Highlights from all books

In a bureaucracy, there are no bad guys: Just hundreds of people acting in a self-interested fashion. Evil is rarely a choice—rather, it’s an emergent property of a set of rules.

Progressives optimize for intragenerational quality of life and individual agency. Conservatives optimize for intergenerational cultural fitness and fidelity.

The Urban Dispossessed: These are people who live online within contexts that rely on the infrastructure set up by the internet’s economic elite and moderated by the internet’s social elite: Redditors, Facebookers, Instagramers, etc. The Internet’s Rural Dispossessed: These are people who live in online contexts that do not rely on infrastructure set up by the internet’s economic elite and that are is not moderated: 4chan-ers, 8kun-ers, booru-ers. Just as in the real world it is very hard to “occupy” the territory of the rural dispossessed, as soon as one site belonging to the internet’s rural dispossessed is shut down, another springs up. Whereas the traditional social elite of the internet have no influence within these decentralized online communities, they effectively have almost total control of the narrative within the communities of the internet’s urban dispossessed.

One way to mollify this risk is to remove “orders” from a system altogether. Capitalism, when contrasted with state-controlled economies, presents a great example of how this can be achieved, as capitalism creates a system in which individual governing units operate largely independently and based on emergent reward systems.

The most interesting participants, however, take anonymity as an opportunity to gauge their ability to “dominate” the community by seeing how well their ideas spread organically, through their own merit (this is why so many memes that end up inundating other online communities like an invasive species come out of the memetic reactor represented by relatively small, anonymous online communities).

This disease blocks the core purpose of consciousness: To serve as an internal memetic evolution engine that enables ideas to compete within our minds and only permits the most optimal ideas to survive.

Institutionally, anything that grants kids a great childhood, pride in their culture, and a competitive edge in modern markets should be considered a priority.

Ironically, the risk to us from making these kinds of generalizations does not come from the cultures we are generalizing, as most are hard cultures, and very few hard cultures care about generalizations. Hard cultures are typically quite aware that they produce differential outcomes and are distinct from the rest of society—that’s kind of the point. Rather, the risk comes from pop culture variants that use the effective suppression of intellectual inquiry as a metric for status signaling

progressive movements support many prosocial causes that dovetail well with the promise of removing emotional pain21.

The worst part by far is that the supervirus very clearly has no off switch—it’s a paperclip maximizer of “no emotional pain” programmed into our social infrastructure and it is gaining steam.

This motivates individuals to spend more time converting people than spending the time and effort required to literally build a society that structurally embodies their values.

Humans have been bred to fear both death and change because those who accept change and impermanence with abandon are far less likely to survive and produce viable offspring.

(Consciousness in and of itself isn’t valuable;

Consider that each biological kid you have is 50 percent you. As soon as you have more than three kids, there is more of your biological identity (1.5X) in them than in you.

Better still, because most have the freedom to choose reproductive partners they admire, having kids yields an opportunity to augment individual biological identities by mixing them with those of people we respect and admire—people whose unique DNA will improve our own.

The destruction of identity is not an unwanted byproduct of progress but the core value of identity in the first place.

From the first nervous system to today, the cycle has been fueled by suffering, divergence, and conflict between and among individuals, species, and groups. This is not a flaw of the cycle or something to escape; it is the cycle.

But, one day, through a process red in tooth and claw, sapience will reach a state we cannot yet conceive where individuals will experience genuinely meaningful existence.

A study7 conducted in the U.K. in 2015 found that people with the surname Smith (descended from the smith caste) had higher physical capabilities and an above-average aptitude for strength-related activities, while those with the surname Tailor (descended from the tailor caste) had a higher-than-average aptitude for dexterity-related tasks.8 The treatment of Black populations

evolution is a cheap programmer

Conservatism as a political movement sees the individual as an avatar of their cultivar and optimizes for intergenerational fitness and cultural agency. In contrast, progressivism as a movement atomizes the individual and focuses on intragenerational quality of life and individual agency. That said, “conservatism” is not really one cohesive group as we often think of it but rather the manifestation of a number of hard cultural strategies optimized to protect intergenerational fitness.

The difference between conservative hard cultures and actual communists is the extent to which they trust state institutions to run things better than they do—or at least to not be a threat to them. The more an individual trusts their own community to be fair and well run, the less they will trust a government to interfere and the more “conservative” they will appear.

“My self-justifying image about being learned can be the very thing that sometimes keeps me from learning.”

