Everyone has a set of nonnegotiable beliefs, whether they’re religious or not. It’s a matter of personal integrity. In this blog post, I’ll list some of mine.

Please don’t take these points as injunctions. I’m addressing myself, not you – it’s just that the text reads better with ‘you’ in place of ‘I’ everywhere. Instead, these should be taken as confessions.

• Averages. You are the time-weighted average of the people you spend your time with. Reading a book or listening to a podcast counts as spending time with the author or podcast host.
• Beware bad averages. Make friends with different kinds of people, read and listen widely. The wisdom of the crowd is real. Groupthink is a bad average.
• Corruption. Money, prestige and fame corrupt. In particular, having a large number of social media followers corrupts.
• A good measure of life satisfaction. Just the number of good human interactions per day. Try maximise this number, both for yourself and for others.
• Randomness rules. Group dynamics, network effects and the flukes of powerful people govern the world¹. In particular, the world is less predictable than you think.
• You are a citizen. This entails social duties well beyond having to vote. Try hold yourself to high moral standards, and fake it until you make it.
• Everything is politics. Everything acts on society. Companies are political organisations insofar as they act on society and their employees.
• Communicate! Overcommunicating is exceptionally rare. Relatedly, good things happen when goodwilled people have in-person discussions.
• Concentrate! Humans weren’t meant to live alone. Families weren’t meant to live scattered across different continents.
• Kindness. Kindness is underappreciated. If kindness is your distinguishing character trait, you’re a laudable person.
• Thinking well. Poor writing leads to poor thinking.
• The strongest motivations. People just want to make their living and have quality time with their family. First things first. Oftentimes, the reason people are rude is because they cannot make their living or have quality time with their family.
• Humans are craftsmen. Self-realisation is just about honing a craft. We like applying ourselves. Self-realisation is a form of sadism, if you will.

Many of my views can be derived from these beliefs. For example, I’m unsure whether any technological change can meaningfully improve life quality for people in developed countries. Due to the first two points (and general common sense), I’m paranoid about powerful groups of people with likeminded people. And the last point means I’m very unexcited by the idea of an AI utopia where AI can give me custom paintings, poems or videos.

Comments and suggestions are much welcome. I’ll offer a bounty to whoever makes me change my mind about any of the above.