Asymmetric life

TLDR: You should risk it more. Be or get more confident. Today, you can do things faster than ever, you are sub-estimating yourself.

We are too risk-averse, as we got self-obsessed and forgot that no one is actually paying attention. The fear we feel of doing something others won’t approve is a primal reaction to avoid social pain, it makes us freeze when thinking about doing it because it might cause a negative reaction in our group. But most of the time, what we think our group will reject is seeing us fail, it makes us feel weak, as to have someone witness you don’t get what you want means they know something you are not capable of. Of course, the part that our brain isn’t ready for is that our lives are now much faster than they used to be, today what limits you to picking up skills or learning about a topic is your discipline to put the hours in. You can fail a test today and ace it the next week, you can never have heard of a subject and be an expert on it in a few months.

The idea is that we embrace this huge access the modern world provides to aim higher. As a side note, this is one of the reasons why experience shouldn’t matter much for a job, the right person can leverage the tools and become capable really fast. First, we need to bypass our brains that fears that we will be embarrassed when we fail. Unfortunately, I don’t have a clear method for achieving that besides being more confident, and not being born with that trait isn’t a valid excuse. There are numerous ways to raise your confidence, majorly a healthy routine, exercise, and strong relationships, if you already have those and still don’t feel like it, you should fake it till you make it. You can a create persona or a superego that has the personality you want, you just need to act like it. Let me be clear, being confident won’t prevent you from failing, you will fail, but it will make it easier to try. As we know, a real loser is someone who’s so afraid of not winning he doesn’t even try. And failing is part of the process, just don’t get too hung up on it, fail-fast and iterating on your leanings will make go even faster.

The asymmetry in all of this is that all the potential is in our hands, literally, in the best how to play david style, you aim for much higher heights without risk if you only are willing to expose yourself a bit.

What I Learned this week

Heard the nerdiest talk about AI safety (highly recommended)

• A superpowerful AI would seek all the atoms, I’m made of atoms
• “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else”
• Negentropy is short for negative entropy, aka syntropy. Negentropy measures the difference in entropy between a given distribution and the Gaussian distribution with the same mean and variance

Bananas have way too much carbs

There is a micronation inside Copenhagen called Christiania

There is an open source alternative for algolia called typesense