I was angry at her for being like I was being!

“So even if I were successful and the person I tried to change actually changed, would that solve the problem of my being in the box?” “No, I guess it wouldn’t.”

This blindness to personal responsibility is the problem of self-deception.

Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty.

The history of human prosperity, as Robert Wright has argued, lies in the repeated discovery of non-zero-sum bargains that benefit both sides.

For most people, therefore, the market does not feel like a virtuous place. It feels like an arena in which the consumer does battle with the producer to see who can win.

Like biological evolution, the market is a bottom-up world with nobody in charge.

True enough, but I see these rules and institutions as evolutionary phenomena, too, emerging bottom-up in society rather than being imposed top-down by fortuitously Solomonic rulers. They come through the filter of cultural selection just as surely as do technologies. And if you look at the history of, for instance, merchant law, you find exactly this: merchants make it up as they go along, turning their innovations into customs, ostracising those who break the informal rules and only later do monarchs subsume the rules within the laws of the land.

Human history is driven by a co-evolution of rules and tools. The increasing specialisation of the human species, and the enlarging habit of exchange, are the root cause of innovation in both.

I am not saying fossil fuels are irreplaceable. I can easily envisage a world in 2050 in which fossil fuels have declined in importance relative to other forms of energy. I can envisage plug-in hybrid cars that use cheap off-peak (nuclear) electricity for their first twenty miles; I can imagine vast solar-power farms exporting electricity from sunny deserts in Algeria or Arizona; I can imagine hot-dry-rock geothermal plants; above all, I foresee pebble-bed, passive-safe, modular nuclear reactors everywhere. I can even imagine wind, tide, wave and biomass energy making small contributions, though these should be a last resort because they are so expensive and environmentally destructive. But this I know: we will need the watts from somewhere. They are our slaves. Thomas Edison deserves the last word: ‘I am ashamed at the number of things around my house and shops that are done by animals – human beings, I mean – and ought to be done by a motor without any sense of fatigue or pain. Hereafter a motor must do all the chores.’

The world of things – of pecans or power stations – is indeed often subject to diminishing returns. But the world of ideas is not.

The possibility of new knowledge makes the steady state impossible. Somewhere somebody will have a new idea and that idea will enable him to invent a new combination of atoms both to create and to exploit imperfections in the market.

To explain the modern global economy, then, you have to explain where this perpetual innovation machine came from. What kick-started the increasing returns? They were not planned, directed or ordered: they emerged, evolved, bottom-up, from specialisation and exchange. The accelerated exchange of ideas and people made possible by technology fuelled the accelerating growth of wealth that has characterised the past century. Politicians, capitalists and officials are flotsam bobbing upriver on the tidal bore of invention.

Why must the torch be passed elsewhere at all? As I have argued in the previous three chapters, the answer lies in two phenomena: institutions and population. In the past, when societies gorged on innovation, they soon allowed their babies to grow too numerous for their land, reducing the leisure, wealth and market that inventors needed (in effect, the merchant’s sons became struggling peasants again).

Lewis Mandell discovered that Americans were ‘far more likely to use credit cards than to approve of them’. This nicely captures the paradox of the modern world, that people embrace technological change and hate it at the same time. ‘People don’t like change,’ Michael Crichton once told me, ‘and the notion that technology is exciting is true for only a handful of people. The rest are depressed or annoyed by the changes.’ Pity the inventor’s lot then. He is the source of society’s enrichment and yet nobody likes what he does.

Instead, I am going to try now to persuade you that one word will suffice to explain this conundrum: exchange. It is the ever-increasing exchange of ideas that causes the ever-increasing rate of innovation in the modern world.

As the economist Paul Romer has argued, human progress consists largely in accumulating recipes for rearranging atoms in ways that raise living standards.

The pessimists’ mistake is extrapolationism: assuming that the future is just a bigger version of the past. As Herb Stein once said, ‘If something cannot go on forever, then it will not.’

In this book I have tried to build on both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin: to interpret human society as the product of a long history of what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls ‘bubble-up’ evolution through natural selection among cultural rather than genetic variations, and as an emergent order generated by an invisible hand of individual transactions, not the product of a top-down determinism.

The bottom-up world is to be the great theme of this century.

They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.

achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.

I realized that as a startup, we needed a new definition of value. The real progress we had made at IMVU was what we had learned over those first months about what creates value for customers.

