A smart person’s favorite hiding place is usually something they call a virtue.
Venkatesh Rao’s tweet book collects years of aphorisms and longer threads. Many of the best take something that looks like wisdom, such as studying history or staying skeptical, and show what it lets a person avoid. The full collection lives at venkateshrao.com/twitter-book.
Aphorisms
Sufficiently enlightened self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism. Sufficiently clueless altruism is indistinguishable from self-interest.
Dumb people become potential problems when they have nothing to lose. Smart people become potential problems when they have nothing to gain.
Moral hazard is when something feels like a video game to you, but is life and death to people affected by your decisions.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Those who study history are doomed to repeat it with elaborate justifications.
You become capable of evil when you discover one other person whom you consider both weaker than you, and morally inferior to you. Innocence ends the moment you think you’ve met someone you can judge and punish.
Easily the least compassionate people I’ve ever met are those who’ve broken out of bad circumstances by individual effort. The depth of their contempt towards those still stuck is astounding.
Cynicism: never being wrong by never being interesting.
Sometimes it is easier to believe a more complicated theory because the less complicated theory requires more courage to believe. A lot of crackpottery is simply smart people lacking courage.
Success is depressing because it teaches so much less than we expect. Failure is depressing because it dumps more learning potential on us than we can handle.
Half of advanced communication skills is learning sophisticated ways to tell people they’re wrong while letting them save face gracefully.
Epistemic obesity: believing too many things relative to the quantity of reality encountered. Epistemic anorexia: believing too few things to sustain a life. Epistemic bulimia: repeatedly believing too much, then rejecting it all in a fit of disillusionment till the next binge.
Perhaps the best measure of leaders is how their reports interact with each other and outsiders when they are not in the room. Every leader is a ghost in the machine they build.
Selected Threads
Against Waldenponding (#12): Retreating from digital noise is a strategic surrender that lobotomizes your agency; the better path is to upgrade your filters and stay in the flow. It is the strongest objection to rejecting the Machine.
Thinking for Yourself (#13): Autonomy is the psychological endurance to hold a private, coherent model of reality that the social world currently treats as a hallucination.
On Mysteries (#15): Stop trying to solve the core tensions of life like math problems. Inhabit them instead, since the lack of an answer is where their generative power comes from.
External vs Internal Locus of Control (#18): If you view the world as something happening to you, you are an NPC. If you view it as a reaction to your moves, you’ve unlocked the protagonist’s physics engine.
Risk vs Depth (#29): Superficiality is an evolutionary defense against systemic ruin. Depth is a luxury for those who have neutralized baseline risks.
Uncertainty Regulation as a Basic Drive (#51): Humans don’t maximize happiness. They keep chaos within a tolerable band, and manufacture drama when life gets too predictable.
Experts Trilemma (#89): You can have experts who are accurate, legible to the public, or broadly applicable, but only two.
Curiosity vs Interest (#90): Interest is passive and wants to be entertained. Curiosity is predatory: it hunts reality down and dissects it, the way a cat attends to the world.
References:
- Venkatesh Rao, The Art of Gig Twitter Book