by registering progress and verifying how close projects are to this critical threshold, to be prepared to slow down or stop if necessary.

26. Reform Legislative Elections

Advocate for a system where incumbents win by default unless a no-confidence vote removes them, leading to an open race, and oppose term limits for legislators as they empower bureaucracy and parties at the expense of individual elected officials.

27. Absorb Complex Worldviews

To truly understand a person’s worldview, spend a good deal of time with them in person or absorb their general approach by reading their extensive writings across a broad array of topics.

28. Cultivate Startup Persistence

Be persistent in your startup endeavors, as giving up will likely lead to failure; persistence is a generally true and good piece of advice for increasing your chances of success.

29. Attend E-Learning Webinar

Sign up for the free ‘How to Build Your Own Clearer Thinking Style e-Learning Tool’ webinar on June 19th at 1 p.m. Eastern Time to learn secrets of creating effective e-learning modules and get questions answered live.