The importance of basing strategic decisions on firsthand understanding of customers is one of the core principles that underlies the Toyota Production System. At Toyota, this goes by the Japanese term genchi gembutsu, which is one of the most important phrases in the lean manufacturing vocabulary. In English, it is usually translated as a directive to “go and see for yourself” so that business decisions

Without a formal growth model, many companies get caught in the trap of being satisfied with a small profitable business when a pivot (change in course or strategy) might lead to more significant growth. The only way to know is to have tested the growth model systematically with real customers.

One decision stands out above all others as the most difficult, the most time-consuming, and the biggest source of waste for most startups. We all must face this fundamental

“achieving failure”—successfully executing a flawed plan.

That’s the case because the problems caused by the old system tend to be intangible, whereas the problems of the new system are all too tangible.

Critically, lean manufacturing rediscovered the wisdom and initiative hidden in every factory worker and redirected Taylor’s notion of efficiency away from the individual task and toward the corporate organism as a whole.

We have the capacity to build almost anything we can imagine. The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.

real goal of innovation: to learn that which is currently unknown.

How can we build a sustainable organization around a new set of products or services?

Throughout our celebration of the success of the Lean Startup movement, a note of caution is essential. We cannot afford to have our success breed a new pseudoscience around pivots, MVPs, and the like. This was the fate of scientific management, and in the end, I believe, that set back its cause by decades. Science came to stand for the victory of routine work over creative work, mechanization over humanity, and plans over agility. Later movements had to be spawned to correct those deficiencies.

You can add sand or take away sand and you still have just sand on the road.

Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own?

You can adjust the drain or faucet of a bathtub—the flows—abruptly, but it is much more difficult to change the level of water—the stock—quickly. Water can’t run out the drain instantly, even if you open the drain all the way. The tub can’t fill up immediately, even with the inflow faucet on full blast. A

Remember—all system diagrams are simplifications of the real world.

mental models we develop from direct, intimate experience of nature, people, and organizations immediately around us.

New light bulbs that give the same light with one-eighth the electricity and that last ten times as long make the GNP go down. GNP is a measure of throughput—flows of stuff made and purchased in a year—rather than capital stocks, the houses and cars and computers and stereos that are the source of real wealth and real pleasure. It could be argued that the best society would be one in which capital stocks can be and used with the lowest possible throughput, rather than the highest. Although there is every reason to want a thriving economy, there is no particular reason to want the GNP to go up. But governments around the world respond to a signal of faltering GNP by taking numerous actions to keep it growing

This idea of leverage points is not unique to systems analysis—it’s embedded in legend: the silver bullet; the trimtab; the miracle cure; the secret passage; the magic password; the single hero who turns the tide of history; the nearly effortless way to cut through or leap over huge obstacles.

“You’re acting as though there is a fine line at which the rent is fair, and at any point above that point the tenant is being screwed and at any point below that you are being screwed. In fact, there is a large gray area in which both you and the tenant are getting a good, or at least a fair, deal. Stop worrying and get on with your life.”

structure is crucial in a system, but is rarely a leverage point, because changing it is rarely quick or simple.

Population and economic growth rates in the World model are leverage points, because slowing them gives the many balancing loops, through technology and markets and other forms of adaptation (all of which have limits and delays), time to function. It’s the same as slowing the car when you’re driving too fast, rather than calling for more responsive brakes or technical advances in steering.

In Chapter Four, we examined the story of the electric meter in a Dutch housing development—in some of the houses the meter was installed in the basement; in others it was installed in the front hall. With no other differences in the houses, electricity consumption was 30 percent lower in the houses where the meter was in the highly visible location in the front hall. I love that story because it’s an example of a high leverage point in the information structure of the system.

Systems modelers say that we change paradigms by building a model of the system, which takes us outside the system and forces us to see it whole. I say that because my own paradigms have been changed that way.

If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the universe.

There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of not-knowing.

We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

forces you to focus on facts, not theories.

Watching what really happens,

Solution” or “ethnic cleansing,” is speaking what Wendell Berry calls “tyrannese.” My

The first step in respecting language is keeping it as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible—part of the job of keeping information streams clear.

Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. Think about that for a minute. It means that we make quantity more important than quality. If quantity forms the goals of our feedback loops, if quantity is the center of our attention and language and institutions, if we motivate ourselves, rate ourselves, and reward ourselves on our ability to produce quantity, then quantity will be the result. You can look around and make up your own mind about whether quantity or quality is the outstanding characteristic of the world in which you live.

