THREAD: The top 0.1% of ideas I’ve stumbled upon on the internet.

The rabbit holes (without the distractions).

1. Directional Arrows of Progress

“Study the undeniable arrows of progress.” - @wolfejosh

• The future is kinda like a crossword puzzle.

• Nobody is going to spell out for you - but clues exist.

• Wolfe uses the trend line of history as clues for the future.

• E.g. Look at this directional arrow of progress

• Every time the computer gets more powerful, smaller and closer to our bodies.

• Wolfe used this trend line to bet that Brain-Machine interfaces will be huge and started funding companies in the space.

2. The Cobra Effect

”When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to become a measure” - @G_S_Bhogal

• British colonialists tried to reduce the snake population in India.

• They offered bounties for dead cobras with cash given out to the killers

• The incentives back-fired...

• The local population started breeding cobras & killing them.

• When the government discovered this, the reward program was scrapped.

• The cobra breeders then released their $0 snakes into the street, making the problem much worse.

3. Shaan Clubs

• Cliche trope: "You're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with"

• @ShaanVP takes this simple cliche and actually implements it - by creating clubs of similar people.

• He wanted to learn poker, so lived in a house of people learning poker

• He wanted to learn e-commerce, so created an e-commerce Zoom club.

• "I have a method of trying to get good at something... I form a mastermind of other people in the same boat." - @ShaanVP

• So simple and nobody does it. I felt like an idiot after hearing it.

4. Asch Negative

• The obvious answer is A.

• Asch’s study found that if actors gave the wrong answer, other people would sometimes copy them.

• “Asch Negative“ is a trait where people go against the room. (Contrarian for the sake of truth)

H/T @EricRWeinstein

2 interesting ideas this leads to:

A. Asch Negative will be a test in schools of the future

• How many macro-atrocities (genocide) or micro-atrocities (bullying) could be prevented by having Asch-Negative training for kids?

Watch " @DerrenBrown - The Push" on Netflix

B. We need people to create new words

• Before @EricRWeinstein introduced Asch-Negative, there weren’t any words to truly describe it - resulting in low adoption

• Society’s belief system is like open-sourced software

• New words create new functions & forks in the code

5. CEO's > Presidents

• With the rise of a remote population that can migrate easier, @balajis argues that future presidents will look like CEO's.

• They will focus less on politics - and more on sales, recruitment, and product of their city.

• Early signs are here...

• Smaller cities (startups) will think outside the box to compete with huge attractive cities (mega-corps)

• LA or NYC is the mega-corps that don't have to innovate because they're number 1

• Most challenger cities will fail - like startups. (But % will thrive)

6. Calendar-Priority Alignment

• When @rabois meets with a new CEO, he asks to see:

1. Their priorities
2. Their calendar

• They rarely ever match.

• So simple. So obvious. Rarely ever done. I felt stupid after hearing it.

Reminds me of Munger on Mozart being miserable his whole life - because he overspent his income

"If Mozart can't get by with this kind of asinine conduct, I don't think you should try."

If elite CEO's fail the calendar-priority alignment test, I'm 99% sure we are (I am).

7. Write Before Action

• @Conaw writes down what he plans to do, and how he plans to do it (in detail) before he does it

• "Why? Because sometimes I realize as I am halfway through writing things out that there is a fundamentally better approach."

• So simple. Rarely done

• "...my main reasons for writing things down is because I want to find out if there is work I can safely avoid." - @Conaw

• "Another advantage of breaking down the steps into detailed and discreet chunks of work -- you don't have to do everything yourself." - @Conaw

8. The Hotel Bathroom Principle

• "When you want to cultivate serendipity, stick to the 'Hotel Bathroom' dress code.

Always dress well enough to walk into any a bathroom at a hotel you're not staying at and get away with it." - @david_perell

9. Knowledge = The Value

• "(Knowledge) it's not inside the thing itself. For example, oil is useless unless you know how to refine it, burn it, and use it for combustion.

Information is useless unless there's a brain there to receive it." - @naval

• The internet is kinda like college. Educational but full of distractions.

• Customisable algorithms of the future should optimise for the individual's goals - rather than the goals of the platform.

• Until then, we’re all swimming in sewage trying to find nuggets of gold.

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