Human beings have been endowed not only with the ability to count, but also with the ability to assess quality.

If something is ugly, say so. If it is tacky, inappropriate, out of proportion, unsustainable, morally degrading, ecologically impoverishing, or humanly demeaning, don’t let it pass.

Locate Responsibility in the System That’s a guideline both for analysis and design. In analysis, it means looking for the ways the system creates its own behavior. Do pay attention to the triggering events, the outside influences that bring forth one kind of behavior from the system rather than another.

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

expanding the horizons of caring.

It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails.

Capitalism is about more than prosperity (measured in features and benefits, dollars and cents); it’s also about progress (measured in quality of life, technological advancements and the ability of the human race to live and work together in peace).

if shareholders really were the owners of the companies in which they invested, that is indeed how they would act. But in reality, they don’t act like owners at all. They act more like renters. Consider how differently we drive a car we own versus one we rent, and all of a sudden it will become clear why shareholders seem more focused on getting to where they want to go with little regard to the vehicle that’s taking them there.

When leaders use process to replace judgment, the conditions for ethical fading persist . . . even in cultures that hold themselves to higher moral and ethical standards. Soldiers, for example, believe they hold themselves to a higher standard of honesty and integrity than the general public. And the general public thinks so too. However, in their paper “Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession,” Dr. Wong and his research partner Dr. Stephen Gerras, both retired army officers who now work at U.S Army War College, discovered systemic ethical fading as a result of excessive process, procedure or demands placed on soldiers. Some of the things leadership was asking of their soldiers weren’t unreasonable—they were impossible. Soldiers were required, for example, to complete more days of training than were available in the calendar. As in the corporate world, pressure to complete tasks comes from the top down in

“You make me unbelievably insecure because all of your strengths are all my weaknesses. You can do so well the things that I really struggle to do.” The audience laughed. He looked at me and responded, “The insecurity is mutual.” He went on to identify some of my strengths as areas in which he wished he could improve. In an instant I understood the reason why I felt so competitive with him. The way I saw him had nothing to do with him. It had to do with me. When his name came up, it reminded of me of the areas in which I grappled. Instead of investing my energy on improving myself—overcoming my weaknesses or building on my strengths—it was easier to focus on beating him.

Without identifying our Worthy Rivals, strong players start to falsely believe they can control the direction of the game or the other players. But that’s impossible. The Infinite Game is like a stock market; companies list and delist but no one can control the market.

The term “abstract” is used here according to Hegel’s familiar definition of it as the substitution of a part of the whole for the whole, the whole being “concrete.”

Seriousness always has to do with an established script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside the range of our influence. We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out—when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.

seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility.

abstract past, but one’s own personal past. To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.

life is viewed by a finite player as the award to be won,

Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion.

both adopted and transformed in its adoption. Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

A horizon is a phenomenon of vision. One cannot look at the horizon; it is simply the point beyond which we cannot see. There is nothing in the horizon itself, however, that limits vision, for the horizon opens onto all that lies beyond itself. What limits vision is rather the incompleteness of that vision. One never reaches a horizon. It is not a line; it has no place; it encloses no field; its location is always relative to the view. To move toward a horizon is simply to have a new horizon. One can therefore never be close to one’s horizon, though one may certainly have a short range of vision, a narrow horizon.

Do all the right things to precision and “the score will take care of itself” sums

He told me this addressed his concern that most people simply go through the motions at their jobs, just putting in time—existing—with a “business as usual” attitude. Not if you’re on his team.

Standard of Performance. It was a way of doing things, a leadership philosophy that has as much to do with core values, principles, and ideals as with blocking, tackling, and passing; more to do with the mental than with the physical

Regardless of your specific job, it is vital to our team that you do that job at the highest possible level in all its various aspects, both mental and physical (i.e., good talent with bad attitude equals bad talent).

honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the latter;

promote internal communication that is both open and substantive

All of this increasingly demonstrated to others and to ourselves that we were on top of things, neither sloppy nor inattentive,

has a transformative effect. Bonding within the organization takes place as one individual and then another steps up and raises his or her level of commitment, sacrifice, and performance. They demand and expect a lot of one another. That’s extremely important because when you know that your peers—the others in the organization—demand and expect a lot out of you and you, in turn, out of them, that’s when the sky’s the